Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  Dougal glanced down at the headless corpse. He felt better about Liam, and the Pendragon, and Fiona, and Sean. The cat had settled down, both front paws pinning one leg to the ground as an anchor against the rip and pull of his jaws. Man-flesh vanished in chunks, to the sound of crunching bone and a deep, satisfied purr like an idling diesel.

  Dougal shook his head. One thing Fiona didn't understand, one thing none of them understood. It wasn't the killing that mattered to Dougal. It was controlling the killer.

  The falcon, the cat, the other beasts, the woman: it was the control that mattered. It was molding them to his will.

  "Yes, my love," he murmured to the cat. "I’ve trained you into what you are. Just like I’ll train the woman. One such as Sean would take her with a glamour and expect to hold her. I know better. Her will must be changed. Changed into an extension of my will. Changed like you, my lovely one."

  Chapter Five

  Sunshine splintered off the ice, turning the Maine woods into a kaleidoscope of prisms that flashed with the slightest breeze. Blue sky, white ground, black and brown and gray and lichen green of the mottled trunks, all wove together into a world of crystalline beauty and mystery.

  Maureen contented herself with finding beauty in the shadows; the sunbeams stabbed at her fading hangover. Waking up, even her teeth had throbbed with her pulse.

  "Very smart," she said to herself. "Extremely smart. Mixing booze and sleeping pills."

  The sound of her footsteps crunched out into the hushed forest and faded away. She barely sank into the crusted snow, evidence of the cold-front that had followed last night's storm, coating everything with rippled glass. The scattered pines and firs mixed in among the hardwoods bent down like penitents under their coating, white and stiff and crackling. Even their sharp sweet incense seemed frozen or washed from the sky.

  No other footprints marred the path into Carlysle Woods this morning. Squirrels, snowshoe hares, birds--none of them were heavy enough to mark the hardened snow.

  A candid observer just might have called it suicide, girl. You know, for example a shrink or the county coroner, they don't necessarily ask for a fucking note to be left behind. Do they, girl? Just ask if the deceased had been acting strange, depressed, had just suffered some personal loss? If they had a history of being, well, disturbed? In a clinical sense?

  She glared at a shelf fungus on the trunk of an old birch snag, daring it to talk back. The oyster-shell edge wore a necklace of glittering diamonds, the gift of the storm.

  The forest wasn't interested in her problems. Some quirk of ownership had left it here, two miles from the rail-yards of downtown Naskeag Falls, a patch of old-growth woods half a mile across and three times that in length. Surrounded by shopping malls, subdivisions, and the regional high school, laced by trails, it sheltered lovers and bird-watchers and the occasional poet.

  The city owned it, now. On days like this, Maureen owned it. She had it to herself, sole proprietor. Possession was nine tenths of the law.

  She reached out and ran her fingers over the scaly bark of a hemlock, savoring the slowness of its winter thoughts. Owning a forest would be heaven--talking to the trees, guiding their growth and health, understanding the tangled relationships of all the plants and animals. Even before Buddy, she'd been more comfortable with trees than she had been with people.

  You would fucking think that a fucking honors graduate of the fucking forestry school could get a fucking job in the fucking forest industry in the State of Fucking Maine.

  All she had to show for her degree was a degenerate vocabulary from hanging around in beer-halls with the sexist-pig machos of the unemployed Forestry Club.

  Supply and demand. It doesn't matter that the sovereign State of Maine is something like 90 percent goddamn trees. Tree-raping paper companies aren't hiring. They don't need a professional forester to tell a woodcutter to nuke a hundred fucking acres.

  So Maureen Anne Pierce worked six-to-midnight at the Quick Shop and parked her skinny redheaded bod in a cheap two-bedroom apartment with Cynthia Josephine Pierce, similar description, because she couldn't even afford a set of bedbugs of her own, much less a goddamn car that started when she asked it to. Mo and Jo, the sister act.

  It didn't help her self-esteem any that Big Sister earned more than twice as much as she did, with health insurance and benefits, out of her tech-school associate degree in computer drafting.

