Fire Raiser

by Melanie Rawn

  “Only the child! She’s all I want!”

  “How did he know it’s a girl?” Holly asked.

  “Why doesn’t he want any of the rest of us—meaning you?” Evan countered.

  “Give her to me and you’ll be free to leave!”

  Jamey laughed, his face ghost-pale. “I don’t think so!”

  “Amniocentesis, I suppose. Still—”

  “Shut up, Freckles,” Cam said. “Jamey, whatever stupid idea is going through your mind—”

  “But if he’s alone, like Holly said—”

  “Shut up, all of you.” Lulah marched over and handed Cam the sleeping baby. “Don’t drop her.” She beckoned Alec and Nicky with an imperious gesture. Lachlan found it reassuring that age and magical gifts had nothing to do with whether or not men obeyed this woman.

  “Just the child, and you will walk free,” Weiss said from much closer to the door.

  “Why her?” Jamey called out. “Why not me, or the sheriff, or his wife?”

  Evan shot him an angry glare.

  “Eloquent as you are, genial as the sheriff might be, and even taking account of Mrs. Lachlan’s unique qualities—all I want is the child.”

  The three Witches held a hurried consultation, nodded agreement, and laced their fingers together in some complicated arrangement that left only Lulah’s right hand free. In the open palm she held the little rowan-and-holly talisman. The two men disentangled their fingers to cup their hands around Lulah’s. They seemed to be pressing inward, keeping something invisible squeezed tight around the wooden token.

  Lulah caught her breath in a wounded little gasp, then reached blindly for the doorknob. Neither Alec nor Nicky could help her—their hands were pushing still against the power focused on the talisman. At last she got the door open and flung the thing into the hall, shoving a shoulder against the door to slam it shut.

  The lower two feet of it splintered inward, with a blast of fierce white light that brought tears to Lachlan’s dazzled eyes and made Holly moan in pain. Cam cried out and slipped to his knees, the baby howling in his arms. The girl gave a muted whimper, then settled against the pillows again.

  “Evan? Evan!”

  “I’m okay.” He knuckled his eyes and peered down at Holly. “You?”

  “Yeah. It hurt like hell for a second, though.”

  Jamey was holding up Nicky—or perhaps it was the other way around. Lulah was slowly sitting up, Alec beside her, picking bits of the door out of her pant legs. Cam staggered to his feet, the child securely in the crook of one elbow.

  “That wasn’t supposed to happen,” Lulah said shakily. “That just plain wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  “I told you there was too much magic!” Cam pointed to the wall. It was . . . rippling. So was the floor beneath their feet. “Now can we get out of here?”

  “Herr Weiss may have other plans,” Holly warned.

  From her seat on the carpet, Lulah squinted through the hole in the lower section of the door. “I don’t think he’s going to be a problem.”

  Jamey reached to open the door, snatching his hand back when the knob sagged like soft dough. The wooden doorframe shrank, expanded, warped to the right. The door cracked and popped open with the pressure.

  Down the corridor, Weiss lay crumpled and stunned, rising and falling with the undulations of the floor. The wall near him developed a blister that grew bigger and bigger until it nudged him over onto his back. He groaned and turned onto his side and vomited.

  “It really wasn’t supposed to happen like that,” Lulah muttered again. “Really. It wasn’t.”

  THE MATTRESS/STRETCHERS WERE NOW out of the question. They kept swelling and deflating. The easy chair, the bed, the dresser—all grew lumps and bulges that quivered for a moment and then collapsed, only to puff out somewhere else, like allergic hives. Holly decided that was probably a good image: the place had been glutted with magic and was going into anaphylactic shock.

  She’d felt exactly two earthquakes while in grad school at UCLA. One had been a short, sharp shock, there and gone in an instant. The other had been a surging wave, seven endless seconds of nausea-inducing rock-and-roll. Going down the stairs took much longer than seven seconds. It took forever.

