Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  Her body-smell steamed up from the sweater underneath and Brian's nostrils flared. Doors clicked open in his brain, and he felt as if someone had picked him up and moved him across a chessboard into an entirely new game. He suddenly knew why Liam had been stalking her.

  Brian hung her coat on the radiator to dry and fumbled for a seat. His brain and his hormones tumbled over each other, racing along in overdrive as his mind followed tangled connections and his body responded to genes older than the human race.

  And it explained her apparent age. Twenty-eight was still nearly a child, for her kind . . . .

  A waitress wiggled her way towards them through the flashing strobes. A topless waitress, he noticed, wearing nothing but a pair of high heels and skin-tight purple Lycra pants that molded her legs and butt and showed no trace of a panty-line.

  "Get you anything?" The way she hung her painted breast just in front of Brian's nose, it looked like an open-ended offer. The joint was more than a bar . . . no cover charge for the show. They must make money the old-fashioned way.

  "Coffee, if you've got it."

  The waitress lifted an eyebrow. "Cost you as much as a drink. Four bucks."

  "Irish coffee," the girl said. "Two. Make that doubles on the whiskey."

  "Six bucks for the doubles."

  The girl handed over a twenty. "Make it three of them and keep the change."

  The waitress threaded her way back through the maze of empty tables. Brian's gaze dismissed her in its ceaseless prowl of the shadows: he wasn't all that interested in her or the dancer. This redheaded stranger, on the other hand . . . .

  And if she wasn't interested in him, she would still draw Liam's brothers, cousins, and nephews like moths to a pheromone trap. Did she realize it? Could he use her again . . . ?

  The sound system was too loud for talk. He studied her in silence, as she soaked up heat and expanded from her knot of fear and cold. She could be pretty or even beautiful, if she made the effort. She definitely wasn't dressed for sex-appeal, not with those loose jeans and baggy green sweater. Either she wore no makeup or a powerful understatement, and he hadn't caught any hint of perfume in that wash of her musky smell. He saw no rings, no jewelry except a crucifix.

  She didn't know who she was, what powers she could summon.

  Brian's thoughts spun, leading him nowhere. His only anchor was the need to watch the exits and the entry stair. Nobody declared truces in the ancient war he fought.

  He had followed Liam. Someone could be following him.

  The waitress reappeared from wherever the coffeepot lived. She set three steaming mugs in the center of the table, taking no sides in the division of three drinks between two people, eyed Brian, and aimed her breasts at him again as if firing a broadside from a frigate.

  Brian wasn't interested. She shook her head at his lack of response, gave the redhead a searching stare as if trying to figure out what she had, and wound her way back through the tables again. Her rump twitched irritation at the wasted effort.

  The girl swiveled around and poked through the pockets of her jacket, pulling out the .38 and a speed-loader. Five fresh rounds clicked into the cylinder, and the gun disappeared under the table rather than back into her pocket. Suspicious little witch.

  The noise stopped, and the dancer vanished through one of the exits. So. The blessed quiet meant it was time to use that tale he hadn't manufactured. The redhead had already inhaled half of one mug and sat there, one hand hidden, glaring at him with hard distrust.

  "Okay, Galahad, talk! Who are you, who was that in the alley, and what exactly happened back there?"

  Her attitude was reasonable, given what she'd just been through. However, if he spent any more time with her, he'd have to persuade her that firearms could be unreliable in the wrong company.

  He kept his hands on the table and tried not to think too much about where those chunks of lead were aimed. The ones he'd dumped in the trash had been hollow-points--nasty little things.

  Send her off on a tangent. "Pawn to Queen Four."

  "Huh?"

  "Chess. I just thought it was time to try a different opening."

  She smiled. It was the first time he'd seen her smile. Granted, she hadn't had much reason. And then a shot of mischief flashed through her eyes and she became a different person, a person he definitely wanted to know better.

  She nodded and sipped her coffee. "Pawn to Queen Four."

  "Pawn to Queen's Bishop Four."

