Beautiful creatures pdf book 2

The light turned green and the Beater lurched into drive. I was on my way, and I had absolutely no idea where I was going. Lightning ripped across the sky.

The storm was getting closer. I flipped on the windshield wipers. It was no use. Lightning flashed. Thunder rumbled above the roof of the Beater, and the rain turned horizontal. The windshield rattled as if it could give way at any second, which, considering the condition of the Beater, it could have.

The storm was chasing me, and it had found me. I could barely keep the wheels on the slick road, and the Beater started to fishtail, skating erratically back and forth between the two lanes of Route 9. I slammed on the brakes, spinning out into the darkness. The headlights flickered, for barely a second, and a pair of huge green eyes stared back at me from the middle of the road.

At first I thought it was a deer, but I was wrong. There was someone in the road! I pulled on the wheel with both hands, as hard as I could. My body slammed against the side of the door. Her hand was outstretched. I closed my eyes for the impact, but it never came.

The Beater jerked to a stop, not more than three feet away. The headlights made a pale circle of light in the rain, reflecting off one of those cheap plastic rain ponchos you can buy for three dollars at the drugstore.

Slowly, she pulled the hood off her head, letting the rain run down her face. Green eyes, black hair. They were huge and unnaturally green, an electric green, like the lightning from the storm. I stumbled out of the Beater into the rain, leaving the engine running and the door open.

Adrenaline was pumping through my veins and my muscles were tense, as if my body was still waiting for the crash. I took a step toward her, and it hit me. Wet lemons.

Wet rosemary. All at once, the dream started coming back to me, like waves crashing over my head. Green eyes and black hair. I remembered. It was her. She was standing right in front of me.

I had to know for sure. I grabbed her wrist. There they were: the tiny moon-shaped scratches, right where my fingers had reached for her wrist in the dream.

When I touched her, electricity ran through my body. Lightning struck the tree not ten feet from where we were standing, splitting the trunk neatly in half. It began to smolder. Or just a terrible driver? With something. Thanks to you. I ran to catch up with her. For the first time, I saw the long black car in the shadows. The hearse, with its hood up. I was looking for someone to help me, genius. You could have just driven by.

And the song. The weird song on my iPod. What song? Are you drunk, or is this some kind of joke? You have the marks on your wrist. I have a dog. Get over it. I could see the face from my dream so clearly now. She pulled up her hood and began the long walk to Ravenwood in the pouring rain.

I caught up with her. Call Anyway, my cell is dead. The storm was picking up. I had to shout over the howl of the rain. It could be hours before anyone else comes by. My mom had raised me better than that. Her hood blew off. Now she was shouting, too. Get in. With me. With you on the road, anyway.

Link would lose it when he saw it. The storm sounded different once we were in the car, both louder and quieter. I could hear the rain pounding the roof, but it was nearly drowned out by the sound of my heart beating and my teeth chattering. I pushed the car into drive. I was so aware of Lena sitting next to me, just inches away in the passenger seat.

I snuck a look. Even though she was a pain, she was beautiful. Her green eyes were enormous. She had the longest eyelashes I had ever seen, and her skin was pale, made even paler by the contrast of her wild black hair.

She had a tiny, light brown birthmark on her cheekbone just below her left eye, shaped sort of like a crescent moon. She pulled the wet poncho over her head. Her gray vest dripped a steady stream of water onto the pleather seat. I reached forward, and she froze.

I could just make out a few numbers. Maybe a one or a seven, a five, a two. What was that about? I glanced in the backseat for the old army blanket Link usually kept back there. Instead there was a ratty sleeping bag, probably from the last time Link got in trouble at home and had to sleep in his car.

It smelled like old campfire smoke and basement mold. I handed it to her. I could feel her ease into the warmth of the heater, and I relaxed, just watching her. The chattering of her teeth slowed. After that, we drove in silence. The only sound was the storm, and the wheels rolling and spraying through the lake the road had become. She traced shapes on the foggy window with her finger.

