Spellbinder: A Love Story With Magical Interruptions

by Melanie Rawn

  “—arithmancy, lychnomancy, necromancy, pyromancy, sciomancy, tasseomancy, rhapsodmancy, and all other auguries that are part of fortune-telling.”

  “And just what are all these things, Reverend?” the host asked, curiosity warring with bewilderment on his face.

  “Wickedness,” came the prompt reply. “Evil. Abomination. Surely on the Day of Judgment these horrors will be worthy only of being cast into the lake of everlasting fire. For sinners, there is only pain and suffering, despair and misery awaiting them. As there is for all those who believe in reincarnation, metaphysics and spiritualism, transcendental meditation, yoga, Zen, all Eastern cults and religions, mysticism, idol worship—every cult that denies the blood of Christ and every philosophy that denies the Divinity of the Lord Jesus.”

  “So much for pluralism and tolerance,” Susannah muttered.

  “Yeah. When does he start in on Jews, Catholics, Mormons, Muslims, and Zoroastrians?”

  “Reverend,” said the host, “the Bible teaches us specifically that thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

  “It does, it does,” the Reverend agreed, nodding. “Yet killing is not of Jesus Christ. We pray for our enemies that God will be merciful unto them, and bring them to know the truth. So how do we reconcile God’s injunction in the Old Testament with the universal love and peace and gentleness preached by His Son?”

  The host smiled slightly. “Did God change His mind?”

  Reverend Fleming smiled back, flashing an exemplary set of teeth. “Not at all. Remember the commandment: Thou shalt not kill. In the original Hebrew, the sense of the teaching about witches is that the people of God must not allow a witch to live among them. Such persons must be cast out and utterly condemned. Yet even witches may enter into the community of God if they accept Jesus as their personal Savior, if they become true Christians and live Christ-like lives.”

  Susannah remarked, “This is the really good part.”

  “In Jesus’s Holy Name, they must renounce all psychic heredity that they may have, and break any demonic hold or curses over themselves and their family lines back to Adam and Eve through the power of the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

  She paused the tape again, and Bradshaw glanced away from the frozen image of the Reverend Fleming, eyes ablaze with righteous fury.

  “Eli, he actually believes in hereditary witchcraft. Is that incredible, or what?”

  “Or what,” Bradshaw echoed, trying to sound casual. “Did I have to watch this before lunch, when my blood sugar’s low and I’m pissed at the world anyway?”

  “Better before lunch than after,” she retorted, cueing the tape.

  “They must renounce the Prince of Occult Sex and all the sex spirits which enter through occult involvement, participation, transfer, or by inheritance. They must command all demons to forsake their loins, hands, lips, tongues, breasts, masculinity, femininity, and all organs and orifices of their bodies. They must confess and repent of all fixation with sensual desire and appetites, and indulgences of them—all longing for the forbidden—all inordinate affection—all unnatural and unrestrained passions and lusts.”

  A brief snarl of laughter escaped Bradshaw. “Well, he sure as shit believes in sex! Does this get any racier, or have I heard all his best lines?”

  Susannah stopped the tape and walked over to switch off television and VCR. “You’d better take him more seriously, Elias. He’s not kidding.”

  “I never thought he was.” Then he asked a question he’d been afraid to ask ever since she’d first walked into his office. “What do you think about Witches?”

  She gave a shrug of slender shoulders. “I think people have a right to believe whatever gives them comfort and a moral center, as long as it doesn’t harm anybody else. I don’t think that anyone has the right to say that his way is the one and only way—or that anybody has a direct hotline to God. I don’t like being proselytized. I’m sure they only have my best interests at heart, and what they’re trying to do is very noble and generous from their point of view—saving my soul and all. But keep it out of my face!” She smiled fleetingly. “Can’t you just see the Rev in india?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let’s say somebody in New Delhi started quoting the Vedas, expecting him to accept those scriptures as unassailable truth. Just the way he expects them to accept the Bible.” She gave a most unladylike snort. “Fundamentalists are fundamentalists, whatever religion they belong to. For them, a thing is true because the Bible or the Qur’an or the Torah or the whatever says it is, and that’s that.”

