A Feather of Stone #3 Read Online Free

glowed on the ground around the circle. Cerise hadn’t been aware of them that night—I wondered if anyone had noticed them, with everything else going on. Cerise dying. But in my vision I had seen them. I had a more complete picture of what Melita had done, and I thought I understood how and why it had worked. But I needed to do more research. Especially with Daedalus still plowing forward with his plans to re-create the rite.
    I’d been thinking a lot about immortality. The idea had planted its roots in my mind and was taking firmer hold. What would things be like two hundred years from now? What would it be like to never fear death? I didn’t know exactly how it worked—like, could one of the Treize jump off a cliff and just get up afterward, like Wile E. Coyote? What would it be like to be frozen in time as I was now—young and strong and beautiful? I would never age, never get gray hair and wrinkles and have things droop on me. I would be able to learn magick my whole life. What would my powers be like a hundred years from now, with a hundred years of studying under my belt? Would I just keep getting stronger?
    It was starting to sound pretty damn good.
    But—would Thais agree with me? Could I bear to become immortal while she went on to age and die? True, I’d had a sister for only a few months, but she was my mirror image. It would be like watching myself age and die. Now that we knew each other, we were joined. We were connected. It deepened with every day that passed. Could I bear for that connection to be broken someday?
    Next to me, Melysa planted the other baby cabbages. I finished preparing my bed and knelt down to sprinkle weensy radish seeds in short rows. It was almost October, but we had plenty of time for another radish crop. And cabbages grew well in chillier temperatures. Like, if it got down in the fifties. I sighed and brushed my hair off my neck.
    “Feel free to share,” Melysa said.
    I looked up. “Oh. Well—I’ve just been thinking about different things,” I said. “Listen—do you understand the form of the Treize’s original spell?”
    Melysa looked surprised. She was the only non-Treize member who knew about Nan and her famille , knew their freakish history.
    “Well, a bit,” she said. “I don’t know if anyone truly understands all its nuances or powers. Not even the people . . . who were there.”
    Daedalus says he does, I thought. He says he knows enough to re-create it.
    And he wants to teach me.
    I pushed that thought out of my mind.
    “But what would the basic form be?” I persisted.
    Melysa frowned slightly as she cut several small squashes off the vine growing on our fence. “Why do you want to know?”
    “I’m just curious. It seems so amazing, so out of the realm of what we usually do.”
    Her eyes were serious when they met mine.
    “It is,” she said. “For good reason. That kind of magick isn’t positive, doesn’t add a positive presence to the world. It’s harmful, it creates an unnatural situation, it affects other people without their will or knowledge. It’s forbidden.”
    “Forbidden? Do people even know enough about it to outlaw it? Wasn’t that spell with the Treize the only instance of it?”
    Melysa, who I could usually ask almost anything, took on an uncharacteristically shuttered expression. She didn’t answer, and a flash of excitement rushed through me. Did that mean there had ever been other spells like Melita’s? Was there a whole school of magick that I—and most witches—knew nothing about? It would be incredibly interest—
    Oh. Yes. Now I got it. Yes, there was a whole school of magick that probably dealt with spells similar to Melita’s. It was called dark magick, and we did not practice it. It had never occurred to me that among all the awful, evil, totally wrong spells of dark magick, there would be some that could work a spell like Melita’s. The kind of spell that would grant immortality to the witches present.
    And that