Walkways made from multi-colored, irregular-shaped slate wove around the outside of the pavilion, while artfully-placed pots and baskets of ferns and flowers added an unseasonable note of nature to the eaves, window sills and front decking. White smoke drifted from several large chimneys fashioned from rounded river stone, and from a nearby barn a half-dozen dogs bounded out to surround and bark at the car as Troy parked near some pickup trucks and ATVs.
Summer watched Troy as he regarded the front entry. “You don’t want to go in, do you? Is it going to be that bad?”
He shrugged. “I have my own spread a couple miles from here,” he said. “If my father doesn’t want to offer us his hospitality, then we’ll stay at my place.” He climbed out.
As Summer joined him she saw a petite, red-haired woman in a long green dress come out onto the front deck and clap her small hands twice. All of the dogs stopped barking and sat down to grin and pant.
“Haven’t I taught you scallywags better manners?” she scolded as she stepped down from the deck, and then stopped in her tracks when she saw Troy’s face. “Troy, oh, my dear.” She hurried across the space between them to hug Troy tightly. “Why didn’t you tell us you were coming for a visit?”
Now that she was closer Summer saw that the older woman had luminous green eyes and some silver strands weaving through her shoulder-length red curls. What made her heart twist was also seeing the long, jagged scar that ran diagonally across her face from her temple over her nose to end at the lobe of her ear. Summer didn’t look away from the scarred woman but wondered how she could have survived such a horrible injury. From the depth and breadth of the scar the poor woman’s face must have been almost cut in half.
“It was a last minute decision,” Troy was telling her. “Erica, I’d like you to meet Summer. Summer, this is Erica Buchanan, High Priestess of the Silver Wood coven.”
“Hello.” Summer smiled, and then found herself being hugged and kissed on both cheeks.
“You are very welcome here, my dear girl.” Erica drew back and beamed at her for three seconds before she blinked and her smile slipped. “Troy, why have you shielded her with one of your water wards?”
“That and Summer are a long story, Erica.” Troy looked over the older woman’s head at several other people who had emerged from the pavilion. “We’ll get to it a little later.”
The first who followed Erica out was a stout, smiling man with the same curly red hair tied back in a ponytail. He was wearing a battered leather apron and well-stocked tool belt over his denim overalls. At his side was a younger, heavily-built man who seemed almost as wide as he was tall. He had slicked-back hair the color of old brass and wore a white dress shirt and pressed trousers that looked almost incongruous next to the older man’s work clothes. Another pair flanked them, and Summer saw one of them bore a faint resemblance to Troy, although he was shorter and darker, and had a trim beard. His companion, a waifish-looking young woman with black hair and large, luminous gray eyes, rested her frail hands on her protruding belly. She looked almost too thin to be so heavily pregnant.
The final person to emerge from the pavilion stood apart from the rest with his arms folded and his jaw set in an only too familiar hard line. Since physically he was an older, slightly heavier version of Troy, and had the same heavenly blue eyes glaring out beneath the same peak in his silver-streaked black hair, Summer knew he had to be Troy’s father.
“Look who has come home for a visit.” Erica turned toward her people and spread her arms wide, as if she wanted to hug them all, too. “Our dear Troy has brought a friend with him as well. This is Summer.”
Nearly everyone gave her looks of varying suspicion. Only the stout man trundled over, and before she could stop him he seized her hand to bestow a smacking kiss on the back of it.
“Ewan Buchanan, blessed be.”
Summer exchanged an uneasy look with Troy before she smiled at him. “I’m definitely, ah, blessed.”
“Pay no mind to my brother.” Erica rolled her eyes. “Ewan always has to be the first in line to charm the ladies. Now let me attend to the formalities.” The older woman drew Summer to her side and guided her up to where Troy’s father stood on the deck. “Summer, may I present the High Priest of Silver Wood coven, Abel Atwater. Abel, help me welcome Troy’s friend Summer.”
