Beautiful Creatures

by Kami Garcia

  “Sit over here by me, Short Straw.” Ridley led me to an empty chair, across from the silver bird holding Lena’s place card, as if I had a choice.

  I tried to make eye contact with Lena, but her eyes were fixed on Ridley. And they were fierce. I just hoped Ridley was the only one her anger was directed at.

  The table was overflowing with food, even more than the last time I was here; every time I looked at the table there was more. A crown roast, filet tied with rosemary, and more exotic dishes I’d never seen before. A large bird stuffed with dressing and pears, resting on peacock feathers arranged to resemble a live bird’s open tail. I was hoping it wasn’t an actual peacock, but considering the tail feathers, I was pretty sure it was. And sparkling candies, I think, shaped exactly like real seahorses.

  But no one was eating, no one except Ridley. She seemed to be enjoying herself. “I just love sugar horses.” She popped two of the tiny golden seahorses into her mouth.

  Aunt Del coughed a few times, pouring a glass of black liquid, the consistency of wine, into her glass from the decanter on the table.

  Ridley looked at Lena across the table. “So, Cuz, any big plans for your birthday?” Ridley dipped her fingers into a dark brown sauce in the gravy boat next to the bird I hoped wasn’t a peacock, and licked it off her fingers suggestively.

  “We’re not discussing Lena’s birthday tonight,” Macon warned.

  Ridley was enjoying the tension. She popped another seahorse into her mouth. “Why not?”

  Lena’s eyes were wild. “You don’t need to worry about my birthday. You won’t be invited.”

  “You certainly should. Worry, I mean. It’s such an important birthday, after all.” Ridley laughed. Lena’s hair started to curl and uncurl itself as if there was a wind in the room. There wasn’t.

  “Ridley, I said that’s enough.” Macon was losing his patience. I recognized his tone as the same one he’d had after I took the locket out of my pocket, during my first visit.

  “Why are you taking her side, Uncle M? I spent just as much time with you as Lena did, growing up. How did she suddenly become your favorite?” For a moment, she almost sounded hurt.

  “You know it has nothing to do with favorites. You have been Claimed. It’s out of my hands.”

  Claimed? By what? What was he talking about? The suffocating haze around me was getting thicker. I couldn’t be sure I was hearing everything correctly.

  “But you and I are the same.” She was pleading with Macon, like a spoiled child.

  The table began to shake almost imperceptibly, the black liquid in the wine glasses gently sloshing from side to side. Then I heard a rhythmic tapping on the roof. Rain.

  Lena was gripping the edge of the table, her knuckles white. “You are NOT the same,” she hissed.

  I felt Ridley’s body stiffen against my arm, which she was still wrapped around like a snake. “You think you are so much better than me, Lena… is it? You don’t even know your real name. You don’t even realize this relationship of yours is doomed. Just wait until you’re Claimed and you find out how things really work.” She laughed, a sinister, painful sort of sound. “You have no idea if we are the same or not. In a few months, you could end up exactly like me.”

  Lena looked at me, panicked. The table began to shake harder, the plates rattling against the wood. There was a crackle of lightning outside, and rain began pouring down the windows like tears. “Shut up!”

  “Tell him, Lena. Don’t you think Short Straw here deserves to know everything? That you have no idea if you’re Light or Dark? That you have no choice?”

  Lena leapt to her feet, knocking her chair over behind her. “I said, shut up!”

  Ridley was relaxed again, enjoying herself. “Tell him how we lived together, in the same room, like sisters, that I was exactly like you a year ago and now…”

  Macon stood at the head of the table, gripping it with both hands. His pale face seemed even whiter than usual. “Ridley, that’s enough! I will Cast you out of this house if you say another word.”

  “You can’t Cast me out, Uncle. You aren’t strong enough for that.”

  “Don’t overestimate your skills. No Dark Caster on Earth is powerful enough to enter Ravenwood on their own. I Bound the place myself. We all did.”

  Dark Caster? That didn’t sound good.

