A Necklace of Water Read Online Free PDF

wouldn’t be able to concentrate, that I would choke and look weak in front of him. I had to show him that I was strong, that I could do this.
    Clio, do not screw this up.
It felt like my whole future was in this moment, that whether I would live or die, literally, depended on the outcome of this situation.
    I shut my mouth and breathed out slowly through my nose. Consciously I released all fear and regrets, just let them go and agreed to accept whatever happened.
    Which, of course, is always the first step to getting in touch with magick.
    “The first part of this spell binds us to the earth,” Daedalus said. “Even though we’re on the second floor.”
    His eyes twinkled. I’d never seen any sense of humor about him before, and it made him seem a bit less scary—a tiny bit.
    “The second part recognizes the crystal’s vibrations,” he went on in a soft, soothing voice. “And the third part aligns our vibrations with its. Can you tell me what the fourth part of the spell would be? The
fin-quatrième?”
    Spells were divided up into parts, sometimes as many as twelve or thirteen, depending on what you were doing. I knew that spells with even more parts or steps than that existed, but I’d never done any of them, never seen them done. Putting the prefix
fin
-in front of
quatrième
meant that the spell had only four parts and that the fourth part was the last.
    “The
fin-quatrième
would be taking its power,” I said. I had no problem with taking a crystal’s power. It didn’t seem alive, couldn’t feel pain or fear. This was fine.
    Daedalus started teaching me the spell. I knew the basic form, the grounding and centering, and I copied it perfectly. He seemed pleased, and I started to feel better.
    The second part was also familiar—anytime you use anything whatsoever in a spell, you have to recognize it, learn it, identify it. The third part was a variation on what I had done that night with the cats, but it seemed less scary and dangerous. I concentrated hard, memorizing it, and almost gasped when I felt my vibrations subtly align with the crystal’s. My eyes were closed and I was breathing shallowly through my mouth. I felt the crystal practically burning between our hands—Daedalus and I seemed like one, and then we joined the crystal and it was like we were no longer two beings, Clio and Daedalus, but one new, alien life-form made up of our two vibrations plus this other, weird vibration of the crystal. You couldn’t picture it in your mind, and I can’t describe it. But that was what it felt like.
    Then Daedalus started singing the
fin-quatrième.
I paid intense attention, though since we were linked, the words weren’t even words—they were images and emotions and meanings, and they went straight into my brain from his, and I started singing them too, though I’d never heard them before. It was a beautiful spell, elegant and precise, sparely written, with no extraneous showmanship or clumsy, unnecessary elements. It was actually a much better spell than I would have thought Daedalus might craft—but then again, maybe he hadn’t crafted it.
    Suddenly the tone changed. I was in the middle of admiring the spell, memorizing it even as I sang it for the first time, and then it was as if the world went dark. I didn’t open my eyes, but a heavy gray veil suddenly seemed to drop down over everything, separating me and Daedalus and the crystal from the rest of the world. A tendril of fear uncoiled at the base of my spine, but I ignored it, concentrating on the spell.
    The spell started to unravel the crystal, separating its vibrations and energy from its form. It wasn’t a clean break; it wasn’t as if you could simply assume its power and still be left with a whole crystal. With horror I realized that the only way to get power from something was to destroy it utterly. The vibrations were being dismantled, untwined from their hold on the crystal’s perfect, beautiful structure of neatly aligned