  “It’s my understanding,” he said carefully, “that Witches, as a rule, don’t accept Judeo-Christian scriptures as the word of a god—any god. If they did, they’d probably be Jews or Christians, not Witches.”

  “Exactly my point. Justifying yourself with Bible verses to people who don’t believe in the Bible—it’s preposterous.” She went to the credenza and poured them both glasses of iced tea. As she did, she went on, “As for Witches, who knows? You can see Mozart as a Witch, or Einstein—anybody who can do things other people can only be flummoxed by. People who make things happen that nobody else even dreamed of. It’s what we were saying that night at Holly’s—one man’s genius, incomprehensible to ordinary people, makes another man cry ‘Witch.’”

  He accepted the tall iced tea and sipped gratefully. His throat had been a little dry with apprehension regarding her answers. “And one man’s religion can make another cry ‘Witch.’ But the issue with this case is Satanism.”

  “I’m surprised at you, Elias Sutton Bradshaw!” she exclaimed, green eyes glinting. “All these questions about Witches, and you were born in Salem!”

  “Very funny,” he retorted.

  “Not actually,” Susannah countered. “Reverend Fleming’s son did die at some kind of Black Mass. Lots of people play at Goth and vampirism and all that.” All at once she grinned. “I was in Virginia a few years ago, visiting Holly’s farm, and one evening her Cousin Jesse came over for dinner. We were right in the middle of the most luscious apricot cobbler you ever tasted when the phone rang, and poor Jesse had to leave. Know why? A farmer had found one of his calves dead in the field, all its blood drained, and wanted Jesse—he’s the sheriff—to arrest the local vampire.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s about what I said, too. Lulah packed up some cobbler and sent Jesse on his way, and then said with an absolutely straight face that she wasn’t surprised, the vampire had gotten married and his new wife was probably wearing him out, so he needed a decent meal.” Assuming a Virginia drawl, she finished, “‘Though why he picked Ephraim Fuller’s stock to harvest, I couldn’t begin to say—that old bull of his is flat outta jizz an’ sires the scrawniest calves I ever did see.’”

  Bradshaw choked on laughter. “One day I’ve got to meet Aunt Lulah.”

  “You’d love her. Most men do, according to Holly,” she added with a twinkle. “She could’ve married a hundred times, but she never could see why she’d want some whiskery ol’ crotch-scratcher around messing up Grandma Flynn’s carpets with his muddy boots.”

  Elias rubbed his freshly shaven chin. “What happened about the vampire?”

  “I laughed so hard, I forgot to ask!”

  Aunt Lulah, he reflected, was one savvy lady.

  “Anyway,” Susannah went on, “what I was saying was that Satanism and all that is pretty trendy these days. I’ve yet to figure out why. It seems to me that whatever your faith is, it’s pointless unless it awakens the best parts of you.”

  “I agree,” he murmured.

  “That’s why I could never stomach organized religion—at least, not the way we got it in Connecticut. I suppose that nominally I’m a Christian, but I’ve never joined a church.”

  “Why not? I’d think a good Episcopalian upbringing—”

  “Baptist!” she corrected. “Great-grandpa Wingfield married a Baptist, got disinherited except for the house he lived in, an
d we’ve thumped Bibles to varying degrees ever since.”

  So that was where the money had gone, he mused. Lost for love and religious differences.

  “What I object to is that it’s all based on fear,” Susannah was saying. “Do this, and God will be pissed off. Do that, and burn forever.”

  “That’s a bizarre attitude for a lawyer,” he remarked. “What keeps people on the straight and narrow is fear of the police and the courts. It’s comparable to religion, that way.”

  “You’re entirely too cynical, Your Honor. Shouldn’t it be instead that right behavior—whatever your faith says it is, which is pretty constant among all the world’s great religions—is rewarded, rather than wrong behavior punished? Where’s the comfort in a grim old God sitting up there watching, waiting for you to screw up so He can consign you to the Pit? Whatever happened to joy? Whatever happened to the idea that when you do something good, when you’re kind and compassionate to your fellow humans, God is smiling approval? Christ died for our sins, Eli, but isn’t it more important that He spent His life telling us to be good to each other?”

