Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  The cats padded quietly into a gap in the hedge and turned right, where no gap had stood a minute earlier. Right and right and right again they turned, impossibly, just like entering, and then they faced the dead-end again.

  This time it was Fiona instead of a blank wall of hedge.

  Maureen blinked twice to be sure. The hallucination spoke.

  "So that's what set off the alarm. It would be you," she said. "With Dougal dead, it would be you. I warned him."

  Brian's hand twitched toward his knife and then froze. Maureen's heart froze with it.

  "What are you doing here?" she asked, embarrassed by her stupidity even as she mouthed the words.

  "I live here," Fiona answered. "What's your excuse?"

  "I came for Brian."

  Fiona laughed. "He's not yours, love. You didn't want him, when you had the chance. Now you've changed your mind, but you're not strong enough to make it stick."

  Strong enough? Maureen thought. I'm not even strong enough to stand. Brian was holding me up.

  She felt his rigid hand slipping up along her waist, across her ribs, brushing past her breast. She felt like Jell-O oozing out of his grip, down the length of his body, unable to even lift a hand to grab him like a tree. She slipped to her knees and then toppled sideways in a quiet thump. Even the flagstones of the path felt soft and inviting.

  She looked up into Fiona's face and saw pity there--pity and detached amusement. This isn't Fiona, she thought. This isn't magic. I'm just used up. No food. No sleep. Long day. Tired.

  She reached out with her cut left hand and grasped the stem of a rose in the hedge. I tried to set you free, she thought. You, and the cats, and the rowan tree, and Brian. I'm sorry. I just wasn't strong enough.

  {Kill!} echoed in her head, the only answer.

  Maureen tried to snatch her hand back from Fiona's trap. The muscles wouldn't obey. Her whole arm just flopped into the tangle of stems and roots at the base of the hedge.

  The rose didn't follow it. Blood still beaded on her cut palm and oozed slowly down to drip into the soil, to touch the grass at the edge of the path and vanish into the land. Maureen followed a drop along that road, and then another, and another.

  Strange, she thought. It isn't clotting right. Women don't get hemophilia, they just transmit it. Must be short on vitamin K or something.

  A sound like wind rustled through the hedge, followed by grunts of pain. She tore her attention away from the minor magic of her own blood and refocused higher, on Fiona battling with strands of thorny green.

  Maureen blinked, woozily. The hedge was attacking Fiona. She stared at it, unbelieving. I'm not doing anything! Brian's not doing anything! She's still fighting for her life!

  Green whips lashed at the dark witch and shriveled into black powder, only to be replaced by new legions. Vines clutched at her legs and sought her throat. Tufts of wool stood out from her sweater, and scratches lined her face and arms. Her face snapped from side to side, flaming with rage but with a touch of frantic madness. Even her hair stood out in tangles that mocked her usual cool elegance.

  Brian stirred. His hand reached his knife, drew half an inch of steel, an inch. Sweat popped out on his face and dripped to his chest. Fiona screamed some inarticulate noise of power.

  His hand froze and then retreated, eclipsing the steel in its sheath. The hedge attacked with a fresh spasm of vines and thorns.

  Maureen forced herself to stir, to drag herself to hands and knees, to crawl across the rough stones of the path. She grabbed Fiona's ankle. She couldn't reach higher. She pulled her face up against the cool silk of Fiona's stockings and bared her teeth and bit down, hard.

  She tasted blood. She couldn't tell if it was hers or Fiona's.

  She tumbled sideways, her head ringing from a kick and Fiona's scream. When her eyes cleared, Brian had his knife clear of the sheath.

  Maureen fought her way back to a crouch and scraped up the strength to speak. "You've . . . got a choice," she gasped. "You can fight . . . the hedge and me . . . or you . . . can hold Brian. The hedge . . . wants to kill you. Brian . . . will probably . . . let you live. Make up . . . your mind."

  She grabbed the trunk of a hawthorn and thought of earth and rock and water. "Strength," she whispered. "Give me strength. Give me the strength that splits rocks and drives roots deep and sends leaves to the sky. Build a wall of the stone heart of the earth to block Fiona's power, weave a spell of life around her and draw off the essence of her blood and leave her helpless. Loop vines out to seize her wrists and ankles, thread the hooked thorns of her roses against her own throat and eyes. Hold her."

