Spun by Sorcery

by Barbara Bretton

  “Maybe it’s time to push it into the twenty-first century.”

  Both Chloe and Janice scowled at me.

  I regrouped again. “I know we all believe that the best way to bring Sugar Maple back is to retrieve the Book of Spells, and since the Book isn’t answering Chloe’s call, we’ve got to assume it’s with the town.”

  “Go on,” Chloe said.

  “The way I see it, this all comes down to figuring out where can we find another Book of Spells.”

  Chloe laughed out loud. “There’s only one Book of Spells.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  She hesitated. “That’s what I’ve always believed.”

  “Okay, let’s say you’re right and there’s only one Book. We know the Book began in Salem and that the knowledge was acquired there. What if some of that knowledge stayed there in Salem?”

  Janice surprised everyone, including herself, when she said, “Luke might be onto something.”

  Luke? She called me Luke. Most of the time I was either a third-person pronoun or “the human.”

  Chloe seemed uneasy. “It’s taken me four months to even master a tiny percentage of one section of the Book. The knowledge contained in it definitely predates Aerynn’s arrival in Sugar Maple.”

  Janice nodded her head in agreement. “Most of us in town believed the knowledge was accumulated over the ages, not just a few centuries.”

  Chloe glanced from her friend to me. “So you’re saying that maybe not all of our ancestors fled Salem with Aerynn?”

  I could almost hear the click as more puzzle pieces dropped into place.

  “I’m saying it’s a possibility. It’s also possible that some folklore still exists that could provide a clue.” That was the thing about police work. You had to follow every lead because you never knew where the answers might be hiding.

  “Luke’s right, Chloe. Salem might be our only hope.”

  I met Chloe’s eyes. “Salem is the only other place on earth with a connection to Sugar Maple. It’s a four-hour drive. If we come up empty we can be back here and up shit creek again by nightfall.”

  We had nothing to lose.

  CHLOE

  Ask any knitter and he or she will tell you that the only thing better than TV knitting is road trip knitting. I turned the car keys over to Luke again and, pushing aside an explosion of Dream in Color Smooshy, claimed the passenger seat. The circumstances could have been a whole lot better but I have to admit the prospect of a few hours of mindless knit-and-purl made me very happy.

  Janice managed to squish herself into the backseat amid the baskets and bags of roving and rolags and fleeces and a very clingy Penny the cat and was three rounds into a Wendy Knits toe-up lace sock by the time Luke angled the Buick out of the Walmart parking lot.

  I let myself sink into my default pattern for a three-one rib cuff-down sock. I was using a skein of Noro Kureyon Sock in gorgeous saturated shades of royal blue and purple splashed with hot pink and an understated forest green and as always the chaos in my mind stilled as I anticipated the color transitions and savored the way the yarn felt as it moved through my fingers.

  Nobody said a word as we drove toward the highway and left the snow behind. I guess we were all wondering when (and maybe if) we would return. I would have kitchener-stitched my lips together rather than admit it but I was scared. This was the only world I knew. Except for my painfully brief time at Boston University when I was eighteen, I had spent my entire life in Sugar Maple and now it was gone.

  I was so far outside my comfort zone that it was downright laughable. The more miles we put between ourselves and Sugar Maple, the less confident I felt that we would return.

  What if we never came back?

  I glanced toward Luke. He had a life waiting for him in the human world. A phone call or two and he would have a new job in a new town and a new future to consider. He would be back where he belonged, with mortals who went to work every day, who fell in and out of love, who married and had children, who worried about their 401(k)s and whether or not their flu shots were up-to-date. Before long his months in Sugar Maple would seem like a story that happened to someone else.

  I knew he loved me. I knew he would want me to share his life. A year ago I might have been able to make it work. But now that I had magick, I wasn’t so sure.

  And Janice—I couldn’t bring myself to think about what she was going through.