  Nicky carried the girl. Alec grunted as he dragged Weiss—around whose left thumb Cam had tied a bit of knotted string. Cam supported Jamey with one hand and tucked the infant close to his chest with the other. Holly had wedged the laptop under one elbow and kept the other arm around Lulah, who was still shaky from the force of magic she hadn’t expected to unleash. Evan preceded them all, his Glock drawn, while they bounced off the stairwell walls and slipped on sudden bumps and hollows in the steps. The walls bulged their silk stripes, and the vases undulated, some of them shattering, as the flowers turned red, yellow, orange, blue, purple—any color but what nature had intended.

  Abrupt shadows appeared, bled into each other, turned to dark bruises on the floor and walls. A bulging stair underfoot made Holly leap for the next one—which chimed like a silver dinner bell as she landed. Colors wafted through the air, whispering as they passed, or whizzed by with the roar of miniature jet fighters.

  “The stairs may be real,” Alec gasped as Weiss nearly slid from his grip, “but so is the magic—and it’s not happy.”

  “Átkozott!” Nicky spat, ducking a swirling blur of magenta and black. “Just get us out of here!”

  “If I could identify where ‘here’ is—” Hoisting Weiss up again, he went on, “Cam, where’s the place where you got into that room?”

  “Find me a sign on the wall that says ‘This Way to Room 208,’ and I’ll show you.”

  “Why that room in particular?” Jamey asked with splendid irrelevance.

  Holly glanced over her shoulder at him, staggering a bit as the carpet bulged and surged beneath her feet. “Room 208 is the one always used when the customers hire boys.”

  “Judging by what that guy had on,” Cam muttered, “it’s probably stocked with more than Earl Grey tea.”

  “I didn’t like to mention what else was in those bathroom cupboards,” Jamey admitted. “But you could get into that room, so how about the others? There was more than one listening post, right? So maybe those rooms are accessible, too.” The wall beside him spasmed outward to knock him in the shoulder. “Or maybe not,” he finished weakly.

  Holly dragged her attention from the flowers—which were now mimicking the stripes of the wallpaper in a vase a foot wide that had grown spikes like a frenzied cactus—and stumbled into Lulah when the step sagged beneath her. Alec was tapping the wall with his fingertips, mumbling that it had to be this spot, he’d made particular note of the cabinet, and since the door was mechanical and not magical, he should be able to—

  His thumb slid into the wall just as a ripple coursed through it. There was a brittle snapping of bone. “Son of a bitch!” He wrenched back his hand and stared at the second joint of his thumb, crooked at an unnatural angle.

  “Alec!” Nicky lurched toward him, awkward with the girl in his arms.

  “Don’t drop her. I’m all right.”

  “No, you’re not,” Lulah said, detaching herself from Holly. She dug in a pocket and came up with a handkerchief. “Wrap this around it, good and tight. We’ll splint it later.”

  Jamey asked, “Maybe Cam could—”

  “It’s bone, not soft tissue or muscle fiber,” Lulah told him as she wound the linen around Alec’s thumb. “But if you could stiffen the cotton a little—”

  “Like a cast?” He nodded. “That I can do.”

  The cabinet rocked forward and the roses crumbled to dust. Beneath them, all around them, the stairwell shuddered and groaned and warped itself almost into a spiral, then settled again.

  “I can stop it hurting, too,” Cam offered.

  “Feel free,” Alec invited, breathing hard.

  As Cam handed the baby to Jamey for the few moments he would need for the work, Holly met Evan’s bleak ga
ze. They understood each other perfectly. We’re fucked. Completely, totally, absolutely, categorically, monumentally fucked.

  “This place is coming down around our ears,” he said quietly. “We can’t get out through these walls.”

  “I refuse to be a featured performer in a Jean-Paul Sartre play,” she retorted.

  “You’d prefer to take our chances with a Salvador Dali staircase?”

  “What about the downstairs clinic? It’s built into solid rock. Even if wood and plaster and even brick aren’t strong enough to hold up against an overload of magic, maybe a few tons of granite might.”

  He nodded. “I’m liking this theory. Mainly because it appeals to the ordinary, everyday kind of guy I am.”

  “That, love of my life, you never have been and never could be. Let’s get these people downstairs.”

