Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  Kate fumbled for the door, crashing into the sinks and then working along the edge until she found a latch. She still couldn't see. Nothing but sparks blazing in darkness across her eyes. What the fuck was wrong with her head?

  She mapped the corridor from memory, left and then feel for the car-deck hatch on her right. How the hell was she going to puzzle her way back to the truck if she couldn't see?

  "Can I help you, Ma'am?"

  Must be one of the sailors, confronted with a crazy woman. Nobody else would be that polite.

  "Got to get back to my truck."

  "You're hurt. You're bleeding. We've got a first-aid kit on the bridge, and a certified EMT. Just calm down, everything will be okay."

  Yeah, humor the stupid woman. She's hysterical. Kate could just about tell light from dark, tell which end was up. She didn't want to go to the bridge. Her truck felt safe. She knew where she stood with that goddamn pile of junk.

  "Got my own stuff. Just let me get back to my truck." Her head hurt.

  She felt a tug on her arm. "Just this way, ma'am. I'll get the mate to clean up that hand and bandage it. Then you can lie down. You look like you're going into shock."

  He was pulling her away from the car deck and the safety of her truck. The Sovereign State of Maine demanded that she get help. Alice had taught her the magic words for that one.

  "I refuse medical care. Got it? I refuse medical care. Help me to my truck." She had to fight to make the words come out straight. They tried to jam up together and fall down on her tongue. Maybe it was a stroke, after all.

  She could feel him shaking his head in exasperation. "You're the green Dodge stake-bed, right?" The pull changed direction, turned towards safety. God, her head hurt.

  Pain shot red streaks into the darkness around her. She stumbled, feeling a numbness spreading backwards from her fingers and toes. Then she found rough wood under her hand, and she shrugged the crewman's grip off her arm.

  "Leave me be."

  "If you need help, just holler. We'll be watching out for you."

  Damned pest. She ignored him, feeling her way across the back of her truck bed and up the passenger side. The pain eased a little as she moved forward. She still couldn't see, but she didn't need to. Door handle, there. Passenger seat. Reach under, fumble for the flat metal case, touch-fiddle the latches. Pill bottle and water jug.

  Instead of the pill bottle, her hand found something soft, with an odd rough-smooth surface, both stiff and pliable. Her fingers closed around it and she felt warmth there. The pain and numbness eased. She could see again, sort of remote through a periscope with blurry water draining off the lens. She was holding a small dark bag.

  Her sight cleared. The bag was a deerskin poke the size of her fist, ancient, familiar. Beadwork covered it until the skin showed only at the mouth and the drawstring tunnels. Even through tears of pain, she marveled at the skill of those patient fingers — swirling patterns flowed through the colored beads, the kind of interlocking figures she'd seen in Celtic art, made up of pure transparent colors in beads as small as pinheads, bound by invisible stitching. The work wasn't Celtic, though — she knew what it was and where she'd seen it last.

  Naskeag. At least a century old. More likely two or three. Aunt Jean showed it to us, must have been thirty years ago.

  TV Indians would call it a medicine pouch. Kate had no idea what name the Naskeags would use. She didn't open it, didn't wonder what might be inside. So that was why the truck had seemed like the only safe place in the world. She knew who had prepared the bag, chanted over it, tucked it under the seat. The warmth was love.

  She held the bag against her head and felt the throbbing pain ease into the background. She felt fingers brush her forehead. Alice. But the cooling touch brought memory as well as soothing, and Kate cringed. She saw Antonio, and she saw herself snipping a lock of hair from her own head. "The finest gold ever spun," he'd said, and his tongue wove a spell that made her swallow the blatant flattery.

  Hair is hair, she'd thought. It doesn't cost a cent. It grows back. I'm not giving him my soul, or even my body. Where's the harm?

  She twisted around to look at the side mirror, and shook her head. Damn fool. Her fingers traced the gap above her left ear, where the pain had centered. Antonio was a drug-lord and a killer. The medicine bag told her that Bernie had been right. It told her Antonio and Alice were blood enemies.

  The harm? She'd never tried to learn the things that Alice did. Kate hadn't wanted to know. All the weird stuff scared her.

