A Feather of Stone Read online

  “Maman and Melita will help me. And I like babies.”

  “Well, I hope you do,” Claire said, stretching her legs out in the sun. Her bare feet and almost six inches of bare leg were visible below her hem, but Claire had always been scandalous. She was nice to me, though, and she’d been in my class at our tiny village school.

  “Everyone,” my sister called. “It’s time. Let’s form a circle.”

  I stood ungracefully, holding my belly with one hand. It was almost sunset, but at that moment the light winked out, like a snuffed candle. I looked up to see huge, plum-colored clouds sweeping in from the south.

  “Storm coming in,” I murmured to Maman. “Maybe we should do this another time.”

  Melita heard me. “No,” she said. “ Tonight is the only time I can work this spell—everything is perfect: moon, season, people. I’m sure the storm won’t bother us.”

  She quickly drew a large circle that almost filled the clearing, then lit thirteen candles—one for each of us. The wind picked up a bit, an oddly cool, damp wind, but though their flames whipped right and left, the candles stayed lit.

  Melita drew the rune borche in the air, for new beginnings, birth. I frowned slightly, holding my big stomach. Was that safe? I glanced at Maman. She was watching Melita very solemnly. Maman would stop this or send me away if it wasn’t safe. I tried to relax as we all joined hands.

  Marcel couldn’t take his eyes off me, which irritated me. His gaze was like a weight. Unlike that of Richard, who was across the circle, talking in a low voice with Claire. He laughed, and Claire giggled and swung his hand in hers.

  We started to move dalmonde, and Melita began chanting. Again I glanced at Maman and again she had her eyes locked on my sister. I didn’t recognize this song—I’d never heard it before, and it didn’t match any of our usual forms. Melita’s voice became stronger and stronger, seeming to fill my chest. It was very strange—not at all like other circles.

  Rain began to fall, big, cool drops soaking my shoulders and the top of my stomach. I vaguely wanted to stop, wanted to let go, but as soon as I thought it, the idea was out of my mind, and Melita’s song was filling me again.

  My hat flew off as we went faster. I felt awkward, unbalanced, and feared falling, but Jules’s and Ouida’s hands held me up. Then my throat seemed to close. Huge, heavy, powerful magick welled out of the ground as if it would swallow me up. Of course I’d felt magick before. But this was unlike anything I’d ever even dreamed of. This was overwhelming, an enormous wave made of earth and air and water and fire all at once. I was choking, truly afraid now, and still we circled the hissing candles, Melita’s voice filling the air as if it were coming from somewhere else.

  Rain poured down. People’s faces blurred, smeared images flashing by. Every face except Melita’s was afraid—some were angry, also. Thunder rolled through us, so deep that it rocked the earth. The sky was white with lightning, again and again turning us into sharp-edged indigo outlines. I was drowning in magick, caught in magick like a spider-web, like pitch. I shook my hands to release them but couldn’t.

  “Meli—” I cried, but at that moment, the world seemed to end. A cannon boom of thunder and an unearthly blast of lightning struck at the same moment. The lightning hit Melita directly and I screamed, seeing her dark hair flying out around her ecstatic face. The next second, the lightning imploded in me, shooting through Jules’s hand, searing mine, and racing into Ouida’s hand. We all cried out, and I heard my own scream.

  An agonizing, gripping pain seized my belly. Our hands flew apart and I fell to the ground. My stomach felt as though someone had buried an ax in it, and I curled up, gasping.

  “Maman!” I cried, sobbing. I held my stomach as though to keep my insides from spilling out, but the pain was too big for my hands, too horrendous to bear.

  Then others were around me—Richard, Ouida, and finally, Maman, who knelt quickly on the rain-soaked muddy ground. She smoothed my hair off my forehead, her lips already chanting spells. Her hand gripped mine tightly and I clung to it.

  “What’s happening?” I cried. Maman’s strong face filled my eyes, but she muttered spells and didn’t answer.

  Another searing wave of pain crested, and I closed my eyes and sobbed, trying to ride it out. I felt a gushing flood beneath my skirt, and then Maman’s hands were pushing it out of the way and rain hit my bare legs. Richard grabbed my other hand. I pressed it against my cheek, ashamed to be crying and looking weak but too panicked and in pain to stop. Maman and I had already rehearsed the calming and concentrating spells I would perform for the baby’s birth, but every one of them fled my mind. All I knew was a dark tide of pain crashing over me, submerging me in its depths.

  My stomach was heaving, contracting, and after an eternity, I slowly realized that the pain was less. I felt far away, tired, hardly aware of what was happening.

  “Oh goddess, the blood,” I dimly heard Ouida say.

  I knew Richard was still holding my hand, but the pressure was faint. I was so glad that the pain had lessened, so glad that I was removed from the horror and fear and agony. I needed to rest. My eyes closed. Rain splashed my eyelids. The storm still rumbled overhead, but the ground beneath me felt safe and nurturing. I relaxed, feeling all the tension leaving my body. Thank the goddess the pain was gone. I felt perfectly well.

  Then I was looking down on myself, on Maman and Richard and the others, looking down from a high distance. I saw the rain drenching everyone. Maman held up a tiny, writhing baby, its blood being washed away by the rain. I saw myself, looking peaceful and calm, as if asleep. My baby, Hélène, I thought.

  I came out of it when I fell backward and hit my head on a rock.

  Blinking, I looked up and saw dark, moonless sky and the tops of family crypts.

  My head hurt and I put up a hand to rub it, feeling a knot forming on the back of my skull. I sat up. A chunk of a nameplate had fallen off a crypt, who knew how long ago, and I’d whacked my head against it. I didn’t know why I had fallen—if I was dead, why did my head hurt? And my hands?

  It took another minute for it to sink in that I wasn’t dead; I wasn’t Cerise. I was me, Clio, in the here and now. My four candles were guttering and almost out. The small bowl of coal was nothing but gray ashes. I looked around quickly, placing myself, then crawled over to my canvas bag and pulled out my watch. It was 4 a.m. I felt shaken and breathless. This time, instead of just seeing the rite happen, I’d been part of it. I’d heard the spell Melita had used, seen the glowing sigils and runes on the ground, the ones we hadn’t seen her write, because she’d put them there before the circle gathered.

  I’d felt myself die.

  I swallowed, sucking in a shallow, trembling breath, then started to gather my things. I dumped the ashes onto the ground and rubbed them with my toe to make sure they were out. I snuffed the candles and cleaned up the wax that had dripped off.

  “Petra would be very displeased if she knew about this.”

  The dry, slow voice made me jump about a foot in the air. I hadn’t sensed anyone around me—still didn’t, in fact. Looking around wildly, I finally saw a black shadow sitting on the stoop of a crypt, next to a cement vase holding faded plastic flowers. Daedalus stood and came over to me.

  My heart was beating fast—but I put my shoulders back, shook my hair out of my face, and began coolly putting my supplies into my bag.

  “You don’t care what Petra thinks? She raised you.” He knelt a few feet away from me, his black clothes blending into the night.

  “Why don’t you let me worry about that?” I said. I forced my breathing to slow, kept my face blank.

  “Why are you stirring up the past?”

  I looked at him. “You saw what I was doing?”

  “A bit. Not a lot. It was an ambitious spell. Why were you working it?”

  “Why should I tell you?” I stood up, my knees shaky, and shoved my feet into my slides. I began to head for the cemetery gate.

  “I
could help you.”

  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

  “Chip?” 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

  “Feel 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 we
re 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.

  And he wants to teach me.

  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—