The first book in the instant New York Times best-selling gothic fantasy series; a modern paranormal romance set against the gothic backdrop of an isolated southern town. Lena Duchannes is unlike anyone the small Southern town of Gatlin has ever seen, and she's struggling to conceal her power, and a curse that has haunted her family for generations. But even within the overgrown gardens, murky swamps and crumbling graveyards of the forgotten South, a secret cannot stay hidden forever. Ethan Wate, who has been counting the months until he can escape from Gatlin, is haunted by dreams of a beautiful girl he has never met. When Lena moves into the town's oldest and most infamous plantation, Ethan is inexplicably drawn to her and determined to uncover the connection between them. In a town with no surprises, one secret could change everything.
Release date:
December 1, 2009
Publisher:
Hachette Audio
Print pages:
592
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
There were only two kinds of people in our town. “The stupid and the stuck,” my father had affectionately classified our neighbors.
“The ones who are bound to stay or too dumb to go. Everyone else finds a way out.” There was no question which one he was,
but I’d never had the courage to ask why. My father was a writer, and we lived in Gatlin, South Carolina, because the Wates
always had, since my great-great-great-great-granddad, Ellis Wate, fought and died on the other side of the Santee River during
the Civil War.
Only folks down here didn’t call it the Civil War. Everyone under the age of sixty called it the War Between the States, while
everyone over sixty called it the War of Northern Aggression, as if somehow the North had baited the South into war over a
bad bale of cotton. Everyone, that is, except my family. We called it the Civil War.
Just another reason I couldn’t wait to get out of here.
Gatlin wasn’t like the small towns you saw in the movies, unless it was a movie from about fifty years ago. We were too far
from Charleston to have a Starbucks or a McDonald’s. All we had was a Dar-ee Keen, since the Gentrys were too cheap to buy
all new letters when they bought the Dairy King. The library still had a card catalog, the high school still had chalkboards,
and our community pool was Lake Moultrie, warm brown water and all. You could see a movie at the Cineplex about the same time
it came out on DVD, but you had to hitch a ride over to Summerville, by the community college. The shops were on Main, the
good houses were on River, and everyone else lived south of Route 9, where the pavement disintegrated into chunky concrete
stubble—terrible for walking, but perfect for throwing at angry possums, the meanest animals alive. You never saw that in
the movies.
Gatlin wasn’t a complicated place; Gatlin was Gatlin. The neighbors kept watch from their porches in the unbearable heat,
sweltering in plain sight. But there was no point. Nothing ever changed. Tomorrow would be the first day of school, my sophomore
year at Stonewall Jackson High, and I already knew everything that was going to happen—where I would sit, who I would talk
to, the jokes, the girls, who would park where.
There were no surprises in Gatlin County. We were pretty much the epicenter of the middle of nowhere.
At least, that’s what I thought, when I closed my battered copy of Slaughterhouse-Five, clicked off my iPod, and turned out the light on the last night of summer.
Turns out, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
There was a curse.
There was a girl.
And in the end, there was a grave.
I never even saw it coming.
Falling.
I was free falling, tumbling through the air.
“Ethan!”
She called to me, and just the sound of her voice made my heart race.
“Help me!”
She was falling, too. I stretched out my arm, trying to catch her. I reached out, but all I caught was air. There was no ground
beneath my feet, and I was clawing at mud. We touched fingertips and I saw green sparks in the darkness.
Then she slipped through my fingers, and all I could feel was loss.
Lemons and rosemary. I could smell her, even then.
But I couldn’t catch her.
And I couldn’t live without her.
I sat up with a jerk, trying to catch my breath.
“Ethan Wate! Wake up! I won’t have you bein’ late on the first day a school.” I could hear Amma’s voice calling from downstairs.
My eyes focused on a patch of dim light in the darkness. I could hear the distant drum of the rain against our old plantation
shutters. It must be raining. It must be morning. I must be in my room.
My room was hot and damp, from the rain. Why was my window open?
My head was throbbing. I fell back down on the bed, and the dream receded as it always did. I was safe in my room, in our
ancient house, in the same creaking mahogany bed where six generations of Wates had probably slept before me, where people
didn’t fall through black holes made of mud, and nothing ever actually happened.
