by Melanie Rawn
“Go find her,” Evan said. “I’ll take care of this.” Shouldering open one of the double doors, he walked out onto the verandah and called out, “Hey, Matt! You couldn’t pedal that thing any faster?”
“The hamsters went on strike last week,” the young man said, opening the back doors and sliding out a rolling gurney. “I tried squirrels, but they kept gettin’ their tails caught in the treadmill. Whatcha got for us?”
“Mother and newborn.” He waited, hoping he wouldn’t have to suggest it himself. All unknowingly, Matt came through for him.
“Hmm. Steinmetz is physician on call tonight, but if it’s an obstetrics case, we’d better take them over to Dr. Cutter. No complications?”
“None that I know of.” Except for the tiny problem of having lost her.
Matt finished unloading the gurney and got out a stack of blankets, wrapping them beneath his orange raincoat to keep them dry. “Good party?”
“Swell,” Evan said, straight-faced. He turned, and Bernhardt Weiss smiled at him.
“It pleases me that you enjoyed yourself, Sheriff Lachlan.”
“What the—?” Matt began.
Evan hushed him with a quick gesture. Flanking Weiss in the doorway were Jamey, Holly, and two security guards. One guard was pointing an 8mm Beretta at Jamey’s head; Jamey was holding the baby. A second man had Holly by the scruff of the neck, with a .45 stuck in her ribs.
“You know what happens next,” Weiss continued.
If this was New York City, Evan thought, I’d already have ordered up a hundred cops in Kevlar vests, and more firepower than fuckin’ Fallujah on a Friday afternoon, and you wouldn’t make it to the bottom of the steps before a sniper took you out.
This wasn’t New York City.
There was him, and that was all.
“Actually,” he drawled, “your idea of what happens next probably doesn’t coincide with my idea of what happens next. Why don’t we compare notes? For instance, I thought all you wanted was the kid.”
Weiss shrugged and made a dismissive gesture with his left hand—which no longer wore Cam’s little woven restraint on the thumb. Lachlan didn’t waste time wondering how he’d gotten free of it.
“That was before,” Weiss said. “Now I can have the child and your charming wife.”
“Plus she’s your insurance,” Evan remarked. “You can control everyone else by threatening her.” Which explained where Lulah and Alec and Nick and Cam were—or, more to the point, weren’t. Quite apart from anything she meant to them personally, she was a Spellbinder. Protecting her was their top priority.
She was his wife and the mother of his children. Protecting her was his only priority.
Yet it couldn’t be. Of all the clichés he hated, the one he hated most was I’m a cop—it’s not what I do, it’s what I am. What he hated most about it were the times he was forced to admit it was true.
Weiss shifted forward. “I have no wish to harm anyone—which is more than can be said for you, Sheriff Lachlan. Take out your gun, set it down, and stand aside.”
Lachlan pretended to consider as he took a step up. “Mmm, not so much, no. You could order me shot, sure. But they tried that once before, upstairs.” Another step. “Anybody go take care of those two guys I left bleeding on the floor, by the way? Oh, and Leather Dude. Forgot about him.”
“Stay where you are.”
Lachlan forced a smile, hoping it looked convincing. “Educated opinion around here is that you can sense magic.” He unclipped his badge from the chain so that the St. Michael medal showed. “Haven’t you figured out yet what’s hanging around my neck? Haven’t you wondered why your hotshots upstairs fired three or four times—and missed me?”
“You waste my time.”
“Go on,” he invited. “Order your guys to shoot me.” At the edge of his vision he saw Jamey flinch and frown. “Fire away,” he added, and glanced at Holly.
“Tempting,” Weiss replied, gaze narrowing.
“Before you take him up on his offer,” Jamey said, sounding peeved, “I want to know how you intend to evade the police of about a dozen countries. We know about the prostitution, and the human trafficking, and—”
“What I want to know,” Evan interrupted, “is what’s going on with the cryogenics. Little Master Race embryos, right? But not blue-eyed blond Aryans. You’re after the magic. Whose kid is that, anyway? Whose baby did you put into that girl?”