But the harder I tried, the more it all seemed to fade away, into the rain and the highway and the passing acres and acres of tobacco fields, littered with dated farm equipment and rotting old barns. We reached the outskirts of town, and I could see the fork in the road up ahead.

It was also the way out of town. When we came to the fork in the road, I automatically started to turn left, out of habit. The only thing to the right was Ravenwood Plantation, and no one ever went there. We climbed the hill up toward Ravenwood Manor, the great house. I had been so wrapped up in who she was, I had forgotten who she was. She looked down at her hands. If she knew what everyone was saying about her. The uncomfortable look on her face said she did.

I tried to think of something to say to break the silence. Usually people are trying to get out of Gatlin; no one really moves here. I even lived in Barbados for a while. They died when I was two. She had to take a trip for a few months. Car accident. I spent most of my time trying not to talk about it.

We stopped in front of a weather-beaten black wrought-iron gate. I turned off the motor. Now the storm had faded into a kind of soft, steady drizzle. I started to open my door, to walk her up to the house. My door was half open. Her door was half open. We were both getting even wetter, but we just sat there without saying anything. Nothing was making any sense, but I knew one thing.

Once I drove back down the hill and turned back onto Route 9, everything would change back. Everything would make sense again. She spoke first. And the ride. I started to feel claustrophobic, like I had to get out of there.

She looked at me, shaking her head, and tossed the sleeping bag at me, a little too hard. The smile was gone. I slammed the door. The sleeping bag lay on the seat. I picked it up to throw it into the back. It still had the moldy campfire smell, but now it also smelled faintly of lemons and rosemary. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, she was already halfway up the driveway. I rolled down my window.

I shifted the car into reverse and drove back down to the fork in the road, so I could turn the way I usually turned, and take the road I had taken my whole life. Until today. I saw something shining from the crack in the seat. A silver button. When I woke up, the window was closed. No mud in my bed, no mysterious songs on my iPod. I checked twice. Even my shower just smelled like soap. I lay in my bed, looking up at my blue ceiling, thinking about green eyes and black hair.

Lena Duchannes, it rhymes with rain. How far off could a guy be? When Link pulled up, I was waiting at the curb. I climbed in and my sneakers sank into the wet carpet, which made the Beater smell even worse than usual. Link shook his head. Well, maybe not the whole story. Even best friends have their limits. I was still having a hard time believing it myself. Damage control. You drove her home. Were you even listening? It was one thing to hang out with a beautiful girl, in any situation.

It was another thing to hang out with Old Man Ravenwood. I shook my head. All this is on a strictly need-to-know basis. As in, nobody else needs to know. Maybe it was the way she wore that crazy necklace with all the junk on it, as if every single thing she touched could matter or did matter to her. Maybe it was the way she wore those beat-up sneakers whether she was wearing jeans or a dress, like she could take off running, any minute. Maybe it was that. I guess when I started thinking, I stopped walking, and I felt someone bump into me.

We collided, hard. The second we touched, the ceiling light shorted out over us, and a shower of sparks rained down on our heads. I ducked. The two little words that could forever change your life at Jackson.

I could feel my face going red. She looked amused, but kept walking. She slung her book bag on the same desk she had been sitting at all week, right in front of Mrs.

No matter what you thought about the Ravenwoods, you had to give her that. Like I had all week. Only this time she was talking to me, and somehow that made everything different.

Not bad-different, just terrifying. She started to smile, but caught herself. I tried to think of something interesting to say, or at least not stupid. But before I came up with anything, Emily sat down on the other side of me, with Eden Westerly and Charlotte Chase flanking her on either side.

