Meggy had changed. But what sort of enchantment could possibly be on her? There was nothing extraordinary to Meggy—I would have sensed it! She felt no different the night before than she had when I’d first known her. But she had changed . . .
As my thoughts circled, I distantly heard a door open and slam, and a woman’s voice call, “Hello? Megs, you here? Meg?”
Footsteps paced above me, and then the stairway creaked. “Meg!” she shouted. “Hey, Meg! Where are you?”
By the time she opened the basement door, my personal fog had lifted enough for me to recognize that I couldn’t defend myself well with my back to the stairs. Reluctantly, I stood and watched the intruder make her rapid descent. “She’s gone,” I said, squinting at her in the gloom. “I can’t get to her. They’re gone.”
She paused at the foot of the steps where the wards used to run, a tanned, spike-haired apparition in a gray Virginia Beach T-shirt and black shorts. Her dark blue eyes, rimmed with a thick smudge of mascara, widened when she caught sight of me, while her right hand darted around to her back and fumbled under her shirt. “Stay where you are!” she ordered, producing a wooden wand. “Nothing funny now, I’m warning you—”
“You must have made the wards,” I interrupted, glancing about the room. “Not particularly effective.”
Her tough shell showed its first crack as her brow furrowed. “How’d you—”
“Know about the wards? I was down here yesterday, before they failed.” I started another weak fire in my hand and held it up, illuminating my face. “Put the stick down, kid.”
She breathed in sharply, but she had enough sense to let the wand fall. “What did you do to Meg?” she demanded in an angry rush. “She wasn’t hurting anyone.”
“I didn’t do anything to her,” I replied, and let the fire go out. “Gate opened in here in the middle of the night. Olive went back through. Meggy followed her. I tried to stop her, and then I tried to open it again . . .” I shrugged. “Faerie’s closed to me. Think you can open it?”
“Olive? What do you mean, Olive?”
“Her daughter.”
“I know that!” she snapped. “How did Meg—”
“Find her?” I slumped against the desk and folded my arms. “Kid was kidnapped and held in Faerie. She was basically dropped in my lap, and so I brought her back to Meggy. And now they’re gone because I couldn’t hold on against some sort of super-gate, and I haven’t the faintest idea of how to get another gate open. Like I said, you want to try?”
Her eyes darted back and forth between her wand and me. “How do you know Meg?”
“We go back. And in the current parlance, I’m her baby daddy. Surprise!” I shook my head and laughed weakly, too weary to think straight. “And now my mother’s going to kill them, knowing my luck.” I scrubbed my hands over my face. How had this become my life?
The wizard’s expression had shifted from cautious defiance toward outright caution. “Your . . . mother?”
“Titania,” I muttered, and winced as my fingers ran across the knot on my head. “You mean you don’t know me, kid? I got underlined in that little field guide of yours.”
“There was a lot to underline. Want to be more specific?”
“I sell books and answer to Colin. Better?”
“Shit,” she whispered. Her glances toward the wand increased in tempo. “You . . . and Meg . . .”
“She didn’t know. We got kind of drunk, and . . .”
The girl scowled and planted her fists on her skinny hips. “You’re Phoenix Colin? Seriously? Do you have any idea how long she’s been . . . and . . . you . . . you . . .” she sputtered. “Son of a bitch!” she finally managed to shout. “You knocked her up and ran!”
“I didn’t know about the knocking up bit!” I yelled back, feeling the first twinges of a headache coming on. “Now, if you don’t have anything constructive to add, then get the hell out of here and let me think.”
She said nothing, but she remained at the foot of the stairs, watching me. I produced a bottle of gin and took a couple of long swigs, then set it on the table and found her scowling. “Yes?”
“That’s not going to help anything,” she said. “And I don’t know about you, but I think it’s pretty damn irresponsible to be wasting a finite resource on Bombay Sapphire.”
“Finite?”
One thin black eyebrow rose. “Oh, you hadn’t noticed that the general magical levels around here tend to be, you know, falling?”
