I found myself back at the fork in the road. It was our old road, mine and Lena's. The one that had taken me off Route 9 and up to Ravenwood the night we met. The first time I realized she was the same girl I'd been dreaming about, long before she ever moved to Gatlin.

As soon as I saw the road, I heard the song. It drifted into the Volvo as natural y as if I had turned on the radio. Same song. Same words. Same as it had for the last two months -- when I turned on my iPod, stared at the ceiling, or read a single page of Silver Surfer over and over, without even seeing it.

Seventeen Moons. It was always there. I tried turning the dials on the radio, but it didn't matter. Now it was playing in my head instead of coming out of the speakers, as if someone was Kelting the song to me.

Seventeen moons, seventeen years,

Eyes where Dark or Light appears,

Gold for yes and green for no,

Seventeen the last to know ...

The song was gone. I knew better than to ignore it, but I also knew how Lena acted every time I tried to bring it up.

"It's a song," she would say dismissively. "It doesn't mean anything."

"Like Sixteen Moons didn't mean anything? It's about us." It didn't matter if she knew it or even if she agreed. Either way, it was the moment Lena usual y switched from defense to offense, and the conversation veered off track.

"You mean it's about me. Dark or Light? Whether or not I'm going to go al Sarafine on you? If you've already decided I'm going Dark, why don't you admit it?"

At that point, I would say something stupid to change the subject. Until I learned not to say anything at al . So we didn't talk about the song that was playing in my head, same as it was in hers.

Seventeen Moons. We couldn't avoid it.

The song had to be about Lena's Claiming, the moment she would become Light or Dark forever. Which could only mean one thing: she wasn't Claimed. Not yet. Gold for yes and green for no? I knew what the song meant -- the gold eyes of a Dark Caster or the green eyes of a Light one. Since the night of Lena's birthday, her Sixteenth Moon, I had tried to tel myself it was al over, that Lena didn't have to be Claimed, that she was some kind of exception. Why couldn't it be different for her, since everything else about her seemed to be so exceptional?

But it wasn't different. Seventeen Moons was proof. I'd heard Sixteen Moons for months before Lena's birthday, a harbinger of things to come. Now the words had changed again, and I was faced with another eerie prophecy. There was a choice to be made, and Lena hadn't made it. The songs never lied. At least, they hadn't yet.

I didn't want to think about it. As I headed up the long rise leading to the gates of Ravenwood Manor, even the grinding sound of the tires on gravel seemed to repeat the one inescapable truth. If there was a Seventeenth Moon, then it had al been for nothing. Macon's death had been for nothing.

Lena would stil have to Claim herself for Light or Dark, deciding her fate forever. There was no turning back for Casters, no changing sides. And when she final y made her choice, half her family would die because of it. The Light Casters or the Dark Casters -- the curse promised only one side could survive. But in a family where generations of Casters had no free wil and had been Claimed for Light or Dark on their own sixteenth birthdays without any say in the matter, how was Lena supposed to make that kind of choice?

Al she had wanted, her whole life, was to choose her own destiny. Now she could, and it was like some kind of cruel cosmic joke.

I stopped at the gates, turned off the engine, and closed my eyes, remembering -- the rising panic, the visions, the dreams, the song. This time, Macon wouldn't be there to steal away the unhappy endings. There was nobody left to get us out of trouble, and it was coming fast.

4.17

Lemons and Ash

When I puled up in front of Ravenwood, Lena was sitting on the crumbling veranda, waiting. She was wearing an old button-down shirt and jeans and her beat-up Chuck Taylors. For a second, it seemed as if it could've been three months ago and today was just another day. But she was also wearing one of Macon's pinstriped vests, and it wasn't the same. Now that Macon was gone, something about Ravenwood felt wrong. Like going to the Gatlin County Library if Marian, its only librarian, wasn't there, or to the DAR without the most important daughter of the Daughters of the American Revolution herself, Mrs. Lincoln. Or to my parents' study without my mom.

Ravenwood looked worse every time I came. Staring out at the archway of weeping wil ows, it was hard to imagine the garden had deteriorated so quickly. Beds of the same kinds of flowers Amma had painstakingly taught me to weed as a kid were fighting for space in the dry earth. Beneath the magnolias, clusters of hyacinth were tangled with hibiscus, and heliotrope infested the forget-me-nots, as if the garden itself was in mourning. Which was entirely possible.

Ravenwood Manor had always seemed to have a mind of its own. Why should the gardens be any different? The weight of Lena's grief probably wasn't helping. The house was a mirror for her moods, the same way it had always been for Macon's.

When he died, he left Ravenwood to Lena, and sometimes I wondered whether it would have been better if he hadn't. The house was looking bleaker by the day, instead of better. Every time I drove up the hil , I found myself holding my breath, waiting for the smal est sign of life, something new, something blooming. Every time I reached the top, al I saw were more bare branches.

Lena climbed into the Volvo, a complaint already on her lips. "I don't want to go."