Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  "And?"

  "Nada. Five MDEA agents, ten deputies, and a snoop from the Feds. Two sniffer dogs. The place was clean, the people were clean, and there was Tom Pratt as smooth as goose-grease but with this shit-eating smirk when he thought you weren't looking. The agent in charge came back and damned near tore me a new asshole, he was so mad."

  "You weren't there?"

  "Damn straight. Tom Pratt and his cocaine cowboys get my face on their security cameras, I might as well retire. I'd rather sit back and let the uniformed boys take all the glory."

  Back to that damned splinter. "Was Jackie there?"

  "Funny you should ask. My boss really had a burr up his butt about her. Mouthiest little so-and-so he'd ever seen, came that close to hauling her in for interfering with an officer. Only thing that saved her, Tom Pratt had one of those Latino cowboys put a hammerlock on her before she got her ass in a sling."

  Bernie was still staring out at the treetops and the bay. What the hell was going on?

  "Talk to me, Bernie. You've got something else. I smell it."

  He turned around. "Smell? That's an interesting choice of words. Those dogs alerted all over the place. People, closets, cellar, the garage, you name it. Funny thing is, that little beagle Jerry Thompson runs is trained real good. Fifi was wagging her tail for coke, not heroin. And we didn't find a gram of the stuff."

  "Shit."

  "Yeah. They knew we were coming." Bernie wrinkled his nose, as if he smelled something rotten. "Thing is, there's this professional courtesy bit. I told you there was a raid going down. Your turf, and all that. Then the boys waltz in and find your daughter on the scene. Looks bad. Thing looks worse, I warned you off that big-assed New Jersey Suburban and our boys say you've been seen in a bar with the owner. Seen kissing him goodbye at the door of your trailer, next morning. Tell me what this looks like, Rowley."

  Kate's belly did a flip-flop. "Owner?"

  "Yeah. 'Red Bank Delivery' belongs to a string of dummies that belong to one Tony da Silva, AKA 'El Indio.' Different string of dummies own that Subaru wagon we busted with the smack. All leads back to the same place. Talk to me, Rowley. Tell me I'm wrong."

  But Antonio was so nice . . . "I never saw him with the car. You never told me who owned it, and I didn't check any further. You told me not to."

  He glared at her. "You've been told now, Rowley. I can't tell you how to run your love life, but da Silva got that nickname from an old Clint Eastwood western. Movie character was a whackjob, killed for kicks. You're out of the loop, Rowley. No more professional courtesy."

  Kate squeezed her eyes shut. She couldn't make Antonio's face fit the mobster template. It didn't work. She shook her head. "I didn't tell him, Bernie. I didn't tell anyone. I haven't even seen him since you told me about the raid."

  Bernie swung his leg over the Harley and stood there, straddling the seat. "Yeah. That's the word I had from the guys watching him. That's the only reason I'm here rather than up at the DA's office, Rowley. Thing is, you've got a telephone. Watch yourself." He kicked the machine to life, shutting off any reply.

  She watched his back retreating down the drive. The beat of the Harley faded and then roared again as he hit the main road. Kate just stood there, chewing on her lower lip and trying to settle the pain in her belly, as the rumble faded back into the sigh of wind in the spruce trees. She lit another cigarette, counting what remained in the pack. Five left. Have to stop off at the store on the way home.

  Antonio. "El Indio." Cocaine and heroin and Jackie and a drug raid on a house that was almost clean. Now her cop job was in the shithouse, as well as her family life. But Bernie wouldn't have told her anything if he thought she was a bent cop. The pieces didn't fit together.

  "Miz Rowley?"

  Jeff had appeared around the corner of the garage, sometime during her thoughts. He wouldn't meet her eyes, either. She wondered how much he had overheard.

  "Miz Rowley, word on the street is, that smack was stolen. Part of a shipment for Boston. Folks had this turf sliced up, see. Running coke and grass was one group, smack was another, meth and ecstasy and angel dust they bought in from a third. All nice and peaceful. Now the smack boys want a piece of the cocaine group. No more Mr. Nice Guy. Thought you might want to know."

