Dream Dark by Kami García Page B

and try to break through it. Try to pul the clouds in and push the heat away. You don’t know how hard it is. How much it takes from al of us to keep Ravenwood like this.”
    She picked a blade of green grass. “Uncle Macon says he doesn’t know what wil happen next.
    Gramma says it’s impossible to know, because this has never happened before.”
    “Do you believe them?”
    When it came to Lena, Macon was about as forthcoming as Amma was with me. If there was something she could have done differently, he’d be the last person to tel her.
    “I don’t know. But this is bigger than Gatlin.
    Whatever I did, it’s affecting other Casters outside of my family. Everyone’s powers are misfiring like mine.”
    “Your powers have never been predictable.”
    Lena looked away. “Spontaneous combustion is a little more than unpredictable.”
    I knew she was right. Gatlin was teetering dangerously on the edge of an invisible cliff, and we had no idea what was at the bottom. But I couldn’t say that to her—not when she was the one responsible for putting it there. “We’l figure out what’s going on.”
    “I’m not so sure.” She held one hand up to the sky, and I thought back to the first time I fol owed her into the garden at Greenbrier. I had watched her tracing clouds with her fingertips, making shapes in the sky.
    I hadn’t known then what I was getting myself into, but it wouldn’t have mattered.
    Everything had changed, even the sky. This time there wasn’t a cloud to trace. There was nothing but the threatening blue heat.
    Lena raised her other hand and looked over at me. “This isn’t going to stop. Things are going to keep getting worse. We have to be ready.” She pul ed on the sky with her hands absentmindedly, twisting the air slowly, like taffy between her fingers.
    “Sarafine and Abraham aren’t going to just walk away.”
    I’m ready.
    She looped her finger through the air. “Ethan, I want you to know that I’m not afraid of anything, anymore.”
    I’m not either. Not as long as we’re together.
    “That’s the thing. If something happens, it wil be because of me. And I’l have to be the one to fix it.
    Do you understand what I’m saying?” She didn’t take her eyes off her fingers.
    her eyes off her fingers.
    No. I don’t.
    “You don’t? Or you don’t want to?”
    I can’t.
    “You remember when Amma used to tel you not to pick a hole in the sky or the universe would fal through?”
    I smiled. “C. O. N. C. O. M. I. T. A. N. T. Eleven down. As in, you go ahead and pul on that thread and watch the whole world unravel like a sweater, Ethan Wate.”
    Lena should’ve been laughing, but she wasn’t. “I pul ed on the thread when I used The Book of Moons. ”
    “Because of me.” I thought about it al the time.
    She wasn’t the only one of us who had pul ed on the one piece of yarn that tied up al of Gatlin County, above and below the surface.
    “I Claimed myself.”
    “You had to. You should be proud of that.”
    “I am.” She hesitated.
    “But?” I watched her careful y.
    “But I’m going to have to pay a price, and I’m ready to.”
    I closed my eyes. “Don’t talk like that.”
    “I’m being realistic.”
    “You’re waiting for something bad to happen.” I didn’t want to think about it.
    Lena played with the charms on her necklace. “It’s not real y a question of if but when. ”
    I’m waiting. That’s what the notebook said.
    What notebook?
    I didn’t want her to know, but now I couldn’t stop it.
    And I couldn’t pretend we could go back to the way things were.
    The wrongness of everything came crashing down on me. The summer. Macon’s death. Lena acting like a stranger. Running away with John Breed, and away from me. And then the rest of it, the part that happened before I met Lena—my mom not coming home, her shoes sitting where she’d left them, her towel stil damp from the morning. Her side of the bed not slept in, the smel of her hair stil on