Laced with Magic

by Barbara Bretton

  Janice, however, was talking at full volume. “The ex spent the afternoon in a transparent bubble. I think she knows she’s not in Kansas anymore.” Tears flowed down her cheeks. “I didn’t want to say that. I swear I didn’t!”

  Karen leaped to her feet. I grabbed her cup of tea a micrometer before it skidded off the table. “I thought that was a dream.”

  “Of course it was,” I said. “There’s nothing to worry about. It was just a little blip.”

  Janice clapped her hands over her mouth. “Oh gods, I’m sorry! You have to believe me, Chloe. I’d never do anything to compromise the town. It’s like someone’s shut down my internal censor.”

  I swung around to glare at my friend. “What is wrong with you, Jan? Aren’t things bad enough?”

  “Hey, don’t blame me! You’re the sorcerer. You should recognize an interruptive chaos spell when you see one.”

  Please tell me she didn’t really say that.

  Karen stared at the two of us. “Did she just call you a sorcerer?”

  Okay, so she really did.

  “That’s my Ravelry nickname.” I congratulated myself for being quick on my feet. Ravelry was a popular online gathering place for knitters where screen names tended toward the creative. “Queen of the Universe was already taken.”

  Karen shook her head. “I don’t think that’s what she meant.”

  “Feel free to jump in anytime,” I said to Luke.

  He looked like he had been to hell and back, but he slid behind his cop face and pretended none of this was happening. “We gave it a shot and it didn’t work. We have our answer. Let’s call it a night.” He turned toward his ex. “There’s no magic here, Karen. You know it and I know it. I’ll drive you down to Boston.”

  Karen looked from Luke to Janice to me. Our eyes held for what seemed like an eternity, and I felt a shifting deep inside. Part of me wanted her to acknowledge what was right in front of her, that she was surrounded by magick of every kind imaginable and she would never be closer to contacting her daughter than she was right here, right now. I wanted her to fight for her daughter, to take a stand against the impossible.

  But the other part of me, the part who loved Luke and Sugar Maple, just wanted her to go away, and that part won.

  “Luke’s right,” I said. “If Janice can’t make a connection with your daughter, no one can. You’ve done everything you could to reach Steffie. You might as well go home to Boston.”

  She nodded. What was there to say?

  “I’ll straighten up in the morning,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  Janice didn’t bother to say good night. I think she was afraid of what she might say next. Interruptive chaos spells have ruined more marriages than snoring. Luke grabbed the bag of takeout. Karen gathered up her stuff, including her ever-present cell phone. I made sure Penny the cat had sufficient food and water.

  Luke and Karen stepped out onto the lamplit street. I closed the door behind us, set the lock, then drew in a breath of the damp spring night. You could almost smell the disappointment in the air.

  “I’m coming with you,” I said as Luke and Karen walked toward his truck. “I’m not in the mood to drive.”

  Actually I wasn’t in the mood to do much of anything, including knit. I guess without realizing it I had expected something to come of the séance, that contact (however fragile) would be made with Steffie MacKenzie.

  And maybe it would have if Luke hadn’t been such a horse’s ass.

  Which I told him as soon as we were in the truck.

  “What was wrong with you?” I demanded of Luke as soon as Karen climbed into the rear seat. “You didn’t give Jan a fighting chance to reach Steffie.”

  “A white candle and oregano?” He shot me a look as the engine sprang to life. “Like that’s going to call down the spirits.”

  “That wasn’t oregano. It was frankincense, cinnamon, and sandalwood.”

  “It smelled like room freshener,” Karen piped up. “One of those stick-on things you buy at the supermarket.”

  “No wonder the spirits stayed away,” I muttered. “I wish I had.”

  “Janice was humoring you,” Luke said. “I’m surprised she made enough money to get through freshman year. She’s a lousy medium.”

  “And how many mediums have you known in your life?” I threw back at him. “You’re not exactly a New Age-y kind of guy.”

  Luke opened his mouth to say something, then stopped. “Did you feel that?”

  I frowned. “You mean that little bounce?”

  “It’s more than a bounce,” Karen said. “It felt like we were flying for a second.”

