by Ann Gimpel
Christine’s passing had been one of the more numinous ones. Liliana had sat with the woman for a while after death claimed her. Birth and death were two of the mysteries. How life begins—and how it ends. Because Christine was open to it, she’d linked with her mind, not bothering to be subtle about things. The woman had relaxed into Liliana’s reassurances all would be well and embraced the brilliant, blinding light.
Her task as guardian of newly departed souls complete, she’d left the hospital, her mind overfull with all the things that needed to happen before she could leave.
A quick glance at a wall clock told her it was pushing six at night. She’d been home for a couple of hours. It had taken that long to locate everything she needed for her casting. Including a grimoire moldering in a far corner of her library.
Said tome was spread open on the floor in front of her, offering its wisdom. Getting it to talk with her had been her first task. Magical books weren’t indexed and they either took pity on you and showed you what you needed…
Or not.
Maybe because she’d neglected this book so badly, it had taken its sweet time offering answers.
She assessed her hastily assembled outfit with a critical eye. In an attempt to not stick out like a sore thumb, she’d located a long, black skirt and lace-up black boots with flat soles—in case she had to run. A blue long-sleeved tunic was topped with a light jacket and a black woolen cape that fell to knee level. No zippers. No metal fasteners. She’d tucked a small assortment of medical paraphernalia into her many pockets. She knew better than to bring electronics with her. For one thing, there wasn’t much point. They wouldn’t work, and they’d be a dead giveaway she wasn’t who she was trying to pass herself off as.
She’d be damned if anyone would get close enough to frisk her, but women had zero rights where she was heading. She might not have much choice about who laid their grubby, grimy hands on her.
Liliana checked the progression of her spell, noting it was about halfway to maximum velocity. She’d taken her time inscribing a pentagram on the basement floor but carefully drawing all the elements correctly hadn’t been sufficient. Another witch, one who’d actually practiced magic actively over the past few years, could have simply barked the words and been gone, but she’d tried that. The light illuminating the pentagram had sputtered and died, almost as if it was laughing at her paltry efforts.
So she’d backtracked. Apparently, she lacked the skill for magical shortcuts.
Pages rustled, threatening to conceal the needed spell.
Liliana leapt forward and slapped a hand across the open book. “Oh no you don’t,” she adjured and refocused her attention until one hundred ten percent was on her casting. Not on Christine Johnson. Not on running checklists through her head to satisfy herself she hadn’t forgotten anything.
The pentagram brightened.
Liliana blew out a frustrated breath. It would be so much easier if Gloria would materialize. Surely, she knew what was going on, that Rhea had dragged Katerina back to the 1700s.
A bleak thought surfaced. Maybe her mother had been abducted by her Roskelly kinswomen. Rhea was still very much alive at the tail end of the nineteenth century, and Scotland was her preferred playground. The more Liliana thought about things, the surer she was her own mother might be in deep trouble. Gloria’s magic was strong. Twice as robust as Liliana’s had ever been.
Rhea hadn’t taken it well when her own daughter spurned her.
Liliana’s fledgling spell flickered, started to fade. She growled annoyance. Done babying it, she jumped into the center of the pentagram, chanting like a madwoman. Her Gaelic was as rusty as her magic, so she butchered a few of the words, but the spell developed a life of its own.
Finally.
She’d cast enough complicated spells as a much younger witch to recognize the energy pattern that meant the casting had passed a point of no return. If she’d done things right, she’d be sucked into darkness and spit out in 1895 Glasgow. She hadn’t wanted to show up too early and have to try again, so she’d aimed for the middle of the 1890s.
The air around her turned incandescent and thickened with the distinctive feel of witch magic mingled with the smells of her own power. Marigolds, vanilla, and sunbaked clay. Tingling started in her feet and worked its way up her body, sweeping her along with it. She loved the feel of casting power, adored the sense of invincibility and strength.
The walls of her basement fell away, leaving her floating in a dark void. She kept every fiber of her being homed in on her goal. It wouldn’t do to fall off the grid as she dreamed of being Superwoman. She did not want to get stuck in the dark place between worlds and time periods.
