Magic After Dark: A Collection of Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Novels

by Margo Bond Collins

  “Yes and no,” she said. “I don’t usually know where we’re going or why. They just don’t think I need to know, and I don’t. But… it isn’t like this.”

  He shook his head.

  “I’m going with Robbie. We’re leaving in the morning,” he said.

  “It’s the right decision,” she answered.

  “This wasn’t what I expected,” he said.

  “I know,” she told him. “I hope it goes back to normal soon.”

  “Are we in danger?” Grant asked.

  “I don’t know,” Becca said. “I don’t know what’s in the amulet.”

  “I don’t like not knowing,” he said. She grinned.

  “Get used to that. Life is full of things you don’t know. When you’re lucky, there’s someone who’ll tell you.”

  He shrugged with a grunt.

  “I just wanted you to know,” he said. She would have noticed he was gone, certainly, like she would see who else was gone, come lunchtime tomorrow, but she was glad he’d told her, anyway. She nodded.

  “Have a good time,” she said. “Robbie is tough, but he’s really good. You can learn a lot from him.”

  “I know,” Grant said. “Mom says I’m stubborn. I’ll get used to it eventually.”

  She laughed.

  “You’re Makkai,” she said. “Stubborn is redundant.”

  He grinned at this.

  “She’d say I’m that stubborn.”

  Becca smiled.

  “Dawn says I’m supposed to go to bed,” she said. “So… good night.”

  He nodded and sort of gave an awkward start toward her - to shake her hand? to hug her? she never found out - then swerved away and left without saying anything else. Becca frowned after him for just a second before she went into the trailer.

  Boys were weird.

  The blinded windows in the trailer were barely lighter than anything else inside when someone knocked on the door. Billy grunted.

  “That’ll be for you,” he said, rolling over.

  “Have a good visit with Sophie,” Becca said, slipping into her shoes and heading for the door. He said something, but his pillow was the only thing to get the benefit of whatever it was.

  Becca found Jackson at the door. He raised his eyebrows at her.

  “Dawn,” he said. “You ready?”

  “Do I even know enough to answer that?” Becca replied and he grinned.

  “Come with me,” Jackson said. She pulled the door closed behind her and followed out into the woods. About a ten minute walk into the dim, as the sun started to come up from behind the mountains, they came to a huge tree where Bella stood with her mother, Dawn, and three little girls.

  “This is Bella,” Bella said as Becca stopped at the edge of the clearing under the tree. The dark woman put her hand on the head of the tallest girl, maybe eight or nine, with long, black hair and dark eyes that were frighteningly perceptive. “This is Megan and the little one at the end is Tabby.”

  The little one hid halfway behind the oldest Bella, looking at Becca with one eye.

  “They’re…?” Becca looked at Jackson. He nodded.

  “Ours,” he said. “Come on. We should get started.”

  This was the point that Becca saw the box. It was small, a few feet long and a few feet across, and it was on branches, suspended above a hole.

  A casket.

  For a dog.

  “This was my dog,” Bella said, glancing at Dawn, and then letting her hand fall off of the child Bella’s hair. “She died because of me, and she brought darkness to my family, so this is our purification ceremony to reclaim both her and this place from the darkness that has invaded it.”

  The elder Bella stepped forward, opening a hinged box and holding it out to the queen. Becca’s Bella took it and placed a crystal at each corner of the grave, then Jackson spilled a leather skin’s contents over the box. Becca looked down at the three girls. The younger two were crying. It broke Becca’s heart to see it.

  They were growing up with their grandmother rather than their mother. It hadn’t occurred to Becca that Bella would have children, though she should have known. The matriarchal line was too dominant for Bella to simply let it die. Becca shivered again, looking at the distinctive traits the woman had given to her daughter.

