Who are you?
But the harder I swung, the harder he hit me. The next punch landed in my stomach, and I doubled over. That’s when I saw them.
His black Chucks. They were so old and beat-up, they could have been mine.
What do you want?
I didn’t wait for an answer. I lunged for his throat, and he went for mine. That’s when I caught a look at his face, and I saw the truth.
He was me.
As we stared into e
ach other’s eyes and clawed at each other’s throats, we rolled over the edge of the water tower and fell.
The whole way down, I could only think one thing.
Finally.
My head hit the floor with a crack, and my body followed a second later, the sheets tangled around me. I tried to open my eyes, but they were still blurred with sleep. I waited for the panic to subside.
In my old dreams, I had tried to keep Lena from falling. Now I was the one falling. What did that mean? Why did I wake up feeling like I’d already fallen?
“Ethan Lawson Wate! What in our Sweet Redeemer’s name are you doin’ up there?” Amma had a particular way of shouting that could haul you right back up out of Hades, as my dad would say.
I opened my eyes, but all I could see was a lonely sock, a spider working its way aimlessly through the dust, and a few beat-up, spine-busted books. Catch-22. Ender’s Game. The Outsiders. A few others. The thrilling view under my bed.
“Nothing. Just shutting the window.” I stared at my window, but I didn’t close it. I always slept with it open. I’d started leaving it open when Macon died—at least, when we thought he’d died—and now it was a reassuring habit. Most people felt safer with their windows closed, but I knew a closed window couldn’t protect me from the things I was afraid of. It couldn’t keep out a Dark Caster or a Blood Incubus.
I wasn’t sure anything could.
But if there was a way, Macon seemed determined to find it. I hadn’t seen much of him since we came back from the Great Barrier. He was always in the Tunnels anyway, or working on some kind of protective Cast to Bind Ravenwood. Lena’s house had become the Fortress of Solitude since the Seventeenth Moon, when the Order of Things—the delicate balance that regulated the Caster world—was broken. Amma was creating her own Fortress of Solitude here at Wate’s Landing—or Fortress of Superstition, as Link called it. Amma would’ve called it “taking preventative measures.” She had lined every windowsill with salt and used my dad’s rickety stepladder to hang cracked glass bottles upside down on every branch of our crepe myrtle tree. In Wader’s Creek, bottle trees were as common as cypresses. Now whenever I saw Link’s mom at the Stop & Steal, Mrs. Lincoln said the same thing—“Caught any evil spirits in those old bottles yet?”
I wish we could catch yours. That’s what I wanted to say. Mrs. Lincoln stuffed in a dusty brown Coke bottle. I wasn’t sure any bottle tree could handle that.
Right now, I just wanted to catch a breeze. The heat rolled over me as I leaned against my old wooden bed frame. It was thick and suffocating, a blanket you couldn’t kick off. The relentless South Carolina sun usually let up a little by September, but not this year.
I rubbed the lump on my forehead and stumbled to the shower. I turned on the cold water. I let it run for a minute, but it still came out warm.
Five in a row. I had fallen out of bed five straight mornings, and I was afraid to tell Amma about the nightmares. Who knew what she would hang on our old crepe myrtle next? After everything that happened this summer, Amma had closed in on me like a mother hawk protecting her nest. Every time I stepped out of the house, I could almost feel her shadowing me like my own personal Sheer, a ghost I couldn’t escape.
And I couldn’t stand it. I needed to believe that sometimes a nightmare was just a nightmare.
I smelled the bacon frying, and turned up the water. It finally went cold. It wasn’t until I was drying off that I noticed the window had closed without me.
“Hurry up, Sleepin’ Beauty. I’m ready to hit the books.” I heard Link before I saw him, but I almost wouldn’t have recognized his voice. It was deeper, and he sounded more like a man and less like a guy who specialized in banging on the drums and writing bad songs.
“Yeah, you’re ready to hit something, but I’m pretty sure it’s not the books.” I slid into the chair next to his spot at our chipped kitchen table. Link had bulked up so much that it looked like he was sitting in one of those tiny plastic chairs from elementary school. “Since when do you show up on time for school?”
At the stove, Amma sniffed, one hand on her hip, the other pushing at scrambled eggs with the One-Eyed Menace, her wooden spoon of justice.
“Morning, Amma.” I could tell I was about to get an earful, from the way she had one hip cocked up higher than the other. Kind of like a loaded pistol.
“Feels more like afternoon to me. ’Bout time you decided to join us.” Standing at a hot stove on an even hotter day, she didn’t break a sweat. It would take more than the weather to force Amma to budge an inch out of her way of doing things. The look in her eye reminded me of that as she sent a whole henhouse’s worth of eggs tumbling across my blue and white Dragonware plate. The bigger the breakfast, the bigger the day, in Amma’s mind. At this rate, by the time I graduated I’d be one giant biscuit floating in a bathtub full of pancake batter. A dozen scrambled eggs on my plate meant there was no denying it. It really was the first day of school.
You wouldn’t expect me to be itching to get back to Jackson High. Last year, with the exception of Link, my so-called friends had treated me like crap. But the truth was, I couldn’t wait for a reason to get out of my house.
“You eat up, Ethan Wate.” Toast flew onto the plate, chased by bacon and sealed with a healthy glop of butter and grits. Amma had put out a placemat for Link, but there was no plate on it. Not even a glass. She knew Link wouldn’t be eating her eggs, or anything else she whipped up in our kitchen.