  That had stood between them ever since Aunt Jean had chosen Alice. Kate didn't want to fear her friend, or be afraid for her. It was that white-bearded patriarch again, the God of Wrath, hiding in Kate's childhood. "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." But if witchcraft didn't exist, then Alice was safe. Kate didn't dare believe in witches.

  Some of the principles had rubbed off, though, in the years they'd known each other. Kate knew what she had done. She'd given Antonio a key to Alice, a key to the House. She wasn't sure which one was worse.

  Kate kissed the small poke, spread the drawstrings, and hung her protection around her neck. It slid down inside her shirt and nestled between her breasts. Then she searched out antiseptic and gauze, and bandaged her hand. Life goes on. It went on the only way she knew, straight ahead. No matter how hard it is, just do the next thing, and the next. God knows, Alice had told her often enough that she was too bull-headed to go around a problem.

  Her stomach twisted again, gently, just a preliminary test.

  Life goes on, without Alice. She'll never forgive me. The House will never forgive me. I'm a threat to both of them.

  Now she had three reasons to stay away from Alice. That damnfool phone message and the lesbian thing. The Morgan girls. Antonio.

  What I tell you three times is true.

  She curled up on the passenger seat of her truck, ignoring her stomach, ignoring her hand, ignoring the tears tracking her face. The medicine bag tried to calm her, but she ignored that, too.

  The ferry hooted, three deep mournful blasts. They were coming up on Ayers Island. She hadn't puked again.

  Life is made of small victories. Don't think about the large defeats.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Ellen and Peggy needed him.

  Gary typed in another set of commands, hit "Enter," and watched the bank of monitors out of the corner of his eye. They continued to cycle randomly through views of the house and grounds, showing what passed for normalcy these days around the old termite mound Quincy Morgan had built in 1820 and a dozen generations had added to and remodeled in the passing years.

  He stood up and stretched, easing the kinks out of his back. That had taken much too long, with nervous sweat under his arms, and he still wondered whether Ben had followed every move. Gary knew about stealth programs that fed keystrokes to a remote computer. His father-uncle was a sly old dog, just the kind of man to set a watch on the watchers.

  The security display ran through its routine, including a view of the central control console. Gary saw himself still sitting at the keyboard, dutifully studying the system specs. He smiled to himself in Real Mode. Then he sobered and shook his head. An hour wasted, when he should have been worming his way into the Pratts' security rather than his own.

  That was the problem with teaching people to hack systems. Sometimes they learned more than you wanted them to. But had Ben known that Gary knew that Ben knew that Gary knew . . . ?

  Yeah. That one's the infamous Filly-Loo bird, one of the strangest creatures in the Maine woods. Has a unique way of escaping hunters — when something scares it out of the spruce thicket, it flies in an ever-decreasing spiral until it disappears up its own ass.

  Yeah, again. But computers are a kid's world. Remember the Larson cartoon. Ben is an old dog, and that system is a new trick.

  And somebody had kidnapped Peggy, threatened her and Ellen. This sure as hell qualified as a case where the end justified the means.
>
  Anyway, Gary thought he'd disarmed the suicide watch. He couldn't think of anything more appropriate to call it. Ben had turned obsessive since hauling his nephew-son out of the Dragon's Pool, popping out of the woodwork any time Gary had come within smelling range of a body of water larger than a birdbath. At least the old man hadn't forced Gary to wear one of those electronic bracelets the cops used for "house arrest."

  So now certain selected monitor cameras were feeding a loop into the system. Question was, what other tricks did Ben have up his sleeve. That little bit about the entrance Caroline had used — "Never show 'em all your cards." There must be plenty of other stuff Ben wasn't talking about.

  Other stuff besides the obvious. Ellen and Peggy were gone. Somebody had stolen them from under Aunt Alice's thumb. That should have been impossible. There was worse. Ben hadn't said what, but Gary had learned to read that poker face a little better with the constant watching of the past few days. Gary had seen Ben's face when he took the call. Shock, horror, rage — something beyond simple kidnapping. Daniel — Dad — must have warned Ben about something, before breaking contact with the Dragon. Gary had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  Ben was hatching some kind of a plan, something involving the witches and Ron Pelletier and high explosives. Dangerous mix. Ben always had some kind of plan. Problem was, this one didn't involve Gary.

