A Chalice of Wind

  The girl shook her head. “Nothing’s wrong with you,” she said, trying to be nice. “But it’s just that you—you really look like someone who already goes to school here.”

  I stared at her, thinking of the few casual “heys” I’d gotten. “What? I look so similar to someone that people are staring at me when I go by? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “No,” the girl said, giving me an apologetic smile. “You really do look like her. It’s kind of weird, actually.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Once again I had entered some crazy New Orleans X-Files where the rules of reality didn’t apply.

  “I’m sorry,” the girl said, and held out her hand. “I’m Sylvie. Do you want me to show you where the office is?”

  I shook her hand, feeling a pathetic amount of relief that I’d met someone kind. “I’m Thais,” I said. “That would be great.”

  Just walking beside Sylvie helped so much, to the point where I could quit freaking out and actually pay attention to the reactions I was getting. It wasn’t from everyone—mostly older kids. I saw what Sylvie meant: some kids said hello, as if they already knew me. Others looked like they were going to say hi, then frowned and looked confused.

  “Okay, here it is,” said Sylvie, showing me to an open door by a wide counter. Clearly the school office. “Homerooms are by last name. What’s yours?”

  “Allard,” I said, and she smiled and nodded.

  “I’m Allen—Sylvie Allen! So we’ll be in the same one. I’ll see you soon, okay?”

  “Thanks,” I said gratefully.

  Sylvie nodded and headed down the hall, and I waited at the counter. A middle-aged woman with curly gray hair came over to me.

  “Yes, Clio?” she said briefly, taking out a form from under the counter. “What can I do for you?”

  There was no one standing there but me. “Um, I’m not Clio,” I said.

  The woman stopped and looked at me full-on. Embarrassed, I stood there, feeling like a zoo exhibit. A bell rang, and the halls filled with even more kids. The bell stopped, and still she hadn’t said anything to me.

  “You’re not Clio,” she said finally.

  “No. Someone told me I look like someone who already goes to school here.” But can you get over it? “Here are my transcripts from my last school.” I pushed them across the counter. “I just moved here this summer. From Connecticut.”

  Slowly she took my transcripts and the registration letter I’d gotten in the mail. Her name tag said Ms. DiLiberti. “Thais Allard,” she said, pronouncing it correctly.

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, well, welcome, Thais,” she said, seeming to recover enough to give me a professional smile. “I see you were a very good student back in Connecticut. I’m sure you’ll do well here.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Your homeroom teacher will be Ms. Delaney, room 206. You’ll just take the first set of stairs over there to your left.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And here’s some other information.” Now she was all business. “Here’s a copy of our school handbook—you might find that helpful. Here’s our school contract—please read it, sign it, and get it back to me by the end of the day. And if you could fill in this emergency contact form.”

  “Yes, okay.” This stuff I could deal with. What a relief. Then something almost imperceptible made my shoulders tense. I looked up just in time to see Ms. DiLiberti straighten, looking over my shoulder.

  “Wait,” she said to me. “Clio!”

  I looked around—at last, they’d see us both together and we could stop all this double-take crap. A group of girls was walking toward us, laughing among themselves. The light was behind them, so they were just dark silhouettes.

  “Clio! Clio Martin!” Ms. DiLiberti called.

  I turned to face the counter, suddenly aware of a shaky feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was barely nine o’clock, and I was exhausted and emotionally wrung out. Just meet Clio and get it over with. But still, I felt nervous and anxious all over again.

  “See y’all,” said a voice. It sounded like my voice—except the word y’all would never pass my lips. A fist of something like dread grabbed my stomach. I didn’t know why I felt this way, but I was barely able to keep it together. “Yes, Ms. DiLiberti? It wasn’t me,” said the voice. “I just got here.”

  Ms. DiLiberti smiled wryly. “Amazingly, I haven’t called you over to discuss your latest transgression,” she said. “After all, it’s only nine o’clock on the first day. I’ll give you a little more time. But there’s someone I want you to meet. Thais?”

