Sarafine smiled, and I cringed. Her smile was so much like Lena's, or how Lena's smile seemed lately. As the flames moved up her chest, she disappeared.
"So strong and so much like your mother. Her last words were something like that. Or were they?" I heard a whisper in my ear. "You see, I've forgotten, because it didn't matter."
I froze. Sarafine was standing right next to me now, still wreathed in flames. I knew it wasn't an earthly fire, though, because the closer she came, the colder I felt.
"Your mother didn't matter. Her death was neither noble nor important. It was simply something I felt like doing at the time. It meant nothing." The flames rose to her neck and leaped up, consuming her body. "Just like you."
I reached for her throat. I wanted to tear it out. But my hand slipped through her, into the air. There was nothing there. She was an apparition. I wanted to kill her and I couldn't even touch her.
Sarafine laughed. "You think I would waste my time coming here in the flesh, Mortal?" She turned to Ridley, who was still rocking, with her hands clamped over her mouth. "Amusing, don't you think, Ridley?" Sarafine raised her hand and flung open her fingers.
Ridley rose to her feet, her hands clinging to her own throat. I watched as the spikes of Ridley's sandals rose, hovering above the ground as her face turned purple and she choked herself. Her blond hair hung down from her body, like a lifeless doll.
Sarafine's ghostly form dissolved into Ridley's body. Ridley glowed with yellow light -- her skin, her hair, her eyes. The light was so bright, she had no pupils at all. Even in the darkness of the forest, I had to shield my face. Ridley's head jerked up, like a marionette's, and she started to speak.
"My power is growing, and soon the Seventeenth Moon will be upon us, called out of time, as only a mother can. I decide when the sun sets. I have moved stars for my child, and she will Claim herself and join me. Only my daughter could block out the Sixteenth Moon, and only I can raise the Seventeenth. There are no others like us, not in either of our worlds. We are the beginning and the end." Ridley's body collapsed back onto the ground, like an empty sack.
The Arclight was burning in my pocket. I hoped Sarafine couldn't sense it. I remembered the flashing -- the Arclight tried to warn me. I should have paid attention.
"You betrayed us, Ridley. You're a traitor. The Father is not as forgiving as I am." The Father. Sarafine could only be talking about one person -- the father of the Ravenwood line of Blood Incubuses, the father who started it all.
Abraham.
Sarafine's voice echoed over the sound of the flames. "You will be judged, but I will not deny him the pleasure. You were my responsibility, and now you're my shame. I think it's only fitting that I leave you with a parting gift." She raised her arms high above her head. "Since you are so intent on helping these Mortals, from this moment forward you will live as a Mortal and die as one. Your powers have been returned to the Dark Fire from which they were born."
Ridley bolted upright and screamed, her pain echoing through the forest. Then it was gone -- the fallen trees, the fire, Sarafine -- everything. The forest was just as it had been a few minutes before. Green and dark, full of pines and oaks and black mud. Every tree, every branch, was back in place, as if nothing had happened.
Liv was pouring water from a plastic bottle into Ridley's mouth. Liv's face was still muddy and bleeding, but she seemed okay. Ridley, on the other hand, was as white as a ghost.
"That was incredibly powerful magic. An apparition able to possess a Dark Caster." Liv shook her head. I touched the blood above her eye, and she winced. "And Cast at the same time, if what she said about Ridley's powers is true." I looked at Ridley doubtfully. It was hard to imagine Ridley without her Power of Persuasion. "In any event, Ridley won't be quite right, not for some time." Liv doused part of her sweatshirt with water and wiped Ridley's face. "I didn't realize the chance she was taking by coming here. She must really care about all of you."
"Not all of us," I said, trying to help Liv prop Ridley up. Ridley coughed out the water and pulled her hand across her mouth, smearing her pink lipstick. She looked like a cheerleader who had been dunked at the school fair one too many times. She tried to speak. "Link. Is he ...?"
I was kneeling next to him. The tree limb that had fallen on him had disappeared, but Link was still moaning in pain. It seemed impossible that he was hurt, that any of us were, since there was no sign of what had happened here --
no fallen trees, not a twig out of place. But Link's arm was purple and about twice its normal size, and his pants were ripped.
