A Circle of Ashes (2 page)

“But Axelle is the one who saved me from my dream,” Thais objected. “She stopped me from choking myself.”

I looked at her. “That’s what she told you. Any chance she was doing the opposite? Tightening the twisted sheet around your neck, but then you woke up and stopped her?”

Thais frowned. “I don’t know.” She sighed and looked at the clock. It was almost 2 a.m. “So that still gives us Richard and Luc and those three. And Richard isn’t just a really weird fifteen-year-old with tattoos and a pierced eyebrow. He’s a grown-up. A really old grown-up in a kid’s body.”

I forced myself to say it. “What about Luc? He lied to us about so many things. Maybe he was trying to lull us into loving him so we wouldn’t think he would try to kill us.”

“I don’t know,” Thais said after a long pause. “I can’t wrap my mind around it. Logically, it’s possible. But I can’t get myself there.”

“Yeah. I know.” I let my breath out, feeling incredibly tired. Well, finding out your entire life has been a web of lies can do that to a girl. “But still—we shouldn’t be blind about this. He outright lied about so many things. Made us believe—I mean, he was way convincing, right? Who knows what he’s capable of?” I said it, though something inside me just couldn’t believe it. Then something else occurred to me.

“We’re not out of danger,” I said. “Especially with Nan still MIA. But I just thought of something—there’s a spell.”

I expected Thais to pull her sour-milk expression at the mention of a spell, and I wasn’t disappointed. She was still finding it hard to get cozy with all the witch stuff, despite how much she’d loved the feel of magick at the Treize’s circle.

“It’s a spell where two people sort of share their power,” I said, trying to remember where I’d seen it. “Like, people in love use it to strengthen their bond, make them closer. Or a parent might do it with a child to help with learning magick or make the child stronger. It makes it easier to join your powers together afterward. If we did it … both of us would be stronger—against anything that might come at us.”

Thais nodded thoughtfully. “Is it dangerous?”

I frowned. “I don’t think so. Let me get the book.” I knew what she meant—Thais and I had done magick, shared a vision, and it had gotten weirdly huge and powerful, out of control, and I didn’t know why. Our grandmo—Petra had told us that in our magickal
famille
, people were afraid of twins because their magick put together was frighteningly strong. I wasn’t sure if that was true.

In the little house I shared with Nan, we had a living room, workroom, dining room, small bathroom, and kitchen on the first floor. Upstairs were two small bedrooms and another bathroom. Our workroom had bookcases full of magickal texts. The first time Thais had come into this house, she’d been horrified when she saw our books, our supplies for magick. I snickered now, thinking about it.

“Would it be indexed in the back?” Thais asked. “Can I help look?”

“Do you speak old French?”

“I don’t even speak new French,” she said. “Not much, anyway.”

“Okay. Then just sit tight. I should be able to find it….”

A few minutes later I had found it in an old
grimoire
that belonged to Nan. It was in Old French, which I wasn’t completely fluent in but could hack my way through. The spell was called “
Joindre tous les deux
,” or “Join both.”

Quickly I got our supplies together.

“Why do I feel like I’m in the Addams family?” Thais asked, watching me. “Aren’t you leaving out the eye of newt, wing of bat?”

I looked at her. “You liked it at Axelle’s house, the magick.”

She lowered her eyes and quit smiling. “Yeah.”

“Okay, get in,” I said. Thais came to stand next to me as I drew a chalk circle around us on the workroom floor.

“You’re really good at drawing circles,” Thais said, sounding nervous.

“Lots of practice. Circle-drawing 101.” I did it again with salt, then I got Nan’s four pewter cups to represent the four elements and put them at the points of the compass. One held water, one held incense to represent air, one held dirt from our backyard to represent, well, earth, and one held a candle for fire.

“Fire is our element,” I reminded Thais. “Every witch has an affinity with one element, and she focuses on that element in her magick. It makes it smoother, more effective.”

