A Chalice of Wind

  “Oh, I’m so sure,” I sputtered, thinking of all the other kids who’d made their rites of ascension when they were eighteen. No one had ever failed and had to wait till they were nineteen. I would never live it down. I would embarrass my grandmother, who everyone considered one of the best teachers. I would look like a total loser, when really, I should be impressing the hell out of everyone. Damn it! All I wanted to do was see Andre. I didn’t want to study, didn’t want to practice, didn’t want to stop ingesting fun things like margaritas.

  “It’s just that sometimes, studying seems a little, well, boring,” I said delicately. “I always feel like I want lightning and sparks and big magick, you know?” I held my arms out to the sides to demonstrate “big magick.”

  Nan looked at me sharply. “Big magick is dangerous magick,” she said. “Even if it’s for good. Remember, what has a front has a back, and the bigger the front, the bigger the back.”

  I nodded, thinking, Whatever the hell that means. “Okay, I’ll try to study more.”

  Nan stood and brushed her hands off on her old-fashioned apron. “Like I said, it’s up to—” She stopped, her words trailing away. She stood very still, her hands frozen, while she looked all around us. Up at the sky, where the usual afternoon storm clouds were gathering, down the street, across the street, at our house and side yard.

  “What’s the matter?” I stood up also.

  Nan looked at me, as if surprised to see me—I mean, really looked at me, like she was actually trying to tell who I was. It was creepy, and I wondered for a second if she’d had a stroke or something.

  “What’s the matter?” I said. “Nan, are you all right? Let’s go into the house—I’ll get you some cold lemonade, okay?”

  She blinked then and glanced around us once more. “No, I’m all right, honey. It’s just—a storm is coming.”

  “It always comes in the afternoon in the summer,” I said, still gently tugging her toward the front steps. “Every day, around three, a storm. But they always blow over fast.”

  “No,” she said. “No.” Her voice sounded stronger, more like her. “Not a rainstorm. I mean a bigger storm, one that will . . .” Her words trailed off again, and she looked at the ground, lost in thought.

  “A hurricane?” I asked, trying to understand. She was totally creeping me out.

  She didn’t answer.

  Thais

  I looked around and sighed. Great. One of these dreams. Just what I need.

  I’d always had incredibly realistic, Technicolor, all-senses-on dreams my whole life. I’d tried telling Dad about them, but though he was sympathetic, he didn’t really get what I was talking about. It wasn’t every single night, of course. But maybe 65 percent of the time. In my dreams I felt cold and hot, could smell things, taste things, feel the texture of something in my mouth.

  Once, after a shop downtown had been held up, I’d dreamed I’d been in that shop and had gotten shot. I’d felt the burning heat of the bullet as it bored through my chest, felt the impact from the blow knock me off my feet. Tasted the warm blood that rose up in my mouth. Felt myself staring at the shop ceiling, old-fashioned tin, while I slowly lost consciousness, bleeding to death. But it had been just a dream.

  The really annoying thing was, even though I almost always knew I was dreaming, I was powerless to stop them. Only a few times I had called, “Cut!” and managed to get myself out of some situation. Mostly I just had to suck it up.

  Which explained why I was standing in the middle of this swamp/jungle place, thinking, Damn it.

  This would teach me to buy touristy postcards to send to my friends back home. At the time I’d thought they were funny—pictures of a Louisiana swamp, or a huge plantation house, or the front of a strip joint on Bourbon Street—all with a tiny picture of myself pasted on them. But apparently the images had sunk into my subconscious too well.

  Hence the swamp. Okay, I need to release any feelings about this place, I thought, and just see what happens, what the dream needs to show me. I looked around. My bare feet were ankle-deep in reddish-green-brownish water, surprisingly warm. Beneath my feet the bottom was super-slick clay, fine silt that squished up between my toes. The air was thick and heavy and wet, and my skin was covered with sweat that couldn’t evaporate. Hardly any sunlight penetrated to the ground, and I tried to convince myself it was a fascinating example of a rainforestlike habitat.

