Spun by Sorcery (28 page)

And wasn’t that exactly what they wanted me to do: start doubting my resolve? Start doubting my love for Sugar Maple, my deep and abiding connection to everyone who lived there? If you lost your past, you lost everything. Samuel had warned me about this and he had been right. They were trying to wear me down with the ancient weapons of fear and physical pain. I needed to stay focused or I would lose this battle before it began.

But how did you fight what you couldn’t see?

I could feel entities all around me but so far they hadn’t showed themselves. Every now and then I heard a faint rustling, caught an unfamiliar scent in the superheated air, sensed a presence near enough to touch, but whatever it was remained cloaked against us.

Luke’s face was the pale beige of overmilked tea. His beautiful green eyes were glazed and red rimmed. I touched his forehead and was shocked by the icy feel of his skin, such a marked difference from the unbearable heat in this domelike enclosure.

“Sit down before you pass out,” I said to him. “You look like hell.”

“I’m fine.”

The macho male was alive and well.

“You don’t look it,” I said.

“It’s hot,” he snapped. “What do you want from me?”

I couldn’t force him to sit, not without expending precious magick I would need later. Besides, he had magick now and he wasn’t afraid to use it.

Next to me his body stiffened.

“What?” I asked. “Do you see something?”

“Straight ahead, eight o’clock position.”

I looked where he directed.

“Any ideas?” he asked.

“You can see them?” I asked, surprised.

“Can you?”

I nodded. Two pudgy crones sat at spinning wheels, floating in midair, oblivious to the flames dancing all around them and the gusher of molten lava erupting beneath them every few seconds.

Then again, why would they care?

Ghosts Tabitha and Dorcas, my old bathtub buddies, were already dead.

“They’re the ghosts from the tub,” I said as they stopped spinning and started staring. “The ones who tried to drown me.”

“They’re not real.” It was his turn to do the reminding. “Blank out your mind and they’ll disappear.”

I went all white noise but the two crones didn’t budge.

“Crap,” I said. “They should’ve vanished.”

“
Should have
butters no parsnips,” the crone named Dorcas called out.

“We warned you,” Tabitha trilled. “I do not know why you chose to make your life so difficult.”

“Stubborn like her mother,” Dorcas agreed. “Right down to the human she took as consort.”

Tabitha nodded and resumed spinning. “This one is stronger than the last. Death was a blessing for Guinevere and her mate.”

“Shut up.” My hands were curled into fists by my sides. “I won’t let you talk about my parents that way.”

“Let it go, Chloe,” Luke said calmly. “They’re baiting you.” The color seemed to flow back into his face. “Don’t let them distract you.”

“You should be worried,” Dorcas said in a pleasingly gentle voice. “Your human cannot possibly survive what is to come.”

“Your threats don’t scare us!” I called out as I gauged the distance between me and the nearest boulder. “You tried to keep me from Samuel, my only family!”

“Let it go,” Luke repeated, this time with more heat. “They’re chumming. Don’t take the bait.”

“They tried to drown me back at the motel,” I shot back. “How do you know they’re not the enemy we came here to defeat? You’re human. You don’t understand the way they think. You can’t possibly—”

You know that old saying, Leap and the net will appear? That was all I could think about when Luke suddenly launched himself into midair and landed on top of the nearest boulder. Then again
landed
might not be the right word. He crashed into it and was now clinging to its surface as he struggled to gain purchase and position himself on top.

A hideous chain of terrible four-letter words spewed from my mouth as he claimed the top, balanced himself, then leaped to the next one. He had only the most basic powers and no experience using them. I could only hope Samuel had told him that not even magick could perform a miracle.

He leaped to the top of the next boulder and then the next, moving closer to the two spirits, who had abandoned their spinning yet again and were cheering him on with sardonic glee as the deadly lava erupted just feet away from where he stood, balanced on the glistening rock.

And then I realized what was happening. Dorcas and Tabitha didn’t know Luke had temporary powers. They thought he was your average garden-variety crazy mortal male staking out his turf and about to pay the price. The two spirits had a front-row seat to the impending disaster, a disaster that they believed would crush me and send the talisman spinning into their camp forever.

Luke was doing this to divert their attention away from me so I could prepare myself to face the real challengers to leadership of Sugar Maple. Which meant I had to ignore the fact that the only man I would ever love was balanced ten feet away from the heart of an active volcano.

But did that mean I had to stand there like a bump on a log and not do anything to help him?

I conjured up a lifeline that would be visible only to him and anchored it around the hitching post I’d also conjured that was now firmly attached to the ledge. All I had to do was get his attention, then throw him the rope, and the magick contained within would do the rest.

Unfortunately the Fae had other ideas.

Little pinpricks of light emerged from the shadows and danced along my arms and across my stomach. They twined themselves around the lifeline with eerie accuracy and with a series of synchronized movements sent it spinning into nothingness.

Like gnats on a hot summer night the Fae scouting party was out for blood.

Normally magicks were immune to their mischief, but my half-human heritage made me vulnerable. None of the Fae in Sugar Maple had ever exploited my weakness. I’m not sure I’d ever seen a Fae scouting party before the incident in the antique shop. While Isadora hadn’t liked me, she had tolerated me with the deference I deserved as pro bono mayor and leader of the town and I had returned the respect.