"Ridley?" Link opened his eyes.
"She's fine. We're all fine." I ripped open his pant leg even more. His knee was bleeding.
Link tried to laugh. "What're you lookin' at?"
"Your ugly face." I leaned over him, watching to see if his eyes could focus. He was going to be okay.
"You're not gonna kiss me, are you?"
Right then, I was so relieved I almost could have.
"Pucker up."
6.19
No One Special
That night, we slept in the forest between the roots of an enormous tree, the biggest I'd ever seen. Link's knee was bandaged in my spare T-shirt, and his arm was in a sling made from part of my Jackson sweatshirt. Ridley lay on the opposite side of the tree with her eyes wide open, staring up at the sky. I wondered if she was staring at the Mortal sky now. She looked exhausted, but I didn't think she was going to get any sleep.
I wondered what she was thinking, if she regretted helping us. Had Ridley really lost her powers?
How would it feel to be Mortal when you had always been something else, something more? When you had never felt the "powerlessness of human existence," as Mrs. English had said in class last year. She had been talking about H. G. Wells' The Invisible Man, but right now Ridley seemed just as invisible.
Could you be happy if you woke up and suddenly you were no one special?
Could Lena? Is that what life with me would feel like? Hadn't Lena suffered enough for me already?
Like Ridley, I couldn't fall asleep, but I didn't want to stare at the sky. I wanted to see what was in Lena's notebook. A part of me knew it was an invasion of her privacy, but I also knew there might be something in those crumpled pages that could help us. After about an hour, I convinced myself reading her notebook was for the greater good, and I opened it.
At first it was hard to read, since my cell phone was my only light source. After my eyes adjusted, Lena's handwriting stared back at me from between the blue lines. I had seen the familiar print often enough in the months since her birthday, but I didn't think I would ever get used to it. It was such a sharp contrast to the girly script she wrote in before that night. It surprised me even more to see actual writing, after so many months of headstone photographs and black designs. Dark Caster designs, like the ones on her hands, were scribbled in the margins. But the first few entries were dated only days after Macon's death, when she was still writing. emptycrowded daynights / all the same (more or less) fear (less and more) afraid / waiting for truth to strangle me in my sleep / if i ever slept
Fear (less and more) afraid. I understood the words, because that's how she had acted. Fearless and more afraid. Like she had nothing to lose but was afraid to lose it.
I flipped ahead and stopped when a date caught my eye. June 12th. The last day of school. darkness hides and i think i can hold her / smother her in the palm of my hand / but when i look my hands are empty / quiet as her fingers fold around me
I read it over and over. She was describing the day at the lake, the day she had taken things too far. The day she could have killed me. Who was the "her"? Sarafine?
How long had she been fighting it? When did it start? The night Macon died? When she started wearing his clothes?
I knew I should close the notebook, but I couldn't. Reading her words was almost like hearing her thoughts again. I hadn't known them in such a long time, and I wanted to so badly. I turned each page, looking for the days that haunted me.
Like the day of the fair --
mortal hearts and mortal fears / something they can share i untie him like a sparrow
Freedom -- that's what sparrows meant to a Caster.
All along I thought she was trying to be free from me, but really she was trying to set me free. As if loving her was a cage I couldn't escape.
I closed the notebook. It hurt too much to read it, especially when Lena was so far away, in all the ways that mattered.
A few feet away, Ridley was still staring blankly into the Mortal stars. For the first time, we saw the same sky.
Liv was wedged between two roots, with me on one side and Link on the other. After I found out the truth about what happened on Lena's birthday, I guess I expected my feelings for Liv to disappear. But even now I found myself wondering. If things were different, if I had never met Lena, if I had never met Liv ...
I spent the next few hours watching Liv. When she slept, she looked peaceful, beautiful. Not Lena's kind of beautiful, something different. She looked content -- like a sunny day, a cold glass of milk, an unopened book before you cracked the binding. There was nothing tortured about her. She looked the way I wanted to feel.
Mortal. Hopeful. Alive.