“Of course I noticed,” I muttered, taking another drink for good measure. “Got a headache, that’s all.”
“Then take a damn aspirin, you big sot. And get out of my way.” She scooped up her wand, shoved me away from the desk, and sat cross-legged on top. After running her hands back through her dark mop, she extended the stick and slowly exhaled. “I want to see what we’re dealing with.”
“We?” I replied, but broke off my half-planned retort when the girl muttered and waved her hand, and the room began to glow with green swirls and indecipherable characters. “What are you—”
“Shut up and let me concentrate,” she growled through clenched teeth.
The etheric traces began to glow brighter, a web of phosphorescent fog stretching across Meggy’s basement. At their center was a vibrant clump of green strands, tangled in a ghostly Gordian knot. The girl had closed her eyes with the strain of the spell and began to sweat, even though she sat perfectly still. “Can you take it?” she finally mumbled, her face tense with exertion.
“What are you talking about? I can’t do spellwork!” I protested, still clinging to my liquid breakfast.
Her brows twitched slightly. “The spell is laid, you moron. Just keep feeding it and let me see what we have here, okay? Can you do that much?”
“I’ll try, but this isn’t my specialty,” I muttered, sending the bottle away.
“Don’t give me that bullshit. You’re a fucking faerie lord, you can manage to keep this going for five lousy minutes.”
Fighting down the urge to smack the wizard, I turned my attention to the mess before me. So unaccustomed was I to actually seeing magic in action that it took me a few seconds to spot what the girl had done to raise the green work, but I felt her spell soon enough and began to feed it. The process was unwieldy, like trying to power a hair dryer with a car battery and a set of faulty clamps, but the green lines soon glowed like fire, and the girl opened her eyes. “Keep it steady, I’m going in,” she said, then hopped off the table and stepped into the middle of the light show, her wand stretched before her.
“What is that?” I asked, fighting to hold the spell together.
“Echoes. Tracers. The runes show me what went into this business. It’s like getting a chemical signature from the spell.”
My head pounded with the effort. “And that thing in the middle?”
“Enchantment.” The green began to flicker, and she glanced back at me with a frown. “Don’t wuss out on me, man. I’ve got to read this mess, and it’s extremely complicated, so if you don’t mind . . .”
“Just hurry,” I began, but my complaint was cut off an instant later when something heavy slammed into my side and knocked me to the floor.
“What the hell did you do?” an all-too-familiar voice shouted in Fae. Before I could move, the voice’s owner grabbed my shoulders and began to shake me back and forth, up into the air and down against the carpet. When the shock passed, I saw red tangles and furious brown eyes glowing green in the last light of the broken spell, and I shoved my assailant off me.
As he tried to scramble to his feet, I tackled him and wrapped my hands around his neck. “You bring them back and do it now!” I yelled, pressing my thumbs against his windpipe. “Do it! Do it or I’ll kill you right here, I swear it!” I shook him, pounding his head against the floor, and barely registered his hands scratching at my arms. “Damn it, bring them back!”
The world around us flickered, and suddenly we were across the room and vertic
al, rolling along the wall. He tried to throw me into one of the bookcases to shrug me off, but I clung to him and dug in deeper. A second later, I had him upstairs, ramming his head against the futon frame’s wooden legs, and then I slung us into the backyard, where we tumbled over and over in the brown grass, trying our damnedest to kill each other. His skin heated, mine burned with cold, and I littered the yard with broken glass in time to roll him into a sharp patch. He yelped with what little air he had left before sending us two stories skyward and back to earth. The impact knocked the wind from my chest and made me see stars, giving him a chance to slip free and put a few feet between us, where he crouched and slightly wheezed, waiting for the next round.
By that time, however, the wizard had managed to find us. “Stop it!” she yelled, sprinting into the fray with one fist securely wrapped around her wand. “I’m running out of time down there, we’ve got to get the spell read—”
He threw himself at her, grabbed the wand from her hand, and cast it across the yard in a shower of splinters. “What did you do?” he bellowed, then jumped on top of her and began to throttle her in turn. The girl’s face went purple as she kicked and scratched, and her bare arms and legs bled from my broken-glass booby trap in the yard.
