Beautiful Darkness

Unmistakable

The Beater skidded to a stop in front of the Historical Society, the front tires halfway up the curb, the engine dying out on the empty street.

"Can you take it down a notch? Someone's gonna hear us." Not that Link ever drove any differently. Still, we were parked only a few feet from the building that served as the DAR headquarters. I noticed the roof had finally been rebuilt -- it had blown off in Hurricane Lena, a few days before her birthday. Though Jackson High had been hit by the same storm, I guess those repairs could wait. We had our priorities around here.

Almost everyone in South Carolina was related to a Confederate, so joining the Daughters of the Confederacy was easy. But to join the DAR, you needed a bloodline going back to someone who fought in the war for American independence. The problem was the proof. Unless you were an actual signer of the Declaration of Independence, you had to establish a paper trail a mile long. Even then you had to be invited, which required sucking up to Link's mom and signing whatever petition she happened to be passing around. Maybe it was a bigger deal down here than up North, like we needed to prove we had all fought for the same side in a war once. The Mortal part of our town was just as confusing as the Caster one.

Tonight the building looked empty.

"It's not like there's anyone around to hear us. Until the Demolition Derby ends, everyone we know is at the fairgrounds." Link was right. Gatlin may as well have been a ghost town. Most folks were still at the fair, or at home on the phone reporting the details of a certain Southern Crusty bake-off that would go down in history for decades to come. I was pretty sure Mrs. Lincoln wouldn't have let any of the DAR members miss watching her try to beat Amma out of first place in Pies. Although, right about now, I bet Link's mom was wishing she had stuck to pickled okra this year.

"Not everyone." I was out of ideas and explanations, but I knew where we could get some of both.

"You sure this is a good idea? What if Marian's not here?" Link was jumpy. The sight of Ridley hanging out with some kind of mutant Incubus wasn't bringing out the best in him. Not that he had anything to worry about. It was pretty clear who John Breed was after, and it wasn't Ridley.

I checked my cell. It was almost eleven. "It's a bank holiday in Gatlin. You know what that means. Marian should be in the Lunae Libri by now." That's how it worked around here. Marian was the Gatlin County Head Librarian from nine in the morning until six at night every weekday. But on bank holidays, she was the Head Caster Librarian from nine at night until six in the morning. The Gatlin Library was closed, which meant the Caster Library was open. And the Lunae Libri had a door leading into the Tunnels.

I slammed the door of the Beater as Link pulled a Maglite out of his glove box. "I know, I know. The Gatlin Library's closed and the Caster Library's open all night long, on account a most a Marian's clients don't come around durin' the day." Link waved the flashlight across the building in front of us. A brass placard read DAUGHTERS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. "Still, if my mom or Mrs. Asher or Mrs. Snow found out what was in the basement a their buildin' ..." He was holding the heavy metal flashlight like he was brandishing a weapon.

"You planning to take someone out with that thing?"

Link shrugged. "Never know what we're gonna find down there."

I knew what he was thinking. Neither one of us had been back to the Lunae Libri since Lena's birthday. Our last visit had been more about danger than dictionaries.

Danger and death. We did something wrong that night, and some of it had happened right here. If I had gotten to Ravenwood earlier, if I had found The Book of Moons, if I could have helped Lena fight Sarafine -- if we had done one thing differently, would Macon be alive right now?

We made our way around to the back of the old red brick building, in the moonlight. Link shined his flashlight on the grating near the ground, and I crouched down next to it. "Ready, man?"

The light was shaking in his hand. "Whenever you are."

I reached through the familiar grating built into the back of the building. My hand disappeared, as always, into the illusionary entrance of the Lunae Libri. Nothing much in Gatlin was what it first appeared to be -- at least not where Casters were concerned.

"I'm surprised that spell still works." Link watched as I pulled my hand back out of the grate, as good as new.

"Lena told me it's not a hard one. Some kind of hiding spell Larkin Cast."

"Ever wonder if it could be a trap?" The flashlight was shaking so badly, the light was barely shining on the grating.

"Only one way to find out." I shut my eyes and stepped through. One minute I was standing in the overgrown bushes behind the DAR, and the next I was inside the stone stairwell leading down into the heart of the Lunae Libri. I shivered when I crossed the Charmed threshold into the library, but not because I felt anything supernatural. The shiver, the wrongness, came from not feeling anything different at all. Air was air on either side of the grate, even if it was pitch-black. I didn't feel magical right now, not anywhere in Gatlin or beneath it. I felt bruised and angry but hopeful. I had been convinced Lena had feelings for John. But if there was a possibility I was wrong -- that John and Ridley were influencing her -- it was worth being on the wrong side of the grate again.

Link stumbled through the doorway after me and dropped his flashlight. It clattered down the stairwell in front of us, and we stood in the dark, until the torches lining the steep passageway lit themselves one by one. "Sorry. That thing always throws me off."

"Link, if you don't want to do this --" I couldn't see his face in the shadows.

It took a second before I heard his voice in the dark. "Of course I don't wanna do this, but I gotta do it. I mean, I'm not sayin' Rid's the love a my life. She's not. That would be crazy. But what if Lena was tellin' the truth, and Rid wants to change? What if Vampire Boy is doin' somethin' to her, too?" I doubted Ridley was under anyone's influence except her own. But I didn't say anything.

This wasn't just about Lena and me. Ridley was still under Link's skin, in a bad way. You don't want to fall in love with a Siren. Falling for a Caster was rough enough.