  Slowly I turned, finally face-to-face with the mysterious—

  Me.

  I blinked, and for one second I almost put up a hand to see if someone had slipped a mirror in front of me. My eyes widened, and identical green eyes widened simultaneously. My mouth opened a tiny bit, and a mouth shaped like mine but with slightly darker lip gloss also opened. I stepped back automatically and quickly scanned this other me, this Clio.

  Our hair was different—hers was longer, I guessed, since it was in a messy knot on the back of her head. Mine was feathered in layers above my shoulders. She was wearing a white tank top and pink-and-red surfer shorts that laced up the front. She had a silver belly ring. We had the same long legs, the same arms. She had a slightly darker tan. We were the same height and looked like we were the same weight, or almost. And here was the really, really unbelievable part:

  We had the exact same strawberry birthmark, shaped like a crushed flower. Only hers was on her left cheekbone, and mine was on the right. We were identical, two copies of the same person, peeled apart at some point to make mirror images of each other.

  Even though my brain was screaming in confusion, one coherent thought surfaced: there was only one possible explanation.

  Clio was my twin sister.

  Clio

  “Oh. My. Freaking. God.” I was vaguely aware the voice was mine, but everything else had faded away. The only thing in my universe just then was this girl, who had obviously been cloned from my DNA. Obvious—but impossible.

  Racey quickly looked at me, then at the other me, and she literally gasped. “Holy Mother,” she breathed.

  The other me looked like someone had just put a binding spell on her—frozen in place, eyes open wide, muscles stiff. Then I noticed one difference between us.

  “Your face is green,” I said, just as her eyelids fluttered and she started to collapse.

  Racey and I caught her, and Ms. DiLiberti hustled out from behind the counter and led us into the assistant principal’s office. Someone got a wet paper towel. I fanned the new girl’s face with a copy of the student handbook.

  Almost immediately, she opened her eyes and sat up, though she was still kind of whitish green around the edges.

  I hadn’t taken my eyes off her. So that’s what I would look like with layered hair, I thought, realizing I felt stunned and not enjoying the experience. My heart was beating hard, and a million thoughts pushed insistently at my brain. I didn’t want to let them in.

  “Who are you?” I asked. “Where are you from? Why are you here?”

  She drank some water that Ms. DiLiberti brought her and pushed her hair off her face. “I’m Thais Allard,” she said, sounding almost exactly like me but more Yankeeish. “I’m from Connecticut. My dad died this summer, and my new guardian lives here, so I moved here.”

  Her dad died. Who was he? I wanted to shout. Had that been my dad too? Had we been separated at birth and Thais adopted by strangers? Or maybe I—was Nan my nan? She had to be. But she’d never, ever mentioned that I might have a sister. And this girl, even if she was from the planet Xoron, had to be my sister. We were just too freakishly identical, down to our matching birthmarks. The birthmark that I’d alternately loved and hated, the one Andre had traced, had kissed just yesterday—was on her face.

  “Who was your dad?” I said. “Who’s your new guardian?”

  Thais wavered a
nd looked like she was about to turn on the faucets. Outside the office, we heard other students coming and going.

  “I’m going to be late for homeroom,” she said faintly, and I thought, Sacrée mère, she’s a weenie.

  “Your teachers will understand,” Ms. DiLiberti said firmly.

  “My dad was Michel Allard,” the girl said. I’d never heard of him. “My new guardian is some weird friend of his.” She shrugged, frowning.

  It was all too much to take in. I felt a little weak-kneed myself, but unlike The Fainter, I sagged gracefully into a chair.

  The girl—Thais—seemed to be coming back to life. “Do you have parents?” I saw the sudden eagerness on her face, and it was only then that I realized that Nan had to be her grandmother too. I would have to share Nan.

  I’m a successful only child. I mean, I’m successful at being an only child. I bit my lip and said, “I live with my grandmother. My parents are dead.” Our parents were dead. “When’s your birthday?” I asked brusquely.

