A Gatlin Wedding

Book 0: Beautiful Creatures: The Untold Stories

by Kami Garcia, Margaret Stohl

Genres: YA Contemporary; YA Paranormal

Synopsis

Does it always come down to Destiny? The Wheel of Fate? Who's behind that Wheel? What kind of idiot is doing the driving around here?

The day has finally arrived: Mitchell Wate and Lillian English are getting married. Everyone has come together – Ethan and Lena, John and Liv, even Link is back in town – and there's enough pie to make Amma proud. But despite the joyous occasion, Ethan can't help but worry that something feels...off.

When Siren-turned-Hybrid Caster Ridley blows into town unannounced, Ethan's suspicions are confirmed. And it's worse than he imagined: Silas Ravenwood is coming for them, and no one in Gatlin is safe. Has the Wheel of Fate finally caught up to them, or can the Casters and Mortals come together to stop it in its tracks?

#1 New York Times bestselling authors Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl reveal Gatlin's destiny in this not-to-be missed final installment of Beautiful Creatures: The Untold Stories.

A Hachette Audio production.

Release date: January 12, 2016

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 62

Sample

Fifteen pies sat together on the swaying row of conjoined rectangular folding tables in Ethan Wate’s backyard, proud as Mrs. Asher’s cats, waiting like everyone else for the rehearsal dinner to start. Ethan counted them from where he sat on the splintering steps of the old back porch at Wate’s Landing, just out of the last-minute setup chaos.

Tonight was serious business; you could tell by the good china. Not a Pyrex or a pie tin on the tables, and the actual wedding wasn’t even until tomorrow. Marian and Lena and Lena’s grandmother and her Aunt Del and everyone else on Team Wedding—even the bride herself, Ethan’s old English teacher and future stepmother, Lilian English—had outdone themselves. Reluctant recruits or not.

By the time they were through, every half-decent pie maker in town had chipped in. These weren’t pies money could buy, Ethan knew. These pies had to be earned. Raspberry lattice crust. Peach double crust. Apple crimp crust. Blueberry crumble crust. S’mores graham cracker crust. Lemon chess with cream. Chocolate chess with cream. Chocolate silk with chocolate cream. Coconut cream with extra coconut cream. Lemon meringue. Jumbleberry. Wildberry. Blackberry. Blueberry. No-bake strawberry. Even one lopsided Tunnel of Fudge cake, half melted in the evening heat, though it wasn’t a pie at all. Ethan and Lena had made that one themselves, if only for sentimental reasons…

Around Gatlin, pies meant only one thing—love. At least, that’s what they meant to anyone who had ever known Amma, Ethan’s honorary grandmother (and uncontested number one champion blue-ribbon baker of the Gatlin County Fair Annual Pie Bake-Off). But she was gone now, and it hurt to think about it, so when Ethan got to the end of the pies, he just kept counting.

Fifteen pies, one cake, seven platters of butterscotch bars, twelve cream-of-casseroles, six rainbow Jell-O salads, six ambrosia fruit salads, two hundred and forty biscuits, six tubs of honey butter, ten pitchers of lemonade, ten more of sweet tea…

Nearly a hundred upstanding citizens of Gatlin, South Carolina—and more than eight hundred and eighty Jordan almonds. (Ethan’s fingers were raw from wrapping them in netting, which everyone had been doing for days.)

And one Wheel of Fate, he thought.

That’s what had brought them all here, to this day and to these pies and to this backyard.

Of that, he had no doubt.

Because that was what Ethan Wate saw in his backyard the night of his father’s rehearsal dinner, more than anything else. Even if he couldn’t see the Wheel exactly, he could feel it, and it would take more than fifteen pies to distract him from that. Especially when those pies weren’t even baked by the one person whose pies he’d grown up eating.

It all just felt wrong.

Like the final destination of a forking road that never should have been taken, all those years ago.

One that led somewhere no Mortal was ever meant to go.

It wasn’t exactly the most celebratory thought for the day before his father’s wedding, but that didn’t mean Ethan could stop himself from thinking it.

Because the Wheel of Fate has a way of wrecking everything it ever rolls past. And now we’re all just left to sort out the pieces, to pretend this is how it was always supposed to be.

Ethan could feel his one wrinkled white oxford dress shirt growing damp and sticky in the warm twilight air.

I hate Fate.

Ethan looked out over the circle-topped, white tablecloth-covered card tables that had been borrowed from the church and set up in his backyard for tonight’s party. An orchard basket full of peaches and daisies sat in the center of each one, surrounded by little tea lights in mason jars and a stack of Mrs. English’s favorite books, including all the ones she had taught Ethan and Lena. Ethan could see Marian’s meticulous handiwork in everything, which made sense, because Marian, along with Lena’s Gramma Emmaline, had taken over the wedding itself.

Everyone was certainly trying to make this a party. The cracked driveway had been glued back together with asphalt, and flowers had been replanted with new black dirt along its border. The patchy rectangle of backyard lawn was filling up with his Georgia cousins, not to mention half of Gatlin. They’d all turned out in their Sunday best on a Friday night to begin the weekend of festivities that meant Mitchell Wate was marrying their English teacher. If . . .