Fire Raiser

by Melanie Rawn

  —and Cam walked right into a wall.

  Lachlan grinned. “Don’t tell me that being a klutz runs in the family, too!”

  The younger man looked dazed—and not because he’d bumped anything vital. The suitcase had, in fact, taken the impact, barely missing a little carved cupboard garnished with a vase of flowers. Cam’s frown was one of bewilderment, and then of worry. “There’s a staircase here. Not the one you’re looking at—the one I can see through this wall.”

  “A secret staircase? Cool! That happens a lot in really old houses, doesn’t it?”

  “It does. But not this kind.” He set down his suitcase and flattened both palms to the wall. “If you know what I mean.”

  Lachlan was rapidly afraid that he did. “The old houses it happens a lot in—would they include Woodhush?”

  “Holly doesn’t know about it. Lulah doesn’t even know about it. But, yeah, there’s one at Woodhush.” He glanced over at Lachlan, chewing his lower lip for a second before saying, “It won’t show up on any blueprints. Neither will this one. They’re not just secret. They’ve both got magic all over them.”

  Ten

  HE WAS FOURTEEN YEARS OLD when he found it.

  It was summer, and his dad was traveling on business, so Cam was staying at Woodhush for a month or two. Holly, having just graduated from high school, was even more of a pain in the ass than usual—obsessing about college and clothes and guys. Cam tuned her out whenever possible. His own life had been getting more interesting lately, as he suddenly seemed to be making quantum leaps in height, musicianship, and magic.

  As for the first—Lulah had found some old overalls that had belonged to her brother, and Jesse had contributed some aged Levi’s; otherwise, Cam would have been condemned to wearing only cutoffs or pants that no longer had even a speaking acquaintance with his ankles. The overalls made him look like a refugee from the Depression, but they were surprisingly comfortable. The Levi’s were a little tight in the seat, but at least he could wear them into town without feeling like a complete dork.

  The music was, as always, his comfort and delight. The ancient upright piano had been hauled up from the cellar, tuned, and a couple of the cracked keys replaced so that Cam could practice. For something that dated back almost a century, it had an unexpectedly sweet and mellow voice. In the wobbly bench he’d found sheet music for everything from Scott Joplin rags to Classic Opera Arias for Piano, and happily spent most afternoons and evenings sight-reading and then memorizing as he played.

  As for the magic . . . Jesse was teaching him smithcraft, and he dabbled every so often over at Clary Sage’s whenever Holly could be persuaded to drive him. Mainly he learned from Lulah. And only four days into his stay, they’d finally found out what his specialty was.

  Among the family treasures were quilts dating back four and five generations, needlepoint samplers created (possibly at gunpoint) by Flynn girls for at least three hundred years, and a peculiar collection of crocheted and tatted doilies and tablecloths, not one of which matched any of the others. There were saddle blankets and bed blankets, woven with varying degrees of skill at the loom featured in one of the portraits on the staircase, and knitted things ranging from tea cozies to very silly hats for golf clubs. The most interesting, however, had come out of a box found only this past spring: a half dozen pieces of lace. They were fine, cobwebby silk, incredibly fragile, patterned in lilies and roses. It was Lulah’s idea to preserve and conserve them under glass in frames, and as the three of them worked on the delicate fabric, Cam found himself nudging the weaving back into place every so often, repairing the lace without even thinking about it.

  Lulah noticed first. After a few shrewd questions that he couldn’t really answer, she took up the scissors from the table, reached over, grabbed the hem of his t-shirt, snipped—then yanked with both hands. The material ripped halfway up his chest.

  “What the—? Are you crazy?”

  “Fix it,” she ordered.

  “You are crazy!” He looked an appeal at Holly, who folded her arms and pursed her lips and refused to say a word. “Fix it, she says,” he muttered, looking down at the ruin of his vintage Meet the Beatles t-shirt, torn right through Paul McCartney’s face. He thought about it, then thought some more.

