Spellbinder: A Love Story With Magical Interruptions

by Melanie Rawn

  “I admit it’s not cozy, but I’ll make sure it’s comfortable.”

  “You’d better,” Lachlan put in, as if solicitous for the lady’s well-being.

  They entered the cellar. Lachlan couldn’t keep an exclamation from leaving his lips; the place was huge, icy-cold, and as bare as the rest of the house but for the promised stone bench, a slab of black rock he assumed to be the altar, and candles. Hundreds of them, ink-black, standing virgin and unlit on every available surface. In window recesses, crowded onto shelves cut into the rock, on steps up to an outer door, in a semicircle around the stone bench, at each corner of the altar—tall tapers, thick columns, votives, pyramids, spheres, squares, and pillars of black wax clustered everywhere.

  “Holy shit,” Lachlan muttered. “You wanna burn the whole place down?”

  “The fire department would be outraged,” Noel agreed. “Why don’t you try out the bench, both of you? You can tell me how many cushions we’ll need.”

  “Silk, stuffed with feathers,” Denise put in. “If you’re determined to go organic.”

  Lachlan stepped over the half-circle of candles around the bench and paused to turn slowly around. Vaulted ceiling, stone pillars to hold it up, arches on the far wall where wine racks must once have stood, and a small rickety table with some black glass bowls on it. He could picture Susannah seated there. Writing that strange coded note; hoping Holly would get hold of it and recognize it for what it was; scraping her knee against the table leg when she kicked at scurrying rats—

  If the wood matched the splinters in the knee of her slacks, and if a bit of her skin or blood lingered, Evan could prove she had been held here. For all the good it would do, he told himself morosely. Bradshaw had hypothesized a magical scrubbing after Beltane, and the same had probably happened after Noel murdered Susannah. No wonder there were Magistrates to deal with miscreants within the community; ordinary law enforcement didn’t stand a chance.

  Denise pushed past, gathering her burgundy velvet cloak around her, and sat on the bench. “It is cold,” she complained.

  “Dillon? What’s your opinion?”

  Lachlan seated himself beside her. “It needs more than a few pillows.”

  “Yes,” Denise seconded, “where’s the couch we had at Beltane?”

  Noel bent to touch a lighted match to one of the candles on the floor, straightened, and looked at them unsmiling, his eyes as flat and cold as a frozen window into an empty room. With a single sweeping gesture he lit all the candles around the bench.

  “What the—?” Lachlan tried to stand. He couldn’t. His muscles pushed and strained against something that wasn’t there. He felt neither weak nor drained; his ass was simply stuck to the bench as securely as if he’d been glued to it. Neither would his hands lift from where they rested on his thighs, nor his arms move from his sides, nor even his toes wriggle in his boots. He could feel the Glock nestled at his ribs. Useless.

  Denise blurted with surprise, struggling just as ineffectually beside him. “What is this? What have you done?”

  “What do you think?” Noel inquired, as if sincerely curious. “While you contemplate your duties as the altar, Denise, you can also think up a really good explanation for why you brought a United States Marshal with you.” He stayed beyond the barrier of candles, regarding his guests with scorn. “Did you think I didn’t know? Did you think I wouldn’t remember? I catalog every single person who comes through my shop door! Waiting for the right people, searching them for power—you have none,” he directed at Lachlan, “but you reek of those who do. When she came in—” There was no doubt he was not referring to Denise. “—I could smell you on her. What is she?”

  Lachlan tried shifting his body to one side, leaning into Denise to push her off the bench. She was as stuck to it as he was, and cried out as he shoved her again, harder, with no result.

  “Stop that, goddammit! Noel, I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “Tell me what she is,” he said.

  “Just let me go, I promise I’ll get her and bring her back here—”

  He regarded Lachlan quizzically. “Can she really be this dim-witted?” Evan discovered he could shrug his shoulders. “It’s a gift.”

  “What a relief to know she didn’t have to pay for it. Come on, Denise,” he cajoled. “Tell me.”

  As she drew breath to speak, Lachlan warned, “Say it, he’ll kill you anyway.”

