Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  And Mud Season. And then bugs. Someday she was going to move to a place where the weather was designed with people in mind.

  "Fiona asked me to talk to you."

  Maureen jerked her thoughts back from their vague wandering. Brian had told her this man was dangerous.

  Sean didn't look dangerous. He stood in the frozen slush, wind tangling his hair, looking like an ad for some designer line of clothing: a Spanish Don, somebody like Ricardo Montalban about to climb into a big Chrysler with butter-soft leather upholstery and a walnut dash. Even the garish orange glow of the streetlights suited his sleek dark beauty.

  "So talk." Maureen forced a hostile tone, fighting against the voice of the serpent. "What does Fiona want with me? Want me to poison her brother, perhaps? He's too big for me to beat him up."

  Sean laughed, with a deprecating wave of his free hand. "Nothing so crude. She just wants you to remember that you have a home waiting for you with your people. A warm, green home in the Summer Country."

  He gestured at the ice, the cold glitter of the winter stars, the tawdry beer signs flapping across the Quick Shop front. Maureen read the sweep of his arm. The store was flat-ass ugly: Marlboro's ragged vinyl banner, the stack of gallon bottles of windshield-washer fluid sadly depleted by the recent siege of slush, the dumpster overflowing wet cardboard into the piles of filthy snow left by the plow-truck. His arm swept on, to include the whole tattered, icy, dirty, dangerous, nasty scene of city winter.

  Summer Country. The image was seductive, like the travel-agency ads for Cancun or St. Thomas, the cabin-fever getaway specials they trotted out right after a big storm. Somewhere around Groundhog Day, when the mercury in the thermometer congealed down near thirty below, half the State of Maine flew south. The other half wished they could.

  "Why'd you guys attack Brian."

  Sean shook his head. "What makes you think it was us? Believe me, Fiona doesn't want him damaged."

  For an instant, the golden warmth slipped, and Maureen caught a flicker of rage across Sean's face. She felt the sudden chill of danger and peeled her arm out of his hand.

  "Not damaged? Just weakened? Weakened to the point where she can control him?"

  He moved closer to her, bringing the warm glow back into the night. Sean might be dangerous, but not to her. Maureen focused on his eyes, the beautiful depth of his eyes in the light spilling out from the store windows. Anyone, man or woman, could fall into those eyes and drown.

  "Brian is a ruthless man, Maureen. He has many enemies. Remember what he did to Liam. Brian has killed many Old Ones with many friends. Any one of those could be hunting him for revenge. Fiona wanted me to warn you. You are in great danger, living with Brian."

  "And I would be safer in the Summer Country?"

  Sean brushed a finger gently across her cheek, leaving a taste of delicious fire behind. "Safety is relative, my dear. Laws protect you in the world of men. We do not have laws in the Summer Country. We have customs."

  The palm of his hand was impossibly soft and warm and gentle, caressing her neck. "You are a beautiful woman, Maureen, a powerful woman. When you come to the Summer Country, your beauty and the power of your blood will defend you. Men will fear you and adore you, laying their hearts at your feet. They will protect you, each from the other. There is strength in jealousy. This is our custom, strength balanced against strength."

  His face floated, inches from her own--soft, dark, handsome, hypnotic. "We are not barbarians in the Summer Country. No man will take you against your will. Come with me, Maureen. Come with me to your own homeland."

  She smelled the land on him--the warm earth, the green grass, the peat fires, the slow river-waters flowing smooth and tannin-dark across the water-weed. The word pictures flowed through her head using Grandfather O'Brian's voice, the voice of safety. Sean's lips burned against hers without any trace of the cold north wind. Maureen fell into the kiss, losing herself, barely conscious of his hands drawing her body against his.

  Something in the back of her head screamed terror and warning, but it was weak and far away. Her pulse buried it under the rushing, throbbing heat in her breasts and belly.

  * * *

  Jo blinked again. Maureen had been right there. Maureen, kissing a man. And then Jo had blinked with shock, and the two of them were gone.

  She must have stepped back inside the store. It could have been a minute rather than a second, Jo's surprise being what it was.

