Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  Alice opened her eyes. The parlor stood in front of her, looking exactly as usual except for a patch of shattered plaster showing through the wallpaper and a drift of leaves and dirt across the oriental rug. Another goddamn golem. She slid down the doorframe and sat, leaning on the wall and with the wood trim digging into one shoulder blade.

  Golem. Her fingers toyed with the mess on the floor. Golem, not Kate. And I invited it through the door. Broke the wards. Just like a man, thinking with my gonads. She worked her way along the wall, using it to anchor her world. A wisp of gold caught her eye. She teased it out of the mess: a lock of blonde hair, fine and short.

  Kate's hair. Alice remembered the soul-catcher and the stove. She still might have just killed her friend, her love, her almost lover. It all depended on the spells the brujo had used, how he'd gotten the hair.

  There wasn't enough of a mess on the floor. Kate was a big woman, should have left a big mess. Where was the rest? Alice shook her head, ignoring the pain, trying to clear her thoughts. Black jeans walked across in front of her, and she followed them up to a dark face and black hair.

  Caroline.

  "What the hell are you doing out here?"

  "Trying to keep you from hurting yourself worse than you already are."

  Ice settled over Alice's heart. "Where are the kids?"

  "Old parlor."

  Alice forced herself off the floor, clawing at the hands that tried to hold her down. They battled to a truce, Caroline tucking her smaller aunt under one arm and shuffling gently through the maze of the old house.

  "Wartime, they'd shoot you for leaving your post under enemy fire. Your job is to protect the girls, not play nurse to a dumb old woman."

  The old front door stood open, dead leaves on the threshold. The old parlor door stood open. The room was empty, the trap door to the cellar and the spring still closed. Caroline heaved it open, but silence greeted them. The girls were gone.

  Black and white fur stirred behind the door and formed a cat shape. Alice pinched her eyes shut, forcing her brain to work. She looked again. Dixie struggled across the floor, scratching with her front paws only. Alice knelt down, reaching out to touch the third guardian of the House. The cat licked her fingers, feebly. Touching delicately, probing, feeling beyond the evidence of her fingers, Alice found numbness instead of pain. The backbone took a sideways jog just behind Dixie's shoulders. Blood and scraps of flesh dirtied her claws.

  Some of the attackers had been human. They would find that those battle-scars did not heal. They would find that those claw-marks festered deep and drew death into the flesh. Alice found herself chanting quietly in Naskeag, setting the winds to smell for that flesh and blood, setting the waters to deny them cleansing, setting the earth to search them out and track them and drag them under to a coward's grave.

  Alice rocked back on her heels. "Pratts. The damn fools dared!" But it must have been that Peruvian. Tom Pratt would know better. His family had lived here long enough to know what it meant to attack the House. She'd teased Ben about it, banter within the family, but everyone in Stonefort knew. Attacking the House was a messy form of suicide. She'd killed two men a few nights back, reinforcing that lesson.

  Alice reached out to Dixie again, gently. She laid her hand on the cat's head, smoothed the forehead fur, scritched behind the ears, and then sighed. She hated doing this. Dixie licked her hand again, gently, as if the cat asked her to do what she must do. Alice moved her hand to feel a heart beating fast under her palm, laboring, weakening. She closed her eyes and harmonized that pulse with her own, two beats to one.

  Polarity, she thought. My hand is cold. Warmth flows from one body to another. If you make your hand hot, you are giving life. If you make your hand cold, you are drawing it away. The gifts of life and death are two faces of the same coin. My hand is cold.

  Warmth flowed into her hand and up her arm. Dixie lay still, eyes open but unseeing.

  "Farewell, pirate queen," she whispered. "May the sun of the summer lands warm your fur."

  Alice sat quietly, letting the shape of the cat dissolve into a blur of tears. She heard Caroline closing the old front door, the hinges groaning with unaccustomed use. Front doors are used only for weddings and funerals. The House would have tried to jam the frame, but there was a limit to what it could do if its guardians failed.

  The latch clicked. The bar thumped back into place. Locking the barn door behind the horse-thieves. The defenses were designed to keep enemies out, not in. That damned golem had opened it from the inside.

