A Feather of Stone #3 (3 page)

I paused for just a second, then kept walking. Daedalus walked beside me.

“I could help you,” he repeated. “I know more about Melita’s spell than anyone. You obviously have a connection to her, through your bloodline. We could combine our strengths. It could be . . . very interesting. Very rewarding.”

I reached the rusty wrought-iron gate that led out of the cemetery and opened it. It squeaked loudly.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Nan doesn’t trust you, and neither do I.” I turned and walked away from him, hoping he wouldn’t follow me home and maybe wake Petra up to fink on me.

“Think about it.” His quiet words floated through the night, but when I turned, he was gone.

thais

“
C
hip?” Sylvie held out a bag of Fritos and shook it. It was lunchtime, but our school’s cafeteria was always crowded and noisy, so me, my friend Sylvie, her boyfriend, Claude, and Kevin LaTour were sitting outside.

I took some. “ Thanks. Trade you for my pickle?”

“Great.” Sylvie leaned against Claude and bit the pickle. “At least it’s Wednesday,” she said. “Middle of the week. After this, it’s all downhill, toward the weekend.”

I laughed. “I hope next weekend is better than last weekend,” I said without thinking.

Next to me, Kevin groaned and covered his face, obviously thinking about our date last Saturday, when we’d gotten hit by lightning. God, and that wasn’t even what I’d been talking about. That had been scary, but at least it had been scary in the normal way of just being one of those freaky nature things that happened in New Orleans, not some kind of magickal attack.

“I promise,” he said, putting his hand over his heart. “Our next date will be disaster-free.”

I slapped his knee lightly. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Actually, I’d been referring to the nightmare of a Récolte circle I’d gone to on Sunday—but for a second I’d forgotten that I couldn’t talk about it with my friends. They knew that witches existed, in a vague way, but they didn’t know that I and my family actually practiced the craft.

I still found it hard to believe, myself.

Kevin put his arm around me, and I smiled at him. He was a sweetheart—the more I knew him, the more things I liked about him. Plus, of course, the high adorableness quotient.

“Can you maybe grab some coffee with me after school today?”

My face lit up and then instantly fell. “ ’Fraid not. First I’m going to get my Louisiana driver’s license, then I have to go home and wash, scrape, air out.”

Kevin made a sympathetic face. Pretty much every day for the past couple of weeks, my sister Clio and I had spent most waking moments helping to repair, clean, and desmoke our little house. We’d set it on fire during a spell, and the whole back had been damaged.

“But this weekend?” I suggested. “I’m pretty sure if I whine enough, I could possibly get out for one night.”

Kevin grinned and kissed my hair. “Just tell me when.”

I smiled and nodded, amazed at how normal I was being. Inside, I was still trapped on an emotional Tilt-A-Whirl. It was hard to know which end was up nowadays, with everything that was going on. The best thing about Sylvie, Claude, and Kevin was how unconnected they were to my other life, the life of my new family. With them I could be just Thais Allard, unassuming high school senior, northern transplant. At home I loved being a sister and a sort of grand-daughter, but home was also where magick was made, where my troubling and surreal history seemed unavoidable. At home we talked about what had happened at Récolte, or the autumn solstice. We talked about the fact that some people we knew and were related to were immortal. Literally. And we worried about the rite that Daedalus was planning, the one that might kill me or Clio or make us immortal too.

“I’m sorry, what?” I said, realizing that my friends were looking at me expectantly.

“Did you study for calc?” Sylvie asked again.

I let out a breath. Lovely normalcy. “Yep,” I said. “But I still don’t get most of it.”

Clio

“
F
eel the life in every handful of dirt.” My teacher, Melysa, paused to admire the black earth trickling through her fingers.

I looked at her sourly. Gardening was one of my least-favorite things to do, and in our climate you can grow
something
all year round. Plus, the firefighters had completely trampled Nan’s gorgeous front beds to get to the back of the house. So here I was, gardening my little heart out, as penance.

And as part of my lesson.

