Beautiful Darkness(17)

Lena dismissed it with a wave. “Some guy visiting a grave, I guess. He was just kind of … there. I keep meaning to take it down, the lighting's terrible.” She reached up past me, pulling the tacks out of the wall. When she reached the last one, the photo vanished, leaving nothing but four tiny holes in her black wall.

Aside from the images, the room was nearly empty, as if she'd packed up and gone to college somewhere. The bed was gone. The bookshelf and all the books were gone. The old chandelier we'd made swing so many times I had thought it would fall from the ceiling was gone. There was a futon on the floor, in the center of the room. Next to it was the tiny silver sparrow. Seeing it flooded my brain with memories from the funeral — magnolias ripping out of the lawn, the same silver sparrow in her muddy palm.

“Everything looks so different.” I tried not to think about the sparrow or the reason it would be next to her bed. The reason that had nothing to do with Macon.

“Well, you know. Spring cleaning. I had kind of trashed the place.”

A few tattered books lay on the futon. Without thinking, I flipped one open — until I realized I'd committed the worst of crimes. Though the outside was covered with an old, taped-up cover from a copy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the inside wasn't a book at all. It was one of Lena's spiral notebooks, and I had opened it up right in front of her. Like it was nothing, or it was mine to read.

I realized something else. Most of the pages were blank.

The shock was almost as terrible as discovering the pages of my dad's gibberish when I had thought he was writing a novel. Lena carried a notebook around with her wherever she went. If she had stopped scribbling every fifth word into it, things were worse than I thought.

She was worse than I thought.

“Ethan! What are you doing?”

I pulled my hand away, and Lena grabbed the book.

“I'm sorry, L.”

She was furious.

“I thought it was just a book. I mean, it looks like a book. I didn't think you would leave your notebook lying around where anyone could read it.”

She wouldn't look at me, clutching the book to her chest.

“Why aren't you writing anymore? I thought you loved to write.”

She rolled her eyes and opened the notebook to show me. “I do.”

She fluttered the blank pages, and now they were covered with line upon line of tiny scribbled words, crossed out again and again, revised and rewritten and revisited a thousand times.

“You Charmed it?”

“I Shifted the words out of Mortal reality. Unless I choose to show them to someone, only a Caster can read them.”

“That's brilliant. Since Reece, the person most likely to read it, happens to be one.” Reece was as nosy as she was bossy.

“She doesn't need to. She can read everything in my face.” It was true. As a Sybil, Reece could see your thoughts and secrets, even things you were planning to do, just by looking you in the eye. Which was why I generally avoided her.

“So, what's with all the secrecy?” I flopped down on Lena's futon. She sat next to me, balancing on her crisscrossed legs. Things were less comfortable than I was pretending they were.

“I don't know. I still feel like writing all the time. Maybe I just feel less like being understood, or less like I can be.”

My jaw tightened. “By me.”

“That's not what I meant.”

“What other Mortals would be reading your notebook?”

“You don't understand.”

“I think I do.”

“Some of it, maybe.”

“I would understand all of it if you'd let me.”

“There's no letting, Ethan. I can't explain it.”

“Let me see it.” I held out my hand for her notebook.

She raised an eyebrow, handing it to me. “You won't be able to read it.”

I opened it and looked at it. I didn't know if it was Lena, or the book itself, but the words appeared on the page in front of me slowly, one at a time. It wasn't one of Lena's poems, and it wasn't song lyrics. There weren't many words, just strange drawings, shapes and swirls snaking up and down the page like some collection of tribal designs.

At the bottom of the page, there was a list.



what i remember

mother

ethan

macon

hunting

the fire

the wind

the rain

the crypt

the me who is not me

the me who would kill

two bodies

the rain

the book

the ring

amma's charm

the moon





Lena grabbed the book out of my hand. There were a few more lines on the page, but I never got to read them. “Stop it!”

I looked at her. “What was that?”

“Nothing, it's private. You shouldn't have been able to see that.”

“Then why could I?”

“I must have done the Verbum Celatum Cast wrong. The Hidden Word.” She looked at me anxiously, her eyes softening. “It doesn't matter. I was trying to remember that night. The night Macon … disappeared.”

“Died, L. The night Macon died.”

“I know he died. Of course he died. I just don't feel like talking about it.”