2.11

Last time, Ridley and Link are the only decent people in this damn book.

For some reason, he brings his dad to the medics at the reenactment, because his unharmed but suicidal father is clearly safest in an area full of live ammunition. Also, he doesn’t actually need to bring his dad anywhere – he should tell Link to stay with his dad and rush right back to Lena, especially when his dad appears to be totally fine now that Ridley’s dropped the effect. Link can then try to move his dad back to their home, where he can be passed off to Amma, or they can just wait it out, relatively sure no one else is going to mess with them.

I pushed past the girls from Jackson, who had ditched jackets, and were looking skanky in their tank tops and baby tees

Fuck you.

“Ethan, over here!” Larkin was standing in the trees just past the reflective yellow rope that separated the Safe Zone from the You-Could-Get-Your-Butt-Shot-Off-If-You-Cross-This-Line Zone.
…
Usually jumping that rope would’ve been a tough choice, but not today.

You know what would be great? A supernatural explanation for why Gatlin is so weird. I mean, imagine Emothan at college, talking about his boring small town life with their boring reenactments where you aim loaded guns at each other that occasionally explode in your hands instead and how just last year some guy got his head blown off, oh my god life was so boring there and he’s so glad to be hanging out in a city where people do interesting stuff like go out skateboarding.

And everyone else in his dorm just stares at him in dead silence, waiting for the punchline.

We know Ridley can make everyone throw the bestest birthday bash ever all by herself. Who knows how much casters can warp an area? Maybe this is a testing ground to see what you can make mortals do and how long those things will persist after you remove the overt control – we know they definitely do because the party kept running without Ridley’s interference. She probably could have laid off her lollipop even earlier if Lena wasn’t responding to every friendly overture with disgust, sarcasm, and lighting it on fire.

Link is, for some reason, following Emothan.

“Hey, Ethan.”
“Yeah?”
“About Rid, I should’ve listened.”

No, he shouldn’t have, he was spewing nonsense. It’d be one thing if Emothan had told him the truth or even the modified truth to not sound so crazy, but all he did was say that the girl was a bitch and he hated her, which incidentally appears to be what he says about everything female other than Lena.

There’s gunfire and Link hopes they’re blanks, despite earlier saying they’re 100% authentic ammunition that shoots people and despite the fact that they’d either be using blanks or they wouldn’t, you don’t just hope that maybe this particular volley was.

They see Larkin and Lena right at the Greenbrier grave area.

“Mom, what the heck are you doin’ out here?” Link was confused.
Because his mom was standing in front of us, Mrs. Lincoln, my worst nightmare, or at least in my top ten. She looked strangely in—or out of—place, depending on how you looked at it. She was wearing ridiculous volumes of petticoats and the stupid calico dress that cinched her waist way too tightly.

You know, maybe it’s not so much that he’s gay as he’s a crossdresser and he’s just really upset he doesn’t get to wear this stuff and he’s really resentful of women over that.

Anyway obviously something weird is going on and also his Lena telepathy is out. He manages to hear a whisper of her screaming to get her uncle. Naturally he decides that no, he should stay with her, so she has to switch to shouting the same thing out loud.

Something hits him and Link, but he can’t find any sign of the bullet hole, then something else smashes into him and he realizes it’s magic. Dammit. All that time spent on telling us there’s live ammunition and nothing’s going to come of it? Chekhov would like a word with this.

Anyway, he finds himself in an invisible box. He’s a mime now!

Out of nowhere, the sky opened up and rain literally poured out of the clouds, like it was being dumped from a bucket. Lena. Her hair was waving wildly. The rain turned to sleet and fell sideways, attacking Mrs. Lincoln from every direction. In a matter of seconds, we were all soaked to the bone.

That sure is pointless. Also, is it passing through the invisible walls or do they just not have a roof? Detail!