  Luke asked if we minded if he tuned into one of the sports talk radio stations. Janice and I lied and said no. We needed our knitting. He needed his Red Sox. We’d cope. He fiddled with the dial but instead of baseball talk, he got nothing but static.

  “Your radio sucks,” Luke said. “You might want to invest in an antenna.”

  “I drive three hundred miles a year,” I said as I flipped my knitting and continued the round. “I haven’t used that radio since gas was a dollar a gallon.”

  He had a great deep laugh and for a moment things didn’t seem so bleak.

  “Another year and you’ll be able to get historic plates,” Luke said. “Lower your insurance rates.”

  “Another year and she’ll be pushing this thing down Osborne Avenue,” Janice said and this time we all laughed.

  “A little respect,” I said. “It’s getting us where we want to go, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll give you props for the size of your trunk,” Janice admitted. “You could hide three or four bodies in there.”

  Luke met her eyes in the rearview mirror. “You want to run that by me again?”

  “Some people come by their logic watching Twilight Zone. I came by mine watching The Sopranos.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Luke said, but a quick smile softened the prime-time cop delivery.

  I knew Janice made Luke uncomfortable. He hadn’t said anything but his jaw always tightened whenever she was around. Not that I blamed him. Janice had made her feelings about full-blood humans painfully clear on more than one occasion.

  But so far, so good. Some of the nervous tension that had locked my shoulders up around my ears melted away and I settled back against the seat and addressed my knitting.

  Some people meditated. Some people ran laps around a track. When I was tense, I turned yarn into socks. Lots of socks. More socks than any sane woman with the standard-issue pair of feet could possibly use in a lifetime. Now that Luke was part of my life I had started knitting socks for him (a labor of love when the feet in question wore size twelve shoes) and his sock drawer was already bulging at the seams.

  Not that lack of space would stop me. We could always buy him a new sock drawer. At the rate I was knitting we’d need it by the time we hit Salem.

  Which was fine with me. Right now the only thing between me and utter panic was the sock in my hands. I was deeply immersed in all of that purple and blue and green yarny goodness when the snow found us.

  “What the hell—?” He squinted out the window then flicked on the wipers. “That’s a blizzard out there.”

  A wave of uneasiness washed over me.

  “Why is it hitting us?” I asked. “I thought we were outrunning it.”

  Janice wiped condensation off the side window and peered outside. “Not anymore,” she said.

  “Maybe it was in the weather report for today,” I said. “It might have nothing to do with the spell.”

  I didn’t believe a word I said. Neither did anyone else.

  Luke muttered something unquotable as the car slid noticeably to the left. He eased up on the gas and we slid back into the lane. “How the hell do you manage up here without four-wheel drive?”

  “Easy,” Janice jumped in. “Our girl doesn’t drive if there’s more than an inch of snow on the ground.”

  I plucked a bit of vegetable matter from my working yarn and dropped it in the unused ashtray. “I have enough trouble driving when it’s sunny and dry. Why push my luck?”

  “The town council was considering an ordinance to keep her off the road
when there’s more than an inch of precip anywhere in the county.”

  I swatted her with my Noro sock yarn. “Excuse me but that was shouted down without a vote.”

  Janice’s grin was thoroughly wicked. “Only because you swore you’d stay off the road voluntarily.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I said. “You made me drop a stitch.”

  I swear to you Janice gasped so loudly she sucked the oxygen out of the car. “What did you say?”

  “I dropped a stitch and it’s all your—” Now it was my turn to gasp. I had never dropped a stitch in my entire knitting life. Not once.

  Janice squinted at her sock in progress then held it up to the light. “I don’t believe this.” She rummaged in one of my accessory bags for a ruler then laid it against the knitted fabric. “Holy crap,” she said. “I’m not getting gauge.”

  “Gauge is a good thing?” Luke asked, slowing the Buick down to practically a crawl.

  “Gauge is a very good thing,” I said. Otherwise that wonderful boyfriend sweater you were working on might be better suited for a toddler.