I stared up at my plaster ceiling, painted the color of the sky to keep the carpenter bees from nesting. What was wrong with
me?
I’d been having the dream for months now. Even though I couldn’t remember all of it, the part I remembered was always the
same. The girl was falling. I was falling. I had to hold on, but I couldn’t. If I let go, something terrible would happen
to her. But that’s the thing. I couldn’t let go. I couldn’t lose her. It was like I was in love with her, even though I didn’t
know her. Kind of like love before first sight.
Which seemed crazy because she was just a girl in a dream. I didn’t even know what she looked like. I had been having the
dream for months, but in all that time I had never seen her face, or I couldn’t remember it. All I knew was that I had the
same sick feeling inside every time I lost her. She slipped through my fingers, and my stomach dropped right out of me—the
way you feel when you’re on a roller coaster and the car takes a big drop.
Butterflies in your stomach. That was such a crappy metaphor. More like killer bees.
Maybe I was losing it, or maybe I just needed a shower. My earphones were still around my neck, and when I glanced down at
my iPod, I saw a song I didn’t recognize.
Sixteen Moons.
What was that? I clicked on it. The melody was haunting. I couldn’t place the voice, but I felt like I’d heard it before.
Sixteen moons, sixteen years
Sixteen of your deepest fears
Sixteen times you dreamed my tears
Falling, falling through the years…
It was moody, creepy—almost hypnotic.
“Ethan Lawson Wate!” I could hear Amma calling up over the music.
I switched it off and sat up in bed, yanking back the covers. My sheets felt like they were full of sand, but I knew better.
It was dirt. And my fingernails were caked with black mud, just like the last time I had the dream.
I crumpled up the sheet, pushing it down in the hamper under yesterday’s sweaty practice jersey. I got in the shower and tried
to forget about it as I scrubbed my hands, and the last black bits of my dream disappeared down the drain. If I didn’t think
about it, it wasn’t happening. That was my approach to most things the past few months.
But not when it came to her. I couldn’t help it. I always thought about her. I kept coming back to that same dream, even though
I couldn’t explain it. So that was my secret, all there was to tell. I was sixteen years old, I was falling in love with a
girl who didn’t exist, and I was slowly losing my mind.
No matter how hard I scrubbed, I couldn’t get my heart to stop pounding. And over the smell of the Ivory soap and the Stop
& Shop shampoo, I could still smell it. Just barely, but I knew it was there.
Lemons and rosemary.
I came downstairs to the reassuring sameness of everything. At the breakfast table, Amma slid the same old blue and white
china plate—Dragonware, my mom had called it—of fried eggs, bacon, buttered toast, and grits in front of me. Amma was our
housekeeper, more like my grandmother, except she was smarter and more ornery than my real grandmother. Amma had practically
raised me, and she felt it was her personal mission to grow me another foot or so, even though I was already 6'2". This morning
I was strangely starving, like I hadn’t eaten in a week. I shoveled an egg and two pieces of bacon off my plate, feeling better
already. I grinned at her with my mouth full.
“Don’t hold out on me, Amma. It’s the first day of school.” She slammed a giant glass of OJ and a bigger one of milk—whole
milk, the only kind we drink around here—in front of me.
“We out of chocolate milk?” I drank chocolate milk the way some people drank Coke or coffee. Even in the morning, I was always
looking for my next sugar fix.
“A. C. C. L. I. M. A. T. E.” Amma had a crossword for everything, the bigger the better, and liked to use them. The way she
spelled the words out on you letter by letter, it felt like she was paddling you in the head, every time. “As in, get used
to it. And don’t you think about settin’ one foot out that door till you drink the milk I gave you.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I see you dressed up.” I hadn’t. I was wearing jeans and a faded T-shirt, like I did most days. They all said different things;
today it was Harley Davidson. And the same black Chuck Taylors I’d had going on three years now.
“I thought you were gonna cut that hair.” She said it like a scolding, but I recognized it for what it really was: plain old
affection.
“When did I say that?”
