Everything was exactly where he said it would be. I found the marker for the opening with no trouble and eased myself down the frayed rope ladder to the ground. The tunnel smelled like the dead groundhog we found under my front porch last month and the smell sent me racing for the other end.
I hauled myself up another worn rope ladder and popped up in the Weavers’ basement. My eyes had adjusted to the pitch-black darkness of the tunnel so I was quickly able to zero in on the shelves of canned goods, jars of pickles and olives and hot peppers, huge bins of flour and sugar necessary to run a four-star restaurant.
Now the question was how to get from the basement to the third floor, where Karen was—I hoped—still locked in the honeymoon suite. The Weavers and their children assumed human dimension when dealing with the outside world, but the rest of the time they were pure Fae. I knew that Renate and Colm had their own suite of rooms under the windowsill in the parlor. Their teenage daughters hid away beneath the first-floor staircase while the married Weaver children and their families maintained homes under floorboards, and behind the dieffen bachia in the garden room. And that didn’t take into account the enormous staff of itinerant Fae and house sprites who kept the Inn running smoothly or the constantly changing parade of guest spirits who passed through on a daily basis.
Before I set out, I had armed myself with as many protective charms as I could conjure up, but I was still the pink elephant in the room. There was no way an almost-six-foot-tall half-human sorceress could blend in with the crowd.
Gunnar had promised he would help me if he could, but the forces of interdimensional communication were beyond our control. For the most part, I was on my own.
Fortunately I knew the layout of the Inn like the back of my hand. As a teenager I’d worked in the kitchen, the garden, and as an occasional chambermaid, which gave me a pretty thorough knowledge of how the enormous structure was laid out.
Unfortunately I also knew that the odds were against me.
The back staircase wasn’t used half as much as the others. It went only as high as the second floor, but if I made it that far, just try and stop me.
I hugged the wall as I started up the first flight with minimal squeakage. So far, so good. I rounded the bend and was halfway to the second floor landing when it happened.
“Chloe?” Paul Griggs, wielding a menacing-looking wrench, stepped out of the darkness. “What the hell are you doing here?”
KAREN
The golden-haired ghost had made me promise I would stay put until he came back or materialized or whatever it was ghosts did, but that was hours ago. Even Midge and Verna and Bettina had stopped popping in to monitor my lack of progress.
Most important of all, there were no more calls from Steffie.
I guess I’d been holding on to the hope that Chloe and Luke would come bursting through the door to tell me that the problem had been solved and Steffie’s spirit was safely on its way to eternal happiness, but by the time darkness fell, I knew it wasn’t going to happen.
I had to get out of there. Lying here on this squishy mattress pretending to be communing with some New Age source of light was getting old. This was my problem too. Steffie was my daughter. She had reached out to me for help. I wasn’t going to abandon her now.
There was a knock at the door and I leaped back onto the bed and closed my eyes. I heard the squeak as someone opened it a crack.
“Karen?” The male voice was unfamiliar.
I opened my eyes. He was tall, dark, and hairy. “Yes?”
He opened it wider and Chloe slipped inside. “I won’t forget you for this, Paul,” she said. “I owe you.”
The door closed quietly behind him.
“He’s Verna’s husband,” she said as we heard his footsteps recede down the hallway. “He was repairing the boiler in the basement.”
“How did you find me?”
“It’s a long story,” she said. “Let’s just say I had help.”
“The ghost with the blond hair. He said he was going to find you.”
“You saw Gunnar?”
“He didn’t tell me his name.”
She grabbed my hand. “How did he look? How did he get in here? Tell me everything you know.”
“I blinked and he was sitting on the bed. I could see right through him but he was still the most gorgeous man I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“That’s Gunnar,” she said and tears filled her eyes. “He was my best friend and he’s the reason Luke is still alive.”
“Is Luke here?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Just me.”
“How are we going to get out of here?” I asked. “Can you magick us out?”
“The Weavers are a powerful Fae family. When it comes to security, they have this place rigged up pretty good. We’ll have to go out the way I came in.” She told me about the system of tunnels that ran beneath key points in Sugar Maple. “They’re old and nobody thinks about them anymore. Lucky for us, the Weavers forgot to arm the entrance.”
“Shh,” I whispered. “Someone’s coming.”
Chloe ducked into the adjacent bathroom. I leaped back into bed as the door squeaked open and the usual suspects walked in.
“This should work,” Bettina said. “I ran the probes over to the Falls to have them energized.”
“Energized?” Midge sounded puzzled. “You mean like Lilith does with her crystals?”
“It’s a Fae thing,” Bettina said. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“You and your Falls,” Verna said with a laugh in her voice. “It’s just a big Shower Massage, honey. Nothing more.”
I held my breath as Bettina’s gentle hands inscribed tiny circles on my forehead, my temples, across my cheekbones. Please don’t work . . . Keep those energized crystals or probes or whatever they are away from me . . .
I was about to slap Bettina’s hands away when the bed started to shake and I had to force myself not to grip the edges of the mattress to keep from rolling off.
