Beautiful Redemption (7 page)

Silver Button

I
opened my eyes.

I was standing in the front hallway of Lena’s house. It worked. I had crossed. I was back in Gatlin, in the world of the living. I was overwhelmed with relief; it was still here.

Gatlin remained. Which meant Lena remained. Which meant everything I’d lost—everything I’d done—hadn’t been for nothing.

I leaned against the wall behind me. The room stopped spinning, and I lifted my head and looked around at the old plaster walls.

The familiar flying staircase. The shining lacquered floors.

Ravenwood.

The real Ravenwood. Mortal, solid, and heavy beneath my feet. I was back.

Lena.

I closed my eyes and fought away the prickling tears.

I’m here, L. I did it.

I don’t know how long I stood frozen in place, waiting for a response, like I thought she was going to come running around the corner and into my arms.

She didn’t.

She didn’t even feel me Kelting.

I drew in a deep breath. The enormity of it all was still hitting me.

Ravenwood looked different than the last time I was here. It wasn’t really a surprise—Ravenwood was always changing—but even so, I could tell from the black sheets hanging over all the mirrors and windows that this time things had changed for the worse.

It wasn’t just the sheets. It was the way the snow fell from the ceiling, even though I was inside. The cold white drifts piled in the doorways and filled the fireplace, swirling into the air like ash. I looked up to see the ceiling crowded with storm clouds that wound all the way up the stairwell to the second floor. It was pretty cold even for a ghost, and I couldn’t stop shivering.

Ravenwood always had a story, and that story was Lena’s. She controlled the way the house looked with her every mood. And if Ravenwood looked like this…

Come on, L. Where are you?

I couldn’t help but listen for her to answer, even though all I heard was silence.

I made my way through the slick ice of the front hall until I reached the familiar sweep of the grand front stairwell. Then I climbed the white steps, one at a time, all the way to the top.

When I turned to look down, there were no footprints at all.

“L? You in there?”

Come on. I know you can feel me here.

But she didn’t say anything, and as I slipped through the cracked doorway into her bedroom, it was almost a relief to see she wasn’t inside. I even checked the ceiling, where I had once found her lying along the plaster.

Lena’s bedroom had changed again, like it always did. This time the viola wasn’t playing by itself, and there wasn’t writing everywhere, and the walls weren’t glass. It didn’t look like a prison, the plaster wasn’t cracked, and the bed wasn’t broken.

Everything was gone. Her bags were packed and neatly stacked in the center of the room. The walls and the ceiling were completely plain, like an ordinary room.

It looked like Lena was leaving.

I got out of there before I could think what that would mean for me. Before I tried to figure out how I would visit her in Barbados, or wherever she was going.

It was almost as hard to think about as leaving her the first time around.

I found my way out through the massive dining room where I had sat on so many other strange days and nights. A thick layer of frost covered the table, leaving a dark, wet rectangle on the carpet immediately below. I slipped through an open door and escaped out to the back veranda, the one that faced the sloping green hill leading to the river—where it wasn’t snowing at all, just overcast and gloomy. It was a relief to be back outside, and I followed the path behind the house until I came to the lemon trees and the crumbling stone wall that told me I was at Greenbrier.

I knew what I was looking for the second I saw it.

My grave.

There it was, among the bare branches of the lemon trees, a mound of fresh soil lined with stones and covered with a sprinkling of snow.

It didn’t have a headstone, only a plain old cross made of wood. The new dirt hill looked like something less than a final resting place, which actually made me feel better, rather than worse, about the whole thing.

The clouds overhead shifted, and a glimmer from the grave caught my eye. Someone had left a charm from Lena’s necklace on the top of the wooden cross. The sight of it made my stomach flip over.

It was the silver button that had fallen off her sweater the
night we first met in the rain on Route 9. It had gotten caught in the cracked vinyl of the Beater’s front seat. In a way, it felt like we had come full circle now, from the first time I saw her to the last, at least in this world.

Full circle. The beginning and the end. Maybe I really had picked a hole in the sky and unraveled the universe. Maybe there was no kind of slipknot or half hitch or taut-line that could ever keep it all from coming undone. Something connected my first glimpse of the button to this one, even though it was just the same old button. Some small bit of universe had stretched from Lena to me to Macon to Amma to my dad and my mom—and even Marian and my Aunt Prue—back to me again. I guess Liv and John Breed were in there somewhere, and maybe Link and Ridley. Maybe all of Gatlin was.

Did it matter?

When I saw Lena for the very first time at school, how could I possibly have known where this was all headed? And if I had, would I have changed a single thing? I doubted it.

I picked up the silver button carefully. The second my fingers touched it they moved more slowly, as if I had plunged my hand to the bottom of the lake. I felt the weight of the worthless tin like it was a pile of bricks.

I put it back on the cross, but it rolled off the edge, falling onto the mounded dirt of the grave. I was too tired to try to move it again. If someone else was here, would they have seen the button move? Or did it only seem like that to me? Either way, that button was hard to look at. I hadn’t thought about
what it would feel like to visit my own grave. And I wasn’t ready to rest, in peace or not.

I wasn’t ready for any of this.

I’d never really thought past the whole dying-for-the-sake-of-the-world part of things. When you’re alive, you don’t dwell on how you’re going to spend your time once you’re dead. You just figure you’re gone, and the rest will pretty much take care of itself.

Or you think you’re not really going to die. You’re going to be the first person in the history of the world who doesn’t have to. Maybe that’s some kind of lie our brains tell us to keep us from going crazy while we’re alive.

But nothing’s that simple.

Not when you were standing where I was.