  “Ah, Uncle Macon. You’re forgetting that famous Southern hospitality. I didn’t break in. I was invited in, on the arm of the handsomest gent in Gat-dung.” Ridley turned to me and smiled, pulling her shades from her eyes. They were just wrong, glowing gold, as if they were on fire. They were shaped like a cat’s, with black slits in the middle. Light shone from her eyes, and in that light, everything changed.

  She looked over at me, with that sinister smile, and her face was twisted into darkness and shadows. The features that had been so feminine and enticing were now sharp and hard, morphing before my eyes. Her skin seemed to be tightening around her bones, accentuating every vein until you could almost see the blood pumping through them. She looked like a monster.

  I had brought a monster into the house, into Lena’s house.

  Almost immediately, the house began to shake violently. The crystal chandeliers were swinging, the lights flickering. The plantation shutters banged open and shut again and again as the rain battered the roof. The sound was so loud, it was almost impossible to hear anything else, like the night I almost hit Lena when she was standing in the road.

  Ridley tightened her ice-cold grip on my arm. I tried to shake her loose, but I could barely move. The coldness was spreading; my whole arm was starting to feel numb.

  Lena looked up from the table, in horror. “Ethan!”

  Aunt Del stamped her foot across the room. The floorboards seemed to roll beneath her feet.

  The coldness had spread throughout my body. My throat was frozen. My legs were paralyzed; I couldn’t move. I couldn’t pull away from Ridley’s arm, and I couldn’t tell anyone what was happening. In another few minutes, I wouldn’t be able to breathe.

  A woman’s voice floated across the table. Aunt Del. “Ridley. I told you to stay away, child. There’s nothing we can do for you now. I’m so sorry.”

  Macon’s voice was harsh. “Ridley, a year can make all the difference in the world. You’re Claimed now. You’ve found your place in the Order of Things. You don’t belong here anymore. You have to go.”

  A second later, he was standing right in front of her. Either that, or I was losing track of what was happening. The voices and faces were starting to spin around me. I could barely catch my breath. I was so cold, my frozen jaw wouldn’t even move enough to chatter. “Go!” he shouted.

  “No!”

  “Ridley! Behave! You must leave this place. Ravenwood is not a place of Dark magic. This is a Bound place, a place of Light. You can’t survive here, not for long.” Aunt Del’s voice was firm.

  Ridley answered with a snarl. “I’m not leaving, Mother, and you can’t make me.”

  Macon’s voice interrupted her tantrum. “You know that’s not true.”

  “I’m stronger now, Uncle Macon. You can’t control me.”

  “True, your strength is growing, but you are not ready to take me on, and I will do whatever is necessary to protect Lena. Even if that means hurting you, or worse.”

  The weight of his threat was too much for Ridley. “You would do that to me? Ravenwood’s a Dark place of power. It always has been, since Abraham. He was one of us. Ravenwood should be ours. Why are you Binding it to the Light?”

  “Ravenwood is Lena’s home now.”

  “You belong with me, Uncle M. With Her.”

  Ridley stood up, dragging me to my feet. The three of them were standing now—Lena, Macon, and Ridley, the three points of a really frightening triangle. “I’m not scared of your kind.”

  “That may be, but you have no power here. Not against all of us, and a Natural.”

  Ridley cackled. “Lena, a Natural? That’s the funni
est thing you’ve said all night. I’ve seen what a Natural can do. Lena could never be one.”

  “A Cataclyst and a Natural aren’t the same.”

  “Aren’t they, though? A Cataclyst is a Natural gone Dark, two sides of the same coin.”

  What was she talking about? I was in over my head.

  And then I felt my body seize up, and I knew I was blacking out—that I was probably going to die. It was like all the life had been sucked out of me, with the warmth of my blood. I could hear the sound of thunder. One—then lightning and the crash of a tree branch just outside the window. The storm was here. It was right on us.

