A Necklace of Water (5 page)

The spell started to unravel the crystal, separating its vibrations and energy from its form. It wasn’t a clean break; it wasn’t as if you could simply assume its power and still be left with a whole crystal. With horror I realized that the only way to get power from something was to destroy it utterly. The vibrations were being dismantled, untwined from their hold on the crystal’s perfect, beautiful structure of neatly aligned atoms. Like a storm pulling a rosebush off a trellis, the spell slowly ripped away the crystal’s energy. It was devastating. Then I was almost thrown backward as a sharp, clear burst of energy jolted into me, spearing my chest and filling me with light and fire.

My eyes popped open to stare into the glittering blue eyes of an ancient witch. His face was alight, younger, his cheeks flushed and not so sunken. An insane riptide of joy submerged me as I felt the huge, spiraling power within me, far more powerful than anything I’d felt before, either at a circle or with the cats. I felt like I was glowing in the dark, that I could walk down the street and bring trees back to life, heal children, wave my hand and solve any problem.

Daedalus smiled at the look on my face. I realized his hands were holding mine firmly, which was why I hadn’t been knocked out of the circle when the crystal’s energy entered me.

“Do you see, Clio?” His lips didn’t move, but I heard the words clearly. “Do you see how something’s power can become yours for the taking? Do you see what life can feel like?”

I nodded, speechless, my head buzzing with wonder, my knees shaking. If I opened my mouth to speak, white light would pour out, lighting this black room like sunlight at noon.

I was ecstatic, intensely happy, filled with light and love and power beyond all comprehension. It was the most incredible feeling I could possibly imagine—I’d had no idea such a thing was possible, and in
one second I knew that I wanted it, needed it, had to have it all the time.
What now
, I thought eagerly—
do we do another spell to keep it with us? How long will this last? Can I add to this?

With no warning, I felt it start to drain away.

Alarmed, I looked into Daedalus’s eyes and saw my knowledge confirmed there. He knew it was already fading.

“No, no,” I whispered. “Don’t let it go!”

He shook his head, and we continued to breathe slowly in and out in unison. The power leached out of me, like bones being bleached in the sun. I wanted to cry as I felt it leave me, felt my joy and passion and power and strength fade, leaving me diminished, heartbroken, a pale reflection of the glorious creature I had been only minutes earlier.

I felt utterly shattered, as if my bones were turning to lace. My right hand clenched the crystal like a frozen claw, and with difficulty I unpeeled my fingers.

Where the chunk of smoky quartz had been, there was now only a pile of ashy white powder. As soon as I took my hand away, it began to sift through Daedalus’s shaking hand.

Abruptly my legs gave way and I fell to the floor.

I
t was amazing, Axelle thought. Her black eyes focused unwaveringly on the black candle, hovering an inch over her black marble countertop. Her thought was a nebulous ribbon fluttering at the edge of her brain while most of her consciousness spun magick.

Axelle had never been able to levitate a candle, even after Melita had increased their powers, after Axelle had been studying magick, off and on, for almost two hundred years.

Now look at her.

It felt effortless, a smooth extension of herself, as if her will extended beyond the boundaries of her person to affect the world around her without even touching it.

This was all new since the failed rite. During the rite she had asked for more power. She had gotten it. And this newfound power was intoxicating. She knew that all of magick was balance—that if she had gained power, someone had lost it. But truly, why should she care?

“Mrew?” Minou jumped up on the counter next to the hovering candle. Her pupils flared when she sensed the magickal field, and when she saw the candle, she batted at it.

Axelle blinked, the candle fell, and the spell was broken. Minou’s tail puffed instantly, and she jumped off the counter to hide under the couch. The whole thing had taken two seconds.

Nearby, Manon managed half a smile, which was the most Axelle had seen since Manon had shown up on her doorstep, suitcase in hand. Yeah, Sophie had screwed up big this time. Not that Manon’s plan would have worked anyway—look at what Marcel had gone through. Axelle sighed. Marcel. When was he going to get tired of being a little storm cloud, raining on everyone’s parade? Goddess knew
she
was tired of it.

But Sophie had blocked Manon’s plan, when if she had just sat tight and not done anything, it would have ended up the way she wanted. Now Manon felt betrayed, like Sophie had stabbed her in the back. Which, as they all knew, wouldn’t have helped her plan either.

“You couldn’t do that before, could you?” Manon asked.

“No,” said Axelle, picking up the candle. “I’m stronger since the rite.” She looked up at Manon, used to her childish face and body, the blond hair, the dark eyes so oddly old and jaded and bitter in that pretty, girlish face. “You know, this is what Melita feels like all the time. Better than this. Stronger than this.” Axelle looked down at her perfectly manicured hands, the slim fingers that now seemed able to command magick at will.

“I never really realized it before,” Axelle went on. “We all knew she was wicked strong, but I never understood what that meant. It meant this.” She twined her white hands in the air, not making magick, but moving them slowly and gracefully through space. “It felt like part of her, easy and natural. I mean, I think things, and they come to me. It always seemed to take so much effort before. Studying books, memorizing things, practicing forms again and again. This is the difference between taking endless years of violin lessons and being born a virtuoso.”

Manon looked at her. “Do you feel like a virtuoso now, with magick?”

Axelle thought. “It’s just … so much easier. It comes to me. Before, I had to hunt magick down, wrest it out of the world, force it to my will. Now it feels there, everywhere, accessible. I can pluck it out of the air like a kite string.” She made a pinching motion with one hand. “It’s smooth.”

