by Lisa Hendrix
“Hmm? Oh, yes, of course.” With a final, longing glance after Miss Hobart, Mason returned his glass to the table in the arbor, then went to his mother’s side and offered his arm. Frail old mother, indeed. She swam a mile every day.
They made a solemn procession up the path, with Miranda in the lead and Mason and Tish trailing along behind. His mother dragged, providing time for Miss Hobart to vanish and for Mason to consider his next step.
He could always admit the hoax and demand promises for future good behavior, but he’d already seen just how far that sort of confrontation got him. What made it so bloody frustrating was that they thought they were doing him a favor.
What he needed was contrition, a complete change of heart. He wanted them out of the witch business altogether, particularly insofar as it concerned him. If they felt free to try to arrange his love life with their inane chants and potions, then there would be no limit to their interference. Someone really would end up poisoned. He had images of having to resort to the services of a food taster, like some paranoid medieval prince.
No. He needed to keep them on tenterhooks for a few days, believing that their first formula had been an unqualified success, but that all subsequent efforts to remove its effects were dismal failures. Sooner or later they would have to admit that trying to mess with the natural order was a huge mistake. At that point, of course, he’d tell them the whole thing was a hoax, but by then they’d be wiser little witches, much less likely to drop unknown herbs into people’s glasses. The instinct that had led him to enlist Miss Hobart’s aid had been right; he had to see this through.
The problem was Caro, of course. Somehow, he had to continue courting her while keeping his mother and Miranda convinced that he’d lost his heart to Miss Hobart. The weekend stretched before him like a marathon.
They reached the upper terrace and passed into the air-conditioned haven of the conservatory. Mason settled his mother on her favorite chair and phoned the kitchen for a pitcher of ice water.
“Well,” said Miranda with false heartiness, “I imagine you’re anxious to go smooth Caro’s ruffled feathers.”
“Not particularly,” Mason said, enjoying the flustered look this statement brought to his sister’s face. “But I suppose it’s my duty as host. Excuse me.”
The whispers began before the door swung shut behind him. Caroline occupied a guest suite on the second floor, and Mason took his time on the stairs, debating how to handle her. Maybe he should just let her in on the game. After all, if anyone understood the power of manipulation, it was Caroline. On the other hand, he hated to reveal his family’s screwball tendencies, at least until after a wedding ring sat securely on her finger.
Still undecided, he knocked on Caro’s door. A maid opened the door, then turned to announce him. “Mr. Alexander to see you, Miss.”
“Tell him to come in,” Caro called from somewhere inside. The maid stood aside to let him pass, then picked up a tightly twisted trash bag and, holding it at arm’s length, took her leave.
“Really, Mason, you took long enough. What on earth were you doing?”
Mason followed Caroline’s irritated voice to the open bathroom door, where he spotted one bubble-spangled leg raised artistically above the edge of the tub. He elected to refuse the lure and took up a discreet position just outside, where the scent of Cam’s wickedly expensive perfume engulfed him. There wasn’t a dead fish on earth who could stand up to that much Boucheron.
“I had to explain to that poor young woman that you weren’t really going to have her fired,” he said.
“And why not? She ruined a brand new pair of Ferragamos.” The water sloshed in the tub, and Caroline stood up, providing Mason with a superb, if brief, view of her smooth, creamy body.
“Loss of livelihood is hardly fair exchange for a pair of shoes,” he said, ignoring his instinctive male reaction to the deliberate display. “Besides, it was my fault, and you know it. I bumped her tools and knocked her off balance.”
“Very gallant of you, Mason, but she needs to be taught a lesson. She shouldn’t have been spying on us in the first place.”
“Good God, she was just work—” Mason stuttered to a stop as Caro emerged from the bathroom encased in nothing but two yards of Turkish terry.
Apparently his reaction pleased her, because she smiled a knowing smile and sighed. “Oh, I suppose I can afford to be magnanimous. I won’t have her fired. Now, go away so I can dress.”
