Spun by Sorcery (21 page)

“Then who?” Luke asked.

We didn’t have to wait long for an answer.

Chloe was the first one to disappear up the spiral staircase. A second later Janice swirled around the curving structure in her wake. Penny scampered after them under her own power.

Then it was my turn.

I’d been transported before. I knew I was going to feel like a fry pan of scrambled eggs by the time it was over. But take away the whole surprise-slash-fear factor and it was actually kind of cool in a Harry Potter sort of way.

A little grinch of a woman was waiting at the top of the staircase. Her face looked like a dried apple. Her hair was crayon yellow. Her personality made some perps I’d known seem like Mr. Congeniality.

She had Chloe separated from the herd on the other side of the round room. Janice and I stood awkwardly at the top of the staircase.

“What did I tell you?” the crone scolded Chloe who was motionless. “Don’t you even think about moving a muscle, missy.”

I stepped forward. “What the hell are you—”

Bad idea. A jolt of electricity shocked its way through my body, knocking me flat on my ass at Janice’s feet.

Chloe whirled on the gatekeeper. “Touch him again and I’ll blast you into the next dimension.” Bolts of fiery lightning from her fingertips punctuated her threat.

“He’s human,” the crone said. “He has no place here.”

“I’m half human,” she shot back. “Do I have a place here?”

The old woman opened her wizened mouth to speak but stopped suddenly.

The voice was baritone and it filled the room. I looked around for speakers but wasn’t surprised to find none.

Janice made a small noise and wrapped her arms across her chest. Penny leaped to her feet and ran a circle around the room. Chloe’s eyes widened slightly as she locked gazes with me over the crone’s frizzled yellow head.

She didn’t know what was going on either. Damn.

“Don’t be telling me what to do after all these years,” the crone declared. “I won’t be bringing a human close unless I know the reason why.”

That’s enough, Elspeth.
The voice seemed to push out the walls with its power.

Angry Elspeth sizzled like a hot pan of bacon. I could feel the heat from ten feet away. Chloe stepped between us, almost daring the crone to make a move.

“You have no business here, missy,” Elspeth said, shaking a gnarled finger in Chloe’s direction. “Don’t be thinking you can take advantage of Himself just because you lost Sugar Maple and need—”

Elspeth!
The room shook with the force of his voice.

The yellow-haired crone was gone before the sound faded from the room.

Penny sniffed cautiously at the spot where the old woman had been standing then quickly backed away.

“She’s not really gone,” Chloe said, bending down to scratch Penny behind her right ear. “Listen.”

It took a moment but I heard the woman’s voice, creating soft eddies of sound without meaning.

“She’s cloaking,” Janice said. “Wow!”

“I know,” Chloe said. “I’m years away from even attempting it.”

“Cloaking?” I asked. “You mean like the Klingon Bird of Prey in
Star Trek
?”

Chloe nodded. “But we thought of it first.”

Another reminder that we weren’t in Kansas anymore. “How long do you think they’re going to keep us waiting?” I asked Janice and Chloe.

“Who knows,” Chloe said. “It’s all up to them now.”

Calm, patient Zen master Chloe? That would take a little getting used to.

Chloe wandered over to the huge gray-blue wingback chair that was angled near one of the three visible windows. A book lay open and facedown on the seat cushion. A basket of lemon yellow yarn sat between the chair and the wall with a pair of long ivory knitting needles stabbed into the center of the woolly mass.

“That’s just so wrong,” she said, removing the needles and laying them across the yarn.

“What makes it wrong?” I asked. “Seems like the logical place to stow the needles.”

“If you want to split your yarn and destroy a friendship.”

“And deplete the rain forest?” I asked.

“I’m serious,” she said. “If you ever start knitting, don’t do it.”

Not much danger there.

Curved bookshelves hugged an expanse of wall. Chloe hurried over to investigate.

“Moby-Dick
. Leather-bound first edition,” she said, running a finger along the spine. “Don’t you love that?”

I shrugged. I was more a Tom Clancy/Robert B. Parker fan myself.

She continued along the shelf. “Hemingway’s
Old Man and the Sea.
Sebastian Junger’s
The Perfect Storm
in hardcover
and
paperback. A stack of captain’s logs from who knows when.” She bent down and grabbed a huge stack of magazines from the bottom shelf.

“Janice!” Her voice was practically a squeal. “Knitting magazines! Including—”

“
Interweaave Knits
, Spring 2004?” Janice said. “The one with the Marilyn sweater on the cover?”

“The very issue.”

Chloe and Janice broke into the knitter’s version of the happy dance, which, considering the fact we’d been kidnapped to a lighthouse that may or may not be real in the middle of an ocean that may or may not be real, seemed a hell of a lot like slow dancing to the
Titanic
orchestra.

But maybe that was just me.

I pulled one of the magazines off the shelf. “What’s with the red sticker on the spine?” At least six of the stack had been labeled that way. Mine also had a yellow Post-it flag affixed to a page near the back cover.

Chloe pulled another one from the stack. She flipped to a middle page with a yellow Post-it flag.