  WITHIN THE DOORS of the medical clinic, the torture of the walls and floors finally stopped. Holly sank into a chair behind the desk and let out the breath she seemed to have been holding for the past ten minutes. She hadn’t felt this queasy since the morning she got married, when the combination of nerves and pregnancy had nearly resulted in the ruin of nine thousand dollars of Vera Wang bridal gown.

  Still, as she watched Weiss and the girl placed on gurneys and everyone else find chairs—or in Cam’s case, just wilt to the floor with the baby in his lap—it felt as if the floor still swayed a bit. She recognized the sensation. Part of her trip to Europe with Susannah long ago had been a five-day cruise through the Cyclades, and back in Athens it had taken almost a whole day to convince herself that there was nice steady pavement beneath her, not a deck.

  Fingering the diamond bracelet on her wrist, she studied the walls. No, not a quiver, not a wrinkle. Solid concrete within solid rock. The relief on other faces, beloved faces, made her smile. Real magic was beyond her, but at least she had a useful idea every so often. For the moment, they were safe.

  The creaks and shatters of the disintegrating stairwell were muffled here. During their headlong descent, the noise and the distortion had gotten worse. Holly wasn’t sure if she wanted the sounds to stop or not: quiet would be welcome, but quiet would mean the magic had finally given up and the stairwell might collapse altogether. There was a chance that once the spells had sputtered out, the real staircase would still be there and they could use it to get out. But when she thought about the tortured brick and wood, she rather doubted it.

  Evan raided the fridge behind the desk and distributed bottles of water. Jamey chugged one down and asked for another, then fixed his gaze on the laptop in Holly’s embrace. She took the hint and handed it over.

  “Try the files marked Zauber. And I’d be obliged if somebody could tell me what der Puff means.”

  Without looking up from the child in his arms, Cam replied, “Brothel.”

  Well, that made sense. Holly tilted the chair back to regard her husband, who had hoisted himself up to sit on the high counter. He surveyed the room, a rather brooding sort of frown on his face. Holly waited him out, and at length he said, “So the girl and the baby both have magic.”

  She thought that over. “If the day ever comes when I can predict what you’ll come up with next, please divorce me. How do you figure?”

  “All you Witchy types yelled when Lulah’s little flash-bomb went off. Jamey and I didn’t.”

  “But the baby and the girl did. I do wish we had something to call her other than ‘the girl,’ by the way.”

  “She only talks to call you nasty names.”

  “I’m still working on why.”

  “She recognized you from that book jacket photo, but why react like that?”

  “Well, let’s stick a pin in that one for a minute.” Bending to roll up her pant legs yet again, she snarled a curse at them, reached for the scissors on the counter, and starting cutting. “You deduce, Sherlock my love, that she and her daughter are both Witches because all the other Witches were traumatized to varying degrees. I’ll go along with it. She’s found in a room at the top of a staircase that’s real enough, but guarded by things that don’t officially exist according to the laws of physics—which are taking their revenge, according to Cam. Weiss got knocked out by whatever it was Lulah did, so that’s confirmation that he’s a Witch, too.”

  “Unless that was an all-purpose—hey, Lulah!” he called. “Would that wooden thing have worked on just anybody?”

  She glanced up from splinting Alec’s broken thumb. “I don’t follow.”

  “To get knocked out like that, does Weiss have to be a Witch?”

  “Yes and no.”

  Holly rolled her eyes. Evan grinned down at her.

  Alec elaborated. “It was phasers on stun—well, with some oomph we didn’t expect. He’d go down if he was magic-blind or second cousin to Merlin himself.”

  “So why don’t we wake him up and ask?”

  “Not a chance,” Nick said. “He stays knotted up until he’s got wards on top of wards and a pair of double-lock handcuffs, the real kind. Besides, I can tell you a few things about him right now.”

  “This oughta be good,” Alec muttered.

  “He’s East German.”

  “And you know this because—?”

  “His dental work is Russian.”

  “Stop smirking,” Alec chided. “You’re insufferable when you’re being clever.”

  “I should have said some of his dental work,” Nick went on. “His accent is from East Germany. But at some point he lived in Russia. Their dental work is unmistakable.”

