The sound they made, unlike anything else in the universe, when Off the memories and dreams of Mortals, like me, as we slept. Pinpricks on the back of my neck that came from standing too close to so many of Macon's kind. Lena's bare knees hitting the thick mud in front of the grave. The rain dripping off the brim of Amma's best black hat.

Lena thought she was the only one cursed, but Now I knew better, and I only wished it was true.īecause the second I fell in love with a Caster girl, no one I loved was safe.

And the closer I got to Lena, theĪ few months ago, I believed nothing would ever change in this town. Lena's Gatlin was home to Demons and danger and a curse that had marked her family for more than a hundred years. While regular folks were busy cutting back their rosebushes or picking past worm-eaten peaches at the roadside stand, LightĪnd Dark Casters with unique and powerful gifts were locked in an eternal struggle-a supernatural civil war without any Lena's Gatlin was a place where things happened-impossible, supernatural, life-altering things. One that had been there all along, hidden She showed me there was another world within the cracks of our uneven sidewalks. Me, five minutes after I graduated from Jackson High. Was why most people never bothered to leave, and why the ones who did never came back. It knew every inch of us, every sin, every secret, every scab. This town owned us, that was the good and the bad of it.

Was still cutting hair at the Snip 'n' Curl, though she had lost most of her eyesight around the same time she turned seventy,Īnd now she forgot to put the guard down on the clippers half the time, shearing a skunk stripe up the back of your head.Ĭarlton Eaton never failed, rain or shine, to open your mail before he delivered it. One empty finger of her white-gloved hand flapping as she sashayed down the dance floor with the debutantes. Old four-fingered Miss Monroe still taught cotillion, Housekeeper, Amma, who won the bake-off at the county fair every year. The rest of the week involved a whole lot of nothing and a little more pie, if you were lucky enough to live with someone like my family's Sundays were for church, Mondays for doing the marketing at the Stop & Shop, the only grocery store in town. You could be born or married or buried, and the Methodists kept right Woven into everything we did or, more often, didn't do. Around here, our traditions were so traditional it was hard to put a finger on them. Tomorrow my neighbors wouldīe rocking on their porches, heat and gossip and familiarity melting like ice cubes into their sweet tea, as they had for Sun would rise and set over the town of Gatlin without bothering to kick up so much as a breeze. A place where nothing ever happened and nothing would ever change. I used to think our town, buried in the South Carolina backwoods, stuck in the muddy bottom of the Santee River valley, was

Beautiful darkness by kami garcia