Lucil e, the Sisters' cat. I could see her blue eyes shining in the darkness as she stalked onto the porch.
"I told everyone you'd find your way back to the house sooner or later. You just found the wrong house." Lucil e cocked her head to the side. "You know the Sisters are never gonna let you off that clothesline again after this."
Lucil e stared back at me as if she understood perfectly. As if she had known the consequences when she took off but, for whatever reason, she left anyway. A firefly blinked in front of me, and Lucil e leaped off the step.
It flew higher, but that dumb cat kept reaching for it. She didn't seem to know how far away it real y was. Like the stars. Like a lot of things.
6.12
The Girl of My Dreams
Darkness.
I couldn't see a thing, but I could feel the air draining out of my lungs. I couldn't breathe. The air was fil ed with smoke, and I was coughing, choking.
Ethan!
I could hear her voice, but it was distant and faraway.
The air around me was hot. It smel ed like ash and death.
Ethan, no!
I saw the glint of a knife, over my head, and I heard the sinister laughter. Sarafine. Only I couldn't see her face.
As the knife plunged into my stomach, I knew where I was.
I was at Greenbrier, on top of the crypt, and I was about to die.
I tried to scream, but I couldn't make a sound. Sarafine threw back her head and laughed, her hands on the knife in my stomach. I was dying, and she was laughing. The blood was running al around me, rushing into my ears, my nostrils, my mouth. It had a distinct taste, like copper or salt.
My lungs felt like two heaving sacks of cement. When the rush of blood in my ears drowned out her voice, I was overwhelmed with the familiar feeling of loss. Green and gold. Lemons and rosemary. I could smel it through the blood, the smoke, and the ashes. Lena.
I always thought I couldn't live without her. Now I wasn't going to have to.
"Ethan Wate! Why don't I hear that shower runnin' yet?" I bolted upright in bed, drenched in sweat. I ran my hand under my T-shirt, over my skin. There was no blood, but I could feel the raised impression where the knife had cut me in the dream. I pul ed up my shirt and stared at the jagged pink line. A scar cut across my lower abdomen, like a stab wound. It had appeared out of nowhere, an injury from a dream.
Only it was real, and it hurt. I hadn't had one of the dreams since Lena's birthday, and I didn't know why they were coming back now, like this. I was used to waking up with mud in my bed or smoke in my lungs, but this was the first time I had ever woken up in pain. I tried to shake it off, tel ing myself it didn't real y happen. But my stomach throbbed. I stared at my open window, wishing Macon was around to steal the end of this dream. I wished he was around for a lot of reasons.
I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate, to see if Lena was there. But I already knew she wouldn't be. I could feel when she had pul ed away, which was most of the time, lately.
Amma cal ed up the stairs again. "If you're fixin' to be late for your last examination, you'l be sittin' on your sweet corncakes in that room a yours al summer. That's a promise."
Lucil e Bal was staring at me from the foot of my bed, the way she did most mornings now. After Lucil e showed up on our porch, I took her back home to Aunt Mercy, but the next day she was sitting on our porch again. After that, Aunt Prue convinced her sisters that Lucil e was a deserter, and the cat moved in with us. I was pretty surprised when Amma opened the door and let Lucil e wander in, but she had her reasons. "Nothin' wrong with havin' a cat in the house. They can see what most people can't, like the folks in the Otherworld when they cross back over -- the good ones and the bad. And they get rid a mice." I guess you could say Lucil e was the animal kingdom's version of Amma.
By the time I made it into the shower, the hot water rol ed off me, pushing everything away. Everything except the scar. I turned it up even hotter, but I couldn't keep my mind in the shower. It was tangled up in the dreams, the knife, the laughter --
My English final.
Crap.
I'd fal en asleep before I finished studying. If I failed the test, I would fail the class, Good-Eye Side or not. My grades were not stel ar this semester, and by that I mean I was running neck and neck with Link. I wasn't my usual don't-study-and-get-by self. I was already close to failing history, since Lena and I had ditched the mandatory Reenactment of the Battle of Honey Hil on her birthday. If I failed English, I'd be spending al summer in a school so old it didn't even have air conditioning, or I'd be looking at sophomore year al over again. It was the particularly penetrating problem a person with a pulse should be prepared to ponder today. Assonance, right? Or was it consonance? I was screwed.
This was day five of supersized breakfasts. We'd had finals al week, and Amma believed there was a direct correlation between how much I ate and how wel I would do. I had eaten my weight in bacon and eggs since Monday. No wonder my stomach was kil ing me and I was having nightmares. Or at least, that's what I tried to tel myself.
I poked at the fried eggs with my fork. "More eggs?"
Amma squinted at me suspiciously. "I don't know what you're up to, but I'm in no mood for it." She slid another egg onto my plate. "Don't try my patience today, Ethan Wate."
I wasn't about to argue with her. I had enough problems of my own.
My dad wandered into the kitchen and opened the cupboard, searching for his Shredded Wheat. "Don't tease Amma. You know she doesn't like it." He looked up at her, shaking his spoon. "That boy of mine is downright S. C. A. B. R. O.