  “You’re intellectualizing,” Holly admonished. “Did you have to think when you mended the lace?”

  “So speaks the expert Witch,” he shot back, and was instantly ashamed of himself. Holly couldn’t work hardly a lick of magic of her own; it was her Spellbinding blood that made her valuable. She was, understandably, touchy about it.

  “Fix the shirt, Cam. Don’t think. Just do.”

  Cam thought about the magics he’d learned so far in his life; no help there. Then he thought about music. The printed notes required his attention so he could memorize the piece and figure out how it worked. But when he knew it, and simply played it, thinking wasn’t involved. Instinct was.

  He looked down at the cloth, seeing how the cotton yarn was interlocked. Then he bit his lower lip and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the Cute Beatle was gazing soulfully from the silkscreened photograph once more. There was no sign that the material had been rent at all.

  Over the next week or so there were consultations with various of the Witchly relations, and some experimentation. From simple repair work (he learned to look on it as simple, anyway) he moved on to spellcasting directly into fabric. Nobody knew yet how long the workings might last; he wouldn’t be trying any using Holly’s blood until they got an idea about the natural duration and strength of his magic.

  What with helping out around Woodhush, his music, daily rides, and now his new studies, he was exhausted by the time he got up to bed every evening. But one night in late July it was simply too hot and humid to sleep. He did the usual toss-and-turn routine. He lay naked on his stomach under the ceiling fan with a wet washcloth across the small of his back (Lulah would have knocked him silly for courting pneumonia). He thought long and hard about spelling coolness into the sheets, eventually deciding his control wasn’t good enough yet and he’d probably end up lying on a layer of ice. He even thought about some of the other distractions that had been occurring more and more often lately, embarrassing things that his body seemed determined to do without his conscious consent. But he shied away from those thoughts almost at once.

  So he turned to an older method of self-distraction, one that dated to the year his mother had died. He turned onto his stomach, hands flat against his chest, face scrunched into a pillow, and dreamed himself someplace else.

  He never went to real places. Over time he had built up a small library of imaginary ones: mountain lakes, castles, beaches that weren’t quite California, where he’d been born. There was a house where the whole second story was crammed with books, and a luxury hotel with a weird elevator that ascended in an impossible spiral through an atrium with redwood trees growing three hundred feet high. Sometimes he was in a sailboat with blindingly white sails, and sometimes he was behind the wheel of a 1930s vintage Rolls Royce, and a few whimsical times he held the reins of a coach-and-four only slightly less ornate than the one British monarchs rode to Parliament in. When he couldn’t fall asleep, he could imagine himself into one of these scenes, and whether he truly slept or simply kept dreaming while awake didn’t really matter.

  That night he sorted through his mental file, wanting something that would banish the sticky heat and raucous insect chorus from his conscious mind. Someplace cool and pleasant, with music . . . well, of course. His personal version of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle as seen at Disneyland when he was about four. It even came complete with a Tchaikovsky soundtrack. He smiled into the pillow, thinking how ironic it was for a family of Witches to visit the Magic Kingdom.

  Through the dark, narrow hallways he went, up stairwells, through vast chambers of his own devising, decorated with tapestries and huge heraldic war shields—prominently featuring Irish harps and Welsh griffins, of course
. He chose a turning at random, opened a wooden door, started up another staircase. He could feel the thick nap of wool beneath his bare feet, smell the mothballs—

  Wait a minute.

  Cam flipped over onto his back and sat up. Mothballs?

  His gaze unfocussed as he concentrated on the picture within his head. It was a new aspect of the castle, this set of stairs with its heavy flowered Persian carpet. No castle had wallpaper, much less the same wallpaper as the closet in Holly’s room: Regency stripes of dark crimson and cream, unfaded in the more than a century and a half since its finely woven silk had been pasted onto the walls. . . .

  That wall right over there. The one behind the dresser.