“Yeah, full of life,” I muttered, wiping the sweat off my brow. “Gotcha.” I leaned over and pulled up a dead plant by the roots. I threw it on the pile to compost and raked the dirt smooth. On the sidewalk sat a tray of eight tiny cabbage plants, waiting to be transplanted. Great. Gardening
and
looking forward to eating cabbage this winter. Oh, joy.

I stood up, stretching and groaning. “I feel like my back is about to break.” Not to mention my hands, which were red, as if sunburned, and still stung from last night.

Melysa shot me an amused glance. “Number one, you’ve only been at it for fifteen minutes. Give me a break. Number two, you’re seventeen years old. You don’t get to complain about aches and pains until you’re fifty. Now, do you remember green cabbage’s true name?”

I looked at it. Not napa cabbage or red cabbage, but this particular kind of green cabbage.
“Seste,”
I said.

“Very good.” Melysa crouched on the ground and dug a small hole with a trowel. Expertly she flipped a cabbage plant out of its plastic cell and popped it in the ground, patting the dirt around it firmly. “Have you been working on a spell for your rite of ascension?”

I blinked at the change in subject. “Uh-huh.”
If you only knew,
I thought uncomfortably. She couldn’t know, I reassured myself. No one but Daedalus knew about the spell I had done last night in the cemetery.

I raked and pulled, lost in thought. For my rite of ascension, I needed to craft a major spell, one utilizing several levels of power, several forms of spellcrafting, several witch’s tools. Last night, I had done just that, and it had worked. It had been the first major magick I had done alone. It had been awful and scary. But I had learned more about what had happened with the Treize. And with Richard, I remembered, feeling my cheeks flush more. As Cerise, I had memories of him as a lover. It felt weird and uncomfortable, as if I had spied on him. Which I guess I had, in a way.

A totally bizarre, unbelievable,
X-Files
kind of way.

But whatever. What was important was that I’d gotten a bird’s-eye view of Melita’s spell. I’d seen the sigils and runes that had glowed on the ground around the circle. Cerise hadn’t been aware of them that night—I wondered if anyone had noticed them, with everything else going on. Cerise dying. But in my vision I had seen them. I had a more complete picture of what Melita had done, and I thought I understood how and why it had worked. But I needed to do more research. Especially with Daedalus still plowing forward with his plans to re-create the rite.

I’d been thinking a lot about immortality. The idea had planted its roots in my mind and was taking firmer hold. What would things be like two hundred years from now? What would it be like to never fear death? I didn’t know exactly how it worked—like, could one of the Treize jump off a cliff and just get up afterward, like Wile E. Coyote? What would it be like to be frozen in time as I was now—young and strong and beautiful? I would never age, never get gray hair and wrinkles and have things droop on me. I would be able to learn magick my whole life. What would my powers be like a hundred years from now, with a hundred years of studying under my belt? Would I just keep getting stronger?

It was starting to sound pretty damn good.

But—would Thais agree with me? Could I bear to become immortal while she went on to age and die? True, I’d had a sister for only a few months, but she was my mirror image. It would be like watching myself age and die. Now that we knew each other, we were joined. We were connected. It deepened with every day that passed. Could I bear for that connection to be broken someday?

Next to me, Melysa planted the other baby cabbages. I finished preparing my bed and knelt down to sprinkle weensy radish seeds in short rows. It was almost October, but we had plenty of time for another radish crop. And cabbages grew well in chillier temperatures. Like, if it got down in the fifties. I sighed and brushed my hair off my neck.

“Feel free to share,” Melysa said.

I looked up. “Oh. Well—I’ve just been thinking about different things,” I said. “Listen—do you understand the form of the Treize’s original spell?”

Melysa looked surprised. She was the only non-Treize member who knew about Nan and her
famille
, knew their freakish history.

“Well, a bit,” she said. “I don’t know if anyone truly understands all its nuances or powers. Not even the people . . . who were there.”

Daedalus says he does,
I thought.
He says he knows enough to re-create it.

I pushed that thought out of my mind.

“But what would the basic form be?” I persisted.

Melysa frowned slightly as she cut several small squashes off the vine growing on our fence. “Why do you want to know?”

