A Chalice of Wind (12 page)

Okay, now—most people, if they went home and told their grandmother they were a twin, the grandmother would laugh and say, “Oh, you are
not.
”

So this was not good.

Nan wobbled backward and I stuck a chair under her just in time. She grabbed my hands and held them and said, “Clio, what are you talking about?”

I sat down in another chair, still sobbing. “There’s another me at school! This morning they called me to the office, and there was
me,
standing there, but with a haircut! Nan, I mean, we’re
identical!
We’re exactly alike except she’s a Yankee, and she even has my exact same
birthmark!
I mean, what the hell is
going on?
” My last words ended in a totally un-Clio-like shriek.

Nan looked like she’d seen a ghost, only I bet if she saw a real ghost, it wouldn’t faze her. She swallowed, still speechless.

Something was so, so wrong with this picture. I felt like the two of us were sitting there, waiting for a hurricane to hit our house, to yank it right off its foundation, to sweep us up with it. I quit crying and just gaped at her, thinking,
Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. She knew.

“Nan—” I said, and then stopped.

She seemed to come back to herself then, shaking her head and focusing on me. A tiny bit of color leached back into her face, but she still looked pretty whacked. “Clio,” she said, in this old, old voice. “She had your same birthmark?”

I nodded and touched my cheekbone. “Hers is on the other side. It’s exactly like mine. Nan—
tell me.
”

“What’s her name?” Nan’s voice was thin and strained, barely more than a whisper.

“Thais Allard,” I said. “She said her dad had just died, and now she lives here with a friend of her dad’s. She used to live in Connecticut. She says she was born in Boston but the day after me.”

Nan put her fingers to her lips. I saw her soundlessly form the name
Thais.
“Michel is dead?” she asked sadly, as if from far away.

“
You knew him?
Was that—he wasn’t
my
real dad, was he? Wasn’t he just someone who adopted
Thais?
” I felt like my sanity was about to rip in half. “Nan, explain this to me.
Now.”

At last, her eyes sparked with recognition. She looked at me with her familiar, sharp gaze, and I could recognize her again.

“Yes,” she said, her voice firmer. “Yes, of course,
cher.
I’ll explain. I’ll explain everything. But first—first there are some things I must do, very quickly.”

While I sat with my jaw hanging open like a large-mouth bass, she sprang to her feet with her usual energy. She hurried into our workroom, and I heard the cupboard open. I sat there, unable to move, to process anything except a series of cataclysmic thoughts: I had a sister, a twin sister. I’d had a father, maybe, until this summer. I’d have to share Nan. Nan had been lying to me my whole life.

Over and over, those thoughts burned a pattern into my brain.

Numbly I watched Nan come out, dressed in a black silk robe, the one she wore for serious work or when it was her turn to lead our coven’s monthly circle. She held her wand, a slim length of cypress no thicker than my pinkie. She didn’t look at me but quickly centered herself and started chanting in old French, only a few words of which I recognized. Her first coven, Balefire, had always worked in a kind of language all their own, she’d told me—a mixture of old French, Latin, and one of the African dialects brought here during the dark days of slavery.

She went outside, and I felt her circling our house, our yard. She came onto the porch and stood before our front door. She came back inside and moved through each room, tracing each window with a crystal, singing softly in a language that had been passed down by our family for hundreds of years.

Every now and then I caught a word, but even before then it had sunk in what she was doing.

She was weaving layer after layer of spells all around our house, our yard, around us, around our lives.

Spells of protection and ward-evil.

S
unlight was a painful thing, Claire thought, trying to drag a sheet over her eyes. But thin pinpricks of morning seared her retinas, and she knew it was pointless to hold it off any longer.

Carefully she pried one eyelid open. The hazy view of her broken wooden window screen showed her it was maybe only two in the afternoon. Not too bad.

The bed was sunken weirdly—she was rolling toward the middle. A survey revealed a human form sleeping next to her, his straight black hair tossed across a pillow. No one she recognized. Well, that happened.

She sighed. A bath would revive her, and no one did baths better than the Golden Blossom hotel.

“Please, ma’am?”

Claire willed her head to turn and somehow managed to switch her gaze a bit to the left. A small Thai maid, no more than fifteen, knelt on the black wooden floor. She held up a silver tray covered with a stack of neatly folded telephone messages. Her head was bowed—she was reluctant to disturb ma’am. Especially this ma’am, who often threw things and broke things when she was unwillingly disturbed.

“Please, ma’am? Messages for you. Man call many times. He say very urgent.”

With supreme effort, Claire swung her feet over the side of the bed. She glanced at herself in the mirror. Ouch. Reaching out for the messages, a sudden surge of nausea made her freeze momentarily. She muttered some words under her breath and waited a moment for the feeling to pass. The maid bowed her head lower, as if to avoid a blow.

Claire took the messages. She muttered thanks in Thai.

The little maid bowed deeply, then stood and started to shuffle backward out of the room.

“Make a bath for me!” Claire remembered to call, then winced as the words reverberated inside her pain-racked skull, making it feel like all the little blood vessels in her brain were leaking. “Please make a bath,” Claire whispered again, adding the word
bath
in Thai.

Claire glanced at the first message. From Daedalus. She tossed it on the floor and looked at the second. Daedalus. Onto the floor. The third one read,
Get your ass to New Orleans, damn you.
She laughed and tossed it after its companions. The rest were just more of the same, just old Daedalus playing mayor, wanting an audience so he could pontificate about nothing, blah, blah, blah.

Claire reached over, found a bottle by the bed with a few inches of a pale yellow liquor in it. She took a swig, winced, and drew her sleeve across her mouth. Time to start the day.

