A Circle of Ashes

  “Out of the way, miss!” shouted a firefighter as he started pulling loops of flat canvas hose off the truck.

  Then it was like watching a movie. Thais and I had to move out of the way as several firefighters surged past us, the hose on their shoulders.

  “Is anyone inside?” one yelled to me, and I shook my head. “No!” I was so thankful Q-Tip was safe. He was probably under the house across the street. Then I had a paralyzing thought.

  “Nan’s books!” I gasped. “Her tools!”

  “Oh no!” Thais said, her face dismayed. “She’s going to kill us! Maybe we can—” She looked up at the front porch.

  “The fire probably hasn’t reached the workroom inside,” I said slowly. “Maybe if I run in and you catch them as I toss them out the window …”

  “Girls! Please!” said a firefighter, making us jump. “Get across the street! Now!”

  Thais and I looked at each other, then reluctantly moved across the street. I could throw a glamour so that they wouldn’t notice me going up the front steps. I could—no. It was stupid. Nan would kill me for taking the chance. And if I happened to blow myself up doing it—I would be grounded forever.

  Then I heard the hissing spray of fire hoses and saw great clouds of billowing smoke rising as they began to extinguish the flames. Nan’s beautiful garden in front had been trampled, her tomato stakes knocked over, her herbs crushed by the heavy water hoses.

  “How did this happen?” I asked, my throat closing. Tears burned my eyes, which were full of smoke and ash.

  “I don’t know,” said Thais, her voice trembling. “But I guess—I guess it was me,” she said so softly I could hardly hear her.

  I looked at her. “Oh no,” I said. “It was just—I’m sure it was—” But the truth was, I couldn’t reassure her. I actually couldn’t be sure it wasn’t Thais. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before she came.

  I don’t know how long we stayed there, watching our fire slowly be vanquished. There were two fire trucks and three hoses hooked up to the fire hydrant down the block. The street was full of our neighbors, who kept coming over to see if we were okay or needed anything or when Nan would be home. Someone brought us glasses of iced tea, which felt incredibly good on our scorched throats.

  Finally the fire was out. The firefighters began coiling their hoses. Thais and I stared numbly at our house. Just from the front, it looked okay, except for the ruined garden. But in back—the whole back half of the house was scorched, and at least four windows were broken. We had no idea what the inside would be like.

  We were still standing there when Nan ran up to us. She’d had to leave her Volvo down the block because of the trucks.

  “Oh my God!” she cried. “What happened? Are you all right?”

  I nodded, feeling close to tears again. I hated crying, but maybe it would help make Nan more sympathetic? I tried a practice sniffle.

  “There was, uh, a fire,” Thais said hesitantly.

  “Ma’am? Is this your house?” The fire chief stood there, looking hot and sweaty.

  “Yes. What happened?” Nan asked anxiously, stepping over to him.

  “Well, the back of your house got torched,” the fire chief said bluntly.

  “How?” Nan exclaimed, then quickly turned to me. “Did someone try to—?”

  She was asking if this had been another attack on us. The temptation to shout, Yes! and have someone else take the blame was almost overpowering. And Nan had lied to me.

  “No,” said Thais, before I could finish thinking it through. “At least, we don’t think so.” She met my eyes quickly, then went on. “I mean, it could have been. It’s hard to know. But there’s a chance … we started it.”

  Nan just stared at her, trying to take it in. Then she turned to the fire chief.

  “Can you tell how it was started?” she asked.

  “We almost always can,” he answered, taking off his hat and rubbing his sleeve across his forehead. “And our specialist is still checking it out. But I’ve had twenty-five years of experience, and I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  “Like what?” Nan asked faintly.

  “It looks like someone threw a … sheet of fire directly at the back of your house,” he said, frowning, as if he knew his words didn’t make a lot of sense. “I mean, fires always start in one place, then spread. Or if an accelerant is used, there’s a traceable pattern. The back of your house looks like someone sprayed it with gasoline, then threw a match at it.”

  Nan put her hand over mouth and drew me close. Then she put her other arm around Thais.