And nobody’s any different from anyone else, not when you come right down to it.

These are the kinds of things a guy thinks about when he visits his own grave.

I sat down next to my headstone and flopped back on the hard soil and grass. I plucked a single blade poking through the scattering of snow. At least it was coming in green. No dead, brown grass and lubbers now.

Thank the Sweet Redeemer, as Amma liked to say.

You’re welcome.
That’s what I’d like to say.

I looked at the grave next to me and touched the fresh, cold soil with my hand, letting it fall through my fingers. Not a bit dry either. Things really had changed around Gatlin.

I was brought up a good Southern boy, and I knew better than to disturb or disrespect any grave in town. I had walked circles around graveyards, trailing my mom carefully to avoid accidentally putting a stray foot on someone’s sacred plot.

It was Link who didn’t know better than to lie on top of the graves and pretend to sleep where the dead were resting. He wanted to practice—that’s what he said. A dry run. “I want to see what the view is like from down there. You wouldn’t want a guy to head out for the rest a his life without knowin’ where it was all takin’ him in the end, would you?”

But when it came to graves, it was a different thing to worry about disrespecting your own.

That’s when a familiar voice caught in the wind, surprising me with how close it was. “You get used to it, you know.”

I followed the voice a few graves over, and there she was, red hair blowing wild. Genevieve Duchannes. Lena’s ancestor, the first Caster who had used
The Book of Moons
to try to bring back someone she loved—the original Ethan Wate. He was my great-great-great-great-uncle, and it hadn’t worked out any better for him than it had for me. Genevieve failed, and Lena’s family was cursed.

The last time I saw Genevieve, I was digging up her grave with Lena, looking for
The Book of Moons
.

“Is that—Genevieve? Ma’am?” I sat up.

She nodded, curling and uncurling a loose strand of hair with her hand. “I thought you might be coming around. I wasn’t sure when. There’s been a lot of talk.” She smiled.
“Though your kind tends to stay in Perpetual Peace. Casters, we go where we like. Most of us stay in the Tunnels. I feel better here.”

Talk? I bet there was, though it was hard to imagine a town full of ghostly Sheers doing the talking. More like my Aunt Prue, probably.

Her smile faded. “But you’re just a boy. It’s worse, isn’t it? That you’re so young.”

I nodded in Genevieve’s direction. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, you’re here now, and that’s what matters. I suppose I owe you, Ethan Lawson Wate.”

“You don’t owe me anything, ma’am.”

“I hope to repay the debt one day. Returning my locket meant the world to me, but I don’t think you’ll see much gratitude from Ethan Carter Wate, wherever he may be. He always was a bit stubborn that way.”

“What happened to him? If you don’t mind my asking, ma’am.” I’d always wondered about Ethan Carter Wate—after he came back to life for only a second. I mean, he was the beginning of all of this, everything that had happened to Lena and me. The other end of the thread we pulled, the one that had unraveled the entire universe.

Didn’t I have a right to know how his story ended? It couldn’t have been much worse than mine, could it?

“I don’t really know. They took him away to the Far Keep. We couldn’t be together, but I’m sure you know that. I learned it myself, the hard way,” she said, her voice sad and far away.

Her words caught in my mind, snagging on others I’d tried to push off until now. The Far Keep. The Keepers of
The Caster Chronicles
—the same ones my mom refused to talk about. Genevieve didn’t look like she wanted to elaborate either.

Why didn’t anyone want to talk about the Far Keep? What were
The Caster Chronicles
really about?

I looked from Genevieve to the lemon trees. Here we were, at the site of the first big fire. It was the place where her family’s land had burned, and where Lena tried to face off against Sarafine for the first time.

Funny how history repeated itself around here.

Funnier still how I was about the last person in Gatlin to figure that out.

But I had learned a few things the hard way myself. “It wasn’t your fault.
The Book of Moons
sort of plays tricks on people. I don’t think it was ever meant for Light Casters. I think it wanted to turn you—” She shot me a look, and I stopped talking. “Sorry, ma’am.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. For the first hundred years or so, I felt that way. Like that book had stolen something from me. Like I’d been duped…” Her voice trailed off.

She was right. She had gotten the short stick.

“But good or bad, I made my own choices. They’re all I have now. It’s my cross to bear, and I’ll be the one to bear it.”

“But you did it out of love.” So did Lena and Amma.

“I know. That’s what helps me bear it. I just wish my Ethan
didn’t have to bear it, too. The Far Keep is a cruel place.” She looked down at her grave. “What’s done is done. There’s no cheating death any more than you can cheat
The Book of Moons
. Someone always has to pay the price.” She smiled sadly. “I guess you know that, or you wouldn’t be here.”

“I guess I do.”

I knew it better than anyone.

A twig snapped. Then a voice called out, even louder.

“Stop following me, Link.”

Genevieve Duchannes disappeared at the sound of the words. I didn’t know how she did it, but I was so startled that I felt myself start slipping away, too.

I clung to the voice—because it was familiar, and I would’ve recognized it anywhere. And because it sounded like home, chaos and all.

It was the voice that anchored me in the Mortal realm now, the same way it had kept my heart bound to Gatlin when I had been alive.

L.

I froze. I couldn’t move, even though she couldn’t see me.

“You tryin’ to give me the slip?” Link was stomping around behind Lena, trying to catch up with her as she made her way through the lemon trees. Lena shook her head like she was trying to shake Link.

Lena.

She pushed through the brush, and I caught a glimpse of gold and green eyes. That was it; I couldn’t help myself.

“Lena!” I shouted as loud as I could, my voice ringing across the white sky.