Spun by Sorcery (30 page)

Up until that moment I had labored under the belief that everything I saw, everything I was experiencing, was the result of an elaborate series of illusions created by my very inventive Fae opponents. But this time I knew that wasn’t the case.

Magick knows magick. We recognize each other in a crowd without saying a word. There was definitely magick in the air but the sword that nicked the tender skin of my neck was of this world and meant to kill a half-mortal sorceress.

I gasped as the blade pierced the skin of my throat. The warm trickle of blood made me shiver as it moved slowly down my neck and inside my shirt. Except for that, I felt nothing. No pain. No discomfort. Just amazement that I’d been cut, maybe seriously, and felt nothing at all.

The black-robed figure repositioned the sword until the tip of the blade rested against the soft vulnerable spot below my earlobe, next to my jaw. I saw a flutter of lime green glitter spin slowly across my line of vision.

I heard the voice from somewhere inside myself. Light, melodic, undeniably female, but laced with the kind of determination that never ended well for anyone.

“This is my destiny,” I whispered. “This is where I belong.”

The blade angled down, pressing harder against the vein throbbing beneath the skin.

“I belong here.”

I wasn’t about to get into an argument about the relative merits of Salem versus Sugar Maple with someone who was itching to run me through with a sword the size of a two-by-four.

“There is room in this dimension for all of us. Rebuild your community in Salem and we’ll restore our community here in Sugar Maple. We’ll coexist in peace.”

Wrong thing to say.

I heard the pop as the blade broke the skin and dipped into the rich vein below, felt the quick rush of blood, the sense of release that was almost sexual. Was this it? Was this the way my time was supposed to end, the way the Hobbs legacy was supposed to end?

I felt like I was trapped in a dreamworld, drifting away from all that was familiar. Was this how my father felt when his life was ebbing away on an icy road one dark winter’s night? This fuzzy, distant feeling as if everything that had happened before was nothing more than a dream, as if nothing mattered but giving in, giving up, giving over to the inevitable that faced all humans sooner or later.

I loved my human side. I loved that my blood ran warm inside my veins and that I was a link in the long chain of human history, but I wasn’t that girl any longer. I couldn’t go back to the time before magick. My powers were part of me now. They informed every move, every choice I made. The mortal world—Luke’s world—had so much to offer but Sugar Maple had my heart and soul and I wasn’t ready to leave it all behind.

My shirt was soaked with my blood. The narrow hallway spun crazily as I struggled to remain conscious. I tried to cauterize the wound with flames from my fingertips but I had waited too long. The flame was nothing more than a sputter.

I let out a cry of frustration or at least I tried to. The creature in the dark robe suddenly released its hold on me and I slipped to the blood-wet ground. The saber glittered in the reflected sunlight and for a moment I thought I saw Penny the cat watching me with sad golden eyes.

The twinkling surveillance camera silently watched it all.

I was dying. I knew that. I waited for the past life parade but except for Penny and the dark-robed creature, I was alone.

Or was I? I felt strong arms around me, holding me close. A whisper of softness in my ear. A practiced touch at my throat. The faintest smoky haze of purple that was there and gone.

Janice,
I whispered in my mind.
Are you here? Was that you?

But the only sound was the beat of my heart growing stronger, steadier inside my chest. The pool of blood beneath me vanished. No bloodstains on my T-shirt.

And maybe a handful of seconds before the saber-wielding creature tried again.

I’m not exactly an athlete but when your life is on the line even a couch potato like me could qualify for the Olympics. I didn’t know where I was running and I didn’t care. Anyplace without a crazed lunatic with a sharpened sword was good enough for me.

The ground shook beneath my feet as the creature lumbered after me. I reached another intersection and veered right this time. A door on the left swung open and what seemed like a thousand knitting needles—size 15s, 35s, and greater, in lengths I’d never seen before—flew out like a convoy of fighter planes and buzzed my head.

I swung at them and took out at least three pairs of wooden 17s with points sharp enough to puncture a paint can. I didn’t want to think about what they could do to my carotid artery.

The knitting needles split up into two separate flights, diving at me from different directions. One pierced my right forearm. Another scraped the left side of my face. The faster I knocked them down, the faster they came back like crazed mosquitoes looking for blood.

The creature in the robe was having trouble keeping up with me. If I could manage a little more speed I might be able to put serious distance between us.

The hallway curved sharply to the right then to the left. I skidded against the wall, regained my balance, and kept running. Doors swung open and closed, deflecting the flying knitting needles that seemed locked on me like lasers. Another intersection loomed and a crazy thought leaped into my head.

Why turn right
or
left?

Why not break through the wall.

I’m not sure if it was magick or adrenaline or a crazy combination of the two but I went through that wall like it was made of paper and exploded into a winter wonderland.

Walls of snow everywhere. Mountains of it. All sparkling beneath a pale winter sky. Ribbons of ice cut through the accumulation, carving pathways to nowhere.

