“Fernando shouldn’t have encouraged them,” I said with mock severity. “There was no need to both bow and kiss Betty Eastey’s hand.”
“Her poor husband is going to hear nothing but ‘Fernando this’ and ‘Fernando that’ for days,” Abby said with another giggle.
“The ladies will be very disappointed when they discover they are trying to saddle the wrong horse,” Fernando replied. “Your friends told me the most charming stories, Diana. Did you know that vampires are really quite cuddly, once we find our true love?”
“Matthew hasn’t exactly been transformed into a teddy bear,” I said drily.
“Ah, but you didn’t know him before.” Fernando’s smile was wicked.
“Fernando!” Sarah called from the kitchen. “Come help me light this stupid fire. I can’t get it to catch.”
Why she felt it was necessary to light a fire in this kind of heat was beyond me, but Sarah said Em had always lit a fire on Lughnasadh, and that was that.
“Duty calls,” Fernando murmured, giving Abby a little bow. Like Betty Eastey, she blushed.
“We’ll go with you.” Caleb took Grace by the hand. “Come on, sprout.”
Matthew watched the Pratts troop off to the kitchen, a smile playing at the corner of his mouth.
“That will be us soon,” I said, slipping my arms around him.
“That’s just what I was thinking.” Matthew kissed me. “Are you ready to tell your aunt about being a weaver?”
“As soon as the Pratts leave.” Every morning I promised to tell Sarah about all that I’d learned from the London coven, but with every passing day it got harder to share my news.
“You don’t have to tell her everything all at once,” Matthew said, running his hands over my shoulders. “Just tell her you’re a weaver so you can stop wearing this shroud.”
We joined the others in the kitchen. Sarah’s fire was now crackling merrily in the stillroom, adding to the warmth of the summer evening. We sat around the table, comparing notes on the party and gossiping about the latest coven happenings. Then the talk turned to baseball. Caleb was a Red Sox fan, just like my dad.
“What is it about Harvard men and the Red Sox?” I got up to make some tea.
A flicker of white caught my eye. I smiled and put the kettle on the stove, thinking it was one of the house’s missing ghosts. Sarah would be so happy if one of them were ready to apparate again.
That was no ghost.
Grace tottered in front of the stillroom fireplace on unsteady, two-year-old legs. “Pretty,” she cooed.
“Grace!”
Startled by my cry, Grace turned her head. That was enough to upset her balance, and she tipped toward the fire.
I’d never reach her in time—not with a kitchen island and twenty-five feet between us. I reached into the pocket of my shorts and pulled out my weaver’s cords. They snaked through my fingers and twisted around my wrists just as Grace’s scream pierced the air.
But there was no time for spells, either. Instead I acted on pure instinct and rooted my feet into the floor. Water was all around us, trickling through deep arteries that crisscrossed the Bishop land. It was within me, too, and in an effort to focus its raw, elemental power I isolated the filaments of blue, green, and silver that highlighted everything in the kitchen and the stillroom that was tied to water.
In a quicksilver flash, I directed a bolt of water at the fireplace. A spout of steam erupted, coals hissed, and Grace hit the slurry of ash and water on the hearth with a thud.
“Grace!” Abby ran past me, followed by Caleb.
Matthew drew me into his arms. I was soaked to the skin and shivering. He rubbed my back, trying to restore some warmth.
“Thank God you have so much power over water, Diana,” Abby said, holding a tearful Grace.
“Is she okay?” I asked. “She reached out to steady herself, but she was awfully close to the flames.”
“Her hand is a little pink,” Caleb said, examining her small fingers. “What do you think, Matthew?”
Matthew took Grace’s hand.
“Pretty,” she said, her lower lip trembling.
“I know,” Matthew murmured. “Fire is very pretty. Very hot, too.” He blew on her fingers, and she laughed. Fernando handed him a damp cloth and an ice cube.
“’Gain,” she commanded, thrusting her hand in Matthew’s face.
“Nothing seems to be damaged, and there are no blisters,” Matthew said after obeying the tiny tyrant’s command to blow on her fingers once more. He wrapped the cloth carefully around her hand and held the ice cube to it. “She should be fine.”
“I didn’t know you could wield waterbolts.” Sarah looked at me sharply. “Are you okay? You look different—shiny.”
“I’m fine.” I pulled away from Matthew, trying to draw the tattered remains of my disguising spell around me. I searched the floor surrounding the kitchen island, looking for my dropped weaver’s cords in case some surreptitious patching was required.
“What did you get all over yourself?” Sarah grabbed my hand and turned it palm up. What I saw made me gasp.
Each finger bore a strip of color down its center. My pinkie was streaked with brown, my ring finger yellow. A vivid blue marked my middle finger, and red blazed down my index finger in an imperious slash. The colored lines joined together on my palm, continuing on to the fleshy mound at its base in a braided, multicolored rope. There the rope met up with a strand of green that wandered down from my thumb—ironic, given the fate of most of my houseplants. The five-colored twist traveled the short distance to my wrist and formed a knot with five crossings—the pentacle.
“My weaver’s cords. They’re . . . inside me.” I looked up at Matthew in disbelief.
But most weavers used nine cords, not five. I turned over my left palm and discovered the missing strands: black on my thumb, white on my pinkie, gold on my ring finger, and silver on my middle finger. The pointer finger bore no color at all. And the colors that twisted down to my left wrist created an ouroboros, a circle with no beginning and no end that looked like a snake with its tail in its mouth. It was the de Clermont family emblem.
“Is Diana . . . shimmering?” Abby asked.
Still staring at my hands, I flexed my fingers. An explosion of colored threads illuminated the air.
“What was that?” Sarah’s eyes were round.
“Threads. They bind the worlds and govern magic,” I explained.
Corra chose that moment to return from her hunting. She swooped down the stillroom chimney and landed in the damp pile of wood. Coughing and wheezing, she lurched to her feet.