  {Kill!}

  The copper taste of Fiona's blood filled Maureen's mouth. She couldn't tell if it was from her own bite or tasted through the hawthorn's sap.

  Blood. Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? She stood over Dougal's bed, drenched in clotting gore and with the knife heavy in her hand. She spread her own blood on the rowan's trunk, and dripped red on the grass. Everything was blood. Everything was death. She had to find another way, if she was going to live with her memories. Dougal had given her no choice. Here, she had choices.

  Power seethed through the blood in her mouth, searching out its differences, hunting for any weapon she could use against Fiona. She unraveled the cells, and something in the traces spoke to her.

  Fiona was pregnant. The child was Brian's. It was a girl.

  {Kill!}

  "NO!"

  Maureen dragged herself upright, using the hawthorn as a crutch. It didn't scratch her.

  "Don't kill her," she whispered.

  Brian's knife pressed against Fiona's throat. The hedge held her pinned against its green wall. Tendrils locked her arms and legs, encircled her waist, threaded through her hair. Her skin shimmered as if she was wrapped in some kind of supernatural plastic film.

  "Don't kill her," Maureen repeated, searching for an argument that even rage could hear. "Let the baby live."

  Brian blinked and shook his head, as if Maureen had punched him between the eyes. Then he relaxed a fraction. The plants eased their hold. Fiona's eyes opened, locking with Maureen's in a glare of fear and rage and cunning.

  Maureen forced words through her exhaustion. "Do you yield?"

  The archaic phrase nearly made Maureen smile, but she couldn't waste the strength. Still, it sounded right.

  The cunning shone brighter. "What are your terms?"

  Amazing. Hanging on the edge of death, and the woman wanted to bargain. So be it.

  "Brian leaves. I leave. The cats go where they will. We have a cease-fire. That's all."

  "Cease-fire. If I don't bother you, you won't bother me?"

  Maureen blinked, slowly, forcing her eyes to keep working. Her knees wanted to quit, too. This is the Armistice at the end of World War I, she thought. Both sides are dying, bled dry, but one is just a shade drier than the other. If you take too much, you set up another war. And I can't kill her.

  "That's what I meant," she said.

  Fiona gave her a sly, calculating grin. "I can live with that. Besides my own belly, I've got enough of my dear brother's sperm in liquid nitrogen for a few decades of selective breeding. You may find him kind of useless for a few days, love. I've been making him work hard."

  "Exercise builds up muscles," Maureen heard Jo's voice shoot back. "I found his performances satisfactory."

  Fiona's eyebrows quirked up. "Performances, love? If you must know, I thought he was kind of boring."

  "Ah, well." Maureen shook her head. "As the fox commented, those grapes were probably sour, anyway. You had his body, but you didn't have his soul. There's a difference, love."

  "Meow. Now that we've got past our little catfight, love, will you please let me go? This is a touch uncomfortable."

  Brian tested the vines around Fiona's wrists and ankles. "I don't think so, sister dear. It's not that I don't trust you, it's just that I don't trust you. I think we'll leave Maureen's b
indings on your body and your Power, at least until we're safely off your lands. You have a nasty reputation for treachery. Nearly as bad as your twin." He sheathed his knife, apparently satisfied with what he found.

  Maureen felt the last of the adrenaline wash out of her and take every trace of starch with it. Her eyes started tracking things that weren't really there. She sagged away from her hawthorn crutch. Brian caught her, lifting her in his arms as if she was a doll. Neandertal, she thought. Or something close to it. He's designed for carrying mastodon quarters back to the cave. Sometimes it comes in handy.

  She forced herself back out of the warm grayness of fatigue. "One last thing on our agreement. The cease-fire doesn't cover Sean."

  Fiona smiled faintly, and her eyebrows lifted in a way that said Sean was totally expendable. "I never thought it would."

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Brian shifted Maureen gently in his arms, resting one set of muscles by throwing another to the wolves. His eyes measured the distance to Maureen's forest and relative safety. No matter how he added it up, the answer depressed him.