Liliana set her jaw in a determined line, teeth jammed against each other. She’d do her best to cushion her sudden appearance with magic so as not to alarm anyone who might be privy to her entrance.
And then she’d use a tracking spell to locate her mother. It was blood linked, which meant it would also pinpoint every Roskelly witch in close proximity. Not ideal, but it couldn’t be helped. The best she could hope for was that she’d locate Gloria before the Black Witch Roskellys noticed her presence.
I’m being ridiculous. What the hell could they do to me?
Answers rushed in from all sides of the blackness surrounding her. Each one unnerved her, obliterated the joy she’d taken in working magic once again. The kindest thing her kinswomen could do was kill her.
But Roskellys prided themselves on never being kind.
Chapter 2
Sean Weatherford pushed up from his desk. His body felt creaky and stiff, and he chided himself for not getting up every hour or so to walk around for a bit. He engaged in the same recriminations most mornings, but nothing ever changed. Magic ran through his veins like quicksilver. It took the place of even the most rigorous exercise routine—except when he first separated from his well-worn office chair. A snort burbled past his lips. He’d worked most of the night, but he enjoyed the dark hours. The bank was quiet, all but for the security guard, who poked his head in from time to time for a chat over a hot cuppa.
Sean was second in command over all the Druids in the United Kingdom, but he wasn’t particularly fond of managing anything that didn’t involve columns of numbers and methods of making money vanish from plain view. He hoped to hell his underutilized status among Druidry wasn’t about to change. After centuries of bachelorhood, Arlen, the Arch Druid, had fallen in love—with a Roskelly witch of all people.
He’d asked Arlen straight out if he planned to follow his bride-to-be back to the States. Arlen had said no, but things like that could change.
He stretched his arms over his head, rotating his torso to get the kinks out. Katerina—Arlen’s intended—was a lovely woman. Hell, she’d had no idea she was a witch until quite recently, so mercifully Arlen had gotten to her before she’d chosen dark magic. Not that she probably would have at this point in her life.
No. Those paths cut deep and were usually firmly rooted by the time a witch began to bleed.
He raked a hand through his thick, brown curls, aware his mind was wandering. Probably time to call it a night—or a morning. In any event, Arlen had reassured him he had no plans to step down from his post, which left Sean safe in his underling role.
Maybe. As he’d noted before, the best constructed plans could change. Katerina had family back in the States. Witches. Breath whistled through his teeth. He’d feel better once he laid eyes on Kat’s living relatives. Her dead ones were piles of malevolent dogmeat, bouncing in and out of their crypts like eerie jack-in-the-boxes. He screwed his face into a frown and hoped the Druids would catch a break before the dearly departed Roskelly women chose to pay them another visit.
Unfortunately, wishing had never bought him much.
He’d step up to the plate if Arlen left or the witches rose from their crypts again, but it was far from his first choice. Snatching up his computer bag, phone, and tablet, he strode from his office
and out into darkness with a brisk nod and wave at the guard as he passed beneath the main entrance. It might be seven in the morning, but Inverness wouldn’t get light until past ten. Not in early January.
The bank had underground parking, but Sean always parked a few blocks away. It was almost the only exercise he got, and he guarded his half-hour strolls, maintaining them even in rotten weather. Maybe he’d stop by his favorite teashop on his way to the car. Get a nice pot of strong, black tea and a few pastries.
He turned hard right and detoured toward the bakery. He smelled it long before he saw it. Cinnamon, vanilla, butter, and the scents of eggs frying in grease. Maybe he’d get a breakfast sandwich in addition to his favorite cinnamon buns.
A dog barked from somewhere behind him, and a raptor wheeled overhead. A nighthawk on its way home. Sean focused a small beam of magic and wished it good hunting. It angled its body and looked right at him, dipping a wing in thanks.
Even at this hour, traffic wound up and down the darkened streets.
