Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  There will be a reckoning, she whispered to herself. You will suffer ten times what you did to me.

  Slowly, gently, Dougal carried her down stone corridors and up stone stairways into brighter, sweeter-smelling, warmer rooms. She lost herself in his arms, drowsing even though she didn't feel half as hungry and tired as she had before.

  His encircling arms felt so warm, so strong, so protective. They were the arms of a warrior, her warrior, to fight for her and for her friends. She smelled his maleness, and it wasn't threatening. He wasn't Brian, but at least he was the right species.

  "Brian. Jo. David. Danger." Talking was an effort.

  "It's night now. We'll start our hunt in the morning."

  Good. Sleep first, then duty.

  Warm moisture tickled her nose, touched with lavender and soap and a faint resinous burning smell like incense. She opened her eyes again. He had carried her into a smaller room, tiled, warm, softly lit. Vivaldi played quietly in the distance.

  She blinked with surprise. It was a frigging California bathroom, with huge spa tub recessed into the floor and skylights that showed a moon nearly full and towels that looked like they were about an acre across and three feet thick. Some castle her lover kept, bidets and surround showers and full-length mirrors framed by sweeps of ivy climbing to the beams overhead. Stereo speakers hung high in the corners.

  The room even had a goddamn fireplace in one corner, lit with fresh birch logs to scent the air. She blinked again and shook her head, trying to chase the illusion away.

  He smiled down at her. "You were expecting an outhouse? We're not the Sassenach here, not barbarians."

  He helped her undress and kissed her again with a gentle caress that warmed her belly and made her cheeks tingle. Then she settled into the absolute bliss of hot water and soap.

  When she surfaced again, he was sitting on the tiles by the side of the bath, smiling quietly, holding a glass of beer and a genuine, non-mirage, Swiss-and-ham-on-rye, sandwich. She grabbed for it with a sudden lurch and splatter of suds, but he gently pushed her hand aside and fed her himself, alternating bites of sandwich and strong kosher pickle washed down by sweet dark beer.

  The beer seemed to go straight to her head, bypassing her stomach. It called out for more, loud enough for him to hear, but he shook his head.

  "You shouldn't eat or drink too much, too suddenly. It will make you sick. Tomorrow, the day after, you will build up gently. This is all you should have, for now."

  She splashed him. He dunked her head under water, and she got soap up her nose. He massaged shampoo into her hair and washed her back and gently, erotically, teased other parts of her awakening body. Maureen floated in a warm, fuzzy bliss.

  "Time to get out."

  She shook her head, not denying but trying to wake up. The whole scene felt like a dream. She stood, climbed out of the tub, felt soft warm towels fold her to their heart. Her hair dried itself. She caught a glimpse of something slim and pink and elegant in one of the steamy mirrors. She preened and posed for an instant, thinking that stranger didn't look at all bad for an escapee a few minutes out of Buddy Johnson's dungeon.

  A heavy door opened directly into his bedroom, a huge space of stone and wood panels and richly embroidered drapes and arched beams overhead. Weapons and animal heads hung the walls and furs warmed the wooden floor. She stood on one, kneading it with her bare toes and soaking up the sensual bliss.

  Dougal lifted the towel robe from her shoulders, and she wondered at the warm air on her naked body, such a contrast with the stone and the gloom and damp she'd always associated with castles. Such a delight, magic was, to allow both comfort and grandeur.

  Then Dougal took her in his arms again, lifting her gently and carrying her to his bed. Darkness stirred at the back of her head, a fear long felt and fought.

  Man. Bed. Sex. He was going to make love to her. She had feared this, struggled against it. It was something painful and evil. She had sworn to kill, to die, avoiding it.

  But that was all Buddy Johnson. Buddy was locked behind cold iron, in the dungeon.

  She relaxed. Dougal wouldn't hurt her. He loved her. Sex between a man and woman who loved each other was sacred, not evil. Even Father Donovan had said so. Sex was a sacrament of God.

