A Feather of Stone #3 Page 12

  “Water, lie down in your bed!” she commanded, holding out her wand. Electricity crackled around her, though she couldn’t see it. Behind her Ouida and Melysa were chanting and drawing sigils in the air. “Water, lie down in your bed!” Petra shouted, feeling as if her magick were going to sweep her up into its arms and fling her into the air.

  Then it stopped. The waterspout fell all at once, smashing down into the river. Two human figures lay crumpled in shallow water, twenty yards away. Petra raced toward them, already calling on healing powers.

  She reached Thais first and dragged her up onto land. The girl was unconscious but breathing. Ouida ran up and took over while Petra splashed into the river to get Clio. Clio’s eyes fluttered and she raised her head weakly, but she collapsed again and would have gone under if Petra hadn’t grabbed her arms. Melysa supported Clio’s other side, and together they dragged her onto the small sandy shore. In addition to the spells they were muttering, they pounded the girls firmly on their backs. At last the twins started coughing and gagging up water.

  “They look like drowned rats,” Melysa muttered, wiping Thais’s hair away from her face.

  Clio’s eyes opened blearily and she looked around, trying to orient herself.

  Petra held Clio’s head in her lap, stroking her hair. “Clio, are you all right?”

  Clio blinked several times, finally placing where she was and what had happened. “Thais?” she said hoarsely.

  “Will be fine,” said Ouida, kneeling in the sand next to her. “What were you two doing?”

  “I’m sorry, Nan,” Clio croaked, struggling to sit up. Petra helped her, supporting her back. Her anger had been tempered by the girls’ danger and her relief at their safety.

  “I’m sorry. But we had to know who was trying to hurt us. I had to know who blew up my car.” Clio’s eyes were brighter and her voice stronger. Petra recognized Clio’s sense of outrage and knew that it wasn’t in her personality to take anything lying down.

  “You almost got yourselves killed!” Petra said. “Did you cause this, or was this another attack?”

  “Flip a coin,” Thais said weakly, also sitting up. Her face was still pale, and she had an ugly bruise already developing on one shoulder.

  “I’m not sure,” said Clio, looking thoughtful. “I thought we had done it, putting our magick together. But I guess it’s possible. . . .” Suddenly her eyes flared and her face looked furious. “It was Richard, Nan!” She grabbed Petra’s arm and shook it. “It was Richard! Richard who’s been trying to kill us! We saw it!”

  “What?” Petra was shocked. Of all the people she’d suspected, none of them had been Richard.

  Thais nodded, getting stiffly to her feet. She had sand in her hair and dripping off her clothes. “It’s true, if that spell worked. We saw him casting the spells, waiting to see what happened. Richard.” She sounded angry and sad, but Clio had sounded truly incensed, as if she were taking the news more personally.

  Petra met Ouida’s eyes. Ouida looked as shocked as Petra felt.

  “Richard,” Ouida repeated, amazed.

  Grimly, Petra got to her feet and helped Clio stand. “I’m surprised, but I can’t say it’s completely unthinkable. But this ends now. Melysa, can you drive the girls back home? And stay with them till I get back? Do not let them out of your sight, okay?”

  Melysa nodded solemnly. “Yes. Ouida, are you coming with me or going with Petra?”

  “I need to see Richard alone, I think,” Petra said, brushing sand off her wet canvas pants.

  “I’m sure we’ll be okay,” Clio began. “We don’t need a babysitter. We’ll be fine—”

  Petra gave her a piercing glare. “You will stay home, with Melysa, until I get back. You will not leave the house, not even to take the garbage out. You will not be taking anyone’s car without permission, you will not leave Melysa’s side, or I will slap you with a homing spell so strong you’ll live out the rest of your life in your rooms. Understand?”

  A mulish look crossed Clio’s face as she weighed Petra’s words. She must have realized that Petra was dead serious, because she shrugged ungraciously and said, “Whatever.”

  The five of them started to trudge back to their cars. Petra couldn’t believe she’d almost lost the girls today. In their headstrong stupidity. She walked closer to Clio and put her arm around the girl’s shoulders. “I don’t want you hurt.”

