“That’s what I thought.” She was quiet for a moment. “So the bad news is we don’t have any food.”
“And the worse news is there’s no place to get any.” The coffee shop, pizzeria, take-out Chinese, mini supermarket all were gone and the nearest Golden Arches was a good ten-mile walk.
She reached deep into the pockets of her jeans. “I can top that: we have no money to buy food, assuming we could find some in the first place.”
“I lost my wallet back at the waterfall.”
“I left mine at the shop,” she said.
And since we weren’t feeling bad enough as it was, we decided to compile a reverse inventory.
No family.
No friends.
No food.
No cars.
No house.
No clothing.
No furniture.
No cats.
No money.
No ID.
No laptops, no cell phones, no pagers, no BlackBerrys, no iPods.
“I’d try to magick up an ATM but I’m afraid you’d arrest me,” she said.
“Go for it,” I said. “And while you’re at it, throw in a truck with a full tank and some Egg McMuffins.”
“Don’t want much, do you, Chief?” She closed her eyes and started mumbling.
I waited.
She mumbled some more.
Three singles, two quarters, and half a dozen pennies appeared at our feet in a cloud of Kelly green smoke that smelled like mint juleps on Derby Day.
“Oh, crap,” she said, bending down to retrieve the pocket change. “I was trying for a fistful of Franklins.” She aimed an assessing look in my direction. “I think your cop vibe is screwing with my magick.”
“My cop vibe?”
“You reek of cop, but I mean that in a good way.”
Like hell she did, but I let it pass. “So what should I do about it?”
“Go stand over there by those white birches and I’ll try again.”
I’d been around long enough by now to know that when it came to magic I was so far down the food chain that road-kill ranked higher. I jogged thirty feet away from her and waited while she fired up her powers and tried again.
A spit of green smoke. A spurt of orange flame. Then a string of sailor’s curses followed by a crack of thunder that reminded me that the woman I loved was anything but ordinary.
It also reminded me that the hotter her temper grew, the more trouble we might be in. I’d spent an afternoon last month as a Ken doll after a spirited exchange, so I had some personal experience.
“Chill, Tinker Bell,” I said as I rejoined her. “We don’t need any more natural disasters.”
Chloe grabbed my arm. “Did you hear that?”
A faint rumble sounded from the far end of the field. “Thunder?” I asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“Damn,” I said. “That sounds like your car.”
I was right. Chloe’s monster Buick leaped into the meadow in a wild yellow and red and orange hailstorm and headed straight for us.
Chloe took off at high speed toward the car but I tackled her around the waist and knocked her to the ground. “Let me go!” she screamed, but the more she struggled, the tighter I held on.
Even though I was a big Stephen King fan, I wasn’t about to let either of us star in a remake of Christine.
The Buick swerved from one side of the field to the other like a crazed bumper car, wheels spinning, engine straining. I tossed Chloe over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry and we dived into the brush. I rolled her under me, which, under different circumstances, would have been a good thing but right now it was all about survival.
In the world I grew up in, cars didn’t drive themselves but here in Sugar Maple anything was possible.
So the sight of a two-ton, two-decades-old Buick appearing out of thin air didn’t surprise me.
But as it skidded to a stop the familiar face behind the wheel sure as hell did.
4
CHLOE
I’d never seen anything more beautiful in my life than the sight of my friend Janice Meany behind the wheel of my beloved old Buick.
Unless it was the sight of my beloved Penny the cat in the passenger seat, perched high atop a wondrous mountain of yarn.
Janice leaned through the driver’s-side window. “Where have you guys been?” she demanded. “I thought you’d—” Her voice caught and she swallowed the rest of the sentence but I knew exactly what she had been going to say.
I leaped to my feet and ran toward the car. My friend, my car, my cat and some of my stash!
Luke swung open the driver’s-side door and Janice jumped out. I grinned as he gave her a clumsy hug that she returned with more warmth than she had ever shown him before.
“Your ribs?” she asked as he winced. She moved her hands along his sides while whispering an incantation I didn’t recognize. “Give it an hour. You’ll be fine.”
Luke looked skeptical but I knew that sixty minutes from now he’d be a believer in my friend’s healing gifts.
Janice wasn’t a touchy-feely kind of woman but she grabbed me in a hug that almost cracked my perfectly healthy ribs.
Penny the cat erupted in an ear-splitting yowl and we burst into laughter.
“Come on, Pen!” I said, and she leaped into my arms with the energy of a kitten. Her familiar lawn-mower purr sounded like a symphony. Penny was my touchstone. She had been with me all my life, and with my mother and her mother before her. Legend had it that Aerynn had brought Penelope with her when she fled Salem and I believed it was true. On more than one occasion, Penny had served as a conduit between dimensions and even though it sounded crazy when the going got tough, I knew Penny had my back.
And as if that wasn’t great enough, Janice had rescued my stash! Clouds of purple and green, yellow and red and orange, rich browns and saturated blacks and every variation possible on creamy white billowed out the open windows. Noro and Colinette, Rowan and Malabrigo, one-offs from local indie dyers, batts and rolags, Aerynn’s wheel and everything else Janice could wedge inside or tie on the roof.