  Jo pushed through the icy wind and into the Quick Shop. Just checking, she reminded herself. She owed it to Maureen, she owed it to herself, to make sure everything was fine. She hadn't seen her sister since the morning she moved out. They hadn't ever thrashed things out about Buddy, either. There'd never been a chance.

  The greasy little man behind the counter looked up and jumped. Jo had seen that look before: Maureen walked out and Jo walked in, different clothes on the same woman with no time to change. Sometimes they used to do it for a joke, just like real twins.

  "Where's Maureen?"

  The man's eyes narrowed as they groped their way up and down Jo's body. Fucking slimeball, she thought. Come out from behind that counter and I'll kick you in the cojones. Freebie, special for Maureen, just for having to work with you.

  "Stepped outside a minute ago. She never told me she had a twin sister."

  "She doesn't."

  Jo pushed back through the door, right into a gust of wind that might as well have been liquid nitrogen. Her teeth felt like they were going to crack from thermal stress. Maybe Mo had ducked around the corner, hiding out in the shadows and a bit of shelter.

  Smooching.

  Maureen? No way in God's green tomato patch. Something was wrong here. The whole scene, wrong. It stank like a week-old road-killed skunk. If that Brian character had tangled her up in trouble, Jo would skin him alive with her fingernails.

  She'd been right to check on Mo.

  Jo closed her eyes. There was a trick they used to do, she and Maureen, it played hell with games of hide-and-seek: find the sister. Get calm enough, quiet enough, and listen to the chunk of brain just on top of your spinal cord. If Maureen was anywhere within a couple-hundred yards, Jo could find her. And vice-versa. In some ways, they were twins. Nothing mystical or magic: her back-brain probably just knew how Maureen thought, where she was likely to go.

  The wind nipped at her and she drifted along with it, around that hypothetical corner into a calm eddy. No Maureen.

  She quieted herself, relaxed, slowed her breathing. Slow, in through the nose, out through the mouth, like the stress meditation they taught her when coping with insanity was driving her insane. Count heartbeats against the breath, inhale four counts, hold the breath four counts, exhale eight counts. Nothing existed except her breathing.

  Center my self in peace.

  Part of me is missing. Where is she?

  A faint echo returned, at the edge of her sister-sonar: Maureen, that way, around back. She might be embarrassed as hell, Jo catching her making out with a man. Tough shit. Jo wouldn't be able to sleep tonight if she didn't track her sister down.

  Eyes closed, Jo turned and took a careful, sliding step. The feeling strengthened as the air fell still around her. Careful, careful, there was ice underfoot. Another step brought a touch of warmth to her face, and she opened her eyes, expecting an unseen vent.

  Sweat jumped out of her spine and froze there.

  She stood in formless dark. Phantoms played with the corners of her eyes, then disappeared when she flicked her vision after them. Faint whispers echoed sight in her ears, voices and words just beyond or beneath understanding. The damp coolness of a cave hung musty around her, mixed with some sense of graveyard earth. Under the Sidhe hill, she giggled hysterically to herself, a waking dream.

  She was going crazy. She was following her sister straight into the loony bin.

  Jo snatched at her only way out. Where was Maureen?

  Calming breaths, again. In. Hold. Out. Relax back int
o the center. Open herself to the void. Seek the emptiness in her mind. Seek the peace.

  Maureen was that way. Now Jo was trying to save herself instead of her sister. Too late to back out now--she didn't even know which way was out. She was committed.

  Another cautious step and Jo felt the ground firm beneath her feet, spongy with turf rather than the crusty winter muck coating Naskeag Falls. She opened her eyes again.

  Grass. Trees. Green, rolling hills. Blue sky. Sun.

  This isn't real. She blinked and shook her head like a horse tormented by flies. The impossible world mocked her confusion by continuing to exist.

  Jo shivered even though she was no longer cold.

