Spellbinder: A Love Story With Magical Interruptions

by Melanie Rawn

  “Would I do that?”

  “If you thought you could get away with it, yes. All right, then. Once upon a time in a land called Virginia, two young men got lost in a snowstorm … .”

  NICHOLAS RUBBED A SLEEVE AGAINST the pickup’s windshield, but smearing condensation around did nothing to improve the view. In English parlance, rain was likened to cats and dogs; this snowstorm was lions and wolves. “I can’t see a bloody thing,” he complained. “Where the hell are we?”

  “Virginia, last time I checked.” Alec tried the wipers again; they got stuck in snow halfway up, and refused to budge.

  “Where in Virginia?” He amended the metaphor to prides of lions and several packs of wolves.

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “It’s your country, Alec.”

  “And could you navigate the wilds of Transylvania in a snowstorm?”

  “Transylvania is in Romania. I’m Hungarian. I thought good little American schoolboys learn all about Virginia when they study Washington and Jefferson.”

  “Virginia in the 1700s—which I’ll bet was the last time they did any maintenance on this road.” He peered through the windshield. “Is that a light?”

  “Careful. It might be Andreiu and his miraculous retractable fangs, trying to lure us.”

  “As long as he lures us someplace warm, I really don’t care.” He paused. “Warm, with a pot of hot coffee and a plate of oatmeal cookies.”

  The golden glow, fitful as a firefly in the storm, grew brighter. And both men’s senses reeled as the light touched them.

  “Impossible.”

  “Improbable,” Nick corrected. “Remember your Sherlock Holmes. ‘When you have eliminated the impossible —’”

  “‘—whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,”’ Alec finished for him. “But didn’t Mr. Scot say there weren’t any of us out here?”

  “I would say he has been underinformed. Shall I send a request for cookies and see who responds?”

  “Or what responds.”

  All at once a rich scents filled the chilly interior of the Chevy. Oatmeal, brown sugar, walnuts, a delicate hint of cinnamon.

  “Az Istenért!” whispered one voice at the same time the other muttered, “My God!”

  Five edgy minutes later they struggled from the truck into the snow, gazes fixed on rectangles of golden light delineating the windows and door of a house. Two red-brick stories, with an ambitious if vaguely absurd portico-and-pillars arrangement out front; in the open doorway stood a tall woman and a little girl.

  “Well? What y‘all waitin’ for—Imbolc? Get on in here!”

  The two men slogged through hip-deep drifts. The door slammed and warmth enveloped them from a hearthfire in the room to their left.

  “I don’t know who you are,” Alec said, “but —”

  “I’m just the same as you, or you wouldn’t be here, the woman announced.”Get out of those cold damp things before you drip all over Great-greatgrandma Flynn’s best carpet.”

  Meekly they did as told. She was no older than they were—perhaps a year or so younger—but she wielded authority like Catherine the Great. Tall, sturdily made, she was handsome rather than pretty, her hair a wild tangle of redgold curls, her eyes a startling shade of blue. The child—perhaps ten and perhaps not—who peered up at the two strangers was almost her carbon copy.

  Nick shed coat, sweater, and shoes. These were snatched up by the girl, who ran them into the next room and set them to toast by the fire. Soon both he and Alec were wearing ancient knitted afghans and being herded to the sofa beside the hearth.

  “Welcome to Woodhush Farm. I’m Lulah McClure,” the woman announced. “This is my niece. And you might be—?”

  “Nicholas Orlov. My associate, Alexander Singleton.”

  “I’m Holly,” the little girl contributed. “Do you want the cookies now?”

  Alec blinked. “Uh —”

  Nick intercepted the helpless glance and shrugged. “May I help?”

  “If you can hurry up the percolator.” The child grinned all over her freckled face. “I can’t even boil water the usual way. And I’m sorry we don’t have oatmeal cookies, like Aunt Lulah said you wanted. Will gingersnaps do?”

  With coffee and cocoa and cookies laid out on a low oak table beside the fire, Lulah McClure fixed an appraising eye on the two men. “You’re here after the vampires up Old Rag Mountain, aren’t you?”

  Nick almost choked on his coffee. “How did you — ?”

