Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  He smiled at her, politely, and nodded as if he often dined with starving tigresses. She measured the distance across the table and put down her knife. Whatever happened next, she'd at least had one decent meal, and she had her own clothes back. Now, if they'd just let her sleep . . . .

  "Maureen, you must become my wife."

  "Why don't you just rape me, you bastard? Don't you have the balls?"

  He studied her quietly, as if he was measuring her hatred and weighing how much to let her know. "You must become truly the Lady of this castle. I want you to bear my children. Unless you come to my bed willingly, you could cast out any seed I plant in you. This is the Summer Country. You wouldn't need a doctor or an abortion. A woman of your blood has such power and more."

  Abortion.

  The word sent shivers down her spine, waking memories of the grisly pictures Father Donovan used to carry when he led his parishioners on the picket line down at Planned Parenthood. Mom had always dragged her daughters along, forcing them to study the horrors while they knelt on the gritty pavement and prayed for the souls of dead babies. Those were such lovely images for a child of five to worship.

  Amazing how deep the programming went. Maureen hadn't been to Mass in years, but the word "abortion" and the memories still made her sick. What did that bearded patriarch on the Sistine Chapel ceiling have to say about the child of rape? Don't punish the child for the sin of its father? Bullshit!

  "What makes you think I wouldn't lie to you, spread my legs, and then strangle you in your bed?"

  He smiled again. It wasn't a friendly smile this time. "I'd know. This is my magic, if you will, the magic by which I train hawks and hounds and dragons. If you said 'yes' today, you'd be lying. I wouldn't trust you. The day will come when you'll mean it. I'll know."

  She stared into her wine. The alcohol and lack of sleep combined to tangle her brain. Dangerous. Good-cop, bad-cop. He'd whipped Padric after ordering him to beat her. When she gave in to Dougal, he'd probably kill Padric just to make her happy. Torture her jailer to death, gouge out those leering eyes that had feasted on every inch and opening of her body and rip the nails from his filthy brutal probing fingers, and she'd be watching every minute to cheer him on. Padric was nothing more than a tool to Dougal.

  The wine, the dinner, they were nothing more than tools to him. He'd starved her to set it up. He knew she needed the booze. He knew she was an alcoholic, a binge drinker. The whole scene gave new meaning to AA's "hitting bottom," didn't it?

  When she gave in to him. Not if.

  A growl formed, deep in her throat. "God damn you straight to Hell!"

  The wine flew across the table, glass and all, splashing his face and chest and arms. He only smiled as Padric pinned her arms and lifted her bodily from her chair. The grip on her arms was an iron clamp as hard and fiery as the bracelets that shorted out her rage.

  Words took too much energy. She spat catfight noises and kicked the empty air. Padric just carried her back and dumped her in her cell.

  * * *

  Something shook her shoulder again, and she burrowed deeper under the pillow. The luxury of smooth clean sheets and a warm comforter were nothing compared to the simple joy of sleep. She'd just gotten to sleep. Deprive a person of sleep long enough and she goes crazy, she muttered to herself. Even just interrupting dreams will do it. And you weren't sane to start with.

  The rude hand shook her again and pulled the pillow off her head. Bright light flooded through her eyelids.

  "Fuck off," she muttered.

  "Maureen, wake up. You've got to help me."

  It was a man's voice. There was a man in her bedroom, and she remembered she was sleeping in her underwear--some frilly transparent stuff more suited for a honeymoon or a whorehouse than for comfort. She clutched the bedclothes around her and forced one eye open.

  She faced a stone wall. She was still in that damned nightmare dungeon cell. Her head pounded with the revenge of the wine, her gut boiled in an uproar over her rampage through the dinner table, and that goddamn hand on her bare shoulder had to be Padric or Dougal.

  She spun around with her hand in a claw, trying to rake his eyes out or at least smack him with the iron bracelet. Dougal caught her wrist, effortlessly. His face was inches from hers, and for an instant she thought he was going to kiss her. She bared her teeth, ready to bite.

  "Maureen, you've got to help me."

