Daedalus moved to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of eau gazeusewith a twist of lime. Clio was very strong—she’d been in his apartment only a few minutes, yet he imagined he could still pick up her vibrations, barely perceptible but there.
Perhaps Thais should be the one to die. She wasn’t on his side; he could feel it. She could become quite a liability, with her unusual strength and lack of respect for his position. He would have to ponder this.
He paused halfway through the living room. Axelle. What did she want? He sighed, moving to turn on the ceiling fan. Axelle could be extremely tiresome sometimes. But useful too, he admitted. Better to be gracious and keep on her good side.
He opened the door just as she reached up to knock.
“My dear,” he said, ushering her inside. “I’ve been thinking about you. No ill effects from the rite, then?”
“No,” she said. “But you look like hell.”
Trust Axelle to point out the elephant in the room.
“Do I?” Daedalus said smoothly, moving to open the tall French windows that led to the street-side balcony. He held his shoulders back and moved with firm strides.
“Yes, you do,” she said, reclining on one of his Empire settees. “Rough night?”
And just then, a thought crept into his head, the dim recognition of something he’d been missing. Since the rite, he’d been weaker. And so had Petra, he’d heard. The two of them, the most powerful witches in the Treize—aside, of course, from Melita—suddenly struggling for energy. It only followed that someone had taken their power at that rite. Someone had used the rite to draw in more magick, and that magick had to come from somewhere.
It had come from himself and Petra, and it had been taken by …
Axelle.
Daedalus smiled at Axelle patronizingly, carefully blocking his thoughts from her. “Is there something I can help you with?” He sat across from her and set his water on a silver coaster. Now wasn’t the time to share what he knew. He would wait, and he would find the right way to repay her.
“Yes,” Axelle said, crossing her long legs and putting her red-painted toes up on the settee’s arm, which was obviously calculated to annoy him. “Let’s get Melita home.”
It wasn’t any easier going back to Mama Loup’s now that I knew the way. The neighborhood seemed even more threatening, and though it was daytime, the light around Mama Loup’s house seemed dimmer and the air heavier. I parked the rental as close as I could, said spells of protection around it, and tried to look brave and untouchable as I passed people sitting on their stoops, dogs barking at their chain-link fences, kids racing by on too-small bikes.
I went through the rusty iron gate and headed around the side, an old pro. The alley was barely two feet wide, and wild vines covered the thin bamboo fence. This house, like ours, like most houses in New Orleans, was raised up several feet on brick pillars. I could smell the damp soil from beneath the house and had no desire to see what else might be under there.
The same bare-bulb fixture was lit above the same broken screen door. Again, the wooden inside door was open. I pulled open the screen and stepped into the dark interior. After the daylight, blinking made things look polarized and orange. I stood still, wishing my eyes would adjust faster.
There were other people in the shop—the same woman who had waited on me before, who I thought was Mama Loup. She was talking seriously with another woman who looked thin and strung out. A plump baby sat on her hip, clinging to her T-shirt with small, wet fists.
I wandered over by the counter, not wanting to interrupt them, hoping Carmela would see me and come out. Old metal shelves made short aisles in the room, and I started looking at dusty glass bottles with handwritten labels and plastic bags sealed with twist ties. One bag contained what looked like several dried green lizards, and I tried not to grimace.
“That’ll make him come back to you for true,” I heard Mama Loup murmur. “You rub that perlainpainon anything he wears, he can’t help but come back to you, no.”
A love spell. I’d gotten the impression, from Clio and Petra, that to stoop to such a thing was embarrassing, humiliating. I remembered Luc in my room at Axelle’s, angry, saying, “I could make you love me.” Luc.
I didn’t hate him. I was still angry, furious, at what he had done. But I couldn’t seem to muster up hatred. Now, looking at him, he was so different—his natural confidence, almost arrogance, had been obliterated along with his handsome face. He seemed humbled. That could only be a good thing, I thought meanly, then turned as I heard someone come through the hanging bamboo beads that curtained a dark doorway.
It was Carmela, I knew, but once again she seemed to carry her own personal storm cloud with her, making her harder to see, to distinguish.
“You’re back, child,” she said. “I said not to come back until—”
“I have everything on the list,” I interrupted her. Her dark eyes blinked once, which I took to indicate surprise.
“Everything?”
“Yes.” I patted the canvas carryall I had on my shoulder.
For several moments she gazed at me, and looking back at her, I saw only her eyes, as black as Axelle’s.
“Then come this way.” She held the beaded curtain aside with one hand. My heart in my throat, I stepped around the back of the counter, passed her, and entered the black room beyond.
It was a hallway, short and unlit, like a cave, and I could see only the barest outline of a doorway on the left. Feeling slightly hysterical, it occurred to me that this warren of rooms was like the magick tent in Harry Potter—small and normal on the outside, but going on and on for an impossible distance on the inside. Already it seemed like there was no way all these rooms could be contained in the small house I had entered.
“In here.” In this room there was more than just an absence of light—the walls seemed to actually deaden light. The idea of warmth and sunlight outside seemed like a distant memory.