  When he'd first stepped outside of Fiona's hedge, he'd wanted to dance like a demented gypsy in celebration. The world glowed. He owned his mind again. He owned his body again. He was free!

  Instead, he walked slowly and smoothly, with a sleeping woman wrapped in his arms. She snored quietly and snuggled tighter against his chest.

  It made a romantic picture. Problem was, whoever posed the scene had never needed to carry a body for miles, cross-country. Flaming tension spread across his shoulders and ice-picks stabbed his biceps. He couldn't carry her all the way. At least not like this.

  Brian sneered at his self-image. He wasn't modeling for the cover of a novel, ripped-shirt masculinity cradling the swooning heroine in his embrace. He shifted her into a fireman's carry across his shoulders. It might not be as elegant or as comfortable for her, but life's like that. If she didn't like it, she could consider the alternative.

  She didn't stir. She didn't even whimper. He felt her heartbeat against his neck, felt her breathing, so she hadn't done something soap-opera stupid like dying in his arms. She was warm, and her body-smell wrapped itself around him, a reminder of intimacy and promise of reward.

  Maureen's hips poked into his shoulder, bony, no padding. He could wrap one hand around both her wrists. He thought about her eyes, sunken in purple hollows above knife-blade sharp cheekbones. Her skin was as thin as parchment, and her clothes hung on her like rags on a stick scarecrow. What it all boiled down to was, he was carrying a warm skeleton.

  She was starving. She had been all lean tension when he'd first met her. Now she'd blow away in a light breeze. It wasn't just missing meals and sleep. Her body had burned itself to power her magic.

  She really weighed too little to be slowing him down this much. He'd carried backpacks weighing more--carried them all day long, twenty, thirty miles through the Malay jungle or over the sodden moors of the Falklands. This tiredness was Fiona's gift, her theft of his Power. He couldn't draw on it to aid his legs, his back, his shoulders.

  Where had Maureen found the strength to do what she had done today? If Dougal weren’t dead already, Brian would have killed the bastard three times over.

  She slept on. He walked on. His legs and back complained on. Every few paces, he stole a glance back at the hedgerow and the ridge of Fiona's roof, half expecting to find his sister strolling casually along behind them. Those vines and Maureen's binding wouldn't hold forever, and his sister could give new meaning to the word "vindictive."

  It would have been simpler to just kill her. Maureen said no. She'd spared Fiona, because of the baby his sister carried and because Maureen wasn't crazy any more. She'd spared Fiona because she didn't want to kill again.

  "I love you, Maureen."

  She stirred and settled into a different curve around his shoulders. She was still alive. He was still alive. She might even love him. Those had to count for something.

  Not that he deserved it. After all his mistakes, she'd still escaped, she'd found him, she'd broken the spell that held him--set him free and defeated Fiona on her own ground. What it had cost Maureen to break that spell, to rise from butchering Dougal in his own bed to seducing a man, he'd never really know. How does a woman overcome something like Buddy Johnson?

  "You remind me of the Gurkhas, love," he whispered. "You're like them, small and tough and indomitable and dangerous way out of proportion to your size. If we get out of this alive, I'll take you to Nepal sometime. We'll stay with Lobsang Norgay in a dirty stone hut and drink buttered tea spiked with Jamaica rum. He was my old corporal, saved my ass a dozen times. He wanted me to marry his daughter. He'll like you."

  She made a quiet noise in her sleep. It might have been agreement. He wondered if Lobsang would see her magic: those mountain shamans were used to some truly strange things.

  A sudden chill caught at his heart. She'd walled off Fiona's Power. That was how they'd finally won. But Fiona's Power bound Sean to the forest, blocked him off from Power.

  With Fiona bound, Sean was free. Sean had his Power back. Sean knew Maureen wanted his head.

  The forest edge waited, a hundred yards or so ahead. It didn't look as inviting, now. It looked dark and sinister, like an alley in a bad neighborhood at midnight.

  Brian guessed he had just about enough Power to goose a grasshopper. Maureen might as well be in a coma. She was as fit for a magical duel as she was to run a marathon.