His abrupt smile made Lachlan’s skin crawl. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. No, you really would not. Mrs. Lachlan, Mr. Stirling, you will have the goodness to go along quietly to the ambulance. I’d intended to use your vehicle, Sheriff—”
“—but anything will do, as long as you can fire up the lights and siren?” He flicked his gaze once more to his wife, whose eyes widened a bit before she nodded slightly. When her fingers twitched at her sides, he knew she’d finally gotten the idea, and readied himself for some very vast shooting.
Weiss’s face caught on fire.
All Evan had ever heard from the girl was furious screaming—but he recognized her laughter as if he’d heard it in nightmares all his life.
The man holding Holly shoved her down, turning to defend Weiss, and dropped his pistol with a yelp of pain as it sprouted tiny flames. Evan went for his Glock, a motion that caught the attention of the second man, who instinctively turned his gun toward the new and obvious threat.
“Jamey! Down!”
Evan shot the guard high in the chest as a bullet went past his ear and thunked into a support column. He fired again, and the first man staggered, clutching his belly now instead of his burned hand.
Weiss lurched past Evan, plunging down the steps into the rain. The fire burned even more brightly, more fiercely, spreading down his neck and chest. He tried to run, thrashing his arms, trailing horrific pennants of red and orange and gold. A single howl escaped him—and his next gasping breath sucked the flames down his throat into his lungs.
She was laughing. She ran from the shadows to the verandah banister, leaning out into the rain, raking the long dark hair from her face as she watched him burn. He staggered out onto the storm-soaked lawn and crumpled to his knees.
Evan felt a hand touch his ankle. He bent to help Holly to her feet and wrapped an arm around her as they watched Weiss blaze like a torch. At length there was nothing left to feed the flames. The rain fell, the fire withered, and the laughter faded away.
Lachlan slid his gun back into his waistband and put both arms around Holly. She clung to him for a moment, then eased away and lifted her head. He saw for an instant what she would look like when she was old.
“We need—” She coughed thickness from her throat and tried again. “We need to find Lulah. And Alec and—”
“It’s all right, child,” her aunt said from behind them, and they turned. “We weren’t hurt. Just—we weren’t hurt.” Just frightened was something Tallulah Eglantine McClure would never say in a million years.
Nicky had approached the girl, who was leaning against the banister, surveying them all with a challenging glint in her pale blue eyes. He said something low and indistinct in what Lachlan presumed was Hungarian. She replied in English.
“I took his life because he took mine.”
Her lips curved at one corner in a smile that mocked and hated. Lachlan wondered suddenly if she would ever forget how to smile that way. Somehow he doubted it.
SHE FEELS THINGS FLICKERING inside her like distant stars.
When she is finally free of the baby and the kind blond man touches her forehead and she sleeps, she wakes without truly awakening to a painful blaze that sets her whole body stinging for one endless instant. She has not truly been asleep one moment since. Conscious in a vague way of being carried, of voices, of some other man touching her without touching her—that is when the pinpricks of light flare painfully behind her eyes. Slowly, tentative and quivering, tendrils of light lace together in a complex white-gold glow until she exper
iences true awareness for the first time in her life. When some man’s disembodied touch shrouds the lovely radiance, she hates him. When he ties the string around her finger, she gives a soundless scream.
But then the strangest thing happens. All the vivid little sparks pulse, shift, dance this way and that, seeking each other in new patterns. They settle, poised in quivering anticipation. She watches them, feels them, wondering if they can free themselves from the binding.
That thought is all they have been waiting for.
They work swiftly, merrily, finding and immolating the specks of light twined around the binding threads. Finished, they seek new work before she can fully realize she is free, before she can call them back to her. When there is nothing more for them to do, they spark and shimmer, and return. By the time she opens her eyes, and stands, and hears his arrogant menacing voice, the separate constellations inside her have resolved into a river of light as brilliant as the Milky Way.
