Beautiful Creatures(51)

“Yeah. Mostly, Gramma says their powers are too close. It happens sometimes with parents and their children. They’re too much alike, so they’re always fighting.” I knew what she was thinking, that she would never know that for herself. Her face clouded over, and I made a stupid attempt to lighten the mood.

“Ryan? What’s her power? Dog fashion designer?”

“Too soon to tell. She’s only ten.”

“And Macon?”

“He’s just… Uncle Macon. There’s nothing Uncle Macon can’t do, or wouldn’t do for me. I spent a lot of time with him growing up.” She looked away, avoiding the question. She was holding something back, but with Lena, it was impossible to know what. “He’s like my father, or how I imagine my father.” She didn’t have to say anything else. I knew what it was like to lose someone. I wondered if it was worse to never have them at all.

“What about you? What’s your gift?”

As if she had just one. As if I hadn’t seen them in action since the first day of school. As if I hadn’t been trying to get up the nerve to ask her this question since the night she sat on my porch in her purple pajamas.

She paused for a minute, collecting her thoughts, or deciding if she was going to tell me; it was impossible to know which. Then she looked at me, with her endless green eyes. “I’m a Natural. At least Uncle Macon and Aunt Del think I am.”

A Natural. I was relieved. It didn’t sound as bad as a Siren. I didn’t think I could have handled that.

“What exactly does that mean?”

“I don’t even know. It’s not really one thing. I mean, supposedly a Natural can do a lot more than other Casters.” She said it quickly, almost like she was hoping I wouldn’t hear, but I did.

More than other Casters.

More. I wasn’t sure how I felt about more. Less, I could have handled less. Less would’ve been good.

“But as you saw tonight, I don’t even know what I can do.” She picked at the quilt between us, nervous. I pulled on her hand until she was lying on the bed next to me, propped up on one elbow.

“I don’t care about any of that. I like you just the way you are.”

“Ethan, you barely know anything about me.”

The drowsy warmth was washing through my body, and to be honest, I couldn’t have cared less what she was saying. It felt so good just to be near her, holding her hand, with only the white quilt between us. “That’s not true. I know you write poetry and I know about the raven on your necklace and I know you love orange soda and your grandma and Milk Duds mixed into your popcorn.”

For a second, I thought she might smile. “That’s hardly anything.”

“It’s a start.”

She looked me right in the eye, her green eyes searching my blue ones. “You don’t even know my name.”

“Your name is Lena Duchannes.”

“Okay, well, for starters, it’s not.”

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.”