Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  She sneezed.

  He jerked back. He felt curiously reluctant to touch her, as if she might break.

  She pulled her hands in and pushed her shoulders up from the floor. She sneezed again. "Typical bunch of men. Don't you ever sweep down here?"

  The Tear glowed in her hand, smoldering like a banked fire. She stared at it, shaking her head as if wondering if it was worth the price. She grunted and shoved herself up and backwards to squat on her heels, squeezed her eyes shut, and then shifted her gaze to Ben, blinking and squinting as if she found it difficult to focus. "You okay?"

  Control returned to his body. He nodded and then staggered to his feet, looking down at her, and then offered her a hand to help her up. She glanced at the Tear again. That "listening" look crossed her face. She spread the chain, slipped it over her head, and tucked the silver dragon down inside her Tee shirt. Then she took Ben's hand and pulled herself upright. Both of them swayed with the effort.

  Ben saw her gather herself together and draw strength from some deep reserve. She straightened up and blinked three times, shaking her head like she was shaking off a physical blow. Then she narrowed her eyes, wiped sweat from her forehead, and quirked one corner of her mouth into a wry attempt at a smile. "I need to talk to you," she said. "Alone."

  With that, she turned and staggered over to the stair tunnel, expecting him to follow. Ben glanced at Gary. The boy looked like he was sleeping. He'd keep. Might as well do what that damned Haskell Woman expected. Trying otherwise was like Canute ordering back the tide.

  She stopped at the first landing, leaned on the wall and panted for a moment, and then turned aside into a chamber where generations of Morgans had hidden things, thinking they were secret. The sharp odors of grease and solvent overpowered the smell of damp stone. She wrinkled her nose and gestured at the stenciled green packing cases. "Thinking of starting a private war?"

  Ben had been cleaning up the mortar and recoilless rifle: wiping off the preservative grease, mounting sights, and swabbing the bores. Some of his recent dreams tended to get violent.

  He shook his head. "Contingency plans."

  She nodded. "Aunt Alice asked me to remind you of what happened to that British sloop back in 1814. Any of those shells come near the House, she says you can squat down in some deep, dark corner, tuck your head between your knees, and kiss your ass goodbye. Her words, not mine."

  Ben grimaced. More joint family history — in the War of 1812, the British had fired on the town, burned a couple of shacks, and laid siege to Morgan's Castle. Two cannonballs had hit the Haskell House. That night, the British sloop blew up in the harbor, a fire in the magazine. At low tide, you could still see rotten planks and ribs in the salt mud where they'd beached the hulk and let her burn herself out. Without the ship's guns to back them up, the surviving Royal Marines had decided that a strategic withdrawal was a good idea.

  "You tell your aunt that if she keeps on being such a pain, I won't blow her house up. What I'll do instead, I'll toss her headfirst into that frog pond behind the place. She hasn't grown an inch since the last time I did it."

  That drew a weak smile. "Can I watch? From a safe distance? Anyway, that isn't what I wanted to ask. Are you ever planning to tell Gary?"

  That chill ran down his back again. "Tell him what?"

  Caroline wrinkled her nose. "Hey, I take after Mom, not Aunt Alice. I think boys are way more interesting than girls. I was giving Gary the old Haskell look-over. You'd have to score him at least a nine on the cuteness scale, and I was thinking that cousin isn't all that bad, you know, not like real incest. 'Specially with birth control. And he's past the age of consent. But it's a little worse than cousin, isn't it?"

  She mimed a Mall-Rat flip of her hand and tipped her head to one side. "Sex with your half-brother is, like, so redneck. You know, all those, like, inbred hillbilly families that don't have the brains to wipe the drool off their chins?"

  Damned Haskell Witches. Half Morgan or not, this one wasn't any duller than the rest of them. "I can't tell him. It isn't my secret to tell. With Maria dead, the only one who can tell him is Dan."

  She shook her head, turned, and vanished into the darkness of an unlit tunnel. Ben frowned. Just to add insult to injury, the little lights on the motion sensors refused to glow. She was moving too damn fast to get away with that.

