A Chalice of Wind (23 page)

“So you think it was real, what we were seeing?”

Thais looked up, surprised. “You mean, maybe it wasn’t? Do you usually see real things or just possibilities, or even stuff that never happened and couldn’t happen?”

I thought. “All of the above,” I decided. “But that one felt so real, more real than they usually do. Sometimes it’s like watching TV, kind of, where you’re still aware of your surroundings. That one was so complete. I wish Nan were here to talk about it.”

“Where is she, anyway? Isn’t she coming back tonight?”

Amazingly enough, it was barely ten o’clock. It felt like three in the morning.

I shook my head. “She had to go out of town for a little while. She should be back in a day or two.” I hoped. Memories of how I’d planned to spend my free days—and nights—made my teeth clench.

“You’re lucky,” said Thais. “I wish Axelle would go out of town. For a long time.” Suddenly she looked over at me. “Did you love him?” she asked in a broken voice, her face miserable.

I let out a slow breath. “No,” I lied. “I was just using him. He was hot, you know? And I wanted a fling. But I’m still
really
pissed,” I added.

She nodded. It was so obvious that she’d really loved him too. She sighed and I could practically see her heart bleeding inside her. I wondered if we were linked somehow—I’d heard of twins who could finish each other’s sentences and did the same things at the same time, even if they were in different cities. And those twins weren’t even witches, like us.

“Can I go home now?” she said. “Are you sure I shouldn’t take the trolley?”

“Not this late. It’s not safe. Hang on and I’ll get my purse. And I’m going to change.” I hated this skirt, hated this top, never wanted to see them again. I headed upstairs and heard the front door open.

“I’m going to wait on the porch,” Thais called. “Get some air.”

“Okay,” I called back. In my room I put on gym shorts and an old T-shirt and pulled my long hair back into a ponytail.

Pathetic, desperate thoughts swirled around me like dust devils. Maybe Andre was still outside. Maybe they would both be gone when I got out there. Or maybe after I dropped Thais off, I would see Andre on the street, and he would be so miserable and tell me he had been trying not to hurt Thais’s feelings, but it was me he loved. . . .

I raced out through the house and found Thais by herself on the front porch, looking up at the stars.

“It was cloudy earlier,” she said, sounding like she’d been crying. “Now it’s clear.”

“Yeah.” There was a bitterness at the back of my throat that I couldn’t swallow away. My blue Camry was parked on the street: hardly anyone has a garage in New Orleans, and not many people even had driveways.

Thais went out through our front gate while I locked the door behind me. I felt drained, totally spent and exhausted, and just wanted to get rid of Thais so I could go collapse in bed and cry without anyone seeing.

I started down the front steps, and just as I reached the front gate, I heard a dull buzzing, humming sound that was growing louder with every second. I looked up at the overhead telephone and electricity wires—was something going funky? Was it music from somewhere?

“Clio!”

I snapped my head down to look at Thais, then gasped. A huge dark cloud was moving toward her fast. “ Thais!” I yelled. “Get back inside the gate!”

But it was too late—the dark cloud enveloped her, and she screamed. In horror I realized it was a cloud of
wasps,
a huge, droning mass of angry wasps, and they were attacking her. In the next second I realized that this was unnatural, that wasps didn’t do this. Which meant they’d been sent on purpose, to harm Thais or me or both. Rushing out the gate, I started a dispelling spell, drawing the powerful protective sign of
ailche
in the air, followed by
bay,
the sign for wind.

“Clio!” Thais shrieked, the sound muffled.

“I’m coming!” I yelled, and then I dove into the middle of the cloud and grabbed her. If I could pull her back inside the gate, the protection spells should help. Suddenly it felt like a thousand hot needles plunged into my skin, and I cried out. Thais was crying, waving her arms, lurching around, and I started pulling her back toward the gate.

I was frantic: my eyes were swelling shut, one wasp stung me inside my ear—my entire being was a mass of burning pain. I shouted a banishing spell, and it seemed the droning let up for just a second, but then the wasps were around us again, so thickly that I couldn’t even see the gate or the house. The two of us stumbled off the curb into the street—we’d gone in the wrong direction!

“ Thais!” I shouted. “Give me your energy!”

“Wha—I can’t!” she cried, sounding hysterical.

“Just send me your energy, your strength—any way you know!” I yelled. “ Think!”

I had her by both shoulders. My hands were so swollen and numb that it felt like my skin was splitting. Everything in me wanted to scream my head off and run a hundred miles, but I forced myself to stand still and concentrate, trying to ignore the pain, ignore the burning, salty tears running down my swollen, stinging face.

“
Ailche,
protect us!” I said, crying, my tongue thick. “
Bay,
dispel this swarm!
Déesse, aidez-nous!
” I concentrated on Thais, pushing past her outer, terrified body and into her core, where her unawakened energy lay. It was familiar to me, similar to mine, and I sought out the power she didn’t know she had. I joined my power to hers and repeated my banishing spell:

My eyes were almost completely swollen shut, but my ears heard the droning lessen, and I thought I felt fewer new stinger jabs. I risked opening my eyes and saw that the swarm had in fact started to disperse, untidy clumps of wasps staggering through the air as if unsure of how they’d gotten there or what they were doing. Our feet were covered with wasp bodies.

A minute later, they were all gone, and Thais and I were standing in the street. Amazingly, no neighbors had come out to see what the shouting was about, but they might have been spelled to stay indoors.

“Come on,” I said, barely understandable. My tongue filled my mouth, and I knew we needed help fast—we’d both been stung hundreds of times.

Thais was shaking, sobbing, her eyes shut, her grossly bloated arms still covering her head. I took her shoulder and started towing her back to the house. In my mind, I sent one of my teachers, Melysa, an urgent help message. I couldn’t talk on the phone at this point, and I didn’t know how much time we had.

