Beautiful Secrets (Cranksepticeye Fanfiction)

~12.07~ Grave Digging

It was Jack's idea. Today was Aunt Del's birthday, and at the last minute, Jack decided to throw a family party at Ravenwood. It was also Jack who invited Anna, knowing full well nothing shirt of divine intervention could get Anna to set foot through the door of Ravenwood Manor. Whatever it was about Macon, Anna reacted only slightly better to his presence than she did to the locket. And she preferred to keep Macon just as far away.
Boo Radley had shown up in the afternoon with a scroll in his mouth, lettered in careful calligraphy. Anna wouldn't touch the thing, even if it was an invitation, and almost didn't let me go. Good thing she didn't see me get into the hearse with my mom's old garden shovel. That would habe raised a flag or two.
I was glad to get out of my house, for any reason, even if the reason involved grave robbing. After Thanksgiving, my father had shut himself in the study, and since Macon and Anna caught us at the Lunae Libri, all I was getting from Anna was stinkeye.
Jack and I weren't allowed to go back to the Lunae Libri, either, at least, not for the next sixty-eight days. Macon and Anna didn't seem to want us digging up any more information they hadn't planned on telling us in the first place.
"After the eleventh of February, you can do what you like," Anna had harrumphed. "Until then, you can do what everyone else your age does. Listen to music. Watch the television. Just keep your nose away from those books."
My mom would have laughed, the idea that I wasn't allowed to read a book. Things had obviously gotten pretty bad around here.
It's worse here, Ethan. Boo even sleeps at the foot of my bed now.
That doesn't sound so bad to me.
He waits for me outside the bathroom door.
That's just Macon being Macon.
It's like house arrest.
It was, and we both knew it.
We had to find The Book of Moons, and it had to be with Genevieve. It was more than possible Genevieve had been buried at Greenbrier. There were some weathered headstones in the clearing just outside the garden. You could see from the stone where we usually sat, which had turned out to be a hearth-stone. Our spot, that's how I thought of it, even if I had never said it out loud. Genevieve had to be buried out there, unless she'd moved away after the War, but nobody ever left Anston.
I always thought I'd be the first.
But now I had gotten out of the house, how was I going to find a lost Casting book that may or may not save Jack's life, that may or may not be buried in the grave of a cursed ancestral Caster, that may or may not be next door to Macon Ravenwood's house? Without his uncle seeing me, stopping me, or killing me first?
The rest as up to Jack.

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"What sort of history project requires visiting a graveyard at night?" Aunt Del asked, tripping over a bramble of vines. "Oh my!"
"Mamma, be careful." Reece looped her arm through her mother's, helping her negotiate the overgrowth. Aunt Del had a hard enough time walking around without bumping into anything in the daylight, but in the dark it was asking too much.
"We habe to make a rubbing from one of out ancestors tombstones. We're studying genealogy." Well, that's sort of true.
"Why Genevieve?" Reece asked, looking suspicious.
Reece looked at Jack, but Jack immediately turned away. Jack had warned me not to let Reece see my face. Apparently, one look was all it took for a Sybil to know if you were lying. Lying to a Sybil was even trickier than lying to Anna.
"She's the one in the painting, in the hall. I just thought it would be cool to use her. It's not like we have a big family cemetery to choose from, like most people around here."
The hypnotic Caster music from the party was starting to fade in the distance, replaced by the sound of dry leaves cracking under our feet. We had crossed into Greenbrier. We were getting close. It was dark, but the full moon was so bright we didn't even need our flashlights. I remembered what Anna had said to Macon in the graveyard. Half moon's for working White magic, full moon's for working Black. We weren't going to be working any magic, I hoped, but it didn't make it seem any less spooky.
"I'm not sure Macon would want us wandering out here in the dark. Did you tell him where we were going?" Aunt Del was apprehensive. She pulled on the collar of her high-necked lace blouse.
"I told him we were going for a walk. He just told me to stay with you."
"I don't know that I'm in good enough shape for this. I have to admit, I'm a bit winded." Aunt Del was out of breath, and the hair around her face had escaped from her always slightly off center bun.
Then I smelled a familiar scent. "We're here."
"Thank goodness."
We walked toward the crumbling stone wall of the garden, where I'd found Jack crying the day the window shattered. I ducked under the archway of vines, into the garden. It looked different at night, less like a spot for cloud gazing and more like the place a cursed Caster would be buried.
This is it. She's here. I can feel it.
Me, too.
Where do you think her grave is?
As we crossed over the hearthstone where I'd found the locket, I could see another stone in the clearing a few yards just beyond it. A headstone, with a hazy looking figure sitting on it.
I heard Jack gasp, just barely loud enough for me to hear.
Ethan, can you see her?
Yeah.
Genevieve. She was only partially materialized, a mix of cloudy haze and light, fading and out as the air moved through her ghostly form, but there was no mistaking it. It was Genevieve, the woman in the painting. She had the same violet eyes and long, wavy red hair. Her hair blew gently in the wind, as if she was just a woman sitting on a bench at the bus stop, instead of an apparition sitting on a headstone in a graveyard. She was beautiful, even in her present state, and terrifying at the same time. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end.
Maybe this was a mistake.
Aunt Del stopped dead in her tracks. She saw Genevieve, too, but it was clear she didn't think anyone else could see her. She probably thought the apparition was just the result of seeing too many times at once, the muddled images of this place in twenty different decades.
"I think we should go back to the house. I'm not feeling very well." Aunt Del clearly didn't want to mess with a hundred-and-fifty-year-old-and-fifty-year-old ghost in a Caster graveyard.
Jack tripped over a loose vine and stumbled. I grabbed his arm to catch him, but I wasn't fast enough. "Are you okay?"
He caught himself and looked up at me for a split second, but a split second was all Reece needed. She zeroed in on Jack's eyes, looking into his face, his expression, his thoughts.
"Mamma, they're lying! They aren't doing a history project at all. They're looking for something." Reece put her hand to her temple as if she was adjusting a piece of equipment. "A book!"
Aunt Del looked confused, even more confused than she usually looked. "What sort of book would you be looking for in a graveyard?"
Jack broke away from Reece's gaze and her hold. "It's a book that belonged to Genevieve."
I unzipped the duffel bag I'd been carrying and pulled out a shovel. I walked over to the grave slowly, trying to ignore the fact that Genevieve's ghost was watching me the whole time. Maybe I was going to get struck my lightning or something; it wouldn't have surprised me. But we'd come this far. I pushed the shovel into the ground, scooping out a pile of earth.
"Oh, Great Mother! Ethan, what are you doing?" Apparently , grave digging brought Aunt Del back to the present.
"I'm looking for the book."
"In there?" Aunt Del looked faint. "What sort of book would be in there?"
"It's a Casting book, a really old one. We don't even know if it's in there. It's just a hunch," Jack said, glancing at Genevieve , who was still perched on the tombstone only a few feet away.
I tried not to look at Genevieve. It was disturbing the way her body faded in and out, and she stared at us with those creepy violet cat eyes, vacant and lifeless like they were made of glass.