Beautiful Chaos(137)

It is time. There is no turning back now.

I stared out at the tiny lights, waiting to get up the courage to do the unthinkable. The dread churned in my stomach, heavy and wrong.

But this was right.

As I closed my eyes, I felt the arms slam into my waist, knocking the air out of me, dragging me down to the metal ladder. I caught a glimpse of him—of me—when my jaw hit the side of the railing, and I stumbled.

He was trying to stop me.

I tried to throw him off. I leaned forward and saw my Chucks kicking. Then I saw his Chucks kicking. They were so old and thrashed they could have been mine. This was how I remembered it from the dream. This was how it was supposed to be.

What are you doing?

This time, he was asking me.

I threw him against the floor, and he landed on his back. I grabbed the collar of his shirt, and he grabbed mine.

We looked into each other’s eyes, and he saw the truth.

We were both going to die. It seemed like we should be together when it happened.

I pulled out the old Coke bottle Amma had left sitting on the kitchen table earlier. If a whole bottle tree could catch a whole lot of lost souls, maybe one Coke bottle could hold on to mine.

I’ve been waiting.



I saw his face change.

His eyes widen.

He lunged at me.

I wouldn’t let go.

We stared into each other’s eyes and clawed at

each other’s throats.

As we rolled over the edge of the water tower and fell

the whole way down,

I was only thinking one thing


LENA





Nineteen Moons—





Acknowledgments


Three Moons and more than 1,600 pages from the day we sat down to prove to a few smack-talking teenagers that we could write a book, our extended Caster family couldn’t even fit on one or two pages, if we tried to name you all.


We are grateful to all of our incredibly talented publishers in the thirty-eight countries that have welcomed the Beautiful Creatures novels into their world. You have shown our readers, ourselves, and the Casters of Gatlin County many kindnesses. We are grateful to our writer and reader friends, our agent and editor friends, our online and marketing/PR friends, our teacher and librarian friends, and our bookstore friends. We owe a huge debt to our translator friends, particularly Dr. Sara Lindheim, our Classicist and Keeper. More than anything, we are grateful to the teens (and the teens at heart) who read our books, and particularly our Caster Girl & Boy beta readers, who are infamously brutal editors and who, we hope, will one day make other writers weep more loudly than they have us. Good Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise.


Finally, we are grateful to our families, our tribes, our inner circles—all of you who already know this means you because you’re probably sitting here while we’re writing this. Our books are about holding on to your family and finding your tribe, more than anything else. To us, that is magic. It took us a long time to find you, and we love you all.


Emma, May, Kate & Lewis; Nick, Stella & Alex—

We love you first, best, and last.