“Don’t you know the eyes are the windows to the soul?”
“Maybe I don’t want anyone to have a window into mine.”
Amma punished me with another plate of bacon. She was barely five feet tall and probably even older than the Dragonware, though
every birthday she insisted she was turning fifty-three. But Amma was anything but a mild-mannered old lady. She was the absolute
authority in my house.
“Well, don’t think you’re goin’ out in this weather with wet hair. I don’t like how this storm feels. Like somethin’ bad’s
been kicked up into the wind, and there’s no stoppin’ a day like that. It has a will a its own.”
I rolled my eyes. Amma had her own way of thinking about things. When she was in one of these moods, my mom used to call it
going dark—religion and superstition all mixed up, like it can only be in the South. When Amma went dark, it was just better
to stay out of her way. Just like it was better to leave her charms on the windowsills and the dolls she made in the drawers
where she put them.
I scooped up another forkful of egg and finished the breakfast of champions—eggs, freezer jam, and bacon, all smashed into
a toast sandwich. As I shoved it into my mouth, I glanced down the hallway out of habit. My dad’s study door was already shut.
My dad wrote at night and slept on the old sofa in his study all day. It had been like that since my mom died last April.
He might as well be a vampire; that’s what my Aunt Caroline had said after she stayed with us that spring. I had probably
missed my chance to see him until tomorrow. There was no opening that door once it was closed.
I heard a honk from the street. Link. I grabbed my ratty black backpack and ran out the door into the rain. It could have
been seven at night as easily as seven in the morning, that’s how dark the sky was. The weather had been weird for a few days
now.
Link’s car, the Beater, was in the street, motor sputtering, music blasting. I’d ridden to school with Link every day since
kindergarten, when we became best friends after he gave me half his Twinkie on the bus. I only found out later it had fallen
on the floor. Even though we had both gotten our licenses this summer, Link was the one with the car, if you could call it
that.
At least the Beater’s engine was drowning out the storm.
Amma stood on the porch, her arms crossed disapprovingly. “Don’t you play that loud music here, Wesley Jefferson Lincoln.
Don’t think I won’t call your mamma and tell her what you were doin’ in the basement all summer when you were nine years old.”
Link winced. Not many people called him by his real name, except his mother and Amma. “Yes, ma’am.” The screen door slammed.
He laughed, spinning his tires on the wet asphalt as we pulled away from the curb. Like we were making a getaway, which was
pretty much how he always drove. Except we never got away.
“What did you do in my basement when you were nine years old?”
“What didn’t I do in your basement when I was nine years old?” Link turned down the music, which was good, because it was
terrible and he was about to ask me how I liked it, like he did every day. The tragedy of his band, Who Shot Lincoln, was
that none of them could actually play an instrument or sing. But all he could talk about was playing the drums and moving
to New York after graduation and record deals that would probably never happen. And by probably, I mean he was more likely
to sink a three-pointer, blindfolded and drunk, from the parking lot of the gym.
Link wasn’t about to go to college, but he still had one up on me. He knew what he wanted to do, even if it was a long shot.
All I had was a whole shoebox full of college brochures I couldn’t show my dad. I didn’t care which colleges they were, as
long as they were at least a thousand miles from Gatlin.
I didn’t want to end up like my dad, living in the same house, in the same small town I’d grown up in, with the same people
who had never dreamed their way out of here.
On either side of us, dripping old Victorians lined the street, almost the same as the day they were built over a hundred
years ago. My street was called Cotton Bend because these old houses used to back up to miles and miles of plantation cotton
fields. Now they just backed up to Route 9, which was about the only thing that had changed around here.
I grabbed a stale doughnut from the box on the floor of the car. “Did you upload a weird song onto my iPod last night?”
“What song? What do you think a this one?” Link turned up his latest demo track.
“I think it needs work. Like all your other songs.” It was the same thing I said every day, more or less.
“Yeah, well, your face will need some work after I give you a good beatin’.” It was the same thing he said every day, more
or less.
I flipped through my playlist. “The song, I think it was called something like Sixteen Moons.”