The older man gave her a long, silent look before he loomed over her and offered his hand.
“Well, girl? Have you no manners?” he boomed when she didn’t take it.
Troy was by her side a heartbeat later.
“Summer has been cursed and cannot be touched. Hello, Father.”
“Troy.” His father sniffed. “Do you bring this cursed woman with you everywhere, or have you presented her merely for my benefit?”
Cursed? Is that what he’d decided had happened?
Erica took Summer’s arm and led her back to the others to introduce them.
The well-dressed body-builder was named Lachlan Darrow, whom Erica said served as Abel’s assistant and helped run the various business concerns of the coven.
“A pleasure to meet you,” Lachlan said to Summer, although he didn’t try to touch her.
The young couple turned out to be Troy’s younger brother, Wilson, and Wilson’s wife Aileen.
“Welcome to Silver Wood.” Wilson’s tone hovered one degree above icy, and he kept glancing back at Troy and Abel. “Are you from Boston?”
“New York City.” Summer turned to smile at his wife. “You look ready to be a mom.”
“By the New Year at the very latest, I hope,” Aileen said, her small face glowing as she gave Summer a sweet, dimpled smile. “How did you meet Troy? Do you work together?”
“A mutual friend introduced us, actually.”
Summer glanced at Ewan, who was talking to Lachlan and seemed to have no particular interest in her now. She also felt no tug inside as she had with Michael and Troy. Her gaze shifted to where Troy and Abel stood. The two men appeared to be having a very terse conversation. From the way Abel was now glaring in their direction she guessed Troy was telling him about her.
“Would you excuse me for a moment?” she said.
Once she joined the men they stopped talking and turned toward her.
“Mr. Atwater, I don’t want to impose on you and your family. If you would rather I not stay here–”
“So she does have manners.” Abel eyed her. “Until we ferret out the truth about you, and what is to be done about this curse you carry, you are to remain with Erica, Aileen or one of the other women of the coven. You will also avoid having any physical contact with the men.”
She gulped. “I couldn’t stop Ewan in time–”
“So I saw.” Abel turned to Troy. “You may use the northwest rooms. Your brother and Aileen are living in the cabin Wilson built for them over the summer.”
“It’s better if we have separate rooms,” Troy said. “We’re not sleeping together.”
“You brought her here, so you’ll guard her every night. How you do it is your business.” Abel turned away. “We breakfast together in an hour in the dining hall.”
“Thank–” Summer watched the older man stomp back inside. “You.”
“He’s angry with me, not you.” Troy took her backpack and they followed Abel.
Inside the pavilion was even more impressive, with blazing stone fireplaces, cozy hand-made furnishings and walls hung with intricate tapestries. As Troy guided her through a labyrinth of corridors back to their rooms she saw open doorways leading to a library, a weaving room, a glass-walled hothouse, an enormous kitchen and a long dining room with a table large enough to feed forty or more. She also saw some rooms she couldn’t identify: one with a raised platform around which huge floor pillows were scattered, another half-filled with racks of plants hanging upside down, and a third with some sort of shrine.
“How big is this place?” Summer asked as Troy stopped at a pair of double doors and opened them.
“I don’t know anymore.
It looks like my father has been adding on since I left.” Once she walked in he followed and closed the doors behind them. “I apologize for the way he spoke to you. It’s difficult for him to be empathetic when all he wants to do is thrash me senseless.”
Summer grimaced. “If he’s that hostile then maybe we should go to your place.”
“I think now that he’s vented his spleen he will come around.” Troy turned around and scanned the room, which had other doors on either side, and was comfortably furnished in soft green colors. “You can have the bedroom. I’ll sleep on the couch.” He went over and crouched in front of the hearth to start building a fire.
“Troy.” She waited until he looked up at her. “I didn’t feel anything when Ewan kissed my hand, and he hasn’t shown any interest in me. Why didn’t the ‘curse’ affect him?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Maybe my body ward is better than I thought it was.”