  Bradshaw considered the Reverend Fleming’s religion of pain and suffering, despair and misery, with everything forbidden except that one narrow path, and all at once wanted to fold this woman into his arms and see the world through the gentle translucency of her faith. He smiled at her instead, and the answering warmth in her eyes was almost as good as holding her. Holding on to her.

  A discreet knock on his door turned their heads. Mrs. Osbourne, her face pinched with disapproval, filled the doorway with a stylish blue linen pantsuit and announced, “Are we at home to a Ms. Josephe?”

  “No,” Susannah said.

  “That’s what I told her,” Mrs. Osbourne replied with deep satisfaction.

  Elias knew he’d have to see Denise sooner or later. He couldn’t decide, however, whether an improper communication—and, as the judge in a case involving her, it would be highly improper—should take place in secret or where others could observe. Safety in numbers of witnesses, but who knew what she might say?

  “Bradshaw!” came Denise’s voice from the outer office. “Let me in or I’ll—”

  “Not that way, miss,” said Deputy Marshal Wasserman. “The door you’ll be using is right behind you.”

  “Get your hand off me—”

  “Maybe I should help give her directions,” Susannah said, and left with Mrs. Osbourne, decisively shutting the door.

  Bradshaw closed his eyes and rubbed both hands over his face. Wishing he had time for a hefty slug from the bottle in his desk, he stood, shouldered into his robes, prepared his mind and his magic, and went to do battle in the outer office.

  Denise was still there, shrill and adamant. Pete Wasserman, Mrs. Osbourne, and Susannah had barricaded her near the hall door; they were a fortification that would withstand just about anything. Elias didn’t want that to become necessary.

  “Ms. Josèphe?” he said, as if he’d never seen her before. “It’s impossible for me to talk to you without the presence of your attorney.”

  “All you have to do is listen,” she snapped.

  The generous folds of full black sleeves could and did hide a multitude of things; Bradshaw knew one judge who sometimes brought her cat to court, where it slept quite cozily in the crook of her elbow. What Elias hid now wasn’t so benign.

  Denise opened her mouth again. And no sound came out. Her eyes—green like Susannah’s, but mottled with brown—opened, too, as wide as they would go.

  “Very wise of you to have changed your mind,” he remarked. “Marshal, would you be so kind as to open the door? Thank you.”

  Deprived of the powers of speech, Denise was too astonished to use any of her own powers. He’d been betting on that; she wasn’t the type who could think on her feet. Wasserman had her out the door before she knew it.

  “That was different,” Susannah noted. When Elias merely shrugged, she added, “She was a lot more insistent last time.”

  He’d been hoping she didn’t remember last autumn. “Maybe she’s mellowed.”

  “Or maybe now that she’s going to be in your court—” Susannah frowned. “Why was she here in November, anyway?”

  For a variety of reasons, Elias Bradshaw had learned long ago to think on his feet—and more quickly than most, or so he flattered himself. Lying to Susannah came hard; it always had, but it had gotten worse the last few months. He’d discovered it was no easier if he wasn’t looking into those green eyes, the hint of blue in their depths making them almost the color of emeralds. So he met her gaze, and let a corner of his mouth quirk upward, and cribbed a page from Aunt Lulah’s book of Witchly wisdom. “If I remember rightly, she wanted to turn me into a toad.”

  It worked. More or less. Wasserman grinned, Sophia Osbourne grimaced, and Susannah just looked disgusted.

  THAT EVENING BRADSHAW CALLED DENISE from a restaurant men’s room pay phone in Greenwich Village. A confrontation was inevitable, and he wanted to choose the time and the venue—not his chambers, or his home, or hers, or e-mail, or any telephone that could be traced to him.

  “That was a stupid stunt you pulled today,” he began without preamble and without identifying himself. “Don’t do it again.”

  “Same to you, Magistrate,” she snarled. “How dare you—”

  “Shut up, Denise, and listen. I’m no more thrilled about this than you are.”

