Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  "Yeah. Nine-pound, two-ounce premature baby. That's pretty advanced for a sixth-month fetus, Mom. Freshman Health teaches you things like that. I bet you were in labor before the accident. I bet Dad was too drunk to drive you to the hospital. What happened? You have a contraction when you should have been watching the road?"

  Kate wanted to snatch her only child up by the neck and strangle her. That whole scene sounded like the girl had scripted it out and memorized the lines, like she was writing a goddamn play. Why couldn't the kid be smart where it mattered? It sure didn't help things that she was right on every count.

  Maybe Dana Peters had run that stop sign. She still should have seen him. She still might have stopped in time if her damned belly hadn't thrown a riot.

  "Jacquelyn Eileen Lewis . . ." Kate bit her snarl off and turned away before she did wring her daughter's neck. She and Lew had wanted children. They just hadn't planned on getting married until they could afford it. Then she'd turned up pregnant and they'd moved their plans ahead a year. They'd wanted Jackie, God only knew why.

  She turned back, to tell her daughter that, to try and calm things down and work out some way to keep the kid away from the Pratts. The parking lot was empty. Jackie had gone into the locker rooms to change and probably would hide out there, safe from her mother until she could slip away with her friends. She'd gotten just exactly what she wanted. Somehow, she always did.

  Dead end. All Kate could do was hope it wasn't a permanent one.

  Drugs. Bernie and the Pratts and the MDEA. Probably Feds, too. Kate walked slowly back to her truck, softball game forgotten. The drug boys wanted her to keep her nose out of their investigation. Well, she wouldn't use the radio, and she wouldn't knock on any doors. Listen, yes. Watch, yes. Young Jeff might know something — he'd been in the drug scene before she busted him. And she might ask a Morgan or two. The way the last week had gone, it sounded like they might be willing to say a few things about the Pratts.

  No way in hell could she ignore this if Jackie was involved. She'd been a mother a lot longer than she'd been a cop.

  Damned brat.

  Kate climbed into the cab of her truck, buried her face in her hands, and cried.

  Chapter Six

  Ben stared at the surface of the pool. It surged gently to the beat of the surf outside, a dark pulsating mirror for the single light on the cavern wall. He checked his watch again, compulsively. Two minutes. Amazing how long two minutes could be.

  Maria would kill him. With another woman, that could have been random noise or exaggeration. Not Maria. She'd never bought into the whole Morgan thing. She'd refused to enter the tower, refused to accept the family history, lived an armed truce with Dan in order to give young Gary a father's name. Now some of the chickens were coming home to roost. Why did everything have to happen at once?

  Where the hell was the boy? Two minutes ten seconds. As soon as Gary had entered the tower, Ben had zipped in through the back way and up to the security boards. He'd clicked his watch when the boy took his last gulp of air and jackknifed down into the water at the base of the spiral stair. Showed up perfectly on the IR cameras upstairs, that hot body against the cool damp granite and even colder seawater. The affinity was there, the mark was there, the call was there. Kid wasn't a failure, not like Ben.

  This inheritance thing sucked.

  Primogeniture, male succession, the need for the Change and the Dragon's Tear — the whole thing sucked. It trapped Maria where she was, ignored Ellen and Peggy, left the whole Family resting on one set of shoulders in each generation just like some feudal lord. Somebody needed to persuade the Dragon that they lived in the twenty-first century, the United States.

  Two minutes twenty-five. Dan should be the one sitting here, sweating, feeling the chill of the rock and regretting sins long past. He was the one who heard the call. The Dragon chose him — she could damn well keep her promises. Why force the reject to chew his nails and break bad news to a mother with a temper like Maria's?

  The water surged against the pulse of the waves, a body forcing its way through the narrow channel beneath the surface. Gary's head popped up, and gasping breaths echoed through the silence. Ben sighed his relief, gulping in salt air heavy with the damp mustiness of stone. He'd been holding his breath nearly as long as the boy had.

  As the boy had. He hadn't changed.

