Fire Raiser

by Melanie Rawn

Holly stretched out her legs to prop her feet on the coffee table. “Do you know how much I hate being a Witch but not being a real Witch? I don’t hate what I am, I hate what I’m not. Listening to Erika threaten to accuse us all of being what we are—and then listening to myself threaten her and knowing I’ve got nothing to back it up—”

  “I always wondered how you stand it, frankly. I can do things, I can be—proactive, I guess. How did Evan put it? You get to look cute and stick your thumb in the air.”

  “It’s a good thing I have talented friends and relations, then, isn’t it? Just what an otherwise helpless Spellbinder needs.”

  He glanced over at her. “You’re whining again.”

  “Play nice, or I won’t let you have any of my special high-octane blood tonight, and you can fumble around your secret magical staircase on your own.”

  Another voice, gently shaded with the vowels of the Virginia Tidewater, said behind them, “So that’s why you’re all still here.”

  Holly squeezed her eyes shut and muttered, “I swear by everything holy, if I get eavesdropped on one more time tonight, I’m going to start taking hostages.” She looked at Cam. “You left the door unlocked, didn’t you?”

  “He did,” Jamey confirmed.

  Cam sighed. “Evan and Lulah are coming upstairs, of course I left the door open. Also, I’m an idiot. As has been pointed out at least once tonight.” He stood and turned, facing Jamey. “Hi.”

  Holly scrunched around to kneel on the sofa, arms folded over its back. “How’re you doing, Jamey?” she asked with her brightest smile.

  Black brows arched eloquently.

  “Is this where we ask what you heard? Or do we just assume it was kind of everything?”

  “Pretty much from the part about what a good example I am. I think I can guess most of the rest.” He took a few steps forward. “Well, except for the Witch part, and whatever a Spellbinder is. You know I have to ask.”

  Holly traded looks with Cam. “Your call.”

  “Your secret,” he retorted.

  “Yours, too. You know enough so that with my help, he doesn’t have to be told anything.”

  “Holly! You think I’d do that to him?”

  “Good boy.” She smiled. “That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.”

  Jamey shifted restlessly. “If somebody doesn’t tell me something soon—”

  “What do you think, Cam? Words or deeds?”

  “How’d Evan find out?”

  “Accidentally—and then I demonstrated with Nicky’s vodka glasses, not having the wherewithal to establish my bona fides more directly.” She watched Jamey’s gaze cut from one to the other of them, gray eyes darkening below an ever-deeper frown. “I think we need to show him, and I think we need to use me.” She surveyed the young man head to heels—a rewarding occupation in and of itself, but she was looking for something that would convince him, something Cam could spell in such a way that Jamey would believe what they were about to tell him.

  “It’s raining,” Cam said suddenly.

  Holly rummaged in her skirt pocket for the little pouch containing needle and alcohol wipes she was never without. Cam’s lips moved, and Holly pricked her thumb. He touched his left index finger to her thumb, then walked around the sofa to where Jamey stood, slack-jawed and wide-eyed. Quickly, before Jamey could react, he drew an inch-wide circle on the cuff of his shirt where it protruded below the sleeve of his leather jacket.

  “Stick your arm out the window,” Cam instructed.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Do it,” Holly ordered.

  “Do you trust me?” Cam asked at the same time.

  Holly smiled to herself as Jamey obeyed—because he was obeying Cam, not her. He paced warily toward the window, unlatched it, pushed open the screen, and extended his arm. When he stepped away, his cuff was dark and wet, except for the little circle Cam had drawn. He looked down at it, then at the two of them.

  “And this proves—?”

  Cam murmured something under his breath, and the rainwater leached from Jamey’s shirt, turning to droplets that slipped onto the floor.

  “He’s very good, is our Cam,” Holly remarked. “The material isn’t permanently waterproof except for that one little place on your cuff. For permanent, he needed me.”

  “Spellbinder,” Cam murmured.

  “Spell—” Jamey looked down at his sleeve, then back at Cam, and gulped.