  He had to sneak Maureen through that bloody forest without running into Sean, get her up to whatever was left of Dougal's castle. The people there would help her. They'd have to. They owed Maureen their asses.

  Ancient strategic principle propounded by Sun Tzu: when your enemy is strong and you are weak, avoid battle.

  Brilliant observation, Mr. Sun. Now let's see if I can implement it.

  He climbed the stile over the stone fence and entered the forest. They were off Fiona's land. A chill ran down his spine as he carried Maureen into the shadows.

  * * *

  Sean clenched his fist around the feeling of Power and chuckled quietly. Fiona had released him. Fiona had forgiven him. He was strong again.

  His fingers caressed the tree next to him, feeling the life pulsing underneath the bark as he had not been able to feel for the last endless week. The tree spoke to him again. The forest felt alive again. He touched Power again.

  The tree nipped at his hand, trying to catch his fingers between the ridges of its bark. Ah, yes. That would be Maureen's sister. There's a lot of hostility in that family.

  He threw back his head and laughed. The noise ricocheted out into the forest and died. The forest wasn't in a mood for laughter. The forest told him Dougal was dead. The forest waited for its new mistress. The forest waited to digest its latest meal, wondering what price it would pay.

  It was time to leave this forest.

  That other redheaded bitch would be coming down from her hill, looking for him. She did not love him. She had destroyed Dougal. This land would obey her. Better to face her on his own terms.

  No more skulking around the woods, no more slow painful rebuilding of his lung and liver using the traces of Power that trickled past Fiona's walls. He stood up and stretched, lazily, completely, like one of Fiona's cats.

  There were debts to be collected. People owed him blood.

  He picked up the knife and pack--Brian's knife and Brian's pack. How generous of Little Brother to provide both food and weapon. Now Sean had to return them with proper thanks.

  He relaxed his mouth into his slow, mocking smile. Fiona had a short attention span. A little nudge here, a touch of irritation there, the suggestion of some new novelty to be investigated, and he could move against Brian.

  He glanced across the forest glade. Maureen's sister still sat there, briar wrapped around her wrist. When he killed Maureen, he'd own this forest. The sister wasn't going anywhere. She could wait. She was last on his list of
chores, payback for the lingering ache in his side and the shortness of breath. Brian first, then Maureen, then tidy up the forest.

  He drew Brian's knife and chopped a gouge out of the nearest tree, baring the sweet white sapwood underneath. A small payment on the older bitch's account. If he cut a tree, she bled. If she hadn't reminded him of where she lived, he wouldn't have found the need to blaze a trail.

  He moved slowly through the forest, lazily, slashing vines and carving deep into the bark of trees, feasting on the tingle of inflicted pain that ran up his arms with each cut. What was her name? Jo? Jo owed him. This could be fun.

  A twig snapped ahead of him, toward Fiona's, and Sean froze. If Dougal was dead, his pets might do almost anything. That rotting dragon hadn't been the worst thing in the forest, not by a long sight. At least it was rational and curious, as well as hungry. Most of the other beasts were just hungry.

  Something moved between the trees, and Sean crouched behind a bush to watch. The shape resolved into a man, a big man, a man carrying something heavy.

  Brian.

  Brian walked free, through the woods, carrying a woman across his shoulders. Sean caught a flash of red hair from the draped body.

  Brian and Maureen. They came from Fiona's cottage.

  Fear washed through Sean, followed by rage. His twin was dead. That's why he was free. Brian and Maureen coming from Fiona's cottage meant Fiona was dead.

  Caution chilled his rage before he could move. Brian was dangerous. Maureen was dangerous. Attacking them together called for an ambush to crush them without any chance of defense.

  Sean loosed a tendril of Power, the merest wisp of fog testing his enemies. It would just be more of the forest's uneasy watchfulness, to Brian or Maureen.

  Fierce joy flashed through his veins. He sensed nothing. Brian carried no defenses. Maureen felt as if she was barely even there.

  Was she injured? Was that why Brian carried her? Had their battle with Fiona left both of them so weakened? Sean smiled to himself, allowing the faintest beginning of a plan to warm his heart.