  “I sent a call in to the regional office,” she drawled. “Sheriff McNichol and I can only do so much. Hope to hell one of you’s got what it takes to clean up a nest.”

  “Sheriff McNichol?”

  “Cousin Jesse,” Holly explained. “He’s Witch-folk, like us. More cookies, Mr. Singleton?”

  “Thanks. Do you ever have any trouble being what you are? I mean, do any of the people around here —”

  “Oh, they’re more likely to eye us because we’re Catholic,” Holly answered with a shrug. “Not many of ’em do, since most are related to us one way or another. There’s McClures and Flynns and Kirbys and McNicholses all over these hills.”

  “Any vampires in the family?” Nick asked blandly.

  “Not recently,” Holly deadpanned.

  He snorted. Smart-ass kid. He rather liked her. “About this new nest —”

  “Oh, it’s not new,” Lulah told him. “Story goes back a ways, actually. Nobody goin’ nowhere tonight, so you might’s well have more coffee and listen.”

  Back in 1932 (Lulah began), a book called Hollow Folk was published by a Mr. Sherman and a Mr. Henry, who wrote about Appalachia just exactly as if they knew what they were talking about. They described it as a place where people still lived the frontier life of the eighteen-century backwoods and spoke the English of Shakespeare’s time. Crowded into mud-plastered log cabins, supported by primitive agriculture, illiterate, almost completely cut off from the world, these people had never seen a railroad or a five-dollar bill.

  “Crap, of course,” said Lulah with a sniff. “They had everything from Coca-Cola to Japanese porcelain dinnerware and Model-T Fords. But considering the mess this country was in during the ‘30s, they figured they were well out of the mainstream. Besides, it was a helluvalot of fun to fox the researchers. They had a fine old time playing quaint and unlettered and ignorant—before goin’ home to their Caruso records and Jack Benny on the radio.”

  Alec grinned. “I like their style.”

  “Appalachia is all-American, and yet it’s un-American,” Lulah mused. “It’s a folk culture that goes back to the earliest days of the country, but it’s also the most resistant to progress — ‘cept maybe for the Amish. But you can’t hide in Pennsylvania quite the way you can in the Blue Ridge.”

  What the sly hill folk hadn’t known, however, was that certain influential persons decided to seize on their “uncivilized” way of life to dispossess them of their land, making their lack of modern amenities the excuse for destroying their homes and turning a vast swath of hill country into a preserve. In December of 1935, Shenandoah National Park was established. Five hundred families were displaced to “more civilized regions of agriculture and industry.”

  “This was exactly what the vampires wanted. Some prime land got taken over by a little family nest. Now, there’ve always been vampires around here — they’re everywhere that ordinary folks are—but mostly they kept to themselves. They don’t drink the tourists, they sure as shootin’ don’t guzzle local folks, and if a farmer loses a cow or a sheep every so often—well, that’s farming, and the losses get spread out pretty even around the county. Peaceful coexistence, more or less.”

  “But this group was different,” Alec suggested.

  Lulah nodded, firelight striking gold off her tangled red hair. “First it was hikers and campers from elsewhere who disappeared. But then locals started to go missing. Granddaddy spent a small fortune on garlic, protectin’ every
farm in the area. Then he let the nest know that the sooner they cleared out, the better. Most packed up and went elsewhere, once they found out Grandaddy meant business.”

  Holly listened wide-eyed; this was obviously a family tale she hadn’t heard. Nick reflected that Lulah McClure’s version must be appreciably edited, and wondered how her grandfather had managed the eviction.

  “A few decided they liked it around here, and stayed. Grandaddy saw to it they abided by the rules. Things got back to normal.”

  “Ando gav bi zhuklesko jal o pavori bi detesko,” Nick murmured.

  Holly looked startled; Alec sighed. “Yet another obscure Gypsy proverb. He’s got a million of them—at least. Nick, perhaps you’d be so kind as to translate for us ignorant Gadje?”

  “‘In a village without dogs, the farmers walk without sticks.’”

  “Gypsy?” Lulah scoffed. “With a Russian name and blond hair?”

  “Don’t ask,” Alec advised dryly.

  “What’s a Gadje?” Holly wanted to know.

  “Anybody who’s not a Gypsy,” Nick replied. “Forgive my interruption, Miss McClure, please go on. How do you think Andreiu found out about this area?”

