Spell of Vanishing

by Anna Abner

  Talia struggled to all fours.

  “Breathe, honey,” he said, rubbing her back as she trembled uncontrollably. “Deep breaths.”

  “I had to,” she cried, her voice raw and scratchy. “Cole, I had to cast your nightmare spell. I didn’t have a choice.”

  Cole ceased rubbing.

  Hours of unending blood, death, and horror because of her.

  He’d lost touch with his friends. With reality. With who he was. Because of her.

  They both heard the squeak at the same time. Someone or something was making noise in the spare bedroom.

  Talia, even half drowned, was still faster than him and got to the spot a moment before him.

  A little boy was lying on a bare mattress, stretching as if waking from a long sleep.

  “Talia?” he murmured, rubbing his eyes.

  “Sylvester!” She yanked him off the bed, all ninety pounds of him, and held him against her chest.

  Talia burst into noisy, nonsensical sobbing as she clung to the child. Hearing the agony and relief mixed in her voice, Cole realized that, in the last few days, she’d convinced herself her nephew was dead.

  Thank God, he was very much alive.

  She held him so tightly she must be hurting the boy, but he didn’t seem to mind, holding on just as tightly to his aunt. Sylvester’s narrow fingers made fists in her shirt until they turned white under the strain.

  “Go,” Cole told her, clearing a lump in his throat. “Get him to the police. I’ll clean up the witch.”

  “Yeah.” She nodded, not looking at him at all. “Yeah, I’ll go.” She grasped Sylvester’s hand and rushed him out of the house, leaving Cole standing amid the rubble. Alone.

  Minutes passed. He wasn’t sure how many.

  He stared at the mess he’d made, realizing he’d ended a person’s life. And Talia had nearly ended his.

  Nothing made sense anymore. Reality teetered on the brink of collapse.

  “Cole!”

  Dani careened into the room, leaping over two-by-fours and broken furniture to grab him into a tight, oppressive embrace.

  “I’m okay,” he murmured, feeling like the doll she’d loved, lost, and rediscovered in the last place she expected him to be.

  “Where’s the wraith?” David asked, staying at the periphery of the wreckage.

  Cole pointed.

  “Oh, Jesus.” David didn’t get any closer.

  “I’ll take care of it.” Dani released Cole and picked her way nearer the messy remains of the roof. Eventually, she knelt, and he spotted a pale, lifeless hand visible between clumps of sheetrock.

  “You two go outside,” Dani said. “I’ll be a minute.” She called her power and frosted over from head to toe like a Popsicle straight from the freezer. He had no doubt the wraith’s body would be dust before he reached the front door.

  Sure enough, a moment later Dani rushed around him, gesturing for him to hurry. But the inundation of magic he’d suffered made him unsteady. He stumbled on the sidewalk and reached for Dani.

  “Don’t touch me,” she screeched, stepping back as Cole dropped to one knee. “I’m not in control. I’ll hurt you.”

  Grunting, he rose. “Sorry.”

  “Just go,” she said as a familiar, stripped-down Jeep pulled to a fast stop along the curb.

  Becca stepped out gracefully, a pure professional as she faced the growing crowd of neighbors and lookyloos.

  “Everyone stay back.” Even shouting, she managed to sound both sweet and authoritative at the same time. All eyes shifted to her. “I’m a Realtor. These are my clients.” She smiled with exaggerated exasperation. “I told them this place was an accident waiting to happen. They shouldn’t have gone in without me. But don’t worry. The police are on their way to cordon off the entire property.”

  Over her shoulder, Rebecca hissed at Dani. “Get Cole out of here. I can sweet talk the police, but one look at him, and they’ll know I’m lying through my teeth.” She crossed the street and handed out glossy business cards to the witnesses.

  Did he look that bad? Cole glanced down, noticing for the first time smears of blood and white powder coating both his clothes and skin. Yeah, Becca was right. He looked like an escaped lunatic.

  “In we go,” Dani said, waving Cole into the back of David’s big Suburban, while she and her boyfriend took the seats up front.

