Beautiful Darkness

Plus, I got the feeling Liv liked her new teacher as much as her old one. Liv's education had been turned over to a certain former Incubus who spent his days out of sight — in Ravenwood or his favorite study, an old haunt in the Caster Tunnels — with Liv and the Head Caster Librarian as his only Mortal companions.

 

It wasn't how I expected the summer to turn out. Then again, when it came to Gatlin, I never knew what was going to happen. At some point, I had stopped trying.

 

Stop thinking and start digging.

 

I dropped my shovel and pushed up against the side of the grave. Lena leaned over on her stomach, her ratty Converse kicking up behind her. I put my hands around her neck and pulled her mouth to mine until our kiss made the graveyard spin.

 

“Kids, kids. Keep it clean. We're ready.” Link leaned on his shovel and stood back to survey his handiwork. Macon's grave was open, not that there was a coffin down there.

 

“Well?” I wanted to get this over with. Ridley pulled a small bundle of black silk out of her pocket and held it in front of her.

 

Link pulled back as if she had shoved a torch in his face. “Watch it, Rid! Don't get that thing anywhere near me. Incubus kryptonite, remember?”

 

“Sorry, Superman, I forgot.” Ridley climbed down into the hole, holding the bundle carefully with one hand, and placed it in the bottom of Macon Ravenwood's empty grave. My mom may have saved Macon with the Arclight, but we saw it for what it was — dangerous. A supernatural prison I didn't want to see my best friend trapped inside. Six feet under was where the Arclight belonged, and Macon's grave was the safest place any of us could think of.

 

“Good riddance,” Link said as he pulled Ridley up out of the grave. “Isn't that what you're supposed to say when good defeats evil at the end of the movie?”

 

I looked at him. “Have you ever read a book, man?”

 

“Dig.” Ridley rubbed dirt off her hands. “At least, that's what I say.”

 

Link piled shovelful after shovelful of dirt over the bundle while Ridley watched, without taking her eyes off the grave.

 

“Finish it,” I said.

 

Lena nodded, jamming her hands in her pockets. “Let's get out of here.”

 

The sun began to rise over the magnolias in front of my mom's grave. It didn't bother me anymore, because I knew she wasn't there. She was somewhere, everywhere else, still watching out for me. Macon's hidden room. Marian's archive. Our study at Wate's Landing.

 

“Come on, L.” I pulled Lena by the arm. “I'm sick of the dark. Let's go watch the sunrise.” We took off, running down the grassy hill like kids — past the graves and magnolias, past the palmettos and oaks tangled in Spanish moss, past the uneven rows of grave markers and weeping angels and the old stone bench. I could feel her shivering in the early morning air, but neither of us wanted to stop. So we didn't, and by the time we reached the bottom of the hill, we were almost falling, almost flying. Almost happy.

 

We didn't see the eerie golden glow pierce through small cracks and fissures in the dirt shoveled over Macon's grave.

 

And I didn't check the iPod in my pocket, where I might have noticed a new song in the playlist.

 

Eighteen Moons.

 

But I didn't check, because I didn't care. No one was listening. No one was watching. No one existed in the world but the two of us —

 

The two of us, and the old man in the white suit and string tie, who stood at the crest of the hill until the sun began to rise and the shadows fell back into their crypts.

 

We didn't see him. We only saw the fading night and the rising blue sky. Not the blue sky in my bedroom, but the real one. Even though it might look different to each of us. Only now I wasn't so sure the sky looked the same to any two people, no matter what universe they lived in.

 

I mean, how could you be sure?

 

The old man walked away.

 

We didn't hear the familiar sound of space and time rearranging as he ripped into the last possible moment of night — the darkness before the dawn.

 

Eighteen Moons, eighteen spheres,

 

 

 

From the world beyond the years,

 

 

 

One Unchosen, death or birth,

 

 

 

A Broken Day awaits the Earth …

 

 

 

 

 

After

 

 

 

 

 

Siren's Tears

 

 

Ridley stood in her room at Ravenwood, the room that used to belong to Macon. But nothing remained the same except the four walls, a ceiling, and a floor, and possibly the paneled bedroom door.

 

Which she shut, with a heavy click, and bolted. She turned to face her room, her back against the door. Macon had decided to take another room at Ravenwood, though he spent most of his time in his study in the Tunnels. So this room belonged to Ridley now, and she was careful to keep the trapdoor leading down into the Tunnels locked under thick pink shag carpeting. The walls were covered with spray painted graffiti, black and neon pink mostly, with shots of electric green, yellow, and orange. They weren't words, exactly — more like shapes, slashes, emotions. Anger, bottled in a can of cheap spray paint from the Wal-Mart in Summerville. Lena had offered to do it for her, but Ridley insisted on doing it herself, Mortal-style. The reeking fumes made her head ache, and the splattering paint made a huge mess of everything. It was exactly what she wanted and exactly how she felt.