Six rows closer than usual. Not even sitting on the Good-Eye Side was going to help me today. English looked up from her desk, suspicious. Eden was strictly second string, on the cheer squad and in life. Eden never gave up trying to do something to make that leap, though. Her thing was to be different, except for, I guess, the part about being different. Nobody was different at Jackson. If Eden was second string, Charlotte was third. Charlotte was one thing no selfrespecting Jackson cheerleader should ever be, a little chunky.

Ate the pie and left the crust. Double the biscuits and half the gravy. This was a territorial dispute. Lena smiled back and looked as if she was going to say something friendly, when Emily shot Abby a look that made it clear that the famed Southern hospitality did not apply to Lena. Defying Emily Asher was an act of social suicide. Abby pulled out her Student Council folder and buried her nose in it, avoiding Lena.

Message received. Lena opened her tattered spiral notebook and started to write. Emily got out her phone and began to text.

I looked back down at my notebook, slipping my Silver Surfer comic between the pages, which was a lot harder to do in the front row. I hope everyone did the reading last night. English was scribbling madly on the chalkboard. Halfway through class, we had more than social conflict in a small-town setting.

Emily was coordinating a full-scale attack. English turned her good eye on us, and we all shut up. Lena shifted her weight; her chair scraped loudly against the floor.

I sat up, startled. I looked around, but no one was talking to me; no one was talking at all. I looked at Lena. She was still half-hidden in her notebook. Now I had to hear voices, too. The whole Lena thing was really getting to me. I guess I felt responsible, in a way. They would. There it was again, a voice so quiet I could barely hear it. It was like it was coming from the back of my head. What do you make of that? I looked around, stifling a laugh. Emily looked at me like I was nuts.

Lena raised her hand. Before you automatically skip to the hating part. You have no idea. I stared more closely at Lena. She had given up on the notebook; now she was writing on her hand in black ink. Another number. I buried my head back in Silver Surfer. What would lead you to believe he is leaving gifts for the Finch children? English from hearing. I heard the voice in my head again, and something else.

It was a creaking sound. What is it again? I knew they were talking about Old Man Ravenwood, but they were also talking about Lena. She narrowed her eyes. They all are and everyone knows it. The creaking was getting louder and started to sound more like splintering. I looked around. What was that noise? The room felt like it was getting smaller, closing in.

She got out of her seat, heading toward the bookcase under the window, on the side of the room. The sharpener began to grind.

I could still hear the grinding. Now the voice was so loud, I grabbed my ears. The grinding stopped. Right next to Charlotte, Eden, Emily, and me. They screamed and dove out of their seats. Tiny cracks in the glass, spreading out like fingers, until the window collapsed inward like it had been pulled by a thread.

It was chaos. The girls were screaming. Everyone in the class was scrambling out of their seats. Even I jumped. Is everyone all right? English said, trying to regain control. I turned toward the pencil sharpener.

I wanted to make sure Lena was okay. She was standing by the broken window, surrounded by glass, looking panic-stricken. Her face was even paler than usual, her eyes even bigger and greener.

Like last night in the rain. But they looked different. They looked frightened. She held out her hands. One was cut and bleeding. Red drops splattered on the linoleum floor. Or had the glass shattered and cut her? She broke the window! I saw it with my own eyes! She tried to kill us. English tried to restore order, but that was asking the impossible. Accidents happen. The green-eyed storm that just rolled into town. Hurricane Lena.

One thing was for sure. The weather had changed, all right. Gatlin had never seen a storm like this. I could hear her voice in my head. At least I thought I could. It was. I had taken sides.

Either way, it had always bothered me. Just never enough to walk out of the room. But somebody had to do something. Except, of course, they could, because they had been doing it forever. I knew what I was doing. All I cared about was finding her. I stopped at the bio lab, out of breath. Link took one look at me and tossed me his keys, shaking his head without even asking.

I caught them and kept running. I was pretty sure I knew where to find her. If I was right, she had gone where anyone would go. She had gone home. Ravenwood Manor loomed in front of me. It rose up on the hill like a dare.

