I pushed myself all the way up, and let go of her hand. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s not my name. Ridley wasn’t lying about that.” Some of the conversation from earlier started to come back to me. I remembered Ridley saying something about Lena not knowing her real name, but I didn’t think she had meant literally.
“Well, what is it then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is that some kind of Caster thing?”
“Not really. Most Casters know their real names, but my family’s different. In my family, we don’t learn our birth names until we turn sixteen. Until then, we have other names. Ridley’s was Julia.
Reece’s was Annabel. Mine is Lena.”
“So who’s Lena Duchannes?”
“I’m a Duchannes, that much I know. But Lena, that’s just a name my gramma started calling me, because she thought I was skinny as a string bean. Lena Beana.”
I didn’t say anything for a second. I was trying to take it all in. “Okay, so you don’t know your first name. You’ll know in a couple of months.”
“It’s not that simple. I don’t know anything about myself. That’s why I’m so crazy all the time. I don’t know my name and I don’t know what happened to my parents.”
“They died in an accident, right?”
“That’s what they told me, but nobody really talks about it. I can’t find any record of the accident, and I’ve never seen their graves or anything. How do I even know it’s true?”
“Who’s going to lie about something as creepy as that?”
“Have you met my family?”
“Right.”
“And that monster downstairs, that—witch, who almost killed you? Believe it or not, she used to be my best friend. Ridley and I grew up together living with my gramma. We moved around so much we shared the same suitcase.”
“That’s why you guys don’t have much of an accent. Most people would never believe you had lived in the South.”
“What’s your excuse?”
“Professor parents, and a jar full of quarters every time I dropped a G.” I rolled my eyes. “So Ridley didn’t live with Aunt Del?”
“No. Aunt Del just visits on the holidays. In my family, you don’t live with your parents. It’s too dangerous.” I stopped myself from asking my next fifty questions while Lena raced on, as if she’d been waiting to tell this story for about a hundred years. “Ridley and I were like sisters. We slept in the same room and we were home-schooled together. When we moved to Virginia, we convinced my gramma to let us to go to a regular school. We wanted to make friends, be normal. The only time we ever spoke to Mortals was when Gramma took us on one of her outings to museums, the opera, or lunch at Olde Pink House.”
“So what happened when you went to school?”
“It was a disaster. Our clothes were wrong, we didn’t have a TV, we turned in all our homework. We were total losers.”
“But you got to hang out with Mortals.”
She wouldn’t look at me. “I’ve never had a Mortal friend until I met you.”
“Really?”
“I only had Ridley. Things were just as bad for her, but she didn’t care. She was too busy making sure no one bothered me.”
I had a hard time imagining Ridley protecting anyone.
People change, Ethan.
Not that much. Not even Casters.
Especially Casters. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.
She pulled her hand away from me. “Ridley started acting strange, and then the same guys who had ignored her started following her everywhere, waiting for her after school, fighting over who would walk her home.”
“Yeah, well. Some girls are just like that.”
“Ridley isn’t some girl. I told you, she’s a Siren. She could make people do things, things they wouldn’t normally want to do. And those boys were jumping off the cliff, one by one.” She twisted her necklace around her fingers and kept talking. “The night before Ridley’s sixteenth birthday, I followed her to the train station. She was scared out of her mind. She said she could tell she was going Dark, and she had to get away before she hurt someone she loved. Before she hurt me. I’m the only person Ridley ever really loved. She disappeared that night, and I never saw her again until today. I think after what you saw tonight, it’s pretty obvious she went Dark.”
“Wait a second, what are you talking about? What do you mean going Dark?”
Lena took a deep breath and hesitated, like she wasn’t sure if she wanted to tell me the answer.
“You have to tell me, Lena.”
“In my family, when you turn sixteen, you’re Claimed. Your fate is chosen for you, and you become Light, like Aunt Del and Reece, or you become Dark, like Ridley. Dark or Light, Black or White.
There’s no gray in my family. We can’t choose, and we can’t undo it once we’re Claimed.”
“What do you mean, you can’t choose?”