  Which would have been crazy talk except for the fact that the ground suddenly dropped away and we were sailing up over the treetops, over the lighthouse monument, over town hall and the Inn and the Playhouse, and were headed straight toward Snow Lake.

  14

  CHLOE

  I used to have fantasies that I was Sandy in Grease, and one day my own personal Danny Zuko would find me and we’d fly up up and away from Rydell High in a vintage Ford convertible.

  Let’s just say the fantasy was a whole lot better than the fact. For one thing, Danny Zuko’s ex didn’t pass out cold in the backseat the second we went airborne.

  Luke was struggling with the steering wheel, which struck me as oddly endearing, this very human, very male need to control the clearly uncontrollable.

  For some reason I wasn’t scared. I suppose that sounds ridiculous, but I somehow knew the point of this exercise wasn’t to slam the three of us into the ground at two hundred miles an hour. It was just the beginning.

  We skimmed the woods that surrounded Snow Lake, dipped slightly, then glided in for a landing on a dock that suddenly appeared on the west side of the lake.

  “Holy shit,” Luke muttered, still death-gripping the wheel even though we were on solid ground. “Holy shit.”

  I scrambled out of the truck with Luke right behind me. A wild, squirrelly wind kicked up, bending the trees to the ground, then snapping them straight a second later with a sound like machine-gun fire. A violent crack of thunder shook the dock beneath my feet and the sky above split open, showering me in a storm of purple glitter that stung my skin like acid rain.

  The glitter only confirmed what I already knew. Isadora was back for Round 2.

  And this time Luke saw the glitter too. He winced as the crystalline shards bounced off his face.

  “Oh my God!” Karen’s voice took us both by surprise. Why couldn’t she stay unconscious for once? “Was it a tornado?”

  This wasn’t exactly the time to explain the history of Sugar Maple and the rage of the Fae.

  “Don’t move,” I ordered Luke and Karen. “No matter what happens, don’t say anything.”

  I wanted to add, And don’t be afraid, but who was I kidding? You’d have to be flat-out crazy not to be scared out of your mind with the sky ripping apart over your head.

  “What’s going on?” Karen’s voice was shrill and loud. “What is this stuff?” She frantically brushed glitter off her shoulders with quick stabbing motions.

  “Stand behind me,” Luke ordered his ex.

  “This has something to do with the séance, doesn’t it?” She looked from Luke to me. “Maybe it’s Steffie.” She was sliding from shrill to manic. “Maybe she’s trying to let us know she’s—”

  The thunder/lightning combination exploded over us like a hydrogen bomb. The earsplitting, bone-crushing sound was accompanied by a blinding blue-white bolt of light and energy that raised the temperature around us by a few degrees.

  Karen clapped her hands over her ears and dropped to her knees. Luke remained motionless. He’d been through this before. He knew what was coming as well as any human could.

  Not that I knew much more than he did. Isadora was fighting her way through the banishment, exploiting any weakness she could find. Why else would she have brought us to Snow Lake, the scene of Luke’s friend’s death back in Decem
ber? The scene of Sugar Maple’s only murder. Proof positive that even the best of protective spells can fail.

  The sky was now a blackened shade of purple. The towering pine trees ringing the lake were bowed in submission, branches snapping and breaking as a hollow wind howled around them.

  And then suddenly the world went quiet. Karen rose from her knees and glanced quickly around the perimeter of the lake. “Maybe it was a tornado,” she said, her voice high and tight. “They say tornadoes sound like freight trains and—”

  “I see I have your attention.”

  Isadora’s voice swelled like an overture in the hands of a world-class philharmonic. It filled the silence and pushed away any thoughts we might have had of making a run for it.

  Huge fountains of water erupted like minivolcanoes at the center of the lake, all rich purples laced with molten pink. While we were taking in the floor show, Isadora suddenly rose up from the water on a cloud of oily purple mist that suddenly coated my exposed skin.

  “Ohhh!” Karen exhaled on a sigh. Isadora’s Fae beauty could be overwhelming and it was working its magic right now. The ex looked over at me. “Don’t even try to explain her away.”