  You haven't played mental chess since you were shivering in a captured Argie trench outside Port Stanley. Where have the years gone, since that Falklands balls-up? And why in hell did you try that as an icebreaker with this woman? Sergeant-Major Terence Mulvaney spoke up from Brian’s memories, offering his sardonic digs as the price of a mug of tea in the regimental tent. Brian and the big Irishman had bled together in a dozen ugly little wars. Two Pendragons in the entire British army and they’d both ended up in the SAS . . . .

  "Pawn to King Three."

  Ah. "Queen's gambit declined. It leads to interesting variations, but you're going to find yourself locked in a prison of your own pieces if you aren't careful. You must play a lot of chess, to even try it."

  "Used to." Then the light went out of her eyes, and her face hardened again. "The rules never change. Your opponent stays safely on the other side of the table. And the action is purely mental." Her mouth clamped shut, and her eyes narrowed, as if she felt she’d let some secret loose.

  It was Brian's turn to blink. Take it easy, Captain Albion. You've got a casualty here. Check the vital signs. Those three sentences told him the woman had problems that went far beyond Liam. And then he laughed at himself.

  You're at least bright enough to recognize your own buttons, me laddie. You're hearing her say she needs a knight in shining armor, and your nose wants you to be the chosen champion. Engage your brain and switch the balls off-line.

  She seemed to shake a memory out of her eyes. "Who the hell are you and what the fuck's going on, here? Did I walk into a goddamn movie set?"

  He winced at her language. "My name is Brian Albion. That was Liam in the alley. It wasn't a movie set, or a David Copperfield illusion. I hope Liam's dead now, although I really can't be sure, and I can't come up with any reason why you should believe me. That's up to you."

  She sucked up the rest of her first coffee and started on a second. Maybe she intended to drink all three by herself. One hand stayed under the table. With the gun.

  "Saying he's dead, saying you hope he's dead, doesn't tell me shit! What the hell happened back there?"

  She had a lilt to her voice, slight but noticeable in spite of her anger and crude words. Third or fourth generation Irish, he guessed, from a close family where she would have talked a lot with the grandparents. She might have heard tales . . . .

  Brian quietly claimed the last mug, guessing she'd at least growl at him rather than shooting him out of hand. Except first thing in the morning, most people won't kill you for taking their coffee. Besides, she didn't have a silencer.

  "What did you see?"

  She muttered something into her mug, and then looked up at him. "It’s crazy."

  "I doubt it."

  "That . . . Liam . . . came into the alley and things started getting brighter, warmer, as if the sun was shining. It smelled good. There was some kind of round stone tower, like a castle."

  Ah. "You're Irish, yes?"

  She stared at him as if he had just sprouted an extra head. "Grandparents, yes. Some Scots on my father's side. What the hell has that got to do with anything?"

  "He was taking you to Castle MacKenzie in the Summer Country. The British Isles have rain eight days out of seven. Trust the Celts to create a fantasy world where the sun is always shining and the wind is at your back."

  "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Next, you'll be telling me he really did burn up when he died. Magic. You claim to do that, too?"

  "No. Liam did it. The fire wasn't a spell so much
as the ending of a spell. He cast it on himself before he came here, and kept it from happening as long as he was alive. When he died, the spell completed itself."

  "Bullshit!"

  Brian frowned. Maybe it was old-fashioned, but he didn't care for that kind of language from a woman. Unlady-like. But then, he was old-fashioned. Or just plain old.

  She finished up her mug and started eyeing his. She'd downed two doubles in less than ten minutes: equally unlady-like. Brian slid his mug back to her. He'd gotten maybe three sips out of it.

  "You said something about him not being really human."

  A drunken cailín pointing a gun at his balls did not make for smooth conversation. Brian tried a delicate nudge to her thoughts and relaxed slightly as her hand strayed back to the jacket and came away empty.

  "Anybody ever tell you about the Old Ones?"

  There was that two-headed look again, with a slight lack of focus around the eyes. She didn't have a lot of body weight to absorb that much whiskey.

  "You mean the Little People? Leprechauns, fairies, elves?"

  Oh, lord.