  "Jeff, please pass the word along. Tell Jackie she can come home, anytime. No questions. No yelling. Just come home." Kate realized that she was crying again and didn't much care if he saw.

  He nodded and vanished around the corner, leaving her to her pain, leaving her to wonder what had forced him to break his silence.

  Oh, shit! Jackie in the middle. With that damned gun.

  Alice, and Jackie, and Charlie, and now Bernie. Kate felt like somebody was following her around, cutting every connection that gave her strength. Was Jeff going to be next?

  Chapter Nineteen

  As near as Ben could figure it, ounce for ounce Alice Haskell had to be about the nastiest woman walking God's green earth. She had some kind of game going, rubbing his nose in the powers of the all-knowing, all-seeing Haskell Witch and all the secrets the Morgans had thought they'd kept for centuries. And the worst was, she knew that he knew that she knew that he knew that he couldn't go anywhere else for help. He had to swallow it.

  That woman should have been drowned at birth. Hell, he'd had a chance himself, when she was six or eight and fell off the town dock. But no, he'd had to jump in and pull her out. Might be the stupidest thing he'd ever done.

  As penance, he was waiting in the deepest, most secret chamber of the Morgan tunnels, the chamber of the Dragon's pool, under fifty feet of Maine granite, breathing clammy salt air, watching the tide ebb in the black water and leave a wet line on the coarse pink stone. "The Dragon needs to meet your daughter," that damned woman had said. "She's got as much Morgan blood in her as Gary has."

  Okay. That was bad enough — bringing a woman to the Dragon, bringing a Haskell Witch into the heart of the Morgan secrets. Then she'd told him Caroline wouldn't need a guide. The girl would meet him at the pool. "Oh, and bring young Gary along," Alice had added. "Caroline will have a message for him."

  So Alice knew the tunnels and the chambers and the secret entrances. Hell, as far as that went, the damned witches might have their own private door hidden behind the deceptive stone walls of some side tunnel. One even he didn't know about.

  He'd set Gary to studying the alarm system, a training exercise to keep him out of trouble. Now the boy was slipping along one wall of the cave, staring at a motion sensor and occasionally sticking out one hand and waving it. Sometimes the little red LED flashed, sometimes it didn't.

  He turned to Ben and shook his head. "Don't the sensor specs give a wider detection angle than that?"

  Smart kid. "Yeah. I set different trigger thresholds on the indicator and on the alarm relay."

  "So somebody could think he wasn't setting off the alarms, but you'd actually know he was there?"

  "That's the general idea."

  "You're not very nice."

  "It's on the Morgan coat of arms: 'Never show 'em all your cards.' Of course, that's a paraphrase of the original Latin."

  "I never knew we had a coat of arms. Shouldn't it be on a shield over the door, or carved into the mantel over the living room fireplace?"

  "Think about it."

  The literal translation was "I know more than I say." That attitude had served the family well, down through the centuries.

  Ben glanced over at the doorway leading to the stair tunnel. No sign of Caroline. He wiped his hands on his cargo pants and cussed silently, wondering why he felt so nervous. He'd never seen this daughter of his — being dead meant he couldn't spend much time in Stonefort, where people had long memories and might ask embarrassing questions.

  Gary had probably seen her at school, but the difference in ages meant the boy couldn't connect her name with any memory of a face. There was a white square with No Picture written over her name and accomplishments in the old school
yearbook.

  He wondered for a moment if the Haskell Witches actually could be caught on film. The list of activities had been interesting, though: a whole slew of academic honors, then Drama Club, Latin Club, Chess Club, Math Team, Cross-Country Team, and Girl's State. The final entry had made him smile — Juggling Club. He wondered where she had found time to breathe.

  Ben pulled three golf balls out of his thigh pocket and started juggling them, just to give his hands something to do. There was a complicated pattern, "Mel's Mess," he was trying to get nailed down from a written description. Parts of it didn't seem to make sense. The concentration helped to quiet his twitchy feeling about this whole daughter/witch thing. Alice Haskell could give lessons to Niccolo Machiavelli.

  Now the boy stepped out from the wall and danced slowly across the cave floor, eye on the sensor light. Ben moved back to make sure he and the juggling balls were out of range. The light stayed off as Gary slid closer, flowing through the positions of one of his karate forms.

