Spellbinder: A Love Story With Magical Interruptions

by Melanie Rawn

  “Personally,” Elias said from just behind them in the darkness, “I’m not disposed to give him anything.”

  Nick exchanged glances with his partner. Bradshaw had snuck up on them as if they were novices without a spell to their names instead of senior Witches with nearly a century’s combined experience. Alec turned a bland smile on Elias. Nick merely arched a brow. Neither would give the Magistrate the satisfaction of seeing them taken aback.

  Elias gestured to the destruction around him. “This was meant as a distraction, I take it?”

  “It worked—for a while, anyway,” Nick said, forbidding himself to sound defensive. “Holly got in,” he added, neglecting to mention that she had been just as silently sneaky as Bradshaw. Perhaps he and Alexander were getting too old for this sort of thing.

  “So what’s keeping you up here?”

  Nick gestured to the closed door. “Noel shut it rather effectively.”

  “Well, the front door is standing wide open. I don’t like the feel of the entry hall, by the way. Avoid it.” He waited a moment, then said, “Get on with it, then.”

  “As thou will it, so mote it be,” Alec retorted, and reached for Nicholas with his left hand, where his wedding ring shone; Nick matched his left hand with Alec’s, lacing their fingers together so the identical rings touched. Together they faced the door. It had been many years since they had first done this, since circumstances dictated an interweaving of power that both viewed warily, neither wanting to give over control—only to find a pure and elegant joy in the sharing. Nick reveled in his partner’s strength, directing it to the door, willing it to open.

  “Fasz kivan!” he spat, feeling his face flush with angry effort. “Whatever he’s done—it’s so foul, it shields itself with its own malevolence. I’ve only felt this a few times, this kind of mahrimé. I can’t find a way in.”

  “There’s always a way in.”

  Elias pushed them both aside. Nick stopped him with a hand on his arm, and pressed into his palm the blooded stones. Alec hesitated, then gave over the other two rocks. Stepping back, he watched Bradshaw draw a slow, centering breath and spread his arms wide. An instant later he reeled, shoulder colliding with the wall.

  “Christ!” he said shakily. “You’re right—it’s like — everything that ever died in the history of the world is stinking down there —”

  “Mahrimé,” Nick said again. “Not just impure, Elias. Something intensely polluted. Something evil—and Holly’s in the middle of it.”

  “I am armed!” roared Noel’s voice from below. “I am strong!”

  Elias pushed away from the wall. “So am I,” he muttered, grim-faced.

  It was true. Armed with magic and determination and four small bits of Earth, fury blazing in his dark brown eyes, hands clenched bloodless, every muscle rasping against every bone, his hate matched itself against Noel’s evil.

  The wooden door splintered. Elias laughed.

  NOEL PIVOTED SLOWLY, HIS BREATHING erratic, his cheekbones flushed crimson, and pointed one long finger at Denise. Holly resisted an impulse to shrink back into the shadows; he didn’t seem to see her anyway. Or maybe he simply wasn’t interested anymore. He had enough of her blood to Work with. Denise tottered up from the bench, trembling, white to the lips with fear.

  Evan hissed in a breath through his teeth. Holly felt him struggle, trying to move, and tightened her arms around his shoulders. Denise dropped her cloak onto the floor, stumbling as she slowly shed the rest of her clothes. Sweater, blouse, brassiere, shoes, trousers, opaque black tights—she walked naked into the Circle of candles that were rock-steady, no breeze from the shattered window plucking at the flames. Holly suddenly realized she could no longer feel it on her skin, that breath of cold sea air, and understood with a sick grinding in her guts that she had made a mistake. The Quarters meant nothing. She and Evan were not outside the Circle. They were not safe. Noel and the Powers he had invoked had encompassed them within a realm of his conjuring. The breeze could no longer pass through the open window. Nothing else would get into this Circle, either.

  Denise fumbled with the clips holding back her hair. A few strands caught, and with an uncaring yank she pulled them free. Noel raked her body with a dim and feral gaze, a tiny smile touching his lips.

  “I am He that lightnings and thunders! I am the Lord of the Storm and the Shadows! I am your Lord!”

