Kami Garcia - Beautiful Creatures

D ont.

I could hear her voice in my head. At least I thought I could.

Its not worth it, Ethan.

It was.

Thats when I pushed back my chair and ran down the hallway after her. I knew what Id done. I had taken sides. I was in a different kind of trouble now, but I didnt care.

It wasnt just Lena. She wasnt the first. Id watched them do it, my whole life. Theyd done it to Allison Birch when her eczema got so bad nobody would sit near her at the lunch table, and poor Scooter Richman because he played the worst trombone in the history of the Jackson Symphony Orchestra.

While Id never picked up a marker and written LOSER across a locker myself, I had stood by and watched, plenty of times. Either way, it had always bothered me. Just never enough to walk out of the room.

But somebody had to do something. A whole school couldnt just take down one person like that. A whole town couldnt just take down one family. Except, of course, they could, because they had been doing it forever. Maybe thats why Macon Ravenwood hadnt left his house since before I was born.

I knew what I was doing.

You dont. You think you do, but you dont.

She was there in my head again, as if shed always been there.

I knew what Id be facing the next day, but none of that mattered to me. All I cared about was finding her. And I couldnt have told you just then if it was for her, or for me. Either way, I didnt have a choice.

I stopped at the bio lab, out of breath. Link took one look at me and tossed me his keys, shaking his head without even asking. I caught them and kept running. I was pretty sure I knew where to find her. If I was right, she had gone where anyone would go. Its where I would have gone.

She had gone home. Even if home was Ravenwood, and she had gone home to Gatlins own Boo Radley.

Ravenwood Manor loomed in front of me. It rose up on the hill like a dare. Im not saying I was scared, because thats not exactly the word for it. I was scared when the police came to the door the night my mom died. I was scared when my dad disappeared into his study and I realized he would never really come back out. I was scared when I was a kid and Amma went dark, when I figured out the little dolls she made werent toys.

I wasnt scared of Ravenwood, even if it turned out to be as creepy as it looked. The unexplained was sort of a given in the South; every town has a haunted house, and if you asked most folks, at least a third of them would swear theyd seen a ghost or two in their lifetime. Besides, I lived with Amma, whose beliefs included painting our shutters haint blue to keep the spirits out, and whose charms were made from pouches of horsehair and dirt. So I was used to unusual. But Old Man Ravenwood, that was something else.

I walked up to the gate and hesitantly laid my hand on the mangled iron. The gate creaked open. And then, nothing happened. No lightning, no combustion, no storms. I dont know what I was expecting, but if I had learned anything about Lena by now, it was to expect the unexpected, and to proceed with caution.

If anyone had told me a month ago that I would ever walk past those gates, up that hill, and set foot anywhere on the grounds of Ravenwood, I wouldve said they were crazy. In a town like Gatlin, where you can see everything coming, I wouldnt have seen this. Last time, I had only made it as far as the gates. The closer I got, the easier it was to see that everything was falling apart. The great house, Ravenwood Manor, looked just like the stereotypical Southern plantation that people from up North would expect to see after all those years of watching movies like Gone with the Wind.

Ravenwood Manor was still that impressive, at least in scale. Flanked by palmetto and cypress trees, it looked like it could have been the kind of place where people sat on the porch drinking mint juleps and playing cards all day, if it wasnt falling apart. If it wasnt Ravenwood.

It was a Greek Revival, which was unusual for Gatlin. Our town was full of Federal-style plantation houses, which made Ravenwood stand out even more like the sore thumb it was. Huge white Doric pillars, paint peeling from years of neglect, supported a roof that sloped too sharply to one side, giving the impression that the house was leaning over like an arthritic old woman. The covered porch was splintered and falling away from the house, threatening to collapse if you dared set so much as a foot on it. Thick ivy grew so densely over the exterior walls that in some places it was impossible to see the windows underneath. As if the grounds had swallowed up the house itself, trying to take it back down into the very dirt it had been built upon.

There was an overlapping lintel, the part of the beam that lies over the door of some really old buildings. I could see some sort of carving in the lintel. Symbols. They looked like circles and crescents, maybe the phases of the moon. I took a tentative step onto a groaning stair so I could get a closer look. I knew something about lintels. My mom had been a Civil War historian, and she had pointed them out to me on our countless pilgrimages to every historical site within a days drive of Gatlin. She said they were really common in old houses and castles, in places like England and Scotland. Which is where some of the people from around here were from, well, before they were from around here.

I had never seen one with symbols carved into it before, only words. These were more like hieroglyphs, surrounding what looked like a single word, in a language I didnt recognize. It had probably meant something to the generations of Ravenwoods who lived here before this place was falling apart.

I took a breath and vaulted up the rest of the porch steps, two at a time. Figured I increased my odds of not falling through them by fifty percent if I only landed on half of them. I reached for the brass ring suspended from a lions mouth that served as a knocker, and I knocked. I knocked again, and again. She wasnt home. I had been wrong, after all.

But then I heard it, the familiar melody. Sixteen Moons. She was here somewhere.

I pushed down on the calcified iron of the door handle. It groaned, and I heard a bolt responding on the other side of the door. I prepared myself for the sight of Macon Ravenwood, who nobody had seen in town, not in my lifetime anyway. But the door didnt open.

I looked up at the lintel, and something told me to try. I mean, what was the worst that could happenthe door wouldnt open? Instinctively, I reached up and touched the central carving above my head. The crescent moon. When I pressed on it, I could feel the wood giving way under my finger. It was some kind of trigger.

The door swung open without so much as a sound. I stepped past the threshold. There was no going back now.

Light flooded through the windows, which seemed impossible considering the windows on the outside of the house were completely covered with vines and debris. Yet, inside it was light, bright, and brand new. There was no antique period furniture or oil paintings of the Ravenwoods who came before Old Man Ravenwood, no antebellum heirlooms. This place looked more like a page out of a furniture catalog. Overstuffed couches and chairs and glass-topped tables, stacked with coffee table books. It was all so suburban, so new. I almost expected to see the delivery truck still parked outside.

Lena?

The circular staircase looked like it belonged in a loft; it seemed to keep winding upward, far above the second-floor landing. I couldnt see the top.