  Caroline returned, radiating grief. So young to find out that witching can be a war instead of a game.

  There was a thing Alice had to do. Best get it over. "Remember what we are. We protect the spring. We protect the House that guards the spring. We protect any person who is granted refuge in the House. Those are our duties. Not a damn thing in there about rescuing a dimwit aunt who believed her heart instead of her eyes. I screwed up. You were the second line of defense. You failed your duties. You failed those children."

  She watched each word lash across Caroline's face like a whip. Tears streaked the poor child's face, but a lesson earned through pain would likely be remembered. Steel was born from iron only through fire.

  Alice dropped her gaze to the limp pile of fur on the floor. Chewing out Caroline didn't really make her feel any better. The poor girl hadn't let that thing past the door. No way around it, that was the mistake that had cost Dixie the last of her nine lives. So much for the myth of the all-knowing, all-seeing Haskell Witch.

  She gathered Dixie's body into her arms, caressing the still-warm ears. She staggered to her feet. Her head spun, and she blinked three times before the room stopped moving.

  "Okay. Now we go and get those girls back."

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Kate eased her truck ahead in the line, squinting into the low morning sun. Damned Detroit refugee from a scrap-heap wanted either to stall or chew on the virginal white ass of that yuppie Miata in front of her. Either way, she'd jam up the works. Fifteen cars and two trucks still waited to roll aboard the ferry — a normal morning load for the island loop in June.

  Compare that to, say, January, when they might cancel the run for three days straight because nobody wanted to play dodge-'em cars with the sea ice and the storms. Maine in summer and winter were two different worlds. The islands used to have a thriving year-round population. In the last decade or so, they'd turned into ghost towns from October to May.

  She stared ahead at the Governor Chamberlain, wrinkling her nose at the squat, rust-streaked black hull and dirty white superstructure. Just looking at the damned boat made her seasick. However, a friend of Larry Beech owned a summer place out on Ayers Island. That was how she got most of her work, "friend of a friend" referrals, and she couldn't afford to break that chain. It kept her fed.

  If the damn fool wanted to pay her fifty bucks an hour to puke her guts out, Kate was game. It was a time-and-materials job, charge from the minute she stepped out of her door until she got home again — she couldn't argue with that. Besides, she could stand to lose a few pounds.

  She'd left Jeffy Boy behind for this job, said she didn't need him. True enough, as far as it went. But she didn't want to find his body sprawled under a ladder, or floating face-down in the tide like Maria Morgan. Kate was sure someone had been following her around, and she didn't think it was one of Bernie's friends.

  Speaking of cops . . . she reached under the truck's dash and pulled the microphone from its bracket. "Five-seven-seven to Sunrise dispatch."

  Static answered her. The line inched forward another car length, and she tried again. Maybe she'd been hidden in a radio shadow. "Five-seven-seven to Sunrise dispatch."

  "Sunrise. Go ahead, five-seven-seven."

  Webber's voice rasped, still on the fringe of radio coverage. He was filling in at dispatch after totaling his cruiser. Nice guy, but he shouldn't have been going that fast on the Beaver Cove Road.

&nb
sp; Well, he'd have another month to meditate on his sins before the cast came off. The tree had come out of their meeting in much better shape. She keyed her mike again. "I'll be ten seven on the Chamberlain to Ayers Island. Out of service until Tuesday's evening run gets in. Five-seven-seven out."

  "Roger, five-seven-seven. I log you off-duty on Ayers Island until next Tuesday. I'll have five-one-eight swing through town a few times to show the flag."

  Kate left the radio on, keeping track of the slow flow of traffic reports and gossip of a county that stretched over a hundred miles from end to end and only mustered about twenty thousand people. She was next on the ramp, rolling down past the high tide line and across the metal grating. As soon as her tires touched the ferry's deck, she could feel the slow heave of the Chamberlain and her inner ear started to send alarms straight to her belly. She gritted her teeth, parked the truck, and set the brake. As always, switching the ignition off was a gamble. She did have a winch on the front if she couldn't move the beast any other way.