  “Uh-huh,” Holly said. “My blood. His talent is for textiles—linen, silk, wool, cotton, and so forth. Remind me to tell you sometime about the prickly heat he inflicted on this evil little troll he had for geometry, until Uncle Griff caught him at it and grounded him—magically speaking—for a month. And then there was the time he kind of overdid a linen napkin wrapped around a bottle of white wine. Instead of nicely chilled—”

  Jamey interrupted, “The afghan. At your apartment that day—it was wool.”

  Holly waited for Cam to say something. When it was apparent that he wouldn’t—or maybe couldn’t—she went on, “Any kind of natural fiber, really—I don’t actually know, because the only talent I have is the blood thing. What did he do to the afghan?”

  “I’m sorry,” Cam said. “I had to.”

  “Just to keep me from kissing you?”

  Holly felt her eyes widen, and decided it was way past time for her to leave. She was almost to the door when Cam blurted out, “I had to!”

  And she couldn’t help telling him, “No, you probably didn’t—but you can discuss that without me. And Jamey—maybe the kissing thing would go over better this time?”

  With that, she slipped out the door, wishing it locked from the outside.

  “YOU’RE HERE BECAUSE OF WHAT was in that letter, aren’t you?” Lachlan asked as they passed the front desk, heading for the main stairs. “And I’m not talking about the check.” He smiled sidelong at Nicky, aware that Weiss was in the vicinity, unsure if he was watching, presenting a pleasant front in case he was.

  “Indeed,” Nicky replied. “Alec and I made further enquiries, and decided we’d pay you a little visit.”

  Evan interpreted this to mean that more conjuring with rocks or tea leaves or candle wax or whatever had yielded a more urgent warning about Kirby or Bella. He consciously unclenched his fists and traced one hand up the polished mahogany banister as they started the climb. “All of which you’ve mentioned to Lulah.”

  “Of course. We left Alec back at the house for a reason.”

  Lachlan touched Lulah’s elbow. “Laura and Tim hadn’t arrived before you left?”

  “I told Alec to let them in and then lock up behind them, if you know what I mean.”

  He did. They reached the first landing, skirted the central display table with its gigantic arrangement of fresh flowers—one of Weiss’s amenities-that-meant-so-much—turned, and started up the next flight. At the place where Cam had walked right into the wall, Evan paused, looking for a reaction. Both continued on up the stairs. “Damn,” he muttered, and followed.

  They made the turn into the hall, heading for Room 314, and almost ran into Holly.

  “What in the world—? Nicky?”

  DESPITE HOLLY’S ENCOURAGEMENT, the kissing thing didn’t happen. Jamey’s mind, in fact, was so far from anything of the sort that all he could do was stare at Cam, who started by looking apologetic, then uncomfortable, and finally defiant.

  “Well?”

  “Well, what?” Jamey snapped.

  Cam flapped a hand in the air as if trying to grab a coherent word or two. At last he managed, “I don’t know what you’re thinking!”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “Dammit, Jamey—”

  “What do I call you? What’s the correct term for—for whatever it is you are?”

  “Witch. Capital W, please.”

  “I’m not going to ask why you never said anything. It’s obvious why not. You never even trusted me enough to admit that you’re gay until I confron
ted you with it,” he said bitterly, “how could I expect—”

  “That’s not—”

  “—but what really pisses me off is that everybody in this fucking county seems to know about your family, and I work with Evan on an almost daily basis, and I’m over at Woodhush at least once a week, and I feel like a complete fool!”

  “It’s not an uncommon reaction. Think about it from our side of things for a minute. Or—no, think about when you first figured out you were gay. It isn’t exactly something you run around announcing to the whole world.”

  “It isn’t something to be ashamed of, either!”

  “They call it a Witch Hunt for a reason, Jamey.” Cam shrugged and turned away. “Why do you think there are so few of us left?”

  Jamey looked down at his sleeve. There was no difference in the cotton where Cam had drawn the little circle in Holly’s blood. No lingering evidence. For a moment he was tempted to go into the bathroom and run water from the sink over his cuff again, just to make sure. He was a lawyer; he liked evidence that didn’t vanish on him. But to do such a thing would indicate he didn’t believe Cam, which would be a lie. Every instinct he possessed—nothing to do with the trained intellectual legal mind—had trusted Cam at first sight.

