Last time, Amma and Pretty Suit have a midnight swamp chat about how they absolutely must stop the two dumb teens from hooking up or the world is doomed! The world is doomed.

10.10

I was starving. I hadn’t been able to face Amma in the kitchen this morning. One look at my face would have given away everything I’d seen last night, and everything I felt, and I couldn’t risk that.

So instead he fails to appear for breakfast when he eats like a starving horse normally. And this doesn’t seem suspicious at all, apparently.

Then Lena rolls up instead of his friend. He assumes it’s about the late night meeting but he sees she’s wearing a soft, red, embroidered sweater that looked like something the Sisters would have in the attic somewhere. Knowing Lena, it wasn’t from the mall in Summerville.

Um, if it looks like it’s from the attic of the ancient ladies, isn’t that how you can guess it’s not from a mall? Still, it’s actually kind of clever:

Red? Since when did she wear red?
She wasn’t under a bad cloud; she had just come out from under one.

So the goth-sue Lena actually wasn’t – she was looking all depressed and preoccupied because she was, in fact, depressed and preoccupied with something, and indeed, she’s also not writing her birthday countdown on her hand today.

Anyway, she’s not here to pick him up for school, because that’d involve going to school. Uh huh. Nope, instead she drives them to the infamous water tower. Well, at least she’s in control of her own sexuality. They take off their seatbelts and she gets in his lap. Then he sees her bracelet is Amma’s charm thingy and he tells her what he saw and how both their guardians are spooked.

“It’s some kind of Dark talisman, whatever that means, and your uncle told Amma that I never buried it. They were really freaked out about it.”
“How would they know it’s a talisman?”

They knew however they knew to freak out at it the first time! If this isn’t a known power people have, you should have expressed your confusion way back then.

I was starting to get annoyed. She didn’t seem to be focusing on the right thing.

This goes on a bit and I was thinking it’s maybe the bracelet warping her personality but apparently it’s nothing. Anyway, so he doesn’t get why she doesn’t think it’s super weird Amma and Pretty Suit know each other and she’s all whatever and yeah Emothan, whatever, this seems pretty normal for secretive castor people. He also reports that her uncle insists he had power, which she thinks is hilarious and also impossible.

I brought Ridley into Ravenwood. He said I’d have to have power to do that.”
She frowned. “He’s right.”

Wait what? You see why I was thinking the bracelet is doing something weird. But no, just character stupidity.

My dad was a writer and my mom had spent her days reading the journals of dead Civil War generals. I was about as far from being a Caster as you could get, unless aggravating Amma counted as a power.

And here we see the author’s specialness biting her. His family has actually been rather anomalous – not full on magic and kidswapping stuff like her family, but they’re not usual people, especially not in their area. His dad is a gothic horror writer, his mom was doing significant historical research to the point of getting books from Mr. Shut-In McMagic’s library. Doesn’t make him magical, but if we’re talking about as far from it as you can get, I can think of a lot of things farther.

(And that’s before getting into his namesake relative with the identical initials being a feature of the mysterious locket.)

There was obviously some kind of loophole that had allowed Ridley to get inside

For the millionth time, Ridley explicitly stated why she was let in: because she was invited as a guest by Emothan. If only castors can do that, then he’s a castor. If anyone can do that, then probably not. If there’s a bunch of other flavors of magic and any of them can do a Ravenwood invite, then he could be any of those, so he’s presumably whatever rare type isn’t very obvious, I’m sure there’s not too many on the list.

So he keeps going on about evil adults evilly keeping evil secrets and pretending it’s to protect them, and she doesn’t care and then yells at Emothan that her uncle’s protecting her from herself and the evil monster she might turn into – still unclear why concern about what really seems like her subconscious decision/personality determination is something you protect someone from with wards.

Then Lena dares point out the obvious, which is that if their guardians are mysteriously trying to keep the two apart maybe he could stop raving about her uncle and deal with Amma, who actually does hate Lena’s guts. Emothan is fine casting all sorts of suspicion upon Lena’s uncle, who treated him nicely and is obviously doing a lot to protect Lena from whatever the issue is, but the woman who repeatedly accused Lena and the Ravenwoods of being inherently evil and how he shouldn’t mix with their kind? She is a saint!

