Beautiful Darkness
Page 16

Gramma had gotten her way. There was not a burnt book, not a thing out of place in the room. That was the problem. There wasn't one streak of Sharpie, not a poem, not a page anywhere in the room. Instead, the wal s were covered with images, taped careful y in a row along the perimeter, as if they were some kind of fence trapping her inside.
Sacred. Sleeping. Beloved. Daughter.
They were photographs of headstones, taken so close that al I could make out was the rough stubble of the rock behind the chiseled words, and the words themselves.
Father. Joy. Despair. Eternal Rest.
"I didn't know you were into photography." I wondered what else I didn't know.
"I'm not, real y." She looked embarrassed.
"They're great."
"It's supposed to be good for me. I have to prove to everyone that I know he's real y gone."
"Yeah. My dad's supposed to keep a feelings journal now." As soon as I said it, I wished I could take it back. Comparing Lena to my dad couldn't be mistaken for a compliment, but she didn't seem to notice. I wondered how long she had been climbing around His Garden of Perpetual Peace with her camera, and how I had missed it.
Soldier. Sleeping. Through a glass, darkly.
I came to the last picture, the only one that didn't seem to belong with the rest. It was a motorcycle, a Harley leaning against a gravestone. The shiny chrome of the bike looked out of place next to the worn old stones. My heart started to pound as I looked at it. "What's this one?"
Lena dismissed it with a wave. "Some guy visiting a grave, I guess. He was just kind of ... there. I keep meaning to take it down, the lighting's terrible." She reached up past me, pul ing the tacks out of the wal . When she reached the last one, the photo vanished, leaving nothing but four tiny holes in her black wal .
Aside from the images, the room was nearly empty, as if she'd packed up and gone to col ege somewhere. The bed was gone. The bookshelf and al the books were gone. The old chandelier we'd made swing so many times I had
thought it would fal from the ceiling was gone. There was a futon on the floor, in the center of the room. Next to it was the tiny silver sparrow. Seeing it flooded my brain with memories from the funeral -- magnolias ripping out of the lawn, the same silver sparrow in her muddy palm.
"Everything looks so different." I tried not to think about the sparrow or the reason it would be next to her bed. The reason that had nothing to do with Macon.
"Wel , you know. Spring cleaning. I had kind of trashed the place."
A few tattered books lay on the futon. Without thinking, I flipped one open -- until I realized I'd committed the worst of crimes. Though the outside was covered with an old, taped-up cover from a copy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the inside wasn't a book at al . It was one of Lena's spiral notebooks, and I had opened it up right in front of her. Like it was nothing, or it was mine to read.
I realized something else. Most of the pages were blank.
The shock was almost as terrible as discovering the pages of my dad's gibberish when I had thought he was writing a novel. Lena carried a notebook around with her wherever she went. If she had stopped scribbling every fifth word into it, things were worse than I thought.
She was worse than I thought.
"Ethan! What are you doing?"
I pul ed my hand away, and Lena grabbed the book.
"I'm sorry, L."
She was furious.
"I thought it was just a book. I mean, it looks like a book. I didn't think you would leave your notebook lying around where anyone could read it."
She wouldn't look at me, clutching the book to her chest.
"Why aren't you writing anymore? I thought you loved to write."
She rol ed her eyes and opened the notebook to show me. "I do."
She fluttered the blank pages, and now they were covered with line upon line of tiny scribbled words, crossed out again and again, revised and rewritten and revisited a thousand times.
"You Charmed it?"
"I Shifted the words out of Mortal reality. Unless I choose to show them to someone, only a Caster can read them."
"That's bril iant. Since Reece, the person most likely to read it, happens to be one." Reece was as nosy as she was bossy.
"She doesn't need to. She can read everything in my face." It was true. As a Sybil, Reece could see your thoughts and secrets, even things you were planning to do, just by looking you in the eye. Which was why I general y avoided her.
"So, what's with al the secrecy?" I flopped down on Lena's futon. She sat next to me, balancing on her crisscrossed legs. Things were less comfortable than I was pretending they were.
"I don't know. I stil feel like writing al the time. Maybe I just feel less like being understood, or less like I can be."
My jaw tightened. "By me."
"That's not what I meant."
"What other Mortals would be reading your notebook?"
"You don't understand."
"I think I do."
"Some of it, maybe."
"I would understand al of it if you'd let me."
"There's no letting, Ethan. I can't explain it."
"Let me see it." I held out my hand for her notebook.
She raised an eyebrow, handing it to me. "You won't be able to read it."
I opened it and looked at it. I didn't know if it was Lena, or the book itself, but the words appeared on the page in front of me slowly, one at a time. It wasn't one of Lena's poems, and it wasn't song lyrics. There weren't many words, just strange drawings, shapes and swirls snaking up and down the page like some col ection of tribal designs.