by Diane Farr
I dashed back down the driveway, gravel spraying from my flying espadrilles, and clung to the mailbox, my eyes anxiously searching the road. Within seconds, Lance flew around the curve and into view, driving much too fast for safety. He killed his engine at the foot of our drive and reached me in one fluid move, half-leap, half-run. His eyes were blazing with concentration—and power.
My mind was still chattering: What is it? What is it? But he picked up my fear for Meg, too, and addressed that first.
“It won’t hurt Megan. She won’t feel it. Won’t even know it’s there. It’s not aimed at her.”
I still couldn’t speak, but I nodded, grateful for that much at least.
“They’re coming, Zara.”
I didn’t bother to ask who. “How many?”
“Five new ones, I think. Rune and Amber make seven. But I don’t think Rune’s heart is in it. He’s trying to argue with the others.”
“Is that what I’m feeling? Just the…the posse heading my way?”
Lance shook his head. I saw muscles tightening in his jaw and picked up his anger and disgust at what was happening. “They don’t know how powerful you might turn out to be, so they’re wimping out. They’re not going for you directly. They’re going for your home. They think that’ll force your hand.”
He sensed my confusion and spoke before I could ask. “They’re behaving like cowards, if you ask me. Plus it’s not going to work. Come on. We have to act fast.”
I wanted to ask What do you mean? What are they doing? What do they want? What should we do? but all that came out was, “What…what…”
Fortunately, words weren’t necessary between me and Lance.
“Help me,” he said. “We’re going to build a wall around this place.” He sent me the mental image of an invisible shield sitting like a crystal dome over Nonny’s house, Norland’s Nursery, and the surrounding fields and meadow. The picture he showed me looked like my home in a snow globe. “It can’t be too big,” he warned me. “I wouldn’t chance it. We can’t protect the whole town or anything like that. But between the two of us, we can protect this place. And Nonny.”
Nonny! My heart pounded in fear. “Why Nonny? She’s got nothing to do with this.”
“They don’t care. Come on.” He was sprinting down the side of the house, away from the road, where we’d be less exposed. I could only follow. Once we were out of view, he started taking his boots off. I didn’t understand it, but I followed his lead, slipping off my espadrilles and kicking them aside.
There wasn’t time for him to answer my questions; even I could see that. I tried to tamp them down, but anxiety gnawed at the edges of my mind and made it hard to focus.
“Concentrate.” Lance’s voice was sharp with authority. I nodded dumbly, reaching past my confusion to grab his thoughts. I picked up strong images but the only words I caught, slipping past like mist on the wind, were wish she had her power stone.
Yeah. Whatever it was, it would sure come in handy right about now.
He stood beside me. We faced down Chapman Road and held out our arms like a couple of shamans summoning spirits. I might have felt foolish under less urgent circumstances. As it was, trust me, I had no trouble keeping a straight face.
Go with me, Lance commanded silently. And I did. Together, we summoned Power. And I immediately understood why we’d taken our shoes off.
The Power shot up from the heart of the planet and slammed through the soles of our feet. My feet burned where they touched the ground, but the feeling was exhilarating rather than painful. I’d never experienced the thrust of strong magic against my bare skin before. A hot, fierce joy filled me. It was more than exciting; it was transcendent. I felt the strongest connection yet to what I am…the last in a long line of my kind, powerful in ways most people would never know. I felt primitive. Ancient. Eternal.
My hair lifted as if a gust of wind had caught it; it swirled in the air around me, crackling with amethyst energy—because the Power had color to it, it seemed; I was aware of Lance sparking a frosty green that was different from, yet complementary to, my violet fire. We stood in a cloud of green and purple flashes of light.
Yes.
I don’t know whose yes I heard, mine or Lance’s. It didn’t matter. We were one now, fused and seamless by mutual consent. Yet we remained ourselves, too—my mind went with his to Chapman Road, just where it curves toward town, and together we built a invisible wall of energy across it. We curved the wall to the left, shooting it across the field. Then—now that I’d gotten the hang of what we were doing—his mind deferred to mine.
