Another Hundred Years
“I’m not sure she wants to talk to you.” Axelle sounded apologetic, but Sophie knew better.
She had come prepared. “I need to speak to Manon now, Axelle.”
When Axelle continued to block her apartment door, Sophie brushed past her and entered the cool, dark interior. It was amazing, Sophie thought, how they each managed to find their own environments in whatever city they happened to be living in. Axelle’s apartments always looked like this. Daedalus’s were unmistakably his. Wherever she and Manon settled, it had always seemed homey and warm, welcoming and safe.
Except now. Now Manon was gone, most of her clothes out of their closet. It felt unbearably bleak and empty, awful to come home to. And she’d been gone only four days.
Axelle’s small, dark foyer opened up into the large main room on the right and a small galley kitchen on the left, separated from the hallway by a half counter. A black cat sat on the counter, drinking water from a bowl.
It took a moment for Sophie’s eyes to adjust—the kitchen light was on, but the main room was lit by only two inadequate lamps. The first thing she saw was Marcel’s bright, copper-penny hair, starkly visible against the black and white of the kitchen. What was he doing here?
“Sophie,” he said, nodding at her.
“Hi,” she said, flustered, and then turned toward the main room. To her relief she saw Manon, draped over both arms of a big leather chair, reading a Marie Clairemagazine.
“Hi,” Sophie said, hurrying over to her. She sank down beside Manon’s chair, gazing up at the face she’d loved for more than a hundred years. Manon looked tired, unhappy, and Sophie wanted to pull her into her arms, hold her tightly, tell her everything was going to be all right. Reaching out, she touched Manon’s denim-covered knee, but Manon pulled away. Sophie’s heart sank lower.
“Can we talk, please?” she asked in a low voice, all too aware of Marcel and Axelle.
Manon’s expression was unforgiving. “We’ve talked.”
Sophie glanced behind her to see Axelle making no effort to disguise the fact that she was listening in. She was making a gin and tonic at the kitchen counter while Marcel watched her, frowning slightly. Why was he here, anyway? He couldn’t stand Axelle.
“Please, honey,” Sophie said. “Please, let’s just talk it out. You know I wouldn’t hurt you for the world.”
“No, but you would hurt me for you,” Manon replied quietly.
The words stung. Sophie wanted to deny them, but deep down she knew they were true. She’d been willing to sentence Manon to an endless lifetime of unhappiness and frustration just so that she, Sophie, wouldn’t lose her. The really bitter thing was that she hadn’t had to do anything at all—they’d seen that even a much more powerful suicide spell wouldn’t work. If she had done nothing, if she had even pretended to support Manon’s wishes, she would still have had the outcome she wanted.
And Manon wouldn’t have left her.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, looking down at her hands, clenched in her lap. “I know it was wrong. You’re right—it was inexcusably selfish of me. But I did it out of love—because I love you so much I can’t bear the thought of living without you.”
“That’s the thing,” Manon said slowly, standing up. Sophie scrambled to her feet, watching the sweet, perfect face that had frozen in time when Manon was thirteen years old. “I believe that you did it because you couldn’t bear the thought of living alone. But I don’t know if that was about me, really me, or just about you being afraid to live alone.” “What are you talking about?” Sophie cried, following Manon to the kitchen. Glancing uncomfortably at Axelle and Marcel, she saw they were watching with undisguised interest. “Manon—can we talk about it in private? Please?”
“I don’t want to talk about it at all.” Manon’s voice was bleak. She got a glass out of a cupboard and helped herself to some gin and tonic. There was a lime already sliced, and Manon squeezed a piece into her drink, then dropped it in.
“You have to forgive me.” Sophie was growing ever more alarmed. She and Manon had had fights before—had even broken up for a few days at a time—but that had felt different than this. Manon seemed so cold, so unyielding.
Manon sipped her drink, watching Sophie over the rim. “No, I don’t.” The words sounded sad rather than angry.