  “Denise isn’t the Sacrifice, Marshal. I need her living, breathing, and undamaged. Now, for the last time: What is that woman?”

  Denise spat the word. “Spellbinder!”

  Noel looked startled, then laughed. “Of course! Absolutely perfect. At Beltane you mentioned there was one in New York, but I never dreamed she’d walk into my bookshop! I’ve still got her credit card number in my computer—her address won’t be any trouble.” Cocking a brow at Lachlan: “You think you’re the only one with resources?”

  “I think you’re going to be in a world of hurt if we don’t show up when and where we’re supposed to.”

  “‘We’? How gallant of you, Marshal. ‘We’ all know you don’t give a rat’s ass about this bitch.” He frowned, slitting silvery eyes to scrutinize Lachlan’s face, as if trying to see inside his brain. “You smell of her. She gave you something. Very recently. What is it? Something of magic—” He moved forward, then caught himself just before he reached the boundary of candles. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. When this begins, nothing will protect you.”

  “IF HE’S NOT BACK BY FIVE—”

  Alec didn’t bother to glance up from the book he was reading. “Dear heart, do sit down. Or, if you must do your decapitated chicken act, get out a vacuum and do something useful.”

  Holly plopped herself down on the sofa. “What’re you reading?”

  “Seabiscuit.” He turned a page. “Hush up—I’ve just gotten to the 1938 Santa Anita Handicap.”

  “It’s not as if you haven’t read it twice already—”

  “Three times. It’s one of the few books—besides yours, of course—that I enjoy rereading.”

  Holly walked to the window, flicked a finger at one of the witch spheres, and walked back to the hearth again. “You realize I could have you arrested for false imprisonment. In my own home, no less.”

  “Protective custody.” He turned a page.

  “I’m going stir-crazy.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re just scared.”

  “You’re goddamned right I am.”

  “Good. I worry about people who aren’t scared when they ought to be.”

  “Oh, that’s helpful!”

  He set the book aside and mimicked her posture of folded arms and baleful stare. “He’ll be fine. He’s not stupid.”

  “Denise is.” She marched over to the bar for a club soda. She wanted a cigarette so badly, she was ready to claw the plaster off the walls. “Drink?”

  “Glenfiddich, please.”

  She poured and brought it to him. “Where’s Nicky?”

  “Taking a nap. We’re not as young as we used to be, you know—and watching you fret yourself into a nervous breakdown is rather exhausting.”

  “What are we going to do about Noel?”

  “Oh, I’m sure we’ll figure out something,” he said airily. “Ever been to the Gold Coast, where the rich folks live?”

  “No.”

  “You really don’t get out much, do you? You shop, you do the restaurants and theaters, museums and parks—but you don’t participate in the city’s real life. The day-to-day New York.”

  “I’m a country girl. Big cities make me nervous.”

  “Bullshit. You’ve lived in them before.”

  “Maybe I simply agree with Dickens: ‘All that is loathsome, drooping and decayed is here.”’

  “Bullshit squared. He only visited. Why don’t you read Walt Whitman sometime? He actually lived here.”

  “And not in an ivory tower like me, is that what you mean?”
>
  “Well, there’s a whole world going on in New York that you stay fairly insulated from. I’m not saying it’s wrong. I was just wondering.”

  Capitulating, she said, “I don’t understand this city. I’ve never figured out how so many people can live in such a small space and pretend that it works.”

  “And L.A. does work?” he asked wryly.

  “They’re all spread out, so they can fool themselves better. There’s a natural insulation of space. Plus everybody lives in a car, which is a galvanized steel metaphor. But here, there’s so much of everything. So many lives, all separate—you say I’m not connected to New York, but is anybody here really connected to anybody else? Outside of family and friends, I mean. There’s contact—hell, walking down the street is a contact sport—but is there connection?”

  “I think the intertwining is not often acknowledged. New York is the greatest city in the world—which means it’s the most excessive city in the world. Wealth, poverty, art, ugliness, generosity, violence—all outsized. But it weaves together.”