  So much for education as an investment in her future. But that was Old Business on the agenda, not her current problem.

  Okay, Miz Psychiatrist, what's our next move? Back to square one in our habituation program? Treat our patient with gradually increasing doses of the phobia object? Have our acrophobic stand on a cushion, on a chair, a stepladder, increasing the height bit by bit until she can stare straight down into the Grand Canyon without a tremor? Until she can strip off her clothes and climb on top of a man of her own free will?

  She walked further in, gradually relaxing, soaking up the silence and the privacy that the forest always gave her. She reached the patriarch beech she used as a signpost, with the hole twenty feet up where a limb had broken off decades ago. For three years now, a female barred owl had been roosting there and coveting small yappy dogs as their unknowing owners walked them on the paths below.

  Maureen smiled at the thought and looked up. A faint patch of brown and gray lurked in the depths of the hole. The goddess Athena was home, resting from another night's hunting.

  Carlysle Woods was Maureen's sacred grove. She felt like the owl bunkered in her hole, safe here from the mobbing crows of life. She walked among friends--trees and animals she trusted far more than she did any human.

  The trees and elusive foxes had seen it all--birth and death, seduction and rape and simple friendship--the forest had seen that life went on, no matter what. Still, Maureen patted her pocket for the .38 she always carried with her. It no longer seemed quite as reliable a friend as it used to be, but she went with what she had.

  She crunched her way over the ice, leaving the buried path for her own remembered route. It led across the ghost of a small stream where summer raccoons washed food and left their dainty footprints in the mud, past a white pine old enough to remember Benedict Arnold's expedition to Quebec, deep into the heart of the woods and the ancient oak that ruled there.

  You know what they say, girl: a doctor who treats herself has a fool for a patient.

  Going to a shrink meant she would have to talk about It. Anything else would be a waste of time. She'd proven that. The oak was the only one she'd ever told about Buddy, about Jo, about Maureen and pain and fear. But she'd promised . . .

  Besides, shrinks cost money. That hundred from Brian would have covered one session, max. It would take her that long just to fill out the forms. Quick Shop didn't have a health plan and if they did it wouldn't cover psychos and if it did, this was definitely a pre-existing condition.

  Ben Franklin and the empty speed-loader: those had been the only evidence last night ever happened. David and Jo were gone when Maureen crawled out of bed, groping for the aspirin bottle. Even the breakfast dishes were drying in the rack.

  But the car had started and the greasy-fingered mechanic at the corner garage had found a crack in her distributor cap. He’d also replaced the plugs and the air cleaner. She'd had enough left over to buy a new bottle of Scotch and still have lunch.

  Have lunch downtown. She grimaced. There were police barricades all around the smoking hulk of the strip club. Radio news said two women had died. Smoke inhalation. Trapped by jammed fire doors. Cause, probably an electrical fault.

  She touched Father Oak. "Northern red oak," she recited to herself. "Quercus rubra, specimen tree approximately five foot diameter breast-height and seventy feet tall, struck by lightning about twenty years ago but apparently healthy."

  He had already been recovering when Maureen first brought her troubles to him. She sometimes wondered if the lightning bolt had actually struck in the same yea
r as Buddy Johnson. Maybe that was the bond she felt.

  Maureen leaned her back against his rough bark and slumped down to squat on her heels. Strength. What Father Oak provided was strength. He could snatch the lightning from the heavens and channel it down his branching arms and give up a strip of bark more than a hand-span wide and still survive. A little matter of non-consensual pre-pubescent sex must seem trivial after that.

  She loved this tree. He was everything her own father wasn't: quiet, strong, sheltering, non-judgmental, sober. Father Oak would protect her. Father Oak was her friend. She talked to Father Oak. Sometimes He answered questions.

  She had gone into forestry because of Father Oak, to return his love to him. Then she'd found out that Forestry, with the capital "F," was more concerned with killing trees than nurturing them. American forestry was an industrial process. It just asked how to get the most board feet of lumber, the largest yield in cords of pulp, in tons of fiber, per acre per year.

  That was half the reason she worked at Quick Shop. The two job offers she'd had were as an overseer on the Paper Plantation, whip dem darkies if they don't meet quota.

