Veiled Enchantments

by Deborah Blake

  Magnus narrowed his eyes in her direction. “Want to explain the second part of that statement?” His expression suggested he thought he wasn’t going to like her explanation. Good guess.

  “I got another visit from Mr. West, demanding that I tell him where Anton Eastman is.” She held up a hand to keep him from exploding. “Please note that I informed you immediately, as previously requested.”

  Magnus rolled his eyes. “Duly noted. And don’t think I don’t appreciate it. You said something about a threat?”

  She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “It’s bad, Magnus. He’s not just threatening me. He said the Major Anemoi would bring some kind of natural disaster down on Gimle if I didn’t tell him where Anton is. I believe the words ‘forest fire,’ ‘earthquake,’ and ‘flood’ came up. I’m so sorry.”

  “What exactly do you have to be sorry about, Donata?” Magnus scooted down the bed until he was sitting at her feet. Since she was positioned with her legs drawn up to her chest and her arms around them, that put him a little too close for comfort. Or just close enough, depending on how you looked at it. “I asked you to come here. It’s not your fault that trouble followed you.”

  “It may not be my fault,” she said glumly, “but that doesn’t make it any better. The problem is, I can’t possibly give him what he wants. He’s demanding I give him Anton’s whereabouts by the next full moon. Which is swell, except I killed the bastard, and I can’t exactly bring him back, even if I wanted to.” She thought about it for a minute. “Which I don’t, although I wish I hadn’t been forced to do it.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said slowly. “I promised I’d help you get to the bottom of this ghost issue, and I don’t want to abandon you and the rest of the Ulfhednar. But I’m afraid that if I stay, I’ll bring down the wrath of the Major Anemoi on your whole town. I’ve seen what they can do, and it is nothing to take lightly. But wherever I go, they’ll follow, and I’ll put innocents at risk. Maybe I should just admit what I did and face the consequences.”

  “Bullshit,” Magnus said. “You’ve spent too much time as a cop.”

  “Excuse me?”

  To her surprise, he grinned at her, those devastating dimples flashing. “You tend to think in terms of right and wrong, lawful and unlawful. That was always part of the problem between us. But things have changed in your life in the last year; your thinking just hasn’t changed with them.”

  Donata had no idea what the hell he was talking about. “I have no idea what the hell you are talking about.”

  “You need to think more like a mercenary,” he said. “What happened the last time one of the supposedly all-powerful Major Anemoi threatened you?”

  Donata closed her eyes, wishing she could block out the memory that easily. “I killed him,” she said.

  “Exactly.” Magnus sounded like a teacher whose slowest student had finally answered a question right in class. “If you can kill one Major Anemoi, you can kill another. You know the secret to destroying their physical manifestations. Maybe if they keep disappearing when they get anywhere near you, the other Major Anemoi will learn to steer clear and leave you alone.”

  “I can’t just go around killing people right and left,” Donata protested.

  “Of course not,” Magnus countered. “Only the ones who are threatening to hurt you or the ones you love. I think that’s a perfectly reasonable response, under the circumstances, don’t you?”

  “No, I don’t,” she said.

  “Do you have any better ideas?”

  Donata had to admit she didn’t. “I’ll think about it,” she said. “In the meanwhile, what can you tell me about your encounter with your friend Calder?”

  The corner of Magnus’s mouth slanted upward. “Changing the subject, are we?”

  He clearly decided to let it slide. For now. She knew it was only a temporary reprieve. That had always been one of the biggest barriers to a relationship between them—his idea of how to deal with problems and hers were worlds apart. She wasn’t sure whether to be glad or worried that these days his way seemed to make more and more sense.

  “I was sparring with Gunnar,” Magnus said. “Suddenly, there was another face superimposed on his. Calder. I couldn’t react fast enough and Gunnar’s foot connected with my head, with the obvious negative results.” He touched his forehead gingerly.

