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Authors: Cate Tiernan

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BOOK: A Necklace of Water
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I opened my mouth to speak, but Clio turned to face me.

“I don’t want to die,” she said, for the hundredth time. “I saw myself
dead
. Dead
now
, at this age, not older, not as a grown-up.”

“You aren’t sure that’s what the vision meant,” I said carefully, keeping reins on my anger.

“Yes, I am!” she snapped, her green eyes flashing in the deepening night. The birthmark on her left cheek, identical to mine on my right, seemed to blaze brighter, like a splash of blood. “I saw myself
dead
, and it wasn’t a dream; it was real. It was what’s
about
to happen. And I won’t die. Not
now
. Why are you so sure what you saw is real, but what I saw isn’t? You’re not even a witch!”

I jerked back as if slapped. Clio had grown up as a witch, with Petra and her coven. I’d only found out about the Craft a few months ago. Neither of us had passed the rite of ascension, which in the
bonne magie
would make us full members of a coven. Compared to Clio, I was as stupid as a toddler with all the stuff I didn’t know. But it was all too clear that I was a witch, as much a witch as any woman in my family, going back hundreds of years. It was clear that I was going to follow that course till the end of my life.

Clio’s lips made an angry, hard line, and I knew she regretted saying that.

“All I’m saying,” she went on tightly, “is that you seem to think what you saw is more real than what I saw.”

“No, I don’t,” I insisted. But
I’d
seen details of something that
had
really happened, and
she’d
had a premonition at best. Who knew if it would ever come true? “I just don’t see how you could bear to study with someone who killed our
father
.”

Which brought us to the crux of it: Clio had seen herself dead, and it had terrified her. Now she was willing to ally herself with my father’s murderer in order to cheat death—death that wasn’t even certain.

“Daedalus knows the magick behind the rite better than any of them.” Clio jabbed a long fork into the steak and turned it over. Blood dripped onto the blazing coals. “He can teach me what I need to know to make sure the rite works the next time.”

“So you’ll be immortal,” I said tonelessly, and Clio shrugged.

And there you have it: Clio wanted immortality; I wanted to destroy the man who had so coldly ended my dad’s life. My dad had been forty-one! Daedalus was, like, 270. Who deserved to live more?

“I know you don’t want to die,” I said, coming to stand next to her. “I don’t
want
you to die. And I don’t want to die myself. But you
don’t
have to study with Daedalus.”

“He knows the most; he’s the one who got this together,” she said stubbornly.

How could she be so
stupid
? How could she be so disloyal to Dad and to me? “How can you do this!” I shouted in frustration, and Clio wheeled on me, looking furious. Her mouth opened to blast me, but in the next second she froze, as if hearing something.

“Luc,” she said, frowning. She glanced at the freshly painted back of our house. “Luc—and Richard.”

“Here?”

“Yes.” Clio picked up my hand, but only to read my watch. Turning, she stabbed the steak with the fork again, sliding it onto the platter. She headed up the steps with it.

I couldn’t believe Clio wouldn’t change her mind.

Which was why I could never tell her about my plan to destroy Daedalus.

T
hais was really pissing me off. Of course I hated the fact that our dad was dead, that I would never know him, that he’d never known me. If Daedalus had done it, then I would have it out with him. Someday.

But in the meantime, I myself was going to be dead
any day
! In my vision, I’d looked exactly the same as I did now, not even a year older. I’d seen myself
dead
, drowned, gray, looking almost exactly like my ancestor Cerise had when she’d died.

Cerise. My jaw tightened as I set the steak platter down on the kitchen table. I heard Nan in the front room, talking to Luc and Richard. Great. Just who I needed to see now together with Thais. Luc, the man we had both loved and, I was guessing, both still loved, and Richard, another member of the Treize, Luc’s roommate. Someone who set me off like gasoline on a fire. Someone who had tried to kill me and Thais. And had then made out with me.

