Spellbound

by Michelle M. Pillow

  But they’d saved Lydia. This was over. Iain didn’t understand. He’d already lived this event. Lydia was marrying Erik. Charlotte was alive. The evil forces were stopped. Unless…

  Niall.

  Reliving this night could only be the work of magick. Was Niall in his head, pulling out memories? He always wondered what that would feel like. He’d met Jane after this event happened. Jane. He had to remember Jane. He couldn’t let his brother erase her from his memory. His entire body wanted to run, away from this past, down the country road into town. He wanted to shift into bird form and fly away toward her. Jane. Home. Jane.

  What had the potion revealed? What had they discovered about her that was so bad he couldn’t know? What could possibly warrant their taking her from his mind? They never erased a family member’s memories without consent…unless the circumstances were so dire, it was the only way to save the warlock’s life. Iain wanted his memories, all of them. Centuries faded enough without them being manually erased.

  Remember Jane. Remember Jane. Jane. Remember…remember…save Lydia. Save his brother’s woman. Save his brother.

  The current memory called him into it. Feelings of concern for his brother’s girlfriend filled Iain. She was rare, a genetic anomaly of humankind that synced perfectly to one particular warlock. As an inthrall, Lydia could take Erik’s power from him, use his magick, drain him, kill him or protect him. With the mere will to do so, she could absorb Erik’s life. More to the point, she could be forced to take it from him. The lidércs who’d kidnaped her wanted to do just that—force Lydia to give them Erik’s powers.

  Iain worried for Erik. He worried for the clan should the lidércs be successful in their attempts to use Erik’s inthrall against them. The lidércs were psychic vampires who controlled unsuspecting minds and lived as shadows. If they succeeded, they’d wreak havoc on the world. A thick log pole stuck in the lawn with a metal ring along the top. Iain hid with Erik across the dirt road in a ditch. Townsfolk pulled a rope through the ring, hefting Lydia up the pole. When they finally had her several feet off the ground, they stopped and tied the rope on the star decoration near the side of the road. Her feet must have found hold on something because she stopped kicking and stood straighter. Erik tried to stand as if he would rescue the woman.

  “Stop,” Iain warned. “I know ya want to comfort her, but if you’re not careful with your feelings, they’ll detect us.”

  “I love her,” Erik whispered.

  “I love her?” Iain wasn’t so much surprised by the revelation as he was the fact his brother admitted his feelings out loud. Hearing the words caused a tightness in his chest. A strange sensation pulled at his mind as if he should remember something, but nothing came to him. He couldn’t imagine being in love. Warlocks lived for so many centuries that the odds of finding the one person he was meant to be with in all those years, in all those passing lifetimes, were immeasurable.

  “What?” Erik demanded as if Iain had stepped on his territory.

  “Ya said, ‘I love her’.” Iain didn’t love Lydia. He cared for her, as much as anyone could care for someone they’d just met. She was important to Erik, which made her important to the rest of the clan. “Put your magick down and try to concentrate. No need to zap me. I think your lady friend is hot. I’m not going to ask her to have my babies.”

  Erik pointed a finger of warning but let the matter drop. “There, around the top of the fire. Do ya see it? A shadow.”

  “A lidérc.” Iain nodded. Coldness crept into him as he watched the dancing shadow creature.

  “We can’t wait any longer,” Erik insisted.

  The possessed townsfolk continued to build an already blazing fire. The warlock brothers couldn’t rush in with powerballs blazing and kill all the innocent humans being psychically held captive. However, Iain wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep his brother calm. Erik was tormented to see the love of his life strung up on a pole. Unfortunately, that blind devotion was about to get his brother stripped of his magickal powers and killed. “Ya heard Da. We wait for them. We cannot fight the lidércs without the right magick. Lydia is alive. Take comfort in that.”

  “What are those people looking at on the far side of the fire?” Erik’s nervous energy practically snapped off his skin.

  “Ya rush in and they’ll simply start the process early.” Iain needed his brother to hear him. “Ya shouldn’t even be here. Your connection to Lydia is the whole reason this is happening. You’re too involved.”

