A Necklace of Water (21 page)

“Clio,” he called after me, but I shut out his voice as if he were a siren, calling me to smash my boat on the rocks.

I
t was still dark outside. Half awake, I couldn’t see the moon out my window, which meant it was after 3 a.m. Then I realized that it was amazing that I even knew that and marveled sleepily to myself.

So after three but before dawn. I snuggled down into my pillow, already slipping back into my dream. I didn’t know why I’d woken up. I was so tired, and this was so delicious, this almost-asleep feeling. It felt incredibly good, and—

Clio was awake.

We hadn’t shared a dream, had we? I wondered, barely conscious. I lay still, my eyes closed, vaguely wondering what had woken her. My body felt like lead, my arms and legs boneless and weighted down. My bed felt perfect—the sheets were perfect, I was the perfect temperature, and I didn’t have school tomorrow.

After I dozed a minute, some niggling feeling at the edge of my consciousness told me again that Clio was awake. For no reason, I forced my eyes open and focused. She wasn’t sick, was she? Didn’t sound like it. And everything in me was dragging me back down to sleep, as if—

As if I’d been spelled, actually.

This thought made me open my eyes again, and I ran a systems check, wondering if I would recognize a sleep spell. I thought I could—this felt like I was being cradled in a golden web of sleep, and it was drawing me down into perfect, unworried slumber.

But Clio was wide awake. Why was she awake if I’d been spelled? Had I even been spelled? Thoughts flitted out of my mind like tissue in a wind, sliding away before I could even focus on them. All I wanted to do was drift off again.

Deliberately I lay still, keeping my breathing deep and even but trying hard not to slip into unconsciousness, no matter how inviting it was. I closed my eyes and concentrated. It came to me that Clio felt nervous or excited or scared. What should I do? Could I even get up? I was afraid to try: if I were bound to my bed magickally, I would freak out and panic.

Almost silently, Clio left her room and crossed the small landing at the top of the stairs. She passed by my half-open door and padded downstairs barefoot. Something told me that everything was fine, everything was all right, that I should just go back to sleep and not worry about it.

Which made me freak out even more—those feelings were the classic signs of sleep spells, as Petra had described them to me. I fought against exhaustion, blinking again and again, and propped myself up on my elbows, even though being in a coma sounded good right now. Casting my senses, I felt that Petra, downstairs, was asleep herself.

Which meant that Clio had done this: she’d spelled the house so we would all sleep deeply. But why?

I need to wake up
.

My sister had spelled me to sleep through something. I forced myself to sit up, even though my arms and legs felt like they weighed hundreds of pounds. Again came that reassuring thought:
Everything’s fine, it’s nothing, go back to sleep
.

Clio left the house. I felt her leave, and then I heard the faintest of clicks as the front door closed behind her. I finally thought to look at my clock. It was four twenty-five.

What in the world was she doing?

I got clumsily to my feet, feeling dopey and wiped out. I tried to think of a spell to counteract the sleep spell—I was sure there was one; I just couldn’t think of it. Instead I groped my way to the bathroom and hunched over the sink, splashing cold water onto my face.

That woke me up enough to remember to draw some runes in the air—
deige
for dawn, awakening, clarity.
Uche
for strength.
Seige
for life and energy. Then I muttered:

Repel the fog that clouds my brain

Bring me to myself again

Whatever spell thus binds me so

I now compel to let me go.

Within moments I felt myself waking up. I splashed more water on my face, then remembered that Clio had already
left
. I raced into my room and pulled on yesterday’s jeans and a sweatshirt, then sped downstairs as quietly as I could. I ran into the front room and looked out the window by the front door, knowing that Clio must have left minutes ago, when I was trying to clear my head in the bathroom, and that I had no hope of knowing where she had gone.

But to my amazement, she was standing in the front yard by herself. She was dressed in dark clothes, and of course her hair was dark,
but I had eyes like a cat and could see her outline against Petra’s plants by the fence. What the heck was she doing?

In the next instant, I raced back upstairs, taking the steps three at a time. Behind a poster in my room was a niche I’d made in the wall. My supplies were in there—my usual magick tools, plus the things I used with Carmela. I threw them into a canvas bag and rushed downstairs.

At the front window, I was just in time to see a dark blue car pull up in front of our house. Clio went out to meet it. I stared, even as I shoved my bare feet into my sneakers by the front door. When Clio opened the passenger-side door, the interior light went on.

It was Daedalus. What a big surprise. They’d been working together; now they were going to do something, put some plan in action.
Oh, Clio
, I thought in anguish.
How could you
?

I accepted the fact that I would follow them even before I consciously decided to. I grabbed the keys to the rental and hovered by the front door. As soon as they were down the block, I slipped out the front door and hurried to our car. The streets were virtually empty: they would be easy to follow, but I’d have to stay far back, since I would be obvious.

Clio, he killed our father. What are you doing
?

B
eside him in the front seat, Clio looked tired but alert. For the last forty minutes, she’d been uncharacteristically quiet, none of her usual bravado on display. He felt the tension coming off her and felt also how she was working to control it.

He was proud of her. He congratulated himself on finding her, discovering her talent, taking her under his wing. Melita would be very pleased.

“And this will open the Source?” Clio’s voice was quiet but startling in the dark car.

Daedalus shot her a glance. “Yes.”

“And we’ll increase our power with those spells?”