  Then I saw the ghosts. Translucent, gray, Disney World ghosts, floating from one tree to the next, as if playing ghost hide-and-seek. I saw a woman in old-fashioned clothes, a gray-haired man in his Sunday best. There was a hollow-eyed child, wearing rags, eating rice from a bowl with her fingers. And a slave, wrists wrapped in chains, the skin scraped raw and bleeding. I began to feel cold, and all the tiny little hairs all over my body stood on end. There was no sound—no splash of water, no call of bird, no rustle of leaves. Dead silence.

  “Okay, I’ve seen enough,” I told myself firmly. “Time to wake up.”

  The mists around me got thicker, more opaque, swirling in a smoky paisley pattern around the trees, the cypress knees, the Spanish moss. Maybe ten yards away, a log rolled—no, it was an alligator, covered with thick, dark green skin. I saw its small yellow eyes for a moment, right before it silently slid into the water, headed my way.

  Crap.

  Something touched my bare ankle, and I yelped, jumping a foot in the air. Heart pounding, I looked down. An enormous snake was twining around my bare leg. It was huge, as thick around as my waist, impossibly strong, dark, and wet. Its triangular head framed two cold, reptilian eyes. The constant flick of its tongue across my skin made me feel like I was covered with crawling insects. Adrenaline raced coldly through my veins, tightening my throat, speeding up my heart. I tried to run, but it held me fast. Uselessly I pushed at it with all my strength, trying to uncoil it from around me. I punched its head and barely made it bob. It coiled around me till I was weighted down by snake, surrounded by snake, my breath being squeezed from my lungs. I gasped for breath, trying to scream, digging my fingernails into the heavy, coiled muscles around my neck, and suddenly I knew that I was going to die, here in this swamp, without understanding why.

  “Daddy!” With my very last shred of strength, a scream burst from my throat. Then it was choked off—the snake was around my neck. I couldn’t feel my arms anymore. I was light-headed and couldn’t see. . . .

  Then all around me the world grew bright, like a floodlight had been turned on. I gasped and blinked wildly, unable to see, the snake still around my neck—

  “Hold still, damn it,” said a voice, and strong hands worked at my neck. I sucked in a deep breath as the snake’s grip loosened and I could breathe again. I gulped in cool, air-conditioned air, feeling the cold sweat run down my temple, down my back.

  “Wha, wha—”

  “I heard you yell,” Axelle said, and with difficulty I brought her into focus.

  Slowly I struggled upright, my hand to my throat. I was still gasping, still choked by panic. I looked around. I was in my little room at Axelle’s in New Orleans. She looked uncharacteristically disheveled—hair rumpled from sleep, grumpy, her body barely contained inside a red lace slip.

  “What happened?” I croaked, my voice as hoarse as if I’d been coughing all night. Looking down, I saw that my top sheet had gotten twisted into a thick rope, and this had been wound around my neck.

  “I was having a nightmare,” I said, still trying to orient myself. “A snake . . .” I pushed the sheet away, kicking it away from me, wiping my hand across my damp forehead. “God.”

  “I heard you yell,” Axelle said again.

  “How did you get in? My door was locked.”

  She shrugged. “It’s my apartment. Nothing is locked to me.”

  Great. “Well, thank you,” I said awkwardly. “I thought I was dying—it was . . . really realistic.” I swallowed again, my hand brushing my throat, which ached.

  Axelle frowned and nudged my fin
gers away, tilting my chin. She looked at my neck, at the sheet, and back at my neck. At the expression on her face, I got up and shakily made my way to the little mirror over the white bamboo dresser. My neck was bruised, scraped, as if I truly had been strangled.

  My eyes widened. Axelle went to my window and ran her hands around the edge of it. The shutters were pulled and bolted from inside, and the window had been locked.

  “It was just a dream,” I said faintly. Unless of course Axelle had been trying to kill me. But I didn’t sense danger from her—she’d just woken me up. It sounded stupid—it was hard to explain. But sometimes I had a sense about people—like in seventh grade, when I had instantly hated Coach Deakin, even though everyone else had loved him and thought he was so great. I’d hated him immediately, for no reason. And then six months later he had been arrested for sexually harassing four students.

  I went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face, then drank some, feeling the ache in my throat as it went down.

