"Did you read that in her papers?"
"No. It was something John said to Lena." I didn't want to think about it, even if the information was useful. "Where are we again, according to the map?"
She pointed. "Right there." We had reached the long curving line that followed the inlets of the southern shore. Caster connections wove their way together and apart until they met at the edge of the water like nerve endings.
"What are these little shapes? Islands?" Liv chewed on the end of her pen.
"Those are the Sea Islands."
Liv leaned over me. "Why do they look so familiar?"
"I've been wondering that, too. I thought it was from staring at the map for so long."
It was true. I knew those shapes, curving in and out like a group of lopsided clouds. Where had I seen them before?
I pulled a handful of papers -- my mother's papers -- out of my back pocket. There it was, tucked between pages. The sheet of vellum covered with a strange Caster design that looked like weird clouds.
She knew how to find it, without the star.
"Hold on --" I slid the vellum on top of the map. It was like tracing paper, thin as an onion skin on Amma's cutting board.
"I wonder ..." I slipped the translucent sheet into place over the map, the outlines of each shape on the vellum lining up perfectly with the shape on the chart beneath it. Except for one, which materialized in a sort of ghostly silhouette, only appearing when the partial outline of the map grid met the partial outline of the vellum. Without both the vellum and the map, the lines looked like meaningless scribbles.
But when you held them just right, it all came together, and you could see the island.
Like two halves of a Caster key, or two universes stitched together for one common purpose.
The Great Barrier was hidden in the middle of a Mortal coastal chain. Of course it was.
I stared at the ink on the page, and beneath it.
There it was. The most powerful place in the Caster world, appearing through pen and paper as if by magic.
Hidden in plain sight.
6.20
No One's Son
The door itself wasn't that unusual.
Neither was the Doorwell leading up to it, or the curving passage we had followed to find our way here. Twist after turn through corridors built from crumbling rocks and dirt and splintering wood. This is what tunnels were supposed to feel like -- damp and dark and tight. It was almost like the day Link and I followed a stray dog into one of the runoff tunnels in Summerville.
I guess the strangest thing was how ordinary everything seemed, now that we had figured out the secret to the map. Following it was the easy part.
Until now.
"That's it. It has to be." Liv looked up from the map. I stared past her to where a wooden staircase led up to streaks of light, forming the outline of a door in the darkness.
"You sure?"
She nodded and slid the map into her pocket.
"Then let's see what's out there." I climbed the steps to the door.
"Not so fast, Short Straw. What do you think is on the other side of that door?" Ridley was stalling. She looked as nervous as I felt.
Liv studied the door. "According to the legends, old magic, neither Light or Dark."
Ridley shook her head. "You have no idea what you're talking about, Keeper. Old magic is wild. It's infinite. Chaos in its purest form. Not exactly the combination for a happy ending to your little quest."
I moved closer to the door. Liv and Link were right behind me. "Come on, Rid. You want to help Lena or not?" Link's voice echoed off the walls.
"I was just saying ..." I could hear the fear in Ridley's voice. I tried not to think about the last time she sounded this scared, when she faced Sarafine in the woods.
I pushed the door and it creaked, the worn wood bending and straining. Another try and it would open. We would be there, wherever there was. The Great Barrier.
I wasn't scared. I don't know why. But I wasn't thinking about entering a magical universe when I forced the door open. I was thinking about home. The wooden panel wasn't all that different from the Outer Door we found at the fairgrounds, under the Tunnel of Love. Maybe it was a sign -- something from the beginning reappearing at the end. I wondered if it was a good omen or a bad one.
It didn't matter what was on the other side of the door. Lena was waiting. She needed me, whether she knew it or not.
There was no turning back.
I leaned against the panel, and it swung open. The crack of light opened into a blinding field of white.
I stepped into the harsh light, the darkness behind me now. I could barely see the steps below me. I breathed in the air, heavy with salt and sour with brine.
Loca silentia. Now I understood. The moment we emerged from the darkness of the Tunnels into the broad, flat reflection of the water, there was only light and silence.
Slowly, my eyes began to adjust. We were on what looked like a rocky Lowcountry beach, covered in a spread of gray and white oyster shells, framed by an uneven row of palmettos. A splintered wooden walkway stretched along the perimeter of the shoreline facing the islands. We stood there now, the four of us, listening to what should have been the waves or the wind or even a gull in the sky. But the silence was so thick, it stopped us in our tracks.
The scene was perfectly ordinary and incredibly surreal, as vivid as any dream. The colors were too bright, the light too light. And in the far shadows beyond the shore, the dark was too dark. But everything was somehow beautiful here. Even the darkness. It was how the moment felt that silenced us. Magic was unfolding between us, encircling us like a rope, tying us to one another.