  His kisses were warm on her breast, gentle, and her nipples hardened as if they were something independent of her mind and body. His fingers probed and caressed, below, a delicate and knowing touch. Dougal kissed her belly with a final, tender promise before he stepped away from the bed to undress and join her.

  She closed her eyes, waiting for him, trusting in him, and fell sound asleep.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Jo felt invulnerable, and it scared her shitless.

  She knew there were things out there that would love to munch her up like a cocktail olive. The dragon was one of them. And here she was actively looking for it, instead of beating feet in the opposite direction like a sensible woman. So why did this damned forest act like she was a frigging rhino with PMS?

  She crawled out from under the holly tree where she had spent the night, squinted at the morning sun, and walked to the stream--scratching and yawning and generally unlovely, picking dead leaves out of her hair. The great outdoors rated about three-point-five on a scale of ten, as far as she was concerned. Unlike Maureen, Jo preferred civilization.

  She wanted coffee instead of water from the creek. She wanted a hot shower and some clean clothes. She wanted a pizza with anchovies and mushrooms and sausage and green peppers, washed down by a big frosty pitcher of dark beer.

  She wanted toilet paper.

  Nobody has ever written an ode to toilet paper, she thought. One of the greatest inventions of modern man, and it goes totally unnoticed. I'm going to buy a ton of it when I get back.

  Her fire was dead ash and charcoal on scorched stone. She didn't need to light another one: there was nothing to cook. Oh, she could catch some more of those terminally stupid trout. Half-charred fish for breakfast sounded really great. It just needed hunger for a sauce.

  Make that starvation.

  She splashed cold water on her face and scrubbed her hands with sand from the stream after fertilizing some bushes. So much for morning rituals. She thought she should find the trail pretty soon. She hadn't run that far downstream after panicking.

  That hadn't mattered after climbing out of the sinkhole. She'd only been able to walk for maybe five minutes before her adrenaline ran out.

  She tugged Maureen's jacket closer around her shoulders, snuggling against the morning chill. Another problem with the Great Outdoors was the lack of central heating.

  Or maybe she always felt cold because she was always hungry. She looked at her wrist and then tried spanning it with her other hand. She was definitely losing weight. She'd never had much body fat to start with, and those trout weren't keeping up. Better find that dumb man and take him out for pizza before she faded into an Irish ghost.

  Jo laid her hand on a rough-barked old willow and listened with her inner ear. All she got was that static hiss pulsing quietly as if she was listening to the blood rushing in her own ears. The land lived, and somewhere in that life, David wandered.

  Scattered, he'd whispered. He'd only focused on her fear and anger. Now that she was out of immediate danger, he'd gone cloudy again, lost in the slow drift of the forest.

  The agenda for the day was move upstream, find the trail, and follow it back to the dragon. Anything beyond that was beyond her horizon. She didn't want to even think about those teeth and meat-hook claws, those razor-edged scales, those cold yellow lizard eyes. But they were tied to David, and she had to go.

  The stream burbled quietly, talking to itself like a contented baby playing with his toes. She followed it upstream, dodging tangles of briar and deadfalls and wet nasty-smelling patches of the forest floor that threatened to suck the boots right off her feet. She was amazed at what she had run through on the way downstream. Had run right straight throug
h and never even noticed.

  Suddenly, the forest thinned, and the trail cut across the water. Directions to Dragon World, she thought. Take a right at the first traffic light, go straight on from there. You can't miss it. Biggest attraction in the whole frigging forest. Thrills and chills for all ages.

  Like those teeth, she thought, and that chill settled deep in her belly. She remembered those steak-knife teeth, hanging about two inches in front of her nose. She remembered the cold hardness of the claw hooked under the waistband of her jeans, holding her down.

  Arguments that had been tickling at the back of her head forced their way forward and gained a voice. Just what exactly was she doing? Why didn't she just sit down for a minute on that nice convenient moss-covered rock and meditate on her actions before they become fatal?

  She was going to find out what was happening to David and stop it. If that dragon was part of it, she was going to chop it up into paté and spread it on crackers.