U. S. As in ..."
Amma glared at him, slamming the cupboard doors shut. "Mitchel Wate, I'l give you a scab or two al your own if you don't stop messin' with my pantry." He laughed, and a second later I could have sworn she was smiling, and I watched as my own crazy father started turning Amma back into Amma again. The moment vanished, popping like a soap bubble, but I knew what I'd seen. Things were changing.
I stil wasn't used to the sight of my dad walking around during the day, pouring cereal and making smal talk. It seemed unbelievable that four months ago my aunt had checked him into Blue Horizons. Although he wasn't exactly a new man, as Aunt Caroline professed, I had to admit I barely recognized him. He wasn't making me chicken salad sandwiches, but these days he was out of the study more and more, and sometimes even out of the house. Marian scored my dad a position at the University of Charleston as a guest lecturer in the English department. Even though the bus ride turned a forty-minute commute into two hours, there was no letting my dad operate heavy machinery, not yet. He seemed almost happy. I mean, relatively speaking, for a guy who was previously holed up in his study for months scribbling like a madman. The bar was pretty low.
If things could change that much for my dad, if Amma was smiling, maybe they could change for Lena, too.
Couldn't they?
But the moment was over. Amma was back on the warpath. I could see it in her face. My dad sat down next to me and poured milk over his cereal. Amma wiped her hands on her tool apron. "Mitchel , you best have some a those eggs.
Cereal isn't any kind a breakfast."
"Good morning to you, too, Amma." He smiled at her, the way I bet he did when he was a kid.
She squinted at him and slammed a glass of chocolate milk next to my plate, even though I barely drank it anymore.
"Doesn't look so good to me." She sniffed and started pushing a massive amount of bacon onto my plate. To Amma, I would always be six years old. "You look like the livin' dead. What you need is some brain food, to pass those examinations a yours."
"Yes, ma'am." I chugged the glass of water Amma had poured for my dad. She held up her infamous wooden spoon with the hole in the middle, the One-Eyed Menace -- that's what I cal ed it. When I was a kid, she used to chase me around the house with it if I sassed her, even though she never actual y hit me with it. I ducked, to play along.
"And you better pass every single one. I won't have you hangin' around that school al summer like the Pettys' kids. You're gonna get a job, like you said you would." She sniffed, waving the spoon. "Free time means free trouble, and you got heaps of that already."
My dad smiled and stifled a laugh. I bet Amma had said exactly the same thing to him when he was my age.
"Yes, ma'am."
I heard a car honk, and the sound of way too much Beater bass, and grabbed my backpack. Al I saw was the blur of the spoon behind me.
I slid into the Beater and rol ed down the window. Gramma had gotten her way, and Lena had come back to school a week ago, for the end of the year. I had driven al the way out to Ravenwood to take her to school on her first day back, even stopping at the Stop & Steal to get her one of their famous sticky buns, but by the time I got there Lena was already gone. Ever since then, she had been driving herself to school, so Link and I were back in the Beater.
Link turned down the music, which was blasting through the car, out the windows, and down the block.
"Don't you embarrass me over at that school a yours, Ethan Wate. And you turn down that music, Wesley Jefferson Lincoln! You're goin' to knock over my whole row a rutabagas with that ruckus." Link honked back at her. Amma knocked her spoon against the post, put her hands on her hips, and then softened. "You do wel on those tests a yours, and maybe I'l bake you a pie."
"That wouldn't be Gatlin peach, would it, ma'am?"
Amma sniffed and nodded her head. "Just might be."
She would never admit it, but Amma had final y developed a soft spot for Link, after al these years. Link thought it was because Amma felt sorry for his mom after her invasion-of-the- body-snatchers experience with Sarafine, but that wasn't it. She felt bad for Link. "Can't believe that boy has to live in the house with that woman. He'd be better off if he was bein' raised by wolves." That's what she'd said last week before she packed up a pecan pie for him.
Link looked at me and grinned. "Best thing that ever happened to me, Lena's mom gettin' mixed up with my mom. Never had so much a Amma's pie in my life." It was about as much as he ever said about Lena's nightmare of a birthday anymore. He floored it, and the Beater went skidding down the road. It almost wasn't worth mentioning that we were late, as usual.
"Did you study for English?" It wasn't real y a question. I knew Link hadn't cracked a book since seventh grade.
"Nah. I'm gonna copy offa someone."
"Who?"
"What do you care? Somebody smarter than you."
"Yeah? Last time you copied off Jenny Masterson, and you both got D's."
"I didn't have time to study. I was writin' a song. We might play it at the county fair. Check it out." Link sang along with the song, which sounded weird because he was singing along to a recording of his own voice. "Lol ipop Girl, took off without a word, was cal in' out your name, but you never heard."
Great. Another song about Ridley. Which shouldn't have surprised me, since he hadn't written a song about anything but Ridley for four months now. I was beginning to think he would always be hung up on Lena's cousin, who was nothing like her. Ridley was a Siren, who used her Power of Persuasion to get what she wanted with one lick of a lol ipop. Which, for a while, was Link. Even though she had used him and disappeared, he hadn't forgotten her. But I couldn't blame him. It was probably tough being in love with a Dark Caster. It was pretty tough sometimes with a Light one, too.