  “I think the word you want is ‘tangles,’” she retorted. “And no tapestries, please—the image is uninspired. Okay, I can see that after 9/11, yeah, connections were made. Martin told me that he and Ian realized it was the first time in their lives they didn’t feel hyphenated. Not African-Americans, but Americans. The United States finally became their country—and they descend from slaves who goddamned built half the United States!”

  “We were all shocked into seeing each other. It’s a disgrace that it took 9/11 to do it, because we’ve all been here living with each other all along.”

  “Not ‘with,’ Alec. ‘Among.’ The connections were made out of hideous necessity. Some still exist, I’m sure. But—”

  “Life can never be the same. I know it every time I see that great gaping hole in the sky. I would argue that because we’re never more human than when death is breathing down our necks, 9/11 opened our eyes—”

  “—to each other’s fear?” she interrupted. “That isn’t how it should be! It’s unpardonably sappy of me, but why can’t we see each other for reasons that celebrate our common humanity instead of—?”

  “Let me ask you this. To how many people can you be truly visible?”

  “Rephrase that. I don’t understand.”

  “Is there a limit to the number of people you can know? Really know, I mean, not just nod to at the bank or the market. How many people allow you to see them—and how many do you allow yourself to be seen by?”

  “Very, very few,” she mused. “I could do a whole lecture about socialization within the family, tribe, and clan, and keeping relationships structured—”

  “And then I’d have to yell ‘The point! The point!’ and you’d get pissed off.”

  They exchanged brief grins. “The point,” Holly resumed, “is that evolution didn’t wire us for an infinite number of connections. In a city like this we guard our personal space, and that means seeing only a finite number of people. But when we do look at each other, we should see the possibilities.”

  “We have to be willing to be seen, you know.”

  “Yeah.” Holly settled on the couch and dug her hands into her trouser pockets. “I had dinner once with a group that included a rather well-known mistress. No, I’m not going to tell you her name or whose mistress she used to be. She was the wariest person I’ve ever met. People had been wanting things from her all her life. Her body, her influence, gossip about the rich and famous. People were always trying to slice off bits of her. Anyway, there’s this weird dynamic that goes on between a woman who’s made it on her brains and a woman who’s made it on her back. Each secretly envies what the other has, each is not-so-secretly contemptuous of what the other lacks. I hadn’t expected that in myself. But I expected nothing from her except some conversation. It wasn’t until dessert that we finally hit on a topic we were both interested in. We became visible to each other, to use your term. Then she suddenly realized it, and I could practically hear the portcullis slam down. I haven’t thought about her in years—but what you just said reminded me, Alec. She didn’t want to be visible. And who could blame her?”

  “Life does that to some people,” he agreed. “I imagine it has to do with figuring out how visible you want to be. After all, life can be controlled by not making connections.”

  “So we circle back around to me,” Holly observed. “This was your and Nicky’s ivory tower—an equally uninspired image—before it was mine.”

  “Yes, and he holed up in it the same way you do, when he had the chance.”

  “Until you. But that was Mr. Scot’s doing, or so I’ve been told.”

  “And no coincidence. Like the one about the writer whose college friend works for a judge who used to be with my father’s firm, and whose official protection is a big hunk of an Irishman—” He laughed. “I see you take my point. Fate? Destiny? Maybe even magic?”

  “You’ve become insufferable in your old age.”

  “And you, sweetheart, have become more real than you ever were before. Visible. Especially to Evan.” He sipped his Scotch. “I’ve been meaning to tell you, by the by, how relieved Nick and I are that he likes us. He’s remarkably without prejudice.”

  Holly giggled slightly. “You mean for a Catholic heterosexual male law enforcement officer? Except that lesbians confuse him. I think he just can’t wrap his mind around the idea that a woman could prefer another woman to a man—meaning, of course, him!”

  “He’s that good, is he?”

  “Uncle Alec!”

  Eyes twinkling, he asked, “So what do you think we ought to do about Noel?” He waited for an answer, then added, “Has anyone ever told you that you do a first-rate imitation of an astonished goldfish?”