  He got out of bed and pulled his boxers on, staring at the wall. The full moon outside was low and bright enough to let him see what he was doing. Hoping Lulah and Holly were sleeping better in the heat than he could, he carefully moved the dresser to one side. He felt quite impeccably stupid as he flattened his hands against the wall—but beneath layers of paint and paper and glue, he sensed silk. He had been working with the lace for a couple of weeks now; he knew exactly what silk felt and tasted and smelled like to his magic. There was an impression of metal that confused him until he realized he was venturing within the wall itself, and the metal must be electrical wires threaded down from the attic directly above his room.

  Cam took a step back, chewing on his lower lip. There was no indication from this side that the wall was anything other than a solid wall, plastered and papered, with a layer of sunshine yellow paint on top. But he knew there was a staircase behind it. Running his hands over the slightly rough surface, he searched a long time for a seam or crease that would indicate a hidden doorway.

  If there wasn’t a way in or out here, there had to be one someplace. If he could find the carpet again with its faint stink of mothballs, he might be able to follow it to . . . where did secret doors hide anyway? Fireplaces were standard in movies, and of course revolving and/or fake bookshelves. There was the ever-popular trap door beneath the rug. Oh, and big portraits of the ancestors that swung out from the wall. . . .

  He sat on his bed and considered. There were three fireplaces at Woodhush, using two chimneys: the back-to-back hearths that served the kitchen and dining room, and the big one in the parlor. The shared back wall of the double had been torn out years ago, and redone so that you could look—or yell—through it into the kitchen. Ripping it apart would have revealed anything odd about it. He was pretty sure there wasn’t enough room on the north side of the house, where the parlor fireplace and chimney were, for a staircase to be tucked inside the wall. And anyway, exploring would not only cause comment, he’d get filthy.

  It was entirely possible that there were about five miles of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in Woodhush, all perfectly real and solid as far as he knew. There could be trap doors concealed anywhere in the hardwood floors throughout the house. Family portraits were all over the place. And what about all the quilts displayed on the walls? What could be hiding behind them? If there was an architectural drawing of the house, he’d never seen it, so he’d probably have to make his own survey to eliminate those places where it would be impossible to fit a staircase such as he’d seen—how thick was a standard wall, anyhow?

  He was being stupid. Why did the hidden staircase have to conform to the laws of physics? After all, he’d originally sensed it with his magic, hadn’t he?

  Hell’s bells, as his dad would say. But he’d only really been at this magic thing for less than a year. Like the majority of his male kinfolk, puberty triggered more than whiskers. The girls were different—Holly had been, anyway, her Spellbinder blood evidently operational since birth. Still, she’d never really learned to think like a Witch, had she? Not the way Lulah and Jesse and Clary Sage did, anyhow. The way he himself would have to learn to do.

  So he set himself to it, sitting there on his bed at well past midnight of a sultry, stifling summer night. His only real accomplishment was that he forgot about the heat.

  The next morning, after Holly had driven into Flynton for yet more shopping and Lulah was busy in the stables, Cam acted on the results of his first attempt at thinking like a Witch and climbed up to the attic. With his newly discovered sense of silk and wool and magic, he found the upper limit of the staircase. It took some shifting around of trunks and boxes, and some serious sneezing at the dust thus disturbed, but at last he found the plank of the interior wall where a knothole had been punched out of the wood. He felt around with his fingers, then with his magic, and then with both.

  The hinge really ought to have creaked and squealed, he thought. No time-honored atmospherics at all to this secret door. It should be ashamed of itself.

  Bending almost double, he squeezed through—wondering irritably why he couldn’t have found this a year or so ago, before legs and arms started growing to unmanageable lengths. The steps were there, and the heavy flowered carpet. It seemed to have been woven specifically for this purpose, because it took the turns of landings in ways no ordinary staircase runner should. He grinned to himself. Magic carpet.

  There was no dust here. The rods securing the carpet to each riser were shiny brass, untarnished. As he stood at the very top, looking down, he smelled the mothballs that had so disconcerted him the night before and wondered why nobody had spelled the wool to protect it. Maybe the reason was simple practicality—why use magic when a nonmagical solution worked perfectly well? Or maybe there was already so much magic at work here that even that little bit more would be too much.