As I started toward the walkway, the rounded shores of the Sea Islands emerged in the distance. Beyond that was only dense, flat fog. Tufts of swamp grass rose from the water to form long, shallow banks rising in and out of the coastal mud. Along the beach, weathered wooden docks stretched out into the unbroken blue water until they disappeared into the black deep. The docks faded down the coast like weathered wooden fingers. Bridges to nowhere.
I looked up at the sky. Not a star in sight. Liv looked down at the selenometer whirring on her wrist, and tapped it. "None of these numbers mean anything anymore. We're on our own now." She unfastened her watch and slid it into her pocket.
"Guess so."
"What now?" Link bent to pick up a shell with his good arm and chucked it into the distance. The water swallowed it without a sound. Ridley stood next to him, streaks of pink hair whipping in the wind. On the far edge of the dock in front of us, the flag of South Carolina -- with the silhouette of a palmetto and a crescent moon on a field of midnight blue -- looked like a Caster flag as it fluttered from a spindly flagpole. When I looked at the flag more closely, I realized it had changed. This one had a seven-pointed star in the sky, next to the familiar crescent moon and palmetto silhouette. The Southern Star, right there on the flag, as if it had fallen out of the sky.
If this really was the seam where the Mortal and the magical touched, there was no sign of it here. I don't know what I was hoping for. All I had now were one too many stars on the state flag and a feeling of magic as thick as the salt in the air.
I joined the others at the far edge of the walkway. The wind had picked up, and the flag was whipping around the pole. It didn't make a sound.
Liv consulted the folded map. "If we're in the right place, it has to be between that island, beyond the buoy, and where we're standing."
"I think we're in the right place." I was sure of it.
"How do you know?"
"Remember that Southern Star you were telling me about?" I pointed to the flag. "Think about it. If you followed the star the whole way here, the star on the flag is exactly what you would be looking for. Some kind of sign you're at the right spot."
"Of course. The seven-pointed star." She examined the flag, touching the fabric as if she was allowing herself to believe it for the very first time.
There wasn't time for that. I knew we had to keep moving. "So what are we even looking for? Land? Or something man-made?"
"You mean this isn't it?" Link looked disappointed and shoved his garden shears back into his belt.
"I think we still have to cross over the water. It makes sense, really. Like crossing the river Styx to get to Hades." Liv flattened the map against her palm. "According to the map, we're looking for some kind of connector that will take us across the water to the Great Barrier itself. Like a sandbar or a bridge." She held the vellum over the map, and we all looked.
Link took them out of her hands. "Yeah, I see it. Kinda cool." He flipped the vellum up and down across the map. "Now you see it, now you don't." He dropped the map, and it fluttered into a mess of pages on the sand.
Liv bent to pick it up. "Careful with that! Are you completely mental?"
"You mean, like a genius?" Sometimes there was no point in Link and Liv talking at all. Liv pocketed Aunt Prue's map, and we started walking again.
Ridley picked up Lucille Ball. She hadn't said much since we left the Tunnels. Maybe now that she had been declawed, she preferred Lucille's company. Or maybe she was scared. She probably knew better than the rest of us the dangers that lay ahead.
I could feel the Arclight burning in my pocket. My heart began to pound, and my head began to spin.
What was it doing to me? Since we crossed over into the no man's land the map called Loca silentia, the light had stopped illuminating our path and started illuminating the past. Macon's past. It had become a conduit for the visions, a direct line I couldn't control. The visions were coming intermittently, interrupting the present with fragmented bits and pieces of Macon's past.
An old palmetto frond snapped loudly under one of Ridley's shoes. Then something else, and I felt myself slipping away --
Macon could feel it immediately when his shoulder snapped -- the intense pain of his bones cracking. His skin tightened, as if it could no longer hold whatever was lurking inside him. The breath was sucked from his lungs, like he was being crushed. His vision began to blur, and he had the sensation he was falling, even though he could feel the rocks tearing at his flesh as his body seized on the ground.
The Transformation.
From this moment forth, he would not be able to walk among Mortals in the daylight. The sun would singe the flesh from his body. He wouldn't be able to ignore the urge to feed on the blood of Mortals. He was one of them now --
another Blood Incubus in the long line of killers on the Ravenwood Family Tree. A predator walking among his prey, waiting to feed.
I was back again, as suddenly as I had gone.
I stumbled toward Liv, my head reeling. "We've got to get going. Things are getting out of control."
"What things?"
"The Arclight -- the things in my head," I said, unable to explain it any better than that.
She nodded. "I thought it might get bad for you. I wasn't sure if a Wayward would react more strongly to an intensely powerful place, being as sensitive to the pull of certain Casters as you are. I mean, if you really are ..." If I really was a Wayward. She didn't have to say it.
"So you're saying you finally believe the Great Barrier is real?"
"No. Unless ..." She pointed out past the farthest dock on the horizon, where the skinniest, most splintered dock extended past the others, so far that we couldn't see where it ended, except that it disappeared into fog. "That could be the bridge we're looking for."