Laced with Magic

by Barbara Bretton

  Janice opened her mouth but Lynette, with cobra speed, clamped a hand over it. “We don’t want to hear it, Jan.”

  Suddenly I felt so exhausted I could barely keep my eyes open. Time was ticking away, and I was no closer to a solution to the mess we were in than I was when Isadora threw down the gauntlet. “I need to crash for a half hour,” I said to my friends. “If you could clear the house, I’ll let you have the pick of my stash.”

  Five minutes later I was alone with my cats and my Chips Ahoy. The box of red was history. I tried not to think about the fact that Karen was still out there wandering around Sugar Maple. Without my protection she was helpless as a baby rabbit.

  I didn’t like to think that might be why I let her go, but I felt the sting of truth at the possibility.

  Because I knew the answer to this whole mess. I’d known it from the beginning. All I had to do was let her go. Let her child go. They weren’t part of Sugar Maple. They had no bearing on my future or the future of anyone else in this town. Nothing I did would bring Steffie back to the realm of existence she had shared with her parents. No magick was that strong. Not Aerynn’s or Isadora’s and definitely not mine.

  Luke and Karen had already lost their daughter. There would be no more hugs, no more bedtime stories and snuggles, no watching her grow up and go to college and get married and have a baby of her own. Even if I managed to vanquish Isadora once and for all and free Steffie’s spirit, none of those very human experiences would come to pass. Steffie’s time in this realm had come and gone.

  Was I willing to risk the future of Sugar Maple and the people I loved on the slim chance that I could find a way to undo Steffie’s imprisonment and banish Isadora once and for all?

  The risks were enormous. If I screwed up, there was every reason to believe Isadora would make good her threat and pull the town and everyone in it beyond the mist.

  But what if I did nothing? What would happen if I just sat back and let the tower clock toll midnight?

  The thought was ugly but compelling.

  Isadora would still be trapped within her banishment, which would give me time to grow my skills.

  Sugar Maple would still be part of this earthly realm, same as it had been for three hundred years.

  And Luke would still be here with me. We would have a chance to get it right, a chance to push closer to forever.

  All I had to do was let Steffie go.

  20

  KAREN

  “Lie down and get some rest.” Bettina Weaver lit a vanilla candle, then dimmed the lights. “Someone will get your things for you.”

  “Tell Luke where I am,” I said, sinking deep into the feather bed.

  “Of course,” Bettina said. “We wouldn’t want him to worry, would we?”

  Actually I didn’t care if he was worried or not. I just didn’t want him storming over here and ruining everything the way he had at the séance.

  They were going to contact Steffie. Midge and Bettina and Verna and the others were going to do what Chloe and her friends couldn’t: make it possible for me to talk to Steffie. They said Isadora was nothing but an annoyance, that Steffie’s spirit wasn’t in any danger at all. It was all an illusion conjured up to make Chloe look bad.

  “Don’t you pay any attention to all that nonsense between Chloe and Isadora. The trouble goes back to the very beginning, but it has nothing to do with you and your daughter. Isadora was trying to stir things up, that’s all.”

  They were so apologetic. They loved their town and didn’t want me to think badly of them. And I didn’t. They were kind and helpful and they believed that Steffie was trying to contact me. I had to keep reminding myself that Midge was vampire, Bettina was a faerie, and Verna the wife of a werewolf.

  Not that it mattered. All I had to do was relax and they would do the rest. As far as I could see, I had nothing to lose. I already knew that Chloe and Luke couldn’t help me and that when it came to Isadora, I was in way over my head. If they had a plan they believed would work, why not go with it? They had nothing to gain from helping me reach my daughter. They were doing it because they were good—well, people wasn’t the right word, but you know what I mean.

  So I did and a heartbeat later Bettina opened the door to a gorgeous guest suite at her parents’ Inn.

  “You might want to keep a low profile,” she said with a slightly guilty smile. “My parents aren’t big fans of Chloe.”