Sophie’s heart froze. “Manon—can’t you see that I need you? That I love you more than anything?”
“I believe that you need me.”
“You think I don’t loveyou?” This was beyond humiliation, having to beg like this. But Sophie was past caring. All that mattered was that Manon relented and came back.
“I don’t know,” said Manon quietly, touching an ice cube with one fingertip, not looking at Sophie. “Maybe you just can’t be alone.”
“What?Manon, how can you say that?” Sophie exclaimed, feeling close to tears. “I love you! You’re the only person I’ve ever loved!” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she had a cold, sinking feeling. But maybe Manon wouldn’t remember …
“That’s not entirely true,” Manon said evenly. “I’ve had a lot of time to think.” She gave a short, bitter laugh. “I mean, a lotof time. And now I wonder if I wasn’t always second best.”
Sophie gaped at her, horrified. Oh no, oh no, oh no—don’t say it, don’t go there—
“Compared to how much you loved Marcel.”
There was dead silence in the small kitchen. Outside, someone shrieked with laughter; a car horn blared. Sophie felt far removed from this bright, untidy kitchen, with plates piled in the sink, Minou leaning down from a counter, pawing through the trash. She stared at Manon’s small, heart-shaped face, aware only of a desperate, desperate hope that she had misheard, that Manon hadn’t just said that in front of these two, that Manon would never betray her …
… the way she had betrayed Manon the night of the rite.
Oh goddess.
Sophie pressed her hand to her mouth, feeling like she was going to be sick.
“Whaaat?” Axelle asked with fascination, her black eyes darting from Manon to Marcel to Sophie.
Sophie couldn’t move, couldn’t believe this was happening. She took rapid, shallow breaths, aware of Axelle and Marcel on either side of her in her periphery. Her eyes were locked on Manon’s sad, angry, ashamed, triumphant face.
“Uh …” said Marcel, sounding shocked.
What was he doing? Thinking back over the last 240 years, looking for clues? Sophie thought hysterically.
“My God,” said Axelle softly. “None of us knew. Except Manon.”
“I have to go,” Sophie breathed through clenched jaws. Blindly she turned and stumbled toward the front door. Her car keys jingled in one pocket; she had no idea where her purse was. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore. She clawed frantically at the locks, yanked the door open, and ran out into the courtyard. A motion sensor light came on, flashing white light into her face. Sophie shaded her eyes and ran down the flagstone alley to the street. She tried to remember where she had parked, but her mind was a complete blank. Instead she hurried down one block and then another, not knowing where she was going, not caring.
She couldn’t believe Manon had done that to her. Now Marcel knew. Manon might be giving them all the details even now, details Sophie had confided to her more than a hundred years ago, in the early stages of their affair.
Finally she collapsed against an old brick wall overhung with long canes of a Lady Banks rose, trailing to the sidewalk. Pressing her face against the soft orange brick, Sophie sobbed.
This, more than anything, meant that she and Manon were over for good.
This time last year, I’d been juggling three different guys, including a twenty-two-year-old paralegal I’d met at Amadeo’s. Every Friday and Saturday night had been taken; I’d been so busy I could hardly catch my breath.
Look at me this year: my only romance in the last three months had ended in humiliating disaste
r. Other than that, I had the occasional, incendiary smash-mouth with Richard, who I didn’t like and who didn’t like me.
Now here I was on a Saturday morning, in a cemetery, with a man old enough to be my grandfather, like, a million times over. Yet this seemed more important than social butterflying—not that anyone would ever believe I thought that.
“Okay, now, is the whole earth going to crumble into lifeless powder when I do this?” I sounded grumpy, probably to hide my fear and distaste. The last time I’d done this, a beautiful crystal had turned to horrible, dead-feeling powder in my hand because I’d taken its life force. Its energy. Its chi. You might think a crystal is already pretty dead, and yeah, it isn’t alive in the same way that a squirrel is, or a freshman, or an amoeba. But magickally, there’s a huge, striking, palpable difference between a regular crystal, solid and integral, and what had been left after I’d taken its chi. The powder had felt repulsive to me, dead. I’d thought about it since then and decided it felt like anti-life, anti-magick. Not just nothing, but a horrible absence of something. It had been like holding death, and it made my skin crawl.
