So I sang, “Let fighting cease, let time stand still, and this shall happen, I know it will.”
That’s right, I told time to stand still.
And it did.
Chapter 2
You see, I’m a witch.
I’ve known this practically all my life. I come from a family of powerful witches, which makes me the oddball because until recently I couldn’t cast a spell or do anything else mystical. I was just the painfully shy girl with the stammer who stayed in the background growing up, who couldn’t finish college, couldn’t settle on a career, couldn’t even hold down a decent job because my speech impediment made me not want to talk to anybody, about anything. I sure couldn’t bring myself to flirt with a guy, so I’d never really had a romantic relationship, either.
Then a funny thing happened. The temp agency I was signed up with sent me out on a job delivering singing telegrams on Halloween, dressed like a sexy witch. Ironic, right? Everything went okay up to a point. I even discovered that when I sang, I didn’t stammer, not a bit. I had heard of such things, but for some reason I’d never tried it myself. But it worked.
It worked too well when one of the singing telegrams I delivered turned out to be a magical spell sent by a woman who was the vengeful victim of a one night stand. Without even being aware of what I was doing, I cast a spell that shrunk a guy’s most precious appendage down to almost nothing. Thank goodness I was able to reverse the damage when I found out about it later. It’s true, the guy was sort of a jerk, but I was glad I hadn’t unknowingly doomed him to a life of, well, being short-sheeted, so to speak.
The discovery that I could do magic by singing it was just the beginning. Over the whirlwind course of the next few days, I found out the truth about my past: how I had opened a hole in the fabric of reality and almost wrecked the universe when I was only a toddler because I was maybe the most powerful witch in this realm; how the witches’ council, the ruling body of our kind, had wanted to either banish me or destroy me to protect the world from me; how my parents, Edward and Sandra McAllister, had stood up for me and convinced the witches’ council to put a couple of protective spells on me instead.
One of those spells gave me my stammer, so that I couldn’t get the words of a spell out smoothly and efficiently enough to make it work. The other suppressed my desire and ability to sing, just on the off chance that I would be able to do that without stuttering. Growing up, I never knew any of this, since the incident that provoked it occurred when I was too young to remember it.
Those protective spells had to be renewed from time to time to continue to be effective, though, and one of the members of the witches’ council charged with that task, Sharon Cole, had pawned off the job on her son Donovan. He didn’t know that his fiancée Angela Vandermeer (it was to be an arranged marriage) was crazy jealous and set out to discover what his interest in me was. That led to her sending the singing telegram that opened the whole can of worms…
It also led to me accidentally casting a spell that marooned Angela, Donovan’s mother Sharon, and my father Edward in the bleak, gray realm of the witches’ council, where Sharon and Angela had tried to kill me. They were trapped there, unreachable by anyone for at least a hundred years while the members of the council tried to figure out how to reverse my spell, and it just wasn’t fair. I had meant to send me and my father back to the human realm, but instead the spell had transported me and…him.
Donovan Cole.
The man I had fallen in love with but now hated.
Also on Halloween, in order to find out what was going on and why I was so important to the witches’ council, Donovan had pretended to come to my rescue. He had cast a spell to make me fall for him. He probably wouldn’t have needed to do that. He was handsome, funny, charming, smart…everything he needed to make him devastatingly attractive to a shy, lonely young woman who, on those inevitable dark nights of the soul, had convinced herself that there would never really be anyone for her. He didn’t need to bring magic into it and cheapen everything. His ulterior motives alone would have been enough for that.
When everything was revealed, when the council’s political intrigues had blown up in their faces and my father was trapped in that other world, I realized how much I hated Donovan Cole and didn’t want to ever have anything to do with him again.
Then a few days later, he had shown up at the apartment I share with my best friends Taylor and Beth and told me that the ancient book he had brought with him was the key to freeing my father and his mother without having to wait a hundred years for the witches’ council to do it. He had practically begged me to listen to him.
What else could I do?
I told him to tell me what it was all about.
o0o
“My mother has an extensive library of ancient, mystical tomes,” Donovan said. We were sitting on the sofa with a thick, dusty, leather-bound volume on the coffee table in front of us, lying on the piece of soft cloth in which Donovan had wrapped it to bring it over here. I was at one end of the sofa with my cat Matilda in my lap and Donovan was at the other, being careful not to crowd me. “I went through them searching for the one with the thickest layer of wards and protective spells on it, because I figured if she went to that much trouble to keep people out of it, there must be some powerful stuff inside.”
“That was p-pretty smart,” I said with a note of grudging admiration in my voice. I was still so mad at him I didn’t want to say anything nice to him, but I’ve always prided myself on being fair and giving credit where it’s due.
He shrugged and said, “Just common sense, I guess. Anyway, I figured out how to make it past some of the wards, but I couldn’t get very far. Just far enough to know that this is a compendium of some of the most powerful spells in the world, just as I’d hoped. A warlock named Eamon assembled them a thousand years ago.”
“That’s an Irish n-name, isn’t it?”
“That’s right.”
My name, Aren McAllister, is Scottish. So I feel a certain kinship with the Irish. That was irrelevant at the moment, though, so I told Donovan to go on.
“One of the spells in this book,” he said, “is a reversal spell. Eamon mentions that and warns that it should only be used in cases of dire emergency. He says it will reverse any spell cast, but it carries dangers of its own.”