  The moment his back hit the comfortable cloth seat, Cole’s eyes slid closed and he exhaled, and immediately relived the moment the roof had crushed the wraith.

  “I killed her.” He’d never considered how easy it would be to take a life. He glanced up as David pulled away from the Carver’s house and onto the street, driving slowly and cautiously, not at all like a suspicious person fleeing the scene of a crime.

  It reminded him of the careful way Talia drove, but thinking of her hurt too much.

  “I killed someone,” Dani admitted, twisting in her seat to look him in the eye.

  “The Carver.” He’d already heard.

  “How did you know?”

  Cole smirked. “Spirits love to gossip.”

  She faced front. “He was a cruel, despicable man who tortured both David and I without remorse.” She glanced at David and then their hands met over the gearshift as if drawn together. “Once he threatened to hurt David’s little boy, Ryan, I knew he’d keep coming. He’d never give us a moment of peace until either we were dead or he was dead.”

  Cole glowered at his hands, shocked they had taken a woman’s life as easily as tugging on a lamp pull. “Is this a dream?”

  “No, Cole, this is very, very real.” When he didn’t reply, she asked, “What happened? You were supposed to wait for us.”

  He skipped the part about killing the wraith, which seemed fairly self-explanatory. “Talia cast the nightmare spell that almost destroyed me.” Which was the main point as far as he was concerned.

  “What?” Her voice startled him, making the interior of the vehicle perceptively chillier. “Where is she? I’ll kill her.”

  “She took her nephew and left.”

  “She found the boy?” Dani asked. “So, I guess something good happened.”

  He wasn’t sure about anything anymore.

  If Talia had cast his nightmare spell, then had she been playing him the entire time? Was she still very much on the cabal’s payroll?

  “I don’t know,” he groaned into his palms.

  “What?”

  He was talking to himself. On top of everything else. Great.

  David caught his eye briefly in the rear view mirror. “Did she attack you, or not?”

  God, his thoughts would not line up in any understandable way. More like blood splatter on a wall. Unreadable.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s some sick shit,” Dani said. “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s not good enough,” she said, sounding increasingly agitated. “She’ll have to go to the police and explain how she found the kid,” Dani said. “She could implicate you. She could implicate all of us.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Cole was feeling more like himself. After seventy-two hours in his own home, in his own clothes, in his own bed, he was almost completely physically recuperated.

  Emotionally, however, he still had a ways to go.

  He rolled up at David Wilkes’ house in his Subaru sports coupe, and as he climbed from the car a harried older woman walking David’s little boy by the hand came out the front door.

  “Go on inside,” she said with an exasperated sigh. “They’re all waiting for you.”

  He hadn’t made it halfway up the driveway when the screen banged open, Willow ran out, and threw herself against him. Taken by surprise, he hugged her back.

  The stunning young woman, at five feet ten, was almost as tall as he was, and when she pulled away to see into his face, they were eye to eye.

  “Oh, my God,” she cried. “It’s really you?”

&
nbsp; He laughed awkwardly. “It’s really me.”

  She ducked in for another tight squeeze. “You have no idea how worried we were,” she said. “We thought we’d lost you.”

  Cole had spent a lot of time with Willow and the other casters in the Raleigh coven talking about spells and hypothetical situations, but he hadn’t realized until right then that, though they needed him, they might actually care for him as well. Hiding from them had been a mistake. A stupid, selfish mistake.

  “I’m sorry.”

  If Willow was this distraught over his disappearance, think of the damage he’d done to his family. Despite his promise to Talia, he still hadn’t called home.

  An oversight he intended on setting right immediately.

  “Come inside,” she said, finally releasing him. “Everyone’s here to welcome you home.”

  She wasn’t kidding. The living room was crowded with witches and necromancers. And every one of them was in a rush to hug him, shake his hand, and look deeply into his eyes to gauge for themselves if he was okay.

  His fingers curled around the cell phone in his pocket, itching to call Talia and tell her to get her little butt over there.