“Don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.” It wasn’t there. The song was gone, but I had just listened to it this morning. And
I knew I hadn’t imagined it because it was still stuck in my head.
“If you wanna hear a song, I’ll play you a new one.” Link looked down to cue the track.
“Hey, man, keep your eyes on the road.”
But he didn’t look up, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a strange car pass in front of us….
For a second, the sounds of the road and the rain and Link dissolved into silence, and it was like everything was moving in
slow motion. I couldn’t drag my eyes away from the car. It was just a feeling, not anything I could describe. And then it
slid past us, turning the other way.
I didn’t recognize the car. I had never seen it before. You can’t imagine how impossible that is, because I knew every single
car in town. There were no tourists this time of year. They wouldn’t take the chance during hurricane season.
This car was long and black, like a hearse. Actually, I was pretty sure it was a hearse.
Maybe it was an omen. Maybe this year was going to be worse than I thought.
“Here it is. ‘Black Bandanna.’ This song’s gonna make me a star.”
By the time he looked up, the car was gone.
Eight streets. That’s how far we had to go to get from Cotton Bend to Jackson High. Turns out I could relive my entire life,
going up and down eight streets, and eight streets were just enough to put a strange black hearse out of your mind. Maybe
that’s why I didn’t mention it to Link.
We passed the Stop & Shop, otherwise known as the Stop & Steal. It was the only grocery store in town, and the closest thing
we had to a 7-Eleven. So every time you were hanging out with your friends out front, you had to hope you weren’t going to
run into someone’s mom shopping for dinner, or worse, Amma.
I noticed the familiar Grand Prix parked out front. “Uh-oh. Fatty’s camped out already.” He was sitting in the driver’s seat,
reading The Stars and Stripes.
“Maybe he didn’t see us.” Link was watching the rearview mirror, tense.
“Maybe we’re screwed.”
Fatty was Stonewall Jackson High School’s truant officer, as well as a proud member of the Gatlin police force. His girlfriend,
Amanda, worked at the Stop & Steal, and Fatty was parked out front most mornings, waiting for the baked goods to be delivered.
Which was pretty inconvenient if you were always late, like Link and me.
You couldn’t go to Jackson High without knowing Fatty’s routine as well as your own class schedule. Today, Fatty waved us
on, without even looking up from the sports section. He was giving us a pass.
“Sports section and a sticky bun. Know what that means.”
“We’ve got five minutes.”
We rolled the Beater into the school parking lot in neutral, hoping to slink past the attendance office unnoticed. But it
was still pouring outside, so by the time we got into the building, we were soaked and our sneakers were squeaking so loud
we might as well have just stopped in there anyway.
“Ethan Wate! Wesley Lincoln!”
We stood dripping in the office, waiting for our detention slips.
“Late for the first day a school. Your mamma is goin’ to have a few choice words for you, Mr. Lincoln. And don’t you look
so smug, Mr. Wate. Amma’s gonna tan your hide.”
Miss Hester was right. Amma would know I’d shown up late about five minutes from now, if she didn’t already. That’s what it
was like around here. My mom used to say Carlton Eaton, the postmaster, read any letter that looked half-interesting. He didn’t
even bother to seal them back up anymore. It’s not like there was any actual news. Every house had its secrets, but everyone
on the street knew them. Even that was no secret.
“Miss Hester, I was just drivin’ slow, on account a the rain.” Link tried to turn on the charm. Miss Hester pulled down her
glasses a little and looked back at Link, uncharmed. The little chain that held her glasses around her neck swung back and
forth.
“I don’t have time to chat with you boys right now. I’m busy fillin’ out your detention slips, which is where you’ll be spendin’
this afternoon,” she said, as she handed each of us our blue slip.
She was busy all right. You could smell the nail polish before we even turned the corner. Welcome back.
In Gatlin, the first day of school never really changes. The teachers, who all knew you from church, decided if you were stupid
or smart by the time you were in kindergarten. I was smart because my parents were professors. Link was stupid, because he
crunched up the pages of the Good Book during Scripture Chase, and threw up once during the Christmas pageant. Because I was
smart, I got good grades on my papers; because Link was stupid, he got bad ones. I guess nobody bothered to read them. Sometimes
I wrote random stuff in the middle of my essays, just to see if my teachers would say anything. No one ever did.