Mrs. Lincoln, or whoever she was, smiled. There was something about her smile. She looked almost proud. “I’m not going to hurt them. I just want to give us some time to talk.”

Hm. Actually, she has a point. She’s done a pretty good job of confining them nonviolently – it’s not exactly her fault they ran into the walls (assuming it’s invisible walls or nothing, if tint is an opinion then this is rather dickish).

But yeah it’s totally her mom who starts talking about how “Wait until you realize what you can really do. How you can manipulate the elements. It’s the true gift of a Natural, something we have in common.” Classical elements, of course, never mind how little sense that makes as an actual power.

Link’s mom starts to split and her mom comes out.

“I don’t have a mother,” Lena shouted.
Sarafine winced, as if she was trying to look hurt because she was Lena’s mother.

“As if” “trying to”. So when she looks hurt when someone says something hurtful, she’s faking it.

And remember everyone, all evidence at the moment points to Lena not growing up with her mom because the rest of the family stole the kid from her.

She literally stepped out of Mrs. Lincoln’s body, which fused back together within seconds, as if someone had sewn up the seam. Leaving the real Mrs. Lincoln collapsed in the grass with her hoopskirt flipped up, revealing her knee-high support hose and her petticoats.

There is never not a good time to humiliate women.

Also, let’s note how the evilest of the evil casters, stepping out of the body of a woman she was using as a flesh suit, took the time to put her back together instead of, as I’d expect, just tearing her in half and leaving the bloody chunks where they fell. This is quite possibly the most consideration for the lives of mortals we’ve seen in the entire goddamn book.

I mean – let’s remember that Pretty Suit has encountered her before. This leaves us with two options.

A) Pretty Suit knew Lena’s mom was riding inside the woman and also that by extension, all the mortals around were getting riled up by another caster. Therefore, he did nothing to free Mrs. Lincoln and dealt with the problem by threatening and humiliating the mortals into compliance, because who gives a fuck about mortals.

B) Pretty Suit did not know Lena’s mom was inside. When he threatened to murder her in a dark alley, that was a threat to a mortal woman for daring to take issue with the destruction that trails in Lena’s wake.

Incidentally, we get some slight word on the issue of if mortals are actually a different species:

“Mortals. That body was just insufferable, so awkward and uncomfortable. Stuffing its face every five minutes. Disgusting creatures.”

Sounds like eating is pretty optional for them. This would fit with the bit earlier about how casters getting trapped for months in the caster library is no biggie. And sounds like there’s just some general incompatibility there too, since she seems to be saying hiding in the body wouldn’t have been so uncomfortable had it been a caster.

I’m probably overthinking it and the idea is just lol she’s a fatty.

Link, of course, is plenty upset by his mom being unconscious/possibly dead on the ground even if she’s not spewing blood everywhere, and Sarafine casts a quick mute on his shouting.

You’re lucky I didn’t have to spend all my time in your mother’s body over the last few months. If I had, you’d be dead by now. I can’t tell you the number of times I nearly killed you out of boredom at the dinner table, droning on about your stupid band.”

Ah, finally some nice evil. It’s not enough, book, but good try!

And now, because it’s not like there’s been enough damn filler, Emothan now recaps how hey, that’s why Mrs. Lincoln has been doing all of the weird stuff she’s done all book.

“You may think you don’t have a mother, Lena, but if that’s true, it’s only because your grandmother and your uncle took you from me. I’ve always loved you.” It was disconcerting how Sarafine could move so easily from one set of emotions to another, from sincerity and regret to disgust and contempt, each emotion as hollow as the next.

He doesn’t even try to argue the stealing her kid part, just that he’s sure she’s faking the emotions on the basis of jack shit.

Lena’s eyes were bitter. “Is that why you’ve been trying to kill me, Mother?”
Sarafine tried to look concerned, or maybe surprised. It was hard to tell because her expression looked so unnatural, so forced. “Is that what they told you? I was simply trying to make contact—to talk to you. If it hadn’t been for all their Bindings, my attempts would never have put you in any danger, a fact they knew.