  “That’s what was puzzlin’ me, until you gave me his name. ’Bout two years back, a cult moved into the old Neville place. Oh, they had the whole show going—rituals, animal sacrifices—rank amateurs, of course.”

  “Some find Witchcraft very chic,” Alec murmured.

  “If it’d been just that, nobody woulda minded. We’re tolerant folk, mostly. But it turned out they were white supremacists worshipping old Norse gods. The pamphlets Jesse and I found read as bad or worse than what the Klan used to print.”

  “Let me guess,” said Nick. “After defeating one’s enemies, the ancient Teutonic tradition is to drink—” Just in time he remembered the little girl’s presence, and amended his words to, “—from their skulls, to absorb their strength.”

  “You mean ‘drink their blood,’” Holly corrected. “It goes back to the Celtic tribes as described by Julius Caesar—”

  Lulah sighed into her coffee mug. “I try to raise her right, the way her mama and my brother would’ve wanted. But she’s got a brain like a sponge and soaks up the Good Lady only knows what. Anyway, Jesse and I got rid of those people. But it took us two days of hard work to clean the evil out of that house.”

  “Somebody there was not an amateur,” Nick said.

  “Somebody,” she agreed. “We took everything out and burned it. Including a big ol’ empty shipping crate with Karel Andrieu’s name on it.”

  “I think there was a coffin inside it,” Holly told them.

  “I decided I didn’t want to look,” Lulah retorted immediately.

  “I agree with Holly,” Nick said. “Andreiu is known for keeping home-soil coffins in various places. What exactly has happened since he got here?”

  Holly snagged another cookie. “Mr. Mallory lost four cows just before Hallowe’ en, stolen right out of his barn one night. And the Widow Farnsworth, she was out hunting her Thanksgiving turkey and found a couple of deer carcasses drained of blood.”

  “Any human deaths?” Alec asked.

  Lulah’s expression turned grim. “Week ago last Monday Lucretia Houston disappeared.”

  “And then reappeared,” Holly put in. “Most of her, anyways.”

  Her aunt gave her a quelling look. “Holly Elizabeth, isn’t it past your bedtime?” Big blue eyes rounded and the freckled face assumed woeful lines. Lulah snorted. “All right, but if you have nightmares, don’t blame me. They identified Lucretia by her dental records—yes, we do have forensic science in Appalachia. She’d been got to by animals. But there was no blood. None.”

  “And the increase in losses, leading up to this lady’s death, directly correlates to Karel Andreiu’s arrival in the area?” Nick frowned. “One kill a week isn’t much.”

  “I’d say my partner is bloodthirsty,” Alec said to Holly, “but the context is wrong. Have any more of the locals seen anything, heard anything?”

  Lulah shook her head. “Not a flick of a bat’s wing. I don’t believe our local vampires are behind this, unless some of ’em have gone over to Andreiu’s side. Can’t really see that, though,” she added thoughtfully. “I’ve known Ben Poulter all my life, f’rinstance, and he’s harmless as a butterfly.”

  The men exchanged glances: socializing with a vampire? Alec said, “How many are there?”

  “A dozen or so. The daylight kind, anyway. There may be a few more of the allergic-to-sunshine sort. They stay pretty much to themselves, and we don’t bother them, so it’s worked out fine since the Depression.”

  “But now there is Andreiu,” Nick murmured. “A true vlkoslak—a vampire. Do you know where he hides himself during the day?”

  “Up Old Rag Mountain. I don’t know exactly where. The damned thing’s granite, and tryin’ to see through solid rock gives me a headache.”

  “Of course,” Alec said affably, as if he knew a score of others who could in actuality look through solid rock. “What else is up on Old Rag Mountain?”

  “Just the village,” Holly said. “Post office, couple of stores, two churches, a cemetery, and a school.”

  “Don’t sneeze or you’ll miss it,” Alec interpreted wryly, and bent to scratch the ears of a huge ginger tabby that ignored him in favor of springing into Holly’s lap.

  “As you surmised,” Nick said, “we’re here to track down Andreiu. Our superiors are not especially fond of him or his methods.”

  Lulah nodded. “If you can clean out that nest up there, I’d be much obliged.”

