Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  Dammit, stop woolgathering!

  The pigs had been playing with her. She knew that. They could have attacked anytime from that first evening on, but they wanted to wear her down first. Even a witch needed sleep. But they didn't understand the House all that well. Killing the power just made it stronger. Alice could feel the old place heave a sigh of relief, ridding itself of those conflicting magnetic fields and nasty humming machines.

  Still, she considered the refrigerator, wondering if just one live circuit would be safe. Then she shook her head. Time to find out if that super-duper Energy Star insulation was worth the cost. It should be able to hold food safe for a day or two. Beyond that point, she'd definitely have more important problems.

  Just on the outside chance . . . she picked up the phone. Still dead. They'd cut the line, some time between her call to Caroline and her attempt to answer Kate's message. That had been three days ago, the opening shot of this war of nerves. Such a nice, subtle signal that was: "We know where you are. We know the girls are there. Have a nice day."

  She remembered the ice storm three years back — power and phone lines down all over the county. Anybody calling on those dead lines would hear a ringing signal but never get an answer, just like there was nobody home. Only way you could find out otherwise was to drive out to the place and check. You'd think the phone company could work out some way of telling a caller that the line was out of service.

  She'd tried a cell phone once. The House didn't like it. Either that, or this corner of Stonefort was a dead spot on the coverage. The pager worked fine, but that was receive-only.

  Phones — that message from Kate had been sweet. The only thing wrong was the timing. Alice had shut the tape off when it got too graphic for young ears, then had played it through the next morning before Ellen and Peggy were up. And by then the damned phone was dead. Talk about star-crossed lovers . . . .

  Dixie consented to use the cat box, then glared at Alice for making such an indignity necessary. The cat had her own ideas about what was important in this world, and a witch-war didn't make the list. Humans should settle such things without disturbing her routine. She stalked off into the older part of the house, twitching her tail.

  "Okay, girls. Bedtime."

  That roused a groan and a great pouting of lips. She'd been telling tales of the house, to an appreciative audience. Of course, in the stories she told, the good guys always won.

  "Tell us one more, Aunt Alice." Peggy had needed the stories more than Ellen had. She'd understood less of what was going on.

  Ellen got that crafty look again. "Are there any stories of the witch helping men?"

  Alice shook her head, but weakened. She'd never make a good mother, able to make rules and stick to them. "Okay, one more. Yes, the House sometimes helps men. We help good people who can't find help anyplace else. People who have to live in fear, for no good reason. What sort of man might fit that description?"

  Again, it was Ellen who first found voice. "There's this boy in school, everybody calls him a fag. Or there's Mikuma — he's some kind of refugee from Africa. Kids pick on him, even though he's kinda nice. But he's black, and he doesn't speak English very good, and kids keep calling him a terrorist or a raghead because his folks pray funny."

  "He's probably a Muslim, a follower of Muhammad. But those are good choices, Ellen. One of the men who stayed in this house a while, over a hundred years ago, was black. He was an escaped slave named John. Nobody gave family names to slaves, and he refused to use his owner's name.

  "Anyway, he came to Stonefort late one night before the Civil War, traveling by the Underground Railroad. Do you know what that was?"

  Ellen nodded. She must have been through the Black History Month programs. Peggy looked puzzled. "Is that some kind of subway?"

  Alice jumped in before Ellen could put her expression of scorn into words. "No. The 'railroad' was a metaphor, a figure of speech. The Underground Railroad was a network of people who were opposed to slavery, opposed to it strongly enough to break the law and help slaves escape to Canada. They hid runaway slaves, helped them to travel, gave them food and clothes and money, sometimes traveled with them as if they were slave owners."

  Peggy nodded understanding, so Alice went on. "There was a law back then, the government had to send escaped slaves back to their owners. The police had to help recapture the runaways. Somebody knew that John had come to Stonefort, some idiot who thought black people were animals that could be bought and sold. So the police looked all over town, searching people's homes and barns and such, looking in all the boats in the harbor. But they never looked in this house. Everybody knew a man couldn't be hiding here. This was a woman's house."