  “Then fix it!”

  “Need I remind you that you don’t give me orders?”

  “Do it, or I’ll tell them all what you really are. And I can prove it.”

  “Really?” he asked with genuine curiosity. “How?”

  “I know everyone in your Circle. I know their names, where they live, where they work. I can ruin them all—and I intend to let them know it. Are they so loyal to you that they’ll keep their mouths shut?”

  “Yes,” he answered with quiet certainty.

  She barely paused. “The FBI may have done a background check on you before you got onto the bench, but they hardly knew where to look, did they?”

  “And you think you can point them in the right direction?”

  She laughed. “I know someone who was there that night in Salem, and knows what you and the others did to that man. I’m sure you remember.”

  “You know, I can’t help thinking that you get your life confused with your books—one drama queen moment after another. Doesn’t it get rather wearying?”

  “If this was one of my books, I’d have you run over by a truck!”

  “What appalling dearth of imagination. How do you get onto the best-seller lists? No, don’t answer that—I have no desire to find out who you’re screwing.” He ignored her sharp hiss. “Keep a low profile, Denise. Considering the risk, I’m sure you can manage to restrain yourself. If you can’t, or won’t—”

  “You don’t give me orders, either!”

  “That wasn’t an order,” he said quietly. “That was a threat. Good night.”

  Fifteen

  NAIROBI WAS A NOISY NEON chaos; Mombassa, on the seacoast, had been humid misery. But it was easy to forget the heat as a prop plane took her and twenty other dumbfounded tourists low over the bush toward Maasai country. From barely five hundred feet she stared down at giraffes and elephants doing what giraffes and elephants had been doing for a million years in the place where they were supposed to do it. Other countries marked the centuries and the millennia with cathedrals and pyramids, cities and battlefields; the African plains were timeless.

  The seminars had gone quite well, the coordinator assuring her that Ben Wolaver wasn’t even missed, let alone regretted. Kenyans took pride in their heritage—one of the richest histories on the planet, for it was the place where humankind began. Kenya’s stories were essential. Ancestral tales and dreams of the future, feeling and thoughts and imaginings, everyday lives and the tragedies of the AIDS epidemic—all these things needed telling. Holly’s tutorials on historical research and the
uses of fiction had excited her audiences into profuse scribbles in their notebooks and hundreds of questions she answered as best she knew how.

  After twelve days of cities, the offer of a photographic safari was too good to pass up. As she settled into her room at a Lake Nakuru lodge, she felt guilty glee at being incommunicada for a whole week, there being no computers or cell phones in the bush. There was barely even electricity, and even that cut off at nine every night. Sitting on the wooden porch, sipping brandy and listening to animals and birds she couldn’t yet identify, she realized that whereas selected persons knew where she was, not even they could easily get in touch with her—something that had never happened to her before.

  Five days, ten game drives, and approximately one hundred new freckles later, she’d nearly forgotten that the outside world existed. Cheetahs, lions, hippos, gazelles, antelope, elephants, giraffes, baboons—what a treasure of life this place was. Cradle of humankind, where Homo sapiens had learned to stand upright and make tools and communicate, one to the other. She thought about her conversation with Evan and Susannah and Elias, about dancing and artwork and song—yes, here was magic, the most intrinsic and primal magic of all. In the low rumble of a lion, in the heartbeat rhythm of drums, Holly touched, if only for fleeting moments, the most elemental source of magic. Not her magic: everyone’s. It was the birthright of all humanity, the inner knowing that there was something greater and more powerful than anyone could ever imagine, and that a share of that something existed within every human on the planet.

  There was something within her that wanted to crouch before a fire at night, rocking gently back and forth, talking tales and singing songs, weaving the life of the land and the life inside her into a single powerful whole that was deep and real and true. And she came to realize that this was her most authentic magic: the thing she could do rather than the thing she was. Blood-magic, but not the kind where she had to bleed. This was coded in the double helix over millions of years of evolution. Some people expressed humanity’s innate magic in music, in the movements of the dance, in painting or sculpture or weavings; her share came in words.