Spellbinder: A Love Story With Magical Interruptions

by Melanie Rawn

  —leaving them to a superb dinner and a glorious autumn evening and each other, all night long, and almost every night after that until this would-be god took her life by snapping her neck—

  The agony was crippling. Suffocating. There was no power in it, nothing he could use the way he’d used anger and hate. It gave him no strength; it bled him of strength. He could not allow himself to feel it.

  “— so the definition I like most is that Homo sapiens is the animal that makes things, and not just creates but embellishes, and needs beauty in the creating —”

  A quick sweeping glance located Denise and Noel, still within his shrunken Circle. There were bowls and candles and implements on the floor, and sixteen impatiently fluttering ravens. Lachlan sat on a stone bench, looking peevish. And Holly was still talking.

  “— when we respond to beauty, it’s the same way we respond to the whole of Creation. With joy. Simple, honest, inevitable. And we glimpse what Yahweh felt when looking at Creation, and seeing that it was good. What makes us human is our compulsion to create, and to create beauty, and to look on it with joy —”

  Susannah’s voice again echoed in his head: “Whatever happened to joy?”

  This was no time to feel anything but rage. Not sorrow, or loss, or any of the weakening emotions that were of no use to him. He silenced Susannah’s voice in his mind, and deliberately forgot what joy meant. He would not have the purity of his anger and his hatred blighted. He would not allow the power it gave him to sieve away. The thundercloud inside him billowed blacker and thicker, a promise of sacred lightning.

  It was how the Towers fell, in billowing clouds and fire like lightning.

  “Evenin’ Your Honor,” Evan Lachlan said loudly and firmly. “Not to be pushy or anything, but d’you think you can get me the hell out of this?”

  Bradshaw concentrated on Noel, glimpsing in the shadows around him avid faces and seeking hands and greedy, glowing eyes.

  “Hey! Bradshaw!”

  He had no time for this. Anger and hate reseeded within him, spreading, stronger.

  “Or maybe you haven’t got the chops?” called Lachlan’s sneering voice. “Aren’t you supposed to be Mr. Big Kahuna Magistrate? Prove it!”

  “C’mon, Elias!” Holly held up one finger, squeezing a plump drop of blood. “Prove it!”

  Noel sucked in a breath, naked avarice on his face.

  That’s my Spellbinder; you obnoxious asshole. Mine!

  Prove it?

  Facing Lachlan, he began to murmur. The phrases flowed across his lips, smooth as kisses. Oh, yes—this was power, sharply satisfying, enhanced by the secret trembling of the gemstones in his pocket. How did anyone live without this? Elias wrapped his fingers around the rocks, his mind giving him colors and shapes and the scent of Holly’s blood.

  Lachlan pushed himself up from the bench. Wobbly for a moment, he stumbled, righted himself by locking his knees, shook out his fingers, and blew out a long relieved breath. Then he unholstered his Glock and instantly looked much more relaxed. “Thank you.” He eyed Noel, who stood perfectly still before the altar, riveted to the welling of Holly’s blood. “Can I just shoot him now? Please?”

  Holly gave a choking sound that was half laughter, half sob. “Later, a chuisle, later.”

  “Okay, but only if you promise,” he replied grudgingly. “I’d cuff him if I’d brought mine along. Anybody got some rope?”

  Bradshaw reached into another pocket of his robe and drew out a length of golden cord. Denise moaned at the sight of it, and clasped her arms even more tightly around herself. As Bradshaw started forward to tie up Noel’s wrists, Lachlan grabbed the Measure.

  “Amateur,” he muttered. He tried to sort out the cord one-handed, puzzled when he found no ends and no knot tying it closed. “Gimme that knife thing from over there—”

  Denise gave a strangled shriek. But it wasn’t the threat to her Measure that brought her up off the floor, wobbling on shivering knees. With one finger Noel directed her, a smirk twisting his face. She bent over the plinth and spread her legs and arms wide, offering her perfect white ass. His robe swirled as he turned, and his voice echoed like something from a primeval sepulcher: “The act of worship!”

  THE WOMAN WAS BLONDE, BEAUTIFUL. The man in the glistening purple-black robe clasped her by the waist, bent her over the black altar, plunged into her. His fingers moved to her throat, buried themselves in her tumble of golden hair, preparing to snap her neck.