Which made my sitting here, getting ready to do it on a bigger scale, seem astoundingly stupid, even for me.
“No,” said Daedalus. “We can set the limitations to exclude actual vertebrates and invertebrates so the energy will come solely from plants and the earth itself. Nothing will turn to white powder, I assure you.”
I nodded, thinking about Thais and Nan. They would hate my being here. Since I’d started studying with Daedalus, I’d been hiding it every moment I was home. Usually when I felt bad, I’d go to Nan for help. I could even go to Thais, my sister. But not about this. Not about how sick this made me or how it felt emotionally. This I just had to handle on my own. It separated me from them like nothing else.
“The last time I did this,” I told Daedalus as he continued to set up the spell, “I had the mother of all hangovers. I barfed my guts up, which doesn’t do much for a girl’s looks. What caused that?”
“Everything has a price, Clio,” Daedalus said, trickling salt in a circle around us. This was a little-visited corner of the cemetery, with fine, short grass and the occasional weed popping up next to the crypts. Daedalus had set up a couple of spells to gently turn people aside if they came close to us and to make us hard to see if they somehow got through anyway.
“It will grow less with time,” he went on. “I can also give you some herbs and a spell to help counter the aftereffects. But if you want to sail through with your beauty rituals and your make-him-love-me tisanes, then you’ve come to the wrong place.”
His voice was suddenly harsh, his face forbidding. Now I felt like a wuss for even mentioning it.
“Whatever,” I snapped. We worked in silence for ten minutes, Daedalus doing his parts and me doing mine. When everything was set up, we sat cross-legged in the circle, facing each other. A heavy black pillar candle rested in its holder between us.
“You’ll be drawing energy up out of the earth,” Daedalus explained. “The earth is humming with the vibrations of the living things within it, of the life and growth and change happening on a huge scale and a minuscule scale, at every second. Deep, deep beneath the surface, where not even bacteria can live, you still have the energy of the earth itself, its inner core of burning iron.”
I looked at him. “You couldn’t tap into that. It’d be like tapping into a nuclear bomb.”
“Yes,” said Daedalus, sounding regretful. “It would take the strongest magick imaginable and would probably end up killing you. I’m just pointing it out. Now, are you ready? Do you remember the first part of the spell?”
Nodding, I let my hands rest palms up on my knees. This position is used a lot in meditation because it connects all the parts of your body to all the other parts, creating a circle of energy. Meditation and magick have a lot to do with each other.
It was much like it was before. The first part of the spell set the limitations and defined the scope of the spell. The second part put me in touch with my own personal power. The third part sought out and identified other magickal power, in this case, from within the earth, the actual dirt, beneath us. And the fin-quatriemealigned the two powers, joining my energy with the earth’s.
At first nothing seemed to happen, and I was disappointed. Then, just like when the charcoal briquettes caught on fire, I became aware of power licking at the edges of my consciousness.
“Open yourself to it,” Daedalus murmured, his eyes closed. “Let it in.”
I was afraid. It was a beautiful thing, a glorious thing to feel myself become one with the earth, yet compared to what had happened with the crystal, this had the potential to be a tsunami, a terrifying tidal wave of energy that could fry my brain and leave me making pot holders at the state mental hospital.
“Don’t worry,” said Daedalus. “You will tap into only a microscopic section of the earth. You’ll feel power but will be in no danger.”
I hope you’re right, old man, I thought, then hoped he couldn’t feel my thoughts. Damn it. Had to be more careful.
“Concentrate,” came Daedalus’s voice, and I yanked my focus back to the spell. There was a wall of energy pressing against me. It was very different—I’d held the crystal, and its energy had been right there, blooming in my hand like a flower. This was something pressing against me from the outside.
