Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  Gary passed the track for a metal gate, heard rather than seen. He rose to the surface again, not for breath but to check for light or motion before he passed into the trap. The tunnel remained as black as night, with only the rise and fall of the swells following him in from the sea.

  A cave opened out around him. He followed the taste of oil and gasoline to a hull in the water, long and low and sleek, bitter with the reek of anti-fouling paint. He skirted its poison and slipped in between the boat and the floating dock. Whatever alarm system they had, it wouldn't be able to monitor that shifting space.

  He thought himself back into human form, ignoring the fire of molding his bones and flesh. The chill of the dark water bit him, and he had to move fast or change again. He found a ladder on the side of the float, and hooked one arm around it. His fingers turned clumsy, fumbling the straps of his pack, pulling out the IR goggles, flipping the power on, fitting them over his eyes. He slipped and caught them just short of the water. His teeth started to chatter.

  The glasses showed him dying heat from the stern of the boat — it had been run this morning, but it didn't look like very long. Perhaps just maintenance — run it every day, then it would be ready and reliable if you really needed it. Gary filed that memory away, just in case. The craft looked like it would be a lot faster than Maria.

  Light fixtures also glowed faintly green from remembered heat, and a door at the top of the ramp showed pale outlines where warm air leaked around the frame. He couldn't see any cameras, filtered lights bathing the cave in IR, or any suspicious boxes giving off electronic warmth. The float surged gently in the water, rising and falling with swells from the bay, and the boat thumped heavily against the bumpers. They couldn't have any kind of weight or motion sensors on this thing. He slithered up the ladder and lay flat on the decking.

  He fumbled with the pack, pulling out the Kevlar vest, covering it with heavy Polartec jacket and pants, staying as low as possible. He added thin gloves and neoprene booties. Warmth started to overcome the chill of the water. He sniffed, but the sea tang and musty stone told him nothing. Human noses were a waste of space, even if some of them looked cute.

 

 

  She was looking through his eyes, hearing through his ears. At least this time, somebody would know for sure what happened to him.

  Crawling up the ramp, he ignored the fuzzy polyester snagging on rough planking. Get out of this alive, with Dad and the girls, a few hundred bucks for clothing will be cheap. He reached up and tested the doorknob. Locked. Nobody ever said it would be easy. His fingers traced the locksets — two, both a key-in-knob and a deadbolt. Finks. But the door fit loosely, and swung out towards him. If he could slip the knob lockset, he could work on the deadbolt separately.

  He pulled a thin strip of plastic out of one pocket — people joked about credit cards that opened any door, but that was really all you needed for some of them. The lock popped with a touch, and the door jerked towards him. Dim light flowed out from the hall beyond, followed by warm air. He ducked back, expecting to face a gun muzzle. He pulled the IR goggles off, to clear his vision.

  The hall lay empty. They hadn't thrown the deadbolt.

  He heard a chair scrape across rough flooring. Muttered words followed, and footsteps. The voice came clearer. "¡Puerta maldita! ¡Su madre esta puta!"

 

 

  A shadow loomed. Gary drew his legs under him, crouching like a coiled spring. A hand reached out for the knob and he grabbed the wrist, flowing up along it and pulling the arm. A squat man followed, brown Latino face startled and then setting into hard eagerness. Things happened out of muscle memory — Gary spinning away from the other hand, keeping his wrist hold, turning behind the man, bones cracking, hands to chin and back of head, twisting, following his opponent down to the floor.

  He froze, fist just short of the man's temple. He'd done that move a hundred times before in the dojo. They always stopped at this point, just before the killing blow. The man didn't move. His head looked back over his left shoulder, farther than a head ought to turn. His eyes were open, startled, unblinking. Gary felt his stomach lurch. He remembered those crunching sounds, first the arm and then the neck. He'd just killed a man.

  Totally by reflex, he'd just killed a man. His stomach clenched again.

 

  Caroline's voice grabbed his thoughts. Livid scratches crossed the man's cheek, barely missing one eye. The wrist he'd grabbed showed more scratches, deep ones, infected and oozing pus. The other hand was bandaged. He peeled off the tape and gauze, revealing ragged gouges that looked like the aftermath of a chainsaw.

 

  Gary's brain fizzled and sputtered. He'd done that move a hundred times. He'd never hurt any of his partners. The man was dead. It had taken a second, maybe two, for Gary to kill him.

 

  Now he was seeing through her eyes, her memory, the open door of the Haskell house and a black-and-white cat crawling across the floor, back broken, with flesh and blood snagged in her claws. He felt Caroline's rage and horror, and her fierce joy at the dead face under his hands. She was the Haskell legend in flesh and blood — the best friends and worst enemies you could imagine.

  He clenched his jaw against the bile in his stomach. Some men deserved to die. Anyone who threatened Ellen or Mouse sure landed on that list.

 

  He searched the man, coming up with a heavy gun and a ring full of keys. He tossed the gun into the pool.

 

  <"Mice at a cat show.">

 

  He sensed something behind her thoughts, one of those half-smiles that implied she hadn't been completely declawed. Well, he couldn't do a damn thing about it now. He pulled the corpse out into the shadows and left it as a doorstop, blocking the door open for his sister.