  “I don’t see how you could do that to yourself,” Axelle murmured as I shook out the covers, untwisting the sheet and spreading everything flat. “You dreamed it was a snake?”

  I nodded, folding my covers way down out of the way at the bottom of the bed. I didn’t want them anywhere near my head. “In a swamp.”

  Axelle looked at me thoughtfully, and, for the first time since I’d known her, I saw shrewd intelligence in her black eyes. “Well, leave your door open tonight,” she said, pushing it wide. “In case you . . . need anything.”

  “Okay.”

  Murmuring to herself, Axelle traced her fingers lightly around my door frame, almost like she was writing a secret message with her fingers.

  “What are you doing?”

  She shrugged. “Just making sure the door is all right.”

  O-kaaay.

  “Call me if you . . . get scared or anything,” Axelle said before she turned to go.

  I nodded. And the weird part was: I actually found that comforting.

  Then she was gone, her red slip swishing lightly through the kitchen.

  I sat up in bed, propped against the headboard, and didn’t go back to sleep until the sun came through my shutters.

  Time Is Running Out

  Jules spread his latest acquisition over the worktable in Axelle’s attic room.

  “What year is that?” Daedalus asked.

  Jules checked. “Nineteen-ten.”

  This was painstaking, often frustrating work, Jules thought. But perhaps they were making slow progress.

  “Look,” Jules said, tracing a finger down the Atchafalaya River. “It’s different here, and here.”

  Daedalus nodded. “It must have jumped its banks between the time this map was drawn and the one from . . . 1903.”

  “Let’s get a computer up here so we can double-check hurricane dates, floods, things like that,” Jules said.

  Daedalus gave him that patient-father look he hated. “We can’t have a computer up here,” he said, just as Jules remembered that electrical appliances wreaked havoc with magickal fields.

  “Oh yeah,” he said, irritated that he hadn’t thought of that. “It’s just a pain to run up and down those stairs every time we need to check something. And that girl is on it a lot.”

  Daedalus glanced at him, keeping his finger on a map. “Is Axelle monitoring her?”

  Jules shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  He heard Daedalus sigh as though once again, he himself had to do everything, had to make sure everything was being done right, done his way. Jules clenched his jaw. He was getting fed up with Daedalus’s attitude Daedalus wasn’t the mayor, after all. They were all equal in the Treize, right? Wasn’t that what they had agreed? So why was Daedalus issuing orders—find this, get that, go look up such-and-such? And Jules knew he wasn’t the only one whose nerves Daedalus was stepping on.

  Richard came in, holding a bottle of beer. Jules tried not to glance at his watch but couldn’t help it. And of course Richard saw him.

  “Hey, it’s five o’clock somewhere,” he said, popping the top. He took a deep drink, then breathed a contented sigh. “Now that’s a beer,” he said, shaking his hair back. “Thank God for microbreweries. Have you tried this Turbodog?”

  “I don’t drink,” Jules said stiffly, moving to the bookcase and selecting a thick volume with a cracked leather binding.

  “It does dull your magick, Riche,” Daedalus said mildly, still poring over the maps.

  “I’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Richard said, seating himself on a stool by the worktable. One knee poked through the huge rip in his jeans. “We don’t seem to be close to needing my magick, such as it is.”

  “It won’t be long,” Jules said. “We’re working on the maps. We’re getting the rite into shape, practically everyone is here—we each have a role to perform, and we’re doing it.” Unconsciously he looked at Daedalus, and the other man met his eyes. Some roles were more challenging than others.

  “Practically,” Richard said, seizing on the word. “We’re missing Claire, Marcel, Ouida, and who else?”

  “Ouida’s on her way,” said Daedalus. “As are Manon and Sophie, I believe. We’re still working on Claire and Marcel.”

  Richard gave a short laugh. “Good luck. So we’ll have the map, the rite, the water, the wood—and a full Treize, yes?”

  Daedalus straightened and smiled at him. “That’s right. This is the closest we’ve ever come. Nothing will go wrong—we won’t let it.”