“Yes. We’ll take power from the nature around us, as we’ve practiced. Then we’ll be able to take greater power from the Source itself.”

Clio nodded, not looking at him.

On the farthest horizon, the sky was lightening almost imperceptibly. It would be dawn in half an hour. He would be ready. And so would Melita.

I
’m not a morning person. There’s a reason I started drinking coffee when I was five—I needed that jolt of joe to gear me up for kindergarten. Right now I felt like my eyeballs had been fused open. I was hyper-alert, every nerve ending tingling, but I also felt a bone-deep weariness from a combination of having worked hard magick again and again and having gotten barely any sleep last night.

Each road Daedalus turned down was narrower than the last, and by the time it was almost dawn, we were bumping down what felt like a dirt cattle path. I recognized where we were; he’d told me we were going back to the circle of ashes.

“What about everyone else?” I asked as Daedalus rocked to a halt beneath a huge live oak. I looked around—no other cars were visible.

“They’re joining us at daybreak,” Daedalus said, getting out of the car. As usual, he was dressed in dark, somewhat old-fashioned-looking clothes and had his walking cane hung over one arm. “We’ll start with the purity of just us two and then add others as needed.”

I looked at him and once again mentally kicked myself for having put myself into what had the potential to be an incredibly stupid, if not deadly, situation. I seemed to have a death wish of some kind, or maybe I was just dumb as an effing rock.

Daedalus popped the trunk, then leaned around to call me. “Come, my dear. It isn’t far now.”

This whole area felt deeply familiar, now that Id been here less than two weeks ago—and then there were all the visions of the place that Thais and I’d had.

Well, here goes
.

We cast our circle within the circle of ashes just before dawn lit the clouds with scalloped edges of pink and orange. It was almost cool right now, but it would be warm again later. Around us, some trees had lost their leaves, but mostly there were pines and live oaks. Though the woods looked scraggly, they weren’t bare.

No measly candles for us—instead Daedalus kindled a small fire on the patch of bare earth in the center of the circle. We stood facing each other but not touching. Closing my eyes, I sang the spell to reveal my power, perfect and whole and strong, the inner essence of who I was. Then I felt Daedalus’s power, and together we sang the bridge that twined our powers together. We weren’t an even match—when Thais and I did this, it felt smooth and almost indistinguishable. But Daedalus and I were two very different beings, and I was glad we wouldn’t have to do this much.

Just yesterday he had taught me the next section, where I joined my power to the nature around me. Here, surrounded by huge trees and leaves and rocks, I would feel like the Incredible Hulk when it was over. I’d memorized the spell phonetically and recognized only about half the words. It felt very ancient, and as I sang, I realized for the first time that a dark thread ran through it. I hadn’t noticed it yesterday, hadn’t felt it. But now that I was here, setting it loose, its dark undercurrent set off an alarm in my head.

But the alarm vanished in the next moment as a rush of power, beautiful and pure and intense, swept me from head to foot, making me sway and gasp. Light and strength filled my chest and spread throughout my body, as if I’d been empty before and was being filled with life and oxygen for the first time. I was awestruck—this was a hundred times more powerful and intense than anything I’d done before. I felt unbearably ecstatic and at the same time overwhelmed.

I opened my eyes. Opposite me, Daedalus looked flushed, healthy, younger. He smiled faintly, eyes glittering, the rising dawn painting a golden outline around his head.

I smiled, every breath I took feeling like pure sunlight. If I raised my arms, I would float right off the ground. If I touched a flower bud, it would bloom. If I brushed my hand over the ground, sleeping insects would waken, seeds would burst with life, new plants would push through the surface. I felt like I would live forever.

I laughed, and Daedalus smiled at me, his face lit by the fire.

“It’s so beautiful,” I whispered. My voice was other-worldly, musical, so perfectly in tune with nature that it was barely human.

“Yes,” he agreed softly. “Power is beautiful.”

Colorful leaves fluttered to the ground behind him—I saw them despite the weakness of the daybreak’s light. Joy rose up in me at the very idea of autumn, of seasons changing, of the endless cycle of death, rebirth, and growth. All around me, life pulsed in time with my heartbeat; I was connected to everything, one with everything, surging with power, bursting with magick.

“Now, let’s open the Source.” Daedalus’s words came to me as a thought, a feeling, and I felt a new rush of exhilaration at the idea of creating more magick in this exalted state.

“Yes,” I breathed, and the leaves falling from the trees looked like nature’s jewelry. I wanted to hold out my hands and have a leaf land on me as lightly as a dragonfly.

Daedalus started his spell, first casting the limitations. The song went on for a while, and our surroundings grew more lit with each passing minute. I was paying attention to Daedalus, but the gentle sound of leaves falling distracted me, and, enchanted, I focused on one wavering in the air.

And in the next moment, I was chilled with a horror so complete it was like someone had thrown a bucket of icy water on me.

My mouth opened in an O. Quickly I looked around—here, there, all around—and had my horror confirmed. It wasn’t
leaves
falling to the ground—it was
birds
. Everywhere around us, one by one, small songbirds were falling from their perches, from their nests, and dropping to the ground. Appalled, I realized that the magick pulsing with each heartbeat was in fact the power, the lives that these birds were losing to me. Each new pearl of light that swelled inside me meant that another bird had just died and that I had absorbed its power.