I frowned, trying to get it together, as Thais came in from the backyard. Our small wooden table was set for dinner for three. Iced tea had been poured, baked potatoes were ready, and a dish of sautéd okra sat in the middle of the table.

“Come in,” I heard Nan say, and felt footsteps vibrating the floorboards. It was interesting how our house felt when a man entered it. We were three women, our footsteps light, our energy relatively smooth. Our house felt calm and strong around us. But when a man came into it, everything changed. The energy was charged and jagged, their footsteps so much heavier, voices louder—they took up more space than a woman.

“Oh, Clio,” said Nan, her voice still weak. “We… have visitors.”

The way she said it made me look up. She knew that I had felt them arrive. I wondered if she was still furious at Richard or if she’d forgiven him. And she knew that Luc, Richard, Thais, and I had all kinds of tensions between us—though she didn’t know the complete picture about any of it. At least, I prayed she didn’t.

“Well, dinner’s ready,” I said shortly, pulling out my chair and sitting down. Nan came into the kitchen, followed by two people I had rolled around with and now kind of hated. I took a big swig of iced tea, wishing it was Jack Daniels.

Then I saw Luc’s face and almost spewed tea out my nose. I heard Thais’s gasp behind me, and suddenly Nan’s odd tone of voice made sense. I gulped, coughing, trying to get tea down before it blew all over the table.

Finally, holding my napkin to my mouth, I managed, “What happened to your face?”

I flicked a glance at Richard’s dark eyes. The expression on his face told me he’d definitely wanted to be here when I saw Luc for the first time.

“Sit down, Luc,” Nan murmured, pulling out her chair. Our kitchen is small, our table smaller, big enough for only three people at one time. I looked at Thais, where she was leaning against the stove, her eyes big and startled. She met my eyes and mouthed, “Holy crap,” at me, and I nodded.

Luc sat down across from me, looking miserable. Or at least, I thought he seemed miserable—it was actually hard to tell. I mean, it was hard to tell that he was
human
. Luc—one of the hottest, most handsome guys I’d ever seen in my life, with beautiful bones, beautiful dark blue eyes, a beautiful sculpted mouth that I had been unable to resist—now looked like the Thing.

His face was grossly swollen, his features obscured. His eyes seemed small and piggy, almost closed with extra flesh. His skin itself, usually gorgeous, perfect, and tan, was now waxen and pasty, covered with thousands of tiny pustules. Clearly he’d had trouble shaving: several days’ worth of dark stubble mottled his cheeks and chin, and not in a sexy way.

He looked like a monster.

“Yep,” Richard said, walking to the fridge and helping himself to one of Nan’s beers. “I’m guessing someone at the rite wanted everyone’s outsides to match their insides.”

“Shut up,” said Luc, his voice sounding like it had been put through a cheese grater. He sounded very subdued, very different from his usual world-weary, ironic self.

Richard grinned and toasted him with the beer, then tilted his head back and drank. I tried to put all images of kissing and biting that neck out of my mind.

“But what happened?” said Thais, sounding appalled. “Did someone do this? Or is this, like, from something you ate or touched? Poison ivy?”

Luc laughed wryly. “No, this is magickal. I don’t know why or how or who. Someone wanted to teach me a lesson, I guess.”

His gaze flicked past Thais to me, and I frowned. He knew Thais and I had every reason to despise him, but neither of us would ever do anything like this.

Tempting though it would be.

“It wasn’t me,” I said.

“It wasn’t me,” Thais echoed.

“It wasn’t me,” Richard put in. “Though God knows I’m enjoying the hell out of it.”

Luc shot him an angry glance, and Richard grinned. It burned Richard up, how I felt about Luc—not that he wanted me himself. Or at least, not for more than twenty minutes at a time.

Nan took Luc’s chin in her hand, tilting his face in the red-tinged twilight to see it better. “It would help if we knew who had done this,” she murmured, and she suddenly looked so old that I almost drew in my breath. Nan had looked exactly the same for my entire life—seventeen years. Now, two days after the rite, she looked so much paler, weaker. Not as if she’d actually physically aged in any way, but had just… been drained.