I pushed myself to my feet, still woozy from the fall, and thought I was hallucinating when a knight vaulted Meggy’s low wooden fence and ripped the arming sword from his back. He ran to the fight, kicked my brother in the side with a steel-toed boot, then pressed the blade hard against his throat. “Yield,” he mumbled through his black motorcycle helmet. “Or die. Your choice.”
“Yield!” he squealed, holding his burned neck as soon as the point was lifted. “Yield, I yield, get that thing away . . .”
The knight stepped back, then knelt beside the girl and offered her a black-gloved hand. “Are you hurt?” he asked, propping her head against his arm as she sat up and coughed.
He turned just enough, giving me a glimpse of the red cross on his white surcoat—a Templar, then. But no one had seen a legitimate Templar since I was a child . . .
I shook my head, driving the mists aside. That wasn’t a Templar, that was a tall, armored lunatic in costume. “Who in blazes are you?” I shouted, running across the yard before he could abduct the wizard.
He held up one hand to stay me, then lifted his visor to reveal worried brown eyes in a young, familiar face. “Father Paul said he had a bad feeling about this,” said the seminarian. “Asked me to check in on you on my way. Probably a good thing, huh?” As I goggled, he pulled the girl upright. “So, who’s the cretin?” he asked, cocking his head toward his vanquished foe, who by then had crawled out of striking distance and continued to hold his injured throat.
“My asshole half brother. Well, one of them,” I replied, keeping my distance. Running straight into a steel bodysuit, I had by then recalled, would only end in tears. “You’re about seven months too early to play dress-up, you know.”
Joey pulled off his helmet and tossed it into the grass. “Not a lot of trunk space on a Harley. I figured I’d wear my gear down and leave the Kevlar at home. Might work against road rash, I guess.” He sheathed his sword and folded his arms, regarding the three of us in turn. We made an ugly scene—my brother in jeans and an oversized yellow polo, the only one actually dressed, struggling to his feet and wincing at the pain from the rising red welt across his throat; the wizard in her T-shirt and bed shorts, bruised and bloodied, still coughing as she recovered; and me, haggard and scratched, wearing sleeping sweats and feeling the chill in bare feet. “So, uh . . . someone want to fill me in?” he said.
The wizard cut her eyes to me. “You pal around with cosplayers?”
“Not knowingly,” I muttered.
“It’s not cosplay,” Joey protested. “I’m supposed to be jousting all next week. This stuff’s legit, not that costume nonsense. Ah,” he barked, seeing my brother step back. “Hold it. We’re not finished yet, bub.”
He scowled, his burn momentarily forgotten. “You dare to give me orders?” he snarled, and dropped to a half crouch.
I jumped between them before the idiot could charge. A quick burst sent him sailing headfirst into the trunk of one of Meggy’s shade trees, where he groaned and fell. “Okay, Joey,” I said, turning my attention back to the ersatz knight, “how about an explanation that makes sense this time, huh?”
He watched my brother rub his head. “Is he all right?”
“Fine. You mentioned jousting?”
Joey’s face reddened under his helmet-plastered hair. “It’s just something I’ve done for a while, you know. My dad did it—he smiths now—and my mom’s always been really into the medieval scene, and they tour . . . I sort of picked it up along the way, horses and swords and lances and all of that. We’re going on spring break now at school, and there’s a fair going on about an hour outside of Raleigh—I’m still plugged into the circuit, uh, and . . . well, I mean, they had an extra slot . . .”
“And the Templar getup?”
“Seemed kind of appropriate,” he mumbled. “Look, Father knows about it, I’m not doing anything wrong . . .”
“Can you actually use that thing?” I asked, pointing to the steel-and-leather hilt peeking over his right shoulder.
He nodded. “Decently enough. I won some tournaments in high school.”