  Richard nodded and took another swig from his bottle. Jules didn’t look up from the book, pretending to scan the old-fashioned French words. He didn’t share Daedalus’s optimism. There were too many variables—too many things that could go wrong. And time was running out.

  Thais

  My life had settled into a routine at Casa Loco: I had somehow become the general houseboy, maid, gofer, and all-around girl Friday. Not that Axelle was forcing me into these roles at gun-point. Some I did for my own comfort and survival, some out of boredom, and then there were a few things that Axelle asked me to do and I had no good reason not to.

  Now that I lived here, there was usually actual food around. The ant problem in the kitchen had been licked, and I could cross the main room in the dark without killing myself. I tried not to think about home or what I would be doing there, but every once in a while I was overwhelmed by longing for my dad and my old life. He used to take me canoeing on the weekends. Or skiing in the winter. Once he’d broken his ankle skiing, and he’d let me decorate his cast, all of it, by myself.

  When I got older, my best friend, Caralyn, and I would both get summer jobs at whatever shop in town was hiring. I’d worked at Friendly’s Hardware, Marybeth’s Ice Cream Shoppe, Joe & Joe’s Coffee Emporium, you name it. And after work we’d meet at the pool and go swimming, or hit the movies, or go to the closest mall, twenty miles away.

  When I’d mentioned getting a summer job to Axelle, she’d looked at me blankly, as she so often did, and then had pulled two hundred dollars out of her wallet and handed it to me. I had no idea why I shouldn’t get a job, but whatever.

  After a couple days of lying on my bed, wallowing in despair, I’d realized that I needed to do something, anything, to stay busy and keep my mind off My Tragic Life. Hence my springing into action and becoming a domestic goddess.

  Today I’d braved the heat and the wet, thick air to go out to get the mail—pathetically, getting the mail was the highlight of my day. Axelle got tons of catalogs, and I got a kick out of looking through them. Some of them sold freaky stuff for, like, pagans and “witches.” I didn’t know how anyone could take this stuff seriously, but she obviously did. I remembered how she’d run her fingers around my door frame after my nightmare. Had she been trying to do some kind of magic? How? What for?

  Anyway. I loved her clothes catalogs, for the little bit of leather queen in all of us.

  Sometimes I got letters from my friends or Mrs. Thom
pkins back home. Mostly we e-mailed, but they also sent me funny articles and pictures—which almost always made me cry.

  I hadn’t gotten anything from my dad’s lawyer about his estate, and Mrs. Thompkins said they were still sorting through everything. It sounded like a total headache. I wanted it to be all settled—I could put the house furniture into storage, and when I escaped from this loony bin, I could set up my own apartment or house back home. I was counting the days.

  Thais Allard, one envelope said. It was from the Orleans Parish Public School System. I ripped it open to find I was to attend École Bernardin, which was the nearest public school. It started in six days. Six days from now, a brand new school.

  So, okay. I’d wanted to go to school, but somehow accepting the fact that I would attend school here felt like a ton of harsh reality all at once. An oh-so-familiar wave of despair washed over me as I headed up the narrow carriageway to the back of the building.

  I went in, got blasted by the air-conditioning, and dumped Axelle’s mail in a pile on the kitchen counter. A weird burning smell made me sneeze, and I followed it through the kitchen and into my bedroom, where Axelle was—get this—burning a little green branch and chanting.

  “What the heck are you doing?” I asked, waving my arms to clear out the smoke.

  “Burning sage,” Axelle said briefly, and kept going, waving the smoldering green twigs in every corner of my room.

  Burning sage? “You know, they make actual air fresheners,” I said, dumping my stuff on my bed. “Or we could just open the window.”

  “This isn’t for that,” Axelle said. Her lips moved silently, and I finally got it: the burning sage was some “magic” thing she was doing. Like she was doing a “spell” in my room for some reason. So. This was my life: I lived with an unknown stranger who was right now performing a voodoo spell in my own bedroom. Because she actually believed all that crap. I mean, Jesus. Not to take the Lord’s name in vain.

  Axelle ignored me, murmuring some sort of chant under her breath as she moved about the room. In her other hand she held a crystal, like you can buy at a science shop, and she ran this around the window frame while she chanted.