12.07

So they’re going grave robbing.

They plan to accomplish this by throwing a birthday party for Lena’s aunt at Ravenwood. I’m not sure why a birthday party wasn’t already in the cards, but maybe they don’t really celebrate birthdays too much due to the whole curse thing, so it’s only if one of the kids wants an excuse for a party.

Boo Radley had shown up in the afternoon with a scroll in his mouth, lettered in careful calligraphy.

…oh! So he’s not her protector, he’s just the all-purpose servant. It wasn’t unicorns and pixies that harvested cotton, it was puppies. THE NORTH OPPOSED PEOPLE HAVING CUTE PUPPIES AND SHERMAN BURNED THE CUTE PUPPY’S HOMES!

Also for some reason Emothan has to bring a shovel for it, even though he explicitly says that had Amma caught him doing that she’d have known something was up.

Lena and I weren’t allowed to go back to the Lunae Libri, either, at least, not for the next sixty-eight days.

Considering how Marian talks about being bound to let anyone use the library, this doesn’t seem like it’s true, or at least not enforceable.

It’s worse here, Ethan. Boo even sleeps at the foot of my bed now.
That doesn’t sound so bad to me.
He waits for me outside the bathroom door.
That’s just Macon being Macon.
It’s like house arrest.
It was, and we both knew it.

While I’m generally tolerant about hyperbole, this is a book that’s already done the look at how we are exactly like the poor persecuted slaves, it is not like house arrest, it is like, by which I mean actually is, being grounded.

It was more than possible Genevieve had been buried at Greenbrier. There were some weathered headstones in the clearing just outside the garden. You could see them from the stone where we usually sat, which had turned out to be a hearthstone.

Wow and you found the locket she was supposedly buried with right there that’s

Our spot, that’s how I thought of it, even if I had never said it out loud.

Or you could be totally oblivious to all that.

Genevieve had to be buried out there, unless she’d moved away after the War, but nobody ever left Gatlin.
I always thought I’d be the first.

God, no wonder everyone hates you. Seriously, you believe absolutely no one everyone else ever has left the place in its entire history and only you’re that special? Even when the very person you’re talking about right now, Genevieve, had her entire family line leave Gatlin as shown by the fact Lena’s an outsider here?

You even said your friend Link had plans to leave too! You claimed to be impressed by how he had clear plans, but apparently even your best friend, the only one who’s stuck by you when the rest of school got sick of you, was getting sneered at all along – you never thought he’d actually leave, you thought only you’d manage it. He wasn’t good enough to leave.

Anyway.

“What sort of history project requires visiting a graveyard at night?” Aunt Del asked, tripping over a bramble of vines. “Oh my!”
…
“We have to make a rubbing from one of our ancestors’ tombstones. We’re studying genealogy.”

I think the operate part of that sentence was “at night”, Lena.

Reece then asks why Genevieve in particular.

Lena immediately turned away. Lena had warned me not to let Reece see my face. Apparently, one look was all it took for a Sybil to know if you were lying.

Also apparently, they’re too damn dumb to know that hiding your face from them also means you’re lying. Also, I thought they just saw connections to people or something? Whatever.

While in obvious liar position, Lena bullshits about how she just wanted to get the woman in the hallway painting, and apparently Pretty Suit hasn’t said anything about the locket because they don’t think anything of it.

Then they see Genevieve’s ghost hanging out. Lena’s aunt does as well, but doesn’t realize it’s a ghost because of the thing where she sees different times constantly. At least, that’s Emothan’s on the spot guess, contradicted next line with her actual dialogue

“I think we should go back to the house. I’m not feeling very well.” Aunt Del clearly didn’t want to mess with a hundred-and-fifty-year-old ghost in a Caster graveyard.

So she doesn’t mention it because she doesn’t realize it’s a ghost, except she reacts to it like it’s a ghost, but she still doesn’t mention it, and Emothan sees nothing dumb about his two contradictory guesses for her behavior.

Then Reece gets a look at Lena’s face and realizes it’s a lie, so she tells the truth about the book.

“It’s a Casting book, a really old one. We don’t even know if it’s in there. It’s just a hunch,” Lena said, glancing at Genevieve, who was still perched on the tombstone only a foot away.
I tried not to look at Genevieve. It was disturbing the way her body faded in and out, and she stared at us with those creepy golden cat eyes, vacant and lifeless like they were made of glass.

Why don’t you fucking interact with her?

You’re there to try to stop the curse on her line, something she wasn’t much a fan of, by digging up a book she presumably buried herself with to keep away from her family, which will desecrate her grave in the process. Not only do you know ghosts exist in a general sense already, but she’s staring right at you! Say something about what you’re doing! Maybe try to get her blessing.

Anyway, the two other women just stand there and complain a bit once they’ve dug a foot deep. I guess grave desecration is no big deal to casters. Maybe that’s why Amma was so snippy with Pretty Suit visiting, she already knew his whole magic user type gave no fucks about the dead. That’d also serve to yet again put her in the weaker position – she has to beg them for help, while to real magic users, they’re totally inconsequential.

Finally, her aunt suggests just using her time seeing powers to check without digging it up. Why the fuck didn’t Lena just ask her first?

I stepped out of the hole, wiping the dirt on my pants. I looked over at Genevieve. She had a peculiar look on her face, almost as if she was interested to see what was about to happen, or maybe she was just about to vaporize us.

So I’m going to just assume that like Emothan’s mother, Genevieve’s presence seems like it’s important but actually amounts to nothing.

