Beautiful Chaos

Bad-Eye Side

With her glasses knocked off, her glass eye closed, and her hair unraveled from its maniacal bun—Lilian English almost looked like a person.

A nice person.

I called 911. Then I sat in the worn flowered chair, staring at Mrs. English’s body, waiting for the ambulance. I wondered if she was dead. Another casualty in this war I wasn’t sure we could win.

Another thing that was my fault.

The ambulance arrived not long after that. By the time Woody Porter and Bud Sweet found a pulse, I could breathe again. I watched as they loaded the gurney into the back of the “bus,” as Woody called it.

“Anyone you can call for her?” Bud asked as he slammed the ambulance doors.

There was one person.

“Yeah. I’ll call someone.” I went back into Mrs. English’s tiny house, through the hall and into the kitchen with the hummingbird wallpaper. I didn’t want to call my dad, but I owed Mrs. English that much after everything she’d been through. I lifted the pastel pink receiver off the cradle and stared at the rows of numbers.

My hand started to shake.

I couldn’t remember my phone number.

Maybe I was in shock. That’s what I kept telling myself, but I knew it was more than that. Something was happening to me. What I didn’t know was why.

I closed my eyes, willing my fingers to find the right numbers.

Combinations of numbers marched through my mind. Lena’s number and Link’s and the Gatlin County Library’s. There was only one phone number I couldn’t remember.

My own.

Lilian English missed her first day of school in about a hundred and fifty years. The actual diagnosis was severe exhaustion. It made sense, I guess. Abraham and Sarafine could do that to anyone, even without the help of a Demon Queen.

Which left Lena and me hanging out alone in the classroom a few days later. Class was over, and Principal Harper had collected the pile of papers he would never grade, but we were still sitting at our desks.

I think we both wanted to stay a while longer in the place where Mrs. English had never been a puppet, where she’d been a Demon Queen all her own. The real Mrs. English was the hand of justice, even if she wasn’t the Wheel of Fate. There was never a curve in her class. Between that and the whole Crucible thing, I could see why the Lilum had thrived in Mrs. English’s body.

“I should have known. She was acting creepy all year.” I sighed. “And I knew her glass eye was on the wrong side at least once.”

“You think the Lilum was teaching our English class? You said the Lilum talked really weird. We would’ve noticed.” Lena was right.

“The Lilum must have been inside Mrs. English some of the time, because Abraham and Sarafine showed up at her house. And, trust me, they knew what they were looking for.”

We were sitting in silence at opposite ends of the room. Today, I was on the Bad-Eye Side. It was that kind of day. I had recounted every detail of the other night to Lena three times, except the part about forgetting my phone number. I didn’t want her to worry, too. But she was still having trouble wrapping her mind around it all. I couldn’t blame her. I had been there, and I wasn’t doing much better.

Lena finally said something, from the Good-Eye Side. “Why do you think we have to find this One Who Is Two?” She was more upset than I was, maybe because she had just found out about it. Or maybe because it involved her mother.

“Did you miss the whole Crucible speech?” I’d told her everything I could remember.

“No. I mean, what is this ‘One’ going to do that we can’t? To forge the New Order, or whatever.” She left her seat and sat on the edge of Mrs. English’s desk, her legs dangling. The New Order. No wonder she was thinking about it. Lena knew the Lilum said that she would be the one to Bind it.

“How do you Bind a New Order, anyway?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “No clue.”

There had to be some way to find out. “Maybe there’s something in the Lunae Libri about it.”

Lena looked frustrated. “Sure. Look under N, for New Order. Or B, for Binding. Or P, for psycho, which is how I’m starting to feel.”

“Tell me about it.”

She sighed, swinging her legs harder. “Even if I knew how to do it, the bigger question is, why me? I broke the last one.” She looked tired, her black T-shirt damp with sweat and her charm necklace tangled in her long hair.

“Maybe it needed to be broken. Sometimes things have to break before you can fix them.”

“Or maybe it didn’t need fixing.”

“You want to get out of here? I’ve had enough Crucible talk for today.”

She nodded, grateful. “Me, too.”

We walked down the hall, holding hands, and I watched as Lena’s hair began to curl. The Casting Breeze. So I wasn’t surprised when Miss Hester didn’t even look up from painting her long purple nails as we passed by, leaving the Demon and the Mortal worlds behind us.

Lake Moultrie really was as hot and brown as Link said. There wasn’t a drop of water in sight. Nobody was around, though there were a few souvenirs from Mrs. Lincoln and her friends, stuck in the cracked mud of the sloping shore.

COMMUNITY WATCH HOTLINE

REPORT ALL APOCALYPTIC BEHAVIOR

She’d even written her home phone number across the bottom.

“What, exactly, constitutes apocalyptic behavior?” Lena tried not to smile.

“I don’t know, but I’m sure if we asked Mrs. Lincoln to post a clarification, she’d have it up here tomorrow.” I thought about it. “No fishing. No dumping. No calling up the Devil. No plagues of heat and lubbers, or Vexes.”

Lena kicked the dry dirt. “No rivers of blood.” I’d told her about my dream—that one, anyway. “And no human sacrifice.”

“Don’t give Abraham any ideas.”

Lena put her head on my shoulder.

“Do you remember last time we were here?” I poked her with a dry piece of river grass. “You ran away on the back of John’s Harley.”

“I don’t want to remember that part. I want to remember the good part,” she whispered.

“There are a lot of good parts.”

She smiled, and I knew I would always remember this day. Like the day I found her crying in the garden at Greenbrier. There were times when I looked at her and everything stopped. When the world fell away and I knew nothing could ever come between us.

I pulled her against me and kissed her harder, in a dead lake where no one could see us and no one cared. With every passing second, the pain was building in my body, the pressure of my pounding heart, but I didn’t stop. Nothing else mattered but this. I wanted to feel her hands on my skin, her mouth tugging on my bottom lip. I wanted to feel her body against mine until I couldn’t feel anything else.

Because unless we found whoever it was, and convinced the One Who Is Two to do whatever had to be done by the Eighteenth Moon, I had a sinking feeling it didn’t matter what happened to either of us.

She closed her eyes, and I closed mine, and even though we weren’t holding hands, it felt like we were.

Because what we had, we knew.