Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  And David would die.

  She touched the vines again. "How can I set you free?"

  {. . . master . . .}

  Now he'd gone fuzzy again, just the single word coming through the static. Just before, he'd even said "I," not that goddamn "We."

  "I'll fry your Master's liver for lunch," she muttered. She reached for another vine of the briar, and it twisted away from her in fear. The knife flashed in her hand.

  {NO!} The mental scream was deafening.

  David's pain wrenched her guts. Another vine leaked drips of blood onto the dry leaves. "Can't do that," she hissed. "Fucking blood loss will kill him even if the pain doesn't."

  {. . . leave . . .}

  He was fading. Even with her hand on the stems wrapping his arm, he was fading into the static. Heedless of the thorns, she dug down underneath the briars and touched the skin of his wrist. His pulse beat weak and slow, and she felt only the faintest echo of life and thought.

  It was as if his soul was spreading out, like those drops of blood were mixing with the water of a pool, starting out pure red and gradually thinning away to purple smoke and then the merest dark haze before disappearing completely in the blue reflection of the sky. Another day, maybe another hour, and he would be gone beyond recall.

  She dropped the knife. She squatted on the forest floor, staring at the vines forming the effigy of the man she loved, and thought.

  David was dying. She was his only chance.

  Every thought led back to the same point: the forest's hold was too strong and too intimate for outside force to work. She could only see one place where it might be vulnerable, one place she could fight it. She could force him to focus and hold him together, waiting for a miracle.

  Slowly, gently, as if she was reaching for one of those over-trusting trout, she captured one of the rooted vines. The thorns twisted away from her flesh, and she jerked suddenly to force them to cut her palm. Her own blood touched the green stem.

  "I will follow you," she whispered. "Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge." She felt her face set into a grim mask of stone.

  "I will track you to the ends of this land and gather every bit of you and bring you back. I will search every hill and hollow, every root and branch, I will search the rock and soil and water and the very sky if it be necessary. I swear it by the sun and moon and all the stars above." She paused for breath and emphasis.

  "I will bring you back or die with you."

  {Jo, don't!}

  Slowly, gently, precisely, as if she was arranging flowers for a Zen master, Jo draped the vine three times around her wrist and forced it to scratch the skin. She held the stem against her blood. She felt it root. She sent her mind into the thin filament joining her to the land and asked the darkness she found there to bring her David.

  The wordless hiss touched her hand and embraced her. She wrapped herself around its fog and squeezed it into the semblance of a man and held it. She looked around for her body and the daylight of the forest.

  Darkness surrounded them.

  {David?}

  * * *

  Sean leaned against a tree and coughed again, gently, the noise buried under the ravens' calls. He'd heal so much faster if he didn't try to move.

  But then he'd lose her.

  That bitch was his weapon against Fiona and Brian. That bitch owed him blood. He tried to weigh the balance. Revenge would be satisfied, either way. He fingered the heavy knife Fiona had taken from Brian.

  The woman knelt there by her lover. She didn't move.

  He stared at her back, willing her to move, willing her to speak, willing her to smell or hear or feel him through the land, willing her to notice him and pull out that ugly piece of human metal that never should have worked.

  If she sat there much longer, she'd make his decision for him. He knew how to find his dearest siblings without her help.

  His gut ached. His gut refused even the thought of food. The simple act of drinking water felt like it tore his chest and belly into shreds. Maybe it would be easier just to die, like a gut-shot deer in the woods.

  As the humans would say, "Up yours!" he thought. Next week, he'd be better. The week after that, he'd be back to normal. He'd been through this before. He would survive.

  Survive. He smiled. The full moon would rise tomorrow night. So much for Maureen's prophecy. Live one more night and he would break the doom she'd laid upon him.

  The sister still knelt there, her back toward him. Sean drew the knife and stole forward, as silent as a cat. Who needed magic when his enemies were fools?

  Something snagged his ankle, and he fell. Instinct and training tucked his fall into a roll, but his gut stabbed him and broke the silent flow. He staggered to his feet in a rustle of leaves and cracking twigs.