  She climbed down from the cab and tried to ignore the growing rebellion in her stomach. Floors shouldn't move, dammit. She was like that Greek myth guy Alice had told her about — she drew strength from touching the earth. Get her out on water or up in the air and she turned to jelly.

  Not that the sea was rough, or anything. Two- to four-foot swells — that was damn near calm. But that still left her walking on a live thing, a dragon's chest breathing in and out six times a minute. And then there were the swirls of oily diesel smoke from the idling engines, and the throb of those engines through her feet, and the dead-fish smell of the rockweed at low tide . . . . Kate swallowed.

  Ten miles. That's all she had to survive. Ten miles, plus loading and unloading time at each end, and then she could stand on solid ground again and have a horizon that stayed where God put it. That wasn't too much to ask, was it? She scuffed at a rust blister on the deck, thinking that maybe if she sat down and stared at something that didn't move, she could fool her inner ear into thinking the world stood still.

  Kate tried to think of something, anything, besides the slow rise and fall of the horizon. Cop work, carpentry, the bare-stone economics of Sunrise poverty that was like being nibbled to death by ducks. Alice, and the way she tied in with all of the above. Work on the old Haskell House, with that strange sense of a cat purring warm under Kate's hands as she maintained the ancient wood and stone. A woman could get to like that kind of feeling. It made her think she was important.

  Cop work and Alice. Right now, those two didn't go together. Kate felt an odd dislocation there, the same sort of out-of-body experience she'd had in the hospital after the accident, when Jackie was born. She'd spent a week perched up on a shelf beside the television set, stoned out of her head. Watched doctors and nurses parade past that body down there on the hospital bed. Watched Lew appear each morning hollow-eyed and stubbled and hung-over, watched him vanish a couple of times an hour once the bars were open to return looser and looser until he staggered out the door each evening drunk enough to be a fire hazard.

  Watched Alice sit next to the bed every minute Lew wasn't there, humming or singing quietly, holding a limp hand with an IV in the forearm feeding a body with nobody home. If Alice hadn't been there waiting so damn patiently, Kate never would have bothered to come down. Sometimes she thought it was the music that called her back.

  Now she had the same feeling, multiplied by the miles between the ferry terminal and the Haskell House. She was here, watching herself walk up to the door there. "Along came a man with a warrant in his hand . . ." Sooner or later, DHS was going to hear about the Morgan girls. Kate hoped to be in another state when that happened. Even on a ship would be better.

  The ferry gate clanged shut and locked with a thump, cutting off her escape. Well, there were two cars between her truck and the ramp, anyway, so she'd been trapped since before she shut off the ignition. Kate swallowed. Now the damned boat would actually start moving.

  She pulled out her tobacco and started rolling a smoke. Maybe that would help calm her stomach. A sailor walked past, moving from the gate to the engine room hatch, noticed her makings, and pointed to stenciled letters on the side of the deckhouse. "No Smoking." Kate swore under her breath and tossed the completed cigarette over the rail. Now they'd book her for discharge of hazardous materials into navigable waters.

  Cop work and Alice. If Kate had to choose between them, which way would the old frog hop? Sometimes it wore thin, that bit about walking up to a car with your ticket book in your hand and wondering if this one was the dope runner with a MAC-10 tucked between his knees. Wondering if this was the time she picked up one of Stonefort's five resident blacks by the scruff of his neck and pitched him out of a bar that he didn't want to leave at closing time, only to have him land in the lap of a NAACP lawyer.

  Hell, she was getting tired of those three-AM calls because some maiden aunt didn't like her neighbor's cat singing in the petunias. Kate was getting too old for that shit. Alice sure rated higher on the list than Sylvia Carter complaining about Rose Leavitt's cat.

  But mainly it was walking the edge every minute she was on duty. A week or two back, some brown-skin stranger had twitched his hand under his coat and her own hand had jerked to her belt. The man had hatred and fear in his eyes, and carried himself like a killer. That was why she'd asked him for ID, not because of the color of his skin. Turned out he was just pulling out his wallet like a nice resident alien, but if she'd been carrying, she could have shot him dead.