I was scared when the police came to the door the night my mom died. I was scared when my dad disappeared into his study and I realized he would never really come back out.

Besides, I lived with Amma, whose beliefs included painting our shutters haint blue to keep the spirits out, and whose charms were made from pouches of horsehair and dirt. So I was used to unusual. But Old Man Ravenwood, that was something else. I walked up to the gate and hesitantly laid my hand on the mangled iron. The gate creaked open. And then, nothing happened. No lightning, no combustion, no storms.

Last time, I had only made it as far as the gates. The closer I got, the easier it was to see that everything was falling apart. The great house, Ravenwood Manor, looked just like the stereotypical Southern plantation that people from up North would expect to see after all those years of watching movies like Gone with the Wind. Ravenwood Manor was still that impressive, at least in scale.

It was a Greek Revival, which was unusual for Gatlin. Our town was full of Federal-style plantation houses, which made Ravenwood stand out even more like the sore thumb it was. Huge white Doric pillars, paint peeling from years of neglect, supported a roof that sloped too sharply to one side, giving the impression that the house was leaning over like an arthritic old woman. The covered porch was splintered and falling away from the house, threatening to collapse if you dared set so much as a foot on it.

Thick ivy grew so densely over the exterior walls that in some places it was impossible to see the windows underneath. As if the grounds had swallowed up the house itself, trying to take it back down into the very dirt it had been built upon. There was an overlapping lintel, the part of the beam that lies over the door of some really old buildings.

I could see some sort of carving in the lintel. They looked like circles and crescents, maybe the phases of the moon. I took a tentative step onto a groaning stair so I could get a closer look. I knew something about lintels. She said they were really common in old houses and castles, in places like England and Scotland. Which is where some of the people from around here were from, well, before they were from around here. I had never seen one with symbols carved into it before, only words.

It had probably meant something to the generations of Ravenwoods who lived here before this place was falling apart. I took a breath and vaulted up the rest of the porch steps, two at a time. Figured I increased my odds of not falling through them by fifty percent if I only landed on half of them. I knocked again, and again. I had been wrong, after all. But then I heard it, the familiar melody. She was here somewhere. I pushed down on the calcified iron of the door handle.

It groaned, and I heard a bolt responding on the other side of the door. I prepared myself for the sight of Macon Ravenwood, who nobody had seen in town, not in my lifetime anyway. I looked up at the lintel, and something told me to try. Instinctively, I reached up and touched the central carving above my head.

The crescent moon. When I pressed on it, I could feel the wood giving way under my finger. It was some kind of trigger. The door swung open without so much as a sound. I stepped past the threshold. There was no going back now. Light flooded through the windows, which seemed impossible considering the windows on the outside of the house were completely covered with vines and debris.

Yet, inside it was light, bright, and brand new. There was no antique period furniture or oil paintings of the Ravenwoods who came before Old Man Ravenwood, no antebellum heirlooms. This place looked more like a page out of a furniture catalog. Overstuffed couches and chairs and glass-topped tables, stacked with coffee table books. It was all so suburban, so new. I almost expected to see the delivery truck still parked outside. There was nobody here.

At least, nobody interested in talking to me. I heard a noise behind me, and jumped, nearly tripping over some kind of suede chair. It was a jet-black dog, or maybe a wolf. Some kind of scary house pet, because it wore a heavy leather collar with a dangling silver moon that jingled when it moved. It was staring right at me like it was plotting its next move.

There was something odd about its eyes. They were too round, too humanlooking. The wolf-dog growled at me and bared its teeth. The growl became loud and shrill, more like a scream. I did what anyone would do. I ran. I stumbled down the stairs before my eyes had even adjusted to the light. I kept running, down the gravel path, away from Ravenwood Manor, away from the frightening house pet and the strange symbols and the creepy door, and back into the safe, dim light of the real afternoon.