  Donata blinked. “When you say ‘superimposed,’ do you mean Calder actually took possession of Gunnar’s body?” That would be a new twist.

  “No, I don’t think it was that. More like he was standing in almost exactly the same space. Gunnar said afterward that he got a sudden chill, as if a cold breeze had blown through him.”

  “That’s pretty typical of a manifestation. Did your friend say anything? Acknowledge your presence in any way that made you think he was there for you in particular?”

  Magnus thought for a minute, scrtching his fingers through his stubble. “I’m pretty sure he mouthed my name, although there wasn’t any noise to go with it. He reached one arm out in my direction. How does that help?”

  “I’m not sure if it does,” Donata said ruefully. “I think it is clear that the Ulf candidates are being targeted somehow; everyone is being haunted by a ghost who means something to them personally. That is to say, you aren’t just being visited by random dead Ulfhednar. Freddy was visited by his brother, you by your friend. Someone is doing this on purpose. I just can’t figure out why or how. Thanksgiving is a week away, and I’m still not getting anywhere.” She ground her teeth in frustration. “I’m sorry. You brought me here to help, and I’m useless.”

  Magnus moved her—effortlessly, as usual—until she was turned so he could put his arm around her. “You are certainly not useless, Donata. I hadn’t even thought about people being targeted in some way, beyond just being Ulf candidates. And I’m sure you’ll come up with a solution eventually.”

  “Even though I can’t seem to talk to the ghosts successfully and broke my great-aunt’s Ouija board,” Donata said glumly. “And have half the universe waiting for me to give them the impossible or else.”

  “Even though,” Magnus said with a laugh. “I have faith in you.”

  Donata thought about her conversation with her great-aunt and the brown bag from the pharmacy tucked under the sink in her bathroom. “Maybe you shouldn’t,” she said. She sighed, kissed him gently on his bruised forehead, and left the room before she burst into tears.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Donata stared at the little white stick in disbelief. She’d spent the previous evening worrying and zoning out on all the conversations around her, and the night tossing and turning while she went over and over the events of the day. Now this.

  Seriously. It was as though the gods were laughing at her.

  She hadn’t really been concerned when her great-aunt told her about the other possibility she’d thought of that could cause a Witch’s magic to behave erratically. Apparently in a small proportion of the population, pregnancy sometimes caused this problem during the first trimester. Tatiana had said something about the baby’s energy disrupting the mother’s magic until their life forces became more synchronized with each other. To tell the truth, Donata hadn’t really been listening. She’d been too busy denying the possibility with one part of her brain while counting backward with the other.

  She’d been in Gimle for twenty-six days as of that morning. Before that, she’d been fighting a Major Anemoi and dealing with a Dragon, and doing whatever the hell it was she’d been doing with Peter. She hadn’t even noticed when she’d missed a period. And to be honest, if she had, she probably would have chalked it all up to stress anyway.

  The little pink plus sign stared back at her from the stupid white stick. Stress. Yup. Feeling that now.

  Of course, just because her magic wasn’t working right and some chemicals on a piece of plastic had turn
ed colors didn’t mean she was pregnant. Obviously she was going to have to go back into Masonville and get a more professional opinion. Donata had noticed a small, discreet Planned Parenthood sign on the way to the hospital the other day. She’d just borrow a vehicle, go in and get tested, and some nice person in a doctor’s jacket would tell her she was freaking out for nothing. That was the plan.

  “Congratulations,” the nurse practitioner said with a smile. “You’re definitely pregnant.”

  Crap. Crap with a side of whatever it was you had with really, really bad crap.

  “Oh,” Donata said. “You’re sure? You couldn’t have done the test wrong?” Her heart clenched painfully in her chest. She couldn’t tell if it was fear or just shock to have the news confirmed. She had no idea how she felt. How could this even be happening?

  The smile slid away. “I’m afraid not,” said the woman. She had kinky-curly brown hair, round wire-rimmed glasses, and a name tag that said Gloria. “I take it this isn’t a pleasant surprise? I thought perhaps at your age it would be.”

