“Striking us here, on this night. She was just making a point.”

“And what point would that be, Macon?”

“That she can.”

I could feel a hand at my temple. It caressed me, moving across my forehead. I tried to listen, but the hand made me sleepy. I wanted to crawl home to my bed.

“Or that she can’t.” I looked up. Arelia was rubbing my temples, as if I were a little broken sparrow. Only I could tell she was feeling for me, for what was inside me. She was searching for something, rummaging around in my mind as if she was looking for a lost button or an old sock. “She was foolish. She made a critical error. We’ve learned the only thing we really needed to know,” Arelia said.

“So you agree with Macon? The boy has power?” Del sounded even more frantic now.

“You were right before, Delphine. There must be some other explanation. He’s a Mortal, and we all know Mortals can’t possess power on their own,” Macon snapped, as if he was trying to convince himself as much as anyone.

But I had begun to wonder if it wasn’t true. He had said the same thing to Amma in the swamp, that I had some kind of power. It just didn’t make sense, even to me. I wasn’t one of them, that much I knew. I wasn’t a Caster.

Arelia looked up at Macon. “You can Bind the house all you want, Macon. But I’m your mother and I’m tellin’ you that you can bring in every Duchannes, every Ravenwood, make the Circle as wide as this godforsaken county if you want. Cast all the Vincula you can. It’s not the house that protects her. It’s the boy. I’ve never seen anything like it. No Caster can come between them.”

“So it would seem.” Macon sounded angry, but he didn’t challenge his mother. I was too tired to care. I didn’t even lift my head.

I could hear Arelia whispering something in my ear. It seemed like she was speaking Latin again, but the words sounded different.

“Cruor pectoris mei, tutela tua est!

Blood of my heart, protection is thine!”

11.01

The Writing on the Wall

In the morning, I had no idea where I was. Then I saw the words covering the walls and the old iron bed and the windows and the mirrors, all scrawled with Sharpie in Lena’s handwriting, and I remembered.

I lifted my head up, and wiped the drool off my cheek. Lena was still sacked out; I could just see the edge of her foot hanging over the side of the bed. I pushed myself up, my back stiff from sleeping on the floor. I wondered who had brought us down from the attic, or how.

My cell phone went off; my default alarm clock, so Amma would only have to yell up the stairs three times to get me up. Only today, it wasn’t blaring “Bohemian Rhapsody.” It was the song. Lena sat up, startled, groggy.

“What happ—”

“Shh. Listen.”

The song had changed.

Sixteen moons, sixteen years,

Sixteen times you dreamed my fears,

Sixteen will try to Bind the spheres,

Sixteen screams but just one hears…

“Stop it!” She grabbed my cell and turned it off, but the verse kept playing.

“It’s about you, I think. But what’s Binding the spheres?”

“I almost died last night. I’m sick of everything being about me. I’m sick of all these weird things happening to me. Maybe the stupid song is about you, for a change. You’re actually the only sixteen-year-old here.” Frustrated, Lena flung her hand up in the air and opened it. She closed it into a fist, and banged it against the floor like she was killing a spider.

The music stopped. There was no messing with Lena today. I couldn’t blame her, to be honest. She looked green and wobbly, maybe even worse than Link did the morning after Savannah had dared him to drink the old bottle of peppermint schnapps out of her mom’s pantry, on the last day of school before winter break. Three years later and he still wouldn’t eat a candy cane.

Lena’s hair was sticking out in about fifteen directions, and her eyes were all small and puffy from crying. So this was what girls looked like in the morning. I had never seen one, not up close. I tried not to think about Amma and the hell I was going to pay when I got home.

I crawled up onto the bed and pulled Lena into my lap, running my hand through her crazy hair. “Are you okay?”

She shut her eyes and buried her face in my sweatshirt. I knew I must reek like a wild possum by now. “I think so.”

“I could hear you screaming, all the way from my house.”

“Who knew Kelting would save my life.”

I had missed something, as usual. “What’s Kelting?”

“That’s what it’s called, the way we’re able to communicate with each other no matter where we are. Some Casters can Kelt, some can’t. Ridley and I used to be able to talk to each other in school that way, but—”

“I thought you said it had never happened to you before?”

“It’s never happened to me before with a Mortal. Uncle Macon says it’s really rare.”

I like the sound of that.

Lena nudged me. “It’s from the Celtic side of our family. It’s how Casters used to get messages to each other, during the Trials. In the States, they used to call it ‘The Whispering.’”

“But I’m not a Caster.”

“I know, it’s really weird. It’s not supposed to work with Mortals.” Of course it wasn’t.

“Don’t you think it’s a little more than weird? We can do this Kelting thing, Ridley got into Ravenwood because of me, even your uncle said I can protect you somehow. How is that possible? I mean, I’m not a Caster. My parents are different, but they’re not that different.”