  She stood by a fieldstone wall that separated pastures from ancient woods. The breeze caressed her cheeks, wiping the bite of winter away and bringing the sweet warmth of spring to her nose. Dazed beyond fear, she slipped off her gloves and ran cold-reddened fingers over the moss on the stone. Damp. Velvet soft. Coolness that felt warm by contrast with her touch-memory of Maine ice. She brought fingers to her nose and drank in the sour wet smell of lichen eating stone.

  It was real. Either real or delusions strong enough to make Maureen's look like sanity.

  Starch leaked out of her knees. She settled onto a rock, grateful for its gritty reality under her butt. She'd always thought little Mo's babble about wizards from Grandpa's Summer Country proved she was ready for the butterfly nets.

  Black dots swirled across her eyes and she fought them down, continuing to breathe slowly against an urge to just give up and faint. She'd always hated those tight-corseted females who gave a theatrical groan and collapsed under a little strain.

  Jo gritted her teeth and forced the world to settle on an even keel. Jesus H. Christ, Maureen, what have you gotten into now?

  Jo scanned the forest edge, picking out oak and birch and a huge glossy holly that dominated the field's corner like a god. This forest was old, radiating age like Stonehenge or the Sphinx. That pasture oak, it had to be older than Columbus.

  This was no place in Maine, with old-growth forest right up against a pasture wall. The oak would have been firewood sent up a chimney a century ago. And she'd never seen lush grassland like this. Maine pastures tended to look like a terminal case of mange: bald spots of granite mixed with drifts of scrub juniper too tough and prickly for grazing.

  The field wasn't just grass. Jo plucked a three-lobed leaf. Shamrock. Grandpa gave each of them one in a silver locket, when they were kids. Another hallucination. Ireland? Bullshit. Ireland would be in the middle of winter, just like Maine. The sky glowed blue from horizon to horizon, and the breeze felt warm and dry.

  Meanwhile, where was Maureen? That was the question that brought Jo here. Maybe Maureen had some answers, her or that man she was with.

  Jo could use an answer or two about now.

  She scanned again, looking for an echo. Eyes closed, she concentrated on calm and centering. Calm would help a few other things, things like the sweat forming on her palms and trickling down her armpits in a most un-lady-like display of gibbering terror.

  Calm. Centering got her into this. It could get her out again. She concentrated on her breathing. Where was the sister? Maureen knew the way here, she knew the way back. Simple.

  That way.

  Her compass pointed through the woods, a line near the ancient holly. There was a stile over the fence, flat stones set into the wall to make a set of steps no cow or pig could follow. Goats sure as hell could but the Irish were never big on goats.

  She decided to just go and call it Ireland, ignoring the sunshine. Having a name cut back on the terror.

  A trail led away from the stile, back into the shadows under the trees. Jo followed it into a fairy-tale forest, dark and old and musty and watchful, full of ancient dangers. The trees wore faces crusted with lichen beards and split peelings of bark hair, drowsing faces with closed eyes and mouths. Jo thought she'd just as soon they never woke up. She remembered fairy-tale dangers and felt her fingernails digging into her palms.

  Again, she forced herself to relax. After all, she wasn't big enough to be worth eating.

  Well, she was bigger than the woodcutter's children. Fairy-tale forests had teeth. Big Bad Wolves, the Gingerbread Witch, the Black Dragon at the Ford--dangers lurked in the shadows and waited for lunch to walk into their jaws.

  Stop it! I'm walking right into Maureen's paranoid dreams, not some storybook dragon's mouth. Next thing I know, the trees are going to start talking to me.

  She scuffed her boots in the litter on the trail, rustling along through the dead leaves and branches, trying to substitute anger for fear. She was hot. Some of that sweat was earned, dressed as she was for winter in Maine. She stuffed her hat and gloves into a pocket.

  What the hell was she going to do with this cold-weather crap? She'd need it again on the way home.

  A hiss froze her in her tracks. Something large moved among the trees--something as big, as slow-moving, as confident as a bear or moose.

  Bears don't hiss. Moose don't hiss.

  Darkness filled the trail, a heavy glittering darkness that swirled and coiled like a twining anaconda in the Amazon jungle.

  Oh, shit!