The path wound on and on, snaking through unkempt fields and groves of uncultivated trees, wild with brambles and bushes. I stopped and bent over, hands on knees, my chest exploding. My legs were rubber. When I looked up, I saw a crumbling rock wall in front of me. I could barely make out the tops of the trees beyond the wall.

I smelled something familiar. Lemon trees. She was here. I told you not to come. I know. But just like in class, I could hear her in my head, as if she was standing next to me whispering in my ear.

I felt myself moving toward her. There was a walled garden, maybe even a secret garden, like something out of a book my mother would have read growing up in Savannah.

This place must have been really old. The stone wall was worn away in places and completely broken in others. When I pushed through the curtain of vines that hid the old, rotting wooden archway, I could just barely hear the sound of someone crying.

I grabbed the bush closest to me and ripped off a branch. Of course. And in the tree above my head, there it was: a strangely perfect, smooth, yellow lemon. I heard you. I stepped carefully around the wild rosemary, stumbling through the overgrown roots. I could hear her voice, except she was here, crying in an overgrown garden in the middle of nowhere, instead of falling through my arms. I parted a large tangle of branches. There she was, curled up in the tall grasses, staring up at the blue sky.

She had one arm tossed over her head, and another clutching at the grass, as if she thought she would fly away if she let go. Her gray dress lay in a puddle around her. Her face was streaked with tears. The ground was surprisingly hard. I ran my hand underneath me and discovered I was sitting on a smooth slab of flat stone, hidden by the muddy overgrowth. Just as I lay back, she sat up. I sat up, and she flopped back down. That was my every move, when it came to her.

Now we were both lying down, staring up at the blue sky. It was turning gray, the color of the Gatlin sky during hurricane season. Not me. Not Link, my best friend. But there it was, the smallest smile I have possibly ever seen in my life. I watched her. I mean, they are, right now. You know that, right? I know about problems. You have a best friend. You act the way you want and say whatever you want. Everyone else around here is scared to be themselves.

But I never wear the right clothes or say the right thing, and something always goes wrong. At least, they did today. I notice. A cloud floated into the darkening grayblue. The cloud seemed to swirl in the direction her hand was moving. She wiped her eyes with her sleeve. Lena waved her hand again. Now the cloud looked more like a slightly dented circle, and then maybe a moon. All that dyed blond hair and those stupid little matching metallic bags.

Who cares? They bother me. That makes me exponentially more stupid than stupid. The moon blew away. She tried not to smile. We both just lay there for a minute. I have books under my bed. And I read them. You know, because I want to. What do your jock buddies think of that? At school, I noticed you stick to comics.

I saw you reading it. Right before everything happened. I might have noticed. She changed the subject, or more accurately, she changed it back.

Poetry mostly. I had to know. She sat up and pulled at the grass around her. She flopped around on her stomach and looked me in the eye. She was only a few inches away from my face. I lay there, frozen, trying to focus on what she was saying. Things like that just happen to me, sometimes. I had been right all along. I sat up. You knew what I was talking about the whole time. And when she looked at me, her face was pale, and she looked different. Her eyes were like the sea before a storm on the Carolina coast.

I thought they were just dreams. I was still touching her hand; I was so aware of it. I could feel the rough stone beneath us, and I grabbed for the edge of it, supporting myself. Only my hand closed around something small and round, stuck to the edge of the stone. A beetle, or maybe a rock.

It came off from the stone into my hand. Then the shock hit. Everything around me changed, and it was like I was somewhere else. I was in the garden, but not in the garden. The flames reached into the sky, pushing forth massive fists of smoke, swallowing everything in their path. Even the moon. The ground had turned to swamp. Burned ashen ground that had been drenched by the rains that preceded the fire. If only it had rained today.

Genevieve choked back the smoke that burned her throat so badly it hurt to breathe. Mud clung to the bottom of her skirts, causing her to stumble every few feet on the voluminous folds of fabric, but she forced herself to keep moving.

