A Necklace of Water (17 page)

In the kitchen, Petra put the kettle on. What did she feel like having? Her joints ached; she felt scattered and unfocused; she was bone-tired…. She laughed wryly. She could drink her whole pharmacopoeia and it wouldn’t help.

She was weakening and perhaps on the downhill slide toward death. Actual death, after so long. It was a bizarre thought. What would happen to the twins if she died? Once again, Petra damned Daedalus for setting all this in motion.

Glancing at the light outside, Petra saw that she had maybe an hour before something had to be done about dinner. Where were the girls now? She wasn’t exactly worried; things had been more or less quiet since the rite. But … everything that had once seemed solid now felt tenuous, rickety, as if it might fall apart at any moment. She’d spent centuries getting to this place, where she could create a good life. She’d brought up Clio here. After such a disastrous experience with motherhood the first time, it had taken more than two hundred years for her to want to do it again. But somehow, when she’d seen Clémence die, seen the two tiny babies take their first breaths, she’d known that these were the ones she would save. She would somehow try to break the curse of Cerise’s line.

Clio had been six months old when her birthmark had appeared, on her left cheek. Cerise’s birthmark. Petra’s mother had had it and her grandmother. Their line was marked.

The kettle whistled, making Petra snap back to the present. She took a bag of plain Earl Grey tea and dropped it in her cup, then poured steaming water over it. The scent rose through the air on a ribbon of steam: the magick of tea.

Petra had invested almost eighteen years in Clio, and now she had Thais as well. These were two children she would not see die, or turn to the dark side, or disappear.

Petra poured some tea into the plain white saucer on the table. She concentrated, closing her eyes, building the scrying spell for the girls she thought of as daughters one elegant layer at a time. Like anything else, magick was a skill. It could be done badly or done well. It was the difference between a rough-hewn, three-legged milking stool cobbled together by a farmer and the highly polished burl maple of a Boston highboy, with its perfect proportions, joints like the tail of a dove, and wood as smooth as silk.

Opening her eyes, Petra gazed down into the pale, shallow liquid. Faint tendrils of steam rose from it, and when they cleared, Petra saw Clio and Thais sitting, their heads together, talking seriously. Thais picked up a glass and drank. There were plants in the background. Clio said something, and they both laughed.

They were fine. Petra exhaled deeply, feeling tension slowly uncoil from her bones. She lifted the saucer to pour the tea back into her cup, but another image, unsought, was forming.

Petra watched in astonishment as a beautiful face, framed by waves of hair as black as her eyes, formed within the shallow saucer.

Her heart slowed to three beats per minute. Petra couldn’t breathe as she absorbed the details of that face, the face she hadn’t seen in 242 years.

The face smiled, showing even white teeth. “Maman,” Melita said. “
Comment ca va
?”

D
aedalus stopped and took his bearings. As often as he’d been in this cemetery, still, the way the sunset was dappling the tombs made things look different. A large angel had fallen off a mausoleum dedicated to firefighters, and that had made him miss a turn.

Could this really be happening now, when he was nearing his own personal sunset? Or at least felt it possible for the first time? Everything was coming together, happening all at once, and it was incredibly exciting and gratifying. Having the whole Treize, having Clio studying with him, so eager to learn… This was the least discontent he’d been in decades.

Ah
. Daedalus stopped in front of his family tomb. Clio had teased him about his name—how he didn’t use “Planchon.” Everyone knew him only as Daedalus. “Like Cher,” Clio had said, with an impertinent smile. No one had teased him in a very long time. It both irritated and amused him. As usual, he lowered himself onto the small cast-iron bench directly across from the nameplate. It was from a different lifetime, the lifetime when he’d had a brother and his brother had been secretly married to the strongest, darkest witch anyone had ever seen.

Now—242 years of history were coming together, right here. Daedalus had a front-row seat. In fact, he was the ringmaster.

He felt her before he heard the almost-silent footsteps on autumn-dry grass. A deep thrill went through him—this was almost unimaginable, what was happening. Every tiny hair on his arms rose. He felt so tightly strung with tension that if he stood up suddenly, his bones would snap.

There she was.

He didn’t turn as she seemed to glide across the grass toward him. In the deep shadows of new sunset, he saw her place a white rose on his brother’s tomb.

Finally he spoke. “I’m here, as you directed.”

She turned and, if possible, was even more beautiful than he remembered. Unusually tall for a woman from their time, slim, dark-haired, and black-eyed—she favored her father much more than she did Petra, and Armand had been an incredibly handsome man.

He remained seated as she bent down to brush kisses against each cheek. When she sat next to him, he picked up the scent of spices he couldn’t name.

“Of course you are.” Her voice was at once foreign and frighteningly familiar, the voice that had commanded more dark magick than he’d seen before or since. “Now, tell me everything.”

“Y
ou’ve come very far, very fast,” Carmela said as I sat, dazed, my eyes on the black candle that only moments before I had actually levitated. By myself. I felt drained and queasy, as usual.

“I’ve been practicing,” I said, wondering if taking Dramamine would interfere with magick. I also wondered if my eyes had changed so that I could now see in the dark. I was in the same dark red, windowless room that Carmela had first led me to. Then I’d felt like I was moving through fog, unable to see more than a foot in front of me, unable to see Carmela clearly.

Now, after working with her for only five days—was today Wednesday? Thursday? It was hard to keep track without the regular school rhythm—I felt like a cat, able to see in complete darkness. I’d worked with Carmela every day this week, sometimes for five or six hours at a time, sometimes for only an hour or two, depending on how long I could sneak away. I’d learned more in this past week with her than the last two months with Petra and Clio.