  I let it pass. My feelings for the knitting sorcerer were mixed, but for the most part I liked her. Even if she had stuffed me in a transparent bubble and left me there to age like cheese.

  “I thought there were no vacancies,” I said as I marveled at the hand-painted wall coverings, the incredible quilts, the enormous four-poster of glowing mahogany. “I would have dumped Chloe’s cottage in a second for this.”

  Which probably wasn’t the most politic thing I had ever said, but if you saw my room at the Inn, you would understand.

  “Saturn is in close transit tonight,” she said by way of explanation. “The spirits will stay close to home until it passes.”

  I didn’t understand half of what they’d said to me about spirit trails and rest stops and journeying souls. All I knew was that they were going to put me in contact with my daughter. Nothing else mattered.

  Not even the ragged, haggard-looking Revolutionary War-era soldier sitting on the edge of the windowsill, looking at me with sad eyes.

  “Abigail?” he asked, a note of hope in his rum-soaked voice. “Have you come for me, Abby?”

  Except for the fact I could see the window behind him, he looked as alive as I did.

  “I’m not Abby,” I said, struggling to sound like I spoke to ghosts every day of the week. “I’m Karen.”

  “Where’s Abby?” he asked. “I’m here for Abby.”

  “Abby’s in the parlor, Ethan. She’s waiting for you there.”

  I shrieked at the sight of a glamorous woman in full 1940s movie star attire sitting on the foot of my bed.

  It was getting seriously weird around here.

  She smiled at me and pressed her index finger to her lips.

  “Out with you, Ethan,” she said in a friendly tone of voice. “You have no business being in a lady’s room.”

  Ethan was gone in an instant.

  “Cute as a bug in a rug.” Her bright blond hair swooped over her right eye and fell to her shoulders in a shimmering skein of gorgeousness. “He and Abby have been playing hide-and-seek for over two hundred years.”

  “Wow.” That was the best I could do, given the circumstances.

  “So how did you get here?” she asked, curling her silk stocking-clad legs under her and getting comfortable like we were two good friends at a slumber party.

  “Midge and Bettina brought me.”

  “No, no.” Her laugh was pure movie goddess. “I mean, how did you die?”

  “Die?” I leaped up from the bed. “I’m not dead.” I pinched myself to be sure. “I’m absolutely alive.”

  “Honey, it’s okay. It takes some of us longer than others to make the transition. You’ll be fine. I promise you.”

  “No,” I persisted. “Seriously. I’m not dead but my—my little girl is. That’s why I’m here.”

  Her brilliant smile dimmed a little. “Holy cow,” she said. “I guess there’s a first time for everything.” She patted my leg but all I felt was the faintest movement of the air. “I saw an adorable little redhead around here yesterday.”

  “Steffie! Dark green eyes, lots of freckles, about six years old?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Where is she? Can you take me to her? Did she say anything? You have to—”

  “Hold your horses!” She rose from the bed and straightened the seams of her stockings with her fingertips. “I don’t make the rules around here. Nobody does. We’re just travelers looking for a way to complete our journeys.”

  “What does that mean?” I snapped in exasperation. “Everyone keeps sayi
ng things like that but it doesn’t make any sense.”

  Too bad I was talking to thin air. The forties movie star had gone the way of the Revolutionary War soldier.

  Was it possible Steffie was close by? I had always thought my maternal instincts would lead me to her no matter where she was, but I wasn’t picking up anything at all. Still, the movie star claimed she’d seen a red-haired girl who met Steffie’s description, and from what I’d seen, spirits really did feel comfortable here at the Inn.

  Just lie down and rest. We’ll take care of everything.

  I didn’t exactly hear the voice, but the words blossomed inside my head.

  “Bettina?” I asked the empty room. “Is that you?”

  Just lie down and rest. We’ll take care of everything.

  The voice was soothing. Authoritative in a hang-loose kind of way.

  Put your head down. That’s right. Now close your eyes and think about your daughter.