  “You’re wrong, Uncle M. Lena isn’t worth protecting, and she’s certainly not a Natural. You won’t know her fate until her birthday. You think that just because she’s sweet and innocent now, she’ll be Claimed by the Light? That means nothing. Wasn’t I the same a year ago? And from what Short Straw here has been telling me, she’s closer to going Dark than Light. Lightning storms? Terrorizing the high school?”

  The wind grew stronger, and Lena was getting angrier. I could see the rage in her eyes. A window shattered, just like in English class. I knew where this was going.

  “Shut up! You don’t know what you’re talking about!” Rain came pouring into the dining room. Wind followed, sending glasses and plates crashing to the floor, black liquid staining the floor in long streaks. No one moved.

  Ridley turned back to Macon. “You’ve always given her too much credit. She’s nothing.”

  I wanted to break free from Ridley’s hold, to grab her and drag her out of the house myself, but I couldn’t move.

  A second window shattered, then another, and another. Glass was breaking everywhere. China, wineglasses, the glass on every picture frame. Furniture was banging against the walls. And the wind, it was like a tornado had been sucked into the room with us. The sound was so loud, I couldn’t hear anything else. The tablecloth blew right off the table, with every candle, platter, and plate still on it, throwing everything against the wall. The room was spinning, I think. Everything was being sucked out into the foyer, toward the front door. Boo Radley screamed, that horrible human scream. Ridley’s grip seemed to loosen around my arm. I blinked hard, trying not to pass out.

  And there, standing in the middle of it all, was Lena. She was perfectly still, her hair whipping in the wind around her. What was happening?

  I felt my legs buckle. Just as I lost consciousness, I felt the wind, a surge of power that literally ripped my arm out of Ridley’s hand, as she was sucked out of the room, toward the front door. I collapsed to the floor, as I heard Lena’s voice, or thought I did.

  “Get the hell away from my boyfriend, witch.”

  Boyfriend.

  Was that what I was?

  I tried to smile. Instead, I blacked out.

  10.09

  A Crack in the Plaster

  When I woke up, I had no idea where I was. I tried to focus on the first few things that came into view. Words. Phrases handwritten in what looked like carefully scripted Sharpie, right on the ceiling over the bed.

  moments bleed together, no span to time

  There were hundreds of others, too, written everywhere, parts of sentences, parts of verses, random collections of words. On one closet door was scrawled fate decides. On the other, it said until challenged by the fated. Up and down the door I could see the words desperate / relentless / condemned / empowered. The mirror said open your eyes; the windowpanes said and see.

  Even the pale white lampshade was scribbled with the words illuminatethedarknessilluminatethedarkness over and over again, in an endlessly repeating pattern.

  Lena’s poetry. I was finally getting to read some of it. Even if you ignored the distinctive ink, this room didn’t look like the rest of the house. It was small and cozy, tucked up under the eaves. A ceiling fan swirled slowly above my head, cutting through the phrases. There were stacks of spiral notebooks on every surface, and a stack of books on the nightstand. Poetry books. Plath, Eliot, Bukowski, Frost, Cummings—at least I recognized the names.

  I was lying in a small white iron bed, my legs spilling over the edge. This was Lena’s room, and I was lying in her bed. Lena was curled in a chair at the foot of the bed, her head resting on the arm.

  I sat up, groggy. “Hey. What happened?”

  I was pretty sure I had passed out, but I was fuzzy on the details. The last thing I remembered was the freezing cold moving up my body, my throat closing up, and Lena’s voice. I thought she had said something about me being her boyfriend, but since I was about to pass out at the time and nothing had really happened between us, that was doubtful. Wishful thinking, I guessed.

  “Ethan!” She jumped out of the chair and onto the bed next to me, although she seemed careful not to touch me. “Are you okay? Ridley wouldn’t let go of you, and I didn’t know what to do. You looked like you were in so much pain, and I just reacted.”

  “You mean that tornado in the middle of your dining room?”

  She looked away, miserable. “That’s what happens. I feel things, I get angry or scared and then… things just happen.”