  “I know.”

  “I can’t believe it’s Richard. But I’ll get to the bottom of this, I promise.”

  Clio looked up at her and gave a tiny smile. “Okay.”

  “I just can’t imagine—” Petra thought out loud. “I wonder . . . does it have something to do with you two looking like Cerise?”

  Next to her, Clio stopped in her tracks. “We look like Cerise?”

  “Yes, of course. Didn’t you see her in your visions?”

  “I told you that,” Thais said. “We look just like Cerise; we did see it in our vision.”

  Clio shook her head slowly. “Not clearly enough to see her face. It was dark and rainy.”

  “I saw her,” Thais said. “And we do look like her, except she was blond.”

  Petra saw the two girls exchange a look.

  “I’m sorry,” she told Clio, continuing on to her car. “I thought you knew that.” As always, her heart felt pained at the memory of the night she’d lost her last two remaining children.

  “How much alike?” Clio asked.

  “Exactly,” Petra said sadly, opening her car door. “You two look exactly like Cerise, but with black hair. But other than that, spitting image.”

  Ouida nodded, looking sympathetic. “She was a beautiful girl, as you two are.”

  Petra watched her girls get bundled into Melysa’s car. Melysa had thought to bring large beach towels, and now she made sure the twins were wrapped up warmly. Petra followed Melysa’s car all the way back to New Orleans, until Melysa took the Carrollton exit off the highway, and Petra continued on to the French Quarter.

  When They Had Met

  Each day was a blessing. Each day when he opened his eyes, whether it was sunny, rainy, clammy, or freezing, he was glad to be alive. It hadn’t always been that way.

  Jules got up out of his single bed and stretched. It was raining lightly—he heard it pattering against the roof. The floor beneath his feet was cool—could autumn really be showing her face? He moved quietly, like a cat, into the bathroom, glancing into the front room as he did. Claire was asleep on the couch, in her clothes. He’d heard her come in early this morning, heard Luc put her to bed. She hadn’t changed her ways. She never would.

  It was strange, really, how little any of them had changed over such a long period of time. Not only had they been frozen in age, but in their personalities too. You’d think that over almost two hundred and fifty years, at least some of them would have undergone huge changes, but none of them ever really had. Certainly not him.

  Back in the kitchen he put the kettle on to make coffee. Claire would want some when she woke up. The small window over his kitchen sink had an uninspiring view of the brick fence next door, covered with fig ivy. In the front room, Claire stirred, shifting position, curling up almost like a child on the narrow futon couch. She’d teased him about his meager surroundings. Told him he still thought like a slave, after centuries of freedom. He admitted it was true. Slavery was not something one ever really got over.

  In the kettle, the water made a rough purring sound. It was about to boil. He got out the sugar cubes, knowing Claire usually took three.

  In some ways, it seemed just a short while ago that he had met her.

  He’d run away from the tobacco farmer who owned him. He’d been beaten badly, and his hands had been manacled, but he’d escaped. He’d wandered for days, moving as he could, though in the end it was more like crawling. He reached a swamp and was only five feet into it when he fell, tripping on a hidden root, splashing down, hitting his head on another root. The world swirled
, and he smiled, because now he was dying. They hadn’t found him, and now they would find only a corpse. He almost laughed, thinking how furious they would be. The top of his head, his face, was barely out of the water. It was warm and pleasant. Surely it wouldn’t take long now.

  But . . . being dead couldn’t hurt this much, could it? He was in so much pain it shocked him. The bumping, the jolting . . . He forced himself to open his eyes. Please let me be dead. Please, please let me see nothing, see the white men’s angels, see devils, see anything but—

  Trees. Above him were trees. It was barely light out, but whether it was dawn or twilight, he couldn’t tell. He was being dragged somewhere. He was alive. Tears escaped his eyes and rolled down the drying mud on his face. A rolling boom of thunder made him tremble, and then warm rain was pelting him through the trees.