I followed him down into the flickering, torch-lit darkness of the world beneath our town. We left Gatlin for the Caster world, a place where anything could happen. I tried not to think back to a time when that was all I wanted.

Whenever I stepped through the stone archway bearing the carved words DOMUS LUNAE LIBRI, I was entering another world, a parallel universe. By now, some parts of the world were familiar -- the smell of the mossy stone, the musky scent of parchment dating back to the Civil War and beyond, the smoke drifting up from the torches hovering near the carved ceilings. I could smell the damp walls, hear the occasional drip of underground water making its way down to the patterns in the stone floor. But there were other parts that would never be familiar. The darkness at the edges of the stacks, the sections of the library no Mortal had ever seen. I wondered how much my mother had seen.

We reached the base of the stairs.

"What now?" Link found his flashlight and aimed it at the column next to him. A menacing stone griffin's head snarled back. He pulled the flashlight away, and it flickered on a fanged gargoyle. "If this is a library, I'd hate to see a Caster prison."

I heard the sound of the flames erupting into light. "Wait for it."

One by one, the torches surrounding the rotunda burst into flame, and we could see the carved colonnade, with rows of fierce mythological creatures, some Caster, some Mortal, snaking around every pedestal.

Link cringed. "This place is messed up. Just sayin'."

I touched a woman's face twisted into carved agony in stone flames. Link ran his hand over another face, revealing massive rows of canines. "Check out the dog. It looks like Boo." He looked again and realized the fangs were growing out of a man's head. He yanked his hand away.

There was a swirl of carved rock that appeared to be made of both stone and smoke. A face emerged from the twists and folds of the column, and it looked familiar. It was hard to tell because there was so much rock around it. The face seemed to be fighting the stone, trying to push its way out toward me. For a second, I thought I saw the lips on the face move, as if it was trying to speak.

I backed away. "What the hell is that?"

"What's what?" Link stood next to me, staring at the column, which was just a column swirled with curving waves and spirals again. The face had been swallowed back into the pattern, like a head disappearing under the sea's waves. "The ocean, maybe? Smoke from a fire? Why do you care?"

"Forget it." I couldn't, even if I didn't understand it. I knew that face in the stone. I had seen it somewhere before. This room was eerie, warning that the Caster world was a Dark place, no matter whose side you were on.

Another torch ignited, and the stacks of old books, manuscripts, and Caster Scrolls revealed themselves. They radiated out from the rotunda in all directions, like spokes on a wheel, and disappeared into the darkness beyond. The last torch burst into flame, and I could see the curving mahogany desk where Marian should have been sitting.

It was empty. Though Marian always said the Lunae Libri was a place of old magic, neither Dark nor Light, without her the whole library felt pretty Dark.

"No one's here." Link sounded defeated.

I grabbed a torch off the wall and handed it to him, taking another for myself. "They're down here."

"How do you know?"

"I just do."

I plowed ahead into the stacks as if I knew where I was going. The air was thick with the smell of the bent and crumbling spines of old books and ancient scrolls, the dusty oak shelves straining under the weight of hundreds of years and centuries of words. I held my torch up to the nearest shelf. "Toes: to Caste Hair on Your Maiden's. Tongues for Binding and Casting. Toffee: Casts Hidden Inside. We must be in the T's."

"Destruction of Mortal Life, Total. That should be in the D's." Link reached for the book.

"Don't touch that. It'll burn your hand." I had learned the hard way, from The Book of Moons.

"Shouldn't we at least hide it or something? Behind the Toffee one?" Link had a point.

We hadn't gone ten feet when I heard a laugh. A girl's laugh, unmistakable, echoing off the carved ceilings. "You hear that?"

"What?" Link waved his torch, almost setting the nearest pile of scrolls on fire.

"Watch it. There's no fire escape down here."

We reached a crossroads in the stacks. I heard it again, the almost musical laughter. It was beautiful and familiar, and the sound of it made me feel safe, the world I was standing in a little less foreign. "I think it's a girl laughing."

"Maybe it's Marian. She's a girl." I looked at him like he was insane, and he shrugged. "Sort of."

"It's not Marian." I motioned for him to listen, but the sound was gone. We walked in the direction of the laughter, and the passageway turned until we reached another rotunda, similar to the first.

"You think it's Lena and Ridley?"

"I don't know. This way." I could barely follow the sound, but I knew who it was. Part of me always suspected I could find Lena no matter where she was. I couldn't explain it, I just knew.

It made sense. If our connection was so strong we could dream the same dreams and speak without speaking, why wouldn't I be able to sense where she was? It's like when you drive home from school, or some place you go every day, and you remember leaving the parking lot, then the next thing you know you're pulling into your driveway and you don't remember how you got there.

She was my destination. I was always on the way to Lena, even when I wasn't. Even when she wasn't on her way to me.

"A little farther."

The next twist in the passage revealed a corridor covered with ivy. I held up my torch, and a brass lantern lit itself in the middle of the leaves. "Look." The light from the lantern illuminated the outline of a doorway hidden beneath the vines. I felt along the wall until I found the cold, round iron of the latch. It was in the shape of a crescent. A Caster moon.

I heard it again, laughter. It had to be Lena. There are some things a guy just knows. I knew L. And I knew my heart wouldn't lead me astray.

My chest was pounding. I pushed open the door, heavy and groaning. It opened into a magnificent study. Along the far wall of the study, a girl was lying on an enormous four-poster bed, scribbling in a tiny red notebook.

"L!"

She looked up, surprised.

Only it wasn't Lena.

It was Liv.