  I reached over and put my hand over hers, feeling the warmth move up my arm. “Things like windows breaking?”

  She looked back at me, and I curled my hand around hers until I was holding it in mine. A random crack in the old plaster in the corner behind her seemed to grow, until it curled its way across the ceiling, circled the frosted chandelier, and swirled its way back down. It looked like a heart. A giant, looping, girly heart had just appeared in the cracking plaster of her bedroom ceiling.

  “Lena.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Is your ceiling about to fall in on our heads?”

  She turned and looked at the crack. When she saw it, she bit her lip, and her cheeks turned pink. “I don’t think so. It’s just a crack in the plaster.”

  “Were you trying to do that?”

  “No.” A creeping pink spread across her nose and cheeks. She looked away.

  I wanted to ask her what it was she’d been thinking, but I didn’t want to embarrass her. I just hoped it had something to do with me, with her hand nestled in mine. With the word I thought I heard her say, the moment before I blacked out.

  I looked dubiously at the crack. A lot was riding on that crack in the plaster.

  “Can you undo them? These things that just… happen?”

  Lena sighed, relieved to talk about something else. “Sometimes. It depends. Sometimes I get so overwhelmed that I can’t control it and I can’t fix it, not even after. I don’t think I could have put the glass back into that window at school. I don’t think I could have stopped the storm from coming, the day we met.”

  “I don’t think that one was your fault. You can’t blame yourself for every storm that rolls through Gatlin County. Hurricane season isn’t even over yet.”

  She flipped over onto her stomach and looked me right in the eye. She didn’t let go, and neither did I. My whole body was buzzing with the warmth of her touch. “Didn’t you see what happened tonight?”

  “Maybe sometimes a hurricane is just a hurricane, Lena.”

  “As long as I’m around, I am hurricane season in Gatlin County.” She tried to pull her hand away, but that only made me hold on more tightly.

  “That’s funny. You seem more like a girl to me.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not. I’m a whole storm system, out of control. Most Casters can control their gifts by the time they’re my age, but half the time it feels more like mine control me.” She pointed to her own reflection in the mirror on the wall. The Sharpie writing scribbled itself across the reflection as we watched. Who is this girl? “I’m still trying to figure it all out, but sometimes it seems like I never will.”

  “Do all Casters have the same powers, gifts, whatever?”

  “No. We can all do simple things like move objects, but each Caster also has more specific abilities related to their gifts.”


  Right about now, I wished there was some kind of class I could take so I’d be able to follow these conversations, Caster 101, I don’t know, because I was always sort of lost. The only person I knew who had any special abilities was Amma. Reading futures and warding off evil spirits had to count for something, right? And for all I knew, maybe Amma could move objects with her mind; she could sure get my butt moving with just a look. “What about Aunt Del? What can she do?”

  “She’s a Palimpsest. She reads time.”

  “Reads time?”

  “Like, you and I walk into a room and see the present. Aunt Del sees different points in the past and the present, all at once. She can walk into a room and see it as it is today and as it was ten years ago, twenty years ago, fifty years ago, at the same time. Kind of like when we touch the locket. That’s why she’s always so confused. She never knows exactly when or even where she is.”

  I thought about how I felt after one of the visions, and what it would be like to feel that way all of the time. “No kidding. How about Ridley?”

  “Ridley’s a Siren. Her gift is the Power of Persuasion. She can put any idea into anyone’s head, get them to tell her anything, do anything. If she used her power on you, and she told you to jump off a cliff—you’d jump.” I remembered how it felt in the car with her, like I would’ve told her almost anything.

  “I wouldn’t jump.”

  “You would. You’d have to. A Mortal man is no match for a Siren.”

  “I wouldn’t.” I looked at her. Her hair was blowing in the breeze around her face, except there wasn’t an open window in the room. I searched her eyes for some kind of sign that maybe she was feeling the same way I was. “You can’t jump off a cliff when you’ve already fallen off a bigger one.”