  “But the thing is, so far there’s no trace of accelerant,” he went on. “There’s nothing to suggest that it was deliberately set. Except for the fact that its pattern simply can’t be natural.”

  He shook his hat against the side of his waders and called to his men to finish loading.

  “You should contact your insurance company, ma’am,” he said. “And when I get the final report from our specialist, I’ll send you a copy. Or the police will want to conduct a further investigation.” He made a sympathetic face, then strode toward one fire truck, barking orders.

  “We were doing a spell,” I confessed in a tiny voice. “In the backyard. I was trying to see Thais’s aura, to see if I could tell why her magick always goes weird. But we saw that same tree get hit by lightning and catch on fire, and the next thing we knew, the whole back of the house had gone up.” I really did feel like crying now. “I’m so sorry, Nan. We didn’t mean to do it. I don’t know why it happened.”

  She nodded, looking tired, and tucked a stray strand of hair back into her loose bun. She looked up quickly.” “Q-Tip!”

  “We got him out,” Thais said.

  “Thais got him out,” I clarified. “She punched a hole in the screen to rescue him.”

  Nan took Thais’s hand and looked at the scratches the metal screen had caused. Then, putting her arms around us both again, she started toward the house.

  “I’m so thankful neither of you was hurt,” she said.

  They’ve Seen What Happened

  “But they weren’t hurt?” Ouida asked, looking back at Petra in her rearview mirror.

  “No,” Petra said. “They went to school today, but their hands and faces look sunburned.”

  “And you don’t know how it happened?” Sophie asked.

  “They were doing a spell,” said Petra. She closed her eyes and leaned against her seat back, glad that Ouida was driving. She felt like she had aged more in the last seventeen years with Clio than she had in the two hundred years before that. “A spell to see what might be causing Thais’s magick to explode.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Ouida. “How’s your house?”

  “Water damaged, from the fire trucks,” said Petra, wishing she could block the picture of her charred house from her mind. “The whole back of the house went up. It’ll need to be scraped and sanded and painted and maybe a quarter of the weatherboards replaced. The windows are cracked and need new glass. Inside, the house smells like a smoke pit. Thais and Clio stayed up late, trying to mop up the water in the kitchen, but it’s going to take weeks to get the house back to normal.”

  She opened her eyes and saw Ouida looking at her in the mirror.

  “Do you think this lends credence to your darktwin theory?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Petra, feeling worn out. First that difficult birth all day and then coming home to find her house on fire. Clio had been upset about not being able to save Petra’s books and tools, as if she would care about those things. And they hadn’t been touched anyway. Her first, panicked thought had been that someone else had set the fire, trying to harm the girls. But it didn’t seem like that was the case.

  “Why don’t you try to get some rest?” Ouida suggested. “I’ll wake you up when we get to Chacahoula.”

  “Maybe I should.” Petra looked out the car window, thinking. “You know, the girls have shared visions of th
at night, the Treize, by the tree, with Melita. They’ve described the action as if they were there.”

  Sophie turned around in her seat, horrified. “Pas vraiment! But how could they?”

  “I don’t know,” Petra answered. “But they’ve seen what happened. More than once. Really seen it—the rain, the power surge, the lightning. Cerise.” Even after all this time, it was a fresh pain, the memory of her daughter. Since then, Petra had tried to help as many other women give birth as she could. “And last night, they saw someone facedown in a swamp and a dark figure standing over her, holding something, some kind of weapon. Thais described her as dark-haired, black-eyed, and beautiful.”

  “Not Axelle,” said Ouida.

  “No. Axelle’s best friend.”

  “Melita?” Sophie asked. “They saw her dead?”

  “I don’t know if she was dead,” Petra said slowly. “Clio just said she was facedown and someone was standing over her. And it was clearly a scene of danger. Maybe she was killed that night—or maybe just threatened or injured? I don’t see how she could have died….”

  “Daedalus thinks there’s a chance the rite affected Melita differently somehow,” Ouida said. “He thinks there’s a small chance that she wasn’t made immortal. But that seems so improbable.”