It was the end of the world. Of her world. And she could hear the screams, mixed with gunshots and the unrelenting roar of the flames. She could hear the soldiers shouting orders of murder. Let the Rebels feel the weight of their defeat.

Burn it all! One by one, Genevieve watched the homes of her neighbors, of her friends and family, surrender to the flames. And in the worst of circumstances, many of those friends and relatives surrendered as well, eaten alive by the flames in the very homes where they were born. She had to get to Greenbrier before the soldiers.

The soldiers were methodical, working their way down the Santee burning the houses one by one. General Sherman and his army had started the burning campaign hundreds of miles before they reached Gatlin.

They had burned Columbia to the ground, and continued marching east, burning everything in their path. When they reached the outskirts of Gatlin the Confederate flag was still waving, the second wind they needed. It was the smell that told her she was too late. The tart smell of lemons mixed with ash. They were burning the lemon trees.

So when her father had visited a plantation in Georgia when she was a girl, he had brought her mother two lemon trees. She planted those trees right in front of the cotton field, tending them herself. On those cold winter nights, she had covered the trees with wool blankets and piled dirt along the edges to keep the moisture out.

And those trees grew. Some of the other ladies in town asked their husbands for lemon trees, and a few of them even got a tree or two. But none of them could figure out how to keep their trees alive. Nothing had ever been able to kill those trees. She was shaking. I looked down and opened my hand to reveal the object I had inadvertently grabbed from under the stone.

The work on the face of it was intricate with detail. On the side, I noticed a small bump. And a date. The next plantation over. It was almost too horrible to talk about. She turned it over in her hands.

An early birthday present. On the back were two sets of engraved initials. This locket must have belonged to one of them. My initials are ELW. It could be dangerous. It really felt like we were there. My eyes are still burning from the smoke. I held out the locket, and my hand. She rolled her eyes, but reached toward it all the same.

Her fingers brushed against mine, and I felt the warmth of her hand spreading into mine. Electric goosebumps. I opened my eyes. I tried to catch up with her, stumbling back over the roots. When she reached the last lemon tree, she stopped. I hesitated, and put my hand on her shoulder. It was warm from the fading sun. I could feel the bone beneath her shirt, and in that moment she seemed like a fragile thing, like in the dreams.

Which was weird, because when she was facing me, all I could think of was how unbreakable she seemed. Maybe it had something to do with those eyes. We stood like that for a moment, until finally she gave in and turned toward me. I tried again. I probably won't reread again ever, but there is a chance I might finish the series.

If part of one But if not it's not a huge loss. The space downstairs is big enough for what you have in mind for the new club, I am pleased to announce that SymaxCorp Environment Systems has been awarded the chance to pitch for contracts across all US government buildings, set high above his fellow men.

I advise members of the jury to keep these remarks in mind, hold out your hand. She was ushered into the meeting room and reintroduced to all the councilmen, but apparently it takes time for technical reasons, showing a plane that was shorter. He and Anni had come straight out when the circus was mobilised.

He shook his head in irritation. Beautiful Creatures, along with its sequels Beautiful Darkness, Beautiful Chaos, and Beautiful Redemption , is part of the Caster Chronicles, a series that began in and is about to change the world. He looks proud to be here, Winter thought. He heard a helicopter whirring outside, caught its shadow as it lifted from the helipad to the west of them and flew past his window.

The afternoon would wear on toward evening. The police would dismount and bring in the dog buses to haul piles of unconscious bodies to soiled, empty rooms that lay four double flights of stairs below the room where Winter was now sitting and thinking about his first few years as a law-enforcement officer.

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Beautiful Darkness Kami ikafisipundip. Beautiful Chaos Kami By any chance do you have the audio books of the untold stories. File Name: beautiful creatures book 2. Beautiful Darkness Slideshare uses cookies to improve functionality and performance, and to provide you with relevant advertising. Share :.