The woman from the book cover is nearby, and for an instant she is tempted to take her revenge. If not for this woman’s words, he would never have known that she understands English. But it seems a trivial betrayal now, compared to what he did to her. And he is there, so close, so unaware of her—so superbly unaware that her fire has been his freeing, and her fire will be his death.
She takes his life because he has taken hers. Sending out her little shining ones to swarm and glow feels dimly familiar, though nothing has ever felt as wonderful as this.
She smiles.
And then she begins to hurt.
CAM GRIFFEN HAD TAUGHT DEMOCRACY in countries where getting to his job required an armed escort. He had spoken for the majesty of American constitutional law in places where doing his job meant carrying a fully loaded automatic. But, damn it, he hated guns—and not just because he saw the muzzle of one tucked against Jamey Stirling’s throat.
He would never know how Evan managed it; he only knew he owed his cousin’s husband more than could ever be repaid. He had about three seconds to think about this before Bernhardt Weiss went up in flames.
A need to touch Jamey, maybe even to hold him the way Evan was holding Holly, got lost in dread as the girl’s blue eyes rolled in their sockets and she wilted into a whimpering heap of white nightgown. Her fingers curled into her palms, the bones of wrists and shoulders and knees cracking as a spasm surged through her. Tiny bursts like firework sparklers danced around her, the kind of white-gold fire that meant magic. They flickered, died, and she moaned.
Cam knelt beside her, scarcely hearing Lulah’s frantic warning. Arrogance or outrage or fear of what might come next made him weave stillness into the soft cotton threads of her nightgown. Her body relaxed, her eyes opened, and what he saw in them scared him more than Beirut or Kosovo.
“Cam—help her!” Jamey’s voice, behind him, very far away.
He shook his head. “She’s—it’s her brain, what the magic is doing to her.”
“You could do something for her—help her the way you helped me.”
“It’s brain tissue, it’s neurons and electricity and—”
“And neural fibers, a fiber is a fiber—”
He tried. He tried when he wasn’t even sure how to touch her. A hand across her forehead, like a nurse in a mawkish Victorian mezzotint? Fingers splayed around her face, like a Vulcan performing a mind-meld? Her head had fallen to one side, and he automatically slid a hand beneath her nape, and the anarchy within her skull brought a cry to his lips. If his weaving of silence through the silk lining the corridors was a linkage of threads of light, her mind was a weave coming apart. Every intersect point was a spurt of power, each center detonating, pulsing fire along delicate filaments that swelled and twisted and disintegrated. The magic was an uncontained nuclear reaction spreading through her brain.
He scuttled back until his spine was tight against a wall, shook his head, wrapped his arms around his knees. “No—it’s not—there’s nothing I can—”
“Hush.” Holly had her arms around him. She stroked his hair, the frantic motion contrasting to the softness of her voice. “Shh, it’s all right, you’re all right.” Then, sharply: “Get him a blanket, dammit, he’s shaking.”
“I can make her comfortable,” he heard himself say. “But the kindest thing would be to let her die.”
Jamey crouched beside them, gripping a blanket, his face stricken. “You don’t know that for sure—”
“You don’t understand. What I did for you—it was different.” He met Jamey’s gaze. “What’s going on inside her—the magic, it’s ripping her brain apart. Even if I could knit all of it back together, there’s so much damage, so much that’s gone black and dead—”
“I’ll take a look,” said Alec.
“No!” Cam seized his hand. “Don’t—please, Uncle Alec—”
Nicky hushed him with a gesture. “If the boy says not, then we don’t.”
“We’re responsible for this,” Alec said. “We kept working spells on her and near her—we kindled her magic—”
“It’s just as likely that the staircase was restraining it,” his partner argued. “When that was gone—”
“Your ‘laws of physics’ dictum?” Jamey snapped.
“How the fuck should I know?” Cam cried.
“So you can’t help her? Or you won’t?”
Nicky caught his breath, Alec stiffened defensively, but it was Evan who spoke.
“Don’t answer that, Cam.”
There were angry glints of green and gold in Evan’s dark eyes as he glared down at Jamey.
“You trust him or you don’t.”