  He didn’t take Erik’s answering growl of dismissal personally. “What are they looking at?”

  “Someone’s on the ground.” Iain tried to be the voice of reason. He narrowed his eyes and focused on the prone body, using his shifter vision to zoom in. He saw Charlotte lying on the ground. Again, a strange feeling tried to invade him, but he shook it off. “Charlotte. She’s not moving.”

  Lydia screamed in pain. Iain focused harder, trying to find signs of a pulse in Charlotte’s neck. Suddenly, his eyes locked in their changed state and he couldn’t look away from the unmoving body. He tried to physically jerk back, but old magick held him in its spell. Charlotte was a trap. The lidércs had used her as enchanted bait, waiting for any glimpse of MacGregor magick to come near her.

  The pain started in his eyes and rolled through his body. The agony of it was unbearable, but Iain couldn’t make it stop, couldn’t scream as he desperately wanted to. He tried to warn his brother, but no sound came out. He held his chest, endeavoring to keep his power inside his body. It did no good. The entranced Charlotte forced the magick out of him like an empty chalice demanding to be filled. The human woman wasn’t built to hold his powers. The transfer would surely kill her.

  One of the lidércs circled overhead, waiting to drink Iain’s magick from Charlotte. If that happened, the creatures would win, and they would be out to destroy his family. Helplessness mingled with the pain. Tears would have fallen, but the magick pulling out of his eyes wouldn’t let them.

  The entranced townsfolk turned toward the brothers’ hiding place, chanting louder. Erik refused to run. Iain gasped for breath, unable to pull air deep into his withering lungs.

  Slowly, the people formed a line along the far side of the road. He saw the shadowy impression of them before the bonfire light. The pain intensified as streams of his magick poured from his eyes and mouth toward Charlotte. Erik slapped his hand over Iain’s face as if he could physically stop the process. When that didn’t work, Erik tried to lift Iain’s immobile body over his shoulder to carry him to safety. Seconds later, Iain found himself on the ground next to a collapsed Erik. He had the impression of being moved, but his eyes were blurry from their locked position.

  This was death, coming in the hardest way possible. His magick was part of his very being. Without it, he was nothing more than a pile of bones and dust. This was it. He would never know the kind of love Erik fought for. Centuries passed before him, suddenly so short of a timespan. A tear managed to slide over his cheek, boiling hot enough to steam and burn his skin. Charlotte was taking everything. And in the moment before blackness set in, he heard the bagpipes of his youth calling to him. They beckoned his spirit to come home.

  Home.

  “Jane,” his mind whispered, not knowing who she was, only that she meant home.

  * * *

  Iain wouldn’t have minded the blackness surrounding him if he’d actually been passed out or asleep. Instead, he was incredibly aware of being stuck in a cold, dark place. He tried to use his magick, but Charlotte had left him drained. Aside from a residual pain that made him aware he still had at least bones for a body, he felt nothing. Was he still on the ground? Was this death? Limbo? Hell? A coma?

  Fear filled him, but his circumstances gave him no way to retaliate against the darkness. He didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, didn’t move. He thought he felt a brush against his arm, but he couldn’t move his head to look, wasn’t sure he even had a head anymore. Perhaps the pain radiating
through what he thought was his body was really just his consciousness trying to hold on to normality. To anything.

  “Dè tha thu ag iarraidh?” someone whispered. What do you want?

  The airy words were so light they could have been an echo from his past. Iain tried to answer, but he had no mouth.

  “Dè tha thu ag iarraidh!” the voice demanded.

  Oh, how he wanted to answer it.

  “I don’t know what I want!” a woman screamed. He didn’t know the voice, at least not that he remembered. He tried to focus, to hear where it came from within the darkness. Was someone inside his mind’s tomb with him? Was he finally going to have company in the endlessness his existence had become?

  The first sense to come back to him was smell. Faint traces of lilacs and purple Scottish heather surrounded him. Iain was sure he’d never smelled anything so wonderful in his life. Next came honey. He tasted it on his tongue. Then bagpipes in the distance. He knew that music. It filled his soul with memories of home. His family called to him. It had to be his family. They were trying to guide him back from oblivion.