  Not even the Widow Farnsworth’s ‘shine had ever made her feel this drunk. Not real, not real, sang a little mocking voice in her head; the preening ravens, the shimmering candles, the naked woman and robed man before the black marble altar, the lingering whiff of incense — Not real not real not real!

  The solid strength of Evan’s body argued otherwise. She clung to him. He was real. She was real.

  When Noel spread his arms wide, robes billowing purple-black as raven’s wings, he was real, too.

  THIS TIME ALEC HAD WARNING of new arrivals. He tore his attention from the disintegrated door and Bradshaw’s eyes that danced with glee at his own cunning, and nudged Nick’s shoulder. “Keep him here,” he mouthed, and his partner nodded vigorously.

  He returned to the foyer, where, as he had suspected, all precincts were now heard from and accounted for: Lydia, Martin, Ian, Kate, Simon, a tall silver-haired man Alec recognized as the Reverend Fleming, and a young African-American woman with coldly furious eyes. Martin was carrying his sword at the ready, hilt grasped in both hands, as he demanded, “What the hell’s going on here?”

  “It’s kind of complicated. I can’t say I’m glad you’re joining the festivities.”

  Kate said severely, “If you don’t tell us what’s going on right this instant, I’ll —”

  “No, I’ll,” Martin snapped. “I’m the one with the Sword. And slicing holes in Elias’s spells tonight has given me just enough of a warm-up.”

  “Evidently,” Alec remarked, eyeing the younger man’s martial stance. “You might as well keep that thing ready. You’re not going to credit what Noel has Called on down there.”

  “Where’s Elias?” Lydia asked, glancing around the ruined foyer.

  Alec pointed to the servants’ corridor. Then he turned to the unknown young woman and smiled. “I don’t believe I’ve had the privilege and the pleasure.” She confronted him with a glower that convinced him he’d have more luck trying to charm a starving panther, and safer conversations with his straight razor.

  “Deputy Marshal Leah Towsley,” Kate supplied. “Martin got her loose, too. We may need her. Oh — and this is Reverend Fleming, whose son —”

  “Yes, I know,” Alec interrupted. “My condolences, Reverend. We shall probably be needing you, as well.” He glanced around, made a quick count. “All together, we’re thirteen—very good.”

  “Thirteen?” the Reverend echoed, scowling.

  “Twelve plus a leader,” Kate murmured. “The way the Order of the Garter is organized, the original Round Table —”

  “And Christ with the Disciples,” Fleming snapped. “I know the mockery you people make of Holy Scripture, and I will not be a part of it!”

  “Reverend,” Alec told him with unfeigned compassion, “you may not have a choice.”

  “THE—ACT—OF—WORSHIP,” Noel said, his lips moving in weird slow-motion now, as if unfamiliar with the English language.

  Lachlan knew what that had to mean: Noel had successfully cobbled together a composite godhood chunk by chunk, and was ready to rape Denise. And Lachlan could do nothing about it.

  He felt Holly clutch his shoulders, felt her shivering a little. He turned his cheek to her fingers, wanting the comfort that their bodies always communicated, one to the other. As he shifted, he felt the pull of the shoulder holster beneath his leather jacket. If the petrifaction spell didn’t extend that far up, and if Holly could get the gun, she could shoot the son of a bitch. He opened his mouth to tell her so.

  But suddenly she wasn’t there anymore. She was walking around the stone bench, shedding
her coat as Denise had done, and there was a flash of diamonds, Susannah’s and Granna Maureen’s, and of cold delicate steel from her left hand.

  “Running a little low by now, aren’t you?” she asked mockingly. “About ready for a refill?”

  “Holly!” Evan shouted. “No!”

  She paid him no mind. Noel’s gaze swerved from Denise to her, and Denise sagged against the altar like a string-snapped marionette. Holly brought the needle toward her right thumb and went on taunting him.

  “Only a taste, now, you wouldn’t want to drain me dry.” She pricked her thumb and a ruby drop welled up. “Just what every god needs, a surefire stone-cold guaranteed way to work miracles.”

  “I—AM—God!”