“Oh crap!” Midge said in her cartoon-girl voice.
“It’s started.” Verna sounded like the voice-over to a horror movie.
“Isadora,” Bettina whispered. “She’s flexing her muscles.”
They were gone in an instant, hurrying along the hallway, then clattering downstairs in their noisy clogs.
Chloe popped out of the bathroom, eyes wide. “What the hell was that?”
I sat up and tugged my clothes back into position. “It felt like an earthquake.”
“We don’t have earthquakes in northern Vermont.”
“I think you just did.”
We heard the sound of voices floating up from the street below. We took turns peeking through a crack in the blinds. Apparently everyone else in town thought it was an earthquake because villagers were pouring out of their houses and gathering across from the Inn.
“They’re all out there,” Chloe said, moving away from the window. “Let’s go while we still can.”
A surge of panic erupted in my chest. “That was an earthquake ,” I reminded her. “You want to run through a tunnel after an earthquake?”
“We don’t have a choice.”
She was right. We didn’t.
She led me along the dimly lit hallway to the back staircase. It was narrow and steep and I had to concentrate to keep from breaking my neck. The twists and turns made my head spin.
“How many flights?” I asked, starting to breathe hard.
“Two more,” she said. “Don’t look down. It will only make you dizzy.”
Outside, the crowd was growing louder. I was able to make out some of what they were talking about and I didn’t like it.
“Isadora?” I asked Chloe as we rounded the landing and began to make our way down the flight of steps that led to the basement. “Do you think she caused the earthquake?”
“Most likely.”
“That’s crazy. You said her powers were limited.”
She shot me a look ov
er her shoulder. “They are. Imagine what she could do if we set her free.”
The prospect was terrifying and went far beyond the Sugar Maple town limits.
“Now here’s the really scary part,” Chloe said when we finally reached the basement. “How do you feel about rope ladders?”
“About the same way I feel about the dentist.”
She gave my hand a squeeze. “I knew I liked you.”
Our eyes met and the insanity of the last few days vanished. For a second we were two women, both knitters, who probably could have become good friends if the circumstances had been different.
But they weren’t, and right now I had a rope ladder with my name on it waiting for me.
28
CHLOE
We both made it down the shaky rope ladder with no trouble, then began moving through the pitch-black tunnel toward the opposite end. We gripped hands and that connection with another person helped keep my panic level from going over the top.
“Claustrophobic?” she asked as the tunnel narrowed, then widened again.
“How did you guess?”
“Sweaty palms.”
“Swell,” I said. “Now you know all my secrets.”
She laughed softly and I grinned into the darkness.
“I’m afraid of spiders,” she said. “If a spider landed on me right now, I’d be able to tunnel up to the surface with my bare hands in three seconds flat.”
I opened my mouth to speak but the deep rumbling freight train sound coming from the ground below our feet stopped me cold.
“Oh God,” Karen said. “Not again.”
Add fear of earthquakes to our list.
“Crouch down and cover your head.” It was the only thing I could think of. “We’ll ride it out.”
I sounded so confident, so in control, that even I almost believed we would, but when you’re afraid the ground beneath your feet was going to split apart like the Grand Canyon and take you with it, it was hard to believe in much of anything.
After what seemed like an eternity, the rumbling stopped and we cautiously stood up.
I carefully ran my fingers along the flimsy wooden supports overhead. “We’d better make a run for it,” I said. “I’m not sure these supports can take another temblor.”
“Great,” Karen said. “Just when I thought we’d run out of things to worry about.”
No such luck.
“Why aren’t we moving?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I lied. “It’s just—” I cleared my throat. “I think we got ourselves turned around when we stopped.”
“We’re lost?” Her voice rose with each word. “We’re in a tunnel. How can you get lost in a tunnel?”
Good question.
“I’d flip a coin,” she said, “but it’s too dark to tell if it’s heads or tails.”
Which for some strange reason struck us both as hysterically funny, and we laughed until we were hanging on to each other for support.
The laughter stopped the second the earth started to move.
“It’s the third time,” Karen said, her voice rising in agitation. “The third time!”
“I heard you the first time.”
“We’d better run for the exit.”
“We don’t know which way the exit is.”
“It doesn’t matter. We’d be better off in the Inn than under it.”
She had a point. We were in big trouble and there was only one way out.
“Hang on!” I yelled. “We’re going for a ride.”
I grabbed Karen’s hand and tried hard to ignore the way the ground beneath us was swaying. “Clear your mind,” I told her. “Focus on getting out of here in one piece.”
“Not a problem,” she said.
“Don’t be scared,” I warned her. “It might get a little bumpy.”
“Okay,” she said. “Anytime you’re ready.”
I didn’t want to tell her that I’d been ready for at least two minutes and had invoked the spell that should have transported us to safety.
The ex was smart, though. She caught on.
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Chloe?”
“Of course I do.” I paused. “Theoretically I do.” Oh crap. She might as well know the truth. “Actually I’ve never done this before.”