  Chapter Thirteen

  David thought that somebody sure had wrung a lot of mileage out of a single set of building plans. Maureen's new tenement looked like a clone of the one she had shared with Jo, and there had been five others just like them in the blocks between the two. Typical three-story wooden rat-palaces, all seemed to have been built within ten years of each other back around the 1920s. They were probably all owned by the same family of slumlords off in California.

  He squinted against the sunlight, trying to see if the shades were up or down.

  It looked as if somebody was awake. He hoped it was Maureen and not that freaky gangster of hers. Brian had never done anything hostile, but something about him reminded David of a police Doberman. Whether he was hurt or not, you moved carefully around him and kept your hands in plain sight.

  Jo had said she was going to see Maureen, might be late. Noon was more than late. Noon was worry-time.

  He took the stairs two at a time, muttering about the length of time that it took to get a phone installed. The apartment was wired already; he knew that from helping to move them in. It shouldn't be much more of a job than flipping electrons at the central office and assigning a number. So could Verizon do it in less than a week?

  No. David knocked and waited.

  He'd raised his hand to knock again when he heard the click and rattle of someone inside. Chains, bolts, shiny new dead-bolt lock--either Maureen or Brian didn't want surprise visitors, that's for sure. The little round eye of a spy-hole in the door also looked new.

  Brian answered the door. Damn. The gangster wore a tee shirt, jeans, bare feet, and a spectacular set of bruises, but he looked a hell of a lot better than he had a couple of nights ago. He barely limped, and he used both hands to reset the locks. That arm and shoulder must be healing.

  "Is Jo here?"

  That earned David a startled glance, followed by narrowed eyes. "No. I thought Maureen went over to your flat."

  Double damn.

  "I haven't seen Jo since last night. She went to the Quick Shop to check on Maureen. I thought maybe they both came back here and talked girl-talk all night."

  Brian sat down at a kitchen table that must have come from the same factory as Jo's. Hell, it looked like it had the same knife-cuts in the plastic laminate and the same dents in the zinc edging. David hovered near the door and kept that table between him and the Doberman, just in case.

  The kitchen smelled like a lab--or a hospital. Then details registered: surgical forceps and a few scraps of black thread lay on the table, next to bottles of antiseptic and a scattering of chess pieces.

  David blinked and shook his head in disbelief as Brian snipped another stitch with a pair of tiny stainless-steel scissors. He swapped them for the forceps and
teased more black thread out of his own arm. The wound looked like it was weeks old rather than two days, edges a deep purple with the shiny gloss of fresh-healed tissue and a few peeling scraps of dead skin.

  "I heal fast," Brian said. "Runs in the family." He snipped the last two stitches, pulled them, and swabbed the arm with peroxide. It foamed gently in the holes left by the thread, spreading a thin tang of excess oxygen.

  Brian cleared away the medical debris and wrapped his tools up in a green nylon field kit. "So they decided to take a girl's night out? They need a break from us, now and then. And vice-versa."

  David shook his head. "I called the night manager for the store. Maureen went out on a break and never came back. The man said to tell her she's fired. He said Jo came in a couple of minutes later and went out again, looking for her. He's pissed."

  Brian got up and poured a cup of coffee, lifted his eyebrows at David to offer him the same, and then shrugged.

  "One other thing." David paused and drummed his fingers on the table. "The manager said Maureen left with this person, he wasn't sure if it was a man or a woman. Thin, well dressed, dark hair, dark skin. Not black, he said, more like Spanish or Italian. Good manners. Sound like anybody you know?"

  Coffee splashed all over the floor.

  "I guess the answer is yes." David stopped, rather than let his voice edge into the snarl he felt his face forming. When he could control his tongue, he went on. "Is she in danger? Is Jo in danger?"

  "Maybe." Brian growled, the kind of sound you'd expect from a bear cornered in a cave. "Probably. Bloody pig-headed bitch wouldn't listen to me!"

  David's heart turned over and froze. "Forget about cleaning up that mess! We're going to the police!"

  Brian ignored him, sopping up blotches of hot liquid.

  "What the fuck's the matter with you, man? Don't you care about Maureen?"