I
didn’t remember getting back to Axelle’s. The whole surreal day swam through my consciousness like bits of a movie I’d seen long ago. For six periods I’d dealt with stares and whispers, dealt with seeing Clio again and again as we passed each other in the hall, both of us jerking in renewed surprise. Thank God for Sylvie. In her I sensed a true friend—she treated me normally, helped me get my bearings, told me where classes were, how to meet her at lunch.

Clio was going to talk to her grandmother. So
I
had a grandmother too, for the first time in seventeen years. Doubt was pointless. It had been overwhelmingly obvious that Clio and I had once been one cell, split in two. Now that I knew I had an identical twin, I somehow felt twice as lost, twice as incomplete as before. Would that feeling go away if we became close? I had family now, real blood family, but I still felt so alone.

Dad hadn’t known. I felt that instinctively. Never in any way had he ever revealed that he knew I’d been a twin. Which was a whole other mystery in itself.

I’d managed to get on the streetcar going downtown and got off at Canal Street, the end of the line. Like a trained dog, I found my way to Axelle’s apartment. For just a minute I rested my forehead against the sun-warmed iron of the gate.
Please, please, let Axelle not be home. Or Daedalus or Jules. Please.

I passed the small swimming pool in the courtyard and hesitated before I unlocked the door. How had Axelle gotten me? Who was she, really? Had she even known my dad? Because just as surely as I knew Clio was my sister, I also instinctively felt that I had been brought to New Orleans on purpose, and part of that purpose must be Clio. I paused for a moment, my key in my hand. Oh my God. Had Axelle caused my dad’s death somehow? The timing was so . . . I took a deep breath and thought it through.

I didn’t see how she could have done it. Remembering it was a fresh pain: my dad had been killed when an old woman had a stroke at the wheel of her car. It had jumped the curb and crashed through the drugstore window. My dad had been in the way. But the woman was from our town—old Mrs. Beadle. I’d known her by sight. There was no way Axelle could have bribed her. She’d broken her nose and her collarbone and gotten glass in one eye. Her driver’s license had been taken away forever. Despite everything, even Mrs. Thompkins had felt sorry for her. No. Axelle and her gang of merry weirdos couldn’t have had anything to do with it.

I opened the door and was met by a blast of air-conditioning, as usual. The air inside was stale with cigarettes but blessedly quiet and empty. In that instant, I knew no one was home, as if I could have felt the jangling energy their presence would make.

I dumped my backpack in my room and sat down on my bed, feeling numb. What was happening with my life? Even if Axelle hadn’t caused my dad’s death, still, it wasn’t a coincidence that I had been brought halfway across America to a city I’d never been before only to run into my
identical twin
—the twin I never knew existed. Yet given how unconcerned Axelle had been about my going to school, I didn’t see how meeting Clio today had been planned. If Axelle knew Clio was here, she hadn’t planned on us meeting—at least not yet.

Restlessly I got up. She wasn’t home, and I had no idea when she’d be back. I started roaming the apartment, deliberately snooping for the first time. My eyes fell on the door that led to the secret attic room. If anything was hidden in this apartment, it was in that room. I listened for Axelle. I heard nothing, felt nothing. There was a small brass knob right below the small brass lock. Could she have left it unlocked this once? I knew she carried the key with her.

I turned the doorknob and pulled.

Nothing happened. It was locked. Of course.

A wave of frustration made me grit my teeth. I needed answers! I closed my eyes, trying to calm the thousand questions swirling in my brain. I took some deep breaths. A lock, a lock . . . I was about to cry, as I hadn’t all day, not since this morning when I’d gotten up. I pictured the lock in my mind. All I needed was a stupid key! I could see how the small key would slide into the lock, how its indentations would line up with the little row of pins in the cylinder. . . .

I needed to think, to decide what to do. I leaned against the cool wall, my eyes closed, hand still on the knob. I reached my finger up and traced the keyhole. One stupid key. I would just put the key in, turn it, the pins would fall into place. . . . I could
see
it. I sighed heavily. Maybe I should go take a long tepid shower.

Then, under my finger, I imagined I felt the smallest of vibrations.

I opened my eyes. I listened. Silence. Stillness. I turned the doorknob and pulled gently.

The door opened.

I was in! Without hesitation I ran up the worn wooden steps. The plaster walls were decaying slightly, like everything else in New Orleans. Here and there bare brick was exposed.

I held my breath as I reached the door at the top of the stairs. God only knew what was behind here, and all of a sudden, horror-movie images filled my mind.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I muttered, and turned the doorknob.

The door led to one dimly lit room, the only illumination coming from shuttered half-moon windows at either end. The ceiling was low, maybe eight feet in the center, and sloped down on both sides to maybe four feet. The air was completely still and the exact temperature of my skin. I could smell wood, incense, fire, and too many other intermingled scents for me to name. At one end was a scarred worktable that was covered with the same kinds of maps and plans and books I’d seen downstairs. At first glance, I saw no suitcase full of heroin, no huge opium pipes, as I’d feared. So it was just about the voodoo, then.

Low bookshelves lined the wall on one side, and, curious, I knelt to read their spines. Some of the titles were in French, but others read,
Candle-Burning Rituals for the Full Moon; Witch—A History; Astral Magick; Principles of Spellcraft; Magick, White and Black.

I sat back on my heels. Oh, jeez. Magick. Witchcraft. Not a surprise, but a depressing confirmation. I looked around. The bare wooden floor had layers of dripped wax from candles. There were pale, smeared lines of circles within circles, all different sizes, around the candle wax. Other shelves held candles of all colors. An astrology chart was pinned to one crumbling wall. There were rows of glass jars, labeled in some other language—maybe French? Latin?