See, this should actually suggest that she was using some sireny power on him, particularly because there’s otherwise no reason to put the focus on her being a “beautiful girl”.

He then honest to god recaps the entire plot so far, like the author expects we’ve forgotten. The worst part is 90% of it is what just happened last chapter.

He then dreams of holding onto a tree as there’s gale-force winds tearing at him and hail hitting him and she’s shouting at him to let her go and save himself, and apparently she isn’t the tree but on the other side of the tree or something.

I felt her wrist sliding through my fingers.

Maybe the reason she’s always yelling at him to let her go has something to do with the fact she’s always bruised and/or scratched by his attempts. Why can’t she claw him back for once?

I flipped on the old storm lamp next to my bed and pulled the bookmark out from where I’d left off in Snow Crash when I heard something.

Snow Crash! That’s still namedroppy and kind of old but at least it’s less established.

The he hears movement and it’s Amma sneaking out.

following the woman who may as well have been my mother when she got into a car at night, with a strange man driving a junker, was a hard thing to do if you didn’t have a car.

Further evidence his mom was one of the last things added into the plot. Not only is this just generally weird for someone who’s mom died a few months ago to be saying, but supposedly he was with his mom all the time, so it’s not even like she delegated the raising of him to Amma.

I could tell the pickup was heading toward Wader’s Creek. Amma must have been going home.

Except for the part where apparently she lives at his house. I’m really not clear how any of this works.

The guy driving is the postmaster who reads all the letters, which will either be important or is just because the author doesn’t want to bother making up a new person.

She walked along the path in the dark, the gravel crunching under her feet. I walked in the grass beside the path to avoid that same crunching sound, which would’ve given me away for sure.

So, this is the sort of swamp with a lot of dry ground, otherwise there’d be mud sounds. Anyway, then she comes to a place full of platforms and wooden rafts made by ??? and gets on one and goes, so he follows there too. Also there’s lots of gators, because gators, and they arrive at her house, which is apparently reachable by other methods normally but she’s going this way because ??? and The window frames were painted the same shade of haint blue as the ones at Wate’s Landing. which is totally a thing that’s visible in the middle of the night. Also, just the frames? You’re supposed to put it on the underside of the ceiling to scare the ghosts.

He also smells Confederate jasmine flowering out of season, and compares it to the lemon and rosemary because smell = magic I guess is the book’s point.

The she comes back out in her Sunday best.

As much as I didn’t enjoy the trek to Amma’s house, slogging through the swamp in my jeans was worse. The mud was so thick it felt like I was pulling my feet out of cement every time I took a step.

Still no word on how he’s doing this in dead silence. Maybe that’s another magic power of his.

So, she goes and then she pulls out some chicken bones. He has some amazingly good eyesight. Then Pretty Suit appears. Although she’s muddy to her knees, he’s pristine because magic. She grumbles about getting summoned by him. He says yeah yeah but they need to deal with this pronto. She says he better not get near her because she doesn’t want to be near your kind on this sorta night, so evidently they’re not the same sort of magic user at all.

“‘The moon, when she is fullest, is farthest from the sun.’ To quote our good friends, the Clergy.”

Okay, I am generally pretty enthusiastic about little tidbits of information, but it’s really well time I started getting stuff I can make sense of. The dark/light divisions haven’t even been properly explained, and Pretty Suit is some weird other thing, and now Amma is something different from that, and now there’s magic clergy too?

We learn that apparently she capital-letter Bound the locket when she threw some herbs at it and wrapped it in a handkerchief, which makes me wonder how many truckloads of herbs and handkerchiefs were involved for Ravenwood. Pretty Suit explains that Emothan didn’t bury it, and she’s just upset he went to Ravenwood and not that there’s still some evil locket running around.

I warned you that this friendship would be dangerous, that it could develop into something more. A future between the two of them is an impossibility.”

Is that why stuff keeps exploding?

This won’t be an issue once she is Claimed, if we make it that far.

Okay, but supposedly she can be claimed by either side, so that would mean that Emothan can’t hang out with her regardless of alignment? Also, what third thing are they so scared of? He seems to be concerned she’s going to die before she makes it that far, but now we’ve seen one of their “enemies” and she just wanted to hang out with Lena and insist she’d get claimed by the bad side.