  Bradshaw gasped and stumbled back. Gemstones ground against the bones of his fingers as revulsion seized his muscles. Susannah, it was Susannah—

  The rocks stung like a handful of cinders gone almost cold. The blue of the turquoise and the red specks of the bloodstone skittered at the edges of his vision, but what his mind seemed to taste was the reddish-brown carnelian: the gem that was a talisman against mental invasion, that healed grief, that granted joy.

  The joy that Susannah had been for him filled the gaping emptiness he’d thought she’d left inside him. She would never have been that selfish, to take with her that which allowed him to love. Hatred did no honor to what she had given him. Anger did her no justice. It was for him to remember joy: “She who is remembered, lives.”

  He shut his eyes, shamed and oddly grateful. The pain lingered; it would always be there. The joy was stronger. And it protected him.

  TENDRILS OF GREEN STEMS SNAKED up, sprouting purple flowers that became summery skirts that swirled around her legs as the man in the black cassock grasped handfuls of purple byacinths and pushed up, up, and her blonde hair straggled down as she turned her head to look at him with those gray-green eyes—

  No! It hadn’t happened this way, he’d never seen her face, only her flowered dress and the cassock hitched up around powerful thighs—she was dead, long dead, the priest was rotting in jail as he deserved, she wasn’t here and neither was he but oh God it looked just like them—

  —hair darkened to deep gold-threaded russet, writhed around eyes of clear Irish blue and when the man turned his head and grinned, her blood was on his lips.

  SHE DIVIDED HER STARE AMONG the three men, not understanding Noel’s glee or Elias’s fury or Evan’s anguish. All she really understood, as they froze into a tableau vivant of power she couldn’t feel, was that she had damned well had enough of this.

  Striding to Elias, she grabbed the pistol at his waistband. “I knew this thing would come in handy sooner or later,” she muttered, and pointed it at Noel. It had been quite a while since Cousin Jesse had taken her out for target practice, but Noel didn’t have to know that. “Whatever it is you’re doing, knock it off,” she snapped, “or I’ll make you a castrato. So much for your ‘act of worship’ then.”

  Noel’s arms remained outstretched, but his gaze met hers—a glitter in his eyes, something of vehemence and fire that matched the sonorous rumble of his voice. “Put it down.”

  “Back off!” Holly cocked the little gun, her fingers slippery with blood. “At this range I can’t hardly miss!”

  “I am a god!”

  She heard a difference in his voice, an abrupt hollowness in his claim, and saw something like fear cross his face. “And so you’re immortal? Want to test your theory?”

  The lustrous power flickered erratically in his eyes. Sammael, Abraxas, Belial, Set, Abbadon—they were not creator deities but bringers of death, destroyers of souls. As long as they anticipated worship, they would linger. But if they weren’t going to get what they wanted, they might abandon Noel as useless.

  “If I don’t hit you,” she taunted, “I’ll probably hit Denise—you or her, I don’t really give a shit! If she’s dead, there goes your act of worship!”

  His eyes smoldered and his lips curved, and she knew she’d said exactly the wrong thing. There was more than one woman here, more than one opportunity for the ritual.

  “Death and God – one and the same.”

  The gods within him laughed in his eyes. She knew a quiver of tempta
tion to speak directly to them. Well, why not? “You others—yes, all of you skulking around—what if I shoot him? What good will he be to you if he’s maimed? That’s not what brought you here!” The luminescence flared and wavered like a guttering candle flame and she knew she was finally on the right track. “What if I kill him? What god would inhabit something dead?”

  There was a flutter of black wings and an outraged tumult of kawing. Noel swayed backward toward the altar, all the substance gone out of him. His cry of despair became a howl of agony as Denise’s fisted hands lashed up and clouted him right in the balls. He collapsed, moaning.

  Denise crawled away from him, green eyes glaring feebly at Holly as she groped for her velvet cloak. “Him or me, you don’t give a shit?”

  Holly knew exactly one really filthy phrase in Hungarian. She used it now. “Baszod meg, lamb chop. You got us into this mess.”

