Spun by Sorcery

by Barbara Bretton

  “He’s human, Janice,” I said. “Have you ever worked on a full-blooded mortal before?”

  “Not to this extent,” she said, “but right now I’m all he has.”

  “What if he’s in some kind of shock?” I said to her. “Maybe we should take him to a hospital.” I watched Grey’s Anatomy.

  “Shock!” Janice sounded elated. “That’s it. . . .” Her hands were a blur as they swept patterns over his body. Her voice rose and fell with the strange words.

  “Come on,” I whispered. “Come on!”

  Janice’s eyes fluttered closed. Her lips moved but I couldn’t hear the words any longer. She had gone somewhere I couldn’t follow, deep into the heart of her knowledge and magick.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Luke sprang to a sitting position and glared at Janice. The pallor, the harsh breathing, the swollen eyes—all gone. He was big, healthy, and pissed off.

  “A simple thank-you would be plenty,” she snapped, glaring back at him.

  “Janice just saved your life, you idiot.” I was laughing and crying simultaneously as I threw my arms around him.

  He leaned slightly away and looked into my eyes. “I’m serious: what happened?”

  “Your eyes . . . you lost your—” I frowned. “You don’t remember?”

  He didn’t. The episode was a total blank to him.

  “Remember what?” he asked.

  I filled him in on the details.

  “Shit,” he said. “Are you kidding me?”

  We all knew the question was rhetorical.

  He stood up and brushed dirt off his jeans. His color had returned to normal. Even I had trouble believing the last few minutes had been anything but some kind of crazy dream.

  “Don’t move,” I said. “I should have done this hours ago.”

  I conjured up a simple but effective protective charm then doubled it for good measure.

  “Thanks,” Luke said. “Does that make me catproof?”

  Janice and I exchanged looks. He still didn’t understand that cats lived above the rules of law and magick.

  I reached for the handle on the driver’s-side door.

  Luke frowned. “Isn’t the guy supposed to open the car door?”

  “No offense,” I said to Luke, “but so far you’ve driven us over an embankment and gone temporarily blind.”

  “You hate driving,” he reminded me.

  “Yes,” I agreed, “but it turns out I hate crashing even more.”

  “I’m a damn good driver.”

  “Not today you’re not.”

  “You’re blaming me because you have a lousy car with no snow tires and no four-wheel drive?”

  “I’m not blaming anyone, Luke, but I’m still driving.” Okay, so maybe I did blame him but not in an ugly sort of way. We’d been up for over twenty-four hours. We’d engaged in a fierce battle with Isadora, lost my hometown, pushed our way through a blizzard, crashed through a guardrail and plunged twenty feet to almost certain death, then topped off the fun with temporary blindness.

  He was only human and humans had their physical limits. It wouldn’t be long before I reached my limits, too, but the magick side of my lineage would carry me through a little longer.

  I was still new to the whole male-female dance. Sometimes I could be a little too direct. I loved him. I didn’t want to hurt him. “You understand, right? We’re going to be busy when we reach Salem. You could catch a nap or something.”

  I watched as his jaw worked through all sorts of contortions before he spoke. “It’s your car,” he said finally, then walked around to the passenger side and got in.

  “Do I get a say in this?” Janice demanded. “We’d be better off if the cat drove.”

  “I don’t hear you offering to drive.”

  Janice grunted something nasty about my Buick then climbed into the backseat.

  I readjusted the mirrors and buckled my seat belt. I won’t lie to you. I wasn’t looking forward to merging onto the highway. (I wasn’t all that crazy about turning out of my driveway back home.) But I couldn’t delay forever.

  I shifted into drive and had just started rolling along the shoulder, building speed, when a pine tree crashed to the ground three feet in front of us without any warning at all.

  I slammed the gear into park and turned off the engine.

  Nobody said a word. When a forty-foot tree missed you by inches, there really wasn’t much to say.

  You win, Universe. I get it. You don’t want us in Salem. Message received.

