A Circle of Ashes
Power too strong to contain …
“Clio!” I yelled, shaking my hands, which were locked in hers. “Clio!” I pulled back as hard as I could, knocking us both to one side, and all of a sudden we were lying on the ground in Clio’s backyard. I’d broken the spell. It was nighttime, the sky above me dark and speckled with stars and … sparks, flying upward? I jumped to my feet.
“Oh God, Clio!” I yelled, looking past her. I grabbed her shoulder and shook her—she hadn’t sat up yet. Now she blinked slowly, looking at me like I was a stranger.
“Clio! Get up! The house is on fire!” I shouted, shaking her hard enough to rattle her bones. With the next breath she seemed to awaken, sitting up quickly and looking around her. She gasped and put her hand over her mouth, as horrified as I was.
This time we hadn’t gotten thrown across a room. We’d started a fire that had leaped away from us, and our house, my new home, was ablaze.
BALEFIRE
Book One:
A Chalice of Wind
Book Two:
A Circle of Ashes
Book Three:
A Feather of Stone
Book Four:
A Necklace of Water
SWEEP
Book One:
Book of Shadows
Book Two:
The Coven
Book Three:
Blood Witch
Book Four:
Dark Magick
Book Five:
Awakening
Book Six:
Spellbound
Book Seven:
The Calling
Book Eight:
Changeling
Book Nine:
Strife
Book Ten:
Seeker
Book Eleven:
Origins
Book Twelve:
Eclipse
Book Thirteen:
Reckoning
Book Fourteen:
Full Circle
Super Edition:
Night’s Child
BOOK TWO
CATE TIERNAN
Balefire 2: A Circle of Ashes
RAZORBILL
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Young Readers Group
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Copyright 2005 © Gabrielle Charbonnet
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-101-56492-9
Interior design by Christopher Grassi
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
Printed in the United States of America
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With many thanks to the real Melya,
for all you’ve done
The Marked Girl Brings You Death
Maybe Another Two Hundred Years
“H
ere.” I pushed the cookies over to Thais. “Crumble them on top. It’s good.”
Thais took a couple of cookies and dutifully crumbled them over her ice cream. Then she took a bite and nodded. “‘S good.”
We kept up the everything’s-normal ice cream eating for another two minutes, and then at the exact same time, we put down our spoons and stared at each other.
“Immortal,” said Thais.
“Yeah. If we believe them.” I had a sudden thought. Quickly I ran upstairs to my room and pulled out an old photo album. I brought it downstairs and opened it on the kitchen table between us. Together Thais and I looked at pictures from when I was way little, a baby, and on up till when I was about three. I was an extremely pretty baby.
Nan—Petra—looked exactly the same as she did today. She hadn’t aged a bit in seventeen years. And I, with my razor-sharp skills of observation, had never noticed it. She’d always just been Nan. I was trying to process the knowledge that she was so much more than she’d ever told me.
“So,” I said, closing the book with a sigh, “they were probably telling the truth. Or mostly.”
Thais nodded. “I’m totally freaking.”
I gave a short laugh. “That’s one word for it.” I sighed. I was having a rough summer, and so far, I had no signs that anything was going to get easier.
“Just all of it,” said Thais. “Twins.” She pointed at me, then at herself, summing up the whole, huge, identical-twins-separated-at-birth thing with one gesture. “Luc.” She closed her eyes and breathed out heavily, summing up the whole, huge, two-timing-lying-bastard-witch-boyfriend thing. “Witches.” She shook her head slowly about the whole, huge, finding-out-you’re-a-witch-and-so-is-your-family thing.
“And now the possibility of being immortal,” I said. “Oh, and almost being killed a bunch of times.”
“It’s been a crazed couple of months,” Thais said, and that reminded me that on top of everything else, she’d lost her father—our father—just this summer. Even though I’d never known him, I still felt pangs of loss, so I could barely imagine what she had to be going through.