  “November twenty-second.” Now her eyes were examining me, her strength coming back. Déesse, was she even a witch? Well, of course, she had to be—but did she grow up being a witch? How could she not?

  I frowned. “I’m November twenty-first.” I looked up at Racey to find her staring at me, like, what the hell is going on? Such a good question. One that I intended to ask Nan as soon as possible. I thought—Nan was probably not home now. She was a midwife, a nurse-practitioner at a local clinic. She had irregular hours, but she’d been getting ready to leave when I was walking out the door this morning.

  “Where were you born?” Thais asked me.

  “Here, New Orleans,” I said. “Weren’t you?”

  Thais frowned. “No—I was born in Boston.”

  Racey raised her eyebrows. “That must have been a neat trick.”

  The first-period bell rang. I couldn’t remember a time when I’d felt less like going to class, which in my case was saying something. All I wanted to do was go home and confront Nan, ask her why a stranger had shown up at my school in my town with my face. I’d just have to wait till she got back tonight.

  “Well, this is certainly a mystery,” said Ms. DiLiberti, standing up. “You two obviously have some figuring out to do. But right now I’m going to write you passes for your teachers, and you’re going to get to your first-period classes.”

  I consulted my class schedule. “I have American history.”

  Thais looked at hers. She still seemed shaken and pale, which made her birthmark stand out like red ink on her cheek. “I have senior English.”

  “You girls get going,” said Ms. DiLiberti briskly, handing us pink slips. “You too, Racey. And I can’t wait to hear how this all plays out.”

  “Me neither,” I muttered, gathering my stuff.

  “Me neither,” said Thais, sounding like an instant replay of me.

  “Me neither,” said Racey, and Thais looked at her, seeming to notice her for the first time. “I’m Racey Copeland,” she told Thais.

  “I don’t know who I am,” Thais said in a small voice, and suddenly I kind of felt sorry for her. And for me. For both of us.

  “We’re going to find out,” I said.

  Nan didn’t come home until almost six o’clock. When she works late, I’m in charge of dinner, which we call emergency dinners, because cooking is yet another domestic art I’m not strong at.

  Tonight’s emergency dinner was a frozen pizza and a salad. I ripped up a head of lettuce and got a tomato from the garden in back. Ta da.

  From the moment I’d walked in the door, I’d been wound as tight as a window shade. My shoulders literally ached. This afternoon I’d planned to see Andre—I’d finally been going to go to his apartment, and who knew what would happen? But now all I could think about was the fact that my double was walking around New Orleans, looking like me, sounding like me, yet not being me. I mean, it wasn’t her fault, obviously, but I felt like a Versace bag that had suddenly seen a vinyl imitation being sold on a street corner.

  So I just paced around the house, my jaw aching from being clenched, missing Andre and wanting to run to him and have him make me forget all about this and instead counting the minutes until my grandmother got home.

  Finally I felt her pushing open the front gate. I didn’t go meet her but waited while she turned her key in the lock and came in. She looked tired, but when she saw my face, she straightened up, very alert.

  “What is it?” she said. “What’s happened?”

  And that was when Clio Martin, stoic queen, non-crier in public, non-crier in general, burst into tears and fell on her shoulder.

  Nan was so startled it took a moment for her to put her arms around me.

  I pulled back and looked at her. “I’m a twin!” I cried. “I have an identical twin!”

  To say I’d managed to take Nan by surprise was a gross understatement. I had absolutely floored her, and believe me, Nan did not floor easily. She’d always seemed like she’d seen everything, that nothing could rock her or make her upset. Even in second grade, when I’d slipped on a watermelon seed and split my head open on our neighbor’s cement porch, Nan had simply filled a dish towel with ice, told me to hold it in place, and driven me to the hospital.

  But this, this had really managed to stun her. Her face turned white, her eyes were dark and huge in her face, and she actually staggered back. “What?” she said weakly.

  Okay, now—most people, if they went home and told their grandmother they were a twin, the grandmother would laugh and say, “Oh, you are not.”