  A face looked back at him. A white face, with orange hair and blue eyes. A boy. The boy was dragging him on a plank over the ground. The boy would take him back to the farm, turn him in, collect his ten dollars.

  Crying, he’d raised his hands to his face, but the manacles were heavy and he banged himself on the nose. The white boy looked back at him, then rested the plank on the ground and came to kneel by his head. He tried to stop crying, tried to look brave, like a man, but he wasn’t a man—he had no name.

  The white boy spoke in French. “Vous serez récuperer, m’sieu,” he said in a soft voice. “À mon ville, pas loin. Calmez-vous.”

  Those words made no sense.

  That had been Marcel who’d found him in the swamp, dying, and fashioned a travois out of a plank and dragged him three miles to Ville du Bois. Twelve-year-old Marcel turned him over to Petra, the healer. Jules burned with fever for a week, hallucinating, rigid with terror. Petra made him teas and soups, some bitter, some not. She washed the swamp mud off him, put salve on all his injuries. The smith came and broke the manacles off his hands.

  “Vous vous appelle Jules,” Petra murmured one night, late, just after his fever had broken. “Vous vous serez appeller Jules maintenant.”

  A dark-haired man came in. Armand. He explained things to Jules in English. And when Jules recovered, as Marcel had said he would, he stayed there, in the Ville du Bois, living as one of them, as a person, for the first time in his life. It was a hidden paradise. Jules never ventured far from the village—misery and pain waited outside. He never wanted to leave—everyone was so kind. M. Daedalus taught him to read and write. Everyone, even the children, helped teach him the natural religion, the bonne magie. It fell into place in his life, like tumblers in a lock being set into place with the right key.

  One day, some ten years after he’d arrived, he talked to Claire for the first time. He knew what the village said about her—that she had loose skirts—but it wasn’t like back in the other world, where she would have been beaten or exiled.

  Jules had been walking home, a string of catfish over his shoulder. As he walked, he murmured a litany of thanks for everything he had, everything he saw around him, every scrap of happiness he felt. He gave thanks for all of it as often as he could.

  Not far from the village, he heard voices raised in anger. Several more steps showed him Claire and a young man—Etienne somebody—arguing.

  Claire slapped Etienne with her free hand. Fury washed Etienne’s face with an ugly red hue, and he raised his fist above Claire’s head. Just as he was sweeping it down, Jules grabbed it from behind.

  “Now, now,” Jules said, keeping his own anger firmly locked away, “you know we don’t hit women.”

  “Mind your own business, old man!” Etienne snapped.

  “This is my business,” Jules said. His strong fingers pried Etienne’s hand off Claire’s arm, and she fell to the ground, then scrambled to her feet. “I’m stopping you from making a mistake that will haunt your soul. You know the threefold law.”

  Etienne sneered. “That’s only for magick, old fool!”

  “No,” Jules replied, shaking his head. “It’s for everything, all the time.”

  “You’d best let me go,” Etienne snarled, “and continue on your way. This is between me and my girl.”

  “I’m not your girl!” Claire said.

  “You’re everybody’s girl.” The disdain on Etienne’s face pained Jules. The younger man turned back to him. “Last warning. You let me go now, or—” He showed Jules his clenched fist.

  “I’m not a girl you can threaten, boy,” Jules said mildly. “And my fist is bigger than yours.”

  It was almost twice as big, in fact: Jules was a much bigger man than most of the villagers—the little French people, as he thought of them.

  Etienne looked at Jules’s huge fist, with its fingers that had been broken and not set properly. He looked at Jules’s face, which was not mean but iron hard. Jules saw the moment when the boy realized that Jules was maybe seven inches taller and had about fifty pounds on him.

  The fight faded from the younger man. The fight, but not the fury.

  “Have it your way,” he spat, and wrenched his hand loose.

  “I’ll be upset if I hear you’ve bothered this young lady again,” Jules said.

  “She’s no lady,” Etienne tossed over his shoulder.

  It deserved no response.

  “Are you all right?”