 

 

  He peeked around the doorframe, checking for further guards. The corridor lay empty and dim, doors to either side exactly as the Haskell Air Force had mapped it out. Stronger light flowed out of an opening on the right hand side, just where the bats had heard the hum of electronics. Ben would flat-out drool at the thought of having those winged mice working for the Morgans.

  A security camera sat overhead on the far wall, focused on the door. Gary made a face at it and ducked into the nearest doorway. Move fast enough, odds were nobody would notice him.

  The room was the security post, two chairs and banks of switches under indicator lights and monitors. Both chairs were empty. Gary took a deep breath and let it out. He started scanning the boards, building a map of switches and trying to fit them into the picture the bats had brought home. The system was the same make and model as the Morgans used, proving that the Pratts were no dummies. Ben had said some rude things about the "second best."

  Still, it made Gary's job a lot easier. His hand flicked out and killed the video feed from the security room, then puzzled through the loop switching. That switch, there, selects the sequence. Bingo! They don't monitor all the cameras all the time! He cut the dead camera out of the loop, substituting an outside view. With a little luck, nobody would ask embarrassing questions.

  His father's face flickered across the screen, hollow-eyed and bruised. Gary noted the camera number in the lower corner of the display: fifteen. He followed the sequence straight through. Ellen and Peggy never showed. Some of the outdoor displays looked funny, stuff that would h
ave bothered the hell out of him if it were his own house he was guarding. Maybe Ron Pelletier was doing his bit for God and country. He flipped Dad's camera out, and three random others, adding more outside views. Someone else added a couple more — the other control center agreed with him.

  A hand-lettered note caught his eye, over a bank of switches and green lights. "Always turn off photocells before turning on lights." Double Bingo!

  He followed the line of switches and their engraved plastic tags — Ramp 1, Dock 1, Dock 2, Catwalk 1, 2, 3, Tunnel 1, 2, 3 up to 8. The label over them said "Photocells."

  Basic engineering: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

  The tunnel security was photocells. Anyone coming in would need a light. Anyone going out would need a light. Waves didn't affect that, wind didn't affect that, tides didn't affect that, ice didn't affect that. Simple frigging photocells.

  He switched them off. He reached over and switched on the lights. The board stayed green.

 

 

  Sisters.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Alice walked the misted path, wet gravel squeaking under her feet. This forest smells like Wagner, she thought. Götterdämmerung. The world ends in fire, igniting even the house of the gods. Everybody dies.

  But I'm getting ahead of myself. First I've got to sneak by Fafnir over there, and loot his treasure. Somebody must have warned the Pratts about impending visitors. This was the third sentry she'd seen, all armed. She drew her Tarnhelm over her head and vanished.

  Vanishing wasn't hard. You're in bushes and trees, you think like a bush or tree. It was the chameleon act, changing colors to match your background. Illusions were one of the first lessons in a Witch's apprenticeship. They could save your ass. The beaded regalia made it even easier, with its swirling hypnotic figures starting out as woodland camouflage and refusing to hold still so you could focus on them. Alice hummed to herself, the clarinet statement of the theme from "Forest Murmurs", building her deception.

  Nobody here but a bunch of birds and trees.

  Everyone has magic. Everyone's magic works in different ways. Mine is healing, bringing the power of the Woman's spring to modern medicine. Kate is wood and stone wanting to please her and the single-minded logic of gravity. Caroline is still finding hers, but it looks like it's going to be water. Bright enough to hurt your eyes, impulsive as hell, always changing. You block her one way, before you turn your back she's broken out in another. I don't know whether that's a blessing or a curse.

  Maybe it's the Morgan blood in her. Nobody is ever going to get a handhold on that girl.

  Jackie? Jackie's is ice, born of cold and pain and sorrow, dead before she ever was alive. She's never loved anything but herself.

  Alice concentrated on the garden, on the forest, on becoming one with it and invisible. Generations of work had transformed these spruce and stones, blueberry and rhodora and bracken, into a watercolor Japanese screen in the fog. It radiated peace.

  The Pratts weren't total monsters. Their gardens reminded her of that, with such beauty and serenity. Her war was with the Peruvian brujo.

  Pratts had lived on this land for centuries, setting their roots into the stone just as deep as the spruces, firs, and pines that ringed their home. They lived the way most of Stonefort lived, obeying those laws that they damn well pleased and ignoring the ones that got in their way. Somebody wants to buy drugs? That's his funeral. Nobody forced him. What's the relative difference between the hazards of pot and alcohol?

  The Morgans, the Pelletiers, the Haskells: All lived the same way, hard people in a hard land. Alice had broken more laws than she could count. Kate was another example, a cop who roughed up roughnecks, did things that would leave the ACLU foaming at the mouth. Sunrise County tended to raise up that breed. Survival of the fittest. Sometimes surviving required you to be damned nasty.

  She wouldn't be walking this path if she only faced Tom Pratt. Tom she knew. Tom knew her. Tom wouldn't have held Daniel Morgan locked in the cellar for weeks, drowned Maria, stolen Ellen and Peggy from the Witch's House, drained the life from three innocent old people. But Tom had screwed up royally when he hooked up with that brujo. Now he and his family were going to pay the price. Because of that shadowy figure in the midnight blue Suburban.

