Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  He might be sterile, but he wasn't impotent.

  "We need a plan," she said, and he dropped those thoughts. The Goddess spoke.

  "View it as a Hunt, Dougal," she went on, "apply your special talents. We have two specimens we want to capture, alive and in good condition. Breeding condition, if you will."

  Dougal laughed. "Good condition? I could smell the blood all the way across the street. So much for working with your puppets."

  She shrugged. "They forgot the rules. They'll regret it. For a short time."

  Dougal's glance shifted from Fiona to Sean and back, as if sending some kind of message. "You'll enjoy that, won't you? You enjoy giving pain?"

  "Pain is a tool, love. Terror is a tool." She waved a hand in dismissal. "Like wine, I can drink them or leave them alone. The next time I need some human tools, they'll have heard what happened to this set. They'll pay attention to the rules."

  Sean met Dougal's gaze again, reading sympathy in those hunter's eyes. He seemed to be offering an alliance.

  The ugly little gnome is right: why do I let her treat me like a worm? Is it some witchery she brewed when we were babes together, or even in the womb?

  Dougal shook his head. "Pain isn't always the best form of control, sweet Fiona. Not even with dumb oxen. Use too much pain on some animals and they'll turn on you. That's dangerous, often fatal. Sometimes rewards work better. Food, shelter, sex, even just a chance to sleep. Find out what an animal wants and provide it when the beast does what you want."

  They sat for a while, in silence. Sean traced runes forming and falling apart within the coals of the fire, reading omens, meditating on the unspoken message Dougal sent. "I know what you want," those eyes had said. "I know how you feel about this bitch. I know how you feel about that Pendragon."

  Sometimes, when Sean was away from her, he dreamed of her face flushing purple, her eyes and tongue popping out with the force of his hands squeezing at her throat. Then she'd lift one finger and his soul was hers. That hawk on Dougal's wrist had more free will. But when she sang . . . .

  Fiona leaned back against a polished tree-trunk pillar, scratching her back like some sleek sensuous animal. No wonder she kept cats.

  "The three of us can control Brian," she said, "if we get him here. His injuries might even be useful: they weaken him. The woman is untrained, can't use her powers yet, has no idea what they are. Brian could teach her, if we give him time, or he could just draw upon her strength. We should move soon."

  Dougal stirred. "We need them in the half-world. We need them separate. Force isn't going to get us what we want. We need bait. We need a live-trap for dangerous prey."

  "Ah," said Fiona, "but what's the bait, love? Brian's too smart to come here weak and unprepared. And the woman's strange. Before you set your heart on her, maybe you should study what's under that oh-so-cute red hair. She's nothing but freckled skin pulled tight over fear, with anger bonded to her soul. She went to shoot Liam before he even spoke to her."

  Anger. Connections. Something clicked in Sean's memory. "You talked to her. Didn't your mention of a glamour set her off? When you hinted that Brian tampered with her feelings?"

  "Yesss . . ." Her eyes slitted in the gloom, a cat accepting a chin rub.

  "Wouldn't that mean his glamour worked? Untrained as she is, what worked once will probably work again."

  "Ah, my lovely brother. Such a delightful snake you are."

  Her words were sudden sunshine. She smiled on him, and the world was right again. For this, he'd do anything.

  "I think we have our bait," he drawled. "Two sets of bait. A glamour set on Maureen to bring her here, then Maureen to bring us Brian. Tell me, Huntsman, will it work? Will it trap our prey?"

  Fiona held up one finger. "Meet her in the light, meet her in public. Remember the fear. Liam died because of the fear, even though she didn't kill him. Dougal, love, you're going to have some problems there. The woman's strange."

  "I suppose you think the rest of us are sane," Dougal answered. "I have ways to adjust her strangeness. But if I'm to cast a glamour on her and lure her to my bed, what do I need you for? Why should I help you trap your tiger?"

  She laughed. "Dougal, Dougal, Dougal. A glamour's a weak magic. It works best where attraction's already growing. It can't swim against the tide. Forgive my rudeness, but you'd never do. I speak as a woman here, Maureen's tongue. We'll send my darling Sean to do it. He's much more suited."