My throat was dry—I couldn’t swallow. I felt hyper-alert, as if going through a carnival fun house, on guard against anything that might spring out at me. But the truth was, I had put myself in a dangerous situation, and if things went south, I probably wouldn’t be able to save myself.
And I was so glad I’d just had that thought. Put it out of your mind.
“Show me what you have.”
I blinked at Carmela’s voice, my eyes widening to let in as much light as possible. There was a faint scratch, then a match flared into a swaying dance, and I saw Carmela’s tan hand lighting black candles, three of them, held in a twisted silver candelabra.
Now I saw a small table, saw that we were in a room maybe nine feet square. The walls weren’t painted black, as I’d thought—they were a dark, oxblood red. Out of nowhere I flashed on the fact that on wooden warships, in the olden days, the doctor’s little room for surgery had been painted red so the men couldn’t see all the blood and get scared.
Great. Thank you for that.
I tried again to swallow, unsuccessfully, then started pulling things out of my bag. Three forked twigs from a weeping willow. Red clay dust made by rubbing an old brick on the sidewalk. Little pieces of unworked silver that I’d bought at Botanika. A hard cone of pressed brown sugar I’d gotten from a bodega on Magazine Street. The plastic bag with Daedalus’s hair. Some powdered sassafras leaves from Botanika.
I laid everything out. Carmela examined it all.
“What’s this stuff for?” I asked.
She looked up at me, eyes glowing like a cat’s. “The silver is because I’m making a necklace and thought it would look pretty. The brown sugar is good in coffee—you scrape it with your spoon. The sassafras is called filé, and you sprinkle it on gumbo to thicken it right before you eat it. The brick dust is useful for different spells, and the willow twigs were just for fun, to see if you would bother finding them.”
I stared at her.
“But this, this is very interesting,” she said, picking up the pla
stic bag containing a few silver hairs. “I didn’t think you would get this, child.” She looked at me appraisingly, as if this one ingredient made her take me seriously.
“Tell me more about what you want to do.” Her English was fine grammatically, but she had an accent that didn’t seem quite French or quite anything else.
“I want revenge,” I managed to get out. “This witch, the man whose powers I want to strip—he killed my father with magick. I can’t kill him, but I could take his powers away. If you help me.”
“Why can’t you kill him?” Oddly, in this bare room, her words had no echo but fell from her lips like stones falling silently into still water, leaving no ripple.
Because he’s immortal?
“He’s a murderer,” I said. “I’m not.”
“Being stripped of power would be worse for any witch,” Carmela said thoughtfully.
“Yes.” Even for me? I wondered.
“Do you have any idea what stripping a witch’s powers is like?”
No. “I think it would be really bad but that it wouldn’t kill him.”
“I’ll show you, on something smaller,” she said, pushing back the full sleeves of her caftan. Like Mama Loup, she wore a long, African-print robe and a matching turban. “And then you will decide.”
“Okay.” This didn’t sound so bad. Unless … “You don’t mean, like, an animal, do you?”
Carmela paused and turned toward me. “Would that bother you, Thais? Surely an animal is less than a human being?”
“Animals are … innocent,” I said, tension winding around my spine like wire. “People aren’t.”
She looked at me consideringly. “Surely some people are?” It sounded rhetorical.
I thought about my dad, who had lied to me about my being a twin. I thought of Clio, who was studying with my mortal enemy behind my back. I thought of Luc, who had betrayed me. And Petra, who had lied to Clio for seventeen years. It was inextricably part of being human, I thought sadly. People lied, cheated, hurt the ones they loved. “No,” I said. “No one.”
She laughed, showing small white teeth. “So young to be such a cynic. So very young.”
“I’m more of a realist,” I said.
“Not an animal, then,” said Carmela, in a tone that made me think she’d never planned to use an animal anyway. She reached beneath the table and took out a potted plant, a perfect long-stemmed orchid. Totally anticlimactic.
I blinked. It was a potted plant—its roots weren’t even in the earth. What power could it have?
“Come.” Carmela walked past the table to where a silver circle was painted on the floor. All around the circle were painted small runes and other symbols I didn’t recognize. It was weird—as soon as I stepped into it, it was like stepping into a … well, to call it a windstorm is too dramatic. Not a tornado. But like a faint vortex of some kind, held solely within this dinky painted circle in this little back room of a house in New Orleans. I definitely felt it, like a fan beneath the floor, pulling at my skirt. It was so weird.
“Sit,” said Carmela, gesturing to the floor. She sat down across from me and put the plant between us. “Everything has power, magickal power,” she went on. “And a life force. Those two things overlap, and in some cases they overlap completely, inseparable. The thing is, if you take something’s life force, you also take its magickal power. But sometimes you can take something’s power, but not its life force. You can do that with people. And most animals. And some plants.”
“Okay,” I said, feeling my palms get sweaty on my knees.
“Now …”
The beginning of her spell was familiar in that we centered ourselves, as though for meditation. Then Carmela began singing in a chanting, singsong kind of way, like I’d heard others do. Then, with no warning, I was sucked into the spell, pinned motionless by what was happening, and could only sit and watch.
