A Necklace of Water Read Free Page B

every forty years or so. This will probably blow over.”
    “I don’t know,” said Luc. “This seems different. Manon was … more than furious.”
    “Women!” Richard shook his head, and I gave him an angry glare. He grinned at me and I quickly looked away. When Richard smiled, he looked like an angel who had been kicked out of heaven.
    “Daedalus seems to still feel weak from it,” Luc said, his eyes on Nan. He must have noticed how she looking, how she was acting.
    Nan nodded gravely.
    “But no one else has anything like this,” Luc said, gesturing to his face in disgust. “This is all mine.”
    “I think it will improve,” Nan said. “It’s not permanent. Just follow this regimen and in three weeks you’ll be recognizable.”
    “Three weeks?” Luc sounded horrified.
    “You’ll be okay,” Richard said, patting Luc’s shoulder. “It’ll be good for you. Character-building. See how the other half lives. Man on the street and so on. Instead of that male-model babe-magnet thing you usually have going.”
    Thais made a strangled sound, and I had to forcibly swallow a shriek of rage. Luc’s babe-magnet effect had broken my heart and Thais’s as well. Trust Richard to rub our noses in it.
    “I’m going to Racey’s,” I said abruptly.
    “But you haven’t eaten,” said Nan.
    “Not hungry anymore.”
    “Well, okay,” Nan said, “but don’t stay out late. It’s a school night.”
    “Okay.” I made sure Nan wasn’t looking, and then I stuck my tongue out at Richard. His eyebrows shot up and he grinned again. I turned and hightailed it out of the kitchen, but not before I’d glimpsed Thais’s startled face—she’d seen me. But she didn’t know the whole story between me and Richard, and she never would.
    My purse and the keys to our dinky little rental car were by the front door. Outside, it was completely dark, a pleasant, balmy evening, maybe in the sixties. It was October. In a little less than four weeks our most important festival, Monvoile, would take place. It was a time of supreme magick, when the mists between the worlds thinned and pulled back slightly. And I had a plan for it.
    I got in the car and started the engine, picturing tired little squirrels pedaling, making the engine run. As I pulled away from the curb, I felt Richard’s presence lingering behind me. To hell with him. Jerk. I pulled out my cell phone.
    “Race? Listen, if anyone asks, I’m at your house, okay?”

A Hollow Shell Within a Year
    D aedalus tilted the shade of his dresser lamp to throw light more directly on his face. Peering into his mirror, he turned one cheek toward it, then the other. Two days after the rite, his eyes were sunken, his forehead furrowed, his lips thinner.
    His powers were weakening, and it showed on his face.
    He had no idea how this had happened, only when—at the rite. The failed rite that he had planned for, dreamed of, researched for more than two hundred years. It hadn’t been the perfect recreation—no one had been pregnant. Several people had been brought there by force. The actual Source had not been bubbling up from the ground at their feet. Plus the twins, with their power—that could have been enough to throw the whole thing off. Everything that had been under his control—the timing, tools, the spells themselves, the location—all that had been perfect. But he wasn’t able to completely control the Treize—not the way Melita had.
    And, of course, Petra had actively worked against him. Petra, Marcel, Ouida, probably others that he wasn’t aware of. They’d worked against him, betrayed him. And now look at him—getting weaker every day. He wasn’t positive that someone had specifically spelled him to weaken like this or whether it was just an effect of the rite’s energy going haywire, being misused. But he would find out.
    He had to prevent anyone from realizing what had happened to him. He couldn’t afford to look weaker. Now, in front of the mirror, he