  “Holly,” said Elias, startling her so much, she nearly dropped the gun. “Give me that before you shoot yourself in the foot. And take care of Lachlan. He doesn’t look so good.”

  “Abbadon!”

  This time she did drop the gun. Noel’s voice held no Power but that of his craving.

  “Abraxas! Baalberith!”

  He had risen to his knees, arms flung wide.

  “Abbadon!” he called again. “Abraxas! Baalberith!”

  Holly flung a wild glance at Bradshaw. He had heard it, too.

  “Shiva and Set! Eblis, Thoth, Eurynome! Malphas! We are come! We are here!”

  Elias chanted frantic counterspells to Noel’s Summonings. Ravens shrieked and candle flames shuddered and all the Powers gathered in this place hovered excitedly, more substantial with every passing moment.

  Noel’s hands lifted, writing in the air, fingers tracing sigils of flame. From the darkness prowled a man-shape with the head of a lion, and serpents for legs, and at the end of those legs, scorpions. In his right hand he held a pharaoh’s gold-and-lapis flail; in his left, an oval shield.

  “Abraxas! He who speaks the hollowed and accursed word which is life and death at once and together!”

  Another fiery symbol, and another shape coalescing, and yet another, Summoned to reality—bizarre fever-dream figures with the bodies and heads and limbs of snakes and horses, eagles and hunting cats. She recognized the ibishead of Thoth, and many-armed Shiva. The rest were unknown to her. Noel’s voice named them, louder and louder until she could not longer hear Bradshaw’s frantic words, until at last the cellar stones trembled with a final elated shout: “Sammael the Accuser! Sammael the Seducer! Sammael the Destroyer!”

  From the outer shadows, where the other grotesqueries lurked and lingered, came a tall, elegantly made youth, perfect in every human attribute. Long white hair cascaded below his black-robed shoulders in shining waves; eyes of pure, soft blue glistened in a face of surpassing beauty. Both hands gripped the pommel of a darkly glowing sword held high. A black droplet glittered at its tip.

  The apparition paused to regard Bradshaw with an inquisitive smile, as if wondering who this strangely chanting person might be. With a dismissive shrug, he moved a few paces forward, then stopped and stared down at the floor. An expression of delight intensified his beauty as he bent to pluck up the wand—made of the wood of the holly tree, symbolic of immortality, used in spells to ease the passage of the living into death. He examined it, nodding, long white hair drifting about his shoulders.

  When he looked up again, he saw Holly. He dropped the wand, no longer interested. An eloquent smile curved his lips. And he glided slowly forward, the sword uplifted, his steps timed to Noel’s ceaseless call of his name.

  He walked toward her.

  No. Toward Evan—crumpled on his knees, the golden Measure in one hand, the Glock in the other. She knelt beside him, whispering, “Éimhín?”

  He stared up at her, his dragon’s eyes quite mad.

  “Whore,” he said coldly.

  This was a different anger from his drunken rage of their parting. That had been brutal. This was lethal. And if she had been frightened of that other fury, this one paralyzed her.

  The Measure slithered to the floor. The Glock was gripped in both large, strong hands. Holly watched, numb with terror, as the gaping black hole of the barrel moved closer and closer to her chest.

  Cold steel rested in the hollow between her collarbones. She looked past the dark barrel and his hands to the silver oval resting at his heart. She had thought him invulnerable. She had believed the spelled medal was enough to protect him. Flesh and blood, skin and bone —

  Thirty—one

  NOT REAL! NOT REAL!

  He tried to believe it. The words throbbed through his aching skull with every beat of his heart. But he knew what he’d seen, the black cassock and the dress with purple flowers and the obscene “act of worship”—

  That phrase snagged in his mind, cried out in Noel’s voice. Noet—Denise—not her at all, and not Holly—not real!

  Sound thudded into his brain, sound that was someone who spoke without words, commanding him to stand. He could scarcely see; everyone and everything he knew to be in this cellar was made of shadows.

  Except for Holly, kneeling before him, pale face framed in tangled russet hair and a black sweater. Her face, her hair, her eyes. He felt faint quivering heat in the center of his breastbone, next to his heart. In this unholy muddle of shadows and shapes and birds flapping their feathers and light that hurt his eyes, she was the one reality. In his whole life, in all the world, only she was real.