  “And you need to be worshipped, right? I never did understand that part — why an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent Being would want us trivial little humans to grovel mindlessly in hopes of coercing favors—but, hey, that’s probably just me. At any rate, Your Divinity, why bother with her? She’s got a trifling sort of magic, granted, but I’m the one you needed in order to become whoever it is you’ve become. Why not indulge yourself with somebody who really counts?”

  Lachlan ground his teeth with frustration. He knew what she was doing: trying to throw enough words at Noel to confuse or at the very least delay him. Where the hell were Alec and Nick?

  Holly was still talking—not that this surprised him. He squinted at Noel’s face, which seemed to be locked in an expression of vast confusion: mouth slightly open, brows pinched, pale eyes with their pinpoint pupils fixed on Holly as if he’d never seen her before. And still she kept talking.

  “— what really gets me? When any mere human presumes to know the mind of God. I mean, how is it possible? Our paltry little brains can barely conceive of deity, let alone comprehend it. That’s why we’re humans and God’s God.” She paused for breath. “So I guess you can now understand me perfectly, whereas I don’t understand the first thing about you, right? I mean, nobody really understood Christ, either, when you get right down to it. It’s an ancient paradigm, an individual taking on himself all the sins of the world, and there have been sacrificial kings for thousands of years, but Jesus is the one who got all the press. And yet nobody really comprehended who or what he might truly be.”

  She was like a general on a battlefield, marshaling words instead of soldiers, sending them out to feint, attack, flank, skirmish — but her enemy would not engage. All Noel did was stand there, watching her with those pale, uncomprehending eyes, and whether his not-quite-humanness was a result of the drugs he had taken or the gods he had called to take him over, Lachlan didn’t care to speculate.

  BRADSHAW TOOK A STEP TOWARD the open door, still smiling. He felt a presence behind him, a hard grip on his arm, and shrugged off both. What he hated, what he wanted to destroy, was down there wallowing in death. What had Nicholas called it? Mahrime? Noel was a walking, breathing pollution.

  “Elias!”

  He barely heard his name, and certainly did not respond to it. All that he had deliberately not felt since losing Susannah grew within him, as if that corruption so nearby acted like manure. Grief, loss, abandonment, the bitter ache of longing — he felt all these things at last. Yet even as they ripened, they withered. None could compete with the hatred, could be as powerful as the anger.

  His hatred. His anger. He sensed them grow and thrive—

  “Elias!”

  That aggravating presence again, that voice scratching at him with magic; he moved away from it, down the stairs, inhaling deep of scorched and acrid air that smelled of power.

  Lovely things, the anger and hate, luxurious and commanding. They reached for and twined tight all the Power in him, like those two men upstairs clasped each other’s hands, giving and receiving until they didn’t know where one ended and the other began, a perfect swirling Möbius strip of eternity. His emotions and his ability served each other, fed from each other, until he laughed again.

  His body was improbably light, buoyed by power. But as he reached the fifth step, he growled as he sensed a barrier between him and the cellar. The structure screened anything going on within it; skillful Work, Master Class, in fact. But not even remotely in his class. Shut me out, will you? Not fucking likely!

  Pocketing the gemstones, he felt around the edges of the obstruction, contemptuous of the tiny burning flashes that plucked at his fingers. With both hands he pushed at the barrier. It resisted, like a gigantic sparking bubble.

  He pushed again. This time it contracted. One inch, two—

  “— HELD A GREAT BIG SOLEMN meeting at Chalcedon in four-hundred-and-something to debate whether the Nazarene was human with a spark of the divine, divine with a spark of the human, or half human and half divine.”

  She hadn’t talked this much since her lectures in Nairobi.

  “And you know what they came up with? You’ll never guess. Christ was both fully human and fully divine. Now, this does show some largeness of imagination, but it’s the idea that humans could decide such a thing in the first place that’s really remarkable. What absolutely luscious arrogance!”

  She’d never lectured a god before, either. Or gods. She wished somebody—anybody—would interrupt with a question. She wished she had a glass of water to soothe her scratchy throat. She wished Noel would get that befuddled look off his face. Whoever he was, or thought he was, seemed pretty much all hat and no cattle at the moment. Most of all she wished Alec and Nicky would hurry up.