Fits perfectly with what we’ve seen so far. If she wanted to kill Lena, she’d be doing it right now. Lena is already borderline suicidal, convinced

She says that yeah, they’re been doing this because she’s dark.

But Lena, you know as well as anyone, I had no choice in that matter. It was decided for me. It doesn’t change the way I feel about you, about my only daughter.”

And we know going dark sure changed Ridley’s emotions so much.

I couldn’t look away from Mrs. Lincoln, lifeless in the grass. Lena was looking at her, too. “She’s not, you know. Is she?” I had to know, for Link’s sake.

I mean, it’s not like he actually cares for people in general, but he is supposedly friends with the guy, so he’ll spare Link’s mental health a thought.

Sarafine tried to look sympathetic. But I could tell she was losing interest in Link and me, which wasn’t good for either of us.

Maybe you could tell how you know this, because what you’re saying is she looks sympathetic but you Just Know she’s evil. She continues to demonstrate her evil by confirming that yeah, the woman’s fine.

She then confesses I was only trying to show my daughter the true nature of Mortals. How easily they can be influenced, how vindictive they are.” She turned to Lena. “Just a few words from Mrs. Lincoln and look how easily this whole town turned on you. and why would confessing this seem like a good idea!? You’re admitting they weren’t really tormenting Lena but it was caster interference. There isn’t even reason to believe it only took a few words – we just saw Ridley can mindcontrol everyone easily, and naturals can do everything ever.

Larkin, why don’t you show us those baby blues, I mean yellows?”
Larkin smiled and squeezed his eyes shut, reaching his arms over his head like he was stretching after a long nap. But when he opened his eyes again, something was different. He blinked wildly, and with each blink his eyes began to change. You could almost see the molecules rearranging. Larkin transformed, and there standing in his place was a pile of snakes. The snakes began to coil and climb onto each other, until Larkin emerged once again from the twisting heap. He held out his two rattlesnake arms that hissed and crawled back into his leather jacket until they became his hands. Then he opened his eyes. But instead of the green eyes I was used to seeing, Larkin stared back at us with the same golden eyes as Sarafine and Ridley. “Green never was my color. One of the perks of bein’ an Illusionist.”

Hm. Well, that does explain him groping a sixteen year old and possibly roofieing her. On the other hand, there’s still the problem that he’s so far the only one to do anything particularly wrong at all, and also that he’s been living with the family just fine this whole time.

Plus the plot hole where he was hanging out at light-bound Ravenwood that was killing Ridley to be in by nature, supposedly. I mean, if he was a shifter, you could just barely fanwank this into somehow shifting himself to get around the wards, but no, he’s only illusions. What’d he do, illusion up the feeling he wasn’t dark so the wards wouldn’t notice him?

“Why?”
But the answer was staring right at us, in Larkin’s golden eyes. “Why not?”
“Why not? Oh, I don’t know, how about a little family loyalty?”

Um, your family would’ve kicked him out as soon as they knew. Your family has no loyalty. For that matter, his original faking of good-alignment was probably out of a desire to stay with the family, which makes calling it disloyal total nonsense.

“You betrayed everyone, your own mother. How can you live with yourself?”
He stuck out his tongue. The snake crawled into his mouth and disappeared. He swallowed. “It’s a whole lot more fun being Dark than Light, cousin. You’ll see. We are what we are. This is what I was destined to be. There’s no reason to fight it.”

See, they deserve this. This is what you get for telling half your family they’re evil and nothing they do will ever change it. Why should he fight it? It doesn’t matter how he acted, it doesn’t matter if be out-angeled angels, one day his illusion would flicker and they’d kick him out as evil.

She says he’s a traitor. Evil mommy says so is “Your beloved Uncle Macon.” Her voice was bitter and I could tell it wasn’t
lost on Sarafine that Macon had all but stolen her daughter from her. so he’s willing to admit that she cares about them stealing her child, but only when it’s a negative emotion.