  She still knelt there like a statue.

  Sean shifted his weight to move again. A vise tightened around his leg, and he jerked his concentration away from her defenseless back.

  It was a vine. A green vine wrapped around his ankle and up his leg, its tendrils questing upwards. He snarled and hacked the vicious thing loose from the ground, ripping its thorns out of his pants and flesh. Red blossoms of blood tracked the cloth where it had twined.

  Even cut loose, the thing twisted like a mad snake in his hands. He shuddered and threw it across the clearing.

  The dead leaves rustled as if disturbed by a thousand insects. Smooth green curls and loops twisted out of the forest floor, searching. Sean knew they searched for him.

  He backed away. Gritting his teeth with concentration, shuffling his feet to avoid hidden traps and snares, he edged further and further away from the silent figure kneeling amid the briars.

  The forest quieted.

  So. Sean chuckled silently. He'd wanted a balance. He hadn't been able to decide between his hates. Now it looked like Brian and Fiona had just moved up to the top of the list.

  And it looked like Dougal didn't own this part of the forest any more. Sean wondered when the bastard would find out. And how.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  All Maureen could do was run. Buddy Johnson was stronger than she was. He was faster. Above all, he was meaner, and she fled through the backyards of her childhood. Sweat drenched her. Hedges tore at her skin and lashed her eyes. Again he caught her and dragged her into the overgrown yew bushes behind the Ford's old carriage house. Again he stripped off her shirt and shorts and pinned her naked body against the peeling clapboards and rough fieldstone of the empty building.

  And then it changed, as she stepped aside in a surreal jiu-jitsu move. Time and again, she cycled through the pain and terror of the chase until he caught her and groped her and forced her down on the prickly dead needles under the yews. Each time, she turned into mist and slipped away.

  Heat boiled in her belly. Her power flowed across the years and she seized him like a doll, pulling one leg from the other until he split from crotch to forehead like a wishbone. "Make a wish," she whispered savagely, in her dream. "Make a wish."

  She threw the bloody pieces away and twisted her world onto a new path.

  * * *

  Maureen woke slowly to warmth and softness. Images floated through her head, the fragments and remains of dreams--hot, wet, erotic dreams of Brian's touch, Brian's kisses, Brian enfolding her and covering her naked body with his. She smelled the sharpness of his male sweat, felt its touch on her skin, felt the drying sticky residue of him on her bare thighs.

  Her thoughts drifted in the place where such things were possible, away from the panic his actual touch would bring. In her dreams, she controlled things. She made the moves. She made the rules. She acted on him. That killed the memories.

  She stretched lazily, like a cat, basking in the feel of silk sheets on her bare skin. A bed like this was a work of art.

  Then her stomach growled and disturbed the peace.

  She opened her eyes. Dark beams arched overhead, alive with the deep golden brown of anc
ient varnish. Sunlight in tall windows shot beams of warmth across the room to fall on match-board mahogany paneling, splashing light on the steely gleam of hanging swords and lances, bringing out flashes of glittering blue and green in the tapestries, firing red sandstone into glowing coals.

  Dougal's bedroom.

  Tapered columns of golden oak stood at the four corners of the bed. The canopy and hangings they had once supported were gone; magic or technology took away the need to wrap the sleepers within a tent, as if they were camping inside the cold, damp castle. Her bathrobe hung, waiting, on the nearest post, and she smelled the fresh birch-smoke of a new-laid fire in the bathroom. She even sniffed a hint of coffee. Good coffee.

  Coffee that she didn't have to make, didn't have to wait for. Servants were a wonderful idea.

  Dougal grunted beside her, rolled over, and settled back to the slow, steady breathing of sound sleep. She turned to him. He lay face up, naked and half-covered by the sheets. Her eyes narrowed, comparing him to her dreams of Brian. She shook her head, gently so she wouldn't wake him. He still looked like a shaved chimpanzee stitched back together after a bad car wreck.