  With a Swiss army knife?

  With a frigging piece of chipped flint, if that's all she had. She was hungry.

  She could get seriously dead trying. She remembered a Nature program Maureen had watched last month on PBS, they had a Parental Advisory at the start of it. Remembered what the tiger's fangs did to that cute little deer. Ugly. Jo reminded herself that she was female, about five foot two and a hundred pounds before she went on a diet, and used to shriek at creepy-crawly things and ask Maureen to kill spiders.

  But she'd just killed a man, yesterday.

  Did she? Who did she think had been following her?

  Oh, shit!

  Jo broke out of her funk and grabbed the gun. She twisted from side to side, nervously checking the shadows under rocks and the distant trunks of trees, but saw nothing dangerous. She shoved her left hand into the forest dirt and felt the same vague sense of something cold and angry watching, something afraid and staying just beyond sight.

  The chill of it had forced her into hiding. The holly tree had been her natural barbed wire, a guard no man or animal could sneak past without making noises in the dark. It had welcomed her, as if it had turned its barbs aside to let her in and then closed the gate behind her. David's work, she'd thought, but when she tried to talk to him through the trunk all she'd found was the same static heartbeat. The forest protected her but wouldn't speak to her.

  David.

  Was David worth dying for? She wasn't talking metaphor. She was talking about the thing she'd called T. Rex. With cause.

  She was talking about David. She was talking about the best all-around lover she'd ever found. She was talking about the only man who'd ever got her thinking about cribs and diapers and maybe tossing the condoms in the trash.

  That was just her biological clock ticking. Men were men, interchangeable parts. She'd quit counting how many she'd screwed.

  No, she hadn't. The number was fifteen. That was just practice. That was just a large enough statistical sample to tell her how special David was.

  Special enough to die for?

  Jo sat on her rock, chilled. Dying. Not having David in her life. The two feelings left her equally empty. At least with the dragon, dying wouldn't take all that long.

  Special enough to die for.

  She stood up, pulled the pistol out of her pocket, and walked quietly down the trail.

  The forest watched her. She felt it, the mixed fear and protection all around her, the mixed fear and rage behind her. Whatever, whoever, was following her--it hated her but wasn't about to tangle with her. The fear was stronger. The forest told her that.

  Raucous cries filtered through the trees ahead, caws and croaks that even a city girl could identify as crows. Jo slowed down, a cold lump forming in her chest. Crows and ravens were scavengers. A mob of them usually meant dead meat.

  The chill spread down to her fingers and toes. That was how they always found the bodies in the Westerns, she remembered. By following the vultures. Grandpa used to tell his tales about the war, about the crows over the battlefield, picking at the dead. He'd talked about rats, too.

  David.

  The stranger had said David was dying. She was too late.

  The cold turned her heart to ice. Jo staggered off the trail and pressed her forehead against the rough bark of a tree. David. Dead. She felt the corrugations of the trunk biting into her skin and wanted to pound her skull against them until the blood ran and her head split open and the pain ended in oblivion.

  David. Dead.

  Instead, she dug her fingernails into the bark as if she was a cat, sharpening them. Fiona, the shadow had said. Dougal. The bastard and bitch who ran this freak-show world. Her rage started to burn through her fingers, and resinous smoke rose where she touched the bark.

  "Dougal and Fiona," she growled. Somebody should tell the ravens, dinner was about to be served in some other locations. Jo snarled. A part of her froze at the sound, so like a hungry lion stalking through the African plains.

  {. . . not . . . dead . . .}

  The whispers returned to mock her. David's voice rose from the tree, from the sticky pinesap gumming her fingers where she had gouged straight through to living wood.

  She stared at her nails, at the grooves cut into the bark. Some bear must have done that. She'd seen that on PBS, too, another Nature program. That's how bears marked their territory. She couldn't have done that; she hadn't even split a nail. She'd just put her fingers where the bear had already torn the bark.

