Song of the Sword (8 page)

She dimly felt her socks being pulled off, the cold air flowing around her bare feet.

Felicia held up her cell phone. “Two seconds after you’re naked, the pictures are going to be hitting the phone of every kid in my contact list,” Felicia said. “You’re about to become the most famous girl in Oscana Collegiate, Airy-Anne.”

The girl sitting on Ariane’s knees turned herself around and began fumbling with the button of Ariane’s jeans. Ariane hardly noticed. Her attention was turned inward, seeking the source of that thunderous song. It was like following an unfamiliar path through a dark, dripping rain forest, trying to find a view of the sea. She was close, so close...

Jeans unbuttoned and unzipped. Hands in the waistband, about to pull them off.

“Wait, get her to her feet first,” Felicia said. “Stephanie, you pull the t-shirt over her head. Cassandra, pull the jeans down from behind. That way neither of you will be in the shot.”

Almost...almost...

They hauled her to her feet. In a moment she’d be standing naked before Felicia’s cell phone lens.

And then, with an almost physical shock, as though she’d stuck her finger in an electrical socket, she connected with the power she had sensed building inside of her.

Gadewch y dyfroedd byw ynoch, a chi o fewn y dyfroedd. Y
p
ˆ
wer yn eiddo i chi!

The Lady’s voice echoed in her head with the force of waves breaking against a rocky shore.

Let the waters live within you, and you within the waters. The power be yours!

And it
was
hers, at last. Here was the epiphany she had missed before: power she had never imagined, suddenly at her beck and call. All the water in Wascana Lake felt like a part of her body. She could sense everything in it, locate every fish, every rock, every sunken bicycle and pop can and grocery cart. The water lived in her and she in it – and she could use it as she willed.

And she willed...
this
.

The lake erupted. Ropes of water like muddy snakes shot skyward, poised above her and her tormentors. Felicia, Shania, Stephanie, and Cassandra froze like hares caught in a car’s headlights. Ariane pulled free of Stephanie’s slackened grip, ripped the gag from her mouth, and waded three steps into the lake. The water, though it had to be ice-cold, felt as warm as a blanket around her bare feet.

“If I were you,” she said, “I’d run.”

The girls stared at her in confusion, faces yellow in the lamplight.

And then Ariane struck.

The watery ropes, black with rotting muck, sank back toward the surface of the lake, thickening, crouching, and trembling like feral cats – and then sprang toward the shore with the force of a water cannon. The first struck Felicia in the chest, knocking her off her feet, rolling her over and over across the parking lot. The other girls turned to run, but it was too late. The blasts of mud-choked water hit their backs instead of their chests, throwing them to the pavement.

Screaming, they tried to scramble to their feet, but Ariane wasn’t finished.

Thinner, cleaner tentacles of water reached out from the lake and snapped down on the cowering girls like whips. One smashed Felicia’s cell phone, and glittering shards of plastic and circuitry scattered across the asphalt. Other tendrils struck the girls with audible cracks, leaving red marks on their bare skin. Weeping and shrieking, the girls ran for the Toyota. A tendril of water smashed in the back window, scattering shards of shining glass across the pavement. The SUV skidded out of the parking lot before the doors even closed.

Ariane raised her hands and the tendrils of water slipped back into the lake, leaving behind only a few flecks of foam. She turned to face the once-more placid water. “Thank you,” she whispered.

The roaring had subsided, but she could feel it, tucked away, ready to be called upon if she ever needed it again.
This
was the power the Lady had bequeathed to her. Ari
ane needed to study it, to understand it...

A fit of shivering gripped her, so strong her teeth clattered like castanets. Her feet suddenly felt as if she’d stuck them in a deep freezer, and a wave of tiredness washed over her. She was exhausted. She needed to go home, fast.

She buttoned her jeans and zipped them up again. The shoes, socks, and sweater the gang had stripped off her lay soaked in the parking lot. Ariane knelt and touched them. The water sprang away on her command, and she gratefully pulled on the now-dry sweater. As she was tugging on the equally dry shoes and socks, a lone jogger passed through the parking lot, glancing at her as if wondering what nut would go wading in the lake in this weather.

She gave him her most innocent smile, gathered her own filthy clothes, stuffed them in the shopping bag Felicia had brought them in, and headed home.

She had plans to make.

~ • ~

Wally was supposed to be doing homework in the living room (but was actually watching TV) when Felicia came in that night. Once he had finished tidying her room, he’d stayed upstairs until he heard Felicia and Shania leave. When he did come downstairs, he discovered that they’d taken Ariane’s clothes, still unwashed, with them.

His presence in the house had been an unpleasant surprise for Ms. Carson when she’d arrived around three. She didn’t believe his story of a stink bomb in the chemistry lab until she called the school and confirmed it herself. Fortunately, she didn’t think to ask if he’d been at school at all.

He hoped Ariane would send some kind of message, but the house phone didn’t ring, nobody knocked on the door, and the only e-mails he received promised him cut-rate prescription drugs and a significant portion of a Nigerian ex-politician’s fortune.

At five-thirty he ate his spaghetti under the baleful glare of Ms. Carson, who somehow made it clear, without saying a word, that she considered it
his
fault Felicia hadn’t come home yet. After supper he retired to the living room with a Coke and a plate of Oreos, while Ms. Carson banged around in the kitchen for a while. Before she left for one of her committee meetings – Save Our Squirrels or Protectors of the Park or something like that – she warned him sternly to tell his sister where the leftover spaghetti was when she came in. “She’ll need to eat after a hard night of studying with her friends. You tell her, now.”

