Beautiful Darkness

No One Special

That night, we slept in the forest between the roots of an enormous tree, the biggest I'd ever seen. Link's knee was bandaged in my spare T-shirt, and his arm was in a sling made from part of my Jackson sweatshirt. Ridley lay on the opposite side of the tree with her eyes wide open, staring up at the sky. I wondered if she was staring at the Mortal sky now. She looked exhausted, but I didn't think she was going to get any sleep.

I wondered what she was thinking, if she regretted helping us. Had Ridley really lost her powers?

How would it feel to be Mortal when you had always been something else, something more? When you had never felt the "powerlessness of human existence," as Mrs. English had said in class last year. She had been talking about H. G. Wells' The Invisible Man, but right now Ridley seemed just as invisible.

Could you be happy if you woke up and suddenly you were no one special?

Could Lena? Is that what life with me would feel like? Hadn't Lena suffered enough for me already?

Like Ridley, I couldn't fall asleep, but I didn't want to stare at the sky. I wanted to see what was in Lena's notebook. A part of me knew it was an invasion of her privacy, but I also knew there might be something in those crumpled pages that could help us. After about an hour, I convinced myself reading her notebook was for the greater good, and I opened it.

At first it was hard to read, since my cell phone was my only light source. After my eyes adjusted, Lena's handwriting stared back at me from between the blue lines. I had seen the familiar print often enough in the months since her birthday, but I didn't think I would ever get used to it. It was such a sharp contrast to the girly script she wrote in before that night. It surprised me even more to see actual writing, after so many months of headstone photographs and black designs. Dark Caster designs, like the ones on her hands, were scribbled in the margins. But the first few entries were dated only days after Macon's death, when she was still writing.

emptycrowded daynights / all the same (more or less) fear (less and more) afraid / waiting for truth to strangle me in my sleep / if i ever slept

Fear (less and more) afraid. I understood the words, because that's how she had acted. Fearless and more afraid. Like she had nothing to lose but was afraid to lose it.

I flipped ahead and stopped when a date caught my eye. June 12th. The last day of school.

darkness hides and i think i can hold her / smother her in the palm of my hand / but when i look my hands are empty / quiet as her fingers fold around me

I read it over and over. She was describing the day at the lake, the day she had taken things too far. The day she could have killed me. Who was the "her"? Sarafine?

How long had she been fighting it? When did it start? The night Macon died? When she started wearing his clothes?

I knew I should close the notebook, but I couldn't. Reading her words was almost like hearing her thoughts again. I hadn't known them in such a long time, and I wanted to so badly. I turned each page, looking for the days that haunted me.

Like the day of the fair --

mortal hearts and mortal fears / something they can share i untie him like a sparrow

Freedom -- that's what sparrows meant to a Caster.

All along I thought she was trying to be free from me, but really she was trying to set me free. As if loving her was a cage I couldn't escape.

I closed the notebook. It hurt too much to read it, especially when Lena was so far away, in all the ways that mattered.

A few feet away, Ridley was still staring blankly into the Mortal stars. For the first time, we saw the same sky.

Liv was wedged between two roots, with me on one side and Link on the other. After I found out the truth about what happened on Lena's birthday, I guess I expected my feelings for Liv to disappear. But even now I found myself wondering. If things were different, if I had never met Lena, if I had never met Liv ...

I spent the next few hours watching Liv. When she slept, she looked peaceful, beautiful. Not Lena's kind of beautiful, something different. She looked content -- like a sunny day, a cold glass of milk, an unopened book before you cracked the binding. There was nothing tortured about her. She looked the way I wanted to feel.

Mortal. Hopeful. Alive.

When I finally drifted off, I felt that way, just for a minute....

Lena was shaking me. "Wake up, Sleepyhead. We have to talk." I smiled and pulled her into my arms. I tried to kiss her, but she laughed and ducked away. "This isn't that kind of a dream."

I sat up and looked around. We were in Macon's bed in the Tunnels. "All my dreams are that kind of dream, L. I'm almost seventeen."

"This is my dream, not yours. And I've only been sixteen for four months."

"Won't Macon be mad if we're here?"

"Macon's dead, don't you remember? You must really be asleep." She was right. I had forgotten everything, and now it all came crashing back. Macon was gone. The trade.

And Lena had left me, only she hadn't. She was here.

"So this is a dream?" I was trying to keep my stomach from twisting with loss, the guilt of everything I'd done, everything I owed her.

Lena nodded.

"Am I dreaming you, or are you dreaming me?"

"Does it ever make a difference, when it comes to us?" She was avoiding the question.

I tried again. "When I wake up, will you be gone?"

"Yes. But I had to see you. This was the only way for us to really talk." She was wearing a white T-shirt, one of my oldest, softest ones. She looked tousled and beautiful, in the way I loved best, when she thought she looked the worst.

I put my hands around her waist and pulled her close. "L, I saw my mom. She told me about Macon. I think she loved him."