  Then that soft, sexy alto came out of the shadows and ran ghost fingers down his spine, so much like Lainie. "She hasn't rejected you, father. The Dragon looked into your thoughts and found something worth much more than another tribal chieftain with a strong sword-arm. You rule the Morgans more than Daniel ever did. You plan what he tells them to do. She made you hide because you are priceless, not worthless."

  Chapter Twenty

  Gary lay on the cold stone, aching. He couldn't muster the strength or the will to move. The cold and the ache, those were as much in his heart as in his skin and muscles and bones. The stone was cold enough, yes, and damp, and hard where it bruised his back. And the floor was dusty, as she'd said, with the dust of centuries in this deep place. But he'd catch royal hell if he dared suggest that she could clean it up if she found it so damned offensive.

  The cold and the ache, those came from loss. He hadn't known what the Tear meant to him until the Dragon had told him to take it off. First he'd feared that the Tear would kill this girl with the raven hair and gray eyes and a face that had struck him dumb. Then he'd feared it wouldn't.

  She'd kept it, and lived. And a part of him had walked out of the cave and vanished up the stairs.

  The cave had strange acoustics. Parts of it echoed and passed sound around like the "whispering galleries" in old buildings, in domes like St. Paul's and the Capitol. Some places you could hear a pin drop in a room far away, and then move six inches and never hear a shout.

  She was speaking. She was moving, and snatches of words came down the stair to him: " . . . tell him . . ." ". . . cute . . ." ". . . worse . . ." Some of Ben's words filtered down, as he moved or turned or followed: ". . . secret . . ." " . . . Maria . . ." " . . . Dan . . ." They made no sense, no sense at all.

  But one phrase reverberated in his ears, and it made altogether too much sense: " . . . half-brother . . ." Whose half-brother had been lost in the echoes, but he thought he knew.

  That opened a can of worms, and he wasn't sure which way they slithered. Who was his real father? Who was his real mother? Was he a Haskell, or a Morgan? Did that explain why he couldn't do the Selkie change? Did that explain why he didn't look all that much like Daniel Morgan, or like his sisters? He did recognize her face, with its overlay of what he saw when he looked in a mirror. " . . . half-brother . . ."

  Endless questions. And from what he'd heard, the Haskell men never amounted to much, rare as they were.

  He opened his eyes and stared up at the rough stone ceiling. You could still see the tool marks in the granite after all those centuries. He visualized the red glow of the Dragon's Eye, under cold water just a few yards away. "Why did you give me that thing and then take it from me?"

  The Dragon's voice was calm and analytical, like a computer.

  "And I wasn't strong enough for you. Because I'm not really a Morgan."

 

  So maybe he could earn the right to another Tear — Ben had said that he remembered three in use at once. But how? Morgans had a test, which he had failed. Did the Haskells have a test, for proving strength?

 

  So he did not need to speak aloud. The Dragon read his thoughts, as well as placing her own in his head. But Dad was Caroline's father? But Ben had said . . . Gary's thoughts whirled in confusion, until he finally came up with one soap-opera script that fit. Ben must have been covering up a family scandal, Dad cheating on Mom. Suddenly all the
fights made a kind of sense.

  "So I am a Morgan?"

 

  Gary's thoughts edged around a black pit in his mind. He had to know, but he couldn't force himself to ask straight out. "Do you speak to any other Morgan?"

 

  The pit reached out and sucked him down into searing emptiness. His father was dead. Gary squeezed his eyes shut, tensing his whole body against tears and a scream of rage that clawed at his throat.

 

  Relief washed through Gary's body, and he sagged back to the floor. For days now, they'd felt nothing, heard nothing. He would glance at Ben and shake his head. Ben would look back and shake his head. Neither dared to speak the words — the continued silence meant that Dad was dead, but saying it out loud might be the black magic that made it true.