  Claire nodded. “Thank you.” She seemed embarrassed and unsure of herself, very different from the brash, flirtatious girl Jules saw around the village.

  They began walking together.

  “It’s a shame our paradise is marred by one like him,” Jules said.

  “Paradise!” Claire stared at him. “You mean prison! I would give anything to leave! In fact, Etienne had promised to take me to New Orleans if I lay with him. But he was lying.”

  “This village is the last Eden on earth,” Jules said seriously. “The world out there is full of pain.”

  He saw her glancing at his scars from back on the farm.

  “I’m smothering here, day by day,” Claire said. “I’ve got to get out.” She stopped in the path and looked at him, her eyes clear and without guile. “If you ever leave here, take me with you.”

  He almost lost his breath. What was she saying?

  Oh. That she wanted someone to protect her on the way or a mule or horse to ride, if he had one.

  “I won’t be leaving, mamzelle,” he said gruffly. “You take care now.” He split off from the path and followed another to his own little house, his sanctuary.

  “Hey.”

  Jules jumped as Claire shuffled up and reached for a coffee cup. It was now again, and the memories of then twisted away like leaves in a breeze.

  “Time is it?” she mumbled, pouring coffee.

  “Not quite noon.”

  Her magenta hair smelled like cigarette smoke. She had four small silver rings in her left ear. Jules was thankful she’d let her brow piercing heal over.

  “How was it last night?” Jules asked.

  Claire shrugged, leaning against the kitchen counter. “All right. Ran into Marcel.”

  “Then Daedalus will want to convene the Treize soon, now that you two are here.”

  Claire’s face looked bleak as she sipped her coffee. “Yep.”

  Clio

  I lay on my bed, my wet hair making my T-shirt soggy. Thais and I had both had hot showers, and Melysa and Ouida had made us valerian-and-catnip tea. Now I lay on my bed, feeling Melysa and Thais’s presence downstairs.

  Richard was the one who’d been trying to kill us. Richard, who I’d jumped just two days ago and practically slept with. How could he? He had actually tried to kill me. And sleep with me. He was a total psychopath. It was terrifying—especially since I hadn’t seen it in him, hadn’t felt it. Hadn’t seen it in his eyes or felt it in his touch. What was wrong with me that I hadn’t picked up on it? The same thing with Luc—they had been both pursuing me and simultaneously betraying me. The two of them.

  What was wrong with me? Here’s what was worse: knowing Richard had
tried to kill us made me feel pretty murderous myself. And goddess knew Luc was still on my “forget it” list. Yet—I still wondered what was wrong with me that they didn’t just love me. Which was so twisted and pathetic and unhealthy that I started bawling all over again, pressing my face into my pillow so no one would hear.

  Luc had wanted me because I was the missing part of Thais. Petra wondered if Richard trying to kill us had anything to do with our looking like Cerise, whom he had loved. Did he only see me as a modern version of Cerise?

  I almost cried myself sick, working through half a box of tissues, crying until my guts felt twisted and raw. How many times was I going to cry over guys? It had already been too many.

  Another question: when could I escape to go confront Richard myself? Because I was going to rip his lungs out. Somehow I didn’t feel afraid of him now, or worried about what he might do next. It was like knowing who it was had granted me immunity from his attacks. I was burning with fury, itching to take it out on him. As soon as I got a chance.

  Someone Unseen

  Daedalus opened his eyes slowly. The sky had clouded over significantly in the hour since he’d started his spell. The sounds of the swamp were intensifying as twilight neared—animals were foraging, birds going on the hunt—he was making magick. The palm of his right hand tingled, and even before Daedalus looked, he knew what he would see there: a small, glowing green orb that hovered right above his skin.

  It had worked.

  He’d never done this spell before—he’d found the form in an ancient text at the Oxford library in England. It had been mistranslated from old Persian, and Daedalus had hired a modern scholar to retranslate it. His hunch had paid off. As far as he knew, no one had manifested a locator orb before, not in centuries.

  “Go,” he whispered. “Find the circle of ashes.”