Before now, I’d always had Nan to help me if I was in trouble or hurt. I’d depended on her to fix everything. With her gone, I had to be the strong one, the one who saved us.

“I hate this place!” Thais sobbed thickly. “Sheets attack you here, trucks drive through streetcars, and now killer wasps! This place is a death trap!”

“Shh, shh,” I said, gently pulling Thais through our garden gate. We stumbled up the porch steps, and I had a hell of a time stuffing my hand into my pocket to fish out the house key.

I was barely able to turn the key, and then I felt Melysa coming, running down the street. She lived only three blocks away—she was one of Nan’s best friends, one of the top witches in our coven, and had been tutoring me in healing spells for the past year.

She burst through the gate, her full, wavy gray hair flying. “Clio!” she exclaimed, looking at us.

I made a mumbled “uunnhhh” sound.

“Inside, inside,” Melysa said, careful not to touch us.

I was starting to feel dizzy, light-headed, and oddly cold. I couldn’t think straight, couldn’t explain Thais to Melysa or even tell her what had happened. My world was narrowing, growing chilly and black around the edges, and then I felt myself falling, falling in slow motion.

A
heavy weight was on my chest, making it hard to breathe. Alarmed, I opened my eyes.

A broad white furry face was looking back at me. Q-Tip.

“Jeez, kitty—you’ve got to take dieting seriously,” I murmured, easing him off my chest. Ah. I could breathe again.

So I was at Clio’s. This must be Nan’s room. I got out of bed and moved slowly to the door, feeling like I’d been hit all over with a baseball bat. Out on the landing I suddenly remembered the whole horrible night before. It had started with finding out that I had meant nothing to Luc and ended with wasps almost killing me. I glanced at my arms—I had faint pink spots all over me, hundreds of them, but they were hardly noticeable.

I looked into Clio’s room. It was empty.

Downstairs, I padded barefoot into the kitchen. Clio sat at the small table, her hands wrapped around a mug. When she looked up at me, her green eyes were clear and weirdly calm.

“Coffee?” she asked.

“God, yes,” I said, and poured myself a cup.

“Tell me again what you said last night about being attacked by sheets and streetcars and stuff,” she said.

“Oh my God, Axelle!” I remembered, my hand over my mouth. She was going to be furious! I’d stayed out all night—

“Melysa called her,” Clio told me. “She knows where you are. It’s cool. And I called us in sick this morning to school.”

School—jeez, school was the last thing on my mind. “Was Melysa the woman with gray hair?” I asked, barely able to remember what she looked like, only that she had been calm and kind and had taken all my pain away. She was no doubt a witch, I thought with resignation.

“Yeah,” Clio answered. “She’s one of my teachers. She’s a healer, and she lives close by, so that was lucky. She left early this morning.”

I sank down into a chair, shivering at the memory of the wasps. “ That was very bad,” I said, and Clio nodded.

“Yes. Now tell me again what you said last night. What’s happened to make you think New Orleans is a death trap,” Clio pressed, calm and unstoppable. She seemed unlike herself this morning, older somehow, less offhand. Well, near death can do that to a girl.

“I had a bad dream,” I said, still hating to think of it. “An incredibly realistic dream where I was in a swamp. A huge snake came and wrapped itself around me, choking me. I felt like I was dying, couldn’t breathe. Somehow I yelled, and then Axelle came in—though my door was locked—and she woke me up. My sheet was twisted into a thick rope, and it was wrapped around my neck tight enough to choke me. I had bruises for days, as if I’d been strangled.” I shivered. Clio was listening intently, following every word.

“And then on the second day of school, I was on the streetcar, going to school. A teenager driving a pickup truck jumped the curb and hit a light post. It snapped off and crashed through a closed window on the streetcar—right where I’d been sitting until like a second before. If I hadn’t moved, it could have killed me. And now the wasps. I mean, God.”

Clio nodded, thoughtful.

“Why?” I said.

“A few nights ago, a mugger pulled a knife on me,” she said. “He didn’t even really try to rob us, me and Della, Eu, and Racey. What he really wanted to do was knife me. Me in particular. And then the wasps last night. And your dream and the streetcar. I mean, suddenly it seems so clear, right? Someone’s trying to kill us. Someone from Nan’s old
famille
has found out about us and is trying to kill us because we’re twins.”

My stomach dropped. “You’re right,” I said, shocked. “ That has to be it. But who? If Axelle wanted to kill me, she could have done it a long time ago. She’s the one who saved me from my dream. Same with Jules and Daedalus—Axelle isn’t always there. They could have gotten to me far more easily before now.”

“And it’s not Nan,” Clio said wryly.

“Who else is there?” I asked, trying to think.

Clio shrugged. “It could be anyone from their
famille.
Which could be . . . let’s see—there were fifteen original families three hundred years ago. Now we have all their descendents. It could be more than a thousand people.”

“Great,” I said, wanting to race back to Welsford on the next plane. But they’d found me there—I wouldn’t be any safer now.

“Nan isn’t here to ask,” Clio said. “Of course, now I wish I’d told Nan about being mugged.”

“Well, I can think of one place to start,” I said. “Axelle.”

 

We found Axelle standing in the kitchen, eating cold leftover Chinese food out of its carton.

“Are you all right, then?” she asked, examining me.

“Yes,” I said. “But it wasn’t pretty. This is Clio.”

Clio looked around the apartment—it had quite a different ambience than the comfortable, homey place she shared with Nan.

Axelle studied Clio. “Interesting,” she said, and I realized that Clio and Axelle were somewhat alike in their personalities. They were both kind of showy and used to getting their own ways. Axelle was just a more exaggerated version.