  "Why don't you just go off in a corner and fuck yourself?"

  He shook his head. "This isn't for me. Your sister followed you here, and she's in terrible danger."

  "Fucking liar! How the hell would she get here? Did that slimy shithead kidnap her, too?"

  "I don't know how she did it, but she's out in my forest. I didn't bring her here. You've got to help me find her before something eats her."

  Padric stood behind him, looking worried through the bruised welts of the whipping. Hide and seek. Find-the-sister. She tossed the comforter to one side and swung her legs out of her bunk, sneering at the fact that she gave both men a full-beaver shot of her crotch through those stupid panties. Dream on, you rapist bastards.

  Her jeans slipped on over her vanishing hips, much too easily. She ignored the urgency of her bladder and tugged at the zipper. The damned thing jammed, just like usual. Did anybody here sell Calvin Kleins?

  "There's just one thing," Dougal said, blocking her reach for her blouse. "I can't let you leave the keep without agreeing to be my wife."

  Maureen screamed and threw herself at him, teeth and claws and toenails. One flailing hand connected, first the iron wristlet and then her fingers raking across his cheek. She felt his skin ball up under her fingernails, and she growled like an enraged jaguar tasting blood.

  An arm clamped around her neck, lifting her off her feet to kick helplessly. Her vision blurred and turned into a dark tunnel. Her body went limp. She dove into darkness until the arm relaxed and let just enough blood through to her brain to keep a thread of consciousness.

  "Stupid woman," a snake's voice hissed in her ear. "People you care about are in great danger. Your sister is lost and hunted by my animals. Fiona has captured Brian and holds his soul in her deadly little hands. The land is eating David, plants rooting in his flesh and sucking his life out through his sightless eyes. Only you can save them."

  "You put them in danger." She could barely whisper, couldn't find enough breath to rain curses down on his head. "Only cowards take hostages."

  "You can command this castle. You can be mother to mages and witches powerful beyond your dreams. You can be powerful beyond your dreams. What is so bad about sleeping with a man, about bearing children? Motherhood is the true birth of a woman."

  The arm relaxed a shade further, and she could see again. She spat at the face in front of her and ground her teeth when she missed. Too far. At least she could see blood trickling from three parallel scratches across his cheek.

  "I'd sooner fuck a warthog."

  Dougal shook his head in disbelief. "What kind of a woman won't even help save her own sister? Padric, take all these silly luxuries away. The bitch doesn't deserve them."

  This time they chained her to the wall, standing, so she couldn't sleep. They wouldn't even let her use the hole first, so she had to soak her pants and hang there, stinking, wet and shivering again, with her arms tearing out of her shoulder sockets.

  Jo. Brian. David. Some sixth sense about lies said that Dougal had been telling the truth. That bastard had drawn them into this cesspool and dangled them like swords over her head. He gave her such lovely choices: "Fuck me or Jo dies. Bear my children or David will be eaten alive by some damned plant. Bury your own mind in the darkness of my will or lock Brian away from light forever."

  Maureen wept. She wasn't sure whether they were tears of rage or grief or pain, or just her eyes rubbed raw by lack of sleep, but she wept until her cheeks burned from the salt.

  Chapter Nineteen

  "Follow water and you'll find Man. Great adv
ice, sister mine," muttered Jo. "Great advice when you've got reliable Maine granite under your feet. No damn good in limestone country."

  She stared up at blue sky, bright beyond the dark overhanging walls of the sinkhole, and at the shadows of trees. Her sinkhole--the Cynthia Josephine Pierce Memorial Sinkhole, she called it, about thirty feet across and thirty or forty deep. Say it was thirty feet to freedom. That was the width of her apartment. It might as well be a mile.

  Viewed objectively, it was just about the prettiest place she'd ever seen. A Japanese garden's plunge pool sat under the waterfall, lapping at moss-covered rocks. Ferns and delicate bushes draped the walls and framed the outflow where the clear stream dove underground.

  Even the rocks were beautiful, if she forgot that they had damn near busted her head when she fell in. She'd thought they'd busted her left arm, but it had healed too fast for that. Must have been sprained, instead.