“He’s the one who has been lying to you all this time. He let you believe your fate was predetermined—that you didn’t have a choice.
…
“That’s what happens. It happened to Ridley and Reece and Larkin.”
“You’re right, but you’re different. Tonight, you will not be Claimed. You will have to Claim yourself.”
…
“You have a choice. I’m sure your uncle didn’t tell you that.”

So the entire damn plot of this book was a complete waste of our time. All that figuring out what happened, studying the book, etc – fucking meaningless! She tried to find out the way she could do this, she failed, then she finds out now it’s going to happen regardless.

And Ghost Mommy! What the fuck were you wasting your time here on? Why bother telling her about the claiming herself business if instead of an option it was inevitable! YOU DON’T NEED TO INFORM PEOPLE SOMETHING INEVITABLE WILL HAPPEN BECAUSE IT’S FUCKING INEVITABLE THAT’S HOW INEVITABILITY WORKS!

And if you were trying to cut the wangst YOUWILLGETTOCHOOSE would’ve actually accomplished that!

WHY IS THIS BOOK SHITTY IN EVERY LAST WAY?

Her mom explains that it’s because of prophesy. See, Mommy is the first natural-type born into the family, because yes, natural is the default and you change into a cataclyst if you go evil, and Lena’s second:

“‘The First will be Black
But the Second may choose to turn back.’”

So while Lena’s been going on this pity fest just on the possibility she’d go dark, her poor mother always knew. There was no chance of things going otherwise, there was no hope that maybe being a good person will be what matters.

Emothan acts as emotional support, reminding her that Lena claims dark casters don’t care about anything, and the fact this is a wholly unsubstantiated claim that flies in the face of everything we’ve seen is no reason to discard it now!

Pretty Suit appears!

“Leave my niece alone.” Tonight, in the moonlight, he looked different. Less like a man and more like what he was. Something else. His face looked younger, leaner. Ready for a fight.
“Are you referring to my daughter? The daughter you stole from me?” Sarafine straightened and began to twist her fingers, like a soldier checking his arsenal before a battle.
“As if she ever meant anything to you,” Macon said calmly.

Well she obviously means enough that Sarafine is here and objecting to that fact, so.

Tonight, Boo looked exactly like what he was—an enormous wolf.

Isn’t “what he is” some freakish magic thing that never tires and can get places faster than you even when you’re going in a straight line and also he’s got human eyes stuffed in his head plus Pretty Suit can see through him?

So I’m not sure why you feel “wolf” is the most accurate option there.

Turns out that she also brought his brother along to counter him.

He looked like Macon, but taller and a little younger, with slick jet-black hair and the same pallid skin. But where Macon resembled a Southern gentleman from another time, this man looked fiercely stylish. Dressed in all black, a turtle-neck, jeans, and a leather bomber, he looked more like a movie star you’d see on the cover of a tabloid rag than Macon’s Cary Grant.

But he is totally only interesting in Lena, really I swear.

I’m not surprised you’d take up with someone like her.”
Hunting laughed, raunchy and loud. “Who else would you expect me to take up with? A pack of Light Casters, like you did? It’s ridiculous.

Kind of see the point there.

The dark/light division goes so deep and is so pointless. They probably only tolerate him so long as they’ve got a use for him, namely, protecting Lena. Before her birth, did anyone care about him? And once he’s done his job, will anyone?

In this world, being anything but light puts you in a really horrible position. You may want to be around the good people, but they’ll never do more than tolerate and use you. And you’ll have to put up with it because they’re the only game in town – absolutely everyone seems to hold to the division.

You don’t get to choose what you are, Brother. You’re an Incubus. And whether you choose to feed on blood or not, you are still a Dark Creature.”

