Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  He pushed gently at Maureen and felt her stir. She slept. She seemed unhurt but exhausted, and he sensed absolutely no reserves of Power. Either she was the greatest actress since Hepburn, or she was helpless.

  How about Brian? Sean's touch found weariness and hope. The Pendragon was still strong, too strong for any kind of physical fight. But magic? Sean felt nothing. His brother, too, seemed helpless against Power.

  Sean's eyes narrowed, and his grin widened. His heart raced with anticipation. He slipped from bush to tree-trunk to rock, curving in behind Brian and creeping closer, thirty feet, twenty, ten.

  A twig cracked under Sean's foot, and Brian spun around. The Pendragon dumped Maureen like a sack of grain, drawing his knife.

  Sean shook his head, in mock sadness. This was all too easy: no artistry, no drama. He loosed a stun-spell and felt it break across his brother. Brian toppled like a felled tree, all in one stiff piece, and a fierce joy flashed through Sean's blood. It felt like an orgasm without foreplay.

  "Fiona won't save you this time, my brother. Nothing will save you. I'm not even going to waste my time gloating."

  He lifted his knife and stepped forward and smashed to the ground. Sean spat curses and rolled over against the tight cords binding his right ankle.

  Vines! He slashed at them, felt them twang like bowstrings, and jerked away, only to find brambles crawling up his left arm. Fire woke in his ankle, and he saw blood blossoming through the cloth of his pants. He hacked again and again, chopping to right and left, but the ground crawled underneath him and thorns tore at his flesh.

  "Fiona!"

  The forest swallowed his shout. The forest tangled him. The forest threw vines and brambles around him to drag him down, to drown him, to suck his blood as it had sucked blood and soul from the others. Now both legs and his left arm burned in agony, as if tendrils ate the flesh from his bones. Sean thrashed in panic, triumph turned to terror.

  His thoughts raced. Dougal had set this forest as a guard. With Dougal dead, it was an unchained monster. Sean called on fire to cleanse the land but felt his Power draining away with his blood.

  "Fiona!"

  But his sister was dead. She couldn't save him. Sean hacked frantically, sweat flying from his arm. For every vine he cut, three took root in his flesh and sent acid along his nerves. Brambles looped around his throat and bit him, forming sucker roots that pierced into his veins and drank. His brain fuzzed.

  One thought still loomed through the fog. Kill. Kill before I die. Brian lay a few feet in front of him. Maureen lay to one side. Both were helpless. Sean hefted the knife.

  Brian.

  Sean pulled all his hatred, all his fading Power together, and aimed the knife. His hand drew back for the throw. Something jerked at his wrist, and the knife dropped. He forced his head around. Green briars spiraled up his wrist.

  "FIIIOONNNAAA!"

  His scream died off in a strangled gargle, and he sank under the waves of pain. His thoughts splintered into sparkling atoms and fled like a cloud.

  Darkness took them.

  * * *

  Maureen pushed herself up, groggily. Trees. Brian. Noise. Stench. Pain. Hunger.

  She squatted on hands and knees. She sorted out her senses.

  The noises stopped. The stink didn't. Rotting meat. She'd smelled that before. The forest. She shook her head, trying to focus. Blood dripped from a bundle of vines and briars a few feet from where Brian lay. The bundle twitched once, then twice, then settled as if whatever hid inside it had lost all tension.

  "What? Happened?"

  Single words seemed to be her limit. Her head pounded, and her left hand throbbed in time with the beat. She focused on the hand. A red line crossed it, a half-healed wound. It wasn't still bleeding, she noted with relief. She might have gotten around to worrying about that, some time.

  Brian stirred. His head rolled from side to side. He sat up, jerkily, as if parts of him rejoined the whole like pieces of a puzzle. He shook his head again, a groggy owl staring around. He peered at Maureen.

  "I could have sworn you were asleep."

  She stared at him. "What happened?"

  He waved at the bloody bundle. "Sean attacked us. You killed him."

  She shook her head. "I didn't do anything."

  "Bugger that. I bleeding well didn't. That leaves you."