I was so excited my words tumbled out all over themselves. “I didn’t—we couldn’t—I mean, we thought we would never—” I stopped and pulled in a long breath. I met Janice’s eyes. “So where is Sugar Maple?”
Her brown eyes widened and she looked from me to Luke then back again. “I was going to ask you two the same thing.”
“But you’re here. I thought—”
“You’re here, too,” she pointed out. “I was hoping you had some answers.”
“How the hell did you manage this?” Luke asked, gesturing toward the yarn-stuffed car. Men didn’t stand on ceremony. “Why didn’t the spell that took Sugar Maple take you, too?”
“Hello,” Janice said. “And here I thought you were happy to see me.”
“You were right,” I said to Luke. “It is my fault. When I tied Isadora’s fate to the death of the sun, I must have somehow referenced Sugar Maple.”
“Where did you get that idea?” Janice demanded.
I recited the chain of events as I knew them. “What other answer is there?”
“It wasn’t Isadora and it wasn’t you,” Janice said. “That’s not how it went down at all.”
Luke was in full cop mode. “If it wasn’t Isadora and it wasn’t Chloe, what happened and why weren’t you dragged away with everyone else in town?”
Janice eyed him long enough to make me swallow hard. When Janice looked like that, anything could happen. Luke was lucky he wasn’t squatting on a lily pad somewhere, croaking for help.
I didn’t breathe easy until Janice broke the stare and started talking.
“The town was pretty evenly divided about whether or not to let Isadora take us beyond the mist. Probably more divided than either of you realized. Anyway, the closer we moved to the zero hour, the uglier it got. The Weavers threatened Lilith’s family if they didn’t go along with Isadora’s p
lan. Cyrus tried to step in and broker some kind of understanding when Renate—”
Luke broke in. “Where the hell is the town?”
“I’m getting to that.” She shot me an exasperated look while I resisted the urge to turn him into the speak-no-evil monkey while she finished her story. “As I was saying, the two sides were having a throw-down and Renate started screaming that they were going to miss the opportunity and Paul Griggs said over his dead body and that’s when those mini earthquakes really started popping and you just knew—” She shook her head. “Lynette headed over to your cottage to get the girls. I raced to the shop for Penny and the basket and as much of your private stash as I could cram into the Buick. I planned to drive them over the township line where they’d be safe from whatever was about to happen.
“I waited as long as I could for Lynette but she didn’t show. I was just about to abandon the car and jump back onto the Sugar Maple side of the line and get back to Lorcan and the kids when the town blinked out like a dying lightbulb and disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” I was having trouble following the chronology. “You said disappeared, not pulled beyond the mist?”
“Disappeared,” Janice repeated. “And I’ll bet my last remaining Fig Newton that Isadora had nothing to do with it.”
She had Fig Newtons?
“So who did?” Luke asked.
“This is just a guess but when they didn’t get a signal or whatever it was they were waiting for from Isadora, I’ll bet that the Weavers and the rest of the Fae contingent tried to pull Sugar Maple beyond the mist on their own.”
Luke considered Janice’s words for a long moment.
“They had that kind of power?”
“Not individually but together they might.”
I met Janice’s eyes. “You’ve read about town transport. You know it’s a rough business. If they’d succeeded, the process would have left the same kind of footprint behind as a Cat 5 hurricane and we would have seen it happen.”
“Well, something happened,” Janice said, her eyes filling with tears, “because my husband and kids are gone and I’m—” This time she couldn’t choke back her tears and I hugged her while she cried it out against my shoulder.
Luke was like most men, human and otherwise, in that raw emotion made him uncomfortable. He turned toward the place where the town had been and pretended to study the landscape until Janice’s sobs slowed down to a few random hiccups.
I was on the edge of another crying jag myself. Janice would be with her family right now if she hadn’t taken time to rescue Penny and my stash and drive the jam-packed Buick over the township line to safety. For that matter, maybe none of this would have happened at all if I hadn’t screwed things up in the first place.
“Maybe this is temporary,” I said as she blew her nose into a Fully Caffeinated napkin I’d found on the floor of my car. “Maybe they had enough power to make Sugar Maple disappear but not enough sustained power to keep it away for long. For all we know it’s going to reappear any second.”
“I wouldn’t bet the yarn shop on it,” Janice said. “Never underestimate Renate Weaver and her clan. They’re more powerful than they let on.”
Not exactly what I wanted to hear. “I wish I knew why they flipped allegiance.”
“You know why they flipped. You started consorting with the enemy.” She looked over at Luke. “Sorry, but it’s true.”
If it bothered him, he didn’t show it. He was still in cop mode.
“What if the town was pulled into the mist somehow and Isadora cast a spell to help cover the tracks?” Luke said.
“Come on,” I snapped at Luke. “If Isadora thought there was a chance in hell that they could pull Sugar Maple beyond the mist, she wouldn’t have bothered to cover her tracks. She’d rent a billboard in Times Square.” I took a deep breath. “I think I did it.”
Janice burst into laughter. “Honey, I love you but when it comes to magick, you’re still in diapers. You couldn’t possibly pull off something like this, especially not by mistake.”