“I’m just curious. It seems so amazing, so out of the realm of what we usually do.”

Her eyes were serious when they met mine.

“It is,” she said. “For good reason. That kind of magick isn’t positive, doesn’t add a positive presence to the world. It’s harmful, it creates an unnatural situation, it affects other people without their will or knowledge. It’s forbidden.”

“Forbidden? Do people even know enough about it to outlaw it? Wasn’t that spell with the Treize the only instance of it?”

Melysa, who I could usually ask almost anything, took on an uncharacteristically shuttered expression. She didn’t answer, and a flash of excitement rushed through me. Did that mean there had ever been other spells like Melita’s? Was there a whole school of magick that I—and most witches—knew nothing about? It would be incredibly interest—

Oh. Yes. Now I got it. Yes, there was a whole school of magick that probably dealt with spells similar to Melita’s. It was called dark magick, and we did not practice it. It had never occurred to me that among all the awful, evil, totally wrong spells of dark magick, there would be some that could work a spell like Melita’s. The kind of spell that would grant immortality to the witches present.

And that could kill a witch too, I remembered, trying not to shudder at the memory of feeling Cerise die.

I heard the familiar cheerful chugging of my little Camry and looked up. Thais had found a parking space in the street right in front of our house—we didn’t have a driveway or garage. She got out and walked through our gate, careful not to step on any plants.

“So, you got it?” I asked.

She smiled, looking exactly like me except for the clothes, and waved her new Louisiana driver’s license.

“I’m legal now. To drive, anyway.” She surveyed the front yard, which was being transformed from a trampled, sooty, demilitarized zone into a mere inkling of the glory of Nan’s old garden. “You guys have gotten a lot done. Let me change and I’ll come help for a while before dinner.”

“Great, thanks,” said Melysa, smiling at her.

Having an identical twin sister was starting to feel a teensy bit more normal, but waves of “this is unbelievable” still flitted through my head. I’d spent seventeen years as an only child—having my entire world turned inside out in the last couple of months had made me feel like I was tripping sometimes.

“What’s that?” Thais asked, pointing to the baby cabbages. “Not more okra?”

I laughed. Thais was still getting her southerner’s taste buds jump-started.

“Cabbage!” I said brightly, and she made a face.

Melysa stood and brushed off her hands. “It’s time I was going, now that you’ve got a helper. Tell Petra I’ll talk to her later, all right?”

“Okay. Thanks—see you soon.” I stood up and followed Thais inside. It was time I found out exactly what she thought about immortality.

Black Like My Soul

This had all changed so much. Except for the heat, the mosquitoes, the smell of the water. Those were the same. But the way the land looked, the contours of the canals and the rice fields and the rivers themselves—all that was different. The small trolling motor on this old wooden pirogue made an annoying buzzing sound, like a big, sleepy insect. Richard sat in the stern, one hand on the tiller, maneuvering his way through water paths that had changed ten times since he’d seen them. How long ago had he been here, to this very place? Maybe forty years? Thirty? Decades blended together.

The sun was hot on his skin, warming his blood. Richard brushed his damp bangs off his forehead and lit a cigarette. He remembered Clio snootily telling him not to smoke in Petra’s house. He guessed Petra hadn’t told Clio she herself had smoked for roughly eighty years. He snorted smoke out his nose, feeling the heat, the chemical aftertaste.

Up there. A quarter mile ahead, the flat, treeless rice fields gave way to a flat swamp. The canal was about to become choked with weeds, so Richard shut off the motor and pulled it in. He got out a long, broad paddle, its paint worn away, and began pushing through the weeds. Water hyacinths. Really pretty, shiny green leaves, pretty purple flowers. Clogging canals, ditches, and rivers throughout the Gulf states.

But pretty.

Like Clio.

She too was pretty and useless—in fact, destructive. Look what she had done to Petra’s house. At least, he was pretty sure it had been her, her and Thais’s spell going wrong.
Unless . . .
Frowning, Richard flicked his cigarette into the water. There was a quick hiss, and then Richard remembered that littering was verboten nowadays. Damn.