  “Impossible,” Sophie said, frowning.

  “But she did disappear that night, without a trace,” said Petra. “Without taking any of her things—not that she had much.”

  “Who was standing over her?” Ouida asked.

  “I don’t know, and neither do the twins. They think it was a man, but the figure was very dark, completely in shadow. They couldn’t describe him at all.”

  “Petra,” said Ouida seriously, “don’t tell anyone else about the girls’ visions.”

  They met eyes in the mirror, warm brown looking into blue-gray.

  “I know,” said Petra. If anyone else knew the twins were having these kinds of visions and if these visions had revealed or would reveal the answers to centuries-old mysteries, then the twins would definitely be in danger, perhaps from someone else and for a different reason than they were now. Petra sighed, rubbing her hand over her eyes. If that even made sense. She could hardly think, could hardly sort out what made sense. Had the girls set the house on fire? Or had someone seen them performing a spell and taken advantage of that to set the fire himself? Or herself?

  Why did the girls seem to have more than two hundred years’ worth of memories locked inside them? Could they remember all twelve generations of ancestors, back to Cerise? Why?

  And was Thais a dark twin? Petra had questioned Clio separately last night. It had been very late. Petra had helped Clio make some aloe ointment for her and Thais. Clio had explained the point of the spell, and Petra had asked her what she’d seen. Clio had described the same thing that Thais had, yet Petra was certain that Clio had seen something else, something that had disturbed her, that she wouldn’t talk about.

  It was a problem. Her life was becoming layered with problems.

  “Petra,” Sophie said gently. “We’re here.”

  Groggily Petra opened her eyes. Through the open car window, she saw tall live-oak trees blocking out the sky. Gray wisps of Spanish moss trailed down like tattered silk. In an instant, Petra was taken back to another time, when she would look overhead and see nothing but trees and sky and moss. No buildings, no planes, no wires.

  She’d liked their little village. She’d grown up there. Even its name, Ville du Bois, Village of the Woods, reflected how simple and innocent their lives were there. Not easy—never easy—but still, rhythmic and uncomplicated. Predictable, but in a good way. Crops, farm animals, knowing the plants, the birds in the wood, the fish in the streams. The cycles of Bonne Magie tied in so beautifully, so naturally. It took more effort to feel connected to the earth, to nature nowadays.

  She’d grown to be a woman there. She’d married Armand, whom she’d known all her life. They’d had children. Melita. Jacques had died when he was two. Philippe had lived ten months. After that she’d decided to have no more children. But accidents happen, even to witches performing anti-fertile spells. That had been Cerise, born when Petra was almost forty. Cerise had been a joy, never a sick day in her life, and Petra had taken another chance. But Amanda had lived barely long enough to be named and blessed.

  Then Armand had tired of village life. He’d gone on a trip to New Orleans to buy tools and lead to make bullets. He’d come home only once—to ask Petra to take the children and move with him to the city. She’d been afraid. She hadn’t wanted anything to happen to her daughters.

  Very ironic.

  She knew that Armand had died of malaria when he was forty-five. She’d seen his headstone in the cemetery in New Orleans. Where she now lived. After having lost her last two surviving children to disastrous circumstances.

  “Petra?”

  Petra blinked and looked up into Sophie’s face, as smooth and unlined as when she’d been twenty. Sophie looked concerned, and Petra sat up and opened the car door.

  “Sorry,” she said, climbing out of the car. “Wool gathering.”

  She looked around. They were parked on a narrow shell road that was used so rarely that grass had sprung up in the tracks. “Where are we?”

  Ouida waved at the map spread on the trunk of the car.

  “Here,” said Sophie, pointing to a spot. “Bit southeast of Chacahoula. We left the main roads about forty minutes ago.”

  “Get a bit of a rest?” Ouida asked.

  “Yes.” Petra squared her shoulders. “I can face this now.”

  “I miss Boston,” Ouida grumbled, wiping the sweat off her brow.

  Petra smiled at her, then pushed her own damp hair off her forehead. September was bad enough in the city, but in the middle of the woods, right on the edge of the swamp, it was suffocating.