  Gary's arms swirled the water with a lazy sidestroke, as he caught his breath. He grabbed the rock ledge and pulled his dripping body out of the pool, spat something into his left hand, and swiped hair out of his eyes. The kid shouldn't have been able to do any of those things. Seals don't have arms.

  Dammit, he had the mark — had the slight webbing between his toes and fingers, not enough to notice unless you looked for it. He should have been able to change. Dan's Tear had glowed when the boy was born, showing that the Dragon recognized Morgan blood — no matter how he'd come by it. The Dragon had told Dan it was time.

  Ben tossed Gary a towel and some clothes. The boy crouched on the rocks, panting. He seemed oblivious to the small cave and the sloping half-tide ledges spaced neatly for a seal's body.

  "Alive. Dad's alive," the boy whispered. He stared up at Ben, willing the words to be true.

  How on earth did he know? Ben nodded. The boy dried himself and dressed, keeping one hand closed. Ben wondered if he'd hurt himself during the dive.

  The boy seemed to be slowly coming to grips with his surroundings. He glanced up at the arched stone ceiling overhead, clear of any tide, studied the dark well of the water he had come out of, noted the shadowy stairs that led up from an alcove on the back wall. He finally turned back to Ben. "Dad's alive? Really?"

  "Yes."

  Gary's knees folded under him, and he sagged down to a seat on the ledge. He closed his eyes, slowly shook his head, then rubbed his face with one hand. Ben avoided noticing the fresh wetness.

  The boy looked up at him. "Where is he? How do you know?"

  "Dan? The Pratts have him stashed away somewhere. We were hoping you'd be able to help us get him out." Hoping he'd be able to follow into that cave and figure out where it led, figure out what had gone wrong and avoid it. Hoping a selkie could sneak in where a kayak got caught. "How? We have ways." Yeah. Sometimes that damned Dragon even condescends to talk to the failures.

  "Does Mom know?"

  "Yes. That's one reason why she's acting the way she is. Your sisters don't know, and you can't tell them. They're not old enough to act a part."

  The boy stared at Ben, studying his face again. "Who are you?"

  "Ben Morgan."

  "What caused that fight between you and Mom?"

  Ben winced. "Son, that was a long time ago. She'll tell you if she thinks you ought to know."

  The boy blinked. "Wait a minute . . . Ben Morgan? Uncle Ben? Dad's brother? You're dead!"

  "Not quite."

  "But I saw your stone."

  "You saw Dan's, too. Just because something's carved in granite doesn't mean it's true."

  "Dad's alive." The boy looked stunned — too many punches to the head in too short a space of time. If he found out just why Maria went through the roof when she saw Ben and Gary together, the kid would really have a bad day. The boy shook himself like a wet dog, blinked, and then extended his left hand. "What's this thing?"

  Gary opened the fist, the one he'd kept closed since coming out of the water. A crimson light glowed in the middle of his palm, achingly beautiful. Ben's heart skipped a beat, faltered, and then started thumping. It wasn't possible. The boy had failed. He hadn't changed.

  Why had the Dragon given him her Tear?

  At least that explained how he knew Dan was alive. The Dragon acted as a bond between each of her Tears, as if they all were still parts of her. Family legend said that a glowing egg of crystal fell from the sky and talked to men, back in pre-Christian Wales. Ben wasn't sure how much of that he believed. It had struck a bargain with the ancestral Morgans. For whatever reason, it wanted to
see the world through human eyes. If Morgans carried it wherever they went, it would give them certain powers.

  "What is it? That's a good question, boy. Take it into a gem shop and ask, some day. One expert will tell you it's a ruby, another will say it's garnet, a third will say tourmaline or rosy quartz. Seems to depend on what they expect to see. What it is, is a piece of a living thing. Always keep it near you. If it is separated from its chosen human for more than a day or two, it starts to die."

  At least the Tear gave Ben something to do, to keep his mind off the problem of Gary's failure. He pulled a small jewelry box out of his pocket and opened it to spill a cascade of silver into his other hand. Shaking out the tangle revealed a silver chain and one of the ancient pendant dragons the Morgan family had hoarded since the beginning of time.

