Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  She needed to get away from that subject, fast. "Why are you telling me all this? How can I tell if you're lying?"

  Fiona laughed again, and her voice turned dry. "Rational self-interest, love. If you know what you are, the rest of us are better off. Less disruption. There's lots of empty land in the Summer Country. We aren't that exclusive."

  "Just what the hell is this Summer Country of yours? Why should I be interested in it?"

  Fiona smiled a Mona Lisa enigma, seasoned with a touch of innocent malice. "Ah, the Summer Country. Alternate reality, love. It's two steps away from you, in any direction. It's what you make it be. It's where I come from, this crystal morning, and it's where I'm going back.

  "Think of it as clay on the potter's wheel and you the potter. I have a house there, with gardens ever blooming in the summer afternoon. It's restful when the winter glooms too heavy." She smiled, with a gesture at the ice.

  "Another of us keeps hawks and hounds and great hunting cats. For Dougal, life's a sharp thing, full of musk and blood and the threat of sudden death. The Summer Country's what you make it be, love. Sometimes we talk, we drink, we dance. Sometimes we fight. Carve out a space and build the world you want. All it takes is the Blood and Will. You've got the one. Do you have the other?"

  Maureen shook her head. It all sounded like absurd escapism, and she wondered if she could believe a word this figment of schizophrenia was saying.

  "Why should Ireland follow me here, find me in Maine? Shouldn't we touch the Happy Hunting Ground or whatever the local Abenaki use to take its place? Shouldn't that be the blood that matters?"

  "Each people has its own world, love, its own spirit land, its place to follow the shaman's talking drum. There are hundreds of them. We only lose them when we try to follow the myths of another blood, when we lose touch with our roots. Why should the ghosts of the Sea of Galilee speak to the people of the Hebrides and Galway Bay? Why should my blood hear the voice of the Buddha? He spoke under different trees and suns and skies. He walked a different earth."

  Maureen thought of voices and of lands. "I don't speak Gaelic. The most I know of Irish lore is a few children's tales and songs from my grandfather. I'd never fit in there."

  Fiona laughed.

  "Don't be for worrying, love," her voice went on, lilting. "The Summer Country changes as the world it touches changes. We're not Brigadoon or Shangri-La, to stay the same while centuries pass outside.

  "Do you think we fight the Formorians all day long and sit around all night telling the Táin Bó Cúalnge? That you need to know every tale of the Fionn Mac Cuhal, to fit in? That you have to have the Erse? Don't be for worrying. The land translates for you. If it didn't, the Scots would nae be speaking to the Welsh and the Welsh couldn't speak to the Irish and the Bretons couldn't talk to the lot of them. Because all of us are forsaken pagans and damned to old Jehovah's Hell, the curse of Babel hasn't fallen on the Summer Country."

  Brian had warned her against the Summer Country. Brian, the bastard. Brian, the rapist of her mind.

  "Your brother seemed to think the Summer Country is dangerous."

  "Of course it's dangerous, love. New York and L. A. are dangerous, too, but that doesn't stop a lot of people from wanting to live there." The dark woman smiled and shook her head at the follies of the world. "Life is dangerous. Are you preferring death, so to be safe?"

  Fiona shrugged, and went on. "The dangers are the ones we bring with us, the ones we choose to take. Dougal chooses to tame killers to follow him on a leash, to sit on his wrist and take chicken wings from his hand. I train gardens to trap strangers, knowing they might someday trap me instead. Would you rather face a Mack truck than a dragon? At least you can kill the dragon."

  Maureen sighed and shook her head. That talk of preferring the safety of death cut too close for comfort. "You never answered me, about lying. Why should I believe you? Why should I trust you?"

  "I'm not trying to sell you anything, love. I'll tell you, flat out: yes, I lie. Whenever it's convenient. Why should I always tell the truth? Do I owe the truth to people who only seek it as a reason to hunt me down and kill me? No way, love!"

  "That's getting a bit thick, isn't it? Kill you?"

  "What did Brian do last night? He killed a man, attacking from behind. Killed without warning. Had Liam hurt you, threatened you, even touched you? Brian's the one who cast a glamour on you! All Liam did was stop you from shooting him."