You know the terrain better than I do.
Of course.
I sent him the mental images and he followed with me, building our shield where the land dipped toward the creek, back up the other side to the meadow—our meadow, now; we had reached Nonny’s property—
Not too far, he warned me. I reluctantly discarded the idea of including the Chapman place and obediently turned the wall. We sent it along the fence line for a little way, then bent it where the creek looped back and ran through the bottom of the meadow, then turned it again and shot it up toward the road on the other side of our house…across the road and around the back of the nursery… then looped it around to race back and meet the wall where we began it. We had constructed a nice, not-quite-symmetrical circle around my home.
Now we close it, Lance told me. He took the lead again, pulling the wall higher and higher, and curving it over our heads until it joined itself in the sky. Stretching our arms skyward, we sent our combined energy toward the heavens and sealed that sucker right up.
We were now standing at roughly the center of a protective dome of energy.
We’ve done it, he told me, and I felt his sardonic smile.
Then, together, we sent the Power back down into the earth.
My hair tumbled back into its natural place and the colors evaporated from the air. I took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh of pure pleasure. “That last bit was great,” I informed him. “I never knew what to do with the Power once I was, you know, done with it. Sometimes I couldn’t get rid of it. One time I had to hide in my room for three hours—” Then I picked up something he was trying to hide from me. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” But he looked drawn, and his usual lithe movements were jerky as he pulled his boots back on. And then, to my utter amazement, Lance Donovan, the most graceful and powerful creature I have ever known, fell backwards on his butt in the flowerbed.
“Liar!” I exclaimed. “You’re hurt.” I started to reach down to him, thinking to help him up—and then I remembered. If I touched him, that would break the banishment. Did I really want to do that? Even now?
My hesitation hurt him even more. I was ashamed of myself. Ashamed of my fear. But I still didn’t reach to help him up.
So he got up on his own. Slowly. It obviously wasn’t easy. After he got to his feet he leaned one hand against the house and panted for a minute or so, white-faced. He was in pain, and he was mad at me. And I didn’t blame him.
“It’s the banishment, Zara. You want to lift it now? Because we have to start working together. And it hurts to work with you.”
He was stalking angrily back toward the front of the house. I trotted at his heels like a scolded puppy. “Wait. Wait. What do you mean? What hurt? Talk to me.”
He spun around to face me. “Do you know how much easier that would have been, if I could touch you? You have no idea. Don’t you know I’m on your side? Don’t you know I’m trying to protect you? Why do you have to be so freaking pissy all the time?”
I blushed. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “Sorry, sorry. I know—I know things are different now.”
“Not different enough.”
He meant me, of course. He meant that he had changed, and I hadn’t. He was right—if he really had changed, that is. I sort of had to take his word for that; I couldn’t read the innermost workings of his soul. Just the top layer.
“Thank you,” I said belatedly. “For what you did just now.”
He gave a disgruntled snort, climbed the steps to our porch, and dropped into one of Nonny’s Adirondack chairs. He still looked pale. I hopped up to sit on the wide porch rail across from where he was, and studied him. “Did you say it hurt?”
“I’ll survive.”
“Come on. Seriously. What hurt?”
Lance scowled. “It hurt to join my mind with yours. It doesn’t hurt to read your thoughts, but I guess working together like that breaks the rules of my banishment. Not that I know what the rules are.”
“Neither do I,” I said sheepishly. “I just sort of banished you on impulse, you know. It wasn’t planned out or anything.” Then I remembered why I had done it, and my sheepishness vanished. “As you’ll recall,” I said tartly, “I had to act fast.”
There you go again. “That was then. I wouldn’t hurt you now.”
“When I’m sure of that, I’ll break the banishment.”
“Great.” He sounded disgusted, but then he looked at me and his expression softened. His color was coming back, too. “I can tell you this much. It hurt a lot less than it would have a week ago.”
