Beautiful Chaos(39)

Marian looked at Thelma for a long time, like a mother checking out a child coming in from the yard. “You feeling all right, Miss Thelma?”

Thelma looked almost as confused as the Sisters usually did. “I don’t know what happened. One minute, I was dreamin’ about a fat piece a George Clooney and a hot date with some brown sugar pound cake, and the next thing I knew, the house was comin’ down around us.” Thelma’s voice was shaky, like she couldn’t find a way to make sense of the words she was saying. “Barely had time to get to the girls, and when I found Prudence Jane…”

Aunt Prue. I didn’t hear anything else. Marian looked at me. “She’s with the paramedics. Don’t worry, Amma’s with her.”

I pushed past Marian, feeling my arm slide through her fingers when she tried to grab it. Two paramedics leaned over someone lying on a stretcher. Tubes hung from metal poles and disappeared into my aunt’s frail body in places I couldn’t see, covered with white tape. The paramedics were hooking bags of clear fluid onto more metal poles, their voices impossible to hear over the chaotic chatter of voices, sobs, and sirens. Amma knelt next to her, holding her limp hand and whispering. I wondered if she was praying or talking to the Greats. Probably both.

“She’s not dead.” Link came up behind me. “I can smell her—I mean, I can tell.” He inhaled again. “Copper and salt and red-eye gravy.”

I smiled, in spite of everything, and let out the breath I was holding. “What are they saying? Is she gonna be okay?”

Link listened to the paramedics leaning over Aunt Prue. “I don’t know. They’re sayin’ when the house fell she had a stroke, and she’s unresponsive.”

I turned back to look at Aunt Mercy and Aunt Grace. Amma and Thelma helped them into wheelchairs, waving off the volunteer firefighters as if they didn’t know the men were really Mr. Rawls, who filled their prescriptions at the Stop & Steal, and Ed Landry, who pumped their gas at the BP.

I bent down and picked up a piece of glass from the rubble at my feet. I couldn’t tell what it had been, but the color of the glass made me think it was Aunt Prue’s green glass cat, the one she’d kept proudly on display next to her glass grapes. I turned it over and saw it had a round red sticker on it. Marked, like everything in the Sisters’ house, for one relative or another, when they died.

A red sticker.

The cat was meant for me. The cat, the rubble, the fire—all of it was meant for me. I stuck the broken green glass in my pocket and watched helplessly as my aunts were wheeled toward the only other ambulance in town.

Amma shot me a look, and I knew what it meant. Don’t say a word and don’t do a thing. It meant go home, lock the doors, and stay out of it. But she knew I couldn’t.

One word kept fighting its way back into my mind. Unresponsive. Aunt Grace and Aunt Mercy wouldn’t understand what it meant when the doctors told them Aunt Prue was unresponsive. They would hear what I heard when Link said it.

Unresponsive.

As good as dead.

And it was my fault. Because I couldn’t tell Abraham how to find John Breed.

John Breed.

Everything snapped into focus.

The mutant Incubus who had led us into Sarafine and Abraham’s trap—who had tried to steal the girl I loved, and had Turned my best friend—was destroying my life one more time. My life and the people I loved.

Because of him, Abraham had unleashed the Vexes. Because of him, my town was destroyed and my aunt was nearly dead. Books were burning, and for the first time, it wasn’t because of small minds or small people.

Macon and Liv were right. It was all about him.

John Breed was the one to blame.

I made a fist. It wasn’t a giant fist, but it was mine. So was this. My problem. I was a Wayward. If I was supposed to find the way—to be there for some great and terrible purpose, or whatever it was Marian and Liv had said the Casters would need me to lead them into or out of—I had found it. And now I had to find John Breed.

There was no going back, not after today.

One ambulance pulled away. Then another. The sirens echoed down the street, and as they disappeared in front of me, I started to run. I thought about Lena. I ran faster. I thought about my mom and Amma and Aunt Prue and Marian. I ran until I couldn’t catch my breath, until the fire trucks were so far behind me that I couldn’t hear the sirens anymore.

I stopped when I reached the library, and stood there. The flames were gone, for the most part. Smoke was still streaming into the sky. The way the ash swirled in the air, it looked like snow. Boxes of books, some black, others soaking wet, were piled in front of the building.

It was still standing, a good half of it. But it didn’t matter, not to me. It would never smell the same again. My mother, what was left of her in Gatlin, was finally gone. You couldn’t unburn the books. You could only buy new ones. And those pages would never have been touched by her hands, or bookmarked with a spoon.

A part of her had died tonight, all over again.

I didn’t know much about Leonardo da Vinci. What had the book said? Maybe I was learning how to live, or maybe I was learning how to die. After today, it could go either way. Maybe I should listen to Emily Dickinson and let the madness begin to make sense. Either way, it was Poe who stuck with me.

Because I had the feeling I was deep into that darkness peering, about as deep as a person could be.