  Alice paused, and smiled. "Remember, always be careful about trusting what you know too far. That table over there, the maple one? John made that, while he waited for a chance to move on. He was a skilled man, a cabinetmaker and a good one, but some people knew he wasn't even human. You've been eating supper from his gift, his skill offered as thanks for common human kindness.

  "He stayed here for two weeks, hiding, working on that table. Then one night old Ephraim Morgan rowed John out to the schooner Sally Ann and took him across to Nova Scotia. So your family had a part in the story, and you should be proud of them. Now get ready for bed."

  They pouted again. Ellen looked cheated, as well. "But that story didn't have any magic in it."

  "No, it didn't. But you will find, young lady, that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you don't need magic to do what's right. Remember that."

  And then there's that hundredth time, she reminded herself. She watched as Ellen filled the portable lamps and lit them. She gave the girls as many chores, as many responsibilities, as the situation allowed. They needed them. Work could be a great healer.

  Once again, they walked back through the centuries to the oldest core of the house. This time, Alice purified the fire and set her guards with the girls watching — burning the sweetgrass and the sage, the juniper and the bloodroot, offering tobacco to the winds and to the ancestors. She moved slowly through the ritual and said the words, watching Ellen out of the corner of her eye. The little minx was memorizing every syllable and gesture. Well, nothing ever said the Haskell Witch couldn't have two apprentices.

  The girls undressed for bed. This "motherhood" thing was a challenge, instant children eight and twelve years old, fragile children who'd lost father and then mother in a space of days, for a lesbian who'd never felt the nesting urge. Alice went with the example of her sister and the raucous brood she still was raising. Learn from the pro. Eight and twelve, that would be closest to Jen and Lisa. Alice helped Peggy arrange her blanket and pillow on the futon, carefully keeping her back turned on Ellen — at almost the same age, Lisa was so shy of her changing body that she wouldn't even undress in front of her own mother.

  Alice tucked Peggy in with a motherly kiss on the forehead, patted Ellen softly on the head, turned down the lamp to an orange glow, and shut the door behind her. She heard the bar thump home, the deadbolt click, and then the rustle of sheets as Ellen got into bed.

  She rested her hand on the oak planks of the door for a moment, offering a silent blessing for the children. Then, aloud, "And remember, don't open the door even for me. Not without the password. If you hear noises, or something tries to open this door, get down in the cellar. Understand?"

  Muffled giggles came through the door, followed by a faint "Yes, Aunt Alice." They must have been thinking of the password, to find something to laugh about.

  Alice checked her weapons and flashlight again, and slipped into her sleeping bag. Before she blew out the lamp, she studied the single unshuttered window at the end of the hall, high and too narrow for a man to pass through quickly. A web covered it, hand-spun of milkweed floss and spider-silk and hung with three wing-primaries from a peregrine. She'd left that one opening deliberately, trapped with the strongest soul-catcher she could weave. Dixie settled down into a miniature sphinx
by her head, also staring at the window and the stars beyond. Apparently the cat knew more than she was telling.

  There was that phrase from AA that Lew Lewis pasted on the bumper of his pickup and then ignored: "One Day at a Time." Well, she had to take this one night at a time. It wasn't a matter of vampires dying if touched by the sun, or the powers of darkness waxing stronger in the wee hours of the wolf. Still, she knew the first attack would come at night, in the dark, when she couldn't see, when she was sleepy, when the irrational and the impossible gained strength in human minds. Just make it through, one night at a time.

  And Caroline might show up tomorrow. It depended on schedules and reservations and flying standby and possibly renting a car and driving straight through from Boston. Or Amtrak, into Boston again. Maine didn't have any passenger train service. Whatever worked. Then there'd be two witches to guard the children. Then one of them could stay home and the other could go out and find Kate and get the phone fixed. Then Alice could sleep.

