He turned to me. “Time, to us, is not the same as it is to a human. We would wait and one day we would be together again.”
But time, human or magick, was not on their side. The Fae community in Salem was small but their anger at the loss of Da’Elle was large. Aerynn became the focus of their bitter rage.
“They monitored my every move,” he said, shaking his head sadly at the memory. “Probes violated the sanctity of my thoughts on an hourly basis. In order to protect my soul mate, I had to banish her from my thoughts, my heart.”
“But you couldn’t,” I said.
“No,” he replied, “I couldn’t. At least, not completely.” Now and again he monitored the progress of Sugar Maple through the eyes of Penelope the cat, who had been Aerynn’s familiar from the cradle. The seasons changed and the memory of the troubles grew fainter, less charged with passion. He consoled himself with the thought that each year brought them closer to being together. The day would come when the old problems would disappear and the need for secrecy and caution would disappear with them.
Until then, he could only wait.
Time passed. Too much time as it turned out.
One day the unthinkable happened and Aerynn pierced the veil.
“How did you know she was gone,” I asked, “if you hadn’t been in communication with her since she left Salem?”
His smile was bittersweet. “She came to say good-bye.”
27
CHLOE
It would take a week to explain the traditions that surrounded piercing the veil. I struggled to condense it enough so I could bring Luke up to speed.
“Your essence—your soul, if you will—travels about this dimension prior to piercing the veil and bestows blessings on the ones you love.” I looked over at Samuel. “Do I have it right?” Very few townspeople had left us during my time on earth so my experience was minimal.
The old man nodded while Luke looked like he was rapidly approaching magick overload. Who could blame him? I felt like I was drowning in it myself.
“But it’s always your choice, right?” Luke asked. “You determine when you pierce the veil.”
“Even we have an allotted span,” Samuel said. “Mine is longer than most.” And Aerynn’s had been considerably shortened when she sacrificed some of her own life force to empower the talisman.
I had grown up knowing that the odds were against me. No Hobbs woman had ever managed to get the guy and keep him. Forever wasn’t in our DNA. The only thing we could do was cherish every day we had with the man we loved and not be surprised when destiny had its way. I hadn’t kept this fact a secret from Luke but knowing it and understanding it were two very different things.
I would outlive him. Probably by a very long time. The day would come when he would breathe his last and I would be forced to go on without him, moving down through the years cloaked in the old loneliness I knew all too well. That was the flip side of the magick I had claimed when I fell in love.
He understood it now and the look in his eyes broke my heart. I wanted to reach out and reassure him that it would be different for us but the truth was I knew it couldn’t be. My half-human lineage would even things out a little bit but not enough to matter. Sooner rather than later it would be our turn to say good-bye.
“Why didn’t you join her?” I asked the old man, not caring that the question was insensitive. “If you loved her the way you claim you did, what kept you in this dimension if you could have been together in hers?”
I had to hand it to him: he didn’t flinch or look away. “I stayed because we knew the day would come when you would need the help of family.”
I couldn’t help laughing out loud. The word family wasn’t even in my vocabulary.
The bitterness in my voice was unmistakable. “You believed I would come to Salem to find you even though I didn’t know you existed until twenty minutes ago.”
“Yes.”
“I told you this wasn’t my idea.” That fact bore repeating.
“But you are here just the same.”
In the movies I loved, the books I reread a thousand times, this was the point where the wise old grandfather would open his arms wide and the needy young granddaughter would run into them and all of her problems would be solved in one homily-filled fireside chat. But even though I’d spent my life longing for exactly that, I didn’t have a clue how to make the first move.
Or even if I wanted to.
“I want my town back,” I said to Samuel Bramford, “and I need your help to get it. That’s the only reason we’re having this conversation.” I told him exactly what had happened and how I had tried and failed to access the Book of Spells for help.
“The Book does not contain the answer you seek.”
“Then what does?”
“You should have figured that out by now.”
“And you should come with a translator,” I snapped, “because I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”
“Chloe.” Luke sounded a warning but I was beyond worrying about anyone’s feelings.
“Do you understand him?” I challenged Luke. “Do you understand one single word he’s said since we got here?” I waved my arms in the air like a frustrated windmill. “You’re the one who said the clock was ticking. We’re wasting time, Luke.” I aimed a deadly stare in Bramford’s direction. “He’s wasting our time!”
What did it take to anger the old man? The patient look he gave me was filled with something that looked an awful lot like love.
Which was totally ridiculous. We didn’t know each other. We would never really know each other. You couldn’t possibly love someone you didn’t know. They said blood ran thicker than water but you couldn’t prove it by me. I had never really had the opportunity to love or be loved by someone with whom I shared familial blood.
And yet I felt an answering rush of emotion that I would rather die than acknowledge.
“You do not need the Book, Chloe.” Bramford’s voice seemed to emanate from every part of the tower room. “You need only what is in your head and in your heart.”
“That’s a big help,” I said, with even more snark than I’d intended. “If you tell me life is like a box of chocolates, I’m out of here.”