  “What’s the line about if there was no God, it would be necessary to invent him? I guess that’s what you’ve done here, with bits and pieces of some of the real biggies. And the ravens are a nice touch. Most cultures venerate ravens.”

  Denise sank to the floor in a welter of long limbs and blonde hair, staring at Holly with a stunned expression on her bloodied face. Holly didn’t dare look at her except from the periphery of her vision. She had to keep eye contact with Noel, keep him occupied. She put her brain on automatic pilot and dredged up more of the trivia that clung to her memory like kudzu to a split-rail fence.

  “Huginn and Muginn belonged to Odin. Mostly they’re translated as ‘Thought’ and ‘Memory,’ but the more accurate version is ‘Thoughtful’ and ‘Mindful.’ The Romans thought ravens were birds of prophecy, because their kawing sounded like cras, which is Latin for ‘tomorrow.’”

  She heard a faint sizzle, and from a corner of her eye saw a flicker. It had to mark the edges of the Circle. She felt slightly weak-kneed with relief that the thing didn’t encompass the whole house.

  “‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day —’ Which reminds me of how right dear old Billy was, if he really was William Shakespeare and not the Earl of Oxford. ‘What a piece of work is a man.’ Yeah, what a piece of work we are, forsooth. The only animal who blushes, or needs to. The only animal that fouls its own nest, the only one that kills for sport —”

  Noel’s glazed eyes flickered with renewed life. She lost her thread for an instant, then talked louder and faster.

  “— but I prefer an idea proposed to me just this evening by a very shrewd friend. He reminded me that humans are the animals that create—and in the process of creation glimpse what true deity is. Not what it’s like to be a god, but—”

  Something tingled against the elbow she’d bruised earlier. It made her flinch and take an involuntary step sideways—which brought her into contact with what felt like a waterfall of that same almost-electricity, all along her arm and ribs and leg.

  “— who among us trivial pathetic humans can even imagine what it must be like to be — to be omnipotent, and omniscient, and —” Stop repeating yourself, dammit! Catch his mind again, or what passes for it. “—but you’d know much better than any of the rest of us, wouldn’t you, with parts of gods now part of you, so you can create or destroy at will — all that power, all-knowing and allconsuming —”

  Fleeting embers danced around her, across
her clothes, seeming to tangle in her hair and the diamonds at her wrist and on her finger. But she kept talking. She had to keep talking.

  “—but what is it you’re thinking of creating? Or are you beyond that now? This thing we mere humans have been doing since before we could walk upright without tripping over ourselves out on the savannah —”

  Tiny pinpricks of heat and ice and low-voltage shivers passed through her, spiking every nerve in her body.

  “— a lot of what was created was lost in the intervening millennia, but it had to’ve been going on all that time. After all, it’s not as if thirty thousand years ago somebody just woke up one morning and said, ‘Today I’m going to do some really gorgeous cave-paintings, and I know the perfect spot at Lascaux —’”

  BRADSHAW HEARD IT, BUT HE couldn’t believe it. Christ on the Cross with a Crown of Thorns—the woman is talking again! Still. Yet. For-fucking-ever! Does she never shut up?

  It reminded of him of his birthday at Chanterelle, when she’d driveled on and on and on like a pompous doctoral candidate defending her dissertation, and he’d looked across the table at Susannah—

  “Why do we make things beautiful when all they really need to be is things? We make tools. So do chimpanzees. But we’re the ones who decorate our tools, make them into works of art as well as function.”

  Anger, newly fueled by a monumental exasperation at the Spellbinder he was here to rescue, shriveled when confronted by pain. Susannah, so perfect that night, wearing a blue silk dress and Holly’s sapphires and a blush when she and he both realized Holly had deserted them on purpose—

  “I mean, a chert knife cuts just as well whether or not it’s got a design on the handle. So why make it satisfying to look at? Why decorate it with an invocation to divinity? We obviously can’t deny the impulse, or maybe it’s a compulsion —”