  Sean studied Dougal's eyes. A slight lowering of the brows told the whole story. "Get me the woman," those brows said, "and we'll work out a way to deal with this Pendragon. We'll have an alliance. I believe in rewards as well as punishments."

  Sean nodded, one agreement for two distinct proposals.

  Fiona's eyes glistened, hard rubies in the firelight. "When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning or in rain?"

  "When the hurly burly's done," answered Dougal, "when the battle's lost and won."

  A taste for cheap theatrics, thought Sean. Fiona loves making gestures. They won't always get you where you want to go.

  "That won't be ere the set of sun," he said. "And I hope we don't have to move Birnam wood to do it."

  Fiona smiled, her hard smile with the teeth in it. "Perhaps. On the other hand, I might like to play around in my gardens a touch. We'll see, my love. We'll see."

  And we'll see about a way to kill our younger brother, love, thought Sean.

  Chapter Ten

  "Coffee, coffee, coffee," Jo chanted, under her breath. She knew she shouldn't have drunk so much of that stuff at The Cave, but she didn't plan to get a lot of sleep tonight, anyway. Her fingers twitched, and she slipped her right hand into David's jacket pocket just to give it something to do. The buzz had her eyeballs ratcheting.

  Tomorrow was Saturday. There'd be plenty of time for a lazy morning in a shared bed. They'd wake up sometime around three, have breakfast for two at sunset.

  Midnight on an icy sidewalk in the heart of a Maine winter wasn't what she'd call a romantic idyll. No place to stop and smooch for an hour, no inviting patches of warm dry grass under the stars. And then there was the cold-hands problem . . . .

  Jo snuggled tighter under David's arm. Nice thing about the chem-free club, he even smelled good. No stale cigarette smoke, no sour beer. Just warm male. Just enough fresh sweat left over from the gig to turn her on.

  "You guys sounded good."

  He squeezed her shoulder. "We need to sound better. That one reel with Adam showed how much better we need to get."

  "Pooh. It just proved how much better you can get." She extracted her hand from his pocket and herself from his side, to pook him on the nose with one finger. "Dump Mike, David. Either that or change to sea-chanteys. He sounds like a Beals' Island lobsterman. No brogue, no lilt. With a good lead singer, you guys can make it. Look at Adam and Ish."

  "He sounds like a Beals' Island lobsterman because that's what he is. His name is Mike Beals, you little cabbage! His great-grandpappy settled the place!"

  David ducked to one side and scooped up a handful of snow. She dodged and retaliated. After a fast and flurrious skirmish they both ended up rolling in a snow-bank with Jo on top. She shoved another handful of snow down his jacket.

  "Peace, woman!"

  "You surrender?"

  "What terms?"

  "Abject slavery."

  He grew still. Staring down at him, Jo swore she could see the deep brown of his eyes even in the glow of the streetlights. He smiled.

  "Done."

  Jo stumbled to her feet, suddenly wobbly at the knees. She covered her confusion by shaking snow out of her hair like a redheaded poodle. Her tongue had decided it was time to go on strike.

  "I think you mean that," she whispered, finally.

  He lightly touched her shoulders, turning her to face him, and then brushed snow from her cheeks.

  "I do."

  They hugged for some unknown length of time, just hugged through three sweaters and
two layers of synthetic goose-down. Somehow it felt sexier than screwing bare-ass naked on the seventeenth green of the municipal golf course under a full moon.

  Finally, he pulled back and kissed her on the forehead. "I love you, Jo."

  "I love you, too. David, you want to move in with me?"

  God, that was a shivery thought, her tongue running away with itself. First it shut up like a clam, now it spouted things without asking her permission. She'd slept with ten or twenty men, but she'd never lived with one. It was a huge step, from making her body feel good to inviting a man inside her life, for Chrissakes. Jo felt like she'd just jumped from a plane with no reserve parachute.

  "Jo, what about Maureen?"

  The soft focus faded. She felt the sinking lump in her stomach that said the main chute had just failed.

  "Oh, fuck Maureen." She stifled a giggle. "I mean, not literally. Oh, hell, yes literally. Go ahead. If she says yes, go ahead. I won't mind. God knows, she needs something in her life!"