  So it was done. She remembered dreams, but her brain had shoved the rest off into a corner and walled it up with stone. Somewhere deep inside her belly, sperm and ova played their game of blind-man's-bluff with the calendar. She studied his face, relaxed in sleep. What kind of children would he father? Not that it would make any difference . . . .

  She quietly lifted herself up on one elbow and looked down at him. A sardonic smile touched her lips as she remembered his arrogant trust in his powers.

  Then she drove her fist into his throat.

  Every ounce of her weight and will rode behind the blow. He gasped, and his arms clutched at her. She rolled away, but one hand snatched her left arm and squeezed her biceps in a vise. Fire shot straight up her shoulder to her neck. The other hand groped for her, and she slashed her own right hand across his face, sinking her fingernails deep into his eye-sockets. A rasping scream forced its way out of his throat and he let go.

  She tumbled to the floor, smashing first her elbow and then her head on the wood. Dazed, she rolled through a black tunnel shot with the fire of her hurts. Something smacked her bare back, and she shook black spider-webs from her eyes.

  She stared at the bed, half-stunned. Dougal coughed and spat red on the sheets. More blood seeped between his fingers where they covered his eyes. He tried to shout for help, but the noises came out more like a pig squealing than like words.

  Maureen staggered to her feet. Weapons. Weapons lay all over the fucking place. She needed something with range. She didn't dare let him get his hands on her again. Her head still spun, and her left eye refused to track with the right.

  She groped around the brown lump supporting her, knocking a lamp and other trash to the floor. Her knuckles brushed something heavy and cold. She hefted it for throwing before she found a hilt nestled in her hand.

  Blinking, shaking her head, she forced her eyes to work. The damn thing looked like Brian's knife, the heavy bent one he had used to kill Liam. They must be more common than she thought. She jerked it from its sheath, gripped it with both hands, and made her legs cooperate well enough to stagger back to the bed.

  "Got to stay clear of the arms," she muttered to herself. "Hit and run."

  His head tracked the sound. She swung at his leg and spun away with the weight of the heavy knife. Blood splashed like a fountain. Instead of either attacking or defending, Dougal dropped his hands and stared at her with ruined eye-sockets.

  "How?" His crushed larynx turned the word into a croak.

  "Schizophrenia," she grunted. The heavy blade chopped into his groping arm.

  "Depersonalization."

  He jerked again. Fingers flew loose in a red spray.

  "Dissociation." The words spat out of her mouth with each gasping breath of effort.

  "Delusions of persecution and conspiracy." The blade stuck in his chest. She threw her weight against it, snarling the last word, to pull it free.

  "Blunting and incongruity of affect." The steel glanced off his skull, laying bone open to the sunlight.

  "Hallucinations." One of his hands flopped to the floor.

  "Withdrawal from reality." The knife carved through his belly and swung her like a spinning discus-thrower with its momentum.

  She stopped, gasping for breath. "Also . . . occasional . . . violent . . . behavior . . . against . . . authority . . . figures. You really should study more psychology."

  Hands on her knees, she panted and cleared her head. Her inner voice told her she should have waited and regained her strength. She was almost too weak to kill him.

  Almost, she snarled back. She straightened up and studied the carnage.

  Splatters of gore painted a Jackson Pollock canvas across the bed and floor. She traced a line of teardrop spots up the wall, arcing across where they had been flung by the swinging blade.

  Death as Art, her critic offered. Performance Art.

  The canvas included her body. Her arms dripped red to the elbows. Splashes and smears of blood covered her breasts, her belly, and her thighs. She ignored the scratching noises of a severed hand twitching on the floor, and swabbed blood out of her eyes with her bathrobe from the night before.

  Dougal was still alive. Arms and legs spouted red, great gashes tore his chest and ripped through his belly, but he still lived. She was a lousy killer.

  She straddled his slippery body like a lover and hacked at his neck until his head sprang loose in a gush of blood. She snarled in triumph, grabbed his hair, and held the head up like a trophy, miming Perseus with Medusa's crawling snakes.