Or maybe, Summer thought, the curse isn’t what you think it is.
CHAPTER SEVEN
BY THE TIME the sun rose Michael finished his last sweep of the park. He drove to the east side, to one of the oldest churches in the city. He felt frustrated that he had not been able to find the rapist who had attacked Summer, convinced the man was a rogue warlock. Michael knew rape could be a powerful element in dark magic, and that if the Wiccan was deliberately assaulting females in order to augment some spell, he would have no qualms about terminating the vicious brute.
He will pay for terrifying her, with his worthless life.
Inside the church four humans pretending to work nodded to Michael as he made his way around the scaffolding and piles of construction materials toward the unfinished altar. There he slipped into an elevator hidden behind a curtain and pressed the only, unmarked button on the panel, which lowered the cab through the basement into the sublevel of the North Abbey.
It had been Temple Master Nathaniel’s idea to base their east coast headquarters beneath the decaying church, and use the excuse of renovating it to hide their real activities.
“No one goes to church anymore,” he had said. “No one will set foot in one that’s falling down around their ears. Once our humans finish repairing the old beauty––at a snail’s pace, naturally––we’ll simply have the church declared a private monastic retreat. Perhaps for lepers. That should keep the tourists away.”
Down at the sublevel Michael stepped out and removed his dagger and gun, which he left with the Templar on guard duty. Here cold air poured in from ducts that snaked up to outside air vents, bringing along with it the hard, sour smells of the city. As Michael walked down the long corridor to the command center, where Nathaniel oversaw all the Templar operations within their assigned quadrant, he smelled the mossy incense the humans burned to try to mask the dankness. For some reason the cloying smoke and claustrophobic lack of windows always made him feel as if he were walking into a tomb where the dead were being feted and worshipped.
The command center itself resembled a massive strategic data site, with longs rows of narrow desks and computers manned by the humans who monitored various media feeds for any sign of Wiccan activity. On one wall hung an enormous map of New York and other surrounding states that was regularly marked with flags and pins indicating pagan-related incidents or suspected gathering places. A massively complex radio array constantly swept the police bands and fed the calls into another computer, which flagged any call suspected of being perpetrated by their enemy.
In the midst of all this technological bustle, the Temple Master worked from a school teacher’s desk, where he reviewed reports, took phone calls from his men and the faithful, and directed a staff of more than a hundred mortals and twice as many Templars.
Nathaniel was always busy, and yet when he saw Michael approaching he closed the file he was reading and rose to his feet. Short and rather stout, the silver-haired Temple Master still had a commanding presence that made larger men feel like awkward, overgrown boys.
“Michael, you should have reported in hours ago.” His steel-blue eyes softened with visible affection. “I was growing concerned, my son.”
Michael went down on one knee before his master and mentor, bowing his head as he pressed his fist over his heart in the proper salutation.
“Forgive me, Master Harper. I was hunting a rogue warlock whom I discovered has been assaulting and raping human females in Central Park.”
“This is news to me.” Nathaniel gestured for him to rise and waved over his shift supervisor. “Bring me all the data you have on women who have recently been raped or assaulted in Central Park.” Once the supervisor hurried off he smiled briefly at Michael. “Sit down, my boy.”
Michael lowered himself onto the small chair beside Nathaniel’s desk and shook his head when one of the humans stopped and offered to fetch him coffee.
“It seems rather busy for a morning shift,” he mentioned to his master. “Has something come up?”
“Something will, in due time.” Nathaniel checked his watch. “I have summoned all our brethren in the field to attend me this noon, and I will want you at my side.”
“All of them?” Michael frowned. “May I ask for what purpose, Master?”
“That can wait. You and I have a far more troubling problem to discuss.” Nathaniel removed a file from his desk and handed it to Michael. “This conniving witch presents a very grave threat to our mission.”
“Indeed.” Michael barely controlled his shock when he opened the file and saw a picture of a blood-soaked, terrified Summer staring back at him. “Who is she?”