  I almost laughed. Like I didn’t think of Steffie every moment of every day.

  But I did what the voice told me to do. I’m not sure I could have done anything else.

  Forget everything that’s happened here . . . Forget Sugar Maple and Chloe . . . Think about Steffie . . . when she was still there with you . . . Nothing else matters . . .

  Nothing else did.

  21

  CHLOE

  I couldn’t do it.

  Every time I closed my eyes and tried to catch a nap before daylight came flooding in through my windows, I saw myself at Steffie’s age, remembered how it felt to lose my parents, felt that deep loneliness inside my heart, and I flat out couldn’t do it.

  I wanted to let her go, but my human blood wouldn’t let me. She was real. Spirits were real. I had lived among them all my life. The Harris family. The Souderbushes. All the souls who passed through our town, searching and yearning for connection with the family and friends they had left behind.

  Why had it taken me so long to realize this wasn’t about Luke or Karen? I saw myself in Steffie. I knew how it felt to be a very small child alone in a very big adult world. I knew how it felt to miss your parents so much it hurt to breathe. I knew how it felt to want one more story, one more silly bedtime song, one more memory to tuck away against forever.

  There was order to the spirit world. A tightly woven fabric of laws that governed what happened and when and why. A fully evolved spirit who had completed his or her journey was far beyond the reach of religion or magick or even love.

  Isadora wouldn’t have been able to hijack Steffie’s spirit if Steffie hadn’t still been in transit. Spirits were dimensional travelers on a mission to right a wrong, deliver a message, achieve some kind of closure before they reached their destination. If Steffie had completed her journey and claimed her own afterlife, even Isadora’s considerable powers wouldn’t have been able to touch her.

  There was something Steffie needed to do in this world, some message she needed to deliver to her parents, and somehow Isadora had discovered that fact. Maybe I hadn’t done as good a job of protecting Luke from thought probes as I’d thought. It had all been there waiting for Isadora to grab: his marriage to Karen, Steffie’s death, their bitter divorce. And from there it was a simple dimensional leap to connecting with Steffie’s spirit and setting this whole thing in motion.

  If Steffie was ever going to find peace, I would need to use all the magick I had at my command to make sure she completed her journey.

  Unfortunately I didn’t have a clue where to start. I couldn’t blue-flame Janice and Lynette. I already knew where they stood on the topic of helping humans find their afterlife bliss. Lilith the librarian was unfailingly compassionate, but she wouldn’t understand putting a dead human child’s needs before the needs of Sugar Maple.

  I paced the cottage, trying to gather my thoughts into a cohesive whole. I tried sitting down at my Schacht and spinning some Bluefaced Leicester as a way to regain my focus, but my rhythm was off and I couldn’t seem to manage a simple drafting motion. I picked up one of the dozen works in progress scattered around the place, but even plain old stockinette was beyond my ability.

  I wasn’t a chess player. I didn’t know the first thing about the parry-and-thrust of fencing. Even love had me stumbling around like I had two left feet. Figuring out a plan to steal back a child’s soul without setting Isadora free as well was like trying to reconstruct the blueprints for the space shuttle when you could barely push past the five times table.

  The thought had barely formed when the room began to spin. Not in an I-think-I’m-going-to-faint kind of way but really spin like a carnival ride at the county fair. I sat down on the floor, hard, as the spinning turned into tumbling that sent me rolling across the room into the opposite wall. Before I had a chance to pull myself to my feet, I was yanked backward once again through that bizarre light-and-magic show that had made me feel like toothpaste being squeezed through a tube.

  Who would think something like that could become old news?

  Come on, I thought. You can do better than this. I’d barely scratched the surface of what the Book of Spells was capable of doing and it was already treating me to reruns? I mean, I knew exactly what was coming next: another audiovisual replay of Great Moments in Chloe’s History meant to remind me that Sugar Maple was my first and only destiny.