I felt a frisson of alarm. “Are you sure?”
He almost smiled—the kind of smile that kicked my pulse into high gear. “Pretty sure.”
“So my spell is weakening.” I looked away from him so I could glare properly. Somehow, looking at Lance with that half-smile on his face, it was hard to work up a frown.
“Or you are,” he suggested slyly.
I glared in earnest. “Don’t count on that, Donovan. This always happens to my spells.”
We both thought at once: Need that power stone.
Our eyes met. We were thinking the same thing: What if we found it?
“Okay,” I said softly. “Where do you think it would be?”
“Wherever Nonny put it.”
He was right. Holy cow, he was right.
It would have been on me when my unknown mother bundled me up, dropped me at the commune gates, rang the bell and disappeared. But nobody would have known its significance.
So where would Nonny have put it?
“Safe deposit box?” suggested Lance.
I shook my head. “Not Nonny. She doesn’t trust banks.” Nonny never really got over her hippie commune mindset. If she didn’t have a business to run, she’d probably live on an all-cash basis. Truth be told, she’d be happiest living off the land and trading with her neighbors like a cavewoman.
Something unpleasant occurred to Lance. “What if she sold it?”
For a second, I froze. Then I relaxed. “No. She’d never do that. She’s sentimental. She’d keep it, and give it to me on my twenty-first birthday or something.”
“Then it’s here somewhere.”
Excitement shot through me. Again he was right. We stared intently at each other, as if we could somehow divine the answer from the energy that danced between us like dust motes. “But where?” I whispered, mentally reviewing every cupboard in the house.
“Jewelry box?”
I tried to remember the items on Nonny’s dresser, but drew a blank. “The only jewelry I’ve ever seen her wear was a watch. But let’s go look.”
I hopped off the porch rail, eager to begin, but Lance stopped me. “Wait. If we find it, you’re not going to use it against me, are you?”
I paused with one hand on the door, and looked up at him. He was standing so close to me I could feel the energy humming along his skin and reaching toward me—but actually reaching me was something he could not do. Yet.
My lips were curving into a smile almost against my will. “Not unless I have to,” I said. “So don’t make me. Come on.”
I made a beeline for Nonny’s room at the back of the house. Lance followed, grumbling under his breath.
As if I would know how to use a power stone against him, unless he taught me. Sheesh.
Nonny’s furniture matches the house itself. It’s old-fashioned, comfortable and bungalow-y. Her personal space is nicely crowded with massive, squareish pieces, all in wood, and lots of pillows of various sizes and colors, because she’s totally into needlepoint and embroidery and all that crafty stuff. Her room has a dim, pleasant scent—sandalwood, I think.
There was a wooden box on her dresser, but it was full of old family photos, stacked and clipped. A stone jar held a collection of buttons. I sat on the edge of her bed and went through three sewing boxes and a crochet bag. Nothing.
“What are we looking for, exactly? An amethyst, right? How big?”
“I’m not sure.” Lance was scanning the titles on Nonny’s bookshelves. I sent him a mental image of an amethyst the size of a hen’s egg and he grinned. “Not that big. It’ll just be a normal-looking amethyst. You could probably wear it in a ring, if you want to live dangerously.”
“Why dangerously?” I started pulling out bottom drawers. People always hide stuff in bottom drawers.
“You don’t want to lose it, that’s all.”
I looked at him for a moment. “Excuse me, but why are you checking the books?”
“Looking for a hippie hidey-hole. They used to hollow out a book and turn it into a stash box.” I felt Lance’s interest suddenly sharpen. “Like this.” He pulled out a fat copy of Gone With the Wind. Sure enough, it was a stash box. But when he shook it, it made the wrong sort of sound – there were papers, not stones, in there. He opened it, but was disappointed. “Nothing. Not even drugs.”
“It’s not nothing. What is it?” I took the box from him and dropped into a chair while Lance started rifling through Nonny’s headboard.