  Sticks & Strings was known as the shop where your yarn never tangled, your sleeves always matched, and you always got gauge. Customers came from all parts of the country to take our weekend workshops and ongoing classes. Fearful knitters cast on, terrified of dropped stitches, miscrossed cables, lopsided sleeves, all of the million and one things that can and do go wrong with a project. But by the time they were tying on their next skein of yarn, they were flying without a net.

  It had never occurred to me that my knitting skills might also owe something to good juju and more than a little outside magick. I preferred to think it was great genes.

  So much for Wonder Knitter.

  Janice slumped back in her seat, mumbling to herself as she frogged her sock and poked around in search of a smaller circular needle.

  I was busy fiddling with a steel crochet hook, working my dropped stitch back up the ladder. “Son of a gun,” I said as the stitches reappeared. “Guess I’m not such a bad teacher after all.”

  I knew that in the grand scheme of things a dropped stitch in a road trip sock wasn’t a big deal but I was definitely feeling uneasy. When something happened that had never happened before, you didn’t need magickal powers to know there was trouble brewing.

  Like the blizzard that was now dumping snow on us faster than the windshield wipers could push it away.

  “Maybe you should slow down,” I said to Luke as the rear end of the car slid left.

  “I’m doing twenty,” Luke said as he eased out of the skid. “Any slower, we’ll be going backward.”

  “Then go backward,” I said, clutching my Addi Turbos in a death grip. “I have a bad feeling.”

  I felt the car slow down a little.

  “Fifteen,” he said.

  Penny the cat abandoned the backseat for my left shoulder.

  “Look,” I said, trying to make a joke. “Even Penny’s worried.”

  “Leave the cat out of it and let Luke drive,” Janice said. “He’s a New Englander, too. He knows snow.”

  “Thanks,” Luke said, glancing at Janice in the rearview mirror. “I owe you.”

  “Wish I had that on tape,” Janice said.

  They bantered back and forth, which on another day might have made me happier than owning my own alpaca farm, but, given a choice, I would have preferred less talking and more driving.

  Want to know why I pretty much walked everywhere from November until April? This was it: that sick, out-of-control feeling as you sailed over the icy road trapped in almost two tons of screaming metal.

  Okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating a little. It wasn’t really that bad; it just felt like it. The second time we went into a mild skid Luke expertly steered us back onto the road in no time at all but the pit-of-the-stomach queasiness took longer to go away.

  I have a long history with icy roads. A patch of black ice conjured up by Isadora’s son Dane took out my parents when I was a little girl. I was in the car with them when it happened but was somehow thrown clear. I don’t have any real memory of the accident. They say that’s a good thing but I’m not sure.

  I really don’t remember much about my life before that terrible night, either. I remember a shadowy human who was my father and the image of my mother, a beautiful sorceress who chose to be with him in another dimension rather than live in this one with me.

  So I don’t trust cars. I don’t trust ice. And I’ll always be looking over my shoulder just in case Isadora is gaining on me. I thought I’d banished her forever the night her son Gunnar died saving Luke and me from disaster. I’d inadvertently killed Gunnar’s twin, Dane, without a twinge of regret, and then I’d sent Isadora spiraling into isolated entrapment that had been meant to end her influence on Sugar Maple. But she was as resourceful as she was powerful and less than twelve hours ago I’d completed Isadora’s banishment in a way that only the cosmos in its infinite wisdom could undo.

  Or had I?

  An icy road. A human male at the wheel. And the last of Aerynn’s descendants sitting next to him.

  This wasn’t going to end well.

  8

  CHLOE

  Hard to believe but things quickly went from bad to worse.

  Penny the cat seemed to sense my unease. Her motorboat purr cycled down into something closer to a low growl and the hairs on the back of my neck lifted in response.

  “I hate this,” I murmured into the cat’s soft black fur. “I can’t believe we’re driving in a blizzard. We weren’t supposed to be driving in a blizzard.”

  The blizzard that should have stayed over Sugar Maple.