  A man slipped through the fog to her right, sensed rather than seen, a form in gray wearing a gray ski mask. So it began. She didn't know what "Rules of Engagement" Ron Pelletier had set. She didn't want to know. There were forms for this kind of thing, a Code Duello much like the deadly etiquette that had governed the pistols in her satchel. Whatever it was, it wouldn't be drive-by shootings and Colombian Cowboys with car bombs. Those things were so crude.

  She followed the path, a ghost in the fog under dripping trees. A man lay on the ground by the side of the gravel, face down, wrists and ankles bound with duct-tape and a cloth bag over his head. She touched his neck to verify that he was still alive. Muffled sounds told her that more tape gagged his mouth. "Rules of Engagement."

  Her own rules were somewhat different. Maine hadn't had the death penalty in over a hundred years, but she had an enemy who deserved to die. She intended to hand down and execute that sentence.

  A shout cut through the fog, muffled, followed by the silence of listening stone. The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley. Was the fog helping or hindering her aims? It hid her, and the attackers, and the sentries, and the security cameras, all from each other. She hummed quietly under her breath, working her way through the forest towards the side entrance of the Pratts' house. She felt the rock pool there, drawing her — a small pool, spring-fed, with its moss and fern border and the blue flag iris edging into cattails.

  Her enemy knew the power of that spring. An attack on the house would draw him there.

  *~*~*

  Kate doubled over, racked by dry heaves, tears squeezed from her eyes and dripping. She knelt down, careful of her nonexistent balance, and reached over the side for a handful of salt water to rinse her mouth and face. The icy seawater felt like a slap, clearing her thoughts as it stung her eyes.

  She stood, weak-kneed and fuzzy-headed, swaying with the surge and fall of the boat, and tried to figure out how to get off the damned thing. She faced the Pratts' place; she knew that by the Victorian gazebo weathered gray out on a point of the cliff. She remembered that it needed shingling, with the old cedar shakes curled and split by a generation of sun and salt air. Every building in the compound needed shingling, for that matter.

  But that gazebo was about fifty feet above her. She'd never looked at the place from the sea before. The cliffs were rough, they were climbable, seamed by wind and ice and the battering of the sea. She'd done worse and had no fear of heights. But they dropped straight down into the tide without any trace of a landing. She'd worked on places like this before. Tony Peterson's fifteen-bedroom summer "cottage" had a floating dock at the base of the cliff and a stairway bolted into the rock that led down to it.

  She'd expected something similar. All the rich shore properties had something on the water. At worst, she'd figured on running aground on a cobble beach because they hadn't set the dock out yet for the summer. In spite of their reputation, though, the Pratts apparently didn't go in for boating. The only other high-rent place she knew without some kind of dock was Morgan's Castle. That had been designed as a fort.

  Thinking along those lines, the gazebo was a lookout post. She couldn't tell if it was manned or not, but it didn't look quite so charming now. Pratts and Morgans — cop gossip called them two sides of the same coin, the last un-hung pirates of the Spanish Main. Hell, the Morgans still had loaded cannon up on that pile of rock they called home. She remembered the flash and boom of them on Fourth of July nights, Stonefort's down-home form of fireworks.

  Pirates? Well, she might as well hoist the Skull and Crossbones on Keith Bauer's Boston Whaler. She'd stolen i
t fair and square. Maybe she could join the club.

  So why the hell was she getting in between them?

  Alice.

  Kate didn't need a mirror now. She saw Alice on a path somewhere up above, saw her over the sights of a pistol, falling, saw flames blooming through the fog. The magic had laid claim to Kate's mind, as if trying to lock its ownership down now that it had been allowed past the gates.

  Alice had always complained about Kate's approach to problems, just plowing right straight ahead. Well, that might work here. She could ram the boat into the rock wall in front of her and jump for a handhold in that long split, follow it clear up to the crest. But that would sink the boat. A seaman could probably figure out a better way.

  Her belly reminded her that she wasn't a seaman. She dipped another handful of saltwater and rinsed her mouth and face. She blinked tears from her eyes and stared at the problem again.

  How could she get ashore without wrecking the boat? If she could give the damned seasick sea serpent back, undamaged, she might not go to jail.

  What would a rigger do? Those guys were the geniuses of construction, figuring out how to move huge turbines, lift houses onto new foundations without cracking the crystal in the china cabinets, stretch the reach of cranes across land that wouldn't hold man or machine. She'd watched one crew set up a slow pendulum across marshland, dropping load after load of lumber and structural steel and concrete for a house twenty feet beyond the reach of the boom, the crane operator running his winch with a feather touch to just kiss the landing at the end.

  She blinked as the image changed, showed broad gray water instead of marsh.

  She could do that. Set the anchor. Swing the boat out from shore on the anchor line. Power back in. Cut the motor and throw the wheel over. Time it right and the boat would just barely scrape the wall broadside before swinging back out in the current. Without power, it wouldn't hit the rocks again.