He laughed out loud, a rippling rumble of a laugh that snapped my head back in surprise. “You got the reference?” I asked.
“I have been waiting for you a long time,” he said. “DVDs and knitting are a grand pairing.”
Poor Luke. Knitters were hard enough for civilians to understand. Sorcerers who knit while they watched Forrest Gump were probably impossible.
But again I refused to allow emotion to cloud my purpose. I didn’t want to feel anything for this stranger who claimed to be Aerynn’s soul mate and the father of her child.
“So how do I retrieve Sugar Maple?” I zeroed back in on the matter at hand and I would keep on zeroing back until I got an answer out of him.
“How did you lose it?” he countered.
“We went through this before. I didn’t lose it,” I said with deadly calm. “It vanished.”
“Because your commitment was not strong enough to keep it. Your loyalties were divided. Your love for Luke made you blind to the dangers facing Sugar Maple.”
“That’s not true! Why do you think we were at the waterfall? I was there to prevent Isadora from pulling the town beyond the mist.”
“The child’s welfare became your priority. The safety of the town was a very distant second.”
“The child’s soul was Isadora’s priority. Do you have any idea what Isadora had planned for that little girl?” A yawning black dimension of eternal loneliness that should be reserved as a hell for the worst creatures who ever walked the earth. Luke’s daughter deserved better than that.
“You are wrong. The child was merely Isadora’s tool for prying Sugar Maple out of your control and moving it beyond the mist, but you saw yourself in her plight and acted from your heart. It is your commitment to S
ugar Maple that wavered.”
My eyes flooded with tears I struggled to blink back. Like I said before, the lonely girl inside me was never far from the surface.
“For a moment I committed my heart and soul to saving Steffie. How could that possibly cause Sugar Maple to vanish?” I asked Samuel.
“The talisman observed your loss of commitment at a time when Sugar Maple’s residents needed your leadership most and took it from you.”
I looked over at Luke but he was in full cop mode and his expression gave away nothing. I took the plunge alone.
“So you’re saying that the talisman—an old piece of jewelry, a keepsake—took over the town?”
I had to hand it to the old man. He didn’t bat an eye as he launched into an explanation.
“Since its creation the talisman has been sought after not only as a symbol of unity but as proof of strength. It began with Aerynn, who imbued it with the ability to protect Sugar Maple, and each of her descendants added to its powers, further ensuring the supremacy of the Hobbs clan.”
“My mother didn’t,” I said. “She left this dimension only a few earth years after her own mother pierced the veil.”
“A rare exception to what had been the rule,” Samuel agreed, “and one that weakened the chain. The years between Guinevere’s leave-taking and your assumption of your powers were fraught with peril.”
I frowned at him. “Peril? The town thrived!”
“That is what the residents of Sugar Maple wanted you to think,” Samuel said. “You were struggling to find your way in the world, battling loneliness, waiting for the day when your powers would finally come to life. They didn’t want you to know that with every day that passed, the talisman swayed closer to changing allegiance to Isadora.”
Now that was just plain crazy talk. “But the talisman belonged to Aerynn’s descendants. Even if Isadora stole it away, it would still respond only to a Hobbs.”
Samuel shook his head sadly. “Before Aerynn and Da’Elle left Salem, their powers were nearly equal. The talisman gave Aerynn the edge that conferred leadership upon her. Da’Elle only followed her to Sugar Maple because she hoped to capture the talisman then return to Salem and rebuild the community the Witch Trials had decimated. Over time, going beyond the mist replaced going back to Salem in the hearts of Da’Elle’s descendants, but the hunger for the talisman only grew stronger.”
“I thought Sugar Maple was my destiny and my mother’s before me and her mother’s, all the way back to Aerynn.” This was like finding out there was no Santa Claus but worse.
“Aerynn’s line has thus far proved wise and strong but do you believe the Fae would willingly play second fiddle to her descendants if there was no chance they could one day ascend to power?” He paused for a second to catch his breath. “The answer is no, Chloe: the leadership of Sugar Maple has always been determined by possession of the talisman and always will be.”
“So nothing ever changed,” I said. “We have the same problems with Isadora and her followers as Aerynn had with Da’Elle and hers.”
“The bitterness runs deep and long,” Samuel said with a quick glance toward Luke. “The treatment they received at human hands instilled a mighty distrust that time only served to intensify. When your mother Guinevere fell in love with your human father, the battle lines were drawn. Their deaths, however, only served to cool the flames for a moment because you posed an even bigger problem.”
“They hated the idea of a leader with human blood,” I said. “It’s their worst nightmare.”
“No,” Samuel said, “their worst nightmare is the thought of the child you and Luke will one day have.”
A child whose blood was three-quarters human and only one-quarter magick.
“The thought that the day would come when a leader who was more human than magick would assume control with the power of the talisman to enforce her rule had Isadora’s clan teetering on the edge.”
It took the arrival of Luke’s ex-wife to bring everything tumbling down around us.
“Aerynn wasn’t a seer but she understood the nature of her community. The only way they would survive in the mortal world was if the magick and Fae clans could continue to live in harmony. She knew that there would come a time when the tug-of-war would begin again and the sanctuary she had built in Sugar Maple would be in danger of toppling.”