  The dark woman swept her hair back again, this time with an angry flip. "Beyond that, ask yourself about witches. Ask yourself about drowning, and stoning, and hanging, and burning at the stake. Ask yourself about what always happens to a woman with the Power. And remember, you are one of us! You can join us any time you want."

  She turned away. Maureen blinked, and the woman was gone. No tracks. Two steps in any direction, she had said.

  Maureen suddenly noticed that her fingers ached with cold. She blew on them, flexed them, and slipped them back into her gloves. She dusted lichen off her butt. The ice-coated trees crackled with the passing wind. She walked out, unseeing, through her crystal palace, chewing at a fabric of impossibilities and lies.

  Magic.

  Mystery.

  Glamours.

  God...damn...Brian!

  Chapter Six

  "Hello?"

  "Hi, Mom, it's Jo."

  The phone sputtered like an AM radio, nearly drowning out her mother's voice. She could hang up and try again, or just put up with it. That was the famous Verizon service: it cost more to call Lewiston than Seattle, due to the jacked-up in-state long distance charges. And then she still couldn't get a decent connection.

  "Everything okay there?"

  Mom's generation assumed a long-distance call meant somebody was dead or dying. Otherwise, you'd write.

  "Yeah, sure, I'm fine. How's Dad?"

  The pause hung over the line, at about a buck a minute. So Dad wasn't fine. Or he was too fine, in Mom's opinion.

  "He's off on another business trip. You know how this new job is."

  Yeah. Days in sales offices, evenings in bars, nights in hotel rooms with the random whore. Jo thought that if Mom gave him what he needed at home, he wouldn't drink as much, sleep around as much. But he'd still hit her. The more things changed . . . .

  "Mom, it's about Maureen."

  Now the silence was deafening. She'd better bull right ahead with it, get it over with. As if she didn't know exactly how it would end.

  "She's talking to trees again."

  Jo heard more crackling and a whining hiss like a B-grade Sci-Fi movie.

  "Mom, you still there?"

  "Yes, honey. I don't know what to say. You know she's always been different."

  Jo shook her head. Different was one way to put it. Paranoid schizophrenia also came to mind.

  "Mom, she was dead drunk, passed out half in her bed when I left for work this morning. When I came back, she'd been out to the woods and talked to her sacred grove. She hit me with another one of her rants. You know how she shoots off her mouth when she's having one of her spells. This time she threw in some crap about witches following her around, even told me a wizard had laid his hands on that junk Toyota of hers and told her how to fix it. I think she's been mixing her drugs again. You see about that fire last night?"

  "Oh, dear. Was she downtown when that broke out?"

  "Says she was there when it happened, a goddamn strip club! Says it was started by a battle between warlocks."

  "Oh."

  That was it, just the single syllable. It might be the understatement of the year.

  "Mom, I'm scared. David stayed over again last night. Now she's ranting and raving about how I stole her boyfriend. You know how she is about men."

  Silence, again. Jo squared her shoulders as if facing a firing squad, waiting for Catholic Mom Lecture Number 25.

  "Jo, you shouldn't let a man stay overnight. It's a sin. Sex is for marriage, for children. Have you gone to confession?"
>
  "Mom!"

  "Dear, I'm worried about you."

  "Worry about Maureen. You know that damned gun Dad got for her? She carries it everywhere she goes. Loaded. God above, I swear she takes it to the shower with her. Why'n hell did Dad ever give that thing to her?"

  "Jo, you know he wants her to be safe. She was working nights . . . ."

  "Mom, just how safe do you think life is, behind bars in the Women's Center down at Pownal? How safe is it in the Maximum-Security wing over at the crazy house? She's going to shoot somebody, and I'm sure as hell not going to jail to keep an eye on her!"

  "Jo, you shouldn't swear like that."

  Jo shook her head. If Mom ever heard sweet little Maureen's language . . . . You'd think she'd trained in longshoreman's school, spent four years in the army rather than in college.

  "Look, Momma, Maureen is nuts! We all know that. She's dangerous. Can't we get her into treatment again? Make her take that new medicine? I tell you, I'm scared of her. Next time she starts in on me, I'm going to kick her out of here. Before she shoots me."