  “Okay,” he said slowly. “You’re just exercising a little self-preservation. I can understand that.”

  “Can you? Oh, imagine my relief.”

  “Stop it. I’m just wondering what it takes and how long it takes to earn some trust from you people.”

  “You heard Holly. Evan found out by accident, just like you. It’s not something we put on billboards on Sunset Boulevard.”

  “But this is me, Cam! Did you think I’d—I don’t know, blackmail you? Betray you? Does everybody automatically get thrown into the same category as Erika Ayala?”

  A soft but emphatic knocking on the door interrupted him. Cam flung his arms wide in a Fuck it, I give up gesture and called loudly, “Come on in! Join the circus!”

  Jamey watched with escalating bewilderment as Holly, Lulah, Evan, and a slight-shouldered blond man aged maybe fifty-five entered the room. There were hugs and exclamations, smiles and kisses, and Jamey felt even more of a fool than before.

  Evan sauntered over during the reunion festivities. “It’s a shock,” he remarked, “but you’ll get used to it.”

  “How long did it take you?”

  “Less time than you’d expect. Me, I was more pissed off because she didn’t tell me how much money she makes.”

  “You people are all insane,” Jamey announced.

  “Yep. Like I said, you’ll get used to it.”

  “Or run shrieking into the night,” said the blond man. “Hello, Mr. Stirling. I’m Nicholas Orlov—Cam and Holly’s Uncle Nick. I understand you’ve learned our little secret.”

  “Uh—yes. Nice to meet you.” He shook the man’s hand. “And please call me Jamey.”

  “Lulah was right—lovely manners.” He slanted a look upward at Evan. “Do you want to guide him through this using your own experience, or just throw him into the deep end and see how he swims, the way Holly did with you?”

  “Oh, I’m sure he can handle it.”

  Looking around to find that all eyes were on him, Jamey met Cam’s worried, wary gaze, and deliberately called up the kind of smile he used in the courtroom when counsel for the defense had just blindsided him. “I can handle it,” he said to the world at large, hoping he wasn’t telling the biggest lie of his life. And then he looked at Cam again. All the gentle whimsy had fled that expressive face, leaving a man who was a little tired, a little scared, and a lot alone. “It’s okay,” Jamey added. “I can handle it.” It wasn’t a lie at all.

  NICK TOOK THE DESK CHAIR, straddling it with his arms folded across its back. Holly perched on the arm of the chair where Evan sat with long legs negligently sprawled. Lulah sat between Cam and Jamey on one of the sofas. This was by her own design. Nick wondered why for a moment, then decided it was consideration for Cam’s obviously raw state of nerves. Proximity to the gorgeous young man with the troubled gray eyes was probably difficult enough. If touch, or even the prospect of touch, affected Cam the way Alec had always affected Nicky . . . well, it was better if Lulah sat between them.

  Cam had very kindly dried off their clothing and removed the mud from their shoes. He couldn’t do anything about their hair. Nick ran his fingers one more time back through the damp mess on his head, spared an interior sigh for the slow, inexorable retreat of his hairline, and wondered where to start.

  Holly beat him to it. “Not to be ungracious, Nicky, but why are you here?”

  “I’ll tell you, but we don’t have time for you to throw a fit. I know—saying that is the quickest way to guarantee it, but I’m telling you we don’t have time. Alec and I, through various methods—all of which we checked at least twice—have come to the conclusion that one of your children is in some kind of danger, and it’s going to happen in the next few days.”

  She fixed her husband with an angry glare. He arched a brow and shrugged. “No fits,” she muttered.

  “Thank you,” Nick said, meaning it; he had longer experience of Holly in rant-and-rave mode than anyone here but Lulah and Cam. “We couldn’t get anything specific—not which child, or where, or what would happen. But that’s a separate problem. Lulah and I are here right now to investigate Cam’s discovery.”

  “The staircase inside the walls.” Jamey said it as if he dealt with such matters every day of the week.

  “Yes,” Cam said to his own hands, which were clasped schoolboy-prim in his lap. “Like the one at Woodhush, it’s originally architectural, but it also reeks of magic. I think the staircase here is as old as the first house, but the spells are recent.”