And so Aerynn reached for the talisman, the disk of Welsh gold that Samuel had placed in her care on the night she fled Salem, and imbued it with powers of its own that would far outlive her own stay in this dimension.
“I thought the talisman already had magick,” Luke said.
“You listen well,” Samuel said, nodding his leonine head. “But Aerynn had something else in mind.”
“The talisman would become an entity, a living thing with intellect and judgment and a strong sense of responsibility toward the future of Sugar Maple. No longer an inanimate object acquired to enhance an individual’s power. The choices it made would be with the village’s best interests at heart. Everything else would be secondary to that.
“If the talisman ever sensed that a Hobbs woman had lost control of the two factions and a coup was imminent, a fail-safe mechanism would be activated and Sugar Maple would be put in lockdown.”
“Lockdown?” I imagined a high-security prison with guards and iron bars.
“Isn’t that the modern terminology?” Samuel asked. “I heard it on Law & Order.”
Luke assured him his terminology was correct.
“The town would be relegated to an alternate dimension,” Samuel continued, “until if or when the problem resolved itself.”
I felt like I had been kicked in the gut. Losing the town in battle to Isadora would have been easier to accept than this. I had lost it the moment I fell in love and let it slip through my fingers.
“My mother turned her back on Sugar Maple when she joined my father in mortal death. Why didn’t that trigger a lockdown?”
“Despite the upheaval your mother’s passing created, the town still thought as one. Fae and magick lived peacefully together as Aerynn had hoped. Sorcha was there to guide you into adulthood and the villagers were willing to wait for your powers to finally bloom. Those were good years for Sugar Maple. Happy ones.”
“And then I grew up and blew it by falling in love with a mortal instead of a good-natured werebear from Ohio or a selkie from Maine.” Someone who would bring more magick into the Hobbs genetic equation.
Samuel held my gaze. “We don’t choose our destiny, child, not in this dimension or any other I have encountered. Our destiny chooses us.”
“So tell me what to do,” I demanded. “Don’t give me stories. Don’t show me home movies. Tell me what to do so I can get my home back.”
“Stake your claim,” he snapped, his temper obviously rising. “If you believe Sugar Maple is your destiny, then stand up and fight for what belongs to you.”
“All I’ve done these last few months is fight for Sugar Maple. I wasn’t raised to be a warrior!” The only thing I liked to fight was a balky cable crossing in an Aran sweater.
He rose to his feet. He towered over me. Anger radiated from him in waves of red and black that reared up and battled like cobras above his head. At least now I knew where my temper came from.
“You’re not a warrior yet,” he bellowed. “You don’t know the meaning of the word. You fought to save your mate. You fought to save his child. But not once have you ever fought to save your home.” He fixed me with a look that almost brought me to my knees. “Are you woman enough to do battle, Chloe, or will you be the Hobbs who loses everything?”
28
LUKE
We were going home.
According to Samuel, the Salem Fae had been in our old neighborhood since Sugar Maple disappeared, which was how they had managed to take control of Penny the cat and manipulate her actions during our road trip from hell. He was reasonably sure they were planning to stake claim to the town as soon as t
hey could find the talisman.
“Mortals believe they have long memories,” Samuel said as a pine table laden with steamed lobster, crabs, shrimp, ears of yellow corn, and snowy white potatoes appeared in the center of the room, “but the Fae will hold a grudge for millennia and beyond.”
“The talisman wouldn’t turn the town over to the Fae,” Chloe said. “Would it?”
“If the talisman deemed the Fae the best caretakers for Sugar Maple, then yes, it’s possible.”
“They tried to kill us,” Chloe said. “They sent us plunging off a cliff. They blinded Luke. If the talisman is half as smart as you say it is, how could it possibly hand Sugar Maple to creatures like that?”
“The Fae fight for what they believe in,” Samuel rebutted. “They are willing to risk all to achieve their goal.”
“So did the Nazis,” Chloe shot back. “So did Pol Pot. There has to be more to the equation than ferocity and focus.”
Samuel smiled as Elspeth and Janice materialized next to him. I had the feeling he was responsible for the timing.
“Sit down,” he said. “Enjoy the feast. We will all need nourishment for what lies ahead.”
Chloe did as told. High color splotched her cheeks and her eyes were unnaturally bright. She wasn’t finished with Samuel yet. Not by a long shot.
Me? I was scared shitless. I had battled the Fae twice before and I would have bought the farm both times if first Gunnar, then Chloe hadn’t come to the rescue. My odds weren’t looking too good.
Although Samuel had assured me that we were not living by the human clock in the lighthouse and only seconds had passed in the real world since our arrival, I felt the urgency to get back on the road.
“He is as jumpy as a bug on a skillet,” Elspeth observed, looking over at me. “It must be a human trait.”
Janice laughed and whispered something that made the old crone cackle as she cracked a lobster claw with her twisted fingers.
“You two are getting along,” Chloe observed. “So blood really is thicker than water.”
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