“Been a roller-coaster ride,” I agreed.
“So what now?” Thais asked. “It’s all too much. I don’t know where to start.”
I thought for a minute. Usually I left the dealing with stuff to my not-grandmother, Petra. Nan. I mean, I’d always thought she was my grandmother. She’d said she was. She’d raised me after my mother died giving birth to me and my surprise sister. But as it turned out, she was an
ancestor
, a great-grandmother so many times back that I couldn’t even put in enough
greats
. And she’d kept my sister and my dad a secret from me. I could have known them both all this time. Now he was dead and my chance was gone. I still couldn’t believe Nan had done it, no matter what her reasons were. And I had missed growing up with a sister.
Now Nan was who knew where, and I didn’t know when or if she was coming back. If she wasn’t back by midnight on Wednesday, I was supposed to open a spelled cabinet in the workroom and find instructions there. In the meantime, I had to handle everything.
“Okay, so the Treize,” I said, sitting down and taking another swipe at my ice cream. “They want us to complete their coven so they can do the big schmancy spell that will blow everyone’s minds with power.”
“Is there a spell like that?” Thais asked. “Where everyone would get power and then be able to use it for whatever they want?”
“I don’t know. I guess they think there is. I don’t know how it would work or what it would do to them or us.”
“Besides make us immortal,” said Thais.
“Well, yeah, besides that. So they say. I’ve never heard of anything like that.”
“Luc said he wanted to die,” Thais said, not looking at me. “That he was tired of immortality and wanted to die.”
Luc. Would I ever not flinch when I heard his name? Luc-Andre. I’d known him as Andre. Thais had known him as Luc. Each of us had gone out with him, kissed him, fallen in love with him. He had betrayed us twice: first with each other and then by being one of the Treize. Even now, with my rage still burning, some part inside me ached for him, longed for him, wished he could be mine. Mine and not Thais’s.
But he loved
her
.
I swallowed hard. “Yeah. I’m willing to give him a hand with that.”
Thais gave me a wry look, then her face sobered. “Do you think he means it?”
I looked back at her. “Do you care?”
She turned away and didn’t answer.
I took a deep breath and pushed my bowl away. “Would you want immortality?”
“I don’t know.”
“We have to figure this stuff out. Like, now we’ve met all of them. Who in the Treize is trying to kill us?”
“If it is someone from the Treize. We don’t know that for sure,” Thais pointed out.
“Well, no,” I agreed. “But they’re the obvious place to start. I mean, the attacks had magick behind them.” Someone had been trying to hurt both me and Thais ever since she moved to New Orleans. At first it had seemed like “accidents,” but then when whoever it was finally came after us both together with an angry mass of wasps, we realized there had to be a connection with all the other near misses.
“Yeah, you’re right. Okay, then. Someone from the Treize. Not Petra,” said Thais.
“No. Not Axelle or Daedalus or Jules,” I added, naming three witches we’d just met. “They’ve had plenty of clear shots at you.” Thais had been living at Axelle’s since her—our—dad had died.
“And not Ouida. I hope.” Thais looked troubled. “I really liked her. But I just couldn’t face dinner with her … after all that.”
“No. And Sophie and Manon just got to town,” I said. “So we can rule them out.”
“And the ones who aren’t here, what, Marcel? And … Claire? Not them.”
I nodded, then got up and grabbed a sheet of paper and a pen. I made a list of everyone we had put in the not-guilty category. “Who’s left?”
Thais thought. “You and me. Richard,” she said, pronouncing his name Ree-shard. “Luc.”
“Richard was around Axelle’s a lot too, wasn’t he? So probably not him. And
we’re
not doing it,” I said. I looked at the paper. Only Luc left, which was impossible. Unbelievable. Probably. “Wait—what if Axelle, Jules, Richard, or Daedalus didn’t try to kill you at Axelle’s because it would have been too obvious? That doesn’t necessarily put them in the clear.”