  Cam mulled that over, recalling something his father had told him. “Don’t mess with physics. Most Witches stick to ordinary things—herbs, rocks, tea leaves, wood, stuff that’s perfectly comfortable with itself in the everyday normal world—and juice it up with their magic. Major work, distorting physical space or playing around with gradations of reality, that takes a pile of effort and insane amounts of power. And the laws of physics will have their revenge sooner or later.”

  So he restrained his natural impulse to see if he could do a banishing spell to keep moths from the carpet, and started down the stairs. Keeping a mental drawing of the house in his head did him no good at all. Someone had warped the laws of physics pretty thoroughly to make this staircase, which led through most of the house. He paused every so often to put his hands against the wall in an attempt to figure out what room was on the other side. Sometimes it worked. There were quite a few doors as well, most of them locked in ways he couldn’t understand. The three he could open led into the kitchen, the Wisteria Room, and the upper landing of the real stairs. Keeping alert for any sound that would mean Lulah had returned, he stepped out of the magic passage and into the real house and back again, making note of where the doors were and how they worked from each side. From the unspelled side, there was no hint that there was anything behind the walls except timber and the wires for electricity and phones. He was intrigued by the wiring, because he knew how old it had to be—the first decade of the century at the earliest—yet there was no place where the sheathing had frayed. Somebody had been efficient with a preservation spell.

  At last he climbed back up to the attic door, emerged from the staircase, and slid the opening shut. Two hours of piano practice later, he had decided that the secret passage would remain his secret for now.

  Because even if he hadn’t heard all the gruesome details of the Salem Witch Trials from kids who were his fellow descendants, he’d had the lecture from Holly—and Lulah, and Jesse—about Witches and secrets.

  “Learn to keep your mouth shut, Peaches.”

  “It pains me to say this, because you’re a sweet child without a deceitful bone in your body, but there’s just a lot of things we don’t talk about.”

  “You’re truly one of us now, and that means we all keep each other’s secrets—sometimes from each other.”

  Okay, he did talk a lot (not as much as Holly). And he did have a tendency to blurt at times. But if what he
was beginning to suspect was true about him—something that had nothing to do with magic—he would have to get good at keeping secrets. He figured this would be good practice.

  He never did get around to mentioning that staircase.

  “THEY’RE NOT JUST SECRET,” he told Evan. “They’ve both got magic all over them.”

  If he had expected Lachlan to say something like, “Okay, I am now officially weirded out,” he had underestimated Holly’s husband. There was not a single demand to have things proven to him. Cam wondered what Evan had seen and experienced of magic that had—well, not made him at ease with it, exactly, but at least had swept away the usual skepticism and discomfort.

  What Evan said was, “Woodhush and the original Westmoreland were built about the same time, weren’t they?”

  Cam nodded. “Before 1760—the basic fabric, anyway. There were additions and refurbishings, but the structure stayed the same.”

  “So why are you sensing magic here? I thought Lulah and Jesse cleaned this place out years ago.”

  With an elaborate shudder, he replied, “Don’t ever call her an amateur to her face!”

  “I’m not,” Evan said mildly. “I’m saying that if they got rid of the magic at Westmoreland, somebody since has put it back. So what do we do with this secret staircase, Cam?”

  He hesitated. “I really want to say that we leave it alone—”

  “—but you’re not gonna say that, are you?” The older man grinned suddenly. “This’ll be fun.”

  “Do me a favor, huh? Don’t ever ask me to represent you at a sanity hearing.”

  “Aw, c’mon. You want to get in as much as I do.”

  “I concede the point.” He ran his hands over the wall again, his magic pushing through it to the passage hidden inside. Once again, as at Woodhush, it was the carpet he sensed most strongly. But it wasn’t be-spelled, it had never been touched by fire—“Shit!” he exclaimed as he finally got a sense of its pattern. “It’s new!”