A Feather of Stone #3 Read Free

outlines. I was drowning in magick, caught in magick like a spider-web, like pitch. I shook my hands to release them but couldn’t.
    “Meli—” I cried, but at that moment, the world seemed to end. A cannon boom of thunder and an unearthly blast of lightning struck at the same moment. The lightning hit Melita directly and I screamed, seeing her dark hair flying out around her ecstatic face. The next second, the lightning imploded in me, shooting through Jules’s hand, searing mine, and racing into Ouida’s hand. We all cried out, and I heard my own scream.
    An agonizing, gripping pain seized my belly. Our hands flew apart and I fell to the ground. My stomach felt as though someone had buried an ax in it, and I curled up, gasping.
    “Maman!” I cried, sobbing. I held my stomach as though to keep my insides from spilling out, but the pain was too big for my hands, too horrendous to bear.
    Then others were around me—Richard, Ouida, and finally, Maman, who knelt quickly on the rain-soaked muddy ground. She smoothed my hair off my forehead, her lips already chanting spells. Her hand gripped mine tightly and I clung to it.
    “What’s happening?” I cried. Maman’s strong face filled my eyes, but she muttered spells and didn’t answer.
    Another searing wave of pain crested, and I closed my eyes and sobbed, trying to ride it out. I felt a gushing flood beneath my skirt, and then Maman’s hands were pushing it out of the way and rain hit my bare legs. Richard grabbed my other hand. I pressed it against my cheek, ashamed to be crying and looking weak but too panicked and in pain to stop. Maman and I had already rehearsed the calming and concentrating spells I would perform for the baby’s birth, but every one of them fled my mind. All I knew was a dark tide of pain crashing over me, submerging me in its depths.
    My stomach was heaving, contracting, and after an eternity, I slowly realized that the pain was less. I felt far away, tired, hardly aware of what was happening.
    “Oh goddess, the blood,” I dimly heard Ouida say.
    I knew Richard was still holding my hand, but the pressure was faint. I was so glad that the pain had lessened, so glad that I was removed from the horror and fear and agony. I needed to rest. My eyes closed. Rain splashed my eyelids. The storm still rumbled overhead, but the ground beneath me felt safe and nurturing. I relaxed, feeling all the tension leaving my body. Thank the goddess the pain was gone. I felt perfectly well.
    Then I was looking down on myself, on Maman and Richard and the others, looking down from a high distance. I saw the rain drenching everyone. Maman held up a tiny, writhing baby, its blood being washed away by the rain. I saw myself, looking peaceful and calm, as if asleep. My baby, Hélène, I thought.
    I came out of it when I fell backward and hit my head on a rock.
    Blinking, I looked up and saw dark, moonless sky and the tops of family crypts.
    My head hurt and I put up a hand to rub it, feeling a knot forming on the back of my skull. I sat up. A chunk of a nameplate had fallen off a crypt, who knew how long ago, and I’d whacked my head against it. I didn’t know why I had fallen—if I was dead, why did my head hurt? And my hands?
    It took another minute for it to sink in that I wasn’t dead; I wasn’t Cerise. I was me, Clio, in the here and now. My four candles were guttering and almost out. The small bowl of coal was nothing but gray ashes. I looked around quickly, placing myself, then crawled over to my canvas bag and pulled out my watch. It was 4 a.m. I felt shaken and breathless. This time, instead of just seeing the rite happen, I’d been part of it. I’d heard the spell Melita had used, seen the glowing sigils and runes on the ground, the ones we hadn’t seen her write, because she’d put them there before the circle gathered.
    I’d felt myself die.
    I swallowed, sucking in a shallow, trembling breath, then started to gather my things. I dumped the