  The only thing the scene lacked was an elevator. There was no way out.

  How long had she been down here? Three days? Five? They were all running together, as if somebody had photocopied yesterday and handed it back to her this morning, claiming it was a new assignment.

  Back into the endless loop. She traced out another possible climbing route zigzagging up the sinkhole, from split stone to lump to gnarled root. Every try so far had ended with her stretched across the wall like a splattered spider, groping hopelessly for another hold while her leg muscles imitated a sewing-machine from exhausted tension. Then she'd fall and try to turn it into a jump out into empty air, to miss the rocks and splash into the dubious cold cushion of the pool below.

  Speaking of work. "Bet you're unemployed by now, girl. Rob may believe in flextime, but he likes people to call in if they aren't going to show up. Especially with a deadline coming up this week."

  She was talking to herself now, just to hear something besides the whisper of wind and the hissing water endlessly falling over the lip of her world and flowing away into darkness. Talking to herself, just like a bag-woman wandering the streets.

  Staring at the sky made her eyes water, so she shifted her gaze lower in case something new and interesting had appeared in her gloomy realm. Like maybe a ladder.

  Rob was the least of her problems. He wasn't even her worst problem back in the real world. David would have the cops out dragging the river by now. She shook her head. She'd spent all night worrying about that. Not a damn thing she could do about it, so she saved her energy for important things. Like food.

  She gnawed the last shreds of flesh from the backbone of her last baked trout and then sucked on the bone for any trace of juice or flavor. She'd never thought that unsalted, unbuttered, half-raw, half-burned smoky fish could taste so good she'd hoard the bones.

  Unless some others lurked inside the black mouth of the overflow cave, that was it. Even so, five trout were probably too many for a pool this size. She shook her head with amazement that she could catch the ones she did.

  It was wonderful what a little patience could do for her. She just moved slowly, like she was no threat at all, and slipped her hand up behind the fish and snagged it by its tail. Then she gutted and cleaned the trophy with her Swiss army knife and stuck it over the fire of driftwood the stream had washed into the sinkhole.

  She was burning the last of that, too, except a few chunks too rotten to even smolder, and she was lucky non-smoking Maureen had carried a Bic lighter in her coat pocket along with the useless .38. Otherwise Jo would've been eating raw fish and shivering.

  Or she would have been dead of hypothermia days ago.

  She flexed her left arm for the thousandth time and made a face at the lingering ache right under what passed for muscle in her forearm. It was time to try the wall again.

  A seasoned rock-climber would laugh at her and walk out like a fly, she knew. Probably take two minutes, max. Those idiots could stick to hand- and footholds you couldn't even see, stick to coarse sandpaper glued on overhanging rock. She'd seen it on TV.

  However, she was a city girl. Her idea of climbing was the escalator up to Casual Corner out at the mall. And as far as bodybuilding was concerned, her version of pumping iron involved bedsprings.

  At least she didn't need a bath. A zillion falls into the pool took care of that. Her hairdo was shot to hell, though, and she couldn't guess where to find the nearest electric outlet and blow-dryer.

  Sore arm or no, logic told her to climb now. Then there would still be some coals and scraps of wood to warm her up after she fell in the pool again. She shoved the gun, the knife, and the life-saving Bic lighter into a pocket and zipped it tight. If she did make the top, it was damn sure she wasn't coming back for anything.

  Climb now. If she didn't make it out today, she never would.

  This time she tried the other side of her prison, working on the pig-headed theory that if it looked worse for climbing, it really must be better. She'd done a lot of things like that in her life. She'd gotten away with most of them--so far.

  The first part was easy. The first part was always easy, just clamber up some loose rock fallen from the walls above as the water ate the limestone.

  "Just don't be under the particular part that wants to fall today," she muttered. "You're known for being thick-headed, but that ain't good enough."

  Those TV rock climbers used helmets as well as ropes. She ran a tentative finger over the hot raw lump above her right eye, the track of a chunk of sinkhole that had turned into a portable handhold.

