Free A Necklace of Water by Cate Tiernan

my arms.
    “What? Goddess, Thais, what happened? Are you okay? Where’s Kevin?” Petra immediately got up and came to me, stroking my hair, her long, sensitive fingers tracing my forehead as though to get the information out of me by osmosis.
    “I’m okay. Kevin’s at the hospital. His stepmom said I should come home.”
    “But what happened?”
    I tried to put it all together in my mind. “We were just driving, not too fast, down a little street. And suddenly a little girl ran in front of our car.”
    I sat up, trying to remember what had happened in what order. “There was a puppy. She ran after the puppy. She saw us but was too scared to move. I gasped, and Kevin said something and jerked the steering wheel, but there was no way we wouldn’t hit her.”
    “Oh my God,” Petra said, rubbing my shoulders.
    “Then—I don’t know what happened, but I remember thinking I had to stop it somehow. Word just popped into my head, and I said them. And I did this with my hands.” I showed Petra the splitting-arrow thing. “And then, boom, the little girl flew over by the sidewalk, and the puppy went in the opposite direction. So we didn’t hit them.”
    I looked up to see a bizarre expression on Petra’s face. She focused on me solemnly, as if I’d just given her some terrible news.
    “What?” I asked.
    “Have you been studying displacement spells?”
    “No. What’s a—oh, when you move something out of the way? No, you know I haven’t. I’m still learning the bazillion words for herbs.” I tried not to sound bitter, but the amount of sheer memorization required for the craft was overwhelming.
    “You haven’t studied anything like that? Has Clio shown you something similar? Or anyone else?”
    I thought. “No. I don’t know how I knew it. It was just there. What?” I was starting to feel alarmed at Petra’s expression.
    “Okay,” she said, sitting down across from me. “Then what happened?”
    “Well, I did the thing, and the little girl was out of the way. But we headed toward the left curb, and I saw that Kevin was unconscious, passed out.”
    “Unconscious?” Petra looked awful.
    “Yeah—I don’t know what happened. It’s like he’s—diabetic or something and just passes out. The paramedics said it was like he’d been hit by lightning. This happened once before,” I said, the word
lightning
triggering a memory. “That night we
did
get hit by lightning. Remember? Kevin almost passed out, and that guy had to help us. I mean, I wonder what’s wrong with him. Maybe I should talk to his dad or stepmom about it.”
    Petra gazed at me with her clear, blue-gray eyes. “He’s not diabetic,” she said.
    “How do you know?” Could she really tell without even examining him?
    “It’s you. It’s what happens when you make magick around him.”
    I stared at her. “What do you mean?”
    “I don’t know why you’re able to perform such powerful spells without studying,” Petra said slowly. “But with Kevin—what you’re doing is, essentially, sucking his energy out of him. His life force.”
    Horrified, I gaped at her. “What?”
    “Magick doesn’t come out of thin air,” Petra explained. “Though it might look like it does. Magick is everywhere, and when you make magick, it’s mostly
gathering
magick. Though you can increase what you have to work with.”
    I wasn’t following her.
    “Trained witches create boundaries around their spells so they don’t affect any living thing around them, except of course whatever they want to affect. But you’re not trained, and when you do powerful magick, it grabs force from wherever it can. In this case, from Kevin.”
    I could hardly take it in. “
I
did that to him? But he was—he was gray. His heart was beating way too fast. He’s at the
hospital.
“
    Petra nodded. “It happened before, at the fountain. At the time, I thought maybe the lightning itself had affected him. But now it seems like it was probably you.”
    “Oh my