  The queen put her hand to her face, and Becca felt a stab in her stomach when she realized that the woman she’d traveled with, who had seen everything they’d seen, was also crying. She brushed her hand across the casket, then the elder Bella did the same, leaving space for the three girls who also cast tears on the casket. Bella nodded at Jackson, who touched Becca’s elbow. The two of them stepped forward, and he put a hand under one end of the casket, lifting it and shifting the branches out from under it. Becca took the other end and did the same, then helped him lower the cold weight of the box into the hole. The three girls wept audibly now, and Bella went to stand with her mother among the roots of the tree.

  “I’ll close it over,” Jackson said. “The ground is purified. Go.”

  Becca looked at Bella and her family, waiting for them to leave before falling into step alongside Dawn.

  Dawn shook her head. She didn’t want to talk.

  Neither did Becca.

  “Go upstairs, now,” Bella told the girls, who looked at their grandmother. The elder Bella nodded.

  “I’ll come up to see you soon,” she said. “You can come out and play later.”

  They kissed their mother and left, and Bella motioned to the kitchen table. Becca felt like she was someplace she didn’t belong, intruding on something that should have been a family event.

  “When was the last time you were on a horse?” the elder Bella asked, looking at Becca. “Do you ride?”

  “My aunt trains horses,” Becca said, not sure if that was the right answer.

  “Can you read a map?” the elder Bella asked. Becca nodded. Of course.

  “Good,” the woman said. “I need you to take Dozer and go and fetch something for me. You’re going to need to bring a shovel.”

  The horse that resided in the barn was a Gypsy Vanner, a great big draught horse with a mane and tail that might have been beautiful if they hadn’t been so matted with pasture mud. It was a common enough thing, Becca knew - horses always went to roll the minute you groomed them - but Bella’s horse was an astonishing example of just that. He appeared to relish just how dirty he could be while still being recognizable.

  Easily seventeen hands tall, Becca had to use a block to get mounted, and it had been more of a throw than a lift to get the saddle on at all. Her aunt worked with Arabians and a few other lighter horses; while Becca had seen a Vanner before, she’d never ridden one.

  He was friendly enough, at least, in the way of big horses. He turned his head back from time to time to bump her shins with his nose, just saying hello, and he nibbled at grass as he walked, turning to brush her legs with it. She pulled his head back around because some people considered that bad behavior, and you hate to let someone else’s horse get away with stuff just because you didn’t know better.

  She pulled out her map and her compass, reading the topography and finding a path between aspens that looked like it was least likely to get her knocked out of her saddle. She didn’t think the big horse would bolt and leave her, but horses were unpredictable, and she didn’t want to have to walk back on foot to recover the creature. Bella had warned her that she didn’t want to try to walk the chest back on her own.

  “I’d let you go through it, child, and find the things I need, but I’m not quite sure what they’re going to be yet,” the elder Bella had said.

  “You’re still doing that?” Bella had asked. “Burying all of your valuables?”

  “Best way to not ever have to lock up,” the elder Bella had said. “Never have anything worth taking where anyone can find it.”

  “Also a good way to have someone walk in and trash everything because you’re a gypsy woman living by yourself,” J
ackson had said, coming in a few minutes behind them.

  “Such a good protector,” the elder Bella had said with an edge to her voice that Becca recognized from her daughter. The kind of voice that dared Jackson to be patronizing to her again. He dipped his head in an amused but contrite apology.

  The shovel banged against Dozer’s flank, but he plodded on as though he didn’t even notice. It was possible he didn’t. Becca spent the time enjoying the crisp of the mountain air, cold still in the shade behind the mountain and in the trees, and picking burrs out of Dozer’s mane.

  “You mind if I straighten this?” she asked the horse. “Or have you got it just the way you like it?”

  She’d known a horse that would roll, first thing out of the barn, if you’d just groomed him, regardless of whether he had a rider or not. He’d been her aunt’s favorite horse. Her aunt liked cantankerous and grouchy, and they liked her.