I dove for the nearest pathway, slipping and sliding on the ice, pushing relentlessly forward.

Heavy footsteps sounded behind me.

I heard a whoosh as the creature’s sword slashed the air.

Maybe the Olympic track team wasn’t an impossible dream after all. For a gawky, clumsy girl who couldn’t walk through a room without knocking something over, I was really hauling ass.

Still I couldn’t seem to gain traction. At one point I was pretty sure I was hydroplaning but I was moving too fast to worry about it. Normally navigating ice makes me sick to my stomach. I hate that out-of-control feeling, that one-step-away-from-disaster sensation that filled my stomach with something close to panic.

But I’d rather be skidding on the ice than going mano a mano again with a giant saber-wielding maniac.

The pathway narrowed. I turned a little bit sideways, balanced myself with my hands, then kept going and I was going to keep going until there was a reason to stop.

Which happened about thirty yards later when I burst into a clearing that looked strangely familiar.

The world had fallen silent again. No more footsteps pounding behind me. Just the cushioned white noise of a snow-covered world.

I was standing along the curve of a half-plowed two-lane country road at dusk. Here and there a deer poked an inquisitive nose into the clearing then retreated back into the shadows.

The temperature was dropping. My skin felt like it was freezing from the inside out. I considered magicking myself a down-filled jacket and some handknitted mittens but five seconds from now I could be standing on a beach in the blazing sun. No point in depleting my stores of magick until I knew what was around the next corner.

I started down the icy roadway, arms held wide for balance. There was barely enough plowed road for me, much less two cars going in opposite directions.

Crap. I had to stop putting thoughts in their mind. Old magick was like a boomerang. Put something out there and you could be sure it would come winging back at you with a bomb attached.

Right on queue I heard the rumble of a car approaching. I turned and started to run back toward safety. I slipped and fell to one knee. Pain shot through to my hip. I scrambled to my feet and pushed myself back into the clearing seconds before a black pickup truck roared past then disappeared.

Dusk was giving way to night. I wasn’t sure whether or not this was part of the illusion. Exhaustion, the cold, everything was conspiring to make me punchy. I was tired of dodging bullets, tired of trying to figure out what was real, what was trying to kill me, what was just trying to screw with my head.

I wanted it to be over. I wanted to be with Luke. I wanted Sugar Maple to reappear. I wanted to see my friends again, walk the streets I played on as a kid, claim my heritage, and get on with my life.

Was that asking so much?

And that was when it all came crashing down.

I heard the crash before I saw it. The sound of brakes screeching. A scream rising up into the darkness. The slam of metal against wood.

And then silence.

I started to shake and this time it had nothing to do with the falling temperature.

I knew those sounds. Those sounds had been with me almost every day of my life.

I was frozen in place, once again helpless to stop the inevitable as the seven glittering orbs returned to enjoy the show.

“Don’t do this,” I shouted, even though I knew better. “Please don’t do it.”

They hovered, rays of glitter pulsating to some internal rhythm, and took turns moving slowly past my face. They smelled vaguely like thyme and grass clippings and something I couldn’t identify. Elation flowed from them like snowmelt. They were waiting for me to lay my broken heart on the snow for them to see.

But they ceased to matter when I saw the car.

Oh, how I had loved the big green late 1970s Thunderbird with a backseat made for napping. As a little girl I had thought it was the most beautiful car in the world. It had been my family’s magic carpet to exotic places like Burlington and Montpelier. Anyplace is exotic when you’re not quite six years old.

The T-Bird didn’t look so beautiful crumpled and broken and lying on its side, wheels spinning, windows smashed, steam punctuating the frigid night air from the crushed front end. I heard the sound of a little girl crying from somewhere close by but I didn’t turn to look. I couldn’t turn away from the horror in front of me.

“Ted!” My mother’s voice, slightly husky. Utterly unforgettable. “Oh, please, Ted, talk to me! Say something!”

Her anguish was like another presence. Even though one of Isadora’s sons had thrown down the black ice that caused the crash, my mother’s guilt knew no bounds. If she hadn’t cast a spell over my father that bound him to her forever, the accident never would have happened.

“Why are you showing me this?” I cried out.

Because we can,
came the answer.

I cried out as the crumpled side of the car lifted up and away and I saw my father lying in my mother’s arms.

They were both twenty-five years old and doomed.

I had no photos of my parents. No scrapbooks or old letters or birthday cards to remember them by. Over the years I had blocked all memories of my father, letting my anger at my mother overshadow everything else. In time I was so successful at it that he was nothing more than a whisper on the winds of time.

But now a thousand long-buried memories came at me in a tidal wave of sweet pain.

Riding through town on his shoulders as he showed off his little daughter to Lilith and Archie and Midge and the Griggs family and anyone else in town who stopped to talk to the strapping young mortal and his half-sorceress child.