A Circle of Ashes Read online

  Power too strong to contain …

  “Clio!” I yelled, shaking my hands, which were locked in hers. “Clio!” I pulled back as hard as I could, knocking us both to one side, and all of a sudden we were lying on the ground in Clio’s backyard. I’d broken the spell. It was nighttime, the sky above me dark and speckled with stars and … sparks, flying upward? I jumped to my feet.

  “Oh God, Clio!” I yelled, looking past her. I grabbed her shoulder and shook her—she hadn’t sat up yet. Now she blinked slowly, looking at me like I was a stranger.

  “Clio! Get up! The house is on fire!” I shouted, shaking her hard enough to rattle her bones. With the next breath she seemed to awaken, sitting up quickly and looking around her. She gasped and put her hand over her mouth, as horrified as I was.

  This time we hadn’t gotten thrown across a room. We’d started a fire that had leaped away from us, and our house, my new home, was ablaze.

  BALEFIRE

  Book One: A Chalice of Wind

  Book Two: A Circle of Ashes

  Book Three: A Feather of Stone

  Book Four: A Necklace of Water

  SWEEP

  Book One: Book of Shadows

  Book Two: The Coven

  Book Three: Blood Witch

  Book Four: Dark Magick

  Book Five: Awakening

  Book Six: Spellbound

  Book Seven: The Calling

  Book Eight: Changeling

  Book Nine: Strife

  Book Ten: Seeker

  Book Eleven: Origins

  Book Twelve: Eclipse

  Book Thirteen: Reckoning

  Book Fourteen: Full Circle

  Super Edition: Night’s Child

  BALEFIRE

  BOOK TWO

  A CIRCLE OF ASHES

  CATE TIERNAN

  Balefire 2: A Circle of Ashes

  RAZORBILL

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Young Readers Group

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright 2005 © Gabrielle Charbonnet

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-1-101-56492-9

  Interior design by Christopher Grassi

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  Printed in the United States of America

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  With many thanks to the real Melya,

  for all you’ve done

  Table of Contents

  Clio

  Thais

  St. Louis Cemetery No. 1

  Red with Her Blood

  Clio

  What’s Going On

  Thais

  Éternalité

  Clio

  The Marked Girl Brings You Death

  Thais

  Clio

  The Whole Balance of Power

  Another Level of Desolation

  Maybe Another Two Hundred Years

  Thais

  Clio

  They’ve Seen What Happened

  Thais

  Clio

  Undermine All Their Plans

  Mine Alone

  Thais

  You Yourself Want More Power

  Crying Was Pointless

  Clio

  Thais

  Endless, Pain-Edged Days

  Thais

  Clio

  Thais

  Hurricane Force

  A Spell of Forceful Summoning

  “Here.” I pushed the cookies over to Thais. “Crumble them on top. It’s good.”

  Thais took a couple of cookies and dutifully crumbled them over her ice cream. Then she took a bite and nodded. “‘S good.”

  We kept up the everything’s-normal ice cream eating for another two minutes, and then at the exact same time, we put down our spoons and stared at each other.

  “Immortal,” said Thais.

  “Yeah. If we believe them.” I had a sudden thought. Quickly I ran upstairs to my room and pulled out an old photo album. I brought it downstairs and opened it on the kitchen table between us. Together Thais and I looked at pictures from when I was way little, a baby, and on up till when I was about three. I was an extremely pretty baby.

  Nan—Petra—looked exactly the same as she did today. She hadn’t aged a bit in seventeen years. And I, with my razor-sharp skills of observation, had never noticed it. She’d always just been Nan. I was trying to process the knowledge that she was so much more than she’d ever told me.

  “So,” I said, closing the book with a sigh, “they were probably telling the truth. Or mostly.”

  Thais nodded. “I’m totally freaking.”

  I gave a short laugh. “That’s one word for it.” I sighed. I was having a rough summer, and so far, I had no signs that anything was going to get easier.

  “Just all of it,” said Thais. “Twins.” She pointed at me, then at herself, summing up the whole, huge, identical-twins-separated-at-birth thing with one gesture. “Luc.” She closed her eyes and breathed out heavily, summing up the whole, huge, two-timing-lying-bastard-witch-boyfriend thing. “Witches.” She shook her head slowly about the whole, huge, finding-out-you’re-a-witch-and-so-is-your-family thing.

  “And now the possibility of being immortal,” I said. “Oh, and almost being killed a bunch of times.”

  “It’s been a crazed couple of months,” Thais said, and that reminded me that on top of everything else, she’d lost her father—our father—just this summer. Even though I’d never known him, I still felt pangs of loss, so I could barely imagine what she had to be going through.

  “Been a roller-coaster ride,” I agreed.

  “So what now?” Thais asked. “It’s all too much. I don’t know where to start.”