  “I wasn’t planning to.” I figured the flying car had pretty much let the last of the cats out of the bag.

  Isadora had never looked more breathtaking. Flawless creamy skin. Huge turquoise eyes with dark lashes that cast shadows on her cheeks. Shimmering hair the color of a raven’s wing, hanging straight to the floor. She wore a dark purple velvet cloak embroidered with every color of the rainbow and studded with jewels. An amulet of platinum and amethyst hung between her full breasts.

  Every man’s dream. Every woman’s nightmare.

  “We meet again,” Isadora said, her words floating across the surface of the lake toward us. “How interesting to see you’ve surrounded yourself with your own kind.”

  “Enough, Isadora,” I said, willing myself to sound more confident than I actually felt. “You’ve been banished. You have no power here.”

  On the other side of the lake, one of the centuries-old maple trees ripped free from the muddy earth and shot across the water heading straight for us.

  “Down!” I screamed and the three of us hit the wooden dock a moment before the massive tree split Luke’s truck in two, then slammed into the lake with a mighty splash.

  Karen was trembling so hard I could feel the slats vibrate beneath me. Luke was partially covering me, another of those deeply human gestures that touched the human part of my heart in a way nothing else ever had.

  “Don’t move,” I whispered to the two of them. “No matter what happens, don’t react to anything she says or does. I can fight her but not if I have to worry about the two of you.”

  “What’s going on?” Karen demanded. “Luke’s a cop. He should be—”

  Luke clamped his hand down across her mouth. “Shut up,” he growled. “We do what Chloe says.”

  “Release me.” The sound of Isadora’s voice made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and salute. “You’ve seen a sample of what I can do from within my banishment. Your magick is too new and raw to contain me permanently. Ultimately I will be victorious. Release me now and I will show compassion.”

  I couldn’t help it. I started to laugh. “Compassion? You mean like trying to kill Luke at the knit shop in December? You mean like the compassion you showed my parents when they were dying or the way you watched Suzanne struggling to keep from drowning in the icy lake? Tell me all about compassion, Isadora, because I really need to know.”

  I guess I went too far because suddenly I was being flung across the length of the dock by an unseen force greater than anything I had ever encountered. Rough splinters of wood tore at my jeans and slashed at my sweater. I skidded past the wreckage of Luke’s truck, then sailed off the edge of the dock and who knows what would have happened next if I hadn’t managed to somehow bend my body like a boomerang and sail right back to where I’d started.

  Both Luke and Karen were staring at me like I had danced on the rings of Saturn.

  But there was no time for taking bows. Isadora’s anger was taking physical form and the three of us watched, frozen in place, as her small, slender body began to grow until she all but blotted out the sky from our sight. The wild winds whipped her velvet robes around her legs. Her ankle-length mane of ebony hair swirled around her magnificent face. Her huge turquoise eyes burned with the need for revenge.

  She zeroed in on Karen, and I stopped breathing. Next to me, Luke tensed like tempered steel.

  Stay calm . . . Don’t let her get to you . . . It’s all an illusion . . . She’s still under banishment . . . She can’t hurt us . . . Just stay calm and we’ll get through this . . .

  Isadora didn’t move but suddenly a blizzard of glitter spilled over us so thick and fast I had to shield my eyes with my hands.

  Karen was shaking so hard she needed to lean against Luke in order to remain standing. Who could blame her? I would have traded places with her in a heartbeat, but as much as I hated to admit it, Isadora was running the show.

  “She killed my son.” Isadora’s words were expelled on an oily breath of smoky flowers. “Did you know that, Mrs. MacKenzie? Our Chloe killed my son Dane. She picked up a sword and she sliced him in half . . . my beloved son.”

  Don’t listen to her, Karen . . . Don’t let her see your reaction . . . Stay still . . . Don’t give her anything to work with.

  “I don’t believe you,” Karen whispered and my heart dropped to my knees. Her emotions were fuel for Isadora’s raging fire.

  “Tell her, Chloe.” Isadora’s voice was supple, seductive, a heartbeat away from irresistible. “Tell her what you and your human did that night.”

