Laced with Magic

by Barbara Bretton

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Cop’s intuition,” he said. “Body language. Tone of voice. The whole package.”

  “You could see all of that with her the size of a budgie?”

  “What can I tell you? I’m good at my job.”

  We stopped in at the bank, the pizza shop, Cut & Curl, and the sub shop.

  Nobody knew anything.

  Or if they did, they weren’t telling.

  We walked back to the yarn shop, where eleven boxes of yarn waited by the front door.

  “UPS must love you,” Luke said as we dragged the boxes inside.

  “You should see what it’s like around here when the new fall yarns hit.”

  Which would have been the perfect spot for him to say something about how he couldn’t wait to see either our great autumn yarns or foliage, but he didn’t.

  I pulled one of yesterday’s tuna sandwiches out of the fridge and grabbed two bottles of water.

  “What do you know about Isadora’s last power grab?” he asked as I cleared a spot for us at the worktable.

  “Just what Lilith said this morning. That was the first time I heard about it.”

  “Sorcha never said anything?”

  “Not a word.”

  “There’s something—” He stopped and shook his head. “Every time I get close to it, it fades away.”

  “What?” I asked. “A suspicion? A guess? An idea?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever it is, I can’t grab hold of it fast enough.”

  I took a breath, then jumped into the deep end of the pool.

  “Steffie’s here for a reason, Luke. She wants to be here. Isadora’s only capitalizing on something that was already in motion.”

  The mask started to slip into place.

  “Don’t go all cop on me. Listen to what I have to say.”

  His jaw was set in that familiar line but he nodded. “I’m listening.”

  “You were raised Catholic. You know about the spirit . . . the soul.”

  “They didn’t teach us anything about Fae battles.”

  “Some people pass into the next dimension in peace and harmony, and once they leave this plane of existence, nothing can reach them. There isn’t a medium on the planet who could find them and lure them back for a visit. If Steffie’s spirit had completed her journey, Isadora wouldn’t have been able to capture her.”

  “If that was Steffie we saw.”

  “After all that’s happened, you still don’t believe Steffie’s—”

  “I don’t know what the hell I believe anymore.”

  What was wrong with him?

  “You believe in giant anacondas, vampires, werewolves, mountain giants who can give you an aerial tour of the town, and a girlfriend who can turn you into a Ken Doll, but you can’t bring yourself to believe your daughter’s spirit needs you?” I took another deep, steadying breath. “Steffie wants to tell you something, and Isadora or no Isadora, she won’t rest until she does.”

  He pushed aside his sandwich, stood up, then left the shop without another word.

  And for the first time since this whole thing started, I began to wonder what would happen if I won the battle but still lost the war.

  24

  KAREN

  “Welcome back,” the friendly male voice said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  I opened my eyes, then closed them again. It looked the same either way.

  “I can’t see you,” I said.

  “You can’t see anything. You’re not supposed to.” He had a warm, reassuring voice. I could tell he was on my side. I didn’t have to be afraid.

  “Am I dreaming?”

  “You’re fully conscious.”

  “Then I must be blind.”

  “Only to this dimension.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will,” he said.

  And then a small voice whispered, “Mommy?”

  “Oh God . . . Steffie! Are you here, baby? Are you with me?”

  She was close, so close. I reached out to touch her, but there was nothing except the smell of warm, clean, fresh air.

  “Where are you, baby? Mommy’s here. Take my hand!”

  I felt a soft, warm rush of breath against my skin . . . so soft. My heart yearned for just one hug, one moment with her.

  “Daddy?”

  “He’s not here with me, baby. What do you need? Tell me and I’ll get it for you.”

  “She can’t stay this time,” the man with the kind voice said. “She has to go.”

  “No!” I reached out into the darkness. “Stay with me, Stef! Don’t go!”

  I woke up suddenly and completely. I felt refreshed, rejuvenated, and disappointed to see I was still at the Inn, still in the beautiful four-poster bed with the fancy quilts and blankets. The blinds were closed. A vanilla candle flickered softly on the nightstand.

  And my daughter was nowhere around.

  “Hello?” My voice sounded tentative, not at all like me. “Is anyone here?”

  “You’re awake.” It was the same cordial male voice I’d heard in my dream. “I thought you’d sleep all day. Trying to cross dimensions usually wipes humans out.”

  “Who are you?” I sat up and glanced around. “Where are you?”

  “Right here.”

  He was sitting on the foot of my bed and yet he wasn’t. The bed didn’t register his weight. I could see through him to the painting on the wall, but what I saw took my breath away. He was easily the most beautiful creature I had ever seen in my life. No movie star, no work of art, even came close. He glowed with a golden light that radiated off him in soft waves of energy that warmed my face.

  “Are you a ghost? I couldn’t see through the other ghosts.”

  “I’m not a ghost.” He laughed but there was no mockery in it. “I’m just not of your dimension.”

  “I know your voice. You were with my daughter in my dream.” It was my turn to laugh softly. “Except it wasn’t a dream, was it?”

  “No,” he said, “it wasn’t.”

  “Where is Steffie? Why isn’t she here with you?”