I lit another candle and put it on the floor between us. We sat cross-legged, facing each other. I found the right page again and began to read.

“Can you do it in English?” Thais asked.

I thought. “Well, it might be more effective in French—it all rhymes and everything. Sometimes the very words themselves hold magickal power.”

“But I won’t understand it,” said Thais, and I thought I heard fear in her voice.

“And you think I’ll turn you into a frog?”

Thais just looked unhappy.

“Okay, um, I think I can just translate this as I go,” I muttered, reading down. “Maybe it doesn’t really have to be in French. Let’s see. First let’s center ourselves and get in touch with our magick. Then I’ll read this little section. There are four sections, and at each section, you’ll combine two things together. I’ll explain as we go. Okay?”

Thais nodded, looking uncertain.

I closed my eyes and reached out to barely touch the tips of my fingers to Thais’s knees. After a moment, she did the same to me. “Slow your breathing,” I said very softly. “Slow your mind. Let everything relax. Let go of fear and fatigue. Inside you is a joyous door that leads to magick. When you relax completely, the door doesn’t open—it dissolves, letting you become one with magick. Magick is everywhere around you, in everything, living and inert. That’s the strength and power we tap. Now breathe, very, very slowly.”

From just the little connection I already had with Thais, I was in tune with her aura, and I could feel her gradually relax and become centered. It took several minutes, but as Nan said, quality magick takes time.

Slowly I opened my eyes and referred back to the book. My translation was clumsy, and it was hard to make it into a nice, smooth chant.

“I join with you, my sister, so that we will be one.”

I had Thais repeat that, then I went on.

“We are of the same blood. Now let us be of the same heart and the same mind. I join with you and offer you my power and strength.”

Thais repeated it.

“Water is our witness.” I motioned to Thais, and she poured two silver cups of water into one larger cup.

“Air is our witness.” Thais took two long incense sticks and held their tips together so that their thin spirals of smoke twined together like vines.

“Earth is our witness.” Thais took white sand and black sand and rubbed them together in her palms, like salt and pepper. When they were evenly mixed, she dribbled them out of her hand into the rune shape I showed her,
goeffe
, which looks like an
X
. It stood for gift, partnership, generosity.

“Fire is our witness,” I said. Thais picked up two smaller candles and lit them simultaneously from the candle between us. Then she set them into a small silver candleholder that had two joined stems.

“We join our strength and power,” we said together, and I nodded at two small willow twigs. Thais tied them securely together in the middle with red string.

“Life is our witness.”

I took a piece of chalk and drew the rune
quenne
on the floor “This is for fire, our element,” I said. “It’s our passion, our creativity.”

I gave Thais the piece of chalk and showed her the rune in the book that I wanted her to draw. She did. “Lage is for knowledge, creativity, psychic power,” I said. “We call on the power of these runes to make our spell complete.”

Then Thais and I put our hands on each other’s shoulders and closed our eyes.

“
Nous voulons joindre nous tous les deux
,” I said. We said it together and then said it a third time. And that was when we got blown across the room.

I
hit the wall headfirst and cried out. After several stunned moments, I slowly sat up, trying not to groan. Clio lay in a heap on the other side of the room, and I got up and ran to her. She was already blinking and trying to sit up.

“What the hell was that?” she said.

I knelt and put my arm around her. “Are you okay? You didn’t say that would happen!”

Her eyes were wide, and she rubbed her head where it had hit a bookcase. “Because I didn’t know!” she said. “We got blown right out of that circle! I’ve never heard of anything like that happening. Holy crap.”

“Then what went wrong?” I asked.

“I have no fricking idea.” Clio stood up and brushed off her butt. She rubbed her head again. “Ow. That has never, ever happened to me.” She looked at me, and I felt the usual little spark of surprise that we looked so much alike. Her hair was longer, and our birthmarks were on opposite cheeks, but there was no doubt we were identical. “Maybe it was the twinpower thing,” she said, sounding kind of awed.