  {. . . anger . . .}

  She gritted her teeth and snarled again, this time with words.

  "You want anger, I'll show you anger! I'll turn this goddamn tree into a torch! I'll burn your forest flat, your fucking vampire forest living off of David's body! I'll roast your god-almighty-damned land alive for taking my man from me!"

  She cranked the Bic up to maximum flame and held it against the resin and bark. Her rage glared into the dampness, forcing steam to curl out and then smoke and then flame as the green wood spat into fire against its will. She drove the heat of fire deep into the heartwood of the pine. Burn, baby, burn!

  {No!}

  David's voice screamed pain as if it was his own flesh in the fire. Jo shuddered, and she beat the flames into silence. Boiling pitch clung to her palms and hardened. She peeled it off, leaving clean undamaged skin behind. Illusions.

  The land is David, and David is the land, whispered the remembered voice. She'd taken that as metaphor.

  She'd joined Maureen in the world of delusion, of voices in her head, of strangers following her around. Had she ever shot that man, been in the sinkhole, run screaming from the avenue of skulls? Was the dragon real?

  {. . . real . . .}

  David.

  The crows still called their brothers to the feast. Jo stared at the charred circle of bark on the pine, the claw-marks matching her fingers, the thin white scars crossing her palms where the dragon scales had cut her.

  Those cuts had healed too fast. This was a land of magic.

  If David was dead, she had to see his body. She had to bury him. Then she would go and meet the owner of this forest. Debts would be paid.

  With interest.

  The cold anger carried her down the path, into the thin smell of death that grew into a garbage reek so thick she almost had to lean against the air to walk. Nearer and nearer came the raucous cackle of the crows, until they pounded her ears and the hiss of their wings filled the spaces in between their calls.

  There were too many birds. You couldn't feed that many crows from the fields of Armageddon. And then she saw the long, low lump ahead, crawling with a buzzing horde of flies and suddenly realized the flies were the crows, and what she saw was huge.

  It was the dragon. The frigging dragon was dead, not David.

  She gagged at the thick stench of rotten meat and the maggot-crawl of crows and ravens. They tore threads of meat from the carcass, fought, swirled overhead, waddled around like overweight ducks with the gorge of carrion in their bellies.


  She wrestled her stomach back into line. Damn good thing she'd skipped breakfast. To hell with what killed the dragon. The question she wanted answered was, Where was David?

  She saw scraps of cloth on the ground, fragments of curved fiberglass, a scattering of arrows. She forced her way through the heavy air and found a discarded backpack. She found a tangle of hooked-thorn green briar wrapped into the wicker effigy of a man David's height and weight.

  Dying, she remembered. Dying, inch by inch as the strangling python of thorns sucks his blood, his breath, his very soul out of his body and spreads it through the land.

  The icy lump in her chest spread to her lungs and blocked her breathing. She forgot the racket of the crows. She forgot the stench. She knelt down by the green man and stared at it.

  David.

  The forest told her that was David.

  She touched it. The thorns writhed away from her hand as if they refused to bite her. She'd touched the leg of the form and now she could see blue denim between the vines. David was inside.

  The denim was warm, even though the trees shaded her. If she watched carefully, a slight swell and fall moved the briars around the thing's chest. David was still alive.

  She fumbled the knife out of her pocket. She split a nail opening it. She slipped the blade under a single stem and cut carefully, delicately, away from David's leg.

  The scream jerked her hand away--the deep piercing scream of torture as if she'd lit bamboo slivers under his fingernails. The cut end of the briar writhed like a snake, away from her, away from the knife. It dripped the thick crimson of human blood.

  {I'll die if you cut me loose. I'll be trapped outside my body.}

  The clarity of David's voice jerked her out of her robot movements. He was here. He was focused.

  Fire had hurt him. The knife had hurt him. Jo sat back on her heels and stared at the vines. She could kill them with her eyes, she knew. If she could burn wet brush with her glare, set fire to a living tree in springtime, then she could scorch those vines into ash and charcoal.