Unfortunately, the same principle didn’t apply to multiple-choice tests. In first-period English, I discovered my seven hundred-year-old
teacher, whose name really was Mrs. English, had expected us to read To Kill a Mockingbird over the summer, so I flunked the first quiz. Great. I had read the book about two years ago. It was one of my mom’s favorites,
but that was a while ago and I was fuzzy on the details.
A little-known fact about me: I read all the time. Books were the one thing that got me out of Gatlin, even if it was only
for a little while. I had a map on my wall, and every time I read about a place I wanted to go, I marked it on the map. New
York was Catcher in the Rye. Into the Wild got me to Alaska. When I read On the Road, I added Chicago, Denver, L.A., and Mexico City. Kerouac could get you pretty much everywhere. Every few months, I drew a
line to connect the marks. A thin green line I’d follow on a road trip, the summer before college, if I ever got out of this
town. I kept the map and the reading thing to myself. Around here, books and basketball didn’t mix.
Chemistry wasn’t much better. Mr. Hollenback doomed me to be lab partners with Ethan-Hating Emily, also known as Emily Asher,
who had despised me ever since the formal last year, when I made the mistake of wearing my Chuck Taylors with my tux and letting
my dad drive us in the rusty Volvo. The one broken window that permanently wouldn’t roll up had destroyed her perfectly curled
blond prom-hair, and by the time we got to the gym she looked like Marie Antoinette with bedhead. Emily didn’t speak to me
for the rest of the night and sent Savannah Snow to dump me three steps from the punch bowl. That was pretty much the end
of that.
It was a never-ending source of amusement for the guys, who kept expecting us to get back together. The thing they didn’t
know was, I wasn’t into girls like Emily. She was pretty, but that was it. And looking at her didn’t make up for having to
listen to what came out of her mouth. I wanted someone different, someone I could talk to about something other than parties
and getting crowned at winter formal. A girl who was smart, or funny, or at least a decent lab partner.
Maybe a girl like that was the real dream, but a dream was still better than a nightmare. Even if the nightmare was wearing
a cheerleading skirt.
I survived chemistry, but my day only got worse from there. Apparently, I was taking U.S. History again this year, which was
the only history taught at Jackson, making the name redundant. I would be spending my second consecutive year studying the
“War of Northern Aggression” with Mr. Lee, no relation. But as we all knew, in spirit Mr. Lee and the famous Confederate general
were one and the same. Mr. Lee was one of the few teachers who actually hated me. Last year, on a dare from Link, I had written
a paper called “The War of Southern Aggression,” and Mr. Lee had given me a D. Guess the teachers actually did read the papers
sometimes, after all.
I found a seat in the back next to Link, who was busy copying notes from whatever class he had slept through before this one.
But he stopped writing as soon as I sat down. “Dude, did you hear?”
“Hear what?”
“There’s a new girl at Jackson.”
“There are a ton of new girls, a whole freshman class of them, moron.”
“I’m not talkin’ about the freshmen. There’s a new girl in our class.” At any other high school, a new girl in the sophomore class wouldn’t be news. But this was Jackson, and we hadn’t
had a new girl in school since third grade, when Kelly Wix moved in with her grandparents after her dad was arrested for running
a gambling operation out of their basement in Lake City.
“Who is she?”
“Don’t know. I’ve got civics second period with all the band geeks, and they didn’t know anythin’ except she plays the violin,
or somethin’. Wonder if she’s hot.” Link had a one-track mind, like most guys. The difference was, Link’s track led directly
to his mouth.
“So she’s a band geek?”
“No. A musician. Maybe she shares my love a classical music.”
“Classical music?” The only classical music Link had ever heard was in the dentist’s office.
“You know, the classics. Pink Floyd. Black Sabbath. The Stones.” I started laughing.
“Mr. Lincoln. Mr. Wate. I’m sorry to interrupt your conversation, but I’d like to get started if it’s a’right with you boys.”