  Cam nodded agreement. “One might even say ‘inimitable.’ But why would he have been in Russia?”

  “His parents. I judge this by the age of the dentistry, which is at least forty years old. He looks to be around fifty, fifty-five. This puts us in the early ’60s. A young East German boy would not be in the Soviet Union on his own—”

  “He might have been in school,” Evan said.

  “Possibly. But I believe his parents were posted there to receive training from the KGB.”

  Holly had been following all this with growing impatience. “Next you’re going to tell us he has a tattoo identifying him as a member of the secret brotherhood of—”

  “Stasi agents?” Nick interrupted. “Nothing so trite. I haven’t been playing quite fair, I’ll admit. I recognize the name.”

  “ ‘Weiss’ is as common as Wiener schnitzel,” Alec scoffed. Nicky smiled. “You just went from ‘insufferable’ to ‘intolerable.’ ”

  “Weiss. Plus magic. Plus East Germany. Plus the Soviet Union in the ’60s. Add it up—then divide by 1995.” He met Holly’s gaze, no longer smiling.

  “And the hundred miles of a drive to Delphi?” She scarcely recognized the thin voice as her own. “Is that how he knew about me, Nicky? Is it?”

  “I believe so. Hanna and Eckhardt Weiss were not the people behind the plot against you, but they were the perpetrators’ contacts within a group of former Stasi, East German Secret Police. Trained in the Soviet Union by the KGB, parents of a son. They were, of course, Witches.”

  Jamey was looking desperately confused, but stayed silent. Evan had no such compunctions. “I thought you took care of them.”

  “I did. But it was a difficult time. The reunification of Germany had occurred only about five years earlier. All the former Warsaw Pact countries were fumbling their way toward democracy—”

  “Thereby giving me a lot of work,” Cam remarked. “You don’t have to explain that part, Nicky. It’s more than fifteen years by now, but all the old secret police guys—they’ve changed license plates but not make and model. I remember when they went after Holly and her friend in Greece. They were dealt with. But if Weiss is who Nicky thinks he is, he knows Holly is a Spellbinder. So what he’s after—”

  “—is still the baby,” Jamey reminded them. “He’s been in Pocahontas County for almost two years, right? He’s had any number of chances at Holly. He didn’t take them.”

  “She’s pretty we
ll-protected,” Evan observed mildly.

  “I’m sure she is. But he knows what she is—he called her ‘unique,’ and from what little I understand—”

  “Oh, I think you understand plenty,” Holly murmured.

  “But all he wanted was the child.”

  Refusing to think about that terrifying trip back from Delphi, when she and Susannah had damn near been run off the road, Holly got to her feet and went over to look at the baby. An unremarkable infant: larger than her twins had been at birth, but otherwise she was just a newborn like any other. Except, if Evan was right, she was born a Witch.

  Holly wasn’t the kind of woman to go all gooey over babies. She adored her own, but was just as glad to hand back everybody else’s once due appreciation had been expressed. This one was a fine specimen, robust and healthy, but she had to remind herself that to look at her as a mystery to be solved was to regard her as a thing, a commodity, the way Weiss did.

  “Why you, little one, and not me?” She stroked a silky cheek with her fingertip. “I’m used to it by now. I don’t think about it much, but at least I know the score.”

  “Right now we’re losing,” Cam said. “This whole discussion has been very interesting, but we need to have the talk about getting out of here. Or do we just wait until somebody comes to dig us out?”

  “Lulah said there’s no magic around these rooms. She also said we’re way below ground and surrounded by solid rock.”

  “Terrific.”

  “You should be ecstatic,” Holly complained. “It validates your theory, doesn’t it? That there was so much magic in the staircase that there wasn’t room for any more?”

  “Validating my stupid theory is what got us stuck down here, when there was more magic thrown into the staircase than it could hold—”

  Nicky held up a hand. “Enough! O shoshoy kaste si feri yek khiv sigo athadjol.”

  They looked at Alec, who sighed and translated, “ ‘The rabbit which has only one hole soon is caught.’ Obscure Romany Saying Number 346. He’s getting back at me for believing that a way in could also be a way out.”