  Jo listened to Verizon static for about a minute.

  "Jo?"

  "Yes."

  "Jo, you know we can't force her into treatment. She's an adult. I can't control her any more. Do you want me meddling in your life? I don't approve of the way you live, either. Please, keep an eye on your sister. Please?"

  Jo sighed.

  "Mom, how many clinics has she been in? How many different psychiatrists and faith healers and just plain quacks has she seen? Not a damn one of them has helped. And you want me to straighten her out?"

  "Jo, please?"

  "Momma, I've been watching out for Maureen for twenty years. I went to tech school. She went to college. I've got a good job. She works part-time for minimum wage. I pay the rent and utilities. She sometimes buys food. More often, she buys whiskey. She practically pees her pants if a man comes within twenty feet of her, but when I meet a guy I'd maybe like to marry, she accuses me of stealing him from her. I've just about had it with my baby sister! When do I get to have a life?"

  Silence filled the wires again. Jo chewed on her lip until her mother's voice came back, weary with the distance.

  "Jo, God gives us burdens to carry. Your father is mine. Maureen is yours. All I can say is, pray for strength. She won't be heavier than you can carry. Good will come of it."

  "Momma, I'm just about ready to tell God to carry his own sack of groceries. And if Dad hits you again, I'd suggest you do the same. I just don't give a cold-assed damn about that chunk of theological bullshit."

  "Jo!"

  "Sorry, Momma, but that's the way it is. I've had it. She's your crazy daughter, not mine."

  Jo bit off her next words and hung up. She stared at the instrument, sitting all innocent on the kitchen counter. You could talk all you want, but that didn't mean you'd communicate. It was the main reason why she only talked to her mother about once a month--a kind of predictable catharsis.

  Sometimes she thought Momma's delusions seemed worse than Maureen's. Married since seventeen to a drunken, abusive brute who cheated on her every chance he got, and she chewed out Jo for insisting on a test-drive before she got serious about a new man. Hell, Dad was probably at the root of half of Maureen's troubles. "Man" equaled "Pain."

  And all that treatment their parents had paid for was private, the soul of discretion, no records without a court order. It left nothing to show up on a background check. The little twit could lie when she went for her gun permit.

  God.

  Jo shook her head. She wouldn't kick her baby sister out. She couldn't. Stone-ass crazy or not, Maureen was the only family Jo cared about. Some ways, Mo was still the five-year-old redheaded mirror with smudged cheeks and scraped knees climbing trees and babbling about what the wind in the leaves was telling her. She was still the warm body sitting snuggled up against her older sister while Grandpa told stories he had heard from his grandpa, the scared voice in the darkness during thunderstorms when they had shared a room. Maureen just never grew up.

  The hell of it was, between these "episodes" they got along as well as sisters ever did. Some of Maureen's spaced-out fantasy world might even be fun. Not the part that had her carrying a gun, or the part that called a phallus a torture instrument. Jo didn't have a clue where those came from.

  They had come early, she knew, pre-puberty. 'Way back as far as Buddy Johnson. Whenever Jo brought a boy home, Maureen would cringe away. That fear went back as far as Jo's enthusiasm the other way.

  But Jo thought she wouldn't mind a world in which the trees talked, in which Grandpa O'Brian's Bean Sidhe howled for the death of a wicked chieftain, in which the Puca drummed his hooves three times on the hillside and a door opened down into the realm of the fairies. It sounded like a nice place to visit.

  And the Lurikeen's everlasting pot of gold would be useful as hell.

  Fat chance of that. Well, maybe little Mo could just vanish under the Sidhe hill for a night and come back ten years later. Cured. As much as Jo loved her sister, some problems didn't have acceptable solutions.

  Others did. She picked up the phone again.

  Five rings, and a groggy voice answered. A groggy, male voice, grunting, and she felt warm all over.

  "David?"

  "Uh."

  "What the hell you doing still in bed?"

  "Gotta sleep sometime."

  "I didn't get any more sleep than you did and I'm up. Put in a full day at the office, even."