  "Bullshit. Last thing I did was faint into your arms like Scarlett O'Hara. I dreamed I was strangling Sean. Jo and David held him down. Then I woke up with a bump on my head. Whatever happened to him, I didn't do it."

  Brian stood up, moving slowly. He shook his hands and feet as if they tingled from returning circulation. He knelt and poked at the wrapped form that must have been Sean, using the tip of his knife.

  "Dead." He looked up at her and studied her face, as if he was reading the mixture of fierce joy and loathing she felt. He shook his head. "You seem to think Sean was your worst enemy. That poor sod may have been a nasty piece of work, but he was really just a puppet. Fiona's the one who made him, and you had to leave her alive behind our backs. Alive and very angry."

  Maureen stared at the bloody vines and refused to worry about Fiona. She was tomorrow's problem. "Is that what Dougal did to David?"

  "No. This just killed him, fast. David may even still be alive."

  "Show me."

  He offered her a hand and pulled her up. Maureen leaned on him again, tucking herself under his arm. He felt hard and warm and reassuring, support she could rely on. It felt like leaning on Father Oak, only with a heartbeat.

  The dragon still stank like the devil's own cesspool. Crows and ravens and vultures perched all through the trees, too gorged to fly. The birds barely even followed the two of them with their black sated eyes.

  Brian stopped. "My God!"

  Jo sat there, next to another bundle of vines. She didn't move. Maureen traced the greenbriar looped around her sister's wrist and saw the fine rootlets bonded to her skin. Her eyes were open but blank. A faint breath stirred her chest, and then another.

  Maureen remembered a vegetable in a nursing home, fed by a tube. Psych. class field trip. Catatonic withdrawal. Lights on, nobody home.

  She vomited. She barely had enough strength to keep the vile mess off her clothes. A part of her body snarled at the silly waste of food.

  Brian held her. Brian spoke soothing noises. Finally, the noises made words. "Jo found him. She forced herself into the bond, to track him through the land. They're both alive."

  She forced a whisper. "How do we get them out?"

  "I don't know if we can. I don't know if anybody ever has broken this kind of bonding. Their bodies are here, but their thoughts are scattered throughout the forest. They've become the forest."

  The flash of insight felt just like a cartoon lightbulb. "Jo and David killed Sean. They saved us. We've got to save them."

  Brian shook his head. "Maureen, you may be the most powerful witch in the Summer Country, but you're damn near dead. You have to rest. You have to eat, and sleep, and rebuild your Power before you're ready to try anything like this."

  "No." She knew, with cold hard certainty, that Jo and David couldn't wait. She felt it. They'd die. "You said I own these lands? I take over from Dougal because I killed him? All that feudal shit of force majeure?"

  "Yes."

  "Then I'm going to be a feudal lord." She found some strength, somewhere, and staggered over to the nearest tree. She stared at the trunk, too exhausted for emotion, thinking about the spells she'd worked.

  The Power didn't come, this time. The words didn't force themselves on her. She didn't have the strength.

  The bark of the beech was smooth under her hands. She'd asked a beech for directions, earlier today. She hoped it wasn't this one. If she'd just walked right by Jo and David . . .

  "Give them back to me. You've got Sean. You've got your blood. In their place, I swear to act for the good of this forest. Give them back." Nothing happened.

  "I don't have th
e strength or time to argue with you. I am the ruler of this land. I command you to give them back."

  Still nothing. This world seemed to require threats.

  "If you don't send Jo and David back into their bodies, I swear I will burn every last tree and bush and clump of moss in this forest. I will burn this land as bare as the knob of rock where Dougal set his tower. It may take me the rest of my life to do it, but I will do it, as surely as the sun rises in the morning.

  "Ask Dougal MacKenzie's ashes whether I am patient enough to do it. Ask Sean's blood whether I have the foresight. Ask Fiona's hearthstone and threshold whether I have the will. Give them back."

  Her vision throbbed again, pulsing with her heartbeat. The cut on her hand had reopened and left a thin red smear on the gray bark of the beech. It looked like a brush-stroke of Japanese calligraphy, signing a contract.

  The forest stirred around them. Something tapped Maureen on the ankle. She glanced down, slowly, without the strength for more than idle curiosity.