  Why? Because Donata was too old to screw up this badly, or because she was so old that if she was going to do it, now was the time? Of course, as a Witch, she actually lived longer than most Humans, and her race often started having babies later in life, but of course, she couldn’t tell the NP that.

  “I’m on birth control,” she said, trying not to sound as though she was making excuses. “I should have been fine.”

  Gloria shrugged. “No birth control is one hundred percent effective,” she said. “Were you on antibiotics anytime in the last couple of months? Or could you have missed a day? Sometimes that’s all it takes.”

  Donata thought about the broken nights of sleep due to having been given herbs that opened her to bizarre dreams, and dealing with Paranormal criminals, and all the other things that had happened in the month before she’d gotten to Maine. “No antibiotics,” she said. “But my life has been pretty crazy lately. I can’t swear I didn’t forget and not realize it.”

  She sighed. There was a certain irony to the entire situation. Ever since Anton Eastman had started sending her dreams about babies in an effort to persuade her to create one with him, she’d actually begun thinking about them. Maybe it was her age. Maybe it was just a lingering side effect from the psychological games he’d played. She had no way of knowing. But once she’d started thinking about having children, the notion seemed to have stuck in her mind. Watching Magnus being such a great uncle hadn’t helped any either.

  She had a sudden burst of memory of falling into the hole in the cave and put one hand protectively over her belly. Mine. My baby. Donata felt a swelling of some emotion too powerful to put a name to. Great goddess, her timing sucked. But still . . .

  “It happens,” the nurse practitioner was saying sympathetically. “Do you know what you want to do?”

  “Do?” Go home and hide under her bed, maybe? But it wasn’t her home, or her bed.

  “Will you be keeping the baby? There are options, of course, and I’d be happy to discuss them with you, but perhaps you’d like to talk to the baby’s father first?”

  Crap.

  Donata blinked a couple of times, trying to digest the whole thing. “I’m definitely keeping the baby,” she said. That was certain, although she didn’t have much idea what else was. Including the identity of the baby’s father. The last time she’d had sex with Peter and the first time she’d slept with Magnus weren’t that far apart, and both theoretically fell in the right time frame, as far as she could tell.

  “Do you have any idea how far along I am?” she asked.

  “From what you’ve said and your physical exam, I’d guess a month to a month and a half. You might get a better idea from an ultrasound, but it is a bit early for that.”

  Great. So, it could be either of them. Just when she thought her life couldn’t get any more complicated. Thank goodness she hadn’t slept with Anton. Having three fathers to choose from would just be embarrassing.

  Donata walked out of the clinic with a handful of pamphlets and a spinning head. Out of habit, she walked to the small park in the town square and sat on her favorite bench. A couple of pigeons had been sitting on it and fluttered indignantly at her as she plopped down nearly on top of them.

  “Sorry, guys,” she said, figuring that talking to pigeons was probably the least of her problems. “I need this bench more than you do.”

  “Have you returned to give me the information I desire?” a voice said. West took the space next to her.

  Oh, great. This day just gets better and better.

  “No,” she said. “Also, go away.”

  West looked down at the pamphlets in her hands and then back up at her face, which no doubt looked somewhat shell-shocked. His eyes lit with an unholy glee.

  “You are with child!” he said. “It worked!”

  “Do you mind keeping your voice down?” Donata muttered. There might be people from Gimle around, and the last thing she needed was for word to get back to Magnus before she could figure out how she was going to tell him herself. And what exactly she was going to say when she did.

  Then the rest of what West had said sank in. “What do you mean, ‘It worked’?”

  “Anton succeeded. You are with child.” He gazed at her speculatively. “So far you seem healthy enough. How do you feel?”

