The Writing on the Wall
In the morning, I had no idea where I was. Then I saw the words covering the walls and the old iron bed and the windows and the mirrors, all scrawled with Sharpie in Lena’s handwriting, and I remembered.
I lifted my head up, and wiped the drool off my cheek. Lena was still sacked out; I could just see the edge of her foot hanging over the side of the bed. I pushed myself up, my back stiff from sleeping on the floor. I wondered who had brought us down from the attic, or how.
My cell phone went off; my default alarm clock, so Amma would only have to yell up the stairs three times to get me up. Only today, it wasn’t blaring “Bohemian Rhapsody.” It was the song. Lena sat up, startled, groggy.
“What happ—”
“Shh. Listen.”
The song had changed.
Sixteen moons, sixteen years,
Sixteen times you dreamed my fears, Sixteen will try to Bind the spheres, Sixteen screams but just one hears…
“Stop it!” She grabbed my cell and turned it off, but the verse kept playing.
“It’s about you, I think. But what’s Binding the spheres?”
“I almost died last night. I’m sick of everything being about me. I’m sick of all these weird things happening to me. Maybe the stupid song is about you, for a change. You’re actually the only sixteenyear-old here.” Frustrated, Lena flung her hand up in the air and opened it. She closed it into a fist, and banged it against the floor like she was killing a spider.
The music stopped. There was no messing with Lena today. I couldn’t blame her, to be honest. She looked green and wobbly, maybe even worse than Link did the morning after Savannah had dared him to drink the old bottle of peppermint schnapps out of her mom’s pantry, on the last day of school before winter break. Three years later and he still wouldn’t eat a candy cane.
Lena’s hair was sticking out in about fifteen directions, and her eyes were all small and puffy from crying. So this was what girls looked like in the morning. I had never seen one, not up close. I tried not to think about Amma and the hell I was going to pay when I got home.
I crawled up onto the bed and pulled Lena into my lap, running my hand through her crazy hair. “Are you okay?”
She shut her eyes and buried her face in my sweatshirt. I knew I must reek like a wild possum by now.
“I think so.”
“I could hear you screaming, all the way from my house.”
“Who knew Kelting would save my life.”
I had missed something, as usual. “What’s Kelting?”
“That’s what it’s called, the way we’re able to communicate with each other no matter where we are.
Some Casters can Kelt, some can’t. Ridley and I used to be able to talk to each other in school that way, but—”
“I thought you said it had never happened to you before?”
“It’s never happened to me before with a Mortal. Uncle Macon says it’s really rare.”
I like the sound of that.
Lena nudged me. “It’s from the Celtic side of our family. It’s how Casters used to get messages to each other, during the Trials. In the States, they used to call it ‘The Whispering.’”
“But I’m not a Caster.”
“I know, it’s really weird. It’s not supposed to work with Mortals.” Of course it wasn’t.
“Don’t you think it’s a little more than weird? We can do this Kelting thing, Ridley got into Ravenwood because of me, even your uncle said I can protect you somehow. How is that possible? I mean, I’m not a Caster. My parents are different, but they’re not that different.”
She leaned into my shoulder. “Maybe you don’t have to be a Caster to have power.”
I pushed her hair behind her ear. “Maybe you just have to fall for one.”
I said it, just like that. No stupid jokes, no changing the subject. For once, I wasn’t embarrassed, because it was the truth. I had fallen. I think I had always been falling. And she might as well know, if she didn’t already, because there was no going back now. Not for me.
She looked up at me, and the whole world disappeared. Like there was just us, like there would always be just us, and we didn’t need magic for that. It was sort of happy and sad, all at the same time. I couldn’t be around her without feeling things, without feeling everything.
What are you thinking?
She smiled.
I think you can figure it out. You can read the writing on the wall.
And as she said it, there was writing on the wall. It appeared slowly, one word at a time.
You’re
not
the
only
one
falling.
It wrote itself out, in the same curling black script as the rest of the room. Lena’s cheeks flushed a little, and she covered her face with her hands. “It’s going to be really embarrassing if everything I think starts showing up on the walls.”
“You didn’t mean to do that?”
“No.”
You don’t need to be embarrassed, L.
I pulled her hands away.