  So this was not good.

  Nan wobbled backward and I stuck a chair under her just in time. She grabbed my hands and held them and said, “Clio, what are you talking about?”

  I sat down in another chair, still sobbing. “There’s another me at school! This morning they called me to the office, and there was me, standing there, but with a haircut! Nan, I mean, we’re identical! We’re exactly alike except she’s a Yankee, and she even has my exact same birthmark! I mean, what the hell is going on?” My last words ended in a totally un-Clio-like shriek.

  Nan looked like she’d seen a ghost, only I bet if she saw a real ghost, it wouldn’t faze her. She swallowed, still speechless.

  Something was so, so wrong with this picture. I felt like the two of us were sitting there, waiting for a hurricane to hit our house, to yank it right off its foundation, to sweep us up with it. I quit crying and just gaped at her, thinking, Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. She knew.

  “Nan—” I said, and then stopped.

  She seemed to come back to herself then, shaking her head and focusing on me. A tiny bit of color leached back into her face, but she still looked pretty whacked. “Clio,” she said, in this old, old voice. “She had your same birthmark?”

  I nodded and touched my cheekbone. “Hers is on the other side. It’s exactly like mine. Nan—tell me.”

  “What’s her name?” Nan’s voice was thin and strained, barely more than a whisper.

  “Thais Allard,” I said. “She said her dad had just died, and now she lives here with a friend of her dad’s. She used to live in Connecticut. She says she was born in Boston but the day after me.”

  Nan put her fingers to her lips. I saw her soundlessly form the name Thais. “Michel is dead?” she asked sadly, as if from far away.

  “You knew him? Was that—he wasn’t my real dad, was he? Wasn’t he just someone who adopted Thais?” I felt like my sanity was about to rip in half. “Nan, explain this to me. Now.”

  At last, her eyes sparked with recognition. She looked at me with her familiar, sharp gaze, and I could recognize her again.

  “Yes,” she said, her voice firmer. “Yes, of course, cher. I’ll explain. I’ll explain everything. But first—first there are some things I must do, very quickly.”

  While I sat with my jaw hanging open like a large-mouth bass, she sprang to her feet with her usual energy. She hurried into our workroom, and I
heard the cupboard open. I sat there, unable to move, to process anything except a series of cataclysmic thoughts: I had a sister, a twin sister. I’d had a father, maybe, until this summer. I’d have to share Nan. Nan had been lying to me my whole life.

  Over and over, those thoughts burned a pattern into my brain.

  Numbly I watched Nan come out, dressed in a black silk robe, the one she wore for serious work or when it was her turn to lead our coven’s monthly circle. She held her wand, a slim length of cypress no thicker than my pinkie. She didn’t look at me but quickly centered herself and started chanting in old French, only a few words of which I recognized. Her first coven, Balefire, had always worked in a kind of language all their own, she’d told me—a mixture of old French, Latin, and one of the African dialects brought here during the dark days of slavery.

  She went outside, and I felt her circling our house, our yard. She came onto the porch and stood before our front door. She came back inside and moved through each room, tracing each window with a crystal, singing softly in a language that had been passed down by our family for hundreds of years.

  Every now and then I caught a word, but even before then it had sunk in what she was doing.

  She was weaving layer after layer of spells all around our house, our yard, around us, around our lives.

  Spells of protection and ward-evil.

  Life at the Golden Blossom

  Sunlight was a painful thing, Claire thought, trying to drag a sheet over her eyes. But thin pinpricks of morning seared her retinas, and she knew it was pointless to hold it off any longer.

  Carefully she pried one eyelid open. The hazy view of her broken wooden window screen showed her it was maybe only two in the afternoon. Not too bad.

  The bed was sunken weirdly—she was rolling toward the middle. A survey revealed a human form sleeping next to her, his straight black hair tossed across a pillow. No one she recognized. Well, that happened.

  She sighed. A bath would revive her, and no one did baths better than the Golden Blossom hotel.