  Dozer shook his mane out, trotting down a slope with a sort of bounce that nearly threw her over his shoulders, and she smacked him playfully.

  “You did that on purpose,” she said. He sneezed at her.

  Up this high, she realized, there weren’t really many insects. She was used to barnyards that buzzed with flies - especially biting ones - but Dozer seemed to live an idyllic life free of deer flies and horse flies. The birds flew from tree to tree around them, watching and chatting, and Becca checked her map again, breathing in the scent of horse with her.

  The chest was all of two miles away, up and down a couple of really steep slopes that it would have been impossible to take a motor-driven vehicle up or down, and far enough from anything that the odd hiker seemed highly improbable. It was a great strategy for keeping things safe, Becca thought, and knew that she would remember it again someday and use it. It was unclear to Becca who owned the land, but she thought it hardly mattered. Terrain like this didn’t have an owner quite so much as it just had lines across it to make everyone happy. No one would do anything out here, save hunt and fish, and the kind of people that would make it this far would have an understanding with women like Bella that they were welcome, so long as they respected the land, the game, and her personal space.

  They crossed a stream, just deep enough to let Dozer splash water up to his knees with a little playful kick, and then they were going uphill again. She was looking for a trio of aspens growing from the same seed, according to the map - Bella had drawn a quick picture - and they weren’t hard to spot. Most of them grew straight, so the angled trunks stood out. She found the space where four rocks marked corners and she dug.

  The chest wasn’t buried deep because it didn’t need to be, in order for no one to ever find it. The dirt over top of it was still pretty loose, and it didn’t take her a lot of effort to dig it out.

  That was the point that she realized she didn’t know how to get back up onto Dozer’s back.

  “Great,” she muttered, sighing and grabbing Dozer’s reins to start the slick trek back down to the stream. There, she found a boulder outcropping over the water that she could use to get mounted back up. Getting the chest balanced across her lap was no easy feat, either, but she managed, thanks to Dozer’s unending willingness to just stand still while she fidgeted. She chirped to him to move again and he swung his head around and bumped her toe with his nose before easing forward again with the inevitability of an avalanche.

  The ride home was less comfortable, and not just because she had a thirty pound wood chest across her thighs. She was so preoccupied with not dropping it that she failed to steer, and she had branches hitting her in the face the entire way home. At one point, she only narrowly missed getting clipped by a two-inch limb, and spent the next six rolling strides trying to get the chest re-centered on Dozer’s back.

  He plodded on, swiping her legs with another mouthful of long grass.

  Bless him.

  When she got back to the yard, Jackson was waiting for her, and he helped her with the chest so that she could dismount with her dignity intact. He grinned as she slapped the horse’s neck and went to go untack him.

  “Something to that, isn’t there?” he asked. “Something with a heart and lungs instead of an engine?”

  She nodded.

  “Yeah. I always forget.”

  She did a little bit of cursory grooming, just to spend a little more time with the warm horse scent, and turned at a small noise behind her.

  “Tabby, right?” she asked. The little girl nodded, then rushed forward, taking the stiff brush out of Becca’s hand.

  “He’s ticklish,” she said, going over the section of Dozer’s coat that Becca had already done. It made her a little sad to go, but she left the child to it, feeling like she’d been busted intruding somewhere she didn’t belong. Tabby looked over her shoulder once and the look she gave Becca wasn’t hostile so much as it was frightened and curious. Becca gave her a little wave and went into the house.

  The elder Bella was unloading the chest, talking to Jackson’s Bella as she did. Becca went to sit on a couch next to Jackson.

  “I’m going to need corn syrup,” the elder Bella said, standing and putting her hands on her hips. “A lot of it.”

  Becca glanced at Jackson and frowned. She’d never heard of gypsy magic that needed corn syrup. He shifted and handed her a set of keys. She raised her eyebrows.

  “You know where the grocery store is,” he said.

  “You’re letting me drive your truck?” she asked. He laughed.

