There was no turning back.
I leaned against the panel, and it swung open. The crack of light opened into a blinding field of white.
I stepped into the harsh light, the darkness behind me now. I could barely see the steps below me. I breathed in the air, heavy with salt and sour with brine.
Loca silentia. Now I understood. The moment we emerged from the darkness of the Tunnels into the broad, flat reflection of the water, there was only light and silence.
Slowly, my eyes began to adjust. We were on what looked like a rocky Lowcountry beach, covered in a spread of gray and white oyster shells, framed by an uneven row of palmettos. A splintered wooden walkway stretched along the perimeter of the shoreline facing the islands. We stood there now, the four of us, listening to what should have been the waves or the wind or even a gull in the sky. But the silence was so thick, it stopped us in our tracks.
The scene was perfectly ordinary and incredibly surreal, as vivid as any dream. The colors were too bright, the light too light. And in the far shadows beyond the shore, the dark was too dark. But everything was somehow beautiful here. Even the darkness. It was how the moment felt that silenced us. Magic was unfolding between us, encircling us like a rope, tying us to one another.
As I started toward the walkway, the rounded shores of the Sea Islands emerged in the distance. Beyond that was only dense, flat fog. Tufts of swamp grass rose from the water to form long, shallow banks rising in and out of the coastal mud. Along the beach, weathered wooden docks stretched out into the unbroken blue water until they disappeared into the black deep. The docks faded down the coast like weathered wooden fingers. Bridges to nowhere.
I looked up at the sky. Not a star in sight. Liv looked down at the selenometer whirring on her wrist, and tapped it. "None of these numbers mean anything anymore. We're on our own now." She unfastened her watch and slid it into her pocket.
"Guess so."
"What now?" Link bent to pick up a shell with his good arm and chucked it into the distance. The water swallowed it without a sound. Ridley stood next to him, streaks of pink hair whipping in the wind. On the far edge of the dock in front of us, the flag of South Carolina -- with the silhouette of a palmetto and a crescent moon on a field of midnight blue -- looked like a Caster flag as it fluttered from a spindly flagpole. When I looked at the flag more closely, I realized it had changed. This one had a seven-pointed star in the sky, next to the familiar crescent moon and palmetto silhouette. The Southern Star, right there on the flag, as if it had fallen out of the sky.
If this really was the seam where the Mortal and the magical touched, there was no sign of it here. I don't know what I was hoping for. All I had now were one too many stars on the state flag and a feeling of magic as thick as the salt in the air.
I joined the others at the far edge of the walkway. The wind had picked up, and the flag was whipping around the pole. It didn't make a sound.
Liv consulted the folded map. "If we're in the right place, it has to be between that island, beyond the buoy, and where we're standing."
"I think we're in the right place." I was sure of it.
"How do you know?"
"Remember that Southern Star you were telling me about?" I pointed to the flag. "Think about it. If you followed the star the whole way here, the star on the flag is exactly what you would be looking for. Some kind of sign you're at the right spot."
"Of course. The seven-pointed star." She examined the flag, touching the fabric as if she was allowing herself to believe it for the very first time.
There wasn't time for that. I knew we had to keep moving. "So what are we even looking for? Land? Or something man-made?"
"You mean this isn't it?" Link looked disappointed and shoved his garden shears back into his belt.
"I think we still have to cross over the water. It makes sense, really. Like crossing the river Styx to get to Hades." Liv flattened the map against her palm. "According to the map, we're looking for some kind of connector that will take us across the water to the Great Barrier itself. Like a sandbar or a bridge." She held the vellum over the map, and we all looked.
Link took them out of her hands. "Yeah, I see it. Kinda cool." He flipped the vellum up and down across the map. "Now you see it, now you don't." He dropped the map, and it fluttered into a mess of pages on the sand.
Liv bent to pick it up. "Careful with that! Are you completely mental?"
"You mean, like a genius?" Sometimes there was no point in Link and Liv talking at all. Liv pocketed Aunt Prue's map, and we started walking again.
Ridley picked up Lucille Ball. She hadn't said much since we left the Tunnels. Maybe now that she had been declawed, she preferred Lucille's company. Or maybe she was scared. She probably knew better than the rest of us the dangers that lay ahead.
I could feel the Arclight burning in my pocket. My heart began to pound, and my head began to spin.
What was it doing to me? Since we crossed over into the no man's land the map called Loca silentia, the light had stopped illuminating our path and started illuminating the past. Macon's past. It had become a conduit for the visions, a direct line I couldn't control. The visions were coming intermittently, interrupting the present with fragmented bits and pieces of Macon's past.
An old palmetto frond snapped loudly under one of Ridley's shoes. Then something else, and I felt myself slipping away --
Macon could feel it immediately when his shoulder snapped -- the intense pain of his bones cracking. His skin tightened, as if it could no longer hold whatever was lurking inside him. The breath was sucked from his lungs, like he was being crushed. His vision began to blur, and he had the sensation he was falling, even though he could feel the rocks tearing at his flesh as his body seized on the ground.
The Transformation.
From this moment forth, he would not be able to walk among Mortals in the daylight. The sun would singe the flesh from his body. He wouldn't be able to ignore the urge to feed on the blood of Mortals. He was one of them now --
another Blood Incubus in the long line of killers on the Ravenwood Family Tree. A predator walking among his prey, waiting to feed.
I was back again, as suddenly as I had gone.
I stumbled toward Liv, my head reeling. "We've got to get going. Things are getting out of control."
"What things?"
"The Arclight -- the things in my head," I said, unable to explain it any better than that.
She nodded. "I thought it might get bad for you. I wasn't sure if a Wayward would react more strongly to an intensely powerful place, being as sensitive to the pull of certain Casters as you are. I mean, if you really are ..." If I really was a Wayward. She didn't have to say it.
"So you're saying you finally believe the Great Barrier is real?"
"No. Unless ..." She pointed out past the farthest dock on the horizon, where the skinniest, most splintered dock extended past the others, so far that we couldn't see where it ended, except that it disappeared into fog. "That could be the bridge we're looking for."
"Not much of a bridge." Link looked skeptical.
"Only one way to find out." I walked ahead of them.
As we picked our way across rotting boards and oyster shells, I found myself slipping over and over. I was there, and I wasn't. In and out. One minute, I could hear Ridley's and Link's voices echoing as they bickered. The next, the fog blurred around the edges, and I was pulled back into visions of Macon's past. I knew there was something I was supposed to gain from the visions, but they were coming so quickly now it was impossible to figure out.
I thought about Amma. She would have said, "Everythin' means somethin'." I tried to imagine what she would have said next.
P. O. R. T. E. N. D. Seven down. As in, you be sure to pay attention to the what now, Ethan Wate, because that's gonna point the way to the what's next.
She was right, as usual -- everything did mean something, didn't it? All the changes in Lena would have added up to the truth, if I had been able to see it. Even now, I tried to piece together my glimpses of the visions, to find the story they were trying to tell.
I didn't have time, though, because as we reached the bridge, I felt another surge, the walkway started to sway, and Ridley's and Link's voices faded --
The room was dark, but Macon didn't need light to see. The shelves were lined with books, as he had imagined they would be. Volumes on every aspect of American history, particularly the wars that had shaped this country -- the
Revolutionary War and the Civil War. Macon ran his fingers over the leather spines. These books were of no use to him now.
This was a different kind of war. A war among the Casters, waged within his own family.
He could hear footsteps above, the sound of the crescent key fitting into the lock. The door creaked, a slice of light escaping as the hatch in the ceiling opened. He wanted to reach out, offer his hand to help her down, but he didn't dare.