  “Do you want the long answer or the short one?”

  “Long,” I said.

  His smile dimmed and so did he. “For that, you’d have to ask my mother.”

  LUKE

  The tiny library was swarming with kids. I was almost trampled by a quartet of second graders hell bent on creating as much destruction as they could in as little time as possible.

  “It’s Love Your Library Week,” Lilith said with a shake of her head.

  “Followed by Send a Librarian to Hawaii Week?” I said and she laughed.

  “Speaking friend to friend, this probably isn’t a great time, Luke. If you need to concentrate, you should come back later.”

  “Clock’s ticking,” I reminded her. “I’m the oldest of five. I can handle noise.”

  “Tell me what you need and I’ll try to find you a fairly quiet corner.”

  I told her what I was looking for. She nodded and grew quiet for a few moments. “We’re not digitized,” she said, “so you probably won’t find anything on Google. Not to mention that most of what happens here stays here.”

  Like Vegas with a twist of magic.

  “Do you have old Sugar Maple newspapers on microfiche?”

  “We have the actual newspapers in the archive and daily logbooks kept by earlier town historians. You might find something there.”

  “You said you were around the last time Isadora made a move. What do you remember?”

  “Not much.” She glanced across the room at a pair of middle school girls who were giggling over a vampire book. “Chloe’s mother was ready to deliver anytime. Her father worked at the hardware store with Paul but things weren’t going well. Isadora was spending more time in this dimension because her boys and the Weaver kids were friends. She seemed to get angrier with every day that passed. She hated Chloe’s father because he was human and
she despised the fact that the next leader of the town would be a half-blooded human.”

  “And that’s when Isadora made her move?”

  “I guess she figured this was her best chance. Before Guinevere gave birth and the next generation of Hobbs was in place.”

  It sounded reasonable enough, but my gut said there was more.

  “I have to lead story hour,” Lilith said, “but let me think about this. Maybe there’s something I’m missing.”

  She handed me the key to the archive, and I let myself into the long narrow room. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined the walls, and each shelf was stocked two and three deep with newspapers, booklets, pamphlets, journals, photo albums, all in eerily mint condition and all clearly labeled by date. A computer with high-speed Internet access rested on a side table near a bank of filing cabinets.

  I zeroed in on the six-month period surrounding Chloe’s birth and stacked up the material on the mahogany worktable. I found a roll of parchmentlike substance stowed behind some of the annual journals, and I unfurled it across the table. It looked like it might be from the side of an old canoe, decorated with drawings burned into the surface. An eagle. A brilliant star. Indians in full dress. Trees. A waterfall. At least I think it was a waterfall. A fierce catlike creature was positioned over it, and lines like the rays of the sun radiated out from the centerpoint.

  Interesting but it got me nowhere.

  “Focus,” I told myself. There wasn’t time for anything else.

  I was halfway through a long account of damage caused by spring flooding when my cell vibrated.

  “Dawn Eckhard, Vermont Country Daily. What’s the official explanation for the light show over Sugar Maple last night? I checked with NASA public relations and they said it was either Saturn orbiting closer to the earth or space junk flaming when it hit the atmosphere. I’d like your take on it.”

  “Nothing much else to tell, Ms. Eckhard.”

  “Damn,” she said. “I was hoping for a UFO. We haven’t had a good UFO sighting in years.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  She had an easygoing laugh. “Hey, I would have settled for another Saturn story if it got me a few extra column inches.”

  Another Saturn story? On another day I would have asked what she meant by that, but she had already launched into giving me her phone number and e-mail address and the moment passed.

  I went back to searching the archive. Chloe’s birth was heralded in the local paper. The town historian gave her arrival a full page, single-spaced, in the ledger. Her human father didn’t merit a mention.

  I fielded another phone call about Isadora’s light show, wishing I could come up with a better explanation than space junk, but it was the best I could do.

  Maybe that Saturn angle was our best excuse.

  You’ve got to love Google. I typed in Saturn and the date, and the screen filled with hundreds of page options. I picked the first and scanned the contents. Apparently two things were happening today. Every thirty years or so, Saturn reached the point in its orbit when it was closest to earth and easily visible to the naked eye. At the same time the planet was in direct opposition to the sun, making it glow noticeably brighter in the night sky. UFO sightings usually rose accordingly.

  Like any celestial event, it brought out the sky watchers, the crazies, and the hopeful.

  I owed Dawn Eckhard a big thank-you. Now I could blame Saturn for everything, and science would back me up. The galaxy was filled with all sorts of events, random and regular. You could find an explanation for just about anything if you wanted to.

  But as I looked at the chart, the numbers started to form a pattern. Saturn swung this close to earth approximately every thirty years. Chloe was almost thirty years old. The last time Isadora tried to pull Sugar Maple through the mist was within seven days of Chloe’s birth.

  I cross-referenced stats on Saturn’s orbit with a date one week before she was born. Not a match. I tried six days. No luck. Five was the lucky number.

  I went back another thirty years. I cross-referenced Saturn with the same time period in Sugar Maple’s history and found a small mention of earthquake activity near the center of town, followed by a spectacular thunderstorm.

