Beautiful Darkness
Page 4

" His dictis, solutus est. With these words, he is free."
An almost blinding white light emanated from the casket. I could barely see the Gravecaster a few feet in front of me, as if his voice was transporting us and we were no longer standing over a gravesite in Gatlin.
Uncle Macon! No!
The light flashed, like lightning striking, and died out. We were al back in the circle, looking at a mound of dirt and flowers. The burial was over. The coffin was gone. Aunt Del put her arms protectively around Reece and Ryan.
Macon was gone.
Lena fel forward onto her knees in the muddy grass.
The gate around Macon's plot slammed shut behind her, without so much as a finger touching it. This wasn't over for her. No one was going anywhere.
Lena?
The rain started to pick up almost immediately, the weather stil tethered to her powers as a Natural, the ultimate elemental in the Caster world. She pul ed herself to her feet.
Lena! This isn't going to change anything!
The air fil ed with hundreds of cheap white carnations and plastic flowers and palmetto fronds and flags from every grave visited in the last month, al flying loose in the air, tumbling airborne down the hil . Fifty years from now, folks in town would stil be talking about the day the wind almost blew down every magnolia in His Garden of Perpetual Peace. The gale came on so fierce and fast, it was a slap in the face to everyone there, a hit so hard you had to stagger to stay on your feet. Only Lena stood straight and tal , holding fast to the stone marker next to her. Her hair had unraveled from its awkward knot and whipped in the air around her. She was no longer al darkness and shadow. She was the opposite --
the one bright spot in the storm, as if the yel owish-gold lightning splitting the sky above us was emanating from her body. Boo Radley, Macon's dog, whimpered and flattened his ears at Lena's feet.
He wouldn't want this, L.
Lena put her face in her hands, and a sudden gust blew the canopy out from where it was staked in the wet earth, sending it tumbling backward down the hil .
Gramma stepped in front of Lena, closed her eyes, and touched a single finger to her granddaughter's cheek. The moment she touched Lena, everything stopped, and I knew Gramma had used her abilities as an Empath to absorb Lena's powers temporarily. But she couldn't absorb Lena's anger. None of us were strong enough to do that.
The wind died down, and the rain slowed to a drizzle. Gramma pul ed her hand away from Lena and opened her eyes.
The Succubus, looking unusual y disheveled, stared up at the sky. "It's almost sunrise." The sun was beginning to burn its way up through the clouds and over the horizon, scattering odd splinters of light and life across the uneven rows of headstones. Nothing else had to be said. The Incubuses started to dematerialize, the sound of suction fil ing the air. Ripping was how I thought of it, the way they pul ed open the sky and disappeared.
I started to walk toward Lena, but Amma yanked my arm. "What? They're gone."
"Not al a them. Look --"
She was right. At the edge of the plot, there was only one Incubus remaining, leaning against a weathered headstone adorned with a weeping angel. He looked older than I was, maybe nineteen, with short, black hair and the same pale skin as the rest of his kind. But unlike the other Incubuses, he hadn't disappeared before the dawn. As I watched him, he moved out from under the shadow of the oak directly into the bright morning light, with his eyes closed and his face tilted toward the sun, as if it was only shining for him.
Amma was wrong. He couldn't be one of them. He stood there basking in the sunlight, an impossibility for an Incubus.
What was he? And what was he doing here?
He moved closer and caught my eye, as if he could feel me watching him. That's when I saw his eyes. They weren't the black eyes of an Incubus.
They were Caster green.
He stopped in front of Lena, jamming his hands in his pockets, tipping his head slightly. Not a bow, but an awkward show of deference, which somehow seemed more honest. He had crossed the invisible aisle, and in a moment of real Southern gentility, he could have been the son of Macon Ravenwood himself. Which made me hate him.
"I'm sorry for your loss."
He opened her hand and placed a smal silver object in it, like the ones everyone had thrown onto Macon's casket. Her fingers closed around it. Before I could move a muscle, the unmistakable ripping sound tore through the air, and he was gone.
Ethan?
I saw her legs begin to buckle under the weight of the morning -- the loss, the storm, even the final rip in the sky. By the time I made it to her side and slid my arm under her, she was gone, too. I carried her down the sloping hil , away from Macon and the cemetery.
She slept curled in my bed, on and off, for a night and a day. She had a few stray twigs matted in her hair, and her face was stil flecked with mud, but she wouldn't go home to Ravenwood, and no one asked her to. I had given her my oldest, softest sweatshirt and wrapped her in our thickest patchwork quilt, but she never stopped shivering, even in her sleep. Boo lay at her feet, and Amma appeared in the doorway every now and then. I sat in the chair by the window, the one I never sat in, and stared out at the sky. I couldn't open it, because a storm was stil brewing.
As Lena was sleeping, her fingers uncurled. In them was a tiny bird made of silver, a sparrow. A gift from the stranger at Macon's funeral. I tried to take it from her hand just as her fingers tightened around it.
Two months later, and I stil couldn't look at a bird without hearing the sound of the sky ripping open.