  Then she flung the blade away and stood up to carefully set the head on one corner post of the bed. It hissed and rattled its teeth at her as if it still tried to talk with no breath to form the words. Staring into the gouged eye-sockets, she smiled.

  "Welcome to my reality, Dougal MacKenzie."

  Her wrists burned from the iron bands, and her ankles, and her throat. Where had the bastard hidden the keys?

  She wiped her hands and feet: she didn't want red smears to disturb the impromptu beauty of the bedroom, didn't want to leave anything to show her wandering through the scene. Just Dougal's corpse, and the bed, and the splattered blood, with his severed head presiding over all. Art.

  His clothing lay, cleaned and neatly folded, on a chair. Servants, again, coming and going without waking her. Once the bastard had finally let her sleep, they could have marched a frigging brass band through the room and she wouldn't have twitched an eyelid. She didn't even know if she'd slept one night, or two, or a goddamn week.

  The keys were in his pants. She clicked the locks free, using a mirror over one dresser for the one around her neck. Each ring of steel left red circles behind, like narrow bands of sunburn.

  Even the mirror wore dots of blood from the slaughterhouse. She stared at her face, at her naked body, at the drips and smears of blood painting her, and suddenly the slimy feel and smell disgusted her. She staggered to the bathroom, weak and vaguely sick.

  Bath, she thought. Rinse his blood, his touch, his semen from my body. She knelt by the tub and spun knobs, splashing the first hot gush of water over her arms and letting the crimson tendrils swirl down the drain before setting the plug.

  "Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?" she murmured, flashing back to Shakespeare. She flopped back on her heels and waited for the water to rise.

  Coffee twitched her nose again. An insulated pot waited, on a marble counter by the fireplace. Her clothes lay on a chair nearby, cleaned and folded. They'd even cleaned her boots. She drew a cup of caffeine, hot and black, and swallowed the heat of it to settle her belly, and stared at the fire.

  Fire. Her memories of Brian and Liam, of the winter alley, played like a videotape in her brain. With all she'd done, was Dougal really, truly dead? He hadn't burned, and those teeth kept clacking
curses at her . . . .

  She rummaged through cabinets and drawers, dumping towels, bottles, tins, and boxes on the floor. Oil, scented, for massage, and rubbing alcohol. A shelf of booze: brandy, whiskey, rum, vodka, unopened bottles without tax seals on the corks. She carried armloads of bottles back into the blood-drenched room--once, twice, a third time--and smashed them on the bed, the wooden paneling, and the floor.

  Swinging the knife with grunting frenzy, she hacked chairs into splinters and piled them over the body. The severed hand tried to clutch her when she threw it on the pyre. She buried it with drawers jerked out of a tall oak dresser.

  The water had nearly filled the tub when she dropped the knife and sheath on the bathroom floor. She shut the taps and searched in vain for matches. Finally, she growled in frustration and grabbed a flaming log from the fireplace. The coals didn't even warm her hand.

  The alcohol caught fire with a greedy surge of flame, leaping blue tongues spreading across the soaked cloth and dripping to the wooden floor. Yellow flame joined the blue as the oil caught, and the silk, and the wood. She stared at the hungry blaze for a minute, as the pieces of Dougal twitched in the pyre. Smoke billowed up, and the smell of burning hair filled the room.

  She turned and studied the bathroom door. Nearly three inches of ironbound cross-ply oak and a frame set in solid stone, it looked like it was designed to hold against battle-axes. She closed it behind her and set the latch. Fire could gnaw on that for hours before breaking through.

  Blood. Her reflection in the mirrors disgusted her, the sticky runnels and smears of drying crimson. Soaking in that would make her puke. She flicked levers in the shower and felt the water grow hot immediately, and sluiced Dougal from her body, out of her hair.

  Muffled thuds shook the wall, as if something had exploded in the bedroom beyond the stone. She thought of windows blowing out and letting in fresh air, just like Backdraft.

  Let fire purify his bed of the stains of rape.

  She shut off the shower, dumped bath oil in the tub, and slipped into the lavender-scented water. She looked up, through the skylights, and saw tendrils of black smoke drifting across the morning sun.