Janice did the same.

All three pages contained glowing references to either Chloe or Sticks & Strings.

“I’m not sure if I’m creeped out or flattered,” Chloe said, sliding the magazines back onto the stack.

“Depends who’s keeping track,” I said.

Chloe forced a laugh. “I’m pretty sure old Elspeth isn’t keeping a scrapbook for me.”

Too bad old Elspeth had uncloaked and was standing next to Chloe with a rolled-up parchment clutched in her left hand.

“If I had my way, missy, you’d be sent back where you came from and no two ways about it.”

“Go for it.” Chloe didn’t bat an eye. “Send us back to Sugar Maple and save my Buick some heavy mileage.”

Janice’s eyes were watchful as Chloe assumed a confrontational stance. Penny oversaw everything from an extremely narrow windowsill to my right.

Elspeth made a sweeping motion with the tube of parchment and a soft line of light unspooled toward the rear of the room. Or the front. Or maybe one of the sides. It was hard to tell when the room in question was round.

“Follow it,” Elspeth said, motioning with the paper, “but know this: Harm one hair on his head and know my wrath, missy. Make no mistake.”

“I don’t even know who
he
is,” Chloe said. “Why would I want to harm him?”

“I know your kind,” she said, shooing us along. I had the feeling she would bite our ankles if we weren’t quick enough for her. “Now go. He’s waiting.”

She said
he
the way other people said
Your Majesty
or
Your Holiness.

“Who is he?” Chloe asked as we followed the line of light around the curve. “A name would be nice.”

The crone clamped her plump lips shut and made another shooing motion with her apron.

We rounded the staircase. Natural light spilled through the window and splashed across the wide-planked pine floor.

“Over here, Chloe.” The baritone voice again, but closer. I detected the slight raspiness of age scuffing up the mellow tones.

The light in this part of the structure was shaded by an opaque ivory curtain and my eyes took a moment to adjust to the change. The room was sparsely furnished with a dark pine table, a spinning wheel, and some baskets filled with wool.

“Come closer, Chloe,” the man with the baritone voice said.

I sensed rather than saw him but that was enough. I worked in a world where control was everything. Lose control and you would probably lose your life. This situation was out of our control. A disembodied voice held all the cards and once Chloe took her first step toward him, the game was his for the taking.

The old man was seated in a wooden rocker near the window. The cop side of my brain registered the details I would process later. He wore faded gray pants, heavy workman’s boots, and one of those heavily cabled fisherman’s sweaters Chloe loved to knit. She said every fisherman’s sweater told a story. I wondered what his was.

The guy looked the way an old salt should look. His skin was deeply wrinkled and permanently tanned from the sun. He boasted a full head of white hair that fell like a lion’s mane to his shoulders. His eyes were deep and hooded. I couldn’t make out the color from where I stood but my money was on blue.

In his portraits, Samuel Bramford’s eyes were blue.

I heard Chloe take a long, shuddery breath. She straightened her shoulders then stepped forward and introduced herself.

“Look what you’ve done!” Elspeth pushed past me and ran toward Chloe. “He shouldn’t be up! He
knows
he shouldn’t be up! He’s showing off for you.”

Elspeth pressed her palm to his forehead and clucked. She poured him a tumbler of water from an earthenware jug then handed it to him but his eyes never left Chloe’s. He said something to his manic nursemaid in a low voice. She turned and glared at all three of us then with a wave of her apron swirled down the open staircase to the main floor.

He whispered Chloe’s name and his eyes closed. His head fell back against the rocker. A tear slipped down his weathered cheek.

“Who are you?” Chloe asked. “Why did you bring us here?”

He opened his eyes and looked straight at Chloe. “I’m Samuel Bramford,” he said, “and I am Aerynn’s mate.”

I heard the words but my brain couldn’t process them.

“I am Aerynn’s mate,” he repeated and this time I understood.

The air rushed out of me like I’d been punched. I doubled over at the waist and closed my eyes against the wave of dizziness threatening to drop me to the floor like a bag of rocks.

He reached out a hand to me but I couldn’t move.

“This isn’t how I wanted us to meet,” he said, “but circumstances made it necessary.”

My brain started to make the calculations. “You’re my great-great-great-great—”

“Too many to count, child, but the link is strong and it endures.”

Again that feeling of dizzying wonder.

“You are Aerynn’s image.” His voice broke as he said the words. “I’ve waited a long time for this moment.”

“You knew about me?”

“From long before you took your first breath.”

“You knew what happened to my parents?”

He nodded. His eyes never left mine.

“And you never—”

“That decision was made many years ago and it could not be broken.”

“What decision?” I demanded. “Someone decided I would grow up without parents? Someone decided I’d be alone? I’d like to know more about all of those decisions.”

“I had hoped the transition would be an easy one but we have no time to waste.”

“Transition?” I could hear my decibel level rising. “What transition?”

He looked at me as if I were a beloved but backward child. “The leadership that will pass to you when I finally pierce the veil.”

“Which he would have done by now if not for you, missy!” Elspeth’s voice could be heard from downstairs.