  "No. The mages, the witches, the war wizards, Merlin and Gorlois and Morgan le Fay. Merlin was supposed to be the Devil's child. He was an Old One. So was Liam. Technically speaking, Liam was not Homo sapiens. That's why he traveled this world with a burning spell set on his body. It destroys the evidence, the bones that aren't exactly right. Cuts down on questions."

  "Holy Mary, Mother of God. You are fucking crazy." She stared fuzzily down into the bottom of her last mug, disappointed with what she found there.

  Call it five ounces of whiskey now, in fifteen minutes. Or a bit less, since they probably watered the drinks in this dive. That was still heavy input. Maybe the booze helped her to live in a world that belonged to another species. Brian grimaced in sympathy, but that was about all he could do. If she was lucky, she might live the rest of her life without one of them brushing by her on the street and smelling that sharp musky sweat.

  Liam's blood had been nearly pure. He'd had no more choice in what he did than she had. Put the right scent on a trap, and even the wiliest animal loses all caution.

  She looked up again, eyes totally unfocused. "Merlin," she whispered. "Arthur. Lancelot. The Once and Future King. Mallory. Tennyson. Is that the Summer Country you're talking about?"

  Bloody hell! Now she was going cloudy on him. Next thing, she'd be chanting "The Lady of Shalott."

  "Don't get any warm-puppy feelings about this: the legend of Arthur has to be about the most depressing tale ever told in the English language. It's an endless stream of people you like doing their damnedest to doom themselves and knowing it every step of the way.

  "Besides, with Liam you're looking at the other side. Mordred. Nimue. The tangled dysfunctional family of Clan Orkney. Pain for the fun of it."

  Pain for the fun of it, like what Liam had done to Mulvaney seven years ago. Well, that debt was paid, although Liam's nasty little cousin still wove his traps. Wait a minute . . . . Maybe Dougal had been after this girl.

  She started to hum a tune from Camelot. Even allowing her the twenty-eight years, she wasn't old enough to remember that show. He was. It had made him sick.

  "Do they still hold tournaments in the Summer Country? I hung out with the S.C.A. in college, even learned to fence a bit. We held medieval banquets and mock duels."

  Brian had swallowed enough fantasy for one night. "They have dungeons in the Summer Country. They have slaves in the Summer Country. Camelot is dead. Arthur is dead. Law is dead. Power rules."

  He wondered how much of this was slipping past the alcohol. Time to get crude. "Liam had power. He wanted a woman, either for himself or for his master. He saw you and wanted you and was about to take you. For life. For rape. A bed-slave to bear his children. You wouldn't get a vote. 'Women's Lib' never came to the Summer Country. A woman is either a sorceress or a slave. A bed-slave while she is young and fertile and pretty, a drudge in the kitchen or farmyard afterwards. Much the same is true for men, unless you have the Old Blood and the Power."

  Brian stopped and realized he’d been ranting. Her mug was empty. He wanted a drink or two of his own, to settle his stomach. The next round was his. If she got too drunk, there were things he could do about it.

  That waitress was what they wanted in the Summer Country: a sex toy with no brain. Where the hell was she? His glance scouted the corners of the room.

  A slim woman, dark-haired and dark-skinned, stood at the bottom of the entry stair. A man who could have been her twin held her arm. The gray-clad pair scanned the smoky room like a pair of elegant cobras, their expensively understated dress warping the strip-club into a Parisian demi-monde cellar.

  Damn! Fiona and Sean. Here. Now. Bloody, bloody hell!

  Brian couldn't waste the time to figure out what that meant.

  The redhead blinked fuzzily at him when he draped her coat over her shoulders and dragged her through the nearest exit. He turned and had a few words with the door, hoping the walls were stronger than they looked. They probably weren't.

  Shouts echoed through the room behind them. Customers weren't allowed out back. Brian leaned a little harder on his control, and the girl finished shrugging her arms into the sleeves of her jacket. He slipped her gun out of her pocket before she could think about reaching for it.

  He could make it work, if he had to, no matter what Fiona or Sean tried to say to the little grains of nitrocellulose.