  “You got your license?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then go get her the corn syrup.”

  “Everything on the shelf,” Bella’s mother said. Becca twisted her mouth at the keys and shrugged, going out to get into Jackson’s truck.

  The bench seat was heavy to adjust, but she finally got it, and she made it to the store and back without major incident, bringing in two full shopping bags of corn syrup. The Bellas took it without a word and started working on a huge baking sheet that the elder Bella had on her kitchen table. Jackson and Becca stood back to watch as the women worked; at some point the youngest Bella showed up and held the tray still, though it little needed it, once it actually began to fill.

  “You can do this with water,” the elder Bella said, “but the corn syrup is heavier than water, which is going to make things float easier.”

  Becca raised an eyebrow at Jackson who shook his head. Bella went back to her chest and brought out a smaller box, a jewelry one from the look of it, and set it down on the table next to the pan. She and the other two Bellas started picking through it, pulling out small shards of crystal and laying them in a line on the table. As the youngest Bella picked up crystals, the elder Bella would identify them and tell her what they did, then either add them to the pile on the table or return them to the jewelry box. It felt more like a family project than something of real importance, though neither of the adult women seemed to be happy as they worked, and looking at the child, Becca wondered if she were ever happy.

  Finally, the elder Bella closed the lid on the jewelry box and put it by the kitchen sink, returning to the table and putting her hands on her hips again.

  “All right, child. Go out and play with your sisters. That’s all for you right now.”

  The youngest Bella didn’t seem happy about this, but after a moment of stare-off between the two of them she left, and the elder Bella carried a chair across the kitchen to root through a small cabinet above the refrigerator. She came back down with a huge green crystal rooted in its native ore, completely uncut from the look of it, and she set that down in the middle of the pan. She and Jackson’s Bella started sorting the crystal fragments along the edge of the pan, laying them on wood of the kitchen table, a silent argument as they picked up each other’s placements and resituated them until they both stood back.

  “Is that right?” the younger Bella asked.

  “I think so,” the elder Bella answered, and then they began dropping them one by one into the corn syrup radially
around the green crystal - chlorite, if Becca was right - until there was a ring of multi-colored crystals around the large one in the center. At this point, the elder Bella tipped her head up to look at Becca.

  “You’ve only been doing this for a few months, is that right?” she asked. Becca nodded, wanting to correct her that she’d been with the tribe for almost a year now, but knowing that was pride and not the point. “Then you won’t have seen this before.”

  “I haven’t seen this before,” Jackson said, taking a step forward. The older woman looked at him with sparkling eyes.

  “You don’t think I would leave my home completely unobserved and undefended. Not after everything that happened. I’ve had this crystal up in the cabinet since Bella became queen, and from time to time, I take it down and flush it. I did that just a few weeks ago, so it was almost completely clean when it happened.”

  “When what happened?” Becca asked.

  “Someone used magic to kill Sasha,” the younger Bella said. The elder one nodded.

  “And any time anyone uses magic nearby, this crystal is going to remember it.” She nodded down at the tray. “What we have there is a selection of every kind of magic we can think of, represented in those crystals. We use corn syrup because it makes the crystals act lighter, so we can see which ones react most strongly, when I let the magic out of my recording crystal. They’ll move more slowly, sure enough, but in water some of them might not move at all, that will, now. You ready to see some real Gypsy magic?”

  Becca took another step forward, despite herself, and the elder Bella reached her hand out slowly and placed it on the green crystal.

  Dozens of the shards rocketed into the sides of the pan.

  The elder Bella turned her head to look at the younger one.

  “I’m calling Mom.”

  They’d argued for hours about it, even after the elder Bella was off the phone again.

  “It’s not necessary,” Jackson’s Bella had argued. “I’m not in danger.”

  “I beg to differ,” Jackson said.

  “It’s just a plane,” the elder Bella said. “She’ll be fine, and back in her shop within a couple of days. She can be away that long.”