  And so was he. Gleeful, he sensed his own height and strength and the breath filling his lungs, and the sword in his hand felt more innately right than his Glock. He looked at Holly, and wanted her.

  FLESH AND BLOOD, breath and bone—The pitiable little rhyme nattered mockingly as the angel called “blind to God” stole what she had sought to protect. Her mistake had been that of the rank magical amateur—and a Greek goddess. Eos, in asking eternal life for her lover Tithonos, had forgotten to include eternal youth. In protecting Lachlan’s body, Holly had forgotten to set a matching guard over his mind. Sammael was about to take both.

  Yet he seemed to be having a hard time doing it, not quite able to stay in sync; the two images blurred and twinned and merged and parted again, one dark and hazel-eyed, one with long white hair twisting about his beautiful blue-eyed face. Both of them gazed at her, as if only she had meaning, as if only she was real. Both of them wanted her.

  “No!” screamed Noel. “It’s supposed to be me! The Summoning was mine! Sammael!”

  Sammael didn’t seem to care. All Holly cared about was that the resonance was gone from Noel’s voice, and he was inhabited by nothing more than what was human.

  So was she. Just human. And this thing that was inhuman was thieving what did not belong to it. Evan’s hazel eyes were shading to blue, the two forms occupying the same space. Soon they would share the same body. Conscious as she had never been before of the blood pulsing through her, Spellbinder’s blood gleaming on the tip of her pricked finger as she squeezed the wound yet again, she reached toward the small silver medal. She touched it, looking up into his eyes.

  The etched image of St. Michael began to glow, fiery outline of a tall, fierce man bearing a sword. Evan cried out and dropped his pistol, scrabbling with both hands at the medal, trying to claw it from blistering skin. Holly struggled to her feet and threw her arms around him. She felt heat against her breast but only held him closer. “A chuisle,” she murmured, her voice shaking. “A chuisle mo chroí—”

  NICK WAS THE FIRST DOWN into the cellar, and stopped at the bottom step, all too aware of the Circle that fluxed nearby. He looked around, mystified by the ravens, the implements, the bowls, the candles. Neither did he understand the people: Holly and Evan clutching each other, Denise on the floor in a welter of bare limbs, Elias standing with his hands fisted and his eyes squeezed shut, gasping for breath. And Noel: doubled over, rocking slowly back and forth as if silently weeping.


  What Nicholas understood all too well was the taint in the room. His Romany grandmother’s word for it, mahrimé, had occurred to him earlier and now it seemed even more appropriate. There was something defiled here, something contaminated by evil. When he felt Alec at his back on the stairs, instinct made him stop his partner with an outstretched arm, blocking his way.

  “I’m aware that it’s perfectly foul in here, Nick. We need to do something about it. Come on.” He pushed past and went to Holly and Evan.

  Nick swore under his breath and hurried to help pry them gently loose from each other. While Alec calmed her down, Nick searched Evan’s face.

  Hazel eyes, smudged beneath as if he hadn’t slept in a week, focused blearily. “W-wasn’t her,” he whispered—not quite a question.

  “No. It wasn’t her,” Nick affirmed, having no idea what he was talking about but knowing a need for reassurance when he saw it.

  “That goddamned dress … the flowers … .” His eyes sharpened. “I never knew what they were. Fucking hyacinths.” He raked his hair from his brow and sucked in a deep breath. “Where the hell have you been?”

  Nick ignored the question. “Can you move? We have to get you and Holly out of here.”

  “Yeah, I can move.” His lips twisted. “Which wasn’t the case earlier—and you don’t wanna know. Just don’t go anywhere near that bench.”

  Nick regarded Noel where he rocked and shivered on the floor, pathetic would-be god in a heavy black robe. A few ravens skittered over to pluck petulantly at him. Nick shooed them carefully away and picked up the gold cording. It would serve to tie the man up for the time being. It was only when he could not find an end that he realized it was Denise’s Measure.

  Well, it would do anyhow. Expertly looping it doubled around Noel’s lanky arms, he tied and tightened a few knots and settled back on his heels to evaluate his work. Hands bound behind him, cord passing around his neck, Noel would be unable to move without throttling himself.