Cries of “Devil!” and “Witch!” rose above the high-pitched screams of agony.
This was hell. This was evil incarnate, chaos taken to a level of insanity that turned humans into monsters and monsters into victims.
They were both my people. My blood. No matter who won, I would be on the losing side.
A wail rose from the center of my soul, a keening cry I couldn’t control, didn’t want to control.
And then I saw him.
He walked out of the flames, through the chaos, heading toward me with his powerful arms outstretched. He was both strange to me and familiar, as if he had been part of a life unknown to me. He was impervious to flame and sword. Tall and strong, he wore simple breeches and a dark cloak embroidered with Dewi, Y Ddraig Goch, David the Red Dragon of Cadwallader from Welsh mythology, which was at the heart of Sugar Maple’s ancient history.
I tried to look away but I couldn’t. The power he had over me was absolute. Somehow I knew this man could change my life in ways that terrified me. He could take everything from me that mattered.
The ring on my finger began to blink. An otherworldly glow, different from what I’d grown accustomed to, emanated from it, casting light into the middle distance.
I summoned up every ounce of magick at my command, every drop of human will and strength I had and in the instant before I could see his face, the flames receded, the floor rolled back out beneath my feet, the walls slid back into place, the ceiling returned, and I was back in the library on a sunny morning in Sugar Maple, just as if nothing had happened.
GAVAN
* * *
He cursed the Book of Spells as he inspected the charred sleeve of his garment. He had long heard of its power over all magicks but he had not believed it until now when it forced him into Chloe’s dreamscape. He had barely made the transition between dimensions when he found himself thrust into yet another strange world.
She was looking for answers and the Book knew that he and Rohesia could provide them, but now was not the time.
To live and thrive in this dimension would require more of their old world magick than he had anticipated. He was young and strong but even he felt his resources exhausted by the journey. He understood why making the move between dimensions had once seemed almost impossible to Rohesia.
He retreated to the waterfall portal where he had entered this dimension to replenish his magick and reconsider his options.
CHLOE
Later that evening
* * *
“So Luke couldn’t pry the damn thing off either?” Janice asked me as we gathered for the weekly Knit Night at the shop.
“He suggested that we try a hacksaw, but I drew the line at bloodletting.”
That got a few laughs from the usual subjects gathered around the long work table and I could feel my nerves settling back into place. As awful as it sounded, I was grateful the extended MacKenzie clan had gone back to Massachusetts and wouldn’t return until the wedding. To be honest, I wouldn’t have minded if they stayed away until Christmas.
I needed time to wrap a little normal around my shoulders like a lace-weight shawl and just be me.
I was working on the last inches of a crisp, summery bolero for the baby to wear to the wedding. Sharp lemon yellow, pure white, and touches of saturated cobalt blue, all in a surprisingly buttery washable linen blend. I love the natural colors of wool as much as the next knitter, but there are times when you crave color and this was one of them.
“So what are you going to do about the ring?” Lynette asked.
“I was going to ask all of you,” I said. “There has to be a spell somewhere that can get this thing off my finger.”
“There probably is,” Lilith said, looking up from the tiny sock she was working with toothpick-sized double points, “but first we’d have to find out which spell caused the problem in the first place.”
“So you think it’s already under a spell, too?”
Another burst of laughter from the table.
“Oh, honey!” Lilith leaned across and patted me on the hand. “Of course it’s a spell. Somebody somewhere is trying to make a little mischief with some very bad magick.”
“I’m not sure if that’s good news or bad news,” I said.
Janice made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a snort. “The answer is simple. Luke’s people have some powerful juju going for them. Their sheer mass disrupted the energies in Chloe’s cottage and they’re letting you know they don’t like it.”
“They pissed somebody off big time,” Midge Stallworth squeaked. She was looking particularly rosy-skinned tonight. I tried very hard not to think about why. “My hair downright tingled until they crossed the state line and were back in Massachusetts.”
“They are Irish,” Lynette said with a knowing nod. “I’ve never met a human of Irish descent who didn’t have some connection to the other dimensions.”
“That’s right,” Lilith agreed. “And put a few dozen of them in one highly-charged area and there are bound to be repercussions.”
“I like your theory,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure the MacKenzie clan is of Scottish descent.”
“The name may be,” Lilith said, not missing a beat, “but their vibe is one hundred percent Irish and you know what that means.”
“So what you’re saying is that the MacKenzies pissed off some invisible Sugar Maple leprechauns who decided to ruin the party.”
“Chloe, really.” Verna Griggs, who wasn’t even a knitter, shot me a look dripping with pity as she worked on a quilt top. “Everyone knows there’s no such thing as leprechauns.”
The laughter took a while to die down but when it did, things got serious fast.
“I don’t want to worry you, Chloe, but I think Luke’s mother is up to something,” Lilith said as she wound a center-pull ball of indie-dyed merino. “She emailed me after lunch, asking all sorts of questions about your father.”
“My father?” My stomach dropped into my feet. “What kinds of questions?”