"They loved each other. I've seen the visions, too." So our connection was still there. I felt a wave of relief.

"They were like us, Lena."

"And they couldn't be together. Like us."

It was a dream, I was sure of it. Because we could speak these terrible truths with a strange remove, as if they were happening to other people. She rested her head on my chest, picking mud off my shirt with her fingers. How had my shirt gotten so muddy? I tried to remember but couldn't.

"What are we going to do, L?"

"I don't know, Ethan. I'm scared."

"What do you want?"

"You," she whispered.

"So why is it so hard?"

"We're all wrong. Everything's all wrong when I'm with you."

"Does this feel wrong?" I held her tighter.

"No. But how I feel doesn't matter anymore." I felt her sigh against my chest.

"Who told you that?"

"No one had to tell me." I stared into her eyes. They were still gold.

"You can't go to the Great Barrier. You have to come back."

"I can't stop now. I have to see how it ends."

I played with a strand of her curling black hair. "Why didn't you have to see how it ended with us?"

She smiled and touched my face. "Because now I know how it ends with you."

"How does it end?"

"Like this." She bent over and kissed me, and her hair fell around my face like rain. I pulled up the covers, and she climbed beneath them, folding into my arms. As we kissed, I felt the heat of her touch. We tumbled in the bed. I was on top of her, then she was on top of me. The heat intensified to the point where I couldn't breathe. I thought my skin was on fire, and when I broke away from her kiss, it was.

We were both on fire, surrounded by flames that rose higher than we could see, and the bed wasn't a bed at all but a stone slab. It was burning all around us, the yellow flames of Sarafine's fire.

Lena screamed and clung to me. I looked down from where we were, on top of the massive pyramid of splintered trees. There was a strange circle chiseled into the stone we were lying on, some kind of Dark Caster symbol.

"Lena, wake up! This isn't you. You didn't kill Macon. You're not going Dark. It was the Book. Amma told me everything."

The pyre had been for us, not Sarafine. I could hear her laughing -- or was it Lena? I couldn't tell the difference anymore. "L, listen to me! You don't have to do this --"

Lena was screaming. She couldn't stop screaming.

By the time I woke up, the flames had consumed us both.

"Ethan? Wake up. We have to get going."

I sat up, breathing hard and dripping with sweat. I held out my hands. Nothing. Not a burn, not so much as a scratch. It was a nightmare. I looked around. Liv and Link were already up. I rubbed my face with my hands. My heart was still pounding, as if the dream was real and I had almost died. I wondered again if it was my dream or Lena's. I wondered if that was really how it ended for us. Fire and death, just as Sarafine would want it.

Ridley was sitting on a rock, sucking on a lollipop, which was sort of pathetic. During the night, she seemed to have moved from a state of shock to one of denial. She was acting as if nothing happened. No one really knew what to say. She was like one of those war vets suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, who come home and think they're still on the battlefield.

She was staring at Link, tossing her hair and looking at him expectantly. "Why don't you come on over here, Hot Rod?"

Link limped over to my backpack and pulled out a bottle of water. "I'll pass."

Ridley pushed her shades on top of her head and stared at him even more intently, which made it clear her powers were gone. In the light of day, Ridley's eyes were as blue as Liv's.

"I said come over here." Ridley inched her short skirt farther up her bruised thigh. I felt sorry for her. She wasn't a Siren anymore, just a girl who looked like one.

"Why?" Link wasn't catching on.

Ridley's tongue was bright red as she gave her lollipop one last lick. "Don't you want to kiss me?" For a second, I thought Link might play along, but that would only delay the inevitable.

"No, thanks." He turned away, and it was obvious he felt guilty.

Ridley's lip quivered. "Maybe it's temporary, and my powers will come back." She was trying to convince herself more than anyone.

Someone had to tell her. The sooner she faced reality, the sooner she would be able to move on. If she could. "I think they're really gone, Ridley."

She whipped around to face me, her voice shaky. "You don't know that. Just because you went out with a Caster doesn't mean you know anything."

"I know Dark Casters have yellow eyes."

I heard the breath catch in her throat. She grabbed the bottom of her filthy tank top and yanked it up. Her skin was still smooth and golden, but the tattoo that had encircled her navel was gone. She ran her hands across her stomach, and then crumbled.

"It's true. She really took my powers." Ridley opened her fingers, letting the lollipop fall into the dirt. She didn't make a sound, but the tears ran down her face in two silver lines.

Link walked over and held out his hand to pull her up. "That's not true. You're still pretty bad. I mean, hot. For a Mortal."

Ridley jumped to her feet, hysterical. "You think this is funny? That losing my powers is like losing one of your stupid basketball games? They're who I am, you idiot! Without them I'm nothing." Black streaks ran down her cheeks. She was shaking.

Link picked up her lollipop out of the dirt. He opened the water bottle and doused it. "Give it some time, Rid. You'll develop charms all your own. You'll see." He handed it back to her. Ridley stared back at him blankly.

Without looking away, she hurled the lollipop as far as she could.