  “I don’t have time for this!” I shouted into the twinkling lights. “Send me back now!” Didn’t the Book know there was a clock ticking out there?

  I was the sorcerer-in-charge. I ruled the Book of Spells; the Book didn’t rule me. If I said stop, it stopped.

  “Stop!” I yelled. “Stop!”

  Instead of stopping, I was pulled faster through a tunnel of disco lights leftover from the seventies, a tunnel that was growing longer instead of shorter with every millisecond until I was dumped on the floor of a very dark, very weird room. Earsplitting elevator music made thinking an exercise in futility.

  “Not funny,” I shouted to the Book. “Take me home now!”

  Nothing. Not even a ripple of acknowledgment.

  I forced myself to block out the bad music and creepy décor. When it came to the Book of Spells, everything happened for a reason. Was this the answer to one of my questions? Was it a warning? I guessed this was the human part of my equation talking, but I wouldn’t have minded a few plain old declarative sentences right about now.

  “Okay, Book,” I said, moving deeper into the room. “You brought me here. Now, what is it you want me to know?”

  Nothing happened but I had the sense I wasn’t alone.

  “Is it about Steffie? Can you show me Steffie? Can you let me speak to her?”

  Still nothing but I was getting warmer.

  Literally.

  I was too young for hot flashes but sweat started pouring down the back of my neck.

  The music grew louder. The walls of the room began to ripple like a sixties-era psychedelic dream, pushing inward until I found myself standing at the midpoint and able to touch opposing walls with my fingertips.

  I’m not exactly claustrophobic, but when the room really did start closing in on me, fight-or-flight syndrome definitely kicked in.

  No doors. No windows. No way out.

  My heart was beating so fast I couldn’t breathe. I was a half second away from total meltdown when the music stopped, the walls disappeared, and the ceiling lifted away. There was no sky, no horizon, no sun or moon to help me orient myself. The ground beneath my feet was cushioned, and it felt like I was standing on a bed of whipped cream. Ambient light emanated from the surroundings. Each particle of air glowed from within. Tightly swirling clouds, like minitornadoes or dust devils, rotated all around me as concentrated pulses of light shot off in different directions from under my feet. As soon as a thought formed in my head, no matter how fragmented or foolish, one of the clouds rushed toward me and transformed that thought into my own private virtual reality.

  Was this the next level of understanding? I felt s
trangely energized, lit up from within like the glowing particles that traced the contours of my body in a free-form CT scan.

  My human concept of time and space was irrelevant here. I knew instinctively that it would take hundreds of earth years to master the possibilities offered by this new level. The thought of how many other levels might exist was staggering.

  As soon as that thought formed itself, a small round cloud raced toward me. It stopped inches away from my face, shuddered, then turned a pearlescent white as thousands of platforms appeared before me, rising into the distance.

  “Focus,” I said out loud and turned my thoughts to Karen. The second her image formed in my brain, the platforms collapsed and drifted off into the distance. The round white cloud in front of me evaporated and a silvery gray cloud took its place.

  “Show me Karen,” I commanded. I wasn’t comfortable with commands but they were big in magick circles.

  Karen was lying flat on her back in the center of what I assumed was a bed. Her face was the only detail I could clearly make out. Her eyes were closed. For a second I was afraid she was dead, and a sick feeling of dread grabbed my chest and squeezed hard.

  “Stay with us,” I murmured. “Don’t pull away.”

  I moved deeper into the room, sinking, then rising into the buoyant floor with each step. A midrange tone seemed to fill the air around me. I had the sense there were others in the room besides Karen and me, but they remained invisible to me.

  The thought probes, however, weren’t. Tiny crystalline devices radiated from Karen’s head like a glittering crown. I frowned and moved closer. These were nothing like the torpedo-shaped thought probes I was used to. I reached out and touched her shoulder. At first contact a sizzle of current burned through me and my mind swelled with images of Sugar Maple. People. Places. Magick. All from Karen’s perspective.