  “Take it easy,” Luke said in a tone of voice meant to calm a crazed suspect. “I’ve been driving in snow since I was sixteen years old. We’ll be fine.”

  “It really wouldn’t kill you to slow down.”

  “I’m going with traffic.”

  I opened my eyes and looked out the window. “There is no traffic. We’re the only fools on the road.”

  “Chloe,” he said, “I’m going fifteen miles an hour.”

  “That’s not slow enough.”

  “I changed my mind,” Janice said from the backseat. “Chloe’s right. The snow is freaking me out, too. Slow down!”

  “Why don’t you find a place to pull over?” I suggested. “We can wait for the storm to ease up a little.”

  “Not a good idea,” he said, jaw settling into lines of granite. “Just because you don’t see cars doesn’t mean they aren’t there. We could end up with an eighteen-wheeler in the trunk. It’s better to keep moving.”

  He was probably right. Visibility was less than zero out there. We’d be a sitting target.

  I scrunched my eyes closed and poured myself into the knitting.

  “You can knit with your eyes closed?” Luke asked.

  “I can knit in my sleep,” I said and started to tell him about the time I woke up after a nap to discover I’d cast on for a Pi Shawl, when the car fishtailed wildly to the left and we sailed across the oncoming lane, through the guardrail, and over the embankment.

  Time slowed to a crawl. The car glided through the air as if we were being cushioned by clouds and I had to remind myself we were falling.

  I told myself the snow cover would break our fall and that the tank-sized Buick would withstand the impact. I told myself we’d laugh about it later, but I wasn’t buying it.

  We were screwed.

  My skin went hot, then cold, then hot again. I felt like I was on fire from the inside out. The rush of adrenaline through my bloodstream made it hard to hear anything but my heartbeat.

  We were in a flat spin, like one of those fighter planes in Top Gun just before it slammed into the ocean. A flat spin that seemed to be going on forever, delaying the inevitable.

  Janice would never see her family again. Luke’s mortal body would break apart like shattered glass. Our story would end the way my parents’ story ended, a half step short of
happily-ever-after.

  “No!” The word exploded from me with the force of a gunshot. “No!”

  Not now. Not here. Not again.

  I hadn’t come this far to let our lives slip through my fingers.

  Unfortunately I had less than a second and a half to keep that from happening.

  LUKE

  I popped my cherry on my fifth day on the job. The first few days I had pulled scut duty, partnering old-timers who were counting down the days until retirement. Low-crime areas, not much excitement. You could go twenty years out there and never break a sweat.

  Near the end of shift on the fifth day, a call came in and we hung a U-turn and headed out toward Langley Crescent near a private high school. It was a bitch of a road: hairpin curve, poorly graded, a drainage ditch with no guardrail.

  A kid high on beer and hormones had somehow sailed across the road, over the ditch, and down the embankment to the roadway below.

  I was the first to reach him. One look and I was bent over, puking up my lunch. Seventeen years old and his own mother wouldn’t recognize him.

  So I knew what was going to happen and I knew it was too late to stop it.

  The flat spin angled and we tilted from side to side like an amusement park ride. Gravity always won. I knew I wasn’t going to walk away from this but maybe Chloe could.

  I took that thought and held it tight as the ground rushed up at us.

  CHLOE

  Less than a foot before we hit the ground, I remembered the words.

  “On the wings of my ancestors, carry us away from danger!”

  And just like that we were saved.

  No thunder and lightning. No fireworks display. The power of magick simply reached out, plucked us off the path to disaster, and deposited us back on the road as if nothing had happened.

  This time I didn’t have to tell Luke to pull over. He had no choice. His hands, like mine, were shaking too hard to grip the wheel.

  The second we rolled to a stop, Janice flung open the door, leaned out, and said good-bye to her Egg McMuffin. My stomach was in knots, too, but I couldn’t do anything more than hang on to poor Penny the cat and wait for the panic to die down.