  "Um. Takes more out of a man. We give out, you take in. Hard work."

  "Look, Maureen's pissed."

  "Wha' about?"

  "Us. Last night. She still thinks I stole you from her."

  "Got no cause. Why last night? Not our first time."

  "Wake up, damn you. Maureen's funny that way, you've got to rub her nose in it about five times. She still hoped you were coming over to see her."

  Sounds of movement came over the phone: a crash of something knocked over, muttered cussing, a few coughs. Homo sapiens became vertical on the far end of the line. It had taken the human race a million years or so. There was no reason to expect it would get easier on a daily basis.

  "Jo, let me get my head together. Your sister thought I used to be interested in her?"

  "The man is slow, but it sinks in after a while. Now she's throwing things and foaming at the mouth. You got any suggestions?"

  "Jesus."

  "He ain't available. Try again."

  The phone line crackled, and this time it wasn't long distance. The noise had to be in the local system--Alexander Bell must have installed the damned wires himself, back in 1883. And done a lousy job of it.

  "Jo, I swear I never gave her cause. We talked music and Irish legends. Closest I ever got to her was touching her hand across the table."

  Jo sighed. "You don't know Maureen. Holding hands is the equivalent of unprotected sex, to her. I'm surprised she didn't ask you for a blood test. She's scared of men."

  "Oh, lord."

  She listened to line noise for a minute, wondering if David was calculating the genetic odds on hereditary insanity passed to any hypothetical children of any hypothetical future union of the Marx and Pierce bloodlines. He wouldn't be the first man scared off by exposure to her crazy sister. Mental illness had to be about the worst skeleton you could find in any family closet.

  Used to be, people kept their skeletons locked up decently in an asylum. Jo had to live with hers.

  "Jo?"

  "Right here."

  "Look, I'm not going to give up seeing you just because your sister's screwed up. We can't sleep together over here, five guys living in an open loft. I don't think you're interested in that big an audience."

  She giggled. "I don't know. Performance art is big these days. Maybe we could sell tickets."

  "Bullshit. Jo, I'll talk to her, try to smooth it over. Look, we've got a gig tonight, down at The Cave. Why don't both of you come over and we can sit out
a set. Tell her it's not her fault, not your fault, not anybody's fault. She might not throw a scene in public. Look, she's a nice kid, but I'm not interested in hauling that kind of baggage around for the rest of my life."

  "You and me both, lover. You and me both." She swallowed the rest of her comments. "I'll try. Maureen's not all that rational."

  "I'd noticed. See you tonight. Manim astheee hu."

  "Yeah, and my soul's within yours, too. Cut the blarney, you fake Irishman. You know ten words of Gaelic, and five of those are mispronounced. Damn good thing Dé hAoine doesn't ask you to sing for them."

  "Hey, Marx is a fine old name of ancient Eiru. The group just doesn't ask me to sing 'cause they're jealous of my voice."

  "Like I'm jealous of Maureen's way with men."

  Jo hung up and stared at the phone again. She felt warm just from talking to him. Maybe David was The One.

  She thought The Cave was a good suggestion. It called itself chemical-free, which was a euphemism for drug-free, which was a euphemism for alcohol and tobacco free. God knows, they served coffee. She could use a little of that particular psychoactive alkaloid right now.

  She'd made fun of David, still asleep at four in the afternoon, but she felt drained. And a little sore in assorted private places. And very, very happy with some portions of her life.

  So what if Maureen was mad? Mad Maureen was mad. It had a certain symmetry.

  The phone bleeped, quietly, an electronic purr intruding into her thoughts. It was probably Mom calling back, not about to let her own daughter get in the last word of an argument. Either that, or one of those click-and-an-empty-line calls she guessed was a computerized dialer that had hooked another fish first. Screw Verizon.

  That was an interesting thought. God knows, they were phallic enough, with all those thousands of telephone poles.

  The phone insisted.

  "Hello?"

  "Maureen?"

  "No, this is Jo. Maureen's out, right now. Can I take a message?"

  "Uh, this is Brian, Brian Albion. I walked her home last night, and I wanted to check to see everything was okay. She wasn't feeling well when I left."