He might have offered to stay and help if he’d had any hope it would go anywhere—and if an extended stay in her room wouldn’t destroy the fiction he was presenting to his mother and Miranda. Instead, he pressed a relatively chaste kiss to Caro’s mouth and excused himself.
So much for pulling her into his little play. On reflection, the idea of Caroline Wickersham willingly pretending “her” man had fallen for any other woman, much less for the groundskeeper who had just doused her with fish slime, almost made Mason laugh aloud.
No. He was definitely on his own with this one.
*
“We shouldn’t have left them alone.”
On Sunday evening, Tish held back the edge of the damask drapery just enough to see Mason and Caroline on the terrace below. Behind their silhouettes, the sunset painted a glorious scene of purple mountains against a rose and gold sky, and left their shadows stretched across the stone paving. But there was something distinctly wrong.
“Look at them,” Tish said. “They could be talking stock prices, for all the romance between them. All weekend I’ve been expecting him to jump up and announce to Caroline that he’s taking up lawn mowing as a profession. How could we bungle things so dreadfully?”
Miranda looked up from the thick, leather-bound book on her lap. It was their Book of Shadows, their personal record of the Craft meticulously hand-copied from various teachers’ volumes.
“I could just kick myself,” said Miranda. “I should have stayed down there until I saw Mason and Caroline drink that tea.”
“It’s just as much my fault as yours, darling, but now is not the time for self-recrimination.” Tish let the drapery fall back into place and joined her daughter on the settee. She patted Miranda’s hand, as much to draw comfort as to offer it. On the table, a cone of spicy incense burned in an enameled bowl, its smoke curling around them like a blanket. “Our task now is to set things back on their proper course, and as quickly as possible.”
“It won’t be that quick.” Miranda flipped back to a page that she had marked with a length of purple ribbon. “According to this, a love spell can only be reversed on a waning moon, and the turning works best at the dark of the moon.”
“But that’s over two weeks away,” wailed Tish. “We can’t let this go on that long.”
“I don’t think we have a choice.”
“There must be some other way to neutralize the elixir.”
Miranda shook her head. “I’ve read every spell and ritual even remotely concerned with turning back a spell. There’s nothing else, unless Raven has an idea.”
“Do you really want to trot this little fiasco out in front of our high priestess?” Tish asked.
“She wouldn’t laugh, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”
“No,” Tish said. “She’d just sigh with that way of hers, but I’d die from the embarrassment anyway. Besides, I copied most of that section from her Book; if she had something useful, it would be there.”
“We could try creating our own counterspell,” Miranda suggested. “Raven said we’re ready.”
“To write a ceremonial chant, darling, not leap into free-form spell-casting.”
“But what if the Threefold Law takes effect before we can act?” asked Miranda.
The very thought made Tish ill. One of the basic tenets of the Craft, the Threefold Law held that whatever a witch sowed would come back three times over. Accidental or not, they had sown disaster. Unless they set things right again, they were bound to reap disaster in return.
Miranda sighed. “The only saving grace in all this is that Caro will be gone until after the Fourth.”
Tish perked up. “She will? I didn’t know that.”
“Weren’t you paying attention at lunch? She’s going to the Far East. She ran on about it for a good five minutes.”
“I had things on my mind,” Tish reminded her daughter.
“Anyway, there’s some sort of conference in Tokyo, and then she’s going to Singapore for a few days.”
Tish blinked. “Well, then, there we are. If Mason does insist on seeing that young woman, all we have to do is keep them out of the public eye. Then the moon will change, and we can reverse the spell and send Miss Hobart on her way. And, of course, make certain that Caro and Mason get a fresh batch of the elixir. No one will be the wiser. Now, darling, go over the counterspell, so we can make certain we have what we need.”