  “Jesse and I worked for weeks on—” Lulah stopped, fixing her nephew with a long, dangerous look. “ ‘Like the one at Woodhush’?”

  “Long story, tell it later,” Evan suggested.

  “I think we can count on that,” Lulah snapped.

  Cam gave an audible gulp. “Anyway, that sign outside, about cell phones—it’s there to take care of probably eighty percent of the questions that might come up about why there’s no reception here. If your phone’s off, you’re not going to get any incoming calls. There’s a barrier of some kind, but whether it’s magical or electronic—”

  “I’ll be able to find out,” Nick told him. “If I can’t sense Alec, even at this distance, then it’s spellcraft.”

  “Okay. But whichever, and I’m betting it’s not technology, the other twenty percent could be explained by dead batteries or something—if people keep their phones on anyway and don’t leave them at the front desk like it asks—”

  “Cam!” Evan chided. “Breathe. What he means is that Lulah felt blind here—”

  “Still do,” she said. “It’s magic. I’m convinced of it now. You won’t sense Alec at all, believe me.”

  Nicky didn’t like to explore the feelings this provoked in him. He rested his chin on his folded arms for a moment and wished his partner were here. “Then we’re dealing with Witches who don’t want to be discovered as Witches—and if they’re hiding from the legitimate practitioners in Pocahontas County, then—” He glanced over at Cam, who had suddenly sat up very straight. “What is it?”

  “The piano. I sensed magic, I’ll swear I did.”

  “In a piano?”

  Jamey Stirling, Nick observed, hadn’t quite gotten the hang of this yet. “All manner of things can take and hold a spell. There are formulae that determine the strength of a particular working of magic, how long it will last, even who can be affected and who gets a free pass, as it were. Just as Cam works with fibers, some people specialize in wood, gem-stones, herbs, fire, water, weather—”

  “The piano tuner,” Holly interrupted. “Sorry, Uncle Nicky—but there was a little Polish guy who was making the rounds just before Westmoreland opened—he’d been brought in special to deliver and tune the pianos h
ere, and Weiss was courting the county, so he sent him around to tune everybody’s pianos. We had him look at the upright in the parlor—”

  Lulah was shaking her head. “I would have known. I never sensed any magic about that piano.”

  “You’re not Cam, either. You don’t know pianos inside and out. Music is part of his magic. And the upright,” Holly concluded, “hasn’t gone a hemidemisemiquaver out of tune since. Not in the heat or the cold or the damp or the dry.”

  Lulah’s gaze flickered from niece to nephew. “All right. I’m convinced. But mainly because I still feel blind.”

  Nobody said anything for a minute or so. Nicky used the time to reach for his partner, miles away at Woodhush. Their connection was as real, as unique, as inexplicable as the one between Holly and Evan—which had nothing to do with magic at all—and the one he sensed was forming or perhaps strengthening between Cam and Jamey. The linkage was comfort and warmth, safety, home—and not there.

  Even knowing why, he was shaken.

  “Let’s get this done tonight,” Evan was saying. “I don’t feel like leaving and then making up an excuse for getting all of us back in here. Besides that, Weiss keeps looking at me kind of funny. I don’t like him. The chances that he doesn’t know about the magic in this place are slim to none—and it seems to me that ‘slim’ just left the building.”

  Pushing aside the feeling of emptiness, Nick said simply, “I agree.”

  “There’s a pretty large staff to get past,” Holly mused. “The spa people, chambermaids, waiters, kitchen crew, security—but a lot of them will be occupied with cleaning up downstairs, won’t they?”

  “People are still slipping and sliding around in that mud rodeo they’ve got going out in the parking lot,” Lulah added.

  “So by the time it all gets sorted out, it’ll be pretty late and they’ll all be tired.” Evan checked his watch. “It’s almost eleven. I’m hoping that except for a few regular guards or whatever, they’ll all just go to bed. But it’s the ‘whatever’ that bothers me.”

  Cam shook his head. “Nothing set off any alarms when I was checking out the staircase behind the walls.”