  But Gary had three sisters now. And the beginnings of a plan of his own, a way he might sneak Caroline inside that cave Dad found under the Pratt's compound. Caroline, with her mix of Haskell and Morgan skills. Caroline, who could be invisible until she became too solidly, dangerously there.

  Ben was funny. It was obvious — the old man kept tiptoeing around sex and incest. He thought Gary had fallen in love with Caroline. It wasn't that at all. Sure, she radiated "sex" on all wavelengths. From what he remembered, she hadn't been like that in high school. Maybe it was going off to college and living on her own, or the power she'd learned from Aunt Alice. Or maybe that younger Gary hadn't been tuned to the right frequency. Wasn't old enough to decode the message.

  It's hitting Ben harder than it is me, he thought. The old man is tripping over his own dick. You can almost see him whacking himself up side of the head, reminding himself that she's his daughter. Off-limits.

  But Gary saw her more as an Amazon princess, a tough, dangerous, competent woman who happened to be good-looking as hell. Sex didn't enter the picture — she scared him too much. If he made a pass at her, she'd whack him over the head with that broadsword, or turn him into a frog. Instead, she was an instant ally, more comforting at his back than in front of him.

  And Ellen and Peggy needed him. Needed both him and Caroline, and the help only a team with two very special sets of skills could provide.

  Silence still ruled the stone tower, no roars of alarm or rage. Gary eased the heavy door back, expecting to find Ben waiting in the shadows of the hall, climbing the stone stairs, blocking the narrow, twisty tunnel. He slunk through the darkness, waiting for a hand to grab him by the collar as he slipped out of the crypt and into the green damp drizzle of the family burying ground. He'd promised Ben he wouldn't dive into the Dragon's Pool. Into. That was the promise.

  Gary hated turning shyster, weaseling out of a contract with word-tricks, but he had to. Something horrible was happening to Ellen and Peggy, and Ben seemed to chewing nails over a plan to stop it. Gary might be able to help. Might, if he could satisfy the Dragon.

  He walked a zigzag pattern through the drizzle, through the coverage of certain cameras, remembering how the overlapping views were veiled by the mist. June meant rain in Stonefort, the month that fed the grass for July hay, the month of fog as moist spring air rolled up from the south and met the icy ocean of winter. This year had been drier and sunnier than usual. Now the averages were averaging out.

  Shadows formed and dissolved around Gary, wraiths, gravestones and bushes and salt-stunted spruces, none of them turning into Ben. The bay appeared beneath Gary's feet, slow and gray under low clouds that grazed the cliff-top, swells rising and falling lazily against the rocks because there was no wind to drive them, gunmetal water vanishing into fog within yards in every direction.

  He could barely make out the mooring from here. It bobbed with the swells, orange against gray, the home buoy that Dad used in certain winds and tides when he felt the boat would be safe without the guarding arms of Stonefort's inner harbor. Gary stared at the buoy and thought about the concrete anchor cube with its iron ring, set forty feet deep under the tide. That had been the target of a dare when he was thirteen and testing himself to prove his swelling manhood — dive to the mooring, down through the dark icy water of the bay, free-diving without mask or flippers or wet suit.

  He'd followed the rockweed down the mooring chain, deeper and deeper as his ears popped with the pressure and his lips turned numb with cold. He'd touched the slimy concrete, grabbed the rust-crusted ring, torn a frond of kelp from its holdfast, and risen back from darkness into light. Into warmth, into air for his aching lungs. He looked back, now, and saw the risk as training for his heritage.

  He turned and climbed down the cliff, toes searching out the remembered holds, hands shifting from nub to nub in a pattern he'd thought was natural rock. The journals said otherwise, said there were a dozen such routes up and down the cliff, ways to escape or approach the tower if an enemy held the land-side ground or had even taken the tower itself. His ancestors had known altogether too much about siege warfare.