  Maureen shook her head at the memory. She reached into her other coat pocket and pulled out a hand-carved flute, double tubes of dark wood with a surface polished smooth by generations of fingers. She touch-traced the twining leaf-pattern of its decoration, feeling the warmth that had reached out and caressed her hand when she'd wandered into a Junque Shoppe on Martha's Vineyard. The tree that grew it must have had a dryad.

  Smooth puffs of breath brought a gentle non-tune from the flute--a scattering of paired notes floating out into the crystalline stillness like wind chimes in the icy branches. She never tried to play any music, not with this gift from Pan. As best as she could tell, it had come from Romania and wasn't tuned to a Western scale.

  The magic of the forest answered her. Jay-notes floated back to her in a squeaky echo, the smooth blue-crested thieves gliding from tree to tree, telling her of the night's changes and any other gossip that touched their sense of mischief. Her trills broke delicate tinkles of ice loose to cascade from upper limbs as the sun touched them with its sudden thaw. Maureen conducted a concerto for forest and solo flute, lost in comfort and safety.

  A shadow fell across her hands.

  "I didn't know there were any Druids in Maine."

  Maureen blinked against the sunlight. A slim, elegant woman stood on the ice in front of her, long dark hair in a straight cascade, dark eyes, skin that came from somewhere on the Mediterranean. Her outfit of gray fur looked like it had just walked out of a Paris salon and molded itself to her body, and she obviously wasn't worried about animal-rights activists splashing ink on it. Her perfume spoke of dollars-per-gram and said the fur wasn't fake.

  Hairs rose along the back of Maureen's neck. The woman hadn't made a sound as she approached, no crunch and squeak from the ice. Maureen couldn't see any footprints on the snow.

  "I need to talk to you about my brother."

  "Brother?" What the hell . . . ? Maureen had never seen this dingbat before. Or maybe . . . . She had a hazy memory, twin shadows in the thick air of the club.

  "I think he's calling himself Brian these days, Brian Albion. We saw you together last night."

  Maureen's right hand fumbled in her pocket, slipping her finger into the trigger-guard of the .38. Anybody connected with last night wasn't fun.

  The woman flipped her hair back with one hand and laughed. "You won't be needing that thing, love. Believe me, I had nothing to do with Liam following you. We were following Brian. I know him better than you do. Don't trust him."

  "Who the hell are you?"

  "Fiona. Just Fiona. Most of us don't use second names where I live. There aren't that many of us, to need them. And I promise you we won't be missing Liam. He was a shit."

  The obscenity grated in Maureen's ear, out of character with the woman's elegant bearing, out of character with the lilting voice so much a reminder of Grandfather O'Brian that Maureen found herself relaxing against her will.

  She fought against the same sense of psychic Thorazine she'd felt the night before. "You burned down that nightclub. Two people died."

  Fiona shook her head and smiled. "Little Brian burned down the nightclub, love. He set a trap on the door, and it exploded when Sean went through. That started the fire, not us. Brian always was a touch careless with his spells. Ask him about how those fire doors got jammed. He doesn't worry much about mere humans. The holy ones never do."

  Maureen blinked, distracted by the phrase. "Holy ones?"

  "Yes, love. My darling brother is a monk, one of an order that's set itself the task of hunting down the likes of you and me. They've set themselves up as judge and jury and executioner of the old blood, in the name of Christ and all his angels. And they don't even see the irony of it. He's hunted the world for decades, under the cloak of various names and the uniform of a British soldier."

  "A monk?"

  "You've heard about the Templars, the Crusaders who protected pilgrims? Religious knights, delighted to separate any non-Christian head from its owner's neck? That's the Pendragons, love, in spades. They've even got their own monastery, tucked away in a dark corner of Wales where the neighbors think the rattle of machine-guns is the British army practicing for peace."

  "Monks?" She hated the stupidity of repeating herself, but Maureen felt the warmth of Brian's hand again, and the confused sexual longing he'd aroused in her.