  “What’s next?” Janice broke the silence. “Flying monkeys?”

  We broke into nervous laughter.

  “I thought I saw SURRENDER CHLOE smoke signals overhead,” Luke added.

  I would have laughed if my attention hadn’t been diverted elsewhere. “Look,” I said, pointing toward the highway. “They’re driving through the tree like it isn’t there.”

  “Holy shit!” Luke leaned forward and stared through the windshield. “That Porsche didn’t even slow down.”

  Janice shrieked as a yellow school bus roared past without problem.

  I leaped out of the car and ran toward the fallen tree. Correction: I ran into it, then I fell over it. For me the tree was all too real.

  The same thing happened to Luke and to Janice.

  “Magic?” Luke asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “Definitely magick.”

  “Party tricks,” Janice said with clear disdain. “Amateur crap.”

  “It got my attention,” I admitted.

  It also proved Luke was right. If something or someone was trying so hard to keep us away, then Salem was where we needed to be.

  But getting there was another story.

  “What would have happened if that tree had fallen on the car?” I asked Janice.

  “Easy,” she said. “It would have killed us.”

  “No question?” Luke asked.

  “Zero,” she said. “It exists in our reality and that’s all that matters.”

  “You called it a parlor trick, but it seems pretty sophisticated to me.” I’d been studying the Book of Spells for months now and I’d never heard of creating parallel realities. “Who has that kind of magick?”

  “Old-school,” she said, dismissing it with a wave of her hand. “Impressive, yes, and occasionally dangerous, but way outdated.”

  “So who used it before?” I pressed.

  She shrugged. “Mostly Fae but from what my grandmother told me, it was pretty common around the time the group from Salem settled in Sugar Maple. Everyone seemed to have mastered it to some degree.”

  “Did Isadora ever use it?” Luke asked.

  “Not that I know of. Like I said, it’s old-school and kind of cheesy. By the time the country gained independence, it had been pretty much forgotten.”

  Talk of Sugar Maple’s history always made me uncomfortable. Most of my life I’d been a nonmagick half human with no prospects of powers anywhere in my future. My hometown’s backstory seemed as dusty and irrelevant as expired supermarket coupons.

  “I wish I’d paid more attention to Sorcha’s stories when I was growing up,” I said. My surrogate mother had been living history and I’d squandered a lifetime of opportunity.

  “Can you undo this?” Luke asked, gesturing toward the monster tree.

  “No,” I said as Janice shook her head, “but I can drive around it.”

  Which was exactly what I tried to do but somehow the tree was always in the way.

  “Let me try,” Janice said, quashing her hatred of my poor beleaguered Buick.

  She took the wheel while I climbed into the backseat with Penny. “Ouch!” I moved her knitting. “Switch to a single circular, would you? Those double-points are killers.”

  Janice fiddled with the mirrors, then took a deep breath and drove straight into the tree.

  “Jan!” I yelled while Luke muttered something decidedly uncomplimentary. “What the hell?”

  “The tree mov
ed!”

  “This isn’t good,” I said as a canopy of branches appeared overhead.

  “You think?” Janice snapped.

  “Back up!” Luke shouted. “Now!”

  She threw the transmission into reverse and we rocked backward as another tree fell onto the spot where we had been less than a second before.

  “Let’s get out of here.” It was probably the most unnecessary sentence I had ever uttered.

  “Come on,” Luke said. “Our luck won’t hold forever.”

  What was taking her so long? The way things were going, our luck wouldn’t hold another five seconds.

  “I’m trying,” Janice said. “The gear is locked.”

  Luke leaned across the console and tried to shift into drive but nothing happened.

  I threw myself into the space between them and gave it a try. This time it worked. But instead of hitting the gas, Janice leaped out of the car.

  “Drive,” she said.

  No point arguing. The car made the decision for us. Janice and I exchanged places. I adjusted mirrors, buckled up, then stomped on the gas pedal.

  And just in time.