She was the one who had left letters from the Tooth Fairy under my pillow, bandaged every scraped knee, thrown me thousands of pitches when I wanted to try out for Little League. And since my mom died and my dad checked out, Amma was the only one who looked out for me, who cared or even noticed if I skipped school or lost a game.

Okay sounds like your parents never cared or noticed in the first place, also christ you had terrible parents.

But book. Book. If his parents had left him to be raised by Amma, this should have fucking featured before. It does explain why he’s treating his mom’s death and father’s utter breakdown with about the level of concern and emotion of someone losing some moderately loved pet dogs, but we’re too far into the book, that really needed to be explained at the time, and the other stuff you said suggested at his mother, at least, was around a lot.

Emothan finally trips over something that’s actually fucking relevant, namely the locket.

This is about the locket. There’s something they don’t want us to know.”

Except even that doesn’t appear true! Dammit. We know they won’t explain what’s up, but they didn’t mention the visions in the first place, and from everyone’s reaction, it seems the thing does something else bad. (If nothing else, the locket vision stuff appears to only work by physical contact, yet both of them exhibited terror at the sight of it, and both want it wrapped in magic stuff to keep it from doing something all by itself and buried to keep it from doing something all by itself.) Plus they expressed themselves perfectly clearly in the overheard chat – it’s a dark talisman, which sure sounds like it’s inherently harmful. Sounds like their issue with it is it’s evil, doesn’t it? As was expressed by both of them telling you it’s evil and to bury it.

“We need to find out what happens next.”

Or you could be stupid. It’s okay, stupid is acceptable if it means stuff will happen.

I grabbed her hand, even as she tried to yank it away.

The unilateral decisionmaking, less so. Especially when she obviously knows more about magic shit than you do.

This time it just flashes and then they come back, and he realizes the bracelet is blocking it. She protests that she’s sure it isn’t for some reason, and I’m guessing she knows he’s right and just doesn’t want to have the damn vision again, but he browbeats her into it. And then vision.

Lemony Slaveowner Lady is trying to magic her precious Ethan Carter Wate to live. (Hey, what if Ethan wasn’t magic and it’s just her crazy ghost hovering over him thinking he’s her old boyfriend?)

Flowers blooming. Newborn babies crying. The sun rising.
Birth, not death.
She pictured the images in her mind, willing it to be so. The images ran in a loop over and over in her mind.
Birth, not death.

I’m thinking this doesn’t actually seem like the best healing spell, since that’s more about continuing to be alive than being born. You’re not trying to make any new life here, just stop current life from fading. Maybe that’s why the spell borks and Deserterthan dies, although she claims she’s healed sick baby birds so presumably she’s doing what worked then.

“You were right. The bracelet was keeping us from seeing the vision. But why
would Uncle Macon tell me it was for protection?”
“Maybe it is. That’s just not the only thing it’s for.”

Or maybe whatever it is just works along the same lines. If it protects the dead from the dead and spirits from spirits, it’d protect magic from magic, wouldn’t it? Amma said nothing about protecting against only the evil dead and evil spirits. Why can’t a “protection” charm just be a blanket block-all-magic-stuff without it having to be some secret secondary plot? Plus Amma sure sounded casual about it, like it just happened to be the only thing that might be useful she had on hand, and it’s not like Pretty Suit even wanted the damn thing!

(And that’s assuming it’s not actually some malicious thing just pretending to be a vision – hey, maybe that’s why it’s so historically inaccurate! It’s an evil Confederate spirit dedicated to whitewashing history until the South Rises Again.)

Emothan insists that no there is totally a conspiracy here and they must solve it before her birthday!

Whatever they don’t want us to know, it has something to do with your birthday.”

Yes, it has something to do with them thinking it’ll send her round the bend into dark crazy claim territory and/or outright possess her! This is really obvious!

Lena decides that is way not pessimistic enough and it’s obviously because she is definitely going to go dark and her uncle’s just keeping her around because he loves being at ground zero for magic nuke teens so much!

Emothan comforts her that he’ll definitely fight fate with her even though there’s actually no reason it’s fate beyond that she’s scared it’ll be!

Her eyes were clouding over like the sky. “Can’t we just enjoy the time we have left?”

Incidentally, when this chapter started I was thinking maybe he’d keep quiet rather than plunge her back into depression, either because doing so is generally dickish or because he’d figured the same thing as I did about going dark seeming to have a pretty strong connection to being miserable and bullied.