  “Why the hell did we sit here blithering when we should’ve been—?” She fixed him with her fiercest stare; he only smiled. “Have you been managing me?”

  “My love, you are outrageously left-brained and never met a problem you didn’t tackle with words, words, and more words. All I did was give you the chance to talk yourself out of a potential panic while we wait.”

  She hunched down and said nothing for a full five minutes. Alec returned to the 1938 Santa Anita Handicap. His nonchalance infuriated her, all the more so for its being calculated to produce just that effect. Visible? To him she was an open book—hell, she was a whole encyclopedia. Holly Elizabeth McClure A—Z.

  “You’re sulking,” he observed at last.

  “Does such acuity come naturally, or did you take lessons?”

  “You’re an uppity piece of work.” He turned another page.

  “Celebrated in song and story,” she shot back.

  The front door chimed. Every nerve in her body cringed. But that was insane, her instincts were playing her false, it was Evan finally home—

  Nicky entered the living room, wordlessly handing her a note.

  I HAVE LACHLAN. I WOULD RATHER HAVE YOU.

  Twenty—seven

  IF DENISE HAD BEEN A moron to come here, Lachlan figured he had been doubly moronic to come with her. In fact, if he was any stupider, they’d have to water him twice a week. On the other hand, he hadn’t expected to get stuck like a wad of gum to a stone bench.

  Noel had left them alone in the gathering twilight. Denise was currently treating Evan to a moderately impressive prima donna tirade bordering on hysterics. Her voice ratcheted up a couple of octaves, her breathing was quick and erratic, and she was really starting to get on his nerves.

  “Knock it off,” he said at last. “This isn’t helping anything.”

  “Help? There’s nothing anybody can do to help! I’m going to die here—”

  How he wished he could slap her. “Noel won’t kill his altar.”

  “What the fuck do you know about it?” She tried to twist her way off the bench again, and failed. “If I hadn’t left my purse upstairs, there are some things in my gris-gris bag that might have helped us out of this.”r />
  “So it’s voodoo?”

  “The term is ‘Voudon,”’ she retorted haughtily. “Holly hasn’t taught you much, has she? There are as many different Traditions and variations as there are types of magic. I’d explain them, but you could never understand.”

  “We’re stuck on a stone slab and there’s a madman upstairs who wants my fiancée’s blood for some sick ritual to accomplish God knows what—make himself a god, for all we know. Can you lose the attitude, please?”

  “You never told her about me, did you?” she asked unexpectedly.

  “No, and you’re not gonna say anything, either,” he warned.

  She shrugged—movement above the waist was possible, or they wouldn’t be breathing—and shook back her long blonde hair. “I got what I wanted. So did you, if you recall.” With a sly, sidelong smile, she added, “She’ll come for you, Lachlan. Even if Elias tries to stop her.”

  He stared bleakly at the candles. “I know.”

  BY SEVEN THE CIRCLE WAS assembled at Kate’s house on Long Island. Her menagerie was banished to their various crates and cages, her furniture was cleared from the living room, and her electricity and telephone were turned off at their sources. Holly called fire to candles and a substantial hearth blaze, at which Martin and Ian warmed themselves after a long drive in the Porsche with the top down. Simon busied himself drawing the drapes. Nicky brought in and unrolled Holly’s sisal rug from her Beltane celebration with Evan. Elias and Alec were in the dark foyer with Lydia, keeping her away from any shadows.

  Kate’s touch on her arm turned Holly’s head. “You received my package?”

  “Yes. Thanks. I hope it works.”

  “It will.” She hesitated. “Your poor friend. Dead for a stupid mistake.”

  “That’s what hurts so much,” Holly murmured. Looking down, she fingered the diamond bracelet around her wrist. “She didn’t have to die, dammit—”

  “Well, nobody else is going to,” Kate said briskly, “especially not your Evan. This Noel person seems oriented toward Satanism. That’s probably the form his ritual will take, and we know how to deal with that. But from what Elias says about the sigils Lydia saw—” Kate shook her head, tendrils of blonde hair coming loose from her ponytail. “It may get pretty nasty at The Hyacinths.”