“You mean you’ve never transported yourself out of an earthquake-rattled tunnel before, not that you’ve never transported anyone at all, right?”
The poor woman sounded so hopeful I hated to burst her bubble, but it wasn’t like I hadn’t done it before.
“I’ve transported other people—usually Luke and not deliberately—but this is the first time I’ve ever transported myself and not just myself but a second person along with me. It seems to take more power than I figured it would.”
“Maybe you should talk to Bettina. She takes her crystals to some waterfall to charge them up.”
I grabbed her arm and I swear I could suddenly see through the darkness. “What did you say?”
“Ouch. You’re hurting me.”
I didn’t let go. “Tell me what you said again. Slowly. Word for word.”
She did.
The waterfalls! Suddenly it all made sense. The legends. The air of mystery about the place. The sense of unease, dread almost, that I felt every time I went there. The mist that seemed to hover over everything.
Janice’s talk about portals came rushing back at me. The answer had been staring me in the face practically since the day I was born and I hadn’t even suspected until now.
The irony that it had taken a full-blood human to point it out wasn’t lost on me.
“When this is over,” I said, grabbing Karen’s hand one more time, “you can have your weight in cashmere and quiviut.”
I centered myself, dove deep inside my consciousness, and suddenly we were moving through the earth like it was chocolate pudding, faster and faster with Karen next to me screaming. Or maybe I was screaming. I can’t say for sure. I was too busy praying my newly impressive powers held on long enough to get us to the Falls in one piece.
The way I figured it, if we survived the landing, we had a good chance to survive whatever Isadora had in store for us.
If we were lucky.
LUKE
Without a flashlight, reading the signs carved into the trees was damn near impossible. The faint moonlight that filtered through the thicket of evergreens and budding maples was barely enough for me to see my hand in front of my face.
And those temblors weren’t helping either. What next? Plague and pestilence?
I ended up following the sound and smell of rushing water, which ultimately led me to the Falls. The sheer magnitude of the cliffs surrounding the waterfall hit me like a kick to the gut. No wonder the Abenaki tribe had revered this as a sacred place. If someone had told me the ground I was standing on was the center of the earth, at that moment I would have believed it.
The roar of falling water filled my head. And there was something else, a low-pitched hum that moved along my nerve endings like an electrical current.
The portal to the world of the Fae was here. This was where Isadora recharged her powers.
This was where she was holding Steffie captive.
But where was Chloe? I was a good cop. Sometimes even a great cop. But I wasn’t a fool. Without Chloe I was a dead man.
Come on, Chloe . . . Use your magic . . . The waterfall . . . I’m at the waterfall . . .
I heard a sound like breaking glass, a high-pitched yelp, and then something slammed into my back and sent me flying.
“. . . ohmigodohmigodohmigod . . .” Karen was sprawled on top of me. Her entire body was shaking. “Am I dead?”
“No,” I said as she climbed off me. “It just feels that way. Transport’s a bitch on humans.”
She stood up and tugged her sweater into place. “Where’s Chloe?”
“I’m the one who should be asking you that.”
“We we
re in the tunnel—”
“What tunnel?”
“The tunnel beneath the Inn and—”
“There’s a tunnel beneath the Inn?”
“Luke, do you want to hear the story or don’t you? We were in the tunnel when the earthquake started up again. Chloe grabbed my hand, told me to hang on, and the next thing I knew we were somersaulting our way through what seemed like one of those bouncy rooms they use at kids’ birthday parties, and my hand slipped and—” She met my eyes. “I don’t know what happened to Chloe.”
“She’s okay. She’s probably on the other side of the waterfall and working her way over here now.”
I believed it. I had to believe it. There was no way I wanted to live in this world or any other without Chloe Hobbs.
“Now what?” Karen asked as I stood up and brushed myself off.
“We wait,” I said.
“How long?”
I looked at my watch. “Not long.” It was almost nine o’clock. Witching hour when Saturn would pass closest to earth was ten forty-two. By ten forty-three it would be all over.
“I’d kill for a cigarette.”
“I hear you.”
She kept her eyes focused on the waterfall. “It wasn’t just you.”
I looked over at her but said nothing.
“Steffie had a mind of her own. She slipped out on me too, Luke.”
I still said nothing.
“Once she got that bike, there was no stopping her. It could have happened on my watch.”
“But it didn’t.”
“But it could have.”
“Why are you telling me his now?”
She shrugged. “Because I can. I wanted you to hurt as much as I was hurting and that was the best weapon I had.”
Our eyes met. “I was a lousy husband.”
“You were,” she agreed. “Good cop, lousy husband.”
“I never screwed around on you.”
“I know that.” She patted my arm. “That might have been easier to understand.”
“I’m sorry, Karen.” I refused to drop my gaze. “Really sorry.”
She nodded. “So am I.”
We stood there in silence for what seemed like an hour. I looked at my watch again but only ten minutes had passed.
Laced with Magic Page 21
