Liv closed the almanac. “Ancient Celts considered winter solstice the most sacred day of the year. They believed the Wheel of the Year stopped turning for a short time at the moment of the solstice. It was a time of cleansing and rebirth—”
Liv was still talking, but I couldn’t hear anything but my own thoughts.
The Wheel of the Year.
The Wheel of Fate.
Cleansing and rebirth.
A sacrifice.
It’s what the Lilum was trying to tell me at Mrs. English’s house. On the Eighteenth Moon, the night of the winter solstice, the sacrifice would have to be made to bring forth the New Order.
“Ethan?” Lena was staring at me, concerned. “Are you okay?”
“No. None of us are.” I looked at John. “If you’re telling the truth, and you aren’t waiting around for Abraham and Sarafine to come to the rescue, I need you to tell me everything you can about him.”
John leaned across the table toward me. “If you think I can’t break out of a little study in the Tunnels, you’re a bigger idiot than I thought. You have no idea what I can do. I’m here because—” He glanced at Liv. “I have nowhere else to go.”
I didn’t know if he was lying. But all the signs—the songs, the messages, even Aunt Prue and the Lilum—pointed to him.
John handed Liv a pencil. “Get out that red notebook, and I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”
After listening to John talk about his childhood with Silas Ravenwood—who sounded like a military drill sergeant who spent most of his time beating the crap out of John or forcing him to memorize Silas’ anti-Caster doctrine—even I was starting to feel a little sorry for him. Not that I would ever admit it.
Liv was writing down every word. “So, basically, Silas hates Casters. Interesting, considering he married two of them.” She glanced at John. “And raised one.”
John laughed, and there was no way to miss the bitterness in his voice. “I wouldn’t want to be around if he heard you call me that. Silas and Abraham never considered me a Caster. According to Abraham, I’m ‘the next generation’—stronger, faster, impervious to sunlight, and all that good stuff. Abraham is pretty apocalyptic for a Demon. He believes the end is coming, even if he has to bring it around himself, and the inferior race will finally be wiped out.”
I rubbed my hands over my face. I wasn’t sure how much more of this I could take. “I guess that’s bad news for us Mortals.”
John gave me a strange look. “Mortals aren’t the inferior race. You’re just the bottom of the food chain. He’s talking about Casters.”
Liv tucked her pencil behind her ear. “I didn’t realize how much he hated Light Casters.”
John shook his head. “You don’t get it. I’m not talking about Light Casters. Abraham wants to get rid of all the Casters.”
Lena looked up, surprised.
“But Sarafine—” Liv started to say.
“He doesn’t care about her. He only tells her what she wants to hear.” John’s voice was serious. “Abraham Ravenwood doesn’t care about anyone.”
There were a lot of nights when I couldn’t sleep, but tonight I didn’t want to. I wanted to forget about Abraham Ravenwood plotting to destroy the world, and the Lilum promising it would destroy itself. Unless, of course, someone wanted to sacrifice themselves. Someone I had to find.
If I fell asleep, those thoughts would twist themselves into rivers of blood as real as the mud in my sheets when I first met Lena. I wanted to find a place to hide from all of it, where the nightmares and the rivers and reality couldn’t find me. For me, that place was always inside a book.
And I knew just the one. It wasn’t under my bed; it was in one of the shoe boxes stacked against my walls. Those boxes held everything that was important to me, and I knew what was inside all of them.
At least I thought I did.
For a second, I couldn’t move. I scanned the brightly colored cardboard boxes, searching for the mental map that would lead me to the right one. But it wasn’t there. My hands started shaking. My right hand—the one I used to write with—and my left—the one I used now.
I didn’t know where it was.
Something was wrong with me, and it had nothing to do with Casters or Keepers or the Order of Things. I was changing, losing more and more of myself every day. And I had no idea why.
Lucille jumped off my bed when I started tearing through the boxes, tossing the lids, dumping everything from bottle caps and basketball cards to faded pictures of my mom all over my bedroom floor. I didn’t stop until I found it in a black Adidas box. I flipped the lid and it was there—my copy of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.
It wasn’t a happy story, the kind you’d expect a person to reach for when they were trying to chase away whatever was haunting them. But I chose it for a reason. It was about sacrifice; whether it was self-sacrifice or sacrificing someone else to save your own skin—that was a matter of debate.
I figured I could decide tonight, as I turned the pages.
It was too late when I realized someone else must have been searching for answers within the covers of a book.
Lena!
She was turning pages, too—