  One of the briars looped its way around her leg. The tip turned black, curled, and dissolved into powder. A second branched off and quested upward.

  Maureen watched a slow-motion video of Fiona's battle with the hedge. It was happening to someone else. She wondered how it would come out.

  Chapter Thirty

  {The price has been paid. The pact is signed in blood.}

  Ghostly bindings unraveled. Misty fragments of Jo's soul floated free and reached out to each other, gathering.

  She had been vast. That echoing voice seemed to trap her, compress her, and stuff her back into her skull. The claustrophobia of her own body was unbearable.

  Images flickered back into her eyes, a scuffed patch of dirt and roots replacing the pattern of life for miles around. Rot offended her nose, and the harsh croak of ravens buried the song of leaves rejoicing in the sun. The caress of the earth and sky, the water and the rock, died away to the scant range of her own skin. She plunged from riches into poverty.

  Worst of all, she'd lost a bond to David deep enough to make all-night sex seem like a picture-postcard from Detroit. Now that was gone.

  A dull hatred simmered in her, residue of the land's fear of fire. It left her looking for the thief who had stolen bliss. She tried to move, to punch something in frustration, even just to vent her anger in a burst of pungent swearing. Nothing worked. Her body rebelled, demanding toll for the days of abuse she'd heaped upon it.

  Jo coughed. Her throat felt like cracked mud in a dried-up creek-bed. Her wrist stung where the vine had rooted, her knees and hips ached like someone had cut them open and sewn burning coals inside, and her eyes were full of the sand of hours of unblinking sight.

  A scream broke into the tangle of her anger. She sorted out the clashing images and found a focus.

  It was David.

  She forced her muscles to move and staggered to her feet. She managed one jerky step and fell face-first in the dirt. Her feet were numb, no feeling from her knees down to her toes. She blinked and cursed and crawled over to David, to the cage of vines that held David.

  They shriveled into brown ash before her eyes, giving up a smell of burning foulness. Her hand reached out and then jerked back, afraid of what it would find under the dust. The forest had eaten him. Could a half-digested meal be human? Could it even live?

  She looked at her own wrist, where the briars had joined her flesh. Red dots like a healing rash speckled her skin. She gritted her teeth and touched David, brushing the dust away from his face, from his closed eyelids and nose and cheeks, daring to look.

  He was David. He'd lost weight, and his skin shone waxy pale under the angry red welts and pockmarks of what looked like the aftermath of the world's worst case of poison ivy, but he was David. He was alive.

  His screaming stopped when she touched him. She felt his recognition, as she had felt it when she dove into the forest's web to find him and bind him and draw him back.

  She'd won.

  She'd wrestled the forest for his soul and won.

  Someone offered her water. She drank it greedily, the cold wetness soothing her parched throat. She cradled David's head in her arms and dribbled water down his throat and held him against the racking coughs as he rejoined the human race.

  His hand jerked and twitched and then steadied as he reached up and stroked her cheek. "Jo," he croaked, and then, "I love you."

  "Hush." She held his head against her breasts. She felt a shivery warmth there, not sex but mothering. She wanted to open up her blouse and suckle life back into him.

  Feet intruded into the Madonna scene. She traced them up legs to find Maureen and Brian.

  "Where the hell did you come from?"

  They shouldn't have been able to sneak up on her through the forest. The forest saw everything.

  Then she remembered, hazy through the fading bond.

  She remembered their coming into the forest, and she remembered the skulking bastard she'd shot creeping up on them, and she remembered the fierce hungry thrill when she and David had hurled the forest's rage at him and tripped him and swallowed him alive. She also remembered Maureen's threats.

  The forest had wanted to eat them both, Maureen and Brian. The forest hated fire and feared everything on two legs. It had reached out for them, and Jo and David fought it back. The battle was vague in her mind, but a fox was bound up in it, and an oak almost as old as the hill on which it stood. Both had fought on Maureen's side.

  "Goddamn you, why couldn't you just leave us alone?"

  Maureen blinked. "Leave you trapped here? What kind of a bitch do you think I am? You're my sister! I had to get you out! Either that, or die myself!"

