A Feather of Stone #3 Read Online Free Page A

could kill a witch too, I remembered, trying not to shudder at the memory of feeling Cerise die.
    I heard the familiar cheerful chugging of my little Camry and looked up. Thais had found a parking space in the street right in front of our house—we didn’t have a driveway or garage. She got out and walked through our gate, careful not to step on any plants.
    “So, you got it?” I asked.
    She smiled, looking exactly like me except for the clothes, and waved her new Louisiana driver’s license.
    “I’m legal now. To drive, anyway.” She surveyed the front yard, which was being transformed from a trampled, sooty, demilitarized zone into a mere inkling of the glory of Nan’s old garden. “You guys have gotten a lot done. Let me change and I’ll come help for a while before dinner.”
    “Great, thanks,” said Melysa, smiling at her.
    Having an identical twin sister was starting to feel a teensy bit more normal, but waves of “this is unbelievable” still flitted through my head. I’d spent seventeen years as an only child—having my entire world turned inside out in the last couple of months had made me feel like I was tripping sometimes.
    “What’s that?” Thais asked, pointing to the baby cabbages. “Not more okra?”
    I laughed. Thais was still getting her southerner’s taste buds jump-started.
    “Cabbage!” I said brightly, and she made a face.
    Melysa stood and brushed off her hands. “It’s time I was going, now that you’ve got a helper. Tell Petra I’ll talk to her later, all right?”
    “Okay. Thanks—see you soon.” I stood up and followed Thais inside. It was time I found out exactly what she thought about immortality.

Black Like My Soul
    This had all changed so much. Except for the heat, the mosquitoes, the smell of the water. Those were the same. But the way the land looked, the contours of the canals and the rice fields and the rivers themselves—all that was different. The small trolling motor on this old wooden pirogue made an annoying buzzing sound, like a big, sleepy insect. Richard sat in the stern, one hand on the tiller, maneuvering his way through water paths that had changed ten times since he’d seen them. How long ago had he been here, to this very place? Maybe forty years? Thirty? Decades blended together.
    The sun was hot on his skin, warming his blood. Richard brushed his damp bangs off his forehead and lit a cigarette. He remembered Clio snootily telling him not to smoke in Petra’s house. He guessed Petra hadn’t told Clio she herself had smoked for roughly eighty years. He snorted smoke out his nose, feeling the heat, the chemical aftertaste.
    Up there. A quarter mile ahead, the flat, treeless rice fields gave way to a flat swamp. The canal was about to become choked with weeds, so Richard shut off the motor and pulled it in. He got out a long, broad paddle, its paint worn away, and began pushing through the weeds. Water hyacinths. Really pretty, shiny green leaves, pretty purple flowers. Clogging canals, ditches, and rivers throughout the Gulf states.
    But pretty.
    Like Clio.
    She too was pretty and useless—in fact, destructive. Look what she had done to Petra’s house. At least, he was pretty sure it had been her, her and Thais’s spell going wrong. Unless . . . Frowning, Richard flicked his cigarette into the water. There was a quick hiss, and then Richard remembered that littering was verboten nowadays. Damn.
    He took off his shirt and began to push the pirogue through the thick weeds. He saw a nutria, as big as a house cat, race across the canal where the hyacinths were so thick they could practically support its weight.
    Twenty minutes later he was clear of the canal and started the motor again. There was an almost-hidden entrance along here, leading to a narrow, snaking river barely twelve feet wide. Here it was. He angled the boat in and cut the motor again. Too many cypress trees and trailing underwater weeds. Easy to chew up your propeller. Most of the