  She'd seen a flash of herself in court on a murder charge, just like those New York cops. He'd moved like he was going for a gun. Then she'd reacted to intent and instinct, rather than rational evidence. Left her with the shakes for three days. Maybe it was time to take Alice up on her offer.

  The ferry eased back from its slip, adding a rolling motion to the rise and fall of the sea. Her stomach surged, out of phase, and she started looking for the john. Head, she guessed she should call it, on board an effing ship. Fifty bucks an hour for puking didn't look quite so attractive, close up.

  Alice had said that the House could be a full time job, for a year at least. Kate had the touch, was better tuned to the House than any of the Witches in the last century. There was stuff that had been put off for generations. There were changes that the House didn't like, stuff that should be torn out and restored to the old ways or at least done right.

  Kate had felt that in the pulse under her hands. Some machine-made cabinetwork that rubbed the wood's grain the wrong way, just like that cat comparison she kept making. Wires and pipes that should have run differently, aligning with the stars or the earth's magnetic field or something.

  Alice wouldn't call her crazy for thinking that way, going by feel. All buildings had a life of their own, a soul, at least some measure of integrity to keep the roof a working distance from the cellar. The Haskell House just had more than most.

  Not like this effing boat. If it had any soul, it was a damned mean one. Now they'd changed course and the motion was a bow-to-stern pitch with a corkscrew twist. A sailor would have called it gentle, barely noticeable. Kate's stomach had other words for it. She headed towards the side door of the deckhouse, side hatch probably it should be, the john would be in there. Her eyes blurred, and the kitchen counter of the House stood in front of her. It was still moving up and down and sideways, though.

  Alice blocked her way. Kate's brain was disconnected, and she just brushed the phantom to one side. Alice schmalice, what she needed was a porcelain bowl. Kate's knuckles found cold metal and her eyes focused well enough to read "Ladies" on a white name-plate against grease-streaked beige walls. She followed the arrow.

  The place stank, old disinfectant and other people's farts and the peculiar menstrual-blood whiff of women's toilets when they don't get cleaned often enough. Alice shouted something from behind her, but the meaning was lost in the surge of Kate's stomach. She banged a stall door open and bent over with seconds to spare
. Acid rushed up her nose and she lost sight in the sudden tears. Kate groped around for toilet paper. Her knuckles found a sharp edge instead. The new pain changed her focus and quieted her stomach.

  She wiped her eyes and then her nose, standing up and blinking. Damn good thing she had eaten breakfast. If she'd tried this on an empty stomach, she'd still be doubled up with the dry heaves. Now, if she could get some water down, she might have peace for five or ten minutes. Until the next round.

  Her knuckles dripped blood. Kate stared at them, dabbed at the blood with more toilet paper, and cussed the damned fool that had left rough edges on a boat, for gossakes. Bad design, bad workmanship. That kind of thing pissed her off.

  Whatever it was, it had left a gash about two inches long that skipped across three fingers, with ragged skin dangling at the end of each cut like a curl of wood turned up by a chisel. Something sharp, then, and sticking out. Maybe a screw, with a burred head. She turned back, fumbling at her belt for the Leatherman. File, screwdriver, pliers, even an impromptu hammer — no reason to leave that ambush waiting for a fresh victim.

  Red-hot pain bashed her above the left ear. She fell to her knees, blinking against blinding tears. Forgot to duck again, dammit! Forty years old, you'd think you'd have learned how far your effing head was from the effing floor!

  She couldn't see. Her fingers explored the back of her head, expecting to find the familiar stickiness of blood or at least a swelling lump. The scalp wasn't even tender. Something burned inside her skull. Burst blood vessel? Stroke? No, she could still move everything.

  The wound throbbed on her hand, pumped by her racing heartbeat. Bandages. She had the first-aid kit in her truck, stuff you'd need if you put a nail through your foot or caught sawdust in your eyes. Even some serious pain pills Alice had conjured out of the hospital when Kate strained her back, prescription stuff.