Thirty minutes later, he emerged from the shop carrying a sack with his breakfast in one hand and a large cup of the fragrant black tea he preferred in the other. He’d employed the shoulder strap of his computer bag to secure the item around his chest. He stopped for a moment after leaving the shop and breathed deep.
Huffing out the breath, he set a course for his BMW sedan. Mornings should smell fresher. Not like petroleum products and sewers. He shrugged pragmatically. The air hadn’t smelled particularly sweet a couple of centuries ago, either. Then it reeked of shit and unwashed bodies, with a patina of rotting teeth tossed into the mix. Now it smelled of pollution, manmade chemicals that were slowly killing the earth.
“Och. Not so slowly anymore,” he muttered. A quick glance ahead told him his car hadn’t been disturbed. Still sitting on four inflated tires. No broken glass. Crime had done nothing but escalate in Inverness, to the point the local police squad was hard-pressed to keep up with it. Out-of-control lawlessness was a strong argument for keeping his car beneath the bank, but then he’d miss his daily jaunts.
He grinned. Life was a series of trade-offs.
As he walked, he mapped out the remainder of his day. He’d go home to his remodeled castle, catch a few hours’ sleep, and then show up for an engagement party at Arlen and Katerina’s around suppertime. Afterward, he’d return to his recently vacated desk in a secluded corner of the Bank of Scotland’s main Inverness branch.
Or perhaps he’d splurge and take the night off. The thought pleased him. The term workaholic had been coined long after he’d reached adulthood, but the concept fit him to a tee. His grin widened. No one had ever rebuked him for working too hard or too long in earlier times. Humans had grown soft, with an inflated sense of entitlement.
He sent a pulse of magic to open his car door. His hands were full, and it beat setting things down to dig for his keys. A small frisson of something that shouldn’t be there brushed down his back. He stopped, magical senses activated, but whatever he’d sensed was so subtle, he wondered if he’d imagined it.
The open car door beckoned. He hurried forward, bending so he could situate the tea in the console. The wrongness shifted from subtle to a full-blown tide, hitting him from all sides.
Shit. Fuck. This was what came of being sloppy. Damn the twenty-first century all to hell. In earlier times, he’d never let his guard down. Many a night, he’d even slept warded.
Dark magic rolled over him in waves. Power stinking of Black Witches. He tried to turn, but he was trapped, half inside the car, half out. His legs refused to cooperate, and his heart ratcheted into triple-time rhythm. Tossing the bakery bag into the passenger seat to free his other hand, he kicked the doors to his power open.
The earth heard him, and strength flowed through his boot soles, infusing him with sufficient alchemy to defeat his enemies. Maybe. Calling for help was out of the question. No one was close enough to get here in time. Besides, why put anyone else at risk?
The air around him took on a glowing, glistening aspect, and he propelled his body backward. The magic he’d summoned allowed him to break through the part of the witch’s enchantment that had robbed his legs of movement. Spinning quickly, and chanting like a lunatic, he faced an amorphous glob of pulsating blackness. It glittered and shaded to gray in spots as it swayed, forming a half circle that pinned him against his open car door.
Something that looked suspiciously like red-rimmed burning eyes popped up first in one spot, and then in another. Sean asked for more from the earth, and mini lightning bolts jetted from his fingertips. Where they connected with the darkness, they hissed and sputtered before being absorbed.
Sean’s eyes widened. He’d just shot the thing chockful of destructive power. It should be on fire, or at least smoldering, but nothing had changed except the eerie eyes, which were more visible. He upped the ante, running wide open, and hit it with another volley.
Same results.
The witch stench had escalated to an absolute reek, but it didn’t smell like the Roskelly witches had. They’d been dead, and this batch was very much alive. Where in the goddess’s name had they come from? He’d thought Black Witchcraft long gone with the birth of the current century.
Aye, and good riddance to them with their stinking hex bags and dirty magical tricks.