“God. Well, no wonder everyone’s freaked about it.” I realized I was shaking and looked over at the circle. The candles and incense had been snuffed out, and the salt circle wasn’t even there anymore. “So are we joined now?”

We looked at each other, and I sent out a systems check to see if I felt different.

“I’m not sure,” said Clio. “I don’t know if the spell had time to work or what.”

But as I stood there, I realized that I was picking up stuff from Clio—I could
feel
her next to me, but not physically. It was like I felt a form, a shape, next to me. Not like a ghost. Not even human-looking. But it was Clio, definitely Clio. I felt her puzzlement and excitement. I felt fear in myself, but not from her.

“Hey. Is that you?” I asked.

Looking amazed, Clio laughed and nodded. “I feel you too. It’s like—Flubber. Like a Flubber Thais, only I can’t see it. This is way cool.”

“It’s strange,” I said. “I wonder if it works when we’re farther apart.”

“I guess we’ll find out,” she said, grinning.

At dawn I went back to Axelle’s. I still didn’t know how Axelle Gauvin had wrangled custody of me after Dad had died. A spell? Strings pulled? I hoped that Petra would come back soon and that I’d be able to live with her and Clio when she did.

In the meantime, all my stuff was in Axelle’s apartment, in the French Quarter.

At dawn, in September, it was about eighty-five degrees. I walked down narrow, almost quiet streets, thinking how pretty the Quarter was with not many people in it. Later today it would be crowded and noisy and smell like beer and sunscreen.

I was still awed by the spell with Clio. I mean, I had gotten thrown eight feet across a room. By magick. It was hard to believe. Except I had a knot on my head to prove it. Clio said she would try to figure out what had gone wrong, but if she’d never even heard of anything like that happening…

I used my key and went through the wroughtiron side gate that led to Axelle’s apartment. The narrow carriageway was cool and damp, and I could barely hear my shoes on the ancient flagstones, worn by centuries of use. The small courtyard was a mini-Eden, with birds fluttering around the subtropical plants that lined the tiny swimming pool.

And here was Axelle’s front door. Despite feeling shaken by last night’s spell, a new strength had solidified in me, and I felt complete and sure of myself. I opened the door and went in. As usual, the scent of cigarette smoke made my nostrils twitch. It was cool and dark inside, and as I shut the door, Minou, Axelle’s cat, ran past my legs into the apartment.

“Thais.”

My eyes were adjusting to the dim light, and I saw Axelle lying on her black leather couch. Putting aside the newspaper she was reading, she stood and came over to me.

“You’re up early. Catching up on current events?” I said evenly, moving into the kitchen.

“Up all night. Reading the comics.” Her dark shiny pageboy swung right at her chin, every hair in place. She might have been awake for the previous twenty-four hours, but you’d never be able to tell. “So you stayed out all night. Another wasp attack?”

“More like shock and horror over my family’s history.” Not looking at her, I poured myself some orange juice and put two slices of bread into the toaster.

“Shock? Okay, I’ll give you that. You had a lot dumped on you yesterday. But horror?” Her red lips formed a smile. She poured herself a glass of juice, then got a bottle of vodka from the top of the fridge. She splashed some into her orange juice and took an appreciative sip. It was barely 7 a.m.

“Thais,” she said, with a warm, almost seductive note in her voice, “you’ve been handed the opportunity of a lifetime. The chance to become immortal—it’s what fantasies are made of.”

“Or nightmares,” I said. “You guys, the ones I’ve met so far—the Treize—you’re not exactly the poster kids for health and happiness.”

Axelle stretched, her lithe, catlike body arching. “You might be surprised at how much pleasure one can experience with an endless lifetime to pursue it.”

“News flash,” I said. “Pleasure isn’t the same thing as happiness.” I felt bitter and angry that my life was entwined with the Treize at all. It wasn’t that I hated Axelle—I didn’t. But I didn’t trust her, and we had nothing in common.