The Seer's Spread

Book 0: Beautiful Creatures: The Untold Stories

by Kami Garcia, Margaret Stohl

Genres: YA Paranormal; YA Fantasy; YA Romance

Synopsis

Fate is a powerful thing...

Ethan Wate is still grieving the loss of his beloved Amma when he receives an unexpected gift – the old, yellow Whitman's Sampler box that held Amma's most closely guarded secrets. "One day I might let you have a look under that lid, Ethan Wate," Amma used to say. "But today isn't the day."

Now it's time for one of her greatest secrets to be revealed. In a long-lost letter, Amma tells Ethan the story of growing up as a young Seer with a remarkable gift for reading cards. But with a power that far-reaching comes responsibility, and Amma has been honoring her mission since before Ethan was born – to protect the Wate family at any cost. So when Lila Jane Evers enters Mitchell Wate's life, bringing the whole Caster world with her, Amma turns to her cards. This time, it's a the reading that will define the rest of her life – and Ethan's.

In this second installment of Beautiful Creatures: The Untold Stories, #1 New York Times bestselling authors Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl bring you even deeper into the Caster world.

A Hachette Audio production.

Release date: July 14, 2015

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 32

Sample

Ethan stared at the yellow box with the words Whitman’s Sampler looping across the lid. He knew there wasn’t a single vanilla caramel or molasses chew inside. “One day I might let you have a look under that lid, Ethan Wate,” Amma had said after she caught him poking around the candy box when he was seven. “But today isn’t the day.”

The contents of the Whitman’s Sampler box remained one of the many mysteries about the woman who helped raise Ethan—like Amma’s actual age (his dad estimated between seventy and eighty when she died, but no one had ever been brave enough to ask while she was alive); the secret ingredient in her fried-chicken batter (Link thought he’d narrowed it down to red pepper, bacon drippings, or Old Red’s Seasoning Salt, none of which seemed exactly right); and the reason Amma had knocked on the door of Wate’s Landing and moved in the day Ethan’s parents brought him home from the hospital (his mom maintained it was because Amma didn’t think Lila knew anything about babies, but Amma claimed it was because she couldn’t stand the thought of Ethan being raised on frozen biscuits and store-bought pie).

And now that she was gone for good, no one would ever know.

Ethan ran his hand over the faded cardboard and turned to his girlfriend, who was sitting cross-legged on the bedroom floor next to him, scratching words into one of her notebooks as she twirled her black curls. “Why would Amma leave me her box? Why not my dad?”

Ethan hadn’t realized he’d said the words out loud and was almost relieved when Lena seemed to be only half listening.

“Ethan,” she said as she turned a page, “do you really want me to answer that?”

“No.” He set the box on the rug in front of him. “Maybe I’ll get to it tomorrow.”

Ethan knew he sounded sad and tired. It had only been three weeks since Amma’s funeral, and he still missed her as much as on the day she died. After losing his mom, he knew that over time the pain would fade into the background just enough to make it bearable, but it would never go away.

Everything that reminded him of Amma was moving deeper and deeper inside him—the crinkles at the corners of her eyes, the strings at the bac. . .