“She asked a few questions about your mother, too, but I deflected them with our usual ‘we’re digitizing them for the state’ excuse. But then she started on your father: where was he born, how old was he when he died, did I know anything about his people—typical genealogical questions, but she was pretty insistent.”
“What did you tell her?”
“The truth, as far as I know it. He was born in Maine, he was thirty when he died, and he had no people. At least, none that we’ve ever heard about.”
I wasn’t surprised that Bunny was pursuing her search. She had seen my reaction to finding the yellow shoebox. Living in Sugar Maple, the focus had always been on my mother Guinevere. My father had been an embarrassing addendum to Sugar Maple history, the human stain marring Aerynn’s legacy and, as a result, mine as well.
For years I had thought little about the man my mother had loved enough to follow into eternity. I had willingly let him slip away into distant memory. But since Laria’s birth, I had found myself longing to know more about the human who had been part of my life for such a short time. Watching Luke with our daughter awoke feelings I had long forgotten, feelings that escaped my control yesterday when I saw that battered yellow shoebox.
How was it possible to forget unconditional love?
No wonder Bunny’s already formidable maternal instincts had gone into overdrive on my behalf.
“I doubt if she’ll find anyone,” I said, staring down at the glowing ring wedded to my index finger. “I’m thirty-two and nobody’s ever come looking for me.” At least, not so far.
“You never know who’s out there,” Lynette said. “I read a story the other day about two men who had been friends for over sixty years. One man never knew his father; the other had been adopted as an infant. So they were talking about that television show that traces a celebrity’s family tree and they decided they would both take one of those DNA tests.” She paused and took a sip of water. “Well, guess wh
at? It turned out they were brothers!”
“Humans!” Midge Stallworth said with a surprising amount of disdain. “At least we never lose track of our bloodline.”
“Of course you don’t, dear,” said Verna Griggs. “You just call it dinner.”
Just another Knit Night at Sticks & Strings.
Chapter 7
GAVAN
Sugar Maple – one week before the wedding
* * *
Humans smelled like hot milk and spices. He hadn’t expected that. He found himself inhaling their scent, alternately repelled and enchanted.
He moved quietly among them, invisible to their eyes, undetectable by their other senses. He felt their breath moving in and out of their fragile lungs, heard the rapid beating of more hearts than he could count. Their mortal force created eddies of heat around them, intersecting circles of life burning down like candles.
They were also loud, unpredictable, and everywhere. The only inviolate space was the waterfall portal where he had entered the dimension, and even then he could hear them moving swiftly along distant roads.
Even in Sugar Maple, the town created to give refuge to magicks of all types, humans had left their mark. But it wasn’t the mark of savagery and hate. They broke bread with the magicks and left their hard-earned money in their shops. The arrangement seemed to benefit both sides.
And nobody benefited more than Chloe of Guinevere. Her knit shop, situated in the center of town, was a thriving center of commerce and friendship. He watched through the front window of her store as she welcomed humans and magicks alike into her realm, treating each with warmth and humor as she plied her trade. He wasn’t sure how many earth hours he spent that first day observing her at work but the sky went from light to nearly dark before she left.
Thanks to the new magick charm the Sugar Maples had settled over the town, the humans couldn’t see him. Thanks to the old magick charm he had settled over himself, the Sugar Maples couldn’t see him. He was free to observe without being detected.
He soon discovered there were limits to what he was comfortable observing.
The ring on his hand blinked each time he neared Chloe. Imbued with magick of its own, the ring seemed to know its destiny was on the horizon.
Standing outside the window of her cottage, he saw a family. He had communicated to Rohesia that his betrothed had created a child with the human, a beautiful baby girl who, despite being mostly human, exhibited a surprising degree of magick. A baby girl who would one day move Aerynn’s legacy forward. Gavan needed no special powers to see that the three of them, magicks and human male, were bound together by love, the most powerful force in existence and maybe the most dangerous to his cause.
Rohesia remained unmoved. The plan would move forward and swiftly, per her original command.
The existence of one family for the survival of many.
There was no choice.
Chapter 8
WENDY AUBRY LATTIMER
Bailey’s Harbor, Maine – three days before the wedding
* * *
It wasn't the craziest idea ever introduced in the Tip Top Coffee Shop but you wouldn't know it by the way my three best friends were looking at me.
"What?" I demanded as I dipped my fingers into the remains of my hot tea water and spit-spliced two strands of downy soft cashmere fingering weight together. "She asked. I said yes. What’s the big deal?"
“It’s a wedding invitation,” Diandra said, her patience with me clearly strained. “Why would you say yes to a wedding invitation? Haven’t we all been to enough weddings by now?”
“Because the bride is my cousin,” I said. “When a cousin asks, you say yes.”
“Your cousin didn’t ask you,” Diandra reminded me.
“And she’s a cousin you’ve never met,” Kelly reminded me, “and never knew existed.”
“A cousin who might not really be your cousin,” Claire added. “All you have to go on is what this Bonny person has to say.”
“Her name is Bunny and she’s the bride’s future mother-in-law.”