Cam hid his face on his drawn-up knees.
“Listen, Jamey. This is the way it is with them. They have their ethics, and their codes of conduct—except there’s nobody to enforce those rules but themselves. You have to decide whether you trust Cam to know what’s right and do what’s right.”
When Jamey said nothing, Evan spoke again. “You and I, we don’t know anything about how they were educated, what they were taught—but we know what kind of people they are. What honor looks like. What it comes down to is believing they’re going to make the right decisions about things you and I don’t understand.”
It took a significant fraction of forever before Cam felt Jamey’s hand on his shoulder. Warm, in the chill of the rainy night; but whether the touch was trusting or apologetic, he couldn’t tell. He lifted his head.
Deep within cloud-gray eyes was everything. Everything. No one had ever looked at him this way, not even Jamey, years ago when they were young.
“Forgive me.”
Unable to speak, Cam nodded once. Then he turned his head, resting his cheek to Jamey’s hand for a moment before pulling away from Holly’s comforting arms. He shifted closer to the girl, fumbling for and gripping tight the amber around his neck, and made himself look into the wild violence of her eyes. As her brain imploded, something feral glowed from her, like the eyes of a trapped predator.
He didn’t dare touch her again. He wove warmth around her, and freedom from pain. It was all he could do for her. He sat beside her and watched her die.
Twenty-one
DAWN WAS MORE an agreed-upon description of the time than an observable event. The storm sweeping in from the Atlantic had stalled against the Blue Ridge, and while thunder and lightning had died away, rain continued its unrelenting gray cascade.
From it, in a blue sedan with windshield wipers unequal to the torrent, came the manager of Westmoreland, a local woman who had no reason to think she wasn’t running just a normal hotel and spa. No one disabused her of this notion. Fresh from a pleasant Sunday off, she was appalled by the heavily edited version of the night’s occurrences given her by Lulah McClure—her mother’s high-school classmate—and readily accepted a promise to be told later all the details of break-ins, accidental shootings, Mr. Weiss’s abrupt departure on urgent business, and a slight problem with the lap pool. She took charge of the staff when the timelock fre
ed them from their dormitory, set them to their duties, and to all intents and purposes Monday morning of Labor Day Weekend was much like any other at an upscale resort.
“Not a clue about any of the other stuff going on?” Jamey asked Lulah.
She shook her head. “And I’ll vouch for her family back three generations. Not a hint of magic in any of them.”
This proved to be true of the entire staff. Alec stood casually in the kitchen drinking espresso in a twelve-ounce mug as they filed past at five in the morning, and reported not a quiver that would warn either of magic or of efforts to conceal it.
Not even the security guards knew about the staircase, the clinic below the spa, or the rooms in the attic. Lulah had no idea how Weiss had done it. Neither did anybody else. Not that they had much energy left for speculation—not after cleaning out Weiss’s office. Luther arrived from the Sheriff’s Station with the other county SUV, into which were loaded computers, financial records, and anything else Evan and Jamey happened to feel like seizing for examination. Jamey’s BlackBerry, with its download from Weiss’s laptop and hard drive, was privately stashed in Holly’s car.
Matt, who had watched Weiss’s incineration, would never remember it. As the four men with gunshot wounds were handcuffed and loaded into the ambulance, first Alec and then Lulah and then Nicky in their varying ways made small suggestions. All these were reinforced by traces of Holly’s blood. By the time he got behind the wheel for the drive to Dr. Steinmetz’s office, Matt was convinced that Weiss had never been there at all.
“I hate having to do that,” Alec murmured.
Cam arched a brow at him. “You’d prefer the alternative?”
“Don’t tell me it’s for his own good. The only people whose good it’s for is us.”
Cam shrugged; it wasn’t an argument that interested him. “Did you take care of the guards, too? The ones who saw what happened, I mean.” He took an involuntary step backward as Alec glared at him. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry!”
“You ought to be,” was the sharp reply, but in the next moment dark eyes softened. “It’s been a rough night,” he went on. “Worse for you than just about anyone else, I’d say.”