  I searched back sixty years, ninety, one hundred fifty, one hundred eighty, as far back as two hundred seventy years ago, and every single time I found references to unusual disturbances in and around Sugar Maple that tied in with the transit of Saturn, and they all spanned a narrow twenty-four-to thirty-six-hour period.

  With the help of the archival records and the computer, I was able to roll it all the way back to the early eighteenth century when the Abenaki Indians were making room for the new settlers from Salem. You couldn’t argue with the math.

  Isadora had been working toward this since before Chloe was born. This wasn’t an impulsive, emotional decision on her part. It was the well-thought-out, deliberate action of a powerful entity with single-minded intent.

  To take back what belonged to her, no matter the cost to herself or Sugar Maple.

  Or to my daughter.

  We had been working on the classic witching hour deadline of midnight, but according to the charts, Saturn would reach the closest point in its transit at 10:42 P.M.

  If Isadora was going to make a move, that was when it would happen.

  Which meant we had less than seven hours to find Karen, save Sugar Maple, and free Steffie’s soul.

  25

  CHLOE

  At some point when I wasn’t looking, knitting became trendy.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. Trendy meant lots of new knitters joining the fold, which meant a healthier bottom line for me.

  I think it was the New York Times that called knitting the new Zen not long after 9/11 happened. I’m not sure I’d go that far (trust me, there is nothing Zen-like about a knitter who just realized she has to frog three months of work on an Orkney Pi shawl), but when I need to think deeply about something, I reach for a plain old cuff-down sock and start knitting.

  Which was what I did the second Luke went out the door.

  Too bad the thinking part didn’t kick in as fast as the knitting part.

  My mother taught me to knit when I was four or five years old. I had wanted to learn how to spin the way she did, but I was too little to sit at the wheel so she taught me to knit and purl instead. She figured there would be plenty of time later to teach me her other art.

  “Your grandmother taught me,” she said, “and her mother taught her, all the way back to Aerynn, and one day you’ll teach your own daughter.”

  I wondered if Karen had taught Steffie how to knit. I imagined them sitting together in the MacKenzie kitchen on a snowy winter afternoon, happily working on a scarf for Luke while a pot of soup bubbled on the stove.

  Yeah, I know. Most of my domestic fantasies were lifted straight off the Hallmark Channel and Nick at Nite. But it made me happy to think at least one little girl lived the life I’d longed for.

  Except she hadn’t. Steffie had barely lived at all. Six years in this dimension were barely a running start at a life. Six years with your parents weren’t close to enough.

  Maybe I was approaching this from the wrong angle. Isadora knew exactly what she was doing when she imposed her arbitrary deadline. Humans reacted strongly to countdown clocks. Even half-blooded humans like me. Our adrenaline pumped hard and fast and made us act on instinct instead of intellect. It made us make mistakes.

  “Slow down,” I said to the empty shop. “Think it through.”

  I had known Isadora all my life. Her son Gunnar had been my best friend. Our lives had threaded in and out over the years, and I still didn’t know one single thing about how they lived or where they lived. Even Janice, who had gone beyond the mist many times to visit clients, didn’t have a clue. That was how good the Fae were at covering their tracks. For mil lennia it had been a matter of survival.

  All I knew for sure was that their powers eman
ated from some source beyond the mist and dissipated the longer they were away from that source. Isadora’s eye-catching display last night had taken its toll on her powers, weakening her visibly toward the end. She was beyond the mist right now, gathering up whatever it was that gave her those powers.

  Which meant I didn’t necessarily have to be stronger than Isadora to win; I had to be smarter. I had to figure out a way to wear her down and drain her energies. If I could outlast her, I could outsmart her and steal back Steffie’s spirit so the child could complete her journey.

  Assuming that I knew the first thing about stealing back spirits.

  Pretty much everything I knew about spirits had been gleaned from repeated viewings of Ghost and Grey’s Anatomy. Janice had tried on more than one occasion to bring me up to speed, but I had my hands full with vampires, werewolves, selkies, witches, trolls, sprites, brownies, and the rest of my neighbors. I found myself wishing I’d paid more attention.

  One thing I knew for sure about Isadora was that she didn’t delegate authority. She was your original hands-on bad guy, more than happy to do the dirty work herself. To be honest, I believed she liked it. Plucking a child’s soul from the afterlife would be more fun than a week in the Bahamas in mid-February.

  Holding the child’s soul hostage? Priceless to someone like Isadora.

  It was clear Isadora’s powers had increased exponentially in the last few months. Even within the restrictions of banishment, she was able to reach into other dimensions and snag Steffie’s spirit and hold it captive.

  Each time she exploited another weak spot in the banishment, she came one step closer to breaking free without my help, and when that happened, we would be done for. That clock was ticking even more loudly than the one I had scaled a few hours ago.

  I had no doubt that if Isadora were released from her own imprisonment, she would be able to pull Sugar Maple beyond the mist right now. She had the skills and the power necessary, and equally important, she had a score to settle and she didn’t mind using a child’s soul as the bargaining chip.

  Which meant that wherever Isadora was right now, Steffie was close by.