“A new-cut wand of willow.” Miranda peered down at the book, her finger tracing over the words. “A white-handled knife. An arrow of wood. A fire…”
Two weeks, Tish thought, staring at the glowing tip of the incense while her daughter read the ritual. Two weeks to repair the damage done in a single morning, or the Alexander fortunes could drift away just like the sweet smoke that surrounded them.
*
Three
« ^ »
“Where’s her head?” asked Raine, staring down as Arne poured crimson liquid over the chalky form sprawled at his feet.
“Fell out of the truck. I figured it didn’t matter.”
Raine shrugged. “A body is a body.” She squatted down and safety-pinned a label to the stained T-shirt that covered the mannequin’s plaster breasts. “City People’s Mercantile. That’s the last one.”
She straightened and licked corn-syrup blood off her fingers as she surveyed the rooftop. A twelve-foot facade, looking like a cross between the Berlin Wall and a hyper-modern low-rise office building, ran across the top of the abandoned warehouse, effectively cutting off the view of the Ship Canal beyond. Twenty-three dead bodies lay scattered before the wall, most hanging off the roof to one degree or another. Each was tagged with the name of a neighborhood business. Yellow police tape marked the “crime scene.” Above it all, an eight-by-twenty-foot banner, roped to utility poles, blared the reasons why MMT Properties shouldn’t erect their monstrosity of a building on this site.
Guerrilla art.
Six months ago, MMT had abruptly announced development of its property in Fremont, a vibrant, avant-garde neighborhood just north of Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill. The old two-story building sat well below street level, so its roof barely showed above the concrete guard wall on Thirty-fourth. Its replacement, a monolith of concrete and glass labeled Canal Place
, would tower a full three stories above street level. That the proposed building would cut Fremont’s business district off from its waterfront was bad enough, but the project presented bigger problems than a blocked view.
According to Raine’s studies of feng shui, the ancient Chinese art of earth-divining, the MMT building would disrupt two of the three critical lines of ch’i, or energy, that ran through the area. Allowed to go up as designed, with all its daggerlike angles and reflective facades, the building would literally kill Fremont, draining it of vital energy like a vampire.
She’d tried to tell them, she really had. Written letters to MMT and to the newspapers that were never answered or printed. Made phone calls no one returned. Attended zoning board meetings where her comments were cut short. No one had been interested in hearing how the building would slice the heart right out of Fremont—at least, no one with clout.
But a few people had heard and, with no particular effort or intention on Raine’s part, had coalesced into a free-form citizens group, elected her Fearless Leader, and launched an offensive based on an old Seattle tradition of mixing hit-and-run art installations with politics. The whole operation, now called FUSE—Fremonters United to Secure Energy—had developed a life of its own.
Which was how Raine found herself trespassing on the roof of a vacant building at four-thirty on Monday morning, engaging in guerrilla art.
“Righteous,” said Arne, twisting the cap back onto the jug of blood-red Karo. “A perfect symbol of how big business oppresses the people.”
“It’s supposed to— Oh, never mind.”
Arne didn’t care, anyway. He never cared much about the movements he joined—he just liked to protest. But as Raine had just pointed out, a body was a body, and they’d needed as many bodies as possible to set this whole panorama up in under fifteen minutes. He’d been amazingly useful, too, shinnying up those telephone poles to string the banner. He’d probably learned that climbing trees for anti-logging protests, but she didn’t even want to guess where he’d learned to pick the padlocks on the gate so he could get up on the roof and pull the ladder bridges across from street level.
Raine checked her watch, then raised one hand over her head and snapped her fingers. “Wrap it up, people. We don’t want to get caught on-site.”
As if to reinforce her words, a siren wailed somewhere on Queen Anne Hill. The troupe swarmed back across the ladders and dispersed like dandelion seeds on a stiff breeze. Within sixty seconds, Raine stood alone on the sidewalk with her best friend, Zoe Levine. And good old Arne.