  The steel-gray water chilled his eyes. That self-made dare had been a whim of an August noon, when the air and the bay were as warm as they ever got. Now the water was about five degrees above dead winter. But Ellen and Peggy needed him. He had to defy Ben.

  Not that Ben didn't care about the girls. It just seemed like they were abstractions to him. He guarded the son he knew, trading him for the nieces he'd never met, only seen in passing on the street, strangers seen by a stranger.

  They weren't real to him. He hadn't grown up with giggles in the dark and skinned knees from roller-blading and temper-tantrums over favorite toys. He hadn't shared the hug of triumph after that first secret bicycle solo guarded by the older brother because Mom thought little Mouse was too young to throw away the training wheels, hadn't felt tears soaking his shoulder after Ellie's soccer team lost that crucial game by a single penalty kick in overtime.

  Gary held those thoughts as he stripped off his shirt and laid it on the damp rocks at the base of the cliff. Piece by piece he added shoes, socks, tee shirt, until he stood shivering and clad only in goose-bumps in the mist that seemed to have turned to ice. It thickened around him, as if the sea and air conspired to guard him from Ben's eyes. Gary swallowed, dreading the touch of the water as cold and clammy as a drowned corpse.

  Ellen and Peggy were in danger.

  He crouched down and pulled the handcuffs from his jeans pocket, the practice cuffs that had been an early lesson in Locks and Picks 101, the introductory course. Like Houdini, Ben always had picks glued to his body in unlikely places, flesh-colored metal and plastic that stood a decent chance of passing a strip search. Gary hadn't yet reached that plateau of paranoia.

  On the other hand, it isn't paranoia if they actually have tapped your phone. He stared at the cold water. Might as well bring it out and admit it, he thought. I'm scared. I don't want to dive into that stuff. What was it Dad used to say, that an unprotected man could live for about fifteen minutes in the water around here? That your brain starts to flake out on you after less than five?

  He'd barely been able to move when he got back to shore, that other time. Surface temperature was one thing, but the deep waters changed little from winter to summer. His fingers and toes had been white and too stiff to hold on to the rocks. He'd finally hooked an elbow onto something and scraped his knees raw on the barnacles, crawling out of the water into August sunshine. He'd finally stopped shivering sometime that evening, huddled under a blanket in the setting sun.


  His ten-mile endurance swim had been in a nice warm lake, with a wetsuit on and the sun high overhead.

  I'm scared.

  He dove. He didn't feel the water when he hit. He felt the cold, instead, as if an icy hand snatched him and squeezed the air out of his lungs. Then he sputtered when the salt water burned the back of his nose, and he kicked upwards toward the light. Gary shook wet hair out of his eyes and looked around for the buoy. Thirty yards offshore, the orange plastic winked at him as it rose into sight on a swell and then disappeared again. He kicked and splashed towards it, arms and legs already awkward from the cold, the fingers of his left hand locking around the open chrome-steel cuffs.

  His fingers thumped plastic, barely felt through the numbness. Gary grabbed on with both hands, hauling his shoulders above the waves, and shook his head again. His brain was going numb along with his hands and feet. He had to dive, had to dive now while he still remembered what the hell he was doing.

  Practice took over. He gulped air, locked his throat, and plunged straight down. The mooring chain led him on, black and furry with weed, through gray water into shadow. He remembered the emerald glow the water had had that time before, under a clear blue sky, and briefly wished he could die in light rather than darkness. Today, the water was the fog above made liquid and menacing.

  Hand over hand, he worked his way downward. Without flippers, his feet were next to worthless. His fingers slipped on the chain, greased by the thick growth of weed and stiff with cold. Something tangled his left hand and he almost threw it away before he remembered the handcuffs. They were insurance. They meant he couldn't chicken out.

  Blackness closed in around him — he must be deeper than before, the mooring must have shifted. He swallowed against the pressure, popping his ears. That usually meant fifteen feet. He pulled the chain past his body, reeling in the bottom. His ears popped again. His hands slipped again, and he grabbed hard. He felt something grate into his flesh, like a cut without pain. Too numb, he thought. Probably mussels or barnacles. Wonder how deep that cut is.