Read Online A Chalice of Wind by Cate Tiernan - Free Book Online

doing?” I asked, waving my arms to clear out the smoke.
    “Burning sage,” Axelle said briefly, and kept going, waving the smoldering green twigs in every corner of my room.
    Burning sage? “You know, they make actual air fresheners,” I said, dumping my stuff on my bed. “Or we could just open the window.”
    “This isn’t for that,” Axelle said. Her lips moved silently, and I finally got it: the burning sage was some “magic” thing she was doing. Like she was doing a “spell” in my room for some reason. So. This was my life: I lived with an unknown stranger who was right now performing a voodoo spell in my own bedroom. Because she actually believed all that crap. I mean, Jesus. Not to take the Lord’s name in vain.
    Axelle ignored me, murmuring some sort of chant under her breath as she moved about the room. In her other hand she held a crystal, like you can buy at a science shop, and she ran this around the window frame while she chanted.
    I freaked. I couldn’t help it. At that moment my life seemed so completely insane. Without saying a word, I turned around and ran out of that apartment, down the carriageway, and through the gate. Then I was on the narrow street, with slow-moving cars, tourists, street performers. It was all too much, and I pressed my hand against my mouth, trying not to cry. I hated this place! I wanted to be somewhere normal! I wanted to be home! While Welsford wasn’t exactly a mime-free zone, still, I wouldn’t encounter them on the street right outside my house.
    My eyes blurred and I stumbled on the curb. I had nowhere to go, no refuge. Then the word refuge made me think of a church, and that made me remember a place I had seen a couple of days before: a small, hidden garden, behind a tall brick wall. It was attached to St. Peter’s, a Catholic church between Axelle’s apartment and the small corner grocery store where I shopped.
    I headed there now, walking fast down the brick-paved sidewalk. When I reached it, I pressed my face to the small iron grille inset into one wall, about five feet up. I walked the length of the brick wall and pushed some ivy aside to find a small wooden door, made for tiny Creole people of two centuries ago.
    With no hesitation, I wrenched on the latch and shook the door hard until it popped open. Then I slipped under the ivy and entered a serene, private world.
    The garden was small, maybe sixty feet square, and bordered by the church in back of it, an alley on one side, a parish office to the other side, and the street in front. But although all that separated me from the world was a seven-foot brick fence, this place was unnaturally quiet, set apart, not of the secular world somehow.
    I glanced around. A few windows overlooked the garden, but I felt safe and private. Beneath a crape myrtle tree, its bark hanging off in silken shards, stood an ancient marble bench, and I sank down onto it, burying my face in my arms. I didn’t make a sound, but hot tears squeezed out of my eyes and dripped into the crooks of my elbows. I expected someone to come tap me on the shoulder at any minute, telling me the garden was private and I had to leave, but no one did, and I lay hunched over that cool marble bench for a long time, my mind screaming variations of, Someone, for God’s sake, please help me.
    Finally, after my arms felt numb and one thigh had gone to sleep, I slowly straightened up. I felt waterlogged and puffy and sniffled, wiping my nose on my shirt-sleeve.
    “Try this.”
    I jumped, startled, almost losing my balance over the back of the bench. To make my total humiliation complete, there was a guy about my age there, holding out a crisp white handkerchief.
    “How long have you been there?” I demanded, all too aware of what I must look like: flush-faced, swollen eyes, Rudolph’s nose.
    “Long enough to know you could use a handkerchief,” he said wryly, shaking it gently in front of me.
    Okay. It was either that or blow my nose on my