  No, wait. He felt something against his mouth. A kiss? The wet brush of a tongue? No magick his family would perform to call him home would involve such a sweet, intimate act. Like a mad rush, he felt his body return to him, and he was pulled from the dark hole of his mind.

  The last sense to return to him was sight. Iain opened his eyes, desperate to make contact with the bearer of those gentle, saving lips. Windblown curls framed a beautiful face. Warmth replaced the cold. He felt love, so sure and intense that such an emotion could never be contained within one soul. Brown eyes flashed ever so briefly before disappearing altogether. Whoever she was, she was gone.

  “Wait,” Iain whispered desperately. She took her feelings of love with her. He was alive, awake, but the pain of losing something so beautifully perfect hurt worse than the oblivion he was pulled from. “Don’t leave me.”

  Perhaps he was dead. His body was laid in a glass coffin. Trees surrounded him, their dark limbs like fingers across the sky. Iain tried to sit up so he could go look for her, but the effort weakened him. He fell back and then nothingness.

  * * *

  Fear filled Jane, nearly choking the breath from her lungs. One moment she was weeding the MacGregor gardens, next Niall was threatening to make her drink a potion, and then she was thrust into what could only be a hallucination. Only this didn’t feel like a hallucination. It felt more like déjà vu.

  Jane remained rooted in place, like the wild overgrowth of the expansive gardens yearning to be saved. An aging woman yelled at her in Gaelic. She knew that wrinkled face. It was Iain’s… It was… It was…

  Memories began to slip into the moment.

  “Why can I understand what you’re saying?” Jane asked the stranger. “Who are you? How did I get here?”

  The aging woman’s finger dissipated into mist but did not disappear. Instead, the mist surrounded Jane’s head. She swatted it away, but the action only caused the mist to swirl up her nose. The plants moved around her, coming to animated life. They stretched and grew, aging like the now-old woman before her, then transformed into a beautiful combination of lilac and purple Scottish heather. The heady scent of flowers and honey was so strong it burned her nostrils and caused her eyes to water. Bagpipes sounded in the distance, impossibly carried on a wind that did not stir.

  The music called to her, offered to save her. The woman made a strange noise and collapsed on the ground. The instant the woman’s body landed, Jane was freed. Instead of running home, she followed the retracting vines toward the bagpipes. She didn’t know why, only that she was compelled to follow them. They led her deeper into the gardens. The smell of flowers followed her.

  The vines began to shake and whither before falling to the ground. A patch of dead foliage formed a large circle around a glass coffin. Whatever had killed the weeds and bushes had started to infect the trees. Browned leaves clung to branches next to green ones.

  A few dead vines crossed over the top as if hugging whoever lay inside. The encased figure was cast in shadow and did not move. The scene looked like something right out of a horrible fairytale, coffin placed on a stone altar in the middle of a lifeless patch of earth. Jane shivered as she stepped on the dried leaves and old vines. She felt something pulling at her legs, fatiguing her muscles.

  The music grew sad as if begging someone to help. She found herself moving toward the coffin despite the tiredness in her limbs. For some reason, she had to see.

  “Déjà vu,” she whispered. The moment felt oddly familiar as if she’d walked this path many times.

  Her hand shook as she reached to touch the glass case. She slid her fingers over the top, brushing aside crispy leaves. A man with dark hair was preserved perfectly inside. His skin did not look like a corpse’s, but like that of a man sleeping, and yet his chest did not rise and fall with life. A rash darkened his cheek in the perfect trail of a tear.

  Jane knocked on the glass, but he didn’t open his eyes. The vibration of her interference caused the vines holding the lid to crack. The lid slid to the side without her pushing it. She held her breath, waiting to see what would happen.

  Suddenly, something grabbed her wrist and jerked her hand down to his face. A healthy vine held her. She was forced to touch his warm skin. Her fingers tingled as if the man pulled life from her and in turn from the vine. Jane ran her thumb over his lips in a gentle caress. The gesture seemed to drag renewed color, and his lips parted. Breath finally whispered against her fingers.

  “Get away from my son!”