  She was blithering, covering up the Maureen Question. How much did she owe her baby sister? When did she get to have a life? She could talk with Momma 'til the cows came home, but the Maureen Question wouldn't go away.

  "David, Maureen's more than just a roommate problem. She's stone-ass crazy. Clinically bonkers. Does that bother you?"

  He took her hand and started up the slippery hill. She backed off to give him thinking time.

  They paused for a traffic light even though there wasn't a car in sight. He drew her closer, wrapping his arm around her waist again.

  "Honestly, Jo, it bothers me some. Not enough to matter. Even if your sister's cracked, you look sane to me. If you're thinking about kids, most madness isn't inherited. Besides, like Teddy Kennedy once said, I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it."

  Kids. Age thirty-something, maybe she should be thinking about kids. David looked like good father material. He limited himself to two drinks a night, never snarled at her even when she was a bitch, willing to wash dishes and unplug a toilet and reach things down from high shelves. And he didn't snore. Everything she needed in a man.

  Everything that Daddy wasn't.

  Of course, he earned about enough money to keep himself in guitar strings. He'd make a nice pet, though, even if he wasn't a provider. He followed me home, Mommy. Can I keep him?

  The light went from red to green to red again while they snuggled. A cop cruised by, slowing down before deciding they didn't look like a threat to public decency. Too cold for that.

  They hugged and snuggled some more. Then she sobered and forced herself back to the subject at hand. She'd better get it all out in the open.

  "David, Maureen's crazy. Dad's a drunken wife-beater. Mom's a religious freak: if she hadn't gotten married I think she'd be a nun. I'm what you'd call an 'experienced woman.' You up to handling all that?"

  "I don't have to live with the rest of the mob." He nuzzled her ear, again. "And I enjoy your experience. You're like Adam with his guitar: you don't get that far without some damn good teachers and a hell of a lot of practice."

  "Stop that! Your hands are too cold!"

  The hands stopped. They retreated. They left a tingling sensation on her butt, and she didn't bother to refasten the popped snap of her jeans. Hip-huggers, they wouldn't fall off unless she asked them to. Which she probably would, but not until she'd walked another few blocks.

  A hot shower for two would warm up those hands quite nicely.

  She loved those strong musician's hands with the dancing fingers. Sometimes she felt jealous of his guitar strings. If he moved in, she could get him to play love-songs at three A.M. and then proceed to the logical conclusion.

  Yeah. He could play love-songs at three A.M. with Maureen in the next bedroom.

  She followed that thought to its logical conclusion and smiled up at him. "Maureen's got to go."

  David blinked. "Just kick her out, like that?"

  She pulled him across the intersection as if she was going to serve papers on her sister tonight. It was time to get this nonsense over with. Make a clean break.

  "Lover, she's a leech. A twenty-eight-year-old dependent child, tantrums and all. If she can't put up with you moving in, she can haul her ass back to Mommy's apron strings. I'm not licensed to run a group home for the mentally ill."

  David reclaimed his hand, then kicked at a lump of snow. He didn't look happy.

  "Jo, I can find an apartment of my own, a place we can be private. Living with the band, that's kind of weird, anyway. Some kind of mystic brotherhood bullshit. Thought we'd practice more that way, build 'rapport,' fuse into one soul with five pairs of hands. All we needed was a magic well and the harp of Brian Boru to make it work. Let her stay."

  "Screw it, David. I'm not Christian enough to be my sister's keeper. It's not just you. This has been wearing at me for years now, my own Chinese Water Torture. 'Watch out for little Maureen, dear, keep her out of trouble.' 'You're older, it's your responsibility, dear.' 'This wouldn't have happened if you'd been more adult, dear.' Screw it!"

  David shook his head. "I'm going to hate myself for this, come morning. I can't let you kick Maureen out for me. I'd feel like one of those damned seal-hunters, clubbing little loveable white babies for their fur. She's got that same helpless look in her eyes."

  "Helpless, bullshit! That little twit carries a gun everywhere she goes!"

  David stopped short and stared at her. "A gun?"

  "Frigging .38 Special. Sleeps with it, takes it to the john with her, even packs it with her swimsuit when we go out to the lake."

  "Jeezum."