“I can’t believe we’re even having this discussion,” Diandra said as she slowly tinked her way back along a row of lace. “When I said you should get out there and meet someone, this isn’t what I meant.”
“I know exactly what you meant,” I shot back, “and I’m still not ready.”
“You’ve been divorced for almost a year. What are you waiting for?”
"Stop looking at me like I'm an exhibit in the Museum of Lost Women." I took another gulp of coffee. “When I’m ready to date, I’ll let you know.”
Diandra, Kelly, and Claire launched into their usual why-Wendy-should-put-down-her-knitting-and-pick-up-a-guy routine, most of which I knew by heart. They meant well, the three of them, but they all had great jobs, good husbands, and happy kids. We weren’t all that lucky.
Don't get me wrong. I love those women. I mean, who else but your best girl friends would be there to pry the Ben & Jerry's from your cold, plump hands before you ate yourself into a post-divorce fat and sugar coma? But I'd be lying if I said I was anything like them. Sometimes I feel like their slacker mascot, a classic underachiever with only one husband, and one divorce and no children to my name.
I'm not a rocket scientist or an educator or a surgeon. I'm not even the "Do you want fries with that?" girl at McDonald's. I clean other people's houses for a living and I knit for my sanity.
Some knitters knit for process. Some knit for product. I knit to keep from throwing myself under the vacuum cleaner.
I know how to keep a house looking great. It's one of the things I did well so when my life fell apart I figured why not make some money doing for others what I'd done for Gary for free. It’s honest work. Maybe it's not what my parents had in mind when they shipped me off to college but neither was seeing me marry as soon as I was old enough to vote.
I suppose you want the juicy details. I can't really blame you for that. We all want to know how someone else's life fell apart, if only so we can hold on tighter to what's good about our own. What I thought would last forever lasted only until something better came along. He met someone younger, sexier, and richer and he divorced me and married her. I saw The New Wife once and I have to say if I weren’t straight as a plumb line, I might have left me for her too.
And the sad truth is I never saw it coming.
One morning I was standing at the stove stirring the organic oatmeal and raisins concoction that had become our default breakfast when he sat down at the kitchen table, opened the paper to the classified section and said, "I'm moving out."
I thought he was kidding. I wish I could say I had one of those seen-it-coming moments but I didn't. I thought we were happy. I thought our family was like every other family out there in America: sometimes happy, sometimes not so much, but rock solid just the same.
Yeah.
I know.
You never think it can happen to you until it does and even then it took me a good six months to stop listening for the sound of his Miata in the driveway.
The thing is I liked being married. I liked the routine of it. The things that drove other women completely nuts were touchstones for me, reminders that I had a man who loved me and a place in the world where I belonged.
And then Hurricane Sophie blew into town and Barbie's Dream House came tumbling down before Barbie had a chance to figure out what came next.
Last week I learned that Gary and Sophie are expecting their first child and the pain cut through me like a machete. In some strange way I was happy for him. He had always wanted kids and that was the one thing I couldn’t give him.
I guess sometimes dreams do come true.
Just not my dreams.
I’d been feeling restless lately, uneasy in my own skin. Dreams were wonderful but impossible dreams only weighed you down. Sooner or later I would have to step out of my comfort zone and jumpstart my life. This unexpected wedding invitation might be a great first step toward
my second act. Whatever it might be.
“Are you finished?” I asked when my three BFFs stopped for breath. ‘There’s more to the story.”
I handed Claire my iPad and leaned back.
“This better not be another picture of cute kittens and balls of yarn,” she said, reluctantly turning the tablet toward her. “I swear I’ll block you forever if you send me one more of those things.”
“Just read the invitation.”
I watched as her gaze traveled the screen.
“It’s in Sugar Maple!” Claire all but shrieked. She passed the iPad to Kelly.
“Sticks-&-Strings Sugar Maple?” Kelly asked, wide-eyed.
She pushed it toward Diandra who remained unimpressed.
“Some chick sends you an email and you’re racing over to Vermont to hold hands and sing Kumbaya with strangers. That doesn’t sound like you, Wendy.” She leaned across the table and fixed me with a look. “You know you don’t need a wedding invitation to shop at Sticks & Strings. We’ve been talking about a road trip forever.”
“I’m not a moron,” I said, feeling slightly insulted. “I checked Bunny MacKenzie out.”
She was a retired nurse from the Boston suburbs, married, with a boatload of kids and grandkids and a family that had more branches than the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.
One of my half-sisters had asked me to compile information for a school project she was working on and, for a little while, I enjoyed filling in the names and watching as they linked up but that was as far as it went for me. I’m not a big family tree kind of girl. Maybe if I had children of my own, or even the possibility of children, I might find the search for family history more compelling, but that particular buck stopped with me. Janna had posted the results on-line at one of those ancestry websites, which was how Bunny MacKenzie had managed to track me down.
“Apparently Chloe Hobbs doesn’t have any living relatives and Bunny was determined to find family to share her wedding day with her.”
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