  She looked down. Just like every time before, the hole gave her eight or ten feet for free, high enough to really drive her ankles up her nose if she fell. What she saw wasn't pretty: one reason she'd avoided this side was that the pile of rock stretched further out. The pool sat off-center; if she fell now, she'd splatter instead of splashing.

  She looked up. No fun there, either--the wall overhung her head maybe four feet, five feet in the distance up to the shadow-cut rim. She'd have to hang from her tattered fingernails. She reminded herself that she was the girl who couldn't do a single pull-up in high school gym. Thin was in.

  But she thought it might be better to bash out her brains on the rocks than starve to death. This was talking about thin like a sub-Sahara refugee camp, bones sticking out and dry crinkly hair and skin like a banjo head and bug-eyed alien faces. Not pretty. Not chic.

  She saw a ledge, big enough to stand on or even sit, up above her head. That's what she needed to keep her muscles working, some place she could slack off and relax. Half of her exhaustion came from tensing up, from her own muscles clenching against each other. Shit, last time her jaw had ached worse than her legs after the climb, from gritting her teeth.

  She could fit a boot into that rough spot, wrap her hand around the gritty, chalky knob of stone over there, shift weight onto them and lift the other foot a few inches, rather than trying to swallow the whole elephant in one gulp. She'd gotten herself into trouble just last night, stretching for a foothold about half an inch too high.

  She closed her eyes and concentrated on friction, dragging her boot up the rock-face to search for a little nubbin just big enough for the edge of her sole. Her free hand groped blindly into a faint scratch in the stone, a line like the scoring of a cat's claw where the water had flowed and etched the lime away. It ran vertically and she pulled sideways against it, moving the first hand higher.

  "Breathe, Cynthia Josephine," she muttered. "Always remember to breathe. It's useful."

  Keeping her eyes closed helped. She couldn't see a damned thing, anyway, the stone was so close she had to go cross-eyed to focus on it, nose rubbing its tip raw against the dirty chalk that leaned out as if it wanted to French kiss her right tonsil. Maybe she could use that for support.

  Her right hand found another crack and she risked jamming her fist into it rather than wasting the energy of a finger hold. She groped around with the left, banging up against a dangling root and following it back to the lumpy base of a shrub, then clamped on like she p
lanned to strangle the bastard.

  Her boot toe snagged on a lump of limestone, going up, then hunted around for the top of it coming down again. Gotcha, you mother. Her other foot inched up, found a hairline ledge and twisted sideways to stick by sheer inertia. She shifted weight from point to point gradually, never committing to any hold before she tested it, just moving one thing at a time. It was a dance, a vertical tango with her bod spread all over her gritty lover. Get to the top, and it would be orgasm time.

  She ought to find that ledge any move now, that wide place in the road that would look like downtown Boston in comparison with the microscopic holds she'd been using. Her right hand relaxed and backed out of the crack, fingertips exploring for her lover's hot-spots in the dark. There was the swell of the ledge. She turned her head sideways to look up for the best approach.

  The movement pushed her body out from the rock, maybe half an inch. Her left hand jerked and pebbles rattled down the cliff. Jo plastered herself against the stone again, holding on by body-friction and feeling the coarse surface against cheek, breasts, belly, hips. It flowed past her, grain by scratching grain, and then her boots popped loose from the wall and she was falling again.

  Her head snapped forward, and she looked into a surrealist parachute ride, the tumbled boulders floating up to her like bubbles in a scuba movie. "Don't land on that one," the image said. "It's sharp and unstable."

  Suddenly she felt like a flying squirrel gliding sideways to hit the one over there--it was solid and smooth and firmly rooted. She planted both boots just so, broke her fall with bent knees, threw her weight back just so, and kicked out into a back flip that carried her into the soft cradle of the pool again.

  The cold water smacked her in a belly-flop that burned from her toes right up to her forehead. She snorted water and gasped, flailing her way to the edge of the pool and crawling over moss-slick rock to lie dripping and panting at the bottom of the hole again.

  Right under the frigging waterfall. That was appropriate. The land showed its amusement by pissing on her head.