  "Isn't that Dad's?"

  "There are five of them, and they're all a little different. I don't know that more than three of them have ever been in use at once. Right now, yours and Dan's are the only ones. Put your Tear in the center."

  Gary reached out slowly, as if he was reluctant to lose touch with his gift. The stone glowed like a liquid flame, and then quivered for an instant before reforming into a faceted gem clasped in the jaws of the twisting silver dragon. The whole pendant glowed for a few seconds and then faded into a mundane piece of antique jewelry instead of magic on a silver chain.

  Ben jerked his mind away from the stone's sorcery and from thoughts of what might have been. He reached out and slipped the chain over Gary's head, allowing his hands to rest on the boy's shoulders a second longer than necessary. He was alive.

  "Can you tell me what happened down there?"

  "I climbed down the stairs and came to the water. You know all this? You've been there?"

  "Yes."

  "I saw a light underwater and dove in. The light came from a red ball, like an eye, set in the stone. I touched it, and Dad talked to me. The glowing thing gave me this piece of itself. I ran out of air and almost got trapped before I saw the light from this cave. Did you pass the same test when you were young? Did Dad?"

  "We both tried it. I never saw the Dragon's Eye, and never got a Tear. Dan saw it, the Eye wept for him, and something else happened as well. I'll show you what he said about it in the family records. As far as I know, this is the first time that a Morgan has been given a Tear without this other thing happening afterwards."

  The boy looked puzzled. He had cause, but Ben figured reading Dan's words would have more effect than a tale told by a stranger that the world thought was dead. The fact remained that something more than usually strange had happened down in the Dragon's lair, something outside the centuries of Morgan experience.

  Ben gnawed at his lip. Morgans tended to be pragmatic types, more like technicians or engineers than scientists. They worked within their heritage, applying it to problems rather than stretching it. They used the Dragon without having to understand just what she was. To the best of his memory, none of them had ever dug into magic theory. If they had questions on metalworking, or computers, or archaeology, they went to experts. Now he needed to find a consulting wizard.

  He winced at the thought. The only person he knew fitting that title had a sharp memory, an even sharper tongue, and an older sister who had been damned attractive twenty years ago. That was the problem with coming back to a small town — everybody lived in each other's pockets.

  He wondered what Lainie was doing these days.

  Still, maybe it was time to have a talk with the Wicked Witch of the East. Black Alice probably knew more about the Powers than anyone else in Maine, and the Morgans had a long history with the Haskell Women. Not friendship, exactly — those dykes weren't friendly with any male-dominated group. But the families had worked together many a time, and had a mutual respect. And Alice could keep her mouth shut when it suited her.

  Of course, she'd probably gaze into her crystal ball and come back with some smart-ass comment about women's lib, about why couldn't Ellen and Peggy take this same test. And maybe she'd be right. Damn that Dragon.

  First things first. Gary needed to learn a little family history before he'd be ready to talk about the kind of things Alice might know, answer the kind of questions she was liable to ask. Ben waved a hand toward the other stairway, the tower's "back door." "Seems to me you asked for a guided tour. This part I can show you, if you're still curious."

  "There's more?"

  "Yep. Now it gets interesting."

  Ben led the way. This stairway was much steeper than the other one, almost a ladder in a shaftway through the granite, and he was always glad of the iron rails bolted into the stone on either side. Out of long habit, he ducked each light globe as he passed it. A hollow thump and mutter of pain told him that the boy hadn't. Ben stopped and glanced back with a sympathetic smile.

  The boy rubbed his head for a few seconds, then stopped and ran his hands over the granite walls, stopping at a patch worn smooth by generations of shoulders. He leaned forward and gauged the wear on the steps, then shook his head as if he didn't believe what he saw and touched.

  "How old is this place?"

  "This stair? About five hundred years, five-fifty, something like that. I'd have to check the journals. The upper stair is as old as the tower, maybe six-fifty or seven hundred. The spiral stair, the one you went down, that's older still."

  "That's . . . that's not possible."