My, the end of the book is just churning out the retcons and plot holes. So now there aren’t different types of rape demons at all, they’re all just vampires but “good” vamps choose to get sustenance other ways.

You know, Pretty Suit. Mortal blood is just as renewable as mortal dreams anyway, and you can get it from a blood bank rather than being a creeper in teenagers’ bedrooms.

Macon looked at Lena, exasperated, and looked away. “You do have a choice, Lena, a complicated choice. A choice with grave consequences.”

Then we get paragraph of paragraph of him repeating that there are some very important consequences he doesn’t want to get into, because now is absolutely the best time for this shit.

“As if you could trust him. After a thousand lies.” Sarafine glared at Macon and turned to Lena. “I wish we had more time to talk, Lena. But you have to make the Choice, and I am Bound to explain the stakes.

BOUND BY WHO?

Now we’re not just having binding be the term for everything, it’s doing stuff of its own free will!

Also, if she’s bound to do it, then presumably it’s inevitably going to happen, so wouldn’t it have made so much more sense to tell Lena in advance of her hearing it from evil mommy?

“If you choose to go Dark, all the Light Casters in our family will die.”

You know, Evil Mommy has been pretty decent so far. No body count, actually telling the truth when it doesn’t serve her purposes…

Lena went pale. “Why would I ever agree to do that?”
“Because if you choose to go Light, all the Dark Casters and Lilum in our family will die.”

See, Evil Mommy could’ve just said that if she goes light it’d kill Pretty Suit, and left off that going dark also had an equally murdery result. In that case, Lena’s choice would have been to pick good and kill her beloved uncle, her cousin and her mother, or go bad but save everyone’s life.

Also, all the more reason that everyone in the family should’ve been making actual attempts on her life. Or, assuming this is inevitable, trying to winnow down to other side so they could make a case that she should pick their side on the basis of it causing the fewest deaths.

Pretty Suit explains he didn’t tell her because of how fine he is with dying, because he has absolutely no grasp of how people work.

If he’d told her that he was going to die to protect her and give her the chance to make it to sixteen, she’d have come to terms with it. It would’ve been a bit of a shock to learn that it was specifically her choice that’d do the killing, but at least it wouldn’t all be dumped on her at once.

Also, the lilum appear to be an always evil branch, so once again, this really puts Lena’s book-long wangst about how MAYBE she’ll turn evil on her birthday into perspective.

Finally, it’s not just his sacrifice. It’s everyone. No wonder Larkin is “betraying” his family here, Lena going light means he dies.

“There is something else I can offer,” Sarafine added.
“What could you possibly have to offer that would make me want to kill Gramma, Aunt Del, Reece, Ryan?”

“Larkin how could you betray us!!!”
“Uh, realizing that I and everyone else like me no longer counts as a person to you?”

She’s pretty much admitting right there that yes, she’s fine killing them all. She’ll be sad for Pretty Suit but at least she’ll get to do a victory dance through everyone else’s ashes.

Everyone else’s dark ashes. That’s really how things are ending, total genocide against the “dark” branch of the family on the basis they’re inherently evil. The only way this could’ve been worse is if their skin changed color instead of their eyes.

Anyway, Evil Mommy’s bid to not die is that she’ll give her a way to be together with Emothan. Lena is confused because she didn’t think that was really a concern.

you and Ethan can never be together, not physically. Casters and Lilum cannot be with Mortals.” She smiled, relishing the moment. “At least not without killing them.”

Thus opening yet another plothole, namely why did anyone bother objecting to the Genevieve/Ethan Prime match instead of just letting it happen and cleaning up the corpse afterward? Plus, they actually are a species apart so getting offended by that is dumb, especially when they were probably acting to protect his life.

Also, the moral here is that poor sex education in schools will lead to girls destroying the world because they don’t know there’s other options than PIV sex.

When this happens in Chobits, the guy is all I don’t care, what matters is I love her! Here, it’s apparently an actual issue.