  But he withdrew his hand and accepted the beer Dani offered him instead. Though Talia hadn’t called him since their showdown with the White Wraith, she was with her family and that was too important for him to interrupt. No matter how much he selfishly wanted to see her.

  There must have been long days and longer nights with her mom and sister as they went over Sylvester’s reappearance and simply enjoyed being together as a family again.

  When she was ready, she’d come to him.

  The crush of witches and necromancers, not to mention the stray spirits, became too much for him to accept. Overheated and a little anxious, he snuck out the kitchen door and onto a patio.

  Apparently, he wasn’t the only partygoer feeling overwhelmed. Holden loitered in the middle of the concrete rectangle sipping a beer.

  “Congratulations on your engagement,” Cole blurted out. The only rational thing he could think to say.

  “Thanks.” He smiled as if he couldn’t help himself. “Speaking of lovely women, where’s Talia?” he asked, and then lowered his voice. “She didn’t turn out to be evil, did she?”

  “Sort of.” Cole chuckled derisively. “She tried to cast a nightmare spell on me once, but apart from that, she’s as sweet as can be.” He gulped down the beer. “She just got her nephew back from the cabal and is spending a few days with her family.”

  “Oh.” He, too, took a drink. “How do you know she cast the spell? I mean, are you sure it was her?”

  “I’m sure.” But the nagging thoughts he couldn’t shake rose to the surface. “But here’s the thing I can’t reconcile. Maybe you can help.” At Holden’s nod, Cole continued. “The nightmare spell was complicated and dark, and Talia isn’t capable of casting that level of black magic.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think they fooled her into believing she was responsible, but it was actually her handler, the Carver. It was another way to control her. Make her think she’d done this horrible thing and the only people who’d ever understand were the bastards in the cabal.”

  “Sick,” Holden said. “But it’s right up their alley to mess with a person like that.”

  Cole finished his beer. “Now, I just have to talk to her.”

  “What’s stopping you?”

  Good question. The fear and uncertainty had haunted him the last couple of nights he’d curled into his bed alone. He was ashamed to admit to his friend he’d suffered nightmares again, something he thought he’d gotten past.

  He voiced the real question he couldn’t bear to answer. “What if she was evil the whole time?”

  Holden stared at the dark bottle in his hands for a long few moments. Finally, he glanced up. “I’m gonna say there’s a ninety-nine percent chance she’s not evil at all.”

  Cole smirked. “But it’s that one percent that worries me.”

  “Didn’t you spend almost a week with her? You know her better than any of us. Is she evil?”

  The answer was an automatic response. “No.” Not even a little bit.

  “There you go.” Holden tipped his bottle at Cole and then drank deeply.

  “I gotta find the bathroom,” Cole said. “I’ll talk to you later.” He slipped into the house, avoiding eye contact because there was something important he needed to do. Something he should’ve done a week ago, like Talia told him to.

  Cole locked the bathroom door behind him. He stood at the sink, scrutinizing his reflection for a long time. He looked the same—thin, but strong. Black hair tumbled into his dark eyes. Except he didn’t feel the same. He felt unmade, switched around, and slapped back together.

  He pulled his phone, the same burner he’d been using for days because he didn’t want to lose her number, and scrolled through his contacts. He paused on Talia Jackson.

  But he didn’t push call. He just kept scrolling. When she was ready to talk, she’d call.

  Cole dialed a number and waited, his stomach a glob of lead, while it rang.

  “Cole?”

  “Hi, Mom,” he said, trying his hardest not to cry at the sound of her anxious voice. He moved the phone away from his mouth in order to take a ragged breath and calm down.

  She’s alive.

  I didn’t kill her.

  It wasn’t real.

  “Sweetheart, thank goodness you called!” She sniffed hard. “How are you? How are you feeling?”

  “I’m good,” he assured, knowing how much she worried.

  “Where have you been?” she exclaimed. “We had police and investigators searching for you. What happened?”