So many spells had been cast at that rite, so much changed for all of us. When would we know everything that had been set in motion? What each member of the Treize had used that tremendous assimilation of power to accomplish? I shivered at the thought.

“But I think we can do something, not knowing who it was or what they used,” Nan continued. “Skin problems are usually caused by something acting on the liver—the seat of anger or hostility. I would guess some kind of anger recoiled on the liver, and it’s pushing a psychoenergetic poison out through your skin from the inside.”

Yep, that would have been my first guess too.

Nan looked up at me, her pale blue-gray eyes tired but still bright. “Honey, go into the workroom and get me some broadleaf dock leaves. Plus red clover and vervain. Asabarraca. And there’s a jar labeled
French Clay
, if you could bring that, and …” She paused, thinking. “I guess that’s it—we’ll start with that. And Thais, fetch the rosemary and sage out of the pantry. Oh, and the comfrey tea.”

“Comfrey tea wrecks your kidneys,” I threw over my shoulder as I headed to the workroom.

“You can’t drink it for more than three days,” Nan reminded me. “Or it will.”

I was standing in front of Nan’s work cupboard when I felt Richard come up behind me. For one second I felt afraid—I couldn’t forget that he’d tried to hurt me and Thais. But I also believed, as Nan did, that he would never do it now.

“Go away,” I said, my back to him.

“Come to help you carry,” he said in that sardonic voice that always felt like a challenge. “‘Cause I’m that kind of guy.”

I gave him a narrow-eyed look. “Don’t even get me started on what kind of guy you are.” I saw his jaw tighten as he tried to keep his temper from flaring. Turning back to Nan’s cupboard, I examined small brown glass bottles filled with essences and extracts, dried this and powdered that. I set the asabarraca on the worktable, then found the ceramic jar of French clay. Next I went through files of pressed, dried leaves and flowers, organized not alphabetically but according to what larger family they were from and, within that, to the subcategories of what effects they would cause.

I knew this stuff pretty well and usually could put my hand on what I needed pretty quickly. But having Richard breathing down my neck made me tense, and I forgot what I was looking for.

“Go away,” I said again, irritably.

“Look, we have to get this straight between us,” he said in a low voice.

“Get what straight? The fact that you tried to kill me and my sister?” Wide-eyed, I cocked my head, looking confused. “Is that what you’re talking about? The attempted murder stuff?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said tensely. “My bad. Can we move on from that?”

I gaped at him. “Move
on
? Move on from attem—” I was literally speechless.

He waved his hand impatiently. “I explained all that. That was before I even
knew
you. Just… get over it. We need to figure this out, what we have between us.”

“We don’t have
anything
between us!” I hissed, trying to keep my voice down.

“That’s bull, and you know it!” he said, just as angrily. He moved closer to me, and I felt his indescribable force, as if we were literally magnets, positive and negative, irresistibly drawn together whether we wanted to be or not.

I kept my arms at my sides, as stiff as poles. I hated this! Hated what he did to me. “We have
nothing
,” I said again, and turned back to the plant file.
Red dock, red dock
… My fingers flipped through plastic sleeves, all neatly labeled and dated.

In the next moment he curved his arms around me, pressing his body against my back from shoulder to hip. His arms crossed, holding me tightly, his right hand pulling my hips against him, his left hand curling up to hold my right shoulder.

“Don’t say that,” he murmured into my hair while all my nerve endings started exploding. I felt his breath warm on my neck, and then he bit me gently, right where my neck curved into my shoulder. I shuddered and my brain shorted out for a moment.

But just for a moment. I brought my arms up hard, breaking his hold, and though he’d trapped me between himself and the cupboard, I wheeled, ready to rip into him.

I didn’t have a chance. He lowered his head lightning fast and kissed me, pushing me against the open cupboard so that it teetered on its legs. He pressed hard against me, trying to make as much of me touch as much of him as possible.
Not again
.

BOOK: A Necklace of Water
13.59Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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