  She blew out the lamp, and waited.

  Shattering glass woke her from a drowse, and she heard Dixie's squalling battle-cry. One hand found the flashlight while the other groped for her shotgun. She flipped on the light, fiercely bright in the hallway, and slid it away so that anybody shooting at the light would miss her.

  A dark mass oozed through the high window, tangling the soul-catcher and dripping to the floor. Dixie slashed at it with her claws, bit, and spat something out before diving back in. Alice aimed higher and cut loose with the shotgun. The blast and recoil dazed her for an instant, and then she saw the darkness reform like a column of ants. It rolled over Dixie, and Alice couldn't fire low without shredding her friend.

  She blasted it again, higher up, and saw bits fly loose like smoke. The old pump gun roared a third time, tearing through the window and chopping the mass in half. She untangled herself from the sleeping bag and staggered to her feet. Part of the thing was still inside, writhing around the corner into the back hall. Alice scooped up the flashlight and held it far out to one side, inching forward. Then she heard the creak of hinges.

  Shutter. She braced the shotgun on her hip, stepped around the corner, and fired blind. The recoil knocked her back against the wall. Too damn small for this, she thought. Need Kate.

  Blood spattered along the plaster, and she saw a human leg jerk back through the window. The dark snake shattered into a thousand bits and Dixie snarled in triumph. Alice staggered to the window, her head still ringing from the shotgun blasts. A shadow retreated across the back lawn, limping, and she fired once more. The shadow fell and then rose, slowly.

  She let it totter away into darkness. Bodies could be such inconvenient things to explain, come next morning. And given what she knew of shotgun wounds, that shadow only had about two days left to live. She'd loaded other things besides lead pellets into those shotgun shells, nasty things that Winchester or Remington had never dreamed of.

  She pulled the outer shutters closed, latched them, and then the inner ones. Kate could replace the glass. Same with the high window in the back hall. With the house secure again, Alice pulled fresh cartridges out of her pockets and shoved them into the magazine. She turned and stared at the plaster in the hallway, pockmarked and shattered by shotgun pellets. More work for Kate. Drifts of dead leaves covered the floor, with a mixing of grass and dirt. Golem. Her enemy had shaped that thing and sent it into the house, knowing the house would let it pass. It wasn't a man.

  A pale thing fluttered in her soul-catcher, a large moth caught in a spider's web. Dixie sat on the floor, glaring at it between bouts of washing her paws and trying to groom dirt out of her long fur. Alice studied the thing carefully for a minute, judging angles, and then wrapped it in the tangling threads without ever allowing its struggles to touch her. It probably wasn't dangerous, not by itself, but she didn't feel like finding out the hard way. It was too ugly.

  Then she carried it back to the new kitchen and the banked fire of the cook stove. She lifted a burner lid, stirred the coals, added alder wood split small for a fast blaze, and laid the thing on the fire. It shriveled and smoked, giving off an acrid stench like burning hair. Alice heard a low growl behind her and turned, to find Dixie glaring at the stove with her fur all on end. Something screamed in the darkness, down near the water, a long scream a long time dying into echoes.

  The stench vanished up the chimney, and the house relaxed around her. She knew she'd just killed a person — a man, to judge by that scream — and the thought didn't bother her a bit. That one wouldn't leave a corpse behind. A scorched patch down near the tide line, maybe — the laws of similarity and contagion could be rough on the neighborhood.

  Two down. The one who'd limped away wouldn't have been the life-force for the golem. Neither of them would be the enemy sorcerer, worse luck, but at least he was short a couple of tools. Alice used a poker to break up the shriveled bits of her soul-catcher and the soul it had caught, until everything had whitened into ash.

  It was a shame about the peregrine feathers. They were hard to come by.