  “I’m sorry about that,” he said. “I needed a few days to myself after getting out of the hospital.” And the abduction and the nightmare spell. Neither of which his mother would understand.

  “Have you been to see Dr. Reynolds yet?” she asked. “You should go right away. He’ll make time for you. You need to have your heart tested.”

  “I’m fine, Mom.” He smiled, the same old annoyance surfacing at her overprotective nature. But he didn’t mind it this time. “I’ve been checked out. No problems whatsoever. But never mind that. How’s Caitlyn?” His little sister lived at home while she attended Colorado State full time.

  “Besides being worried out of her mind about you?” Mom chided. “She’s doing great, baby. She’s in her bedroom. Hang on a sec.”

  A rustling. A muffled question. And then his sister’s voice. “Cole? What happened? I thought you were dead, you bastard.”

  He chuckled again. “No, just hiding.”

  “You need to fly home,” she said. “Mom and Dad are wrecks. They’ve been on the phone nonstop for two weeks with every cop and doctor in North Carolina. They really need to see you.” There was a pause. “I really need to see you, big brother.”

  He moved the phone again before he spoke. “I’ll book a flight.”

  After hanging up, Cole dialed Talia’s number to tell her the good news. His mom and sister were alive and well and he wanted her to fly home with him for a couple days.

  But he hesitated to hit send.

  She needed time. To visit with her family. To mend fences. To hug Sylvester.

  He turned his phone off, put it away, and went back to the party.

  * * *

  The flowers had wilted, some even turning to crispy curls of an indeterminate gray. But the cards, notes, and tiny teddy bears were still piled into a pyramid beside The Repository’s front doors. Cole took a picture of the well wishes with his phone before gathering it all up and stuffing it into the nearest trash bin. In a couple days he’d write a thank you letter in a customer newsletter because it meant a lot that so many people had gone out of their way to leave him messages when he’d disappeared.

  Cole opened his shop, turned on all the lights, and then swept the floors inside and out. His employees w
eren’t due for another hour. The doors wouldn’t open to the public another half hour after that. So, he went over the inventory and sales numbers for the last thirty days, basically counting every book, figurine, and poster in the store.

  The door chime sounded, signaling an arrival. Cole checked his watch. Still an hour before the shop technically opened for the day, but with the week he’d been having he wasn’t going to begrudge a customer. Setting aside a box of trading cards, he hurried out of the storeroom to greet his guest.

  But the friendly words of welcome died on his lips.

  “Hi,” Talia greeted, standing uncertainly by the Buffy the Vampire Slayer display case.

  Ignoring his brain’s commands to be cool, his eyes raked over her, enjoying the view of shapely legs and a hint of round, pale breasts visible in the vee of her blouse.

  “Hi.” He couldn’t form any more complex sentences.

  “I went to the police,” she said, “but you don’t have to worry. I told them as much of the truth as I could.”

  He was about to say he didn’t care at all about the police, but she obviously did.

  She rushed on. “I told them I recognized the house in Adrian’s photo and that I knew the owner only as the Carver, that he was a friend of a friend. They held me for hours, checking my story. Luckily, Sylvester doesn’t remember anything about anything. And when they figured out the Carver was Charlie Griffin, the same guy who abducted Dani and David, they let me go.”

  He didn’t know what to say. The sight of her—clean, healthy, and safe—was doing strange things to his insides.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, all kinds of guilt and uncertainty in her eyes. “I’ll go.”

  “You didn’t cast the nightmare spell,” he said. “You couldn’t have.”

  She ducked her head. “Yes, I did. I felt it forming inside me. I felt disgusting, black magic pass into you.”

  “Honey,” he began, grateful to finally be able to say this to her, “the Carver cast it, using you as a patsy. He wanted you to believe you did, to control you, but trust me, there is no way you cast that nightmare spell.”

  She seemed to consider the implications, but then shook her head. “It doesn’t matter whether I did, or not, I tried to. At that moment I had every intention of hurting you.” Her voice caught and down went her chin again. “I’m sorry.”