  I thought for a minute. Usually I left the dealing with stuff to my not-grandmother, Petra. Nan. I mean, I’d always thought she was my grandmother. She’d said she was. She’d raised me after my mother died giving birth to me and my surprise sister. But as it turned out, she was an ancestor, a great-grandmother so many times back that I couldn’t even put in enough greats. And she’d kept my sister and my dad a secret from me. I could have known them both all this time. Now he was dead and my chance was gone. I still couldn’t believe Nan had done it, no matter what her reasons were. And I had missed growing up with a sister.

  Now Nan was who knew where, and I didn
’t know when or if she was coming back. If she wasn’t back by midnight on Wednesday, I was supposed to open a spelled cabinet in the workroom and find instructions there. In the meantime, I had to handle everything.

  “Okay, so the Treize,” I said, sitting down and taking another swipe at my ice cream. “They want us to complete their coven so they can do the big schmancy spell that will blow everyone’s minds with power.”

  “Is there a spell like that?” Thais asked. “Where everyone would get power and then be able to use it for whatever they want?”

  “I don’t know. I guess they think there is. I don’t know how it would work or what it would do to them or us.”

  “Besides make us immortal,” said Thais.

  “Well, yeah, besides that. So they say. I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

  “Luc said he wanted to die,” Thais said, not looking at me. “That he was tired of immortality and wanted to die.”

  Luc. Would I ever not flinch when I heard his name? Luc-Andre. I’d known him as Andre. Thais had known him as Luc. Each of us had gone out with him, kissed him, fallen in love with him. He had betrayed us twice: first with each other and then by being one of the Treize. Even now, with my rage still burning, some part inside me ached for him, longed for him, wished he could be mine. Mine and not Thais’s.

  But he loved her.

  I swallowed hard. “Yeah. I’m willing to give him a hand with that.”

  Thais gave me a wry look, then her face sobered. “Do you think he means it?”

  I looked back at her. “Do you care?”

  She turned away and didn’t answer.

  I took a deep breath and pushed my bowl away. “Would you want immortality?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We have to figure this stuff out. Like, now we’ve met all of them. Who in the Treize is trying to kill us?”

  “If it is someone from the Treize. We don’t know that for sure,” Thais pointed out.

  “Well, no,” I agreed. “But they’re the obvious place to start. I mean, the attacks had magick behind them.” Someone had been trying to hurt both me and Thais ever since she moved to New Orleans. At first it had seemed like “accidents,” but then when whoever it was finally came after us both together with an angry mass of wasps, we realized there had to be a connection with all the other near misses.

  “Yeah, you’re right. Okay, then. Someone from the Treize. Not Petra,” said Thais.

  “No. Not Axelle or Daedalus or Jules,” I added, naming three witches we’d just met. “They’ve had plenty of clear shots at you.” Thais had been living at Axelle’s since her—our—dad had died.

  “And not Ouida. I hope.” Thais looked troubled. “I really liked her. But I just couldn’t face dinner with her … after all that.”

  “No. And Sophie and Manon just got to town,” I said. “So we can rule them out.”

  “And the ones who aren’t here, what, Marcel? And … Claire? Not them.”

  I nodded, then got up and grabbed a sheet of paper and a pen. I made a list of everyone we had put in the not-guilty category. “Who’s left?”

  Thais thought. “You and me. Richard,” she said, pronouncing his name Ree-shard. “Luc.”

  “Richard was around Axelle’s a lot too, wasn’t he? So probably not him. And we’re not doing it,” I said. I looked at the paper. Only Luc left, which was impossible. Unbelievable. Probably. “Wait—what if Axelle, Jules, Richard, or Daedalus didn’t try to kill you at Axelle’s because it would have been too obvious? That doesn’t necessarily put them in the clear.”

  “But Axelle is the one who saved me from my dream,” Thais objected. “She stopped me from choking myself.”

  I looked at her. “That’s what she told you. Any chance she was doing the opposite? Tightening the twisted sheet around your neck, but then you woke up and stopped her?”

  Thais frowned. “I don’t know.” She sighed and looked at the clock. It was almost 2 a.m. “So that still gives us Richard and Luc and those three. And Richard isn’t just a really weird fifteen-year-old with tattoos and a pierced eyebrow. He’s a grown-up. A really old grown-up in a kid’s body.”

  I forced myself to say it. “What about Luc? He lied to us about so many things. Maybe he was trying to lull us into loving him so we wouldn’t think he would try to kill us.”

  “I don’t know,” Thais said after a long pause. “I can’t wrap my mind around it. Logically, it’s possible. But I can’t get myself there.”