  Jane flinched and jerked her hand from the man’s face. As soon as the contact was severed, the vine on her wrist turned to dust, and her fingers stopped tingling. The frail old woman stood on the edge of the dead circle. She looked worse than before, her frame not much more than a skeleton in loose flesh.

  “Get away from my son. I know what ya are, death’s reipseach,” the woman shouted. “Thalla’s cagainn bruis. Thalla’s cagainn bruis! I smell the death on ya. I will protect my house from your master. Ya cannot have my son. I have cast spells of protection. I have called to all the forces in the earth to help me bring him back. Ya cannot have him, death’s reipseach. The forces are coming to save him. Go away. Ya cannot have my son.”

  Thalla’s cagainn bruis?

  Away and chew a brush?

  What the hell kind of insult was that? And why could Jane understand that it was an insult? None of this made sense.

  A ball of energy shot out of the woman’s hand as she teetered on unsteady feet. The shaky aim was the only thing that kept the ball from hitting Jane’s head. Jane yelled in fright and ran for the shelter of the nearby trees. Another shot fired and she felt a sizzle against her arm. Her legs were still weak from walking on the dead vines, and she tripped. Her head hit against the base of a stone statue of a woman surrounded by brush.

  Time slipped, but somehow she managed to pull herself up and wander her way home. Her head ached, her legs burned, and when she pulled her tired body up the stairs, she collapsed near the couch, missing the soft cushions as she passed out on the hardwood floor.

  Chapter 18

  “One word about my making a mistake and I’ll hex ya, Angus MacGregor.”

  Jane stiffened at the threat and fought to open her eyes. Her hazy mind and heavy limbs felt as if she’d been drugged. No matter how much she wanted to move, she couldn’t.

  “What would I say, but ya look beautiful, my wife?” Angus answered.

  Why was Margareta in her bedroom?

  Why was Angus?

  Wait. How was she? She was supposed to be working in the gardens.

  No, they’d used magick on her and turned her to stone. They’d wanted to give her a potion. Niall wanted to do something to her.

  A horrible taste coated her tongue, bitter and strange. Had they given her the potion?

  Jane somehow managed to move her arm, dragging her elbow back to push
her body up before her eyes even opened.

  “She moves,” Angus declared.

  “Quiet,” Margareta scolded. “Don’t hover over the girl.”

  Jane opened her eyes to find Angus’s face near hers. She gasped and fell back. Her head bounced lightly on the soft mattress.

  “Wha-ah-eesh,” she said. The words sounded strange, even though her brain tried to say, What is happening?

  “Good morning, dear,” Margareta pushed her husband out of the way. “Ya are coming out of the spell. Give it a moment. Your thoughts will align. The memories of the past will fill in.”

  Jane narrowed her eyes in concern. It was about all the movement she could manage. Though her body didn’t obey her mind, that didn’t mean her mind wasn’t sharp. Iain’s mother looked sixty years younger than the woman she’d seen being pushed in the wheelchair…than the aging woman in the gardens throwing electric magick balls at her.

  Coffin.

  Iain.

  “Iain,” she mumbled, again trying to stir. She remembered Iain trapped in the gardens. Hallucination? Real? It felt real. Iain’s mother was indicating it was real.

  “Sleeping,” Margareta said.

  Jane blinked, confused. She had a hard time concentrating.

  Margareta reached to touch her cheek, and Jane’s widening eyes followed the woman’s hand. Iain’s mother had tried to kill her. She’d found Iain asleep in the forest, and all she’d wanted to do was help, but Margareta had tried to set her on fire with a magick ball. Fear filled her as a tear slipped from her eyes. Margareta brushed the moisture away. Leaning over, she smiled. “Ya woke up too quickly. Ya should be asleep as well. It will make the transition out of the potion’s spell easier.”

  Jane didn’t trust that smile. She tried to shake her head, the only gesture she could make to stop whatever Margareta planned. The woman lifted her other hand holding a small bottle, dripping translucent orange liquid between Jane’s eyes. She closed her lids, trying to keep the potion out of her eyes. It didn’t work. Liquid pooled outside her lids. Sleep came swiftly.