When this was over, Janice and I were going to have to talk. A lot had changed in the hours since I last saw my friend. I wasn’t the same scared-of-her-own-shadow sorceress she’d known and loved. I would never be afraid of my growing powers again.
“I mean I think I screwed up somehow and banished the town along with Isadora.”
Janice made a face. “Impossible. There’s no spell linkage between towns and individuals. The power you needed to destroy Isadora was nothing like the power you’d need to banish a town.”
But to me the logic was unassailable. I had created a spell that linked Isadora’s banishment with the death of our sun and then, not long after, we discovered our town had gone missing, too. Why was I the only one who seemed able to connect those dots?
Penny the cat meowed and began to squirm against me. I put her down on the dewy grass and she wandered off to do what she needed to do while we leaned against the Buick and stared across the field at the large expanse of trees that used to be a town.
“What’s wrong with this picture?” Janice muttered.
“You mean, besides the fact that Penny deigned to put her paws on damp ground?”
“I was thinking more like why aren’t we in there instead of out here?”
“Because we can’t get in,” I said.
“You tried?”
Luke and I exchanged eye rolls. “Of course we tried,” I said. “What do you think we were doing before you showed up?” I was having trouble keeping the duh out of my voice.
Luke brought her up to speed on the shield that guarded the perimeter.
“What about the field?” Janice asked.
“Neutral territory,” he said.
“Well, it made for some hella bad driving,” Janice said.
“That’s the Buick,” Luke said with a grin in my direction, “not the spell.”
“How did you know we were here?” I asked, ignoring Luke’s comment. “I mean, what did you do between the time Sugar Maple vanished and now?” For that matter, how did she even know we were here?
Janice’s eyes widened. “I—I’m not sure.”
“You must’ve done something,” I said. “It’s been a couple of hours.”
She seemed lost in thought. “I can’t remember anything after the town blinked out. Next thing I knew I was driving that bucket of bolts you call a car across the field.”
“Do you think you fell asleep for a while?” Luke asked.
“Not exactly the time for a nap,” Janice pointed out.
“In a trance of some kind?” I asked.
“I guess it’s possible but until you asked I hadn’t thought about the time lapse.”
“We need to make a list.” I rummaged through one of my knitting bags for paper and pen. And ignored the laughter behind me. “I don’t hear any better ideas.” I pulled out a battered Bic that was almost as old as my car and a take-out menu from Wong Foo’s with the first few rows of a lace pattern scribbled across the back. “You first, Luke. What did you see when you walked the perimeter?”
“You mean, besides the missing town?”
I loved him, but he was a wisecrack away from being turned into a hood ornament.
“The town is gone,” he acknowledged, “and so is the bridge. There’s a forest there instead.”
Janice groaned but I tried to put a positive spin on things.
“That’s a good thing.” My Pollyanna imitation needed a little work. “No bridge means no traffic into town, which means we’ll go undetected a little longer.” The Toothaker Bridge was the only way in or out of town.
“What town?” Luke retorted. “Just wait until UPS comes rolling in with a delivery for Sticks & Strings. This story will explode.”
“Crap!” Sometimes passion trumped eloquence. I checked the time on Luke’s watch. “Joe usually hits my shop around nine fifteen.”
For three hundred years Aerynn’s protective charm had shielded o
ur truth from prying eyes but now that there was no town to shield, the protective charm no longer existed and a missing town would be impossible to explain.
“Anybody have a really big tarp?” Janice asked and we laughed despite ourselves.
“Maybe one of Forbes’s granny square afghans,” I said. Forbes was our resident mountain giant.
“One of Midge Stallworth’s bathrobes might work.”
“Or you could create another protective charm,” Luke offered.
Leave it to the cop to come up with a solution. He was definitely more optimistic than I was. So far my powers seemed to have gone the way of Sugar Maple itself. Had he forgotten my pathetic attempt to call down some spending money?
“Go for it,” Janice said to me. “There has to be something in the Book of Spells that will help.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell my friend that so far the Book of Spells was MIA and we just might be on our own.
5
LUKE
The Janice I had known up until now was a wisecracking, self-confident Julia Roberts look-alike who had the real world and every other world by the short hairs. She balanced a big family, a happy marriage, and a thriving business and made it look easy.
Sometimes I almost forgot she was a witch descended from a long line of witches who could take me out without breaking a sweat.
I’m not sure she ever forgot I was human.
The Janice next to me now was a mess. She grabbed my hand as Chloe tried to call the Book of Spells to her side and she squeezed tighter and tighter with every failed attempt.
“She’s struggling,” Janice whispered in my ear. “What happened at the waterfall? Is she okay?”
“She’s exhausted,” I said as her nails dug deeper into the palm of my hand. “She’ll be fine.” I was straddling the line between lie and wish.
The more Chloe tried, the more tongue-tied she grew. Her hard-won magick seemed a distant memory. Bursts of yellow flame erupted at her feet with every failed effort, then fizzled swiftly and died. Mostly it was like watching a slow-motion train wreck.
“Where’s Penny?” Chloe darted over to where we stood by the car. “I need Penny!”
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