  Ben shrugged. "I'll show you the records. It's just as well Dan made you study Latin, though. Most of the stuff before about 1600 was written by the family priests."

  "But . . . the Pilgrims didn't land at Plymouth until 1620."

  "Yeah. And when they landed, they found some Wampanog Indians that spoke English right back at them. Wasn't us, but folks had been sailing back and forth across the North Atlantic for centuries. Columbus got here before 1500, and he was a latecomer."

  Gary blinked and shook his head. The poor kid was giving his disbelief circuits a serious workout. Ben turned back to the stair, and headed up. A few minutes of climbing brought them to a cramped landing and two level passages. One of them led straight ahead into darkness. Ben pointed down the one that led to the right.

  "That one's fairly recent, dug about 1800. It goes to the old mausoleum in the graveyard — that's how I got down to the pool before you did. There's a slab in the back that opens if you do a few things outside before you open the door. I'll show you when we leave."

  "Where's the other one go?"

  "That was done when they built the tower. It used to go all the way across the road and into the forest, back exit in case of a siege. We had to close the far part off when the county road went through. Now it just opens into a dry well inside that big lilac thicket out by the driveway."

  The upper stair led off to the left. It had been recut a few generations back because the wear had gotten dangerous, so the steps were smoother. Ben straightened up, the muscles in his back glad of the improved headroom. The air smelled fresher, too, with the circulation from the two side passages. They started climbing again, through bare rock and then into tight dry-stone masonry where the stairway started to curve to the left. His shoulders brushed the stones on either side. It was a good thing all the Morgans tended to be slender.

  "This top part is actually inside the wall of the tower. The rooms are a few feet off-center. We came up opposite to the door, and we'll end up next to the landing of the old inside stair. These stone treads balance the cantilever of the ones inside. They closed that stair off about the time your Pilgrim latecomers showed up down in Massachusetts."

  They'd reached another landing. The stair continued up, but Ben pushed a worn tapestry to one side, opening the way into a circular room the full width of the tower. Other tapestries draped the walls, and scattered down-lights turned the space into a dim treasure-house full of glittering reflections. Gold gleamed, sliver shone, gems and paints lit fire in pools spotting the gloom.

  "Wow! What is this place?" Gary panted a li
ttle from the climb, still recovering from his dive. Or maybe it was shock.

  Time to get back in character, now that he could relax a touch. "Aladdin's Cave, son, Ali Baba's Lair, the Dragon's hoard. The fairy tale promised you rubies and gold, and the genie always delivers." He bowed the boy through the door, with an elaborate flourish as if he swept the floor with a plumed hat.

  Ben didn't expect any scrap of attention for ten minutes, minimum. The family had always kept a few things in the tower, treasures that damp and salt air wouldn't hurt. That habit dated back to the time when you only kept your wealth by standing over it, sword in hand. He'd spent the morning moving the other stuff in before going down and opening the door. It was all part of the ritual, the secrets you learned when you came of age.

  But the boy hadn't changed. He hadn't found the Dragon's Eye and been trapped. He hadn't come within an inch of drowning and felt the Family's twisted genes kick in and warp his body into its selkie form in order to survive. He'd failed. The Morgans were left with nobody to follow Dan.

  Gary turned from side to side, eyes wide, cataloging the treasures lying on stone or on burlap sacking spread on pedestals, set into the masonry niches and hanging from the walls of a single circular room the size of a small house. Ben absent-mindedly picked up three Lalique crystal paperweights and started juggling them while he watched.

  A true teenaged male, Gary ran one hand along the green barrel of a bronze six-pounder cannon and then reached for a seventeenth-century ceremonial sword, French, all gold and gems and a blade almost as dull as a Congregationalist sermon. Kid showed some sense, though — he didn't touch the steel, and he wiped his hand again before picking up a stack of Maria Theresa thalers and examining them. He stared at a flint Maya sacrificial dagger that Dan hadn't found a buyer for, but again he didn't touch it, just jingling the old silver coins from one hand to the other.

  He put the coins back in their silver bowl and stared at things for a minute. Ben could almost hear the cash register ringing, as the boy totaled up the scene.