  I stayed silent even though I wanted to scream, You had twin sons, Isadora! You lost Gunnar that night too and he was worth a thousand Danes.

  The lake slid into total darkness. Moon, stars, streetlamps, ambient light from houses three blocks away. All of it gone. To be human, even part human, is to have the need to banish the darkness. We’ll do almost anything to bring back the light.

  Some of that primal need for light lived inside me too. The part that came from my human father knew the terror they were feeling. It was bred into our bones.

  The eerie stillness was shattered by Luke’s cell phone, followed almost immediately by Karen’s. The ringtones were the same, the slightly syncopated lullaby that I’d heard earlier.

  “Steffie!” Karen cried out into her cell. “Talk to me, baby!”

  “It’s Daddy, Steffie,” Luke shouted into his phone. “Say something!”

  But their phones kept on playing that choppy lullaby I suddenly knew by heart, joined by the sweetly reedy voice of a child rising up over it.

  “Mommy! Daddy! Help me! Please help me!”

  Karen’s anguish split the night in two. Her howls of despair pierced my heart.

  “This isn’t real,” I said to her and to Luke. “This is an illusion. She’s tapping into your histories and reflecting powerful images that will get the deepest response. Don’t buy into it. That’s not your daughter talking.”

  “Chloe’s right,” Luke said. “Isadora will do anything to get what she wants. That’s not our little girl. Keep telling yourself. No matter how real things seem, that’s not our little girl.”

  A glimmer of light appeared at the western edge of the lake. It hovered about one hundred feet above the treetops, spinning lazily, growing brighter with each revolution until it reached the dock and Isadora’s face was revealed at its center.

  An Isadora I’d never seen before. The turquoise eyes were streaked with blood. Her teeth had lengthened into yellowed fangs. The flawless porcelain skin was pockmarked and sallow, sagging around her neck like a baggy sock around a skinny ankle. The oily mist that had surrounded her earlier spilled from her mouth in noxious clouds that made the bile rise in my throat.

  All things considered, I’d rather face down the giant anac
onda she had conjured during our last battle than this hideous alternative version of Isadora. At least a snake had standards.

  “You understand,” this giant Isadora crooned into Karen’s ear. “You’re a mother. You know how it feels to lose your child. Chloe took my Dane away from me. She killed him, Karen. She took my baby’s life.”

  Karen was strong. Her entire body shook with fear but she stood fast and said nothing.

  Isadora exhaled another cloud of putrid oily smoke. Karen swayed but she didn’t fall. My respect for Luke’s ex-wife climbed another notch.

  “Maybe I should show you what happened,” Isadora said in a mock-friendly tone. “Sometimes humans need to see things with their own eyes before they can let themselves believe the truth.”

  “It’s not the truth,” I said quietly. “It’s not the truth. She’s using our memories for her own purpose.”

  Next to me, Luke was coiled and ready to strike. The analogy wasn’t lost on me. I reached for his hand and squeezed it, but I’m not sure it registered. He had disappeared behind the cop mask.

  The sky began to curl back from the center, illuminated around the edges with shimmering streaks of silver and purple. Quick splashes of color burst onto the empty rectangular patch, random blasts of white and red and gray that added up to nothing at all.

  I felt smug. She had nothing. Okay, so maybe she could fight against the banishment and cause explosions and make the winds go squirrelly and send us flying in Luke’s Chevy, but those were all parlor tricks. Anyone with the most basic set of powers could do all that and more.

  I mean, a big fat sky filled with nothing but Jackson Pol lock spatter? Come on. Give me something I can use. Something that would make a good story one rainy night over a box of wine and some Chips Ahoy.

  “Show’s over, Isadora,” I said in my best been-there-seen-that voice. “We’ve had enough of your pathetic little magic tricks.”

  “Not a good idea,” Luke muttered. “You don’t want to piss her off.”

  For the record, I should have listened. But I was too full of myself, too high on my own burgeoning powers, too pleased with Isadora’s obvious limitations to pay attention to a man who had spent his adult life defusing dangerous situations.