  "You want to know what she thinks about men, watch her shooting silhouettes. She gets this look on her face like she's some kind of executioner. Scares the bejayzus out of me."

  David rubbed his eyes. "What do you mean, how she thinks about men? Targets are kinda unisex, aren't they?"

  "I saw her flat-out shred the crotch of a target--five shots, speed reload, five more shots. I could have put my fist right through the hole."

  His hands dropped, instinctively covering the target area. "Christ! You keep talking like that, babe, you'll have me sleeping alone tonight. Maybe I need to take some time to think over that little question of yours. Yes, your crazy sister bothers me."

  Jo blinked back tears. The weather they'd been having, she'd freeze her frigging eyelids shut. Even salt-water would freeze, get it cold enough. Things were getting awfully cold around here, all of a sudden. She re-snapped her jeans.

  They trudged on through the snow, heads down and walled off in their own separate worlds. Jo felt like a yo-yo, up and down in the passion department. Even off-stage, little Mo sure knew how to kill a party. Or maybe it was hormones.

  David took her hand, kissing the back of her glove with a courtly bow like some Renaissance poet. The yo-yo headed up again, spinning madly.

  The streetlights picked up a tender smile. "You redheaded witch, it'll take more than that to break your spell. What do you know about that Brian character she was with tonight? Maybe we can patch things up between them, get him to whirl Maureen off into Never-Never Land. God knows, he's built like a knight in shining armor."

  Jo shrugged, got her throat working. "Voice on the phone." She probably sounded like a crow, trying to talk after crying.

  She swallowed and went on. "Never even saw him until we met at The Cave. Seems polite enough, good looking if you like the type. I kind of . . . maneuvered . . . him into being there, to take the heat off us. Never expected her to blow up all over the place."

  Maureen, she remembered, Maureen frothing at the mouth. Dumb-faced blonde hunk of muscle jerking back in shock. The "R" word and instant rage. Genuine surprise.

  Memories.

  Damn.

  A curly blonde, blue-eyed boy built like a brick shithouse. Did that ring any bells? Anyone she'd known?

  Oh, hell!

  Jo staggered over to another telephone pole and leaned against it, her head spinning
. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit! All her blood seemed to nose-dive to her feet, abandoning her brain to run on fumes. All it could come up with was a flickering montage of a red-eyed, red-haired child cowering in a corner, mixed in with flashes of Jo's first hormone-racked expedition into the wondrous Land of Sex.

  Buddy Johnson.

  Fucking ghosts from the fucking past. Brian looked a hell of a lot like Buddy Johnson. That was the missing link.

  David gripped her shoulders, held her up by both shoulders. It was a good thing he did. Otherwise she'd be sitting in the snow with a strip of phone-pole splinters up her ass.

  Memories cascaded over each other: times she'd come home to find Buddy already there, times Maureen had moved funny, looked funny. Bruises Jo had seen when they were getting ready for bed at night, bruises she'd blamed on Dad. Maureen white-faced in the john off their room with blood on the toilet paper, years before she'd had her first period. She'd said she'd scratched herself. Things that never connected before.

  "Jo, snap out of it! I had no idea watching out for her was that big a strain. We'll get you some help, move her into a group home, something . . . ."

  "David, don't pile anything more on that Maureen guilt-trip. I've got enough on my conscience, already."

  "Conscience?" He twirled her like a puppet until he was staring down into her eyes. "How in hell can Maureen be a load on your conscience? You program her brain when she was a baby, peel back her scalp before the soft-spot closed and punch in the codes for some particular breed of mental bug?"

  Those eyes. She really didn't want to tell him some things and look into those eyes while he thought about them. The far side of the street looked awfully interesting, right now.

  "Not the schizophrenia, not all the paranoia, not talking with the trees. Her thing about men, especially men with a certain kind of hair, a certain build. That Brian she was with tonight, that look. Blonde apes."

  "So what's that got to do with you?"

  "You saw what happened, heard what happened. She accused him of raping her. Typical spaced-out Maureen. Things just finally clicked. I used to go with a boy who looked like that. He could be oh-so-nice or he could be mean--real mean, a walking ad for a women's shelter. Sure cured me of my Electra Complex damn fast, comparing him with Daddy. I . . . I think my first boyfriend raped my sister."