  Alice walked slowly back into the heart of the House, breathing deeply and shaking out tense muscles to discharge the adrenaline from her fight. At each door, she reset the bars that defended the passage within. She didn't bother to rig a new net at the window. Her enemy wouldn't try the same attack twice. Instead, she finished reloading the shotgun, laid it down, and tapped softly on the parlor door, shave-and-a-haircut pattern.

  "Little pig, little pig, let me come in."

  Footsteps creaked up the basement ladder, and she heaved a sigh of relief. The girls were okay, and they had retreated to the spring when all hell broke loose. The house would have protected them, down there, even if the men had gotten past her.

  A voice slipped through the door, tentative, "Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin."

  "Then I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll blow your house down."

  The lock clicked, and thumps announced the removal of the bar. Alice had thought that such an idiot sign and countersign would be the safest — even if the attackers had managed to force her to tell, one way or another, they probably wouldn't have believed her.

  Alice pushed the door open, slowly, not wanting to startle the girls. Ellen stood by the open hatchway, biting her lip, with a smaller shotgun in her hands pointing almost at the door, and Peggy's head just showed above the floor. Smart kids. Brave kids. Alice smiled her relief.

  Then her arms were full of girls, hugging, and she felt both of them trembling. "It's okay," Alice murmured. "It's okay. Dixie and I scared them off."

  No need to mention dead men, or provide any other food for nightmares.

  Dixie scalloped around their ankles, demanding a reward for her part in the battle. Ellen stooped down and picked the cat up, scritching ears and snuggling until Dixie started to rumble a purr. Peggy stopped sniffling and Alice wiped the child's eyes. "You're safe now." Until the next time.

  Something rattled the outer shutter of the window, a gust of wind or prying fingers. A dry, hard touch scraped across it like the bare ice-stiff branches of winter, and then it rattled again. Both girls jerked in fear.

  "It's okay," Alice explained. "Just a tree limb."

  Except that there wasn't a tree or bush within reach of that window. The girls didn't need to know that, though. At least not until the sun was shining.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Night and fog hung close over the bay. Gary blessed the fog. He was scared, no way around it. The cold, dark, salty cotton wool helped to calm him. He slipped between sheds on the old dock — the battered, rotting work-boat dock covered with rusty gear and fish gurry that the New York yachties thought looked so quaint from their safe distance upwind on the transient moorings.

  With weathered gray wood all around him, gray decking underfoot, gray jeans and turtleneck and watch cap and gloves, the night and fog would make him damn near invisible. Besides, then he could blame condensed seawater for the dampness in his gloves
. It wasn't his palms sweating.

  Still, it was an exciting kind of scared. He'd felt like this the first time he'd shut off the car lights out at the old Stanford quarry and slipped an arm around Sue Hemming. Scared, yes, but certain that something very interesting was on the horizon.

  The old dock was rough under his feet, planking splintered from decades of storms and heavy use. He slipped his feet over the surface and felt for each step — folks left trap buoys and lobster crates lying around, and if somebody had decided to dry and mend a net . . . . His nose told him the blur to his left was the bait shack, rank with the memory of the tons of herring and alewives that had passed through on their way to lobster traps and swordfish downriggers.

  The dock looked different at night, almost sinister, something out of a '40s spy movie with Bogart meeting Bacall to pass along the plans for the coastal forts. Gary must have been down here a thousand times, meeting Dad's boat, loading, unloading, mending traps, finally climbing aboard to work his salt-water bar mitzvah as stern man, a man's job in a man's world. But this time, at this tide, he had no legal business.

  A shot echoed across the bay, muffled by the fog. Gary ducked behind a stack of lobster crates. Another followed, and then two more — the last one louder, as if the shooter had moved. He straightened up and wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve. Night hunters. The deer eat your peas, you eat the deer. Simple equation. In Sunrise County, even the wardens didn't pay much attention. People lived too close to the edge. They'd nail you if you tried to sell the meat, but turned a blind eye to a man who needed to feed his family.