  “Yeah. I know.” I let my breath out, feeling incredibly tired. Well, finding out your entire life has been a web of lies can do that to a girl. “But still—we shouldn’t be blind about this. He outright lied about so many things. Made us believe—I mean, he was way convincing, right? Who knows what he’s capable of?” I said it, though something inside me just couldn’t believe it. Then something else occurred to me.

  “We’re not out of danger,” I said. “Especially with Nan still MIA. But I just thought of something—there’s a spell.”

  I expected Thais to pull her sour-milk expression at the mention of a spell, and I wasn’t disappointed. She was still finding it hard to get cozy with all the witch stuff, despite how much she’d loved the feel of magick at the Treize’s circle.

  “It’s a spell where two people sort of share their power,” I said, trying to remember where I’d seen it. “Like, people in love use it to strengthen their bond, make them closer. Or a parent might do it with a child to help with learning magick or make the child stronger. It makes it easier to join your powers together afterward. If we did it … both of us would be stronger—against anything that might come at us.”

  Thais nodded thoughtfully. “Is it dangerous?”

  I frowned. “I don’t think so. Let me get the book.” I knew what she meant—Thais and I had done magick, shared a vision, and it had gotten weirdly huge and powerful, out of control, and I didn’t know why. Our grandmo—Petra had told us that in our magickal famille, people were afraid of twins because their magick put together was frighteningly strong. I wasn’t sure if that was true.

  In the little house I shared with Nan, we had a living room, workroom, dining room, small bathroom, and kitchen on the first floor. Upstairs were two small bedrooms and another bathroom. Our workroom had bookcases full of magickal texts. The first time Thais had come into this house, she’d been horrified when she saw our books, our supplies for magick. I snickered now, thinking about it.

  “Would it be indexed in the back?” Thais asked. “Can I help look?”

  “Do you speak old French?”

  “I don’t even speak new French,” she said. “Not much, anyway.”

  “Okay. Then just sit tight. I should be able to find it….”

  A few minutes later I had found it in an old grimoire that belonged to Nan. It was in Old French, which I wasn’t completely fluent in but could hack my way through. The spell was called “Joindre tous les deux,” or “Join both.”

  Quickly I got our supplies together.

  “Why do I feel like I’m in the Addams family?” Thais asked, watching me. “Aren’t you leaving out the eye of newt, wing of bat?”

  I looked at her. “You liked it at Axelle’s house, the magick.”

  She lowered her eyes and quit smiling. “Yeah.”

  “Okay, get in,” I said. Thais came to stand next to me as I drew a chalk circle around us on the workroom floor.

  “You’re really good at drawing circles,” Thais said, sounding nervous.

  “Lots of practice. Circle-drawing 101.” I did it again with salt, then I got Nan’s four pewter cups to represent the four elements and put them at the points of the compass. One held water, one held incense to represent air, one held dirt from our backyard to represent, well, earth, and one held a candle for fire.

  “Fire is our element,” I reminded Thais. “Every witch has an affinity with one element, and she focuses on that element in her magick. It makes it smoother, more effective.
”

  I lit another candle and put it on the floor between us. We sat cross-legged, facing each other. I found the right page again and began to read.

  “Can you do it in English?” Thais asked.

  I thought. “Well, it might be more effective in French—it all rhymes and everything. Sometimes the very words themselves hold magickal power.”

  “But I won’t understand it,” said Thais, and I thought I heard fear in her voice.

  “And you think I’ll turn you into a frog?”

  Thais just looked unhappy.

  “Okay, um, I think I can just translate this as I go,” I muttered, reading down. “Maybe it doesn’t really have to be in French. Let’s see. First let’s center ourselves and get in touch with our magick. Then I’ll read this little section. There are four sections, and at each section, you’ll combine two things together. I’ll explain as we go. Okay?”

  Thais nodded, looking uncertain.

  I closed my eyes and reached out to barely touch the tips of my fingers to Thais’s knees. After a moment, she did the same to me. “Slow your breathing,” I said very softly. “Slow your mind. Let everything relax. Let go of fear and fatigue. Inside you is a joyous door that leads to magick. When you relax completely, the door doesn’t open—it dissolves, letting you become one with magick. Magick is everywhere around you, in everything, living and inert. That’s the strength and power we tap. Now breathe, very, very slowly.”

  From just the little connection I already had with Thais, I was in tune with her aura, and I could feel her gradually relax and become centered. It took several minutes, but as Nan said, quality magick takes time.

  Slowly I opened my eyes and referred back to the book. My translation was clumsy, and it was hard to make it into a nice, smooth chant.

  “I join with you, my sister, so that we will be one.”

  I had Thais repeat that, then I went on.

  “We are of the same blood. Now let us be of the same heart and the same mind. I join with you and offer you my power and strength.”

  Thais repeated it.

  “Water is our witness.” I motioned to Thais, and she poured two silver cups of water into one larger cup.