The Salem Fae didn’t much care about deference and respect. I was the enemy and they were going to use everything at their disposal to take me down, including bodymapping me and turning my own biology against me.

The pinpricks of light encircled my head like a wreath. I could feel the heat pressing against my temples, my forehead, my ears. Had they already gleaned information or did I still have time to stop them before they could upload my secrets?

I reached back into my Book of Spells training, visualized a page of information, then said, “Encircle, entangle, entrap,” three times and was rewarded with the sight of those annoying little beasts being gathered up in a black velvet pouch, then tossed into the heart of the volcano.

I’d have time to congratulate myself on averting catastrophe later.

I shrank back into the shadows and struggled to clear my mind. More than anything I wanted to send help Luke’s way but each attempt at sending him a lifeline resulted in a rise in the lava that was already threatening to sweep him away.

Dorcas and Tabitha were floating free of their parapet, laughing uproariously as he clung to the high point of another boulder. Their abandoned spinning wheels were lying on their sides. The rock wall behind them shimmered with some kind of glaze. In spots it glowed red-hot.

With only the spinning wheels to provide scale, I had difficulty determining how big a space we were in but I assumed it encompassed Sugar Maple’s footprint. Height and depth? Infinity was a good guess.

Cloudlike bursts of white light randomly dotted the darkened sky. They were too big for a scouting party but too small for stars. I held my breath as ropes of glittering silver chains snapped and whipped their way toward Luke, who was now balanced on the last remaining boulder.

No fear,
I told myself.
No fear.
I filled my mind with nothing but hanks of pure silk dyed in jewel tones of ruby and sapphire and topaz.

The ropes of silver chain sizzled through the air as they swung toward his head. He ducked just in time. Dorcas’s and Tabitha’s laughter rang out through the superheated, sulfurous air as they swooped closer to him.

He took a halfhearted swing at the pudgy ghosts, stumbled, and dropped to one knee as red-hot lava lapped at his feet.

Dorcas grabbed one of the chains. Tabitha grabbed another. They swung them around as if they were rodeo cowboys twirling lariats. The shimmering circles of metal dropped over Luke’s head and settled around his neck.

Bile rose into my mouth as Luke made a choking sound and grabbed for his throat. Those girls played rough. For all his years as a cop, I wasn’t sure he was prepared to go one-on-one with a pair of old ladies. Even if they had been dead for a few hundred years.

The spirits swooped over him, laughing, mocking. He was gasping for air, frantically clawing at the lights around his neck. If he was aware of Tabitha and Dorcas, he gave no indication until the moment when, with a howl, he broke free of the stranglehold and launched himself into the two spirits like a cannonball.

The moment they collided an explosion slammed me back against the rock wall, knocking the breath from my parched lungs. I slid down the wall until my butt hit the narrow ledge and I clung to it, blinded by the chaotic fireworks display before my eyes. Each successive concussion sent shock waves through my body. When the light show ended, I wasn’t surprised to see that Luke had disappeared, along with Tabitha and Dorcas.

I forced myself to stop thinking, stop feeling, stop doing anything that could put him in danger. He had plowed the road for me. Now I had to do the rest.

If only I knew exactly what that was.

The volcano, which had been shooting plumes of lava one hundred feet into the air every few seconds, fell quiet. The temperature began to drop noticeably and I realized I was shivering. The velvety darkness that had greeted us returned but this time it was punctuated by a starry “sky” that took my breath away. One star, brighter than the rest, flickered on and off with metronomic precision.

A couple of ghosts, some lava, a few fireworks, and it was all over? I didn’t think so. Luke’s actions had probably derailed the plan, whatever it was, and they were regrouping.

Fine with me. I had been taken by surprise in the antique shop when the spinning wheels had rallied against me and—

I tried to push the images away but it was too late. They were literally dancing in front of my eyes. Six Scottish wheels hovered in front of me like enormous hummingbirds. A traveling wheel nudged my right hip.

Spinning wheels.

If this was old magick, I wasn’t impressed. At this rate the talisman would leap into my arms and pledge its undying devotion.

I grabbed the traveling wheel and flung it into the Scottish wheels. It caromed off the first, the second, all the way through to the last, shattering each in turn. The silky wood splintered into thousands of toothpicks that scattered through the starry darkness like pollen in spring.

Before I could congratulate myself on a job well done, seven glittering orbs of light rose up in front of me in the place where the wheels had been. They spun counterclockwise, giving off sprays of butter yellow, lime green, tangerine orange, chestnut brown, aquamarine, orchid, and lemon yellow glitter. Under different circumstances this would have been a real Kodak moment.

“So here we are,” intoned the lime green orb. I recognized the voice from the Salem antique shop. “We’ve been waiting for this.”

“But there’s one problem,” the lemon yellow orb said, also in a voice I’d heard before.

“We think you’d feel more at home somewhere else,” the glittery tangerine orb chimed in. The four others bobbed as they spun and murmured agreement.

I wasn’t crazy about where I was but better the devil you know. Not that I had a choice in the matter. The interior of volcanic hell was instantly replaced with a scene I knew all too well: the abandoned highway rest stop where I had gotten my ass kicked and only Samuel’s timely intervention had saved me.

Okay. I could deal with it. This was like green screen effects on a movie set: it was only as real as you allowed it to be. And I refused to let it be anything more than a minor distraction.