  A sinkhole of truly monstrous proportions opened up behind us as we merged back onto the highway. The last thing I saw in the rearview mirror was the trees being sucked down into the void.

  I had to fight the urge to slam on the brakes so I could take another look.

  “You okay?” Luke asked as I moved into the middle lane.

  “No,” I said. “I’m scared.”

  “You’d be crazy if you weren’t.”

  “Every time I think I’ve got a handle on what’s going on, something else jumps up and bites me in the butt.”

  His beautiful green eyes twinkled for the first time in hours. “Welcome to my world, Hobbs.”

  In more ways than one.

  “Wait a second,” I said. “You grew up right near Salem.”

  “A couple of towns away.”

  A swirl of conflicting emotions tugged at me. “Is your—is your family still there?”

  “I have a brother in San Diego and a sister in Oregon. Everyone else settled near my parents.”

  “Except you.”

  The twinkle in his eyes grew warmer. “I have my reasons.”

  “There’s so much I don’t know about you.”

  “We’ve been a little preoccupied lately.”

  I laughed out loud. “Now there’s an understatement for you.”

  A theatrical cough sounded from the backseat.

  “We didn’t forget about you, Janice,” Luke said.

  “I may be a nosy beyotch but eavesdropping on friends isn’t my style.”

  I opened my mouth to protest.

  “Don’t you dare! I’m having a moment here.” She leaned forward and eyed Luke with open curiosity. “So how many of you MacKenzies are there, anyway?”

  “Seven kids,” he said, grinning at the look of shock on my face. “I’m the middle kid.”

  “Do they know where you are?” Janice asked.

  “They know I’m up in Vermont.”

  “Do you ever talk to them?”

  He tugged at his seat belt then leaned forward and fiddled with the tuner. “I’ve been out of touch for a while.”

  “Is that why you left Boston?”

  “Janice!” I glared at her in the rearview mirror.

  “What?” Janice asked, all wide-eyed innocence. “My mother flips out if I don’t blueflame her at least twice a day.” Blueflame was the magick equivalent of a BlackBerry or smartphone. “She’d send a team of house sprites to track me down.”

  “You don’t have to answer her,” I said to Luke. Janice knew the story behind Luke quitting the police force and leaving Boston. Everyone in Sugar Maple knew.

  “E-mails,” Luke said. “An occasional IM. Most of them are on Facebook so I know what they’ve been up to.”

  “Your brothers and sisters are on Facebook?” I asked.

  “And my nieces, nephews, and in-laws.”

  “Wish I had my laptop,” Janice said and we all laughed.

  My thoughts were crazy scattered. Janice came from a big family but it sounded like the MacKenzies had her beat by a mile.

  “Do you miss them?” I’m not sure why I asked. The question seemed to have a life of its own.

  “I’ve been on my own for a long time. Hell, my older brother and sisters were gone before I started high school. We’ve pretty much all gone our own ways.”

  Maybe so but most of them had stayed in the town where they grew up. That sounded like a close-knit family to me. How could he walk away from that?

  Don’t push it, the voice of reason inside my head warned me. He’s willing to give them up to be with you. Isn’t that enough?

  But family was my Achilles’ heel. I couldn’t imagine walking away from my own blood, not even for love, and I worried that one day Luke might feel the same way.

  Then again, I had no blood relatives. Maybe if I did I would take them for granted the way the rest of the world, both mortal and magick, seemed to do.

  But I didn’t believe it.

  11

  LUKE

  It was hard to explain family dynamics to a woman who had no family. I’d grown up in the middle of a sprawling clan, both nuclear and extended, and I still didn’t know what the hell made them tick.

  The truth was I never much thought about it. Family was like air or water or cable TV. Family was a fact of life. Sometimes annoying. Sometimes funny. Sometimes the one thing that made every other thing worthwhile.

  When Karen and I married, we both knew exactly what to expect. There was a place waiting for us in the MacKenzie clan, a comfortable place where our newly formed family could settle down and plant roots that would last forever.