“That’s amazing.” Manon sounded bitter—she hadn’t gotten what she’d asked for from the rite. Her brown eyes looked bruised from crying, her small face pinched and pale. Axelle still had no idea what Manon saw in Sophie—Sophie seemed so staid, so boring and prissy and goody-goody. Not that Manon was that bent. But she could have done so much better. If Axelle had been Manon, had been made immortal as a beautiful child, she would have found a way to turn it to her advantage instead of whining about it for a quarter of a millennium.

“The thing is,” Axelle said, going to the fridge and taking the bottle of vodka out of the freezer, “this is what Melita felt back then. And who knows what she’s got now, what kind of power? But back then, she had this, possibly more, and she kept it to herself.”

“What do you mean? She showed us all the Source; she did the rite,” said Manon.

Axelle poured herself three fingers of vodka in a glass she hoped was clean. Manon wasn’t the little homemaker Thais had been, and the place was a wreck. “But she didn’t truly share her power. Yeah, she did the rite, made us all immortal, yippee. But only because she wanted immortality for herself as well. Before then she was this strong for, what,
ten years? A long time. And she didn’t share that, didn’t tell anyone else how to get it.”

Manon frowned, then picked up her glass and went into the big main room. She sank down on a black leather chair with her back against one arm and her legs dangling over the other. “Well, why would she? People who have power want to keep it for themselves.”

“You don’t understand.” Axelle lay down on the couch, her clothes sliding against the leather. She punched a pillow into place so her head was still high enough for her to drink. “I was Melita’s best friend from the time we were six. I was more her sister than Cerise was—
she
was always off in her own little fairyland, all fey and golden and otherworldly. Of course we now know she was apparently boinking half the village.”

“Only Richard and Marcel,” Manon said.

Axelle waved a hand. “Uh-huh. How many people were you boinking? Or me? None. Because nice girls didn’t. Even naughty nice girls didn’t. But any-way, I was practically Melita’s sister, but she didn’t share her power with me. She could have made me stronger, and she didn’t. I was the person she loved best in the world, and she left me behind in the dust, just like she left all of you.”

“Huh,” Manon said thoughtfully.

Axelle wished she’d never started talking; she hated Manon knowing how hurt she felt now, today, at what Melita had done more than two centuries ago. But she couldn’t help herself—these last two days had been a revelation.

“I mean, I was proud of her all those years. Yes, maybe I was also envious, but mostly I was proud. And she told me how sorry she was that she couldn’t just wave her wand and tell me how to do it, that she had no idea what had happened to her—that maybe she had been born that way. Yeah, right!”

Now that Axelle had gotten started, she couldn’t stop. “She
wasn’t
born that way—she discovered it. Or someone showed her, someone none of us knew about. If she had shown me, we could have made incredible magick together. But she kept it all to herself.”

Manon was watching her now as the implications of this started to sink in.

“And you were best friends,” she said.

“More than best friends. Blood sisters.” Axelle felt her cheeks heating up with anger, or maybe it was the vodka. For so many years she had let these thoughts go. But now they were stuck in her craw, a constant irritant. “But she didn’t want a blood sister—she wanted a
lackey.
She wanted me to stay
beneath
her. She
wanted
to leave me behind. I never
would have done that to her.” Axelle tipped the glass back angrily. She’d already said too much.

She was pissed, really pissed, at Melita for the first time. She’d hated Melita for leaving her behind, but she hadn’t really known what had happened. Maybe something bad had happened to her—maybe she hadn’t been able to come back, maybe she hadn’t become immortal for some reason, maybe she was dead.

But now Axelle felt, deeply and certainly, that Melita wasn’t dead, that she could have taken Axelle with her. She could have shared her power, could have helped Axelle be much stronger—and she had decided to keep Axelle down.

I
woke up feeling like I’d spent the night in a cement mixer.

My alarm sounded like the world coming apart. Groaning, I leaned over and smacked it off the table. Then I looked at the floor, spinning crazily, and realized I was going to hurl.

Our small bathroom was between my room and Thais’s, and I stumbled toward it, whacking my shoulder hard on the door frame. I drew in my breath with a hiss, kicked the door shut behind me, and
almost
made it to the john before I tossed. Operative word being
almost.

After I was done heaving, I splashed water on my face and rinsed out my mouth. A quick look in the mirror told me I looked horrible—splotchy, greenish, hollow-eyed. My birthmark stuck out against my unnaturally pale skin as if someone had smashed a raspberry against my left cheek. I grabbed a towel and swiped up the floor and toilet as best I could, then pushed the towel behind the big, old-fashioned tub, figuring I’d get it later and slip it into the wash.

I felt like walking death. Or in my case, staggering death.

This was a hangover, but the worst effing hangover I’d ever had in my whole misspent youth. This was a hangover caused by doing risky magick.
Dark magick
, I admitted to myself with a searing sense of shame and remorse. Magick I was hiding from Nan and especially Thais.

But that burst of power I’d gotten from the crystal—

My throat tightened again. I grabbed my hair with one hand to keep it out of the line of fire and hunkered over the toilet.

“Clio? Time to get up!” Nan’s voice came dimly to me from downstairs.

Oh goddess, I had school today.
Frick.

“Coming,” I croaked, hoping she could hear me.

A couple of dry heaves later, I groped my way to the bathroom door and headed downstairs, hanging onto the handrail so I wouldn’t fall
and break my neck. Obviously I had “an awful stomach bug,” and Nan would definitely let me stay home from school.

The smell of coffee and toast almost made me hurl again, but I forced myself into the kitchen so I could evoke as much sympathy as possible.

“Clio?” Nan called again. “Thais, maybe you should—”

“Hey,” I said weakly, entering the kitchen.

“Honey, what’s the matter?”

Thais was pouring me a cup of coffee, but she turned around at Nan’s tone.

“Whoa,” she said. “What’s wrong?”