“We do not know her name, although she was brought into the country from Canada. We managed to turn the human transporting her to our cause, but before we could secure the exchange she attacked. Before she escaped she murdered our sympathizer and five of our best mortal guards.” Nathaniel sighed heavily. “I have just received a report from Gideon that she was spotted last night in Central Park. It is now your sole priority to locate and capture this woman, and deliver her to me.”
Michael quickly skimmed through the report, which stated only that a woman matching Summer’s description had been spotted bespelling humans in the Conservatory gardens.
“Why was she brought into this country? Was she running from our brothers to the north?”
Nathaniel abruptly rose. “Walk with me, my son.”
The Temple Master led Michael through the data center and out into the sparring chamber where off-duty warriors often came to work off their various frustrations by practicing their fighting skills. Today the room was empty, except for the weapons waiting to be wielded. Nathaniel took down an ancient shield that long ago had nearly been cut in two.
“This was carried by Grand Master de Sonnac into his final battle.” Nathaniel’s diamond ring glittered as he traced the battered surface with his thick fingers. “I remember how fiercely he fought that day. Exhausted, half-blinded, and yet he refused to let another take his place at the head of the charge.”
Michael hung his head. “He was an inspiration to us all, Master.”
“I think he would still be with us, had his men not failed to protect him.” Nathaniel hung the shield gently back in its place. “Michael, this witch we seek is no ordinary Wiccan. She knows how to find The Emerald Tablet. Do you know what that is?”
Michael frowned. “From what I recall, it was an ancient grimoire destroyed by the pagans after the Crusades.”
“Not destroyed––hidden by the heretics. The Emerald Tablet isn’t simply an old spell book, my son. It is the oldest and most powerful grimoire ever written. Within its pages are the secrets to controlling all forms of magic, nature and the elements, and perhaps even time itself.” The Temple Master gazed up at him. “Whoever possesses the Tablet will wield unimaginable power. There would be no stopping them, you see.”
Michael felt sick. “You believe we should have such power? When it comes from a source so ungodly as this?”
“We are at war, my boy
. A war that spans so many centuries, and that has taken far too many of our brothers from us. It has gone on too long now.” Nathaniel touched his shoulder in a comforting gesture. “I know how repugnant it seems, when we have already devoted so much of our lives to eradicating the plague of the magic-users. But once we have the Tablet, we will finally have the means to end it. We will turn the tables on them, and use the pagans’ own devilish powers to scour all of them forever from the face of the earth.”
The door to the sparring chamber opened, and a short, bald human bowed respectfully toward Nathaniel. When the Temple Master nodded in return, the clergy aide hurried over to them.
“Master Harper, Steward Edmunds wishes to speak with you prior to the assembly.” Augustin Colbert didn’t spare Michael a glance. “He indicated that it is a matter of some urgency.”
“So it always is with Gideon.” Nathaniel gave Michael a rueful look. “I will see you at the noon assembly, my son.”
Michael bowed his head, but kept an eye on Augustin as the two men retreated. He knew the clergy aide despised him, and had been spying on him for some time now. While he was certain that the little man was interested only in what he could use to somehow disgrace Michael in Nathaniel’s eyes, he would not be above enlisting the help of Gideon Edmunds, Nathaniel’s steward, who had no love for anyone but himself.
Knowing Nathaniel would meet with Gideon in his private chambers, Michael left the sparring room through the maintenance access door, and descended down a dimly-lit stairwell into the equipment room that provided heating and air conditioning for the North Abbey sublevel. During his incarceration after the seventh Crusade, Michael had learned how to use his hands to pick up the vibrations of voices through solid walls and floors, something he was peculiarly sensitive to. He now employed the trick by placing the palms of his hands on the wall that stood between the equipment room and Nathaniel’s chamber.
Only to see if Gideon or Augustin knows more about Summer, he promised himself.
Rescued (Book One of the Silver Wood Coven Series): A Witch and Warlock Romance Novel Page 5