  “You can’t just breathe,” Ouida said. “You have to actually swallow the air. That’s how thick it is.”

  “I miss Paris,” said Sophie.

  “You and Manon will be able to go back there soon enough,” Petra reassured her.

  “Yes…” said Sophie.

  Ouida checked her compass. She looked over-head, looked again at the detailed topographical map she’d gotten from the extension service. “Well, as close as I can figure, we’re about here.”

  Petra looked around, but nothing was familiar. The trees here had been mostly cleared out, probably a hundred years ago. New growth had sprung up, nature reclaiming its own.

  “Okay,” she said, pulling some supplies out of her dress pocket. “We might as well give it a go.”

  “It’s creepy being here,” Sophie said. She glanced over her shoulder as if waiting for someone to spring out of the woods. The light here was filtered and dim, and the only sounds were from insects and birds.

  The three women quickly made a circle on the ground, then stood inside it, holding hands. Petra felt a heaviness weighing on her that was more than the heat and the humidity. Damn Daedalus! When he’d brought Thais to New Orleans, he’d opened up a viper’s nest. Now snake after snake was slithering out, weaving paths of danger all around both Clio and Thais. The twins had almost been killed several times. Thank the goddess Melysa had been home the night of the wasp attack. Now Petra’s own house was a wet, blackened reminder that something was seriously out of balance in her life.

  “Petra?” Sophie’s voice was gentle.

  “Sorry.” Petra closed her eyes and breathed out slowly, trying to release every bit of tension, fear, and dread. Finally, finally, she felt herself slip into that place between waking and dream, where her boundaries blurred and merged with everything around her. She felt Ouida’s breathing, heard Sophie’s heart beating, felt their energies, older now and shaped forever by their lives, but still beautiful. She began her song of power and magick, softly at first, resting lightly on the air. Soon she was joined by Sophie, then Ouida, the three of them weaving their chants together as if they were
fine threads being spun into a strong, silken rope.

  Within her, Petra felt her power rise, felt her magick strengthening. A slight trembling shook the earth below their feet, and Petra’s eyes opened. Their voices didn’t waver, but they looked at each other. The whole Louisiana delta was made of layers upon layers of clay and river silt. There were never earthquakes here.

  Petra gasped slightly, feeling like a huge hand was pulling the power right out of her chest. She felt Ouida and Sophie squeeze her hands harder, and she closed her eyes again and tried to stay centered.

  Their voices rose in a strong, feminine crescendo, and at last the song was over and they broke apart from each other, staggering back. The trembling stopped.

  The world looked different. It felt different.

  The air was tinged with the scent of rain, and purple clouds swelled overhead. A thin cool wisp of breeze brushed Petra’s face as she looked around in the much dimmer light.

  “Storm coming in,” said Ouida, sounding breathless.

  “Yes,” said Petra, feeling resignation settle on her.

  “Look,” Sophie whispered, and Petra and Ouida turned to her. Sophie’s face was white, her eyes dark and troubled. One hand was outstretched, pointing, and Petra squinted to see.

  “There,” Sophie said, her voice shaking.

  Then Petra saw it. Ouida’s mapmaking had proven true. The three women looked at each other, a mix of emotions on their faces.

  “It’s still here,” Ouida said disbelievingly. “I never thought that would work.”

  Petra’s lips were pressed together hard as they walked over to a small clearing right past the first line of trees. There, on the ground, was a blackened ring of scorched earth, a circle of ashes. Where Cerise had died that night.

  “We’ve found the Source,” Sophie said sadly.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Clio said again. “Well, I mean, probably. I mean, you totally didn’t mean for anything like that to happen.”

  I made a wry face at her, tied the top on a bag of apples, and put them in the cart. School had been miserable today. Clio and I both obviously smelled like smoke—everything in our house did, including our entire wardrobes, and we hadn’t had time to wash any clothes. My face and hands still stung slightly despite Petra’s soothing ointment. Now we were at the grocery store. Petra had left the house early this morning, saying she had a case, and asked us to stop and get some things.