Carmela’s spell was like turning a black light onto a black-light poster, where unseen colors suddenly popped and the whole thing looked different. One minute I was looking at an orchid in a pot, and the next I was looking at an alien, vibrating thing, practically glowing with a faint green light, visibly radiating energy or power or whatever it was.
“This is its life,” Carmela said softly, stroking her tan fingers along one glowing-edged leaf. “And this is its magick.” She gestured to the plant, how it seemed to be spiky with movement, vibrating like a plucked string. “We leave its life but strip its magick. We’re not going to take its magick for ourselves. This time.”
She began to sing again, and I recognized about every tenth word as sounding French.
She moved her hands over the plant, and I swore I could see a dim outline of the plant slowly untwine itself from the actual plant. It was like a thin, shimmering blue-green line, orchid-shaped, and Carmela’s hands seemed to coax it away. I was frozen in place, eyes wide, wondering if I were hallucinating. Clearly this was magick on a different scale, and with a far different intent, than anything I’d been exposed to.
I felt the outline’s small, fluttery vibrations, like a butterfly’s wings brushing against me. Carmela seemed to gather it in her palm, then opened her fingers in a starburst shape. The outline coiled and then broke apart, a silent firecracker shattering into thousands of tiny shards. They arched and fell but dissipated almost instantly, and I felt nothing fall around me.
“Oh my God,” I whispered, awed. “That was amazing. That was its power, its magick?”
Carmela nodded seriously, then gestured down at the orchid.
I sucked in my breath, recoiling instinctively.
The orchid was … not dead. Still alive, it drooped in its pot, but I had the shocking feeling that it was obscene somehow, something grotesque and perverse. I blinked a couple of times, trying to figure out what I was seeing.
It was … an orchid, in a pot. It drooped visibly, and its colors were definitely duller, faded. But besides that, there was something about it that filled me with revulsion, that felt awful and horrifying, like I’d stumbled on a rotting corpse in a wood.
“What’s … wrong with it?” I managed to get out.
“We stripped it of its magick. Like you want to do to your witch.”
“It’s not dead?”
“No. It won’t live long, but it’s not dead.”
“Why does it feel so awful?” I could barely speak; my eyes were riveted to the plant.
“Because it has no magick.”
I met her dark eyes, confused.
“Magick is what makes life worth living,” she said matter-of-factly. “This has no magick.”
I stared again at the plant, how it seemed so repugnant to me, worse than dead.
“And this will happen to Daedalus? The witch?”
Carmela’s eyes flashed. She seemed to look right through my pupils to my soul itself. “Yes.”
I swallowed, feeling like I might be sick. “Good,” I whispered.
“What?” Nan looked shocked, and two spots of heat appeared on her cheeks.
I scraped my plate into the garbage and picked up Thais’s. Neither of us had eaten much dinner, but I didn’t think I would be sick. The herbs and spell that Daedalus had given me earlier had helped a lot, and I was acting pretty normal. As opposed to Thais, who had slept all afternoon after some strenuous shoe shopping.
“Here.” Thais put our three glasses on the counter, then took a dishcloth to wipe down the table. She’d been acting weird since yesterday—cold, not looking at me or talking to me. I hadn’t had a chance to ask her what was up.
“I said, what?” Nan was looking at me in horror.
I’d known this conversation was going to be really hard, but it had been on my mind, and I wanted to get it over with. Since Nan had just told me to call Melysa to set up a time to study for my ROA, this seemed like a good moment.
“I don’t want to do my rite of ascension,” I repeated. “At least, not right now.”
“Clio—you’re going to be eig
hteen next month.” Nan left the trash where it was and folded her arms, looking at me.
“I know. But with everything that’s been going on—the Treize, the rite, everything—it’s impossible for me to focus on it,” I explained. “Maybe next year, when things have settled down.”
“No, not next year!” Nan exclaimed. “Thisyear, next month, like we planned.”
“Plus I think it would be great if Thais and I did it together.”
Thais snorted over by the table.
“Thais won’t be ready for her ROA for maybe five or six years,” Nan said. “And you know it.”
“Well—” There was something else that I wasn’t telling her. Usually, in our religion, a witch made her rite of ascension as both a test and a tool to help her solidify her strengths and knowledge. I didn’t need to do that. Right now I couldn’t see how it would help me feel more centered in my power. I was studying with Daedalus, learning a lot, and I already knew I was more powerful than any other witch in Nan’s cercle, besides her. The witches of the Treize were all so much more powerful than ordinary witches, and it looked like that power had been handed down to me and Thais.
I just couldn’t see the point.
“Clio, you’ve been working toward this for a long time,” said Nan, leaning over and tying the top of the trash bag.
“I know. I don’t want to disappoint anyone,” I said. I scrubbed a plate with soapy water and rinsed it. “But I’ve got too much going on. You have to admit, the last month has been a roller coaster. There’s no way I can focus on the ROA.”
“The party has been planned.”
I looked at her. “No, it hasn’t,” I said, smiling. “You know you haven’t gotten that far with it.”
Nan pressed her lips together, clearly thinking, Smartass.