“Looks great, kiddo,” said Zoe, grabbing Raine’s arm. “What are we waiting for?”
“I’m not afraid of the pigs,” said Arne, hoisting his syrup jug into the air in defiance. “Let’s face them head on.”
“Get a life,” Zoe snapped. “Come on, Raine. It’s starting to get light. Bail’s expensive.”
“That’s an ambulance, and it’s headed for Ballard,” Raine said, laughing, but she let Zoe drag her across up the block toward the parking lot anyway.
Arne tagged along. “Hey, uh, I was wondering if you could give me a ride over to the U-District?”
Zoe frowned, but Raine nodded. “Sure. No problem.”
They climbed into Raine’s faded green pickup, and as they headed toward the University of Washington, Zoe fished her cell phone out of her bag and punched in a number. “Okay, Freddy,” she said when someone answered on the other end. “Call in the dogs.”
She laughed and flipped the phone shut. “The hounds of the media will be on their way shortly.”
“I hope so,” said Raine.
“Are you kidding? With the press release I wrote? It helps to have some background in PR.”
“Cool,” said Arne. “The ability to manipulate public opinion is vital to any revolution.”
“And it’s incredibly easy,” Zoe said, suddenly more tolerant of Arne. She started explaining marketing psychology to him.
Amazing, considering Zoe had only temped for that PR outfit for three weeks. Raine bit her tongue and tuned them out, focusing instead on the traffic, already starting to pick up as trucks began their delivery routes.
The first rays of light reflected off the glass of the buildings at the University Med Center, off to the right. In a few minutes, the sun would be high enough for the photographers to get some shots of their installation that would look great in the evening paper. If they showed up. If they bothered to shoot any pictures. If what they shot made the paper. If they even got there before some good citizen notified MMT.
Privately, she’d lay ten-to-one odds that the whole project was down by seven-thirty.
What she was really hoping for was that whatever press coverage they got would flush out the actual owners of MMT Properties. In all her efforts to get some response from MMT, the one certain thing she’d learned was that its owners were very private people, who buried their identities under several layers of corporate flimflam. It was going to take a little poking
around in public records to find out who they were, and she just hadn’t had time. Maybe one of Fred’s hot-shot media connections would do the legwork for them.
She realized that Zoe and Arne were staring at her, and she tossed them a shrug.
“It’ll be okay,” said Zoe sympathetically.
“Yeah, sure.” Raine stepped down on the clutch, shifted down into second, and made the turn onto Forty-fifth. “Everything will be just peachy.”
*
“Don’t drop that thing on me.”
“Not a chance, Rainey.”
Later that same afternoon, Raine flopped belly down in the dirt at the foot of a huge lilac bush and stuck her head and shoulders into the gaping hole beneath the plant. The lilac had been dug out and levered up part of the way with shovels and two-by-fours, but now it was stuck, and Craig wanted her to crawl in and see why. That was the problem with being the skinniest person on the crew—it automatically made her the mole.
She felt around blindly until her fingers hit something solid. “It’s a rock, all right,” she announced. She felt around a bit more. “A big one, too. The roots are all bound around it.” She reached for her pruning shears.
Raine could hardly blame the lilac for curling its toes around the nearest handy object. Over fifty years old and as big as a small house, it probably felt it had the right to stay where it was. Unfortunately, the new owner of its domain didn’t agree and had decreed that it should move to the rear of the property. Even worse, said owner insisted that the lilac had to move right now, heat wave or no, and so, heavily pruned and bundled in twine, it was moving. The poor thing would be lucky to get through the summer alive.
She opened the shears and reached in to snip at the thick, corded roots. Within moments the bush popped free. Raine scrambled backward to safety while the more muscle-bound members of the landscape crew wrangled the plant onto a cart.
As the poor lilac trundled off toward the backyard, she stood up and dusted at her shorts. It was a lost cause. Grit was ground in the entire length of her body, clothes, skin, hair, and all.