  "Slowly," Ben prompted. "Smoothly. Move slow enough and you can walk right by that kind of sensor. Just remember, there are systems that can tell if a new object is in the field, even if it doesn't move. They work with passive sensors and line-of-sight, or aggregate echo count. Always know what you're dealing with."

  Ben checked the tunnel mouth again and she was there, five feet inside the cave of the pool, watching them, with the Morgan gift of never being noticed until she wanted to be. Tight black jeans and "Red Power!" Tee-shirt, she was Lainie made young again: thinner but broad-shouldered and sinewy with exercise, burned dark from the Arizona sun and with glossy straight black hair that seemed to glow under the cavern lighting. Ben's breath caught in his throat. God, she was beautiful.

  He glanced back to Gary. The boy looked like somebody had whacked him between the eyes with a baseball bat: instant love, or probably lust would be more accurate. This could be a problem.

  Ben's hands had kept up the three-ball pattern, operating on reflex programming while his brain and hormones tripped over each other. She smiled, nodded a greeting that included both men in some private joke, and then she stepped up in front of him, snatching the balls one after another in a perfect steal. She continued the flow he'd started and then elaborated with underarm tosses to each side, reverse catches, and some kind of behind-the-back routine he'd never seen even a professional attempt.

  Through all that, she stared at Ben's face and ignored her hands, as if memorizing every pore of his skin. Then she glanced back and forth between him and Gary. She nodded again, as if checking off a guess confirmed, and Ben felt cold sweat on his back. Those eyes, those gray Morgan eyes, looked as if she saw much too much.

  "Gary," she said, and her low voice raised goosebumps on Ben's arms. "Aunt Alice says she talked to her shape-changer shaman. They think you might be too good a swimmer. This never happened before because a lot of local sailors never learned to swim. Certainly not state champions."

  She glanced at Ben, and he nodded confirmation. With the water temperatures off Stonefort, the cold could kill a man within minutes. If you went overboard you were dead. Why prolong the agony? Survival suits had changed that, but most working boatmen were still poor swimmers.

  "Anyway," she went on, "his family uses an ordeal drug in their initiation rite. It forces you into total terror, and you find your totem animal and shape-change to escape. You may need to be actually drowning before the Selkie change can happen. He added a warning: When you change, remember to change back."

  Then she tossed the balls over her shoulder to the boy, one at a time, and he caught them and habit continued the motion into a cascade. Just one big, happy family, Ben thought. All Morgans together. Time to put the troupe of jesters on the stage.

  Time to take control of the situation, rather, or try to. "How'd you get in?"

  "Back door. Climb down the cliff by the bald-headed spruce, cram yourself into a crack in the rock, sit down and slide feet-first under a ledge. Pull yourself in using handholds in the ceiling. Helps a lot if you aren't too fat. Take the first right and third left once you're in the tunnels and you're at the head of the stairs."

  Gary caught all three balls in one hand and glared at Ben. That was an entrance the boy didn't know about. Never show 'em all your cards.

  Ben's rage boiled over. "You mind telling me just how you know about that route? This is private property. Always has been, always will be. People who don't belong here end up dead!"

  She shook her head. "I belong here. My people have always belonged here. Naskeags helped dig these tunnels. The workers told their Woman, the Woman wove the knowledge into a chant, and the chant was passed down through the generations. Then some Aunt wrote down the lore so there was no chance of losing it from one generation to the next. You want to kill it off now, you're going to have to track down a secure server on the Internet and five backups in five different locations. Aunt Alice told you what witches do. We remember. We always remember. That's on our coat of arms."

  So she'd been listening, long before he'd noticed her. Before she'd allowed him to notice her. Gods above and below, what a Morgan could do with her abilities. And she was just an apprentice Witch.

  What a Morgan could do . . . "Any chance your lore has the layout of the tunnels beneath the Pratt compound?"

  That drew a sharp glance from her Morgan eyes. "I don't know. They aren't part of the tribe, aren't 'white Indians' with the long bond we have with your family. But they might have hired local labor. I'll have to check with Aunt Alice. My passwords won't work unless I'm prepared to say she's dead."