“You come from a long line of witches?” Carmela asked, picking up the black candle and setting it back in its stand.

“Yes.”

“Light the candle.”

I loved doing this. I’d done it for the first time yesterday, after Carmela had explained how it worked. Basically, everything exists all the time all around you, wherever you are. Every element, every substance can be called out of “nowhere” because it already exists and is there for the taking. Magick is simply a way to call something to you so that it takes on a form or substance.

I focused on the wick, already burned black. Closing my eyes, I pictured tiny molecules of the element fire all around me, infinitely small, dispersed so widely that they had no form, no cohesion. I began a spell to gather them to me, then direct them to the wick, then coalesce them into something strong enough to take form and ignite.

The best part? This took about twenty seconds. Carmela had made me do it over and over yesterday until it became second nature, like plucking a feather out of the air.

I opened my eyes in time to see a teardrop of fire swirl around the wick, lighting it. This one candle seemed to light the room like a stage because I was so used to the darkness.

Carmela’s bright black eyes were on me.

“What?” I said.

She gave me an odd half smile and shook her head, still wrapped in its African-print turban. “I enjoy our lessons, Thais.” She sounded bemused.

“Oh. Does it… bother you, what I want to do?”

“Strip an old man of his powers? No.” Carmela laughed, the sound echoing off the painted walls. “I’ve done far, far worse.” Immediately her face was solemn, and a chill made me shiver.

Yes, of course you have
, I thought, remembering that I was afraid of her.

“No. It’s just—you’re very strong, unusually strong in a way I haven’t seen in a long time,” she went on. “I enjoy it. It seems familiar. You remind me of someone I used to know.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. “When do you think I’ll be able to do it? Strip him of his powers?”

“Sooner than I had imagined when you first asked me to teach you,” she said.

“When?”

“Perhaps even… on Monvoile?” she said. “I can’t be exact.”

I nodded. Monvoile—Halloween—was about two weeks away. “That would be perfect.”

“Today you’re ready to practice on something more complicated than a plant,” said Carmela. Standing, she went to the small black table by the door and picked up a basket that I hadn’t noticed. She set it in front of me. Timidly I peeked inside, expecting a snake or something to leap out. But it was empty. I looked harder, and then in the basket’s black interior, two amber eyes blinked. Instinctively I jumped; then my brain processed that they were cat eyes.

Smiling, Carmela reached into the basket and pulled out a sleepy black kitten. “Cats and humans are similar enough that if you can strip it of its power, you’ll be seven-eighths of the way to being able to do it to a person.”

I stared at her and at the chunky, fuzzy kitten that was now wandering within our drawn circle, unable to cross its barrier. “You want
me to strip this cat of its powers?” I asked. After the orchid, I’d felt repulsed and tainted and had gone to sleep crying. Two days ago we had done an earthworm. After
that
, I’d felt almost crazy. You’d think an earthworm—slimy, faceless, not cute—wouldn’t even cause a ripple across your conscience if you stripped it of its powers. I mean, it wasn’t like I’d killed it.

It had still been alive when I finished.

I had thrown up outside in the alley. And again in the gutter after I’d pulled the car over. About a stupid
earthworm
. How would I feel after I took magickal power from this kitten?

“Use the same form as before,” Carmela said in her rich, slightly accented voice. “When you get to where you identify your subject, I’ll fill in the words to cause the spell to surround this cat.” Absently she stroked the kitten’s black fur, and it arched slightly and purred.

I looked up at Carmela’s dark eyes. She was watching me intently. This was a test, of course. How far was I willing to go? How far into the darkness? What I wanted to do to Daedalus would take me very far down the road of dark magick. So far that I might not ever be able to return. I knew that. I wanted to do it anyway.

By stripping this cat of its magick, I would be closer to my goal.

The cat was a mammal, a vertebrate. If I could do it to a cat, then I could do it to Daedalus. The cat sniffed closer to the lit candle. I felt its consciousness, its simple feline instincts. It was alert but not afraid.

I sat back. “No.”

Carmela frowned. “No? No, what?”

“I’m not going to do the cat. The orchid and the earthworm were bad enough.”

A look of surprise transformed Carmela’s face so that it looked almost … clear for a second. Not so … well, blurry. She frowned, and her eyes narrowed. “Thais,” she began, a dangerous, impatient note in her voice.

I raised my chin. “This cat is an innocent creature. I won’t do it.”

Carmela opened her mouth, but I interrupted her.

Leaning forward, practically over the candle’s flame, I said, “Look, don’t question whether I can do this to Daedalus. He killed my father and ripped my life in half. Believe me, when it comes time, I’ll be able to strip his powers without a second’s hesitation.” My voice was tense, taut—I felt unlike myself. Stronger, more ruthless. “Daedalus is guilty and deserves what he gets. Every person, every human, is guilty. No animal is.”

All I could see were her black eyes, which were focused narrowly on me.

“You believe every person is guilty of something?”

I thought for a moment. “Maybe not little kids,” I conceded. “But even they have the capacity to be evil, to do wrong. Animals don’t. The cat is out of the question.”

“You believe that you’ll be able to put your squeamishness aside and take the magick of another person because of how guilty you think he is?”

“Yes.” I had no doubt about that. It was hard and even devastating to realize that about myself—that I was in fact willing to perform this heinous, horrific act on another person for revenge. But I was coming to terms with it.

I stood up and broke our circle, not caring if my lesson was over for today. I put on my jean jacket, then picked up the kitten and tucked it inside. I still had that hollow, sick feeling that seemed almost incessant these days, but I managed to stay on my feet without swaying. I turned to look at Carmela, barely able to see her sitting deep in the shadows of the room.