I lifted the lid of her homemade trinket box. What was it that Nonny prized so highly that she hid it in a secret compartment?
I was completely unprepared for the answer. It wasn’t one thing. It was a bunch of things.
There was a little envelope containing a lock of black hair. ‘Zara, age 3’ was noted on the envelope in pencil. My first grade report card stared me in the face. Plus a poem I dimly remembered writing when I was eight or so. And every single Mother’s Day and birthday card I had given her, ever.
There were a few things I didn’t recognize, or that rang a bell but I couldn’t place: a frayed hair ribbon of lavender satin. A receipt for baby shoes. A yellow wildflower that had been pressed between the pages of a book and preserved in waxed paper. Had I picked it for her? I must have.
My eyes blurred with unexpected tears. I replaced everything, being careful to put them in the exact order I had found them.
“What is it?” said Lance.
I shook my head. “We shouldn’t be in here,” I whispered. “We shouldn’t be going through her personal stuff.”
“We’re looking for your personal stuff.”
I shook my head again. “No. It’s wrong.”
My hands were trembling a little as I slid Gone With the Wind back into place. The book title suddenly seemed poignant. My childhood was in there, gone with the wind. Nonny’s little girl… going, going, gone. Had she made a stash box out of this book, of all books, deliberately? Probably.
I realized Lance was watching me. His mind probed mine, observing my emotions. Studying them. And for the first time, I realized that he was learning, from me, how to be human—as I learned, from him, how to be a spellspinner.
“You don’t understand,” I said. It wasn’t a question or a protest—just a simple statement of fact.
“Spellspinners don’t get sentimental. Does that seem cold to you?”
“Yes.”
We stared at each other across the room. We were so alien to each other. So different. We shared a mysterious, unbreakable link, and still couldn’t figure each other out.
Lance almost smiled. “I’ve learned a lot from you, Zara. It’s interesting. But you’ll never turn me into a stick.”
�
�It’s good to be human,” I told him. “You can’t be an island unto yourself, Lance. Power isn’t everything.”
“Sometimes I wonder,” Lance said slowly, “whether you are a hundred percent spellspinner. You’re so different from the rest of us. But you’re so powerful…” He frowned. “You must be.”
“My spells unravel,” I reminded him bleakly. “So maybe I’m not. Which reminds me—you’ll have to help me keep that shield up. Whatever part of it I built will likely fail.”
“Unless we find your power stone.”
I sighed. “Okay. It’s important. I get it. But before we start digging through Nonny’s underwear or something, why don’t you let me just ask her?”
I walked back over to her highboy and shoved the bottom drawer shut with my foot. I could feel the resistance in Lance’s mind. He didn’t like the idea of asking Nonny point-blank about my power stone.
“I’m not going to tell her what it is,” I reminded him. “She won’t know. You just don’t like to ask for anyone’s help.” I looked quizzically at him. “Is that a spellspinner thing, or a guy thing?”
“Both.” His smile was perfunctory. “You’re too trusting, though. Too emotional.” Too much like a stick.
The drawer wasn’t closing all the way. The collar of one of Nonny’s sweaters was poking out. I dropped down and reopened the drawer to adjust the sweater—and Nonny’s voice sounded from the doorway.
“What on earth are you doing?”
I froze. The drawer was open. My hands were in it.
Lance was standing by her bed.
It was one of those awful moments where you realize, in a flash, that not only should you not be doing what you’re doing—what you’re doing looks even worse than it is. I glanced over my shoulder at Nonny’s furious, amazed expression and my heart sank.
“Looking for something,” I said lamely.
“In my sweater drawer?”
“Um.” I stood up. “Pretty dumb, I guess.”
“Get out,” she said. “Both of you.”
We got. Marching back down the passage, I felt like a criminal. Plus I was embarrassed. It probably didn’t help when I blurted out, “I thought you were at the nursery.”
