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BEFORE
Caster Girl
I used to think our town, buried in the South Carolina backwoods, stuck in the muddy bottom of the Santee River valley, was theever happened and nothing would ever change Just like yesterday, the unblinking sun would rise and set over the town of Gatlin without bothering to kick up soon their porches, heat and gossip and fa like ice cubes into their sweet tea, as they had for more than a hundred years Around here, our traditions were so traditional it was hard to put a finger on the we did or, more often, didn’t do You could be born or
Sundays were for church, Mondays for doing the rocery store in town The rest of the week involved a whole lot of nothing and a little h to live with someone like my family’s housekeeper, Amma, on the bake-off at the county fair every year Old four-fingered Miss Monroe still taught cotillion, one e as she sashayed down the dance floor with the debutantes Maybelline Sutter was still cutting hair at the Snip ’n’ Curl, though she had lost ht around the sauard down on the clippers half the ti a skunk stripe up the back of your head Carlton Eaton never failed, rain or shine, to open your mail before he delivered it If the neas bad, he would break it to you himself Better to hear it from one of your own
This toned us, that was the good and the bad of it It knew every inch of us, every sin, every secret, every scab Which hy most people never bothered to leave, and why the ones who did never came back Before I raduated froh Gone
Then I fell in love with a Caster girl
She showed me there was another world within the cracks of our uneven sidewalks One that had been there all along, hidden in plain sight Lena’s Gatlin was a place where things happened—is
So
While regular folks were busy cutting back their rosebushes or picking past worht and Dark Casters with unique and powerful gifts were locked in an eternal struggle—a supernatural civil ithout any hope of a white flag waving Lena’s Gatlin was hoer and a curse that had marked her faot to Lena, the closer her Gatlin came to mine
A few e in this town Now I knew better, and I only wished it was true
Because the second I fell in love with a Caster girl, no one I loved was safe Lena thought she was the only one cursed, but she rong
It was our curse now
215
Perpetual Peace
The rain dripping off the bri the thick rave The pinpricks on the back oftoo close to so many of Macon’s kind Incubuses—Demons who fed off the memories and dreams of Mortals, likeelse in the universe, when they ripped open the last bit of dark sky and disappeared just before dawn As if they were a pack of black crows, taking off from a power line in perfect unison
That was Macon’s funeral
I could reh it was hard to believe some of it had happened at all Funerals were tricky like that And life, I guess The iether, but the rando over and over in your mind
What I could reet to His Garden of Perpetual Peace before dawn Lena frozen and shattered, wanting to freeze and shatter everything around her Darkness in the sky and in half the people standing around the grave, the ones eren’t people at all
But behind all that, there was so in the back ofto think of it since Lena’s birthday, her Sixteenth Moon, the night Macon died
The only thing I kneas that it was so I needed to remember
Theof the funeral it was pitch-black outside, but patches of h the clouds into , and I didn’t care I had left hts since Macon died, like he ht just show up in my room and sit down in my swivel chair and stay awhile
I re by my , in the dark That’s when I found out what he was Not a vaical creature from a book, as I had suspected, but a real Demon One who could have chosen to feed on blood, but chose my dreams instead