Book Read Free

Beautiful Chaos

Page 41

by Kami Garcia


  He was trying to stop me.

  I tried to throw him off. I leaned forward and saw my Chucks kicking. Then I saw his Chucks kicking. They were so old and thrashed they could have been mine. This was how I remembered it from the dream. This was how it was supposed to be.

  What are you doing?

  This time, he was asking me.

  I threw him against the floor, and he landed on his back. I grabbed the collar of his shirt, and he grabbed mine.

  We looked into each other’s eyes, and he saw the truth.

  We were both going to die. It seemed like we should be together when it happened.

  I pulled out the old Coke bottle Amma had left sitting on the kitchen table earlier. If a whole bottle tree could catch a whole lot of lost souls, maybe one Coke bottle could hold on to mine.

  I’ve been waiting.

  I saw his face change.

  His eyes widen.

  He lunged at me.

  I wouldn’t let go.

  We stared into each other’s eyes and clawed at

  each other’s throats.

  As we rolled over the edge of the water tower

  and fell

  the

  whole

  way

  down,

  I

  was

  only

  thinking

  one

  thing

  .

  .

  .

  L

  E

  N

  A

  Nineteen Moons—

  Acknowledgments

  Three Moons and more than 1,600 pages from the day we sat down to prove to a few smack-talking teenagers that we could write a book, our extended Caster family couldn’t even fit on one or two pages, if we tried to name you all.

  We are grateful to all of our incredibly talented publishers in the thirty-eight countries that have welcomed the Beautiful Creatures novels into their world. You have shown our readers, ourselves, and the Casters of Gatlin County many kindnesses. We are grateful to our writer and reader friends, our agent and editor friends, our online and marketing/PR friends, our teacher and librarian friends, and our bookstore friends. We owe a huge debt to our translator friends, particularly Dr. Sara Lindheim, our Classicist and Keeper. More than anything, we are grateful to the teens (and the teens at heart) who read our books, and particularly our Caster Girl & Boy beta readers, who are infamously brutal editors and who, we hope, will one day make other writers weep more loudly than they have us. Good Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise.

  Finally, we are grateful to our families, our tribes, our inner circles—all of you who already know this means you because you’re probably sitting here while we’re writing this. Our books are about holding on to your family and finding your tribe, more than anything else. To us, that is magic. It took us a long time to find you, and we love you all.

  Emma, May, Kate & Lewis; Nick, Stella & Alex—

  We love you first, best, and last.

  Contents

  Front Cover Image

  Welcome

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  BEFORE: Sugar and Salt

  9.07: Linkubus

  9.07: Mortal Girls

  9.07: Stonewalling

  9.07: Off Route 9

  9.12: Glass Houses and Stones

  9.12: Adam and Eve

  9.15: Izabel

  9.15: The City That Care Forgot

  9.15: Wheel of Fate

  9.19: The Far Keep

  9.19: The Devil You Know

  9.19: Winds of Hell

  9.25: Ladies of the House

  9.26: Visiting Hours

  9.28: End of Days

  9.28: Jeopardy

  10.04: Rubbery Chicken

  10.09: Catfight

  10.09: Good-Eye Side

  10.09: Reckoning

  10.09: Temporis Porta

  10.13: Golden Ticket

  10.18: A Real Bad Girl

  10.18: Hostage

  10.19: The Ultimate Weapon

  10.24: The One Who Is Two

  11.01: Crucibles

  11.01: Demon Queen

  11.01: Bad-Eye Side

  11.20: The Next Generation

  11.24: More Wrong Than Right

  12.06: Fractured Soul

  12.07: Cards of Providence

  12.12: Slush Ball

  12.12: A Light in the Dark

  12.13: Tears and Rain

  12.13: The Verdict

  12.13: Perfidia

  12.13: The Day After Forever

  12.14: Demon Door

  12.17: Passing Strange

  12.19: Cream of Grief

  12.20: Hybrid

  12.20: The Wrong One

  12.21: Plain English

  12.21: The Last Game

  12.21: Remainders

  12.21: Broken Bottles

  12.22: Finally

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2011 by Kami Garcia, LLC, and Margaret Stohl, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  www.twitter.com/littlebrown.

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  First eBook Edition: October 2011

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the authors. To the extent any real names of individuals, locations, or organizations are included in the book, they are used fictitiously and not intended to be taken otherwise.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-19306-1

 

 

 


‹ Prev