  Fiona chuckled, maliciously, as if Maureen's thoughts had been written across her face. "Oh, they're not sworn to chastity, love. Just to obedience and violence. Violence against the old blood."

  Maureen's thoughts shied away from the mention of chastity and the tangled path to which it led. She forced herself back to Fiona and danger--danger here and now. "He was warning me about Old Ones."

  The woman sputtered with laughter. She caught her breath and shook her head again, the black hair swinging heavy across her shoulders.

  "Oh, I love that duck! Brian is an Old One, dear. Ask him his age, the next time you see him. Ask him his true name and his purpose in life. He'll probably tell the truth. Most of the Pendragons will. They just won't tell much of it. You have to pin them down."

  Holy Mary, Mother of God. "Just what the hell is an Old One?"

  Fiona's dark eyes sparkled in the sunlight. "My brother didn't tell you much, did he? The title means just what it says. The Old Ones are the original people of northern Europe. Scientists like to have everything neatly boxed and labeled, but some of those old skulls they dig up aren't either Neandertal or modern man. We're both and neither, love. The genes give us some interesting powers, including access to the Summer Country. Did Brian tell you why Liam was following you?"

  Maureen gritted her teeth. "Something about taking me to this Summer Country."

  "And he didn't say why that pea-brained lout would be interested in a random stranger, did he? He didn't say why you could even reach the Summer Country, did he? It's the same reason Brian's interested in you. You carry the Blood. You have the Power. You are an Old One, love. So much for fearing them."

  Maureen decided that "love" was going to get tiresome if she heard it about three times more. Particularly since Fiona loaded it with an edge that turned it into sarcasm.

  Maureen was suddenly conscious of the oak bark pressed against the back of her scalp. Looking up, leaning against the tree, the ragged lichen and corrugated bark snagged her hair. She smelled the dry sharpness of Father Oak protecting her, and it drew her back into the moment.

  She still squatted against the tree, glad of its support. Help me, Father Oak, she prayed, silently. I'm drifting into dangerous dreams again. "Old One?" she added, out loud. "I don't look a bit like Brian, like that Liam creature. I don't look like a Neandertal."

  "Neither do I, love. Neither do I. Old Ones show sexual dimorphism. Men are big and hairy; women are small and smooth. Goes for humans, too. We're crossbreeds. Hybrids. I guaran
tee you have the Blood. Otherwise Liam and my beloved brother wouldn't be sniffing around you. I use the phrase literally. You have an effect on them like doe urine on a buck in rut."

  Brother. "You and Brian. He's light. You're dark. Not just size."

  "Different mothers, love. Same father. Kind of a hit-and-run man, if you know what I mean. It's an old family trait. You didn't find yourself behaving a bit odd, last night?"

  Maureen blushed so hard she imagined steam rising from her cap. Odd was a polite way of putting it.

  "It's called a glamour, love. My darling brother was tampering with your head. I don't think he did any permanent damage, but you have been warned."

  Maureen felt her blush fade into white rage. She bounced to her feet. Her fists started to clench, and she jerked her right hand out of her pocket before she did something with the pistol and blew a hole in her jacket.

  I'll flat-ass kill that bastard!

  Besides, Fiona could probably hex the cartridges, just like Liam. It was time to buy a switchblade, or find Granny’s old hatpin. She focused her anger. "What the hell do they want with me? Don't you have women in this goddamned Summer Country?"

  Fiona shook her head. "Hybrids, love. Hybrids. You don't breed mules to mules, to get more mules. There aren't many of us, and most of us are sterile. I'm not. You're not. You write it on the wind. Believe me, dear, it gives you a lot of power. You can make a man do anything you want."

  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! That was just what little Maureen needed to go with her tangled sexuality. Talk about sending mixed signals!

  "This sterile thing, it goes for men, too?"

  "Most. Brian isn't. Liam wasn't. I'm afraid my little pet Sean is, no matter how much he might be wishing that he were not. He still has his uses, though."

  And Brian had the gall to talk about Liam's seeing me as a womb . . . . I'll murder that bastard! I'll stake him out on an anthill in the sun! I'll . . . . To tamper with my brain!