Beautiful Darkness by Kami García, Margaret Stohl Read Free Book Online Page B

throat. “Speakin’ a girls, how’re things with Lena?” He hadn’t seen much of her, though
     he’d seen more than most people had. Lena spent most of her time at Ravenwood under the watchful eyes of Gramma and Aunt Del,
     or hiding from their watchful eyes, depending on the day.
    “She’s dealing.” It wasn’t a lie, exactly.
    “Is she? I mean, she seems kinda different. Even for Lena.” Link was one of the few people in town who knew Lena’s secret.
    “Her uncle died. That kind of thing changes you.” Link should’ve known that better than anyone. He’d watched me try to make
     sense of my mother’s death, and then a world without her in it. He knew it was impossible.
    “Yeah, but she hardly talks, and she’s wearin’ his clothes. Don’t you think that’s sorta weird?”
    “She’s fine.”
    “If you say so, man.”
    “Just drive. We have to find Lucille.” I looked out the window at the empty street. “Stupid cat.”
    Link shrugged and cranked up the volume. His band, the Holy Rollers, shuddered through the speakers. “The Girl’s Gone Away.”
     Getting dumped was the theme of every song Link wrote. It was his way of dealing. I still hadn’t figured out mine.

    We never found Lucille, and I never got the conversation with Link, or my dad, out of my mind. My house was quiet, which isn’t
     what you want a house to be if you’re trying to run away from your thoughts. The window in my room was open, but the air was
     as hot and stagnant as everything else today.
    Link was right. Lena was acting strange. But it had only been a few months. She’d snap out of it, and things would be the
     way they were before.
    I dug through the piles of books and papers on my desk,looking for
A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
, my go-to book for taking my mind off things. Under a stack of old
Sandman
comics, I found something else. It was a package, wrapped in Marian’s signature brown paper and tied with string. But it
     didn’t have GATLIN COUNTY LIBRARY stamped on it.
    Marian was my mother’s oldest friend and the Gatlin County Head Librarian. She was also a Keeper in the Caster world—a Mortal
     who guarded Caster secrets and history, and, in Marian’s case, the
Lunae Libri
, a Caster Library filled with secrets of its own. She had given me the package after Macon died, but I had forgotten all
     about it. It was his journal, and she thought Lena would want to have it. Marian was wrong. Lena didn’t want to see it or
     touch it. She wouldn’t even let it into Ravenwood. “You keep it,” she had said. “I don’t think I could bear to see his handwriting.”
     It had been collecting dust on my desk ever since.
    I turned it over in my hands. It was heavy, almost too heavy to be a book. I wondered what it looked like. It was probably
     old, made of cracked leather. I untied the string and unwrapped it. I wasn’t going to read it, just look at it. But when I
     pulled the paper away, I realized it wasn’t a book. It was a black wooden box, intricately carved with strange Caster symbols.
    I ran my hand over the top, wondering what he wrote about. I couldn’t imagine him writing poetry like Lena. It was probably
     full of horticultural notes. I opened the lid carefully. I wanted to see something Macon had touched every day, something
     that was important to him. The lining was black satin, and the pages inside were unbound and yellowed, written in Macon’s
     fading spidery script. I touched a page, with a single finger. The sky began to spin, and I felt myself pitching forward.
     The floorrushed up to meet me, but as I hit the ground, I fell through it and found myself in a cloud of smoke—
    Fires burned along the river, the only traces of the plantations that had stood there just hours ago. Greenbrier was already
     engulfed in flames. Ravenwood would be next. The Union soldiers must have been taking a break, drunk from their victory and
     the liquor they had pillaged from the wealthiest homes in