“Don’t talk to me about messes, Melchizedek Ravenwood. My family’s been cleanin’ up your family’s messes for over a hundred years. I’ve kept your secrets, just like you’ve kept mine.”
“I’m not the Seer who failed to foresee them finding the locket. How do you explain that? How did your spirit friends manage to miss that?”

Okay, so that honestly sounds pretty subservient if her family’s stuck helping out his always. And apparently she’s a capital-letter thing, which sounds like being under the castor rules, except there doesn’t seem to be any Pretty Suit aversion in either the light or dark ones.

Anyway spirit friends is voodoo type spirits, in this case made up of her own family. She calls them the Greats and the graveyard the Great House. No word on if you get superpowers by dying and they’re a separate magic system from the castors or if they’re all superpowered castors from the start and it’s just there’s more dead than living so the dead can get more done.

We need to know the whereabouts of Saraf—”
“Shh,” she hissed. “Don’t say Her name—

Okay, so not Guinevere (unless it turns out she’s taken a new name), and sounds like She is actually just some particular super evil women and not actually the force itself.

Also, apparently full moon is for dark powers and half for light, which is slightly clever for not just going with the more obvious amount of light = amount of light power but not all that much. Also if we’ve talking about old mythology the full moon wasn’t a thing of evil that made werewolves or whatever, the extra light from it meant that you were able to see the werewolves or other evil things, escape and tell the tale, so it was actually a positive. Moon related evil rituals usually specify the dark of the moon for it.

My niece, who Turned on her Claiming Day

See, when Lena was explaining, it seemed like it was a split – you became one thing or another. And the repeated refrain about no free will or shades of grey made it sound like even the light wasn’t that great, just better than being dark. But now it’s being talked about like light is the default and some people just get ruined and end up changing to dark.

Anyway apparently he’s got no clue how she got in despite her saying over and over she did it because she tricked him into inviting her. I thought she was actually using the rules of the place – this mostly shows up in pop culture with vampires, but the idea of needing an invitation to get past the wards is a lot more far ranging.

Apparently Amma’s antipathy for him is such she won’t even touch him, although she’s fine with demanding he bring whiskey and drinking it so long as there’s no physical contact. Odd priorities there. And yeah, these are totally loa. But it doesn’t work and he starts yelling that If she Turns, she will damn us all, Mortals and Casters alike. We have a responsibility, a responsibility we both took on willingly, a long time ago. You to your Mortals, and me to my Casters.”

Okay, so, first off, killing her sure sounds like a solution there. Why is no one addressing that, even just to say they know it’s the right thing but they can’t bring themselves to do it? Maybe even tie in to that story about the women who couldn’t bear to cast out her daughter. Lena did say she spent lots of time with him and he’s made it clear he’s willing to risk his own life protecting her.

Second, why is Amma in charge of mortals? It seems castors are doing their own separate thing, so him being in charge makes sense, but if she’s a magic user too how’d she get assigned to mortals?

Amma says that figuring out what dark ones are planning is really hard, so apparently they’re chaoticly aligned – so, presumably light is law-aligned. But not so much that she isn’t 100% certain that She Who Shall Not Be Named will contact Lena, so dark is apparently something you catch. This really is working out to be astounding victim-blamey. Also, there’s some old worn disk necklace with a heart and cross on it that’ll probably be important in some way.

Then she says she can’t get anything. I think Uncle Abner is in a mood. I’m sure it was somethin’ you said.” because apparently her relatives are just dicks like that.

Pretty Suit loses his temper. “Enough of these games. which makes me wonder if this is actually all fake, some sort of belief system that rose up around actual power without actually having anything to do with it. I doubt the book would do anything that interesting, though. Anyway, he accuses her of hiding Emothan’s power, and she insists the kid’s powerless.

pulled out a dirty-looking string with a row of tiny beads on it. “Graveyard Bone. Take it. The Greats want you to have it. Protects spirit from spirit, and dead from dead. It’s no use for us Mortal folk. Give it to your niece

And now she’s just some mortal and I guess all her power is from ghosts who presumably had no power when dead either. Also, magic appears to be pretty restricted in application if there’s no protect mortal from mortal option. Seems it can only work on other magic.

Pretty Suit is less than pleased to take it but grinds out a thank-you, and we end.