Blasting through the dark blob wasn’t going to happen, so he shuffled through possibilities. One was jumping into his car and gunning it. It wouldn’t discourage whatever had targeted him, but at least he could lead the abomination into open country. Something like a distant drumbeat started, low at first, and then growing rapidly louder until it nearly deafened him. Along with its rhythm, the blackness grew wider and taller. Probably thicker too, but he didn’t have that perspective.
He blasted the seething cushion again and again. Power rolled through him like high octane fuel, but the shuddering darkness drew closer, blocking out everything. Somehow it had even slithered between him and the BMW. He scanned the sky, but it was vanishing as well.
What would happen once he was completely boxed in?
He didn’t want to find out but diving into his car wasn’t an option any longer. He had to stand and fight. What he was doing wasn’t working out terribly well.
He needed a new strategy.
The harsh taste of adrenaline coated his throat and tongue. He kept his hands extended, fingers flexed with power surging through them. It might not be effective, but he couldn’t think of anything else to do. If he were going to teleport, he should have done it the moment he realized things weren’t right. Out of all magics, that one had the greatest propensity to boomerang back at him. Its bite was vicious, and he didn’t want to add to his problems.
“Arlen.” He raised his mind voice and followed the single word with the Druids’ war cry. A single ululating note that ran up and down the length of the scale. It wasn’t telepathic, but Arlen would hear. So would every Druid in a hundred-kilometer radius. Calling for assistance went against the grain, but if he didn’t he was a dead man.
No mistaking malevolent intent. It whooped and hollered around him, carved into every drumbeat, every flash of those eldritch red eyes. Pressure built around him as the eerie cloud closed in. Where it touched him, it creeped him out. Oily and slimy, it left tracks he felt through his clothes. Paths that burned as if someone had painted him with liquid fire.
He wasn’t a warrior, not in Arlen’s vein at all. He was an academic, a seer, a sorcerer who dealt with prophecies.
“For fuck’s sake, man up,” he muttered. Breathing had become harder as the thing surrounded him. It must be eating up all the available air. He tightened his hold on his warding, but it didn’t jump to his call as it had earlier. To his horror, he felt magic sluice back through his body and into the earth beneath his feet.
Bitter laughter rose. He didn’t blame the earth. If he had a choice, he’d run as far and as fast as he could from the atrocity that had him in its clutches. He was panting
now, gasping. His vision developed a grayish haze.
“Noooooooo.” His scream sounded thin to his ears, but he cried out again, trading his outrage for another round of the Druids’ war cry. He was going down, but goddamn it all to hell, he’d make the sick sonofabitch who’d targeted him sorry.
Reaching into his coat, he pulled out the dirk he always carried. Its bone handle protected him from its iron blade. He drove the blade into the black thing. Withdrew it and did it again. And again. Drumbeats roared through his skull. Black fluid gushed. Wherever it landed, fires erupted, but Sean didn’t stop.
It might have been his twentieth thrust or his hundredth, but the slender bit of sky above him vanished, closing off both light and air. He’d been managing on nearly nothing before, but the total absence of oxygen made his head spin. Nausea gripped him as he tried desperately to remain on his feet. Clawing at his useless throat, he visualized air molecules, summoned them with his waning power.
It didn’t work.
Shouts and calls echoed from somewhere close. Druid voices, crying out in Gaelic. He tried to hang on, but his boneless body slumped to the cobblestoned street.
Or what should have been a street. The moment he fell, everything changed. No more streets. No more BMW. No more Druids coming to his rescue. The good part was he could breathe again. The bad part was he was in the midst of a time portal not of his own making.
Where had the witches sent him?
“Doesn’t matter,” he answered himself. “I’ll teleport back.”
He winced. Smartass words. He had a feeling it might not be as simple as he assumed. Someone had gone to a whole pisspot of trouble to move him. That same someone would be invested in having him stay put.
His thoughts galvanized him into action. Time travel was scarcely a finely honed casting. At best, you ended up within a year or two of where you’d aimed. He did a quick assessment of his magical center, relieved beyond words he hadn’t totally depleted his ability.