Although I can create clothing out of nothing, I don’t like to take chances with iron-based items. Rather than summon a pair of gloves and hope for the best, I ripped my T-shirt off, wrapped it around my right hand, and gestured with my bare left. Joey took the hint and held out the blade hilt-first, and I carefully gripped it with my covered hand. It wasn’t perfect, but the shirt sufficed for the moment. Duly equipped, I appeared at my brother’s side and held the sword to his throat. “Okay, Robin,” I said as his head began to clear from the blow against the tree, “I’m giving you one chance to tell me what the hell you did to my daughter and my . . . uh . . . to Meggy. Talk.”
His glazed eyes tried to focus on mine and settled for my chin. “Move the sword.”
“Try me and I’ll move it closer.”
“They call him ‘Ironhand’ for a reason,” said the wizard, who had jogged over to see the show.
My brother managed to shoot her a contemptuous glare. “Who do you think gave him the name, witch girl?”
“Wizard,” she snapped. Joey grabbed her arm before she could lunge at him, and though she slapped him off, she kept her distance.
I moved the point of the blade half an inch closer to Robin’s exposed skin. “Stop trying to antagonize the witch.”
“Wizard!”
“Whatever,” I muttered. “Now, you’re going to tell me exactly what you did and why I can’t get a damn gate open, or you’re going to end up just like Áedán. And I liked him a lot more than I like you.”
Robin’s Adam’s apple bobbed just beneath the sword point. “I didn’t know it was going to close off Faerie,” he said quietly, keeping his dark eyes on the steel. “She never said anything about that.”
“Who didn’t?” the wizard cut in.
“Let me ask the questions, okay?” I said, sparing her a quick glance. “Guy with the sword talks.”
“Screw that. Meg’s my friend, and I’m not going to—”
“I have an incredibly vested interest in keeping her alive, you understand?” I interrupted. “And don’t you have a spell to read or something?”
Her jaw clenched. “Bastard there broke my wand. I can’t.”
“Okay. Then Robin can just tell us what we’re up against and spare you the trouble,” I countered.
He looked up, found the three of us ringing him, and swallowed hard. “It was Mab, all right?” he whined. “She gave me that thing, and I—”
“You’re working with Mab?” I shouted. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“It was just supposed to pull those two into Faerie! I didn’t know it was going to cut off the connection!”
I breathed deeply, trying to regroup my fleeing bits of self-control. “First, where did you find Mab? And secondly, why would she have any interest in sending people over the border?”
“I didn’t find her, she found me,” he replied in a rush, keeping a nervous eye on Joey’s scuffed boots. “She had a plan, she said, she was going to go home, and my father was going to go with her, and getting those two in was the first step. She wouldn’t tell me why. Would you please get that away?”
I moved the sword closer. “Not yet.”
“My neck really hurts!”
“Suck it up,” the wizard muttered.
Robin’s eyes turned sullen. “I told her I wanted revenge,” he mumbled. “She said this would do it. I set it off, I get what I want, she gets what she wants, only you and Mother lose. Happy now?”
Joey’s brow scrunched. “What’s your beef with Colin?”
“Remember that faerie problem back in Harrow?” I cut in. “He gave the green light. And I slapped his hand, and he doesn’t like it—do you, little Puck?”
If I hadn’t been armed, my brother would have tried to rip my head off. Instead, he lay there, pinned and seething, and I held my hand steady. “Whatever you did was a combination of enchantment and spellcraft,” I continued. “What was it?”
“I don’t know. Little black box. She said to put it down and count to ten.” He tried to press himself deeper into the grass, away from me. “I think she woke the girl. The other one ran after her, and then you butted in. That’s all I know. Can I get up?”
“You realize,” I said quietly, “that you’re solely responsible for this. Congratulations, genius, we’re severed for the moment.” I held up my other hand and started a fire, but this one burned even weaker than the last. “The magic’s fading, and it’s not being renewed.”
“So put out the damn fire already,” the wizard interrupted.
I closed my hand, and a little tendril of smoke escaped through my fingers. “If we can’t open a connection, there isn’t going to be any magic left. It’s just a matter of time.”
Stranger Magics Page 10
