Beautiful Chaos by Kami Garcia, Margaret Stohl Read Free Book Online Page B

worse.
    Are you still there, Ethan?
    I’m here.
    Will you read me something?
    I smiled to myself and reached under my bed, pulling out the first book I found. Robert Frost, one of Lena’s favorites. I opened to a random page.
“We make ourselves a place apart / Behind light words that tease and flout, / But oh, the agitated heart / Till someone really find us out…”
    I didn’t stop reading. I felt the reassuring weight of Lena’s consciousness leaning against mine, as real as if her head was leaning against my shoulder. I wanted to keep her there as long as I could. She made me feel less alone.
    Every line felt like it was written about her, at least to me.
    As Lena drifted off, I listened to the hum of the crickets until I realized it wasn’t the crickets at all. It was the lubbers. The plague, or whatever Mrs. Lincoln wanted to call it. The longer I listened, the more it sounded like a million buzz saws in the distance, destroying my town and everything around it. Then the lubbers faded into something else—the low chords of a song I would recognize anywhere.
    I’d been hearing the songs since before I met Lena.
Sixteen Moons
had led me to her, the song only I could hear. I couldn’t escape them, any more than Lena could run from her destiny or I could hide from mine. They were warnings from my mom—the person I trusted most, in any world.
     
Eighteen Moons, eighteen spheres,
From the world beyond the years,
One Unchosen, death or birth,
A Broken Day awaits the Earth…
     
    I tried to make sense of the words, the way I always did. “The world beyond the years” ruled out the Mortal world. But what was coming from this other world—the Eighteenth Moon or the “One Unchosen”? And who could that be?
    The only person it ruled out was Lena. She’d made her choice. Which meant there was another choice to be made—by someone who had yet to make one.
    But the last line was the one that made me sick. “A Broken Day?” That pretty much covered every day now. How could things possibly get more broken than this?
    I wished I had more than a song and that my mom was here to tell me what it meant. More than anything, I wished I knew how to fix everything we had broken.

9.12

Glass Houses and Stones
     
    A whole catfish stared at me with glassy eyes, its tail giving a final flop. On one side of the fish was a massive plate piled with slabs of fatty, uncooked bacon. A platter of raw shrimp, translucent and gray, sat on the other side, next to a bowl of dry instant grits. A plate of runny eggs, with bleeding yolks in thick white sauce, was the best of the worst. It was weird, even for Ravenwood, where I sat across from Lena in the formal dining room. Half the food looked like it was ready to get up and run or swim its way off the table. And there wasn’t one thing on the table that anyone in Gatlin would ever eat for breakfast. Especially not me.
    I looked back at my empty plate, where chocolate milk had appeared in a tall crystal glass. Sitting next to the runny eggs, the milk wasn’t appealing.
    Lena made a face. “Kitchen? Seriously? Again?” I heard anindignant clanging from the other room. Lena had irritated Ravenwood’s mysterious cook, who I’d still never seen. Lena shrugged, looking at me. “I told you. Everything is out of whack around here. It gets worse every day.”
    “Come on. We can grab a sticky bun at the Stop & Steal.” I’d lost my appetite around the time I saw the uncooked bacon.
    “Kitchen’s doing her best. Life is hard enough lately, I’m afraid. Last night Delphine was pounding on my door in the middle of the night, insisting the British were coming.” A familiar voice, the soft shuffling of slippers, a scraping chair—and there he was. Macon Ravenwood, holding an armful of rolled newspapers, lifting a teacup that was suddenly full of what probably was supposed to be tea but looked like some kind of soupy green muck. Boo stalked in after him and curled up at his master’s