  Except in this world nothing lasted forever. Not our family. Not our little girl. When life kicked us in the teeth, our marriage went down for the count and took our dreams with it.

  By the time I took the job in Sugar Maple all I wanted to do was disappear, and the small Vermont town sounded like just the place to do it.

  I disappeared, all right, but not the way I planned.

  I’d made a promise to keep Sugar Maple’s secrets when I took the job as chief of police and I wouldn’t break that promise, not even if Sugar Maple was gone forever. But sooner or later my old life was going to come banging on the door and when it did I’d have to answer.

  I hoped like hell it didn’t happen today.

  CHLOE

  We were halfway to Salem when we ran out of gas.

  “I can’t believe it,” I said as the engine started to sputter. “It still shows an eighth of a tank.”

  “Your car’s a hundred years old,” Janice said from the backseat. “You can’t believe what the gauge says.”

  I thought about making a knitting joke but it didn’t feel like the time.

  Luke cocked his head and listened to the sound. “Almost empty but not quite. There’s a rest stop about a half mile ahead. I bet we can make it.”

  “Bet we can’t.”

  I was right. The engine conked out less than three hundred feet from the gas station attached to a Hungry Camper All-You-Can-Eat Buffet. After battling rogue blizzards, a twenty-foot plunge over an embankment, and killer trees, an empty gas tank seemed like a walk in the park.

  “Do you have a gas can in the trunk?” Luke asked.

  “You’re kidding, right?” I only filled up once a year.

  “Stay here,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “When this is over, I’m going to sleep for a week,” Janice said as Luke jogged toward the service station up ahead.

  “I stopped being tired about two hours ago,” I said. “Now I’m in a functional coma.”

  “You know all those awful things I’ve said about your human? I take them back. You could have done worse.”

  “I have done worse,” I said, thinking back on my checkered dating history. “You and Lynette s
et me up with every vampire, werewolf, selkie, troll, and shapeshifter on the east coast.”

  “I would have run off with that last selkie if Lorcan knew how to cook for himself.” Lorcan was her husband and mate, an Irish selkie who lived part of each year in the depths of Snow Lake.

  “You always did have a thing for guys with whiskers,” I said and was rewarded with a swat on the head with a ball of Malabrigo.

  A car backfired somewhere in the distance and we both jumped as if we’d been cattle-prodded.

  “I don’t know about you,” Janice said, “but I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

  “Me too, and I’m afraid the other shoe belongs to Forbes the Mountain Giant.”

  “I miss Forbes,” Janice said. “And Lilith and Archie and Midge and—”

  “Frank and Manny and Rose from Assisted Living,” I continued, “and Lynette and Cyrus.”

  “They’re not coming back,” Janice said quietly. “We’re doing this because we have to try, because we couldn’t live with ourselves if we didn’t, but the truth is they’re not coming back.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Come on, Chloe. Admit it. Sugar Maple is gone and we’re on our own.”

  “No,” I said. “I refuse to believe that.”

  The fight seemed to drain out of her. She glanced out the window toward the rest stop. “Luke will be on his way back any minute. There’s something I want to say and I don’t want you to argue with me or try to change my mind.”

  “I’m not liking the sound of that.”

  Janice was usually all fire and sharp edges, but right now she looked more open and vulnerable than I had ever seen her. She reached for my hand and sandwiched it between hers.

  “If we don’t find the town—” She swallowed hard enough for me to notice. “If we don’t find Sugar Maple and my family, I’m going to pierce the veil.”

  “Janice!” Piercing the veil was the magick equivalent of mortal death. It wasn’t as final as mortal death or as dramatic, but the choice was irrevocable. No matter what happened, she would never be able to exist in this realm again. “I won’t let you do that.”

  Some of the flash and fire sparked behind her eyes. “Honey, if you didn’t have Luke I would never leave you behind, but your life is settled. You have your powers and your human. You’ll miss Sugar Maple and all of us but you’ll be okay. You’ll survive.”