  Dad was alive, but still held by the Pratts. Ben couldn't find a safe way into their grounds or tunnels. They'd tried tricking the DEA into searching, and the best drug-sniffing dogs had failed. And the one way they did know about, the sea cave, was a trap. Gary couldn't use that unless he learned to change. Ben had failed the Dragon's test, and Gary had only met one part of it. Now the Tear had passed on to Caroline and the Haskell Witches. Could Caroline change? Had she inherited that, as well?

  Gary shook his head and forced himself to move. With Daniel gone and Ben "dead," Gary was the Morgan now, the way the family journals used the name: the oldest male, the head of the clan. The Morgan didn't quit. He might die, but he didn't quit. Morgan blood never abandoned Morgan blood. The Morgan had to save his father or die trying.

  The Morgan gritted his teeth and stood, swaying, his vision spotted with black and silver dots. He felt like he'd just finished his black belt test, or crawled out of the water after a ten-mile swim. He'd finished both on sheer determination, all strength and stamina drained.

  Swimming. Caroline had tossed a comment about the Selkie change into that mix, words Aunt Alice had passed on from somebody she knew. Gary was too good a swimmer. The dive hadn't pushed him past his limits into unknown depths.

  Depths. Gary stared at the black water of the Dragon's pool. He stripped off his shirt. The buttons were hard, his hands shaking. Tee shirt and shoes, pants, socks, underpants — he stood naked and shivering, blinking with exhaustion. He had to lock his knees in order to stay upright. Anything now would be pushing past his limits.

  He'd been wading through those dusty, musty journals, slowly, abused Latin irregular verbs and bastardized declensions and all. So far, he'd found two more mentions of the change, two more cold hard eyewitness descriptions thrown in the teeth of impossibility. "What I tell you three times is true."

  He staggered three steps to the water, each move a battle. He stopped at the edge. He'd never feared the water before, perhaps a gift of his Morgan blood. Now the slow dark heave of it looked menacing.

  If he stared at it any longer, he'd back down. Remembering why he was diving, he didn't take a breath before plunging in head first, and shock nearly drove the remaining air from his lungs. The water had seemed almost warm, the time he'd dived before. Now it felt like it had flowed straight from the Arctic.

  Darkness welled up and swept around him. He forced himself down into the freezing water, searching for the red gleam of the Dragon's Eye. The walls, the floor, the ceiling all turned black as he swam beyond the last reach of the cavern lights. He followed the rough walls by touch, then rose to crawling upside-down along the ceiling.

  His lungs burned. His eyes sought phantoms of red among the yellow and white sparks dancing across his vision. His head broke water, into blackness.

  Gary sculled around until he found stone steps, crawled up onto them, and crouched there, gasping. He was in the tower stairway, the way he'd come in the first time. The Dragon was hiding from him.

  Caroline's words echoed in his head: "Total terror." "You may need to be actually drowning before the Selkie change can happen." He hadn't pushed far enough. Yet.

  He sculled back out in the icy pool and dove again. He followed the rough stone downwards, swimming slowly, scanning the black water for any gleam of red. His head buzzed, and lights danced in front of his eyes again, but they were white or yellow. A mosquito whined in his ears, growing to a rushing roar like a jet engine. Silver light flooded the tunnel. He turned over, lazily, and looked up at the mirrored ripples of the inner pool.

  He couldn't take a breath. That would be cheating. He had to go back down. He rolled over again and stared at his hands, floating loose in the water. His fingers and toes tingled and then went dead. They belonged to somebody else, and he had to pull the puppet's strings just right.

  Something grabbed him and he fought it, twisting away and shoving. He wasn't done yet. He hadn't changed.

  It pulled him up into warmth and dragged him across coarse stone, the rough surface tearing fire from his skin. Something forced air into his lungs, warm damp air from warm lips, and pressed against his chest in a familiar rhythm. CPR. Lifesaving class.

  He swung out, blind, struggling against rescue. He had to dive again. Coughs spasmed out of his lungs.

  Rough hands spun him face down, pinning him to the stone. Warm breath panted in his ears, followed by gasping words. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

  Gary found enough air for words. "Got . . . to . . . dive. Got . . . to . . . change."