  I feel like you should stop staring at my belly. “I don’t know what you’re thinking,” Donata said. “But whatever it is, you’re wrong. Anton and I never got to the point of being physical. He just slipped wormwood into my wine and sent me weird dreams about sex and babies. Not cool, by the way. Not cool at all. But there is no way this child is his.” She didn’t even bother to deny the pregnancy, since the top pamphlet said in large letters: So, You’re Pregnant. Now What?

  West shook his head, as animated as she’d ever seen him. “You’re the one who is wrong, Ms. Santori. The Major Anemoi do not need physical contact to reproduce. The dreams you speak of carry energy from one to the other, intermingling until new energy is created.”

  “Yeesh,” Donata said. “No wonder your race is dying out.” She held up one hand. “Sorry, that was uncalled for. I realize you’re desperate, although that doesn’t excuse either his actions or your threats. But I promise you, that might work between two Major Anemoi, but I’m a Witch, and we need actual mingling of bodily fluids. The baby is either part Dragon or part Ulfhednar, but there is no way it is a Major Anemoi.”

  “You don’t know that,” West said. “When the child is born, you will see. It will be the salvation of our race, and it belongs to us.”

  Donata could hear herself growling, and in the back of her head she thought, I’ve been hanging out with Magnus too much. “My baby doesn’t belong to you or anyone else, and if you think I’m going to give him or her up, you are sadly mistaken.”

  “Tell me where Anton Eastman is,” West insisted. “He will tell you what he did.”

  “I told you before. I can’t help you find him.”

  “Then my previous warning stands, Witch,” West said, rising. “You have until the full moon to tell me his whereabouts, or things will get very ugly.” He stared at her belly hungrily. “Now more than ever, it is crucial that we talk to him.”

  “You might want to think again about threatening me,” Donata said. “If you really believe what you say, that this child is part Major Anemoi, you can’t harm me without harming the baby that could save your race.”

  “True,” West said, his brown eyes glinting in the afternoon sun. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t harm your friends or family. You are important to us. They are not. I will see you before the full moon rises. Or they will not see it set.”

  Donata ground her teeth. It was getting harder and harder to feel sympathetic, dying race or not. And now she had to worry about whether or not what he’d said about the ba
by could possibly be true. The problem with dealing with a lost race was there was no place to look up information about them. She was going to have to figure out another way to discover the identity of her baby’s father. But right this very minute, she couldn’t figure out how.

  Back at the house, the calm oasis she’d left seemed to have erupted into controlled chaos. The kitchen was filled with what seemed at first glance to be an army of women, although when Donata got over her initial shock, it turned out to be Astrid, Kari, a neighbor named Ingrid, and someone else Donata thought she’d seen around the town but didn’t know. Astrid was directing an orchestra of pot stirring, bread kneading, and chicken plucking. After a quick look at the latter, Donata carefully aimed her eyes elsewhere; her stomach hadn’t been giving her problems yet, other than the sudden dislike of coffee and that one drastic reaction to her attempt to use magic, but she didn’t want to push her luck.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, hanging the car keys up on their hook by the door and taking off her coat hurriedly. The kitchen must have been forty degrees warmer than the outside air.

  Astrid glanced up from a scribbled list, looking both frazzled and relieved. “Oh, Donata, you’re back. Thank goodness. We could use another pair of hands.”

  “I’m happy to help if I can, although my cooking skills are fairly basic,” she said. “What’s the occasion?”

  Astrid wiped one hand across her forehead, leaving a floury streak. “They’ve called a Thing. For tomorrow. I don’t know how they expect us to be ready in time.”

  “A thing?” Donata was pretty sure she was missing something. “What kind of thing? Like a party kind of thing?”

  Kari rolled her eyes. “Thing with a capital T,” she said. “It’s a formal meeting of representatives from all the clans. Kind of like our regular Assembly on steroids. There will be Lawspeakers like Halfrida from a number of towns, along with whoever they bring with them. Usually people come from all over the East Coast territory, but because this one is so last-minute, it will probably be limited to the clans who live within a few hundred miles of here. They’ll all represent their clan members from farther away.”