Mr. Lee’s tone was just as sarcastic as last year, and his greasy comb-over and pit stains just as bad. He passed out copies
of the same syllabus he had probably been using for ten years. Participating in an actual Civil War reenactment would be required.
Of course it would. I could just borrow a uniform from one of my relatives who participated in reenactments for fun on the
weekends. Lucky me.
After the bell rang, Link and I hung out in the hall by our lockers, hoping to get a look at the new girl. To hear him talk,
she was already his future soul mate and band mate and probably a few other kinds of mates I didn’t even want to hear about.
But the only thing we got a look at was too much of Charlotte Chase in a jean skirt two sizes too small. Which meant we weren’t
going to find out anything until lunch, because our next class was ASL, American Sign Language, and it was strictly no talking
allowed. No one was good enough at signing to even spell “new girl,” especially since ASL was the one class we had in common
with the rest of the Jackson basketball team.
I’d been on the team since eighth grade, when I grew six inches in one summer and ended up at least a head taller than everyone
else in my class. Besides, you had to do something normal when both of your parents were professors. It turned out I was good
at basketball. I always seemed to know where the players on the other team were going to pass the ball, and it gave me a place
to sit in the cafeteria every day. At Jackson, that was worth something.
Today that seat was worth even more because Shawn Bishop, our point guard, had actually seen the new girl. Link asked the
only question that mattered to any of them. “So, is she hot?”
“Pretty hot.”
“Savannah Snow hot?”
As if on cue, Savannah—the standard by which all other girls at Jackson were measured—walked into the cafeteria, arm in arm
with Ethan-Hating Emily, and we all watched because Savannah was 5'8" worth of the most perfect legs you’ve ever seen. Emily
and Savannah were almost one person, even when they weren’t in their cheerleading uniforms. Blond hair, fake tans, flip-flops,
and jean skirts so short they could pass for belts. Savannah was the legs, but Emily was the one all the guys tried to get
a look at in her bikini top, at the lake in the summer. They never seemed to have any books, just tiny metallic bags tucked
under one arm, with barely enough room for a cell phone, for the few occasions when Emily actually stopped texting.
Their differences boiled down to their respective positions on the cheer squad. Savannah was the captain, and a base: one
of the girls who held up two more tiers of cheerleaders in the Wildcats’ famous pyramid. Emily was a flyer, the girl at the
top of the pyramid, the one thrown five or six feet into the air to complete a flip or some other crazy cheer stunt that could
easily result in a broken neck. Emily would risk anything to stay on top of that pyramid. Savannah didn’t need to. When Emily
got tossed, the pyramid went on fine without her. When Savannah moved an inch, the whole thing came tumbling down.
Ethan-Hating Emily noticed us staring and scowled at me. The guys laughed. Emory Watkins clapped a hand on my back. “In like
sin, Wate. You know Emily, the more she glares, the more she cares.”
I didn’t want to think about Emily today. I wanted to think about the opposite of Emily. Ever since Link had brought it up
in history, it had stuck with me. The new girl. The possibility of someone different, from somewhere different. Maybe someone
with a bigger life than ours, and, I guess, mine.
Maybe even someone I’d dreamed about. I knew it was a fantasy, but I wanted to believe it.
“So did y’all hear about the new girl?” Savannah sat down on Earl Petty’s lap. Earl was our team captain and Savannah’s on-again,
off-again boyfriend. Right now, they were on. He rubbed his hands over her orangey-colored legs, just high enough so you didn’t
know where to look.
“Shawn was just fillin’ us in. Says she’s hot. You gonna put her on the squad?” Link grabbed a couple of Tater Tots off my
tray.
“Hardly. You should see what she’s wearin’.” Strike One.
“And how pale she is.” Strike Two. You could never be too thin or too tan, as far as Savannah was concerned.
Emily sat down next to Emory, leaning over the table just a little too much. “Did he tell you who she is?”
“What do you mean?”
Emily paused for dramatic effect.
“She’s Old Man Ravenwood’s niece.”
She didn’t need the pause for this one. It was like she had sucked the air right out of the room. A couple of the guys started
laughing. They thou
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