  He pulled her down the corridor past three curtains, dog-leg right, up a flight of stairs flanked by flaking cinder-block walls to a door with a crash-bar and one of those idiot red flags that said "Alarm Will Sound." He held another quick discussion with locks and electrons.

  They pushed through, not into the storm but into another passageway with doors and stairs and exit signs. The place was a bloody fire-marshal’s nightmare. The door clicked shut without an alarm, and he told it to be a good boy and stay closed. Not that Fiona or Sean couldn't also talk to locks. It would just take them a little while.

  A dull thud shook the floor from below, probably Sean or Fiona showing off. That did trigger the alarms--electronic horns rather than the metallic snarl that would have been the door. Brian hauled the girl up another flight of stairs and slammed the door open with his hip, dragging her out into freezing rain. He'd expected stairs down, but they were in an alley. The place must be built into a slope.

  Another alarm cut in, a mechanical ringing clatter overhead. A sign under it said "Sprinkler Alarm." That meant fire. Must have been Sean: Fiona tended to more subtlety. She wasn't less dangerous, just quieter about it.

  Rain, he thought.

  Scent.

  Fiona would follow him. She wouldn't pay much attention to the girl's smell: wrong circuitry. And Sean wouldn't notice her, either, being what he was. Liam had been the one who'd tracked her.

  He looked for water--rain and slush and the running gutters --things to kill his scent. He had to get the girl home without a fight. She was a dead weight, a drunk, a distraction. She'd almost gotten him caught down there.

  Mental chess. Fiona was such a devious little bitch, twisting Dougal's plot to her own ends. The bloody girl had been bait for a trap, Fiona’s own trap using Liam's hunt as cover.

  He slowed down, the clamor of the alarms blocks behind them in the rainy darkness. Sirens wailed in the distance, stringing together the great braying horns of the fire-trucks as they plowed through intersections against the lights, and he winced at the thought of a panic stop of one of those metal monsters on the ice and slush. At least there wasn't much traffic at this time of night. Or morning.

  Maybe Fiona and Sean would get tangled up in that, get squashed flatter than bedbugs. Faint hope. They'd be more likely to wreck the truck. And Fiona had the persistence of a saint, even if nothing else about her was holy. That book wasn't closed.

  He slipped the gun back into the girl's pocket. He had better ones. Then he smiled at her and turned on the c
harm. "You never told me your name."

  She blinked back, still dizzy from the drinks and the run. "Mau-reen," she said, stumbling over pronouncing her own name. "Maureen Pierce. I don' know if Grandma'd call this a formal in-tro-duc-tion."

  He took her hand and kissed it, gravely.

  "I won't presume upon it."

  Now, to adjust her feelings a little further . . . . Any woman who could take what she'd been through and come back with Queen's Gambit Declined was someone he wanted to know better.

  A touch of the glamour wouldn't hurt anybody.

  Chapter Three

  Maureen's thoughts reminded her of some of the test drugs the doctors had tried on her. She felt the same detached unreality, as if she were a normal woman walking home with a normal man after a normal night on the town. The sense of horror and terror had exhausted itself like a moth fluttering against a lighted window.

  Only this strange man remained, a courtly knight guiding her to shelter from the storm. She'd never felt protected by a man before. They'd always been the threats.

  I'd like to invite him in. I'm afraid, but I'm not afraid of him. A normal woman would invite him in.

  Maureen repeated her mantra as they slogged the last block to her apartment. She ignored the faint voice that whispered fear of any man, that whispered of the fire and death behind them in the cold rain. The mantra shoved that voice back under water and held it there to drown. She felt bewitched by this man, and by a longing her body hadn't felt outside of dreams.

  The rain rattled on her jacket like dribbles of soft gravel, half sleet, still soaking in rather than just bouncing off. She thought it was about the most miserable weather a Maine winter could produce.

  Brian's hand was warm through her sleeve, no gloves. Maybe the same powers he'd used in the alley also protected him against the shitty weather. Calm and safety seemed to flow from his touch, almost like an electric current.