“Let it in,” Daedalus said again.
I tried to relax, to take down my natural walls. Come on, Clio, think! Do it. You can do this. You have to do this.I relaxed every muscle, controlling my breathing, trying to release every bit of fear or alarm I felt.
And suddenly I was flooded with light and power.
The crystal’s power had been a burst within me. This was a wave washing over me, bigger, unstoppable.
“Oh,” I breathed, inhaling it, feeling it fill every cell in my body. It was indescribable, an ecstatic feeling of omnipotence and joy. I felt like I could move cars with a wave of my finger or cure cancer by laying my hands on someone. I could topple bridges with my thoughts. Like the power from the crystal, it was more than intoxicating. This was why I was willing to risk feeling like death afterward, willing to destroy a crystal, willing to rip power away from the earth itself. To feel like this. I wanted to laugh.
The crystal’s burst of power had lasted less than a minute. This seemed to go on and on as I took in the world around me. I glanced at a sparrow, tucked inside a shrub nearby. Instantly I became the sparrow, felt myself small and light-boned, bursting with quick-tempoed life. The world simplified in an instant, my entire existence made up of my feathers, the air moving in and out of me, the rustle of the leaves on the shrub.
Tearing myself away from the sparrow, I saw a dandelion growing in a crack in the cement. I felt its intense surge of life growing upward, felt my roots digging deeply into the thin soil for nourishment. I started crying. I felt like the goddess. I wasthe goddess.
“Yes, and now …” Daedalus murmured, singing softly.
“No, no, no!” I cried, snatching out at the air, at the invisible, seductive life force that I felt draining away from me, escaping into the wind, into everything around me. Within a minute it was gone. The colors of my world had drained away, leaving everything black and white. I came to, finding myself staring at Daedalus’s flushed, ecstatic face, his eyes glittering. He looked younger, healthier. How long would that last?
Then I fell sideways, hitting the short grass before I’d even realized I was losing my balance. I lay sprawled awkwardly, unable to process how empty I felt, how desolate everything was without that power.
That feeling was what Melita had gone to such extreme lengths to get, including even killing her sister.
I understood why she had done it.
“He’s asleep?” I stood on Kevin’s front porch. It was a beautiful porch—shaded by huge oaks, freshly painted, and dotted with white wicker furniture. These people knew how to live.
Mr. LaTour
nodded. “Yes. I’m sorry, honey. We’ve only just gotten home from the hospital. The doctors said he’s going to need several days of total peace and quiet.”
“Did they figure out what was wrong with him?” My voice was small, and I hoped the guilt wasn’t written all over my face.
“No.” Kevin’s dad sounded worried, and I felt terrible. “It might have been some electrical aberration that won’t ever happen again, but we’re keeping him on a portable monitor for at least four more days. Good thing you guys don’t have school next week.”
“Yeah.” I swallowed. “But he’ll be okay?”
“He should be fine.” Mr. La Tour sounded almost too hearty, and I knew he was worried—I could feel it. I was so much more in tune with people’s feelings these days, since I’d gotten in touch with my magick—the magick that had almost killed my boyfriend.
“Thais—I want to thank you for what you did that day.”
I looked up, eyes wide.
“I know that you steered the car away from the little girl and that you called 911 right away and stayed with Kevin until the EMTs came.”
I couldn’t say anything.
“The police report showed that neither of you had been drinking. I just want you to know that I was glad Kevin was with you when it happened.”
Oh God. I was going to fall apart. If Kevin hadn’t been with me, he would be totally fine, not on bed rest and hooked up to a heart monitor.
I nodded, trying not to cry, and pushed my small bouquet of Petra’s flowers at Mr. LaTour. “If you could give him this,” I said. “And this card.”
He took them from me and nodded. “He’ll be fine, honey,” he said kindly. “And as soon as he’s up to it, I know he’ll want to see you.”
I turned to go. The only time I was going to see Kevin again was to tell him I was breaking up with him.