“I promise.” Wally didn’t try to disabuse Ms. Carson of the fanciful notion that Felicia had been studying.

About a quarter to seven, more than half an hour after the sun had set, Wally heard the front door open and close. He only caught a glimpse of Felicia as she passed the living room door on the way to the stairs, but what he saw was enough to make him jump to his feet and rush after her.

He reached the bottom of the stairs just as his sister disappeared along the upstairs hallway. He looked at the front door, and then up the steps.

A clear trail of black, wet spots marked Felicia’s passage.

He ran upstairs. She was in the bathroom, T-shirt half-off. Stinking water and black muck soaked her from head to foot – just as it had soaked him and Ariane that morning. On her chest, just below her bra, he saw a big purpling bruise.

He gaped at her. “What happened to you?”

She jerked her T-shirt back down. “Don’t you ever knock?” she snarled.

“You left the bathroom door open.”

“I didn’t know you were here. Now get out.”

He didn’t budge. “You’re soaked. Wascana Lake, from the smell of it. Fall in?”

“None of your business.” She pointed to the door. “Get out!”

“All right, all right.” He backed up, and she slammed the door in his face. He put his mouth close to the door. “Ariane put up a fight, eh?”

The door opened again so suddenly he jumped back. “You shut up about her!” Felicia’s voice shook and her green eyes blazed in her pale face. He’d never seen her so angry. “You don’t mention her. And you don’t talk to her. If I catch you –”

“You’re dripping all over the carpet,” Wally pointed out.

Felicia told him to do something to himself that would have shocked Ms. Carson into a dead faint, then slammed the door again. A moment later he heard water running in the shower.

Wally returned to his homework and the TV, but could
n’t pay attention to either. Instead, he stared into a corner of the room at nothing in particular. Felicia had gone after Ariane. Felicia had come back bruised, and as wet and furious as a half-drowned cat.

The conclusion was inescapable. Somehow – he had no idea how – Ariane had gotten the better of his sister.

He grinned. The more he learned about Ariane, the more he liked her.

The fact that he and she had a magical quest to complete was just gravy.

CHAPTER FIVE

The White Ford

By the time Ariane got home
to Wallace Street, she was more exhausted than she could remember ever having been in her life. Her determination to explore her strange new power and think seriously about how she could use it to fulfill the Lady’s quest – and use it to find her mother – had given way to an even stronger determination to go straight to bed.

Nevertheless, for some reason the College Avenue intersection drew her tired attention. She stared at it, frowning. For a moment, nothing moved. Then a white Ford Focus turned the corner. It drove slowly past her, and as it passed, she caught a glimpse of its driver, a middle-aged man with a graying beard and ponytail. He didn’t see her – he was looking at something in the passenger seat. The car continued down the street and turned left at the next intersection.

Ariane stared after it. She’d never seen that car in the neighbourhood before. There was nothing particularly odd about
that
. The driver could be visiting someone. He could have been looking down at a map in the driver’s seat. But still, something about the car and the driver felt wrong in a way Ariane couldn’t quite put her finger on.
The Lady’s power, warning me about something?

She shook her head. Most likely, Aunt Phyllis’s paranoia about prowlers was starting to rub off on her.

Pulling her house key from her pocket, she walked by the tipsy garden gnome and back up the front steps she had dashed down in fury just an hour ago. The outer door was unlocked, and she stepped into the little entryway. But she paused before unlocking the inner door, gathering her strength to confront her aunt yet again.

She knew she needed to talk to Aunt Phyllis, to smooth things over, but right now what she needed most was sleep. She would have to convince her aunt to put off their heart-to-heart until tomorrow. Wouldn’t it be better to talk after they had both had a good night’s sleep? Silently composing her argument in her head, Ariane took a deep breath, unlocked the door, and opened it.

No one called out to her. In fact, she could hear nothing but the muttering voice of some CBC commentator on the radio.

Ariane crept forward and looked through the French doors into the living room. Aunt Phyllis sat in her favourite chair, head thrown back, face slack and mouth slightly open. For a horrible moment, Ariane thought she was dead, that their argument had triggered a heart attack or a stroke. Then she saw Aunt Phyllis’s chest rising and falling.
She must have dozed off waiting for me to come home.

Sleep had smoothed some of the lines in Aunt Phyllis’s face, and Ariane could see a hint of her mother’s features there – a strong enough hint that her breath caught in her throat. “Mom,” she whispered. “Where are you?”

The moment passed. The woman in the chair was just Aunt Phyllis: a small, vulnerable woman, trying to do her best in a horribly difficult situation. Ashamed of her earlier outburst, and resolving to put things right in the morning, Ariane pulled a pink and green flowered afghan from the couch, spread it over her aunt, and then tiptoed up to her room.

She spotted Pendragon asleep on her bed just as she was about to close the door, so she left it open a crack to keep the cat from waking her up in the middle of the night scratching to be let out. She pulled her dirty clothes out of the shopping bag and stuffed them down the laundry chute. The leather jacket was a write-off, but she couldn’t quite bear to throw it away yet; instead, she tossed it over her desk chair. She stripped off the clothes she had borrowed from Felicia, wadded them into a lump and kicked them into a corner, then tugged on her warmest flannel pajamas and climbed into bed, careful not to disturb Pendragon.