  “We’ll do our best.” Alec finished his coffee and stretched. “Well, even if it’s not your bedtime, Holly, it’s certainly mine after driving all day in a snowstorm. Just show us to the couches, and—”

  “Don’t be silly.” Lulah smiled. “We’ve been expecting you all day.”

  Holly confessed, “I dropped a piece of bread this morning, butter-side up. Then I dropped a dish rag. And then I got out the broom to sweep—which I never do,” she finished with a grin.

  “All three of which,” Lulah told them, “mean unexpected visitors. Holly honey, run up and get extra quilts for the Wisteria Room and the General’s Tent, and make sure the towels are clean.”

  The girl glanced at the two men. “It’s not really a tent, y’know. We just call it that, from the time George Washington slept here.” She laughed, fully aware of the cliché. “He really did! We got a thank-you note and everything—”

  “Holly. The quilts?”

  “Yes, Aunt Lulah. But they won’t mind sleeping in the same bed. They’ve done it before. Off, Bandit.” And, dumping the cat off her knees, off she ran.

  Alec’s face was a study before he hastily composed himself. “Umm—she’s right, we don’t need to muss up two beds or two bedrooms.”

  “Suit yourselves.” Lulah rose and headed for the hall stairs. “Breakfast at eight. Good night.”

  It took Nick a minute to locate his voice again after she’d gone. “Alec … .”

  “Hmm?” He seemed quite intent on watching Bandit groom a bedraggled ear that bore witness to many a hard-won victory in the field.

  “Do they think we’re—?”

  “If they do, it certainly doesn’t seem to bother them.” He chuckled. “Of course, when one has just discussed how best to deal with a vampire, a little thing like that wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow, would it?”

  “But how did Holly know? That we’ve shared a bed before—out of necessity,” he added quickly. “Not that we—because we aren’t.”

  “You’re cute when you’re flustered, did you know that?” He grinned. “I don’t know what she knows or how she knows it. I’m not even sure exactly what she is.”

  “That’s not usual for you.” Leaning back in a worn easy chair, he stretched his feet to the fire. “As a rule, you make the identification within ten minutes.”

  “I know, and it�
�s driving me batty.” When Nick scowled at him, he paused and shook his head. “Another ill-considered pun. Sorry.”

  “What about Holly?” his partner asked patiently.

  “Can’t say yet. The implication is that she’s lousy at everything—Including boiling water the usual way,” he added with a smile. “Interesting kid. There’s talent there, I just haven’t put my finger on it yet. She has some tricky wardings—Lutah’s work, if I’m not mistaken—and they’re in my way. Lulah’s main talent is far-sense, by the way. Nothing clairvoyant or clairaudient, but she knew where we were.”

  “And sensed the desire for coffee and oatmeal cookies when I thought about it hard enough.”

  “Seems so. I can’t get a read on the girl, though.”

  “Let me know when you figure it out. I’ll collect our suitcases. Time for bed.” Rising, he grinned down at his partner. “And keep your hands to yourself.”

  “You’re no fun.”

  “How would you know?”

  “I know you, that’s how I know. I’m the one who told you the name of your bookstore ought to be ‘The Felonious Monk.’”

  “A vile pun, and an even viler misrepresentation,” he retorted. “On both counts.” And with that he reclaimed his shoes and coat, and departed the parlor.

  At the front door he nearly tripped over the cat. “It’s cold out there,” he told it. “Are you sure you want out?” A paw batted lightly at his shoe. When he went outside, Bandit followed.

  Trudging through swirling snow to the pickup, the cat bounding beside him through the drifts, his attention was suddenly caught by a shadow of movement in a curtained upstairs window. Lulah McClure held a candle in one hand, the other gesturing lightly, gracefully, before she let the curtain drop. He shrugged, wondering why she’d been watching him—and then caught his breath. Bandit was calmly striding the gravel path between the pickup and the barn—which was as clear and dry as if it hadn’t snowed here in twenty years.

  He ran to open the great wooden door, then back to drive the Chevy into hiding. Carrying suitcases, he started for the house. An aggrieved yowl stopped him. Turning, he saw Bandit in the open barn door. Hurrying to close it, he muttered a thanks to the cat, who leaped into the snowdrifts and bounced around to the back of the house—presumably to his own private door.