  "God damn Alice Haskell to hell for a meddling bitch!"

  The voice and the attitude had to be Ben. Gary relaxed and quit struggling. He had lost. He couldn't force himself to dive again. Pressure eased on his back, and he retrieved his arm from the chi na lock he hadn't realized his uncle knew. Gary shook his head, painfully. There was so much he hadn't realized.

  "I've got to try it." He coughed again, pain shooting through his chest. "I've got to get another Tear. You heard what she said. I need to be really drowning."

  The hands turned gentle, twisting Gary's shoulders until a face swam into view. "It isn't worth it, boy. It isn't worth risking your life. You've passed her test once. There's no need to do it again."

  Gary stared up at Ben's face, blurry through fatigue and dripping seawater. It was Caroline's face, underneath the age-lines and stronger jaw, Gary's own face crowned by graying hair. Funny he hadn't noticed it before. But like Ben said, people mostly see what they expect to see.

  Dad screwing around with Elaine Haskell, that wouldn't have been a scandal. Haskell women did what they damned well pleased, always had. That wouldn't have started the endless fights. Ben had said Caroline was twenty. Best Gary could remember, that meant Dad and Mom hadn't even met when Caroline was born.

  "You're my father."

  *~*~*

  Gary shivered. Dried, dressed, wrapped in a blanket, and sitting in front of an electric heater, he still felt groggy with cold. He handed an empty mug back to Ben. Back to his father.

  They hadn't talked, coming up the stairs into the tower. Gary didn't have the strength to connect words in a row. Ben probably had his own reasons for keeping quiet while he kept the boy moving, wrapped him in warmth, and brewed the coffee.

  His father took the mug, poured another dose of inner heat, and hesitated. Then he shook his head. "To hell with doctors and their sage advice." He reached up into the cabinets that lined one stone wall of the room, pulled out a bottle, and topped off the mug. Whiskey fumes spread over the aroma of fresh-brewed Sumatra gold. "The Irish know what a man really needs at times like this." He poured himself a drink, as well, and didn't bother to add coffee to it.

  Then he sat down and stared at the wall, at a point somewhere ten feet beyond his son. Minutes seemed to pass while they both sipped at their mugs.

  "No, Gary, I'm not your father. I'm just a man your mother knew, seventeen, eighteen years ago. Your dad is the man who stayed around
to change your diapers. Genetics doesn't have a damn thing to do with fatherhood."

  He went back to staring at the wall. After a while, he got up and refilled his mug with whiskey, and added straight coffee to Gary's. Then he settled down to wearing a hole through solid granite with his eyes.

  Finally, he sighed. "You've figured out the basics. Might as well give you the whole story, so you can keep your mouth shut down the road.

  "I was taking some courses at the university up in Naskeag Falls. Good deal for everybody involved — I got the education, this numbskull hockey player got the credits, and the university got a conference championship while not officially knowing a damn thing was going on. One year they even made it to the NCAA finals. Everybody's happy." He took another swallow of whiskey.

  "Then I met Maria. One thing led to another, and the name I was carrying wouldn't have passed muster for a marriage license. The family could have cooked us up some papers for another life, but by that time your mother wouldn't have married me if the Pope had presided at the ceremony and we'd given her the State of California as a marriage price. That woman had a temper, and she could carry a grudge from here to Pluto without ever breaking a sweat."

  Gary winced. Yes, he could imagine that. He had no trouble visualizing the entire scene, complete with textbooks instead of expensive glassware raining down on Ben's head and bouncing off the walls.

  "Abortion?" Ben shook his head. "Not for Maria — she was a straight-arrow Catholic, even in bed. That's what got us into the mess in the first place."

  He emptied his mug, refilled it at the cabinet, and then brought the bottle with him when he walked back to his chair. "She wouldn't even meet me after that first explosion. I'm surprised it didn't show up on the seismographs there at the university. So Dan carried messages between us, sort of like a second setting up a duel. We were going to pay for everything, have the baby — have you — handed over to Aunt Jean and then be adopted by one of the cousins. That's how Alice knows all about this mess.