  Ben's head spun with the implications of what she'd said. He had to assume she meant to reveal the things he gleaned from her words. He had too much respect for Alice and any heir she'd choose to think otherwise. Damn the woman!

  He wasn't sure which woman he meant to damn. This daughter of his could be just as exasperating as her aunt. Maybe it came with the territory. Then his lips quirked into a wry grin. "Daughter" didn't mean much in this context. Her genetics might be half Morgan, but her attitudes were pure Haskell. If that damned Dragon had let him settle down with one woman, things might have been very different. Lainie had been years before Maria.

  Ben gritted his teeth and tried to get a hand on the slippery situation. "Okay, you're here. What was so important that your pain-in-the-butt aunt . . . ."

  She wasn't listening to him. Neither was Gary. They were staring at each other, but it wasn't the drooling lust he'd seen before on Gary's face. It was the look of two people who were listening to the same voice, a voice Ben couldn't hear. The Dragon was speaking to them.

  And he was locked out. Whatever the Dragon was saying wasn't for his ears. She rejected him. She always rejected him.

  Gary shuddered and then reached up to his throat and touched his Dragon pendant. He loosened the chain and lifted it over his head, so that the crimson glow of the Tear rested in his palm. He took a slow step towards Caroline, extending and then withdrawing his hand as if he was reluctant.

  Ben froze. They couldn't . . .

  Then he stood between them. "No! That thing can kill a stranger!"

  Caroline shook her head. "I am not a stranger."

  The Dragon's voice echoed in his head, as if she'd spoken aloud in the cave.

  His daughter reached out, palm up in a demand for the Tear. "I have the right!"

  Ben pushed her hand aside and crowded Gary away from her. Pain in the butt or not, he was not about to let this newfound daughter commit suicide.

 

  Gary and Caroline glowed with a red aura, and Ben's eyes felt scratchy as if he had gone three nights without sleep. His hands flopped to his sides, useless, and then he lost control of his knees. Pain lanced through his head. He was looking up now, from a seat on the floor, and he wondered if he had just had a stroke. He couldn't move.

  Caroline reached out again. Gary
clenched his fist around the Tear, trying to obey Ben and protect the girl, fighting against the Dragon's will. Then his fingers unfolded, one by one. The stone blazed in his palm. When Caroline took it, Ben could see the glow clear through her hand.

  The crimson blaze spread up her arm, as if she was turning into a human torch. She screamed once. Then she started chanting in the guttural syllables that Alice used, that Aunt Jean had used when she was wafting herb-smoke in one of her Naskeag rituals. The fire spread until her eyes glowed and her body was a single flame.

  Her voice rose until she was almost shouting. Then she screamed again and collapsed to the floor, a loose doll discarded after playtime. The Dragon was done with her.

  Ben moved a hand, then a leg. He crawled across the rough stone floor, twitching as he regained control of parts of his body. The air smelled of lightning and seaweed and sweat. Gary lay in his path, limp, eyes closed. Ben couldn't remember a Morgan ever giving up his Tear — not in the tales, not in the journals. If that damned witch had killed the boy, Ben would kill her. That was one bit of tribal crudity the family still practiced. No one killed a Morgan and lived. The Pratts were going to find that out, sooner or later.

  Ben's hand tingled all the way up to his elbow, like he'd whacked his funny bone, and his head throbbed. He steadied the twitching and reached out to lay a palm on Gary's chest. The shirt moved under his hand — the boy was still breathing. His heartbeat felt strong and steady.

  What about Caroline?

  The girl lay beyond, crumpled face down on the cave floor. Ben forced himself forward on hands and knees, one leg dragging. He wondered what the Dragon had done to him, to keep him out of the fight.

  Her smooth black hair glistened in his eyes. He touched it, remembering the caress of Lainie's hair under his hand, remembering the fresh-hay smell of her. Damn that Dragon!

  Her hair was damp. A drop of sweat beaded and then ran a track down to the tip of her nose, crossing one eyelid without drawing a blink. He was afraid to check for a pulse or breathing.