  Jo gritted her teeth. "I should have let the forest eat you. We were happy. You've got no idea what it's like, joining the land. It's all your goddamn fault, anyway. You dragged all of us into this fucking mess."

  Then the last threads of the spell finally broke. Jo shuddered, staring into the black chasm of what she'd done. She had nearly died. David had nearly died, and the land had made death seem so inviting that in the end, both of them had nearly reached out for it.

  Maureen's eyes rolled up, and she collapsed into a heap of dirty clothes around a stick doll. Jo jerked with shock, finally noticing details: hollow eyes like bruises in her face, wrist and elbow bones standing out so sharp they almost cut the skin, pallor that made her freckles stand out like spattered paint.

  That was her sister. Someone had done that to her sister!

  Fear surged through Jo, and then cold rage. Maureen looked like one of those survivors in the photos of Dachau.

  "Brian, what the hell did you drag her into?" Jo felt something dangerous pressing against her eyeballs. That clone of Buddy Johnson stood about an inch from getting his ass fried.

  He seemed to know it. He held up a hand and knelt down to gently ease Maureen's position. "Peace, woman! I'm just carrying her to a place where she can get some food and rest. Ask David. He and I were both captured within minutes of coming here. She set me free this morning. She'd already killed the man who did this."

  Jo fumbled her way out of Maureen's jacket, took the lighter out, and tossed both of them to Brian. "Get her covered. Make a fire, warm her up. Get some water into her. You know this goddamn place, for Chrissakes get her some fucking food!"

  He just stared at her.

  "Goddamn you, move your ass! Do I have to light a fucking fire under you?"

  David shook his head, still groggy, and looked up at Brian. "Sisters," he said, as if he was cussing. "They fight like cats, but God help you if you dare threaten one of them."

  The pins and needles of her waking feet proved that she was alive. She was alive and held a living David in her lap.

  She noticed a briar next to David's hand, green and wiry and covered with thorns. It moved. Rage took her, and she ripped it out of the ground--a foot, three feet, five feet of rooted horror. It broke loose and shriveled in her hand. She threw the blackened remnant
into a bush and hoped David hadn't seen.

  She stared at her shaking hand. The rash throbbed with her racing heartbeat, and she thought of asphalt. Nice, safe, dead asphalt.

  * * *

  Maureen tasted blood. She must have cut her lip when she fell. Damn fool theatrical stunt to pull, fainting in the middle of a fight. Debate Club wouldn't permit it, but the Drama Club might. The world fuzzed in and out, balancing on the foggy edge between reality and dream.

  Blood, the little worm boring in the back of her mind muttered. Remember the taste of Fiona's blood? Remember what it told you? Do you have the guts to run a blood test on yourself?

  Was she pregnant?

  The thought formed ice in her belly. She lay there, limp, eyes closed, and wondered. Words echoed around in gray emptiness, bouncing off the walls of her future. Was she pregnant? If so, who was the father?

  And, what would she do when she found out?

  Three questions. Three questions about her goddamn belly, not anybody else's. Not the pope's, not Father Donovan's, not even Sister Anne's back at St. John's School.

  She'd asked how long sperm remained alive inside the human woman. Memories stirred, rolled over, and sat up. The past spoke to her in the dusty words from a medical text on anatomy a high-school friend had stolen from the library. Adults only! the circulation stamp shouted in heavy red ink. Black-market Sex Ed. It showed clinical detail to curious teenagers who had no other source. That was where she had found out about puberty, about why Buddy had used rubbers with Jo but never wasted one on her.

  Sperm remains viable for up to three days inside the human female, said the dry clinical voice of the pages. The translation was, Dougal's slime still swam around in her, mixed with Brian's seed. Her skin crawled at the thought. For a moment, she thought she'd puke again.

  An egg can be fertilized for anywhere up to twenty-four hours after ovulation. So a woman had a four-day range in any cycle of the moon, to become pregnant. Russian roulette is what it was, one bullet in seven chambers. Basis of Rhythm and Blues, a highly questionable method of contraception endorsed by Father Donovan. Like he'd really know.