A young woman with caramel-colored skin, hanging clothes on a wash line, humming quietly, the breeze lifting the sheets into the wind. The woman turns toward a grand white Federal-style house and calls out, “Genevieve! Evangeline!”

And we’re told that’s Ivy, so yes, she was their devoted house slave who loved them so much and then the mean Union came to attack her beloved masters and force her to be free when she was so happy just living there, scrubbing their clothes all day. Anyway, at least we’ve finally answered the question of if black people exist.

Then in the future Ivy throws the book on top of Miss Genevieve’s closed casket, meaning they don’t even have to deal with an icky body to get it and also that apparently Genevieve never married despite her husband and many kids.

The four of us sitting around the half-dug hole, and below the dirt, farther down where we can’t see without Del’s help, the pine box. The Book rests against it. Then farther down, into the casket, Genevieve’s body, lying there in the darkness. Her eyes closed, her skin pale porcelain, as if she was still breathing, perfectly preserved in a way no corpse could ever be. Her long, fiery hair cascading onto her shoulders.

You know, I think this is one of those gendered things? Because it doesn’t seem like people casually mention how a guy’s corpse was so alive and yet lifeless and yet so, so fuckable.

Is her body being preserved going to actually matter? It’s not like they have to even open the casket here, the book they’ve after is on top.

“The Book, it’s down there,” I said.
“That it is, but it appears it belongs to this woman,” Del said

Finally, someone saying it!

But their total disregard is apparently irrelevant, and instead Timevision Aunty just infodumbs that Seeing the dead is not one of the gifts of a Caster, even a Natural, and certainly not within the realm of Mortal talents, so apparently there are mortal talents, but point is you can only see ghosts if the ghosts want to be seen.

I was scared. Not standing on the steps of Ravenwood scared, or having Ridley freeze the life out of me scared. This was something else. It was closer to the fear I felt when I awoke from the dreams, and the thought of losing Lena. It was a paralyzing fear. The kind you feel when you realize the powerful ghost of a cursed Dark Caster is staring down at you, in the middle of the night, watching you dig up her grave to steal a book from on top of her coffin. What was I thinking?

I’m more confused why this only suddenly occurred to you. Also, who the fuck cares she’s dark, that doesn’t seem to have done anything to her.

Anyway, he then continues to not say anything to the ghost, but no worries, the ghost speaks up and says that she’s totally fine with this because he’s trying to fix her screwup so take the book.

“How do we know we can trust her?” She was a Dark Caster after all. With the same golden eyes as Ridley.

Again, there still does not seem to be any evidence dark casters are evil or at all different than their pre-dark selves.

Lena looked back at me, with a glint of excitement. “We don’t.”

Indeed, all of their behavior can be easily explained just by how the rest of you treat them.

The Book looked exactly as it had in the vision, cracked black leather, embossed with a tiny crescent moon. It smelled like desperation and it felt heavy, not just physically, but psychically. This was a Dark book; I knew it just from the seconds I managed to hold it, before it singed the skin off my fingertips. It felt like the Book was stealing a little bit of my breath each time I inhaled.

Why is that DARK evidence? You don’t know anything about what dark magic is or does, and I don’t recall Marian saying anything about not touching the dark books because those are warded against mortals, she said not to touch anything because lots of it is warded against mortals, as if anti-mortal hate charms are just a thing.

Aunt Del gasped. “Great Mother, I never thought I would see it. The Book of Moons. Be careful. That book is as old as time, maybe older.

The modern form of the book was a Roman invention dating a bit after the beginnings of Christianity. From the description, I’d expect it’s much later, since it seems to look like a pretty regular book. Even young earth creationists don’t think the last thousand years are “old as time or older”. Let’s face it, humans have not been around long in the shape of things, and we’ve been writing stuff for much less than that.

(Like with time magic, this is one of those issues that you get with magic – it’s based around our lives being the center of the universe.)

It’s particularly funny considering what her magic type is named from. Of all people you’d think she’d know book history.

Then Lena erases their memories of what just happened.

What did you just do?
Uncle Macon and I have been practicing.

Shockingly, the book does actually admit this is not that great of a thing to do.

I knew why Lena did it. But somehow it felt like a line had been crossed, and now I didn’t know where we stood, or if she could ever cross back over to where I was. Where she used to be.

But Pretty Suit teaching her to do it is a-okay, much like how he’s apparently the same as poor Ridley but she’s an evil whore who shouldn’t darken their doorway ever again while he’s the bestest uncle ever.

Emothan checks the locket but nothing happens.

something told me there weren’t going to be any more. The locket had led us here, showed us what we needed to see.

Hey, remember how everyone who knew anything told you it was an unusually supercharged dark magic thing? You don’t trust Genevieve for being a dark caster, but something that’s nothing but dark magic leading you someplace is fine?

He finally feels emotions about the whole desecration thing and goes to drop the locket in, but she says no, it’s not hers, so I guess he’s got to go drop it in Ethan Prime’s grave or something.

Genevieve was there again, what was left of her breaking into nothingness each time the wind blew through her. She didn’t look as terrifying.
She looked broken. The way you would look if you lost the only person you ever loved.
I understood.

Well, what I understand is that apparently going dark is a matter of only loving a single person, since so far the only person described like that was poor Ridley. But I have no idea what Emothan’s understanding. It’s certainly not understanding loss – he doesn’t give a damn about his dead mom and barely gives one about his withering away dad, and even his attraction to Lena, the closest he gets to emotion, is still really flat.