“I don’t care about d-danger,” I said. “If it might get my father out of that awful p-place, I want to give it a t-try.”
“I thought you’d feel that way. That’s why I came to see you, even though I know I’m probably just about the last person you want to lay eyes on right now.”
“You’re right about that, b-buddy,” I said. “All right, let’s not waste any more t-time. Show m-me the spell.”
He made a face and slowly shook his head. “That’s just it. I can’t. I told you, I wasn’t able to get very far in the book because of the wards and spells on it. I haven’t found the reversal spell yet. I hoped maybe you could help me with that.”
“Let me get this s-straight,” I said, my voice rising a little with anger. “You w-worm your way in here by telling me you’ve found a way to rescue my f-father, but you really haven’t. You just think m-maybe you have.”
“The old warlock who wrote the book says it will reverse any spell. It’s what we need, I’m sure of it.”
“What do you expect me to d-do?”
“Help me break through the rest of the wards and protective spells,” Donovan said. “And then, once we’ve done that, the reversal spell will probably need to be translated. It’s written in Middle Irish, the forerunner of Gaelic, you know, like the rest of the book, and it doesn’t respond well to a universal translation spell…”
Frustration fueled my anger. “You got my hopes up,” I said. “Something like this could t-take years! It may even be the same th-thing the witches’ council is already working on.”
Donovan shook his head and said, “No, I don’t think so. Remember, my mother had this book,
and, well, my mother’s never been real big on…sharing. I don’t know how she got her hands on it, but something this powerful she would have wanted to keep for herself.”
I didn’t know Donovan’s mother all that well, but I didn’t like her. She’d been one of the council members who thought it would be a good idea to destroy me, back at the time of the Apocalypse Incident when I was three years old. The few times I’d been around her recently, she hadn’t done anything to endear herself to me. It’s hard to warm up to somebody who’s trying to blast you to atoms with a beam of magical force.
So I could believe without any trouble that Sharon would keep her possession of the warlock Eamon’s spell collection a secret from the other council members. But that still left me with unanswered questions.
“What makes you think th-this…this thing will d-do us any good?”
I waved a hand at the book in exasperation as I asked the question.
As soon as I did that, the book flew open where it lay on the coffee table.
I let out a startled yelp and flinched back against the sofa cushions. Matilda, who was a multi-colored, long-haired calico, hissed loudly, maybe because I jumped that way…or maybe because she sensed that something very odd had just happened. Sitting in my lap that way, she probably would have dug her claws into my leg, if she hadn’t been declawed by her previous owner.
Taylor and Beth were in Taylor’s bedroom. Taylor, who’s a lawyer at a big corporate firm, was the first of my human roommates to discover that I’m a witch. There hadn’t been any way to hide it from her, since we were both in deadly danger at the time. She’d been recuperating since then, so it came in handy that Beth, my other roommate, is a doctor. I figured they were both crowded up against the other side of Taylor’s bedroom door, trying to eavesdrop on my conversation with Donovan. I would have, if I’d been in their place.
When I yelped and Matilda hissed, the door popped open and Beth peered out with a look of concern on her face. “Is everything all right out here?” she asked.
“I…d-don’t…know,” I said, still staring at the book.
“You see?” Donovan said. “It responds to you. Your power will make this work, Aren. I know it will. You and I can overcome the rest of the wards and find the reversal spell, and then we’ll translate it and you can cast it, and the passage to the council realm will open up again, freeing your father.”
That sounded great, but I had thought of something else.
“If it works, it’ll free your mother and Angela, too,” I pointed out, “and b-both of them want me d-dead.”
“We’ll deal with that,” Donovan said. “Nothing’s going to happen to you, Aren. I give you my word on that.”
Over Beth’s shoulder, Taylor called, “Make him put it in writing.”
Despite my anger and the seriousness of the situation, that almost made me laugh. I said, “I’ve got this, you g-guys.”
“We weren’t eavesdropping,” Beth said. Taylor looked past her and shook her head.
“It’s all r-right,” I told them. “Considering everything that happened, I’d say you have every r-right to know what’s going on in your apartment.” I glanced at Donovan. “In fact, why don’t the t-two of you come on out here?”
“Are you sure?” Beth asked. “Donovan, do you – “
“Don’t ask his p-permission,” I said. “He doesn’t live here. This is our home, not his.”
He looked around at them and said, “Aren’s right. After everything I’ve done, I wouldn’t blame any of you if you chased me out of here. You’ve all been subjected to things that you shouldn’t have been.”
“Don’t be all contrite,” I said. “You’re just t-trying to make us feel s-s-sorry for you, like…like some cuddly little puppy who’s just p-piddled on the rug and now you’re trying to make us think you’re sorry!”
“You don’t believe I regret the things that happened?” he asked, and for the first time since he’d come into the apartment, he sounded a little angry himself.
“Do you?” I shot back at him. “Do you r-regret everything?”
Our gazes stayed locked for several long seconds. Then his expression softened a little and he shook his head.
“No,” he said quietly. “I regret most of it…but not everything.”
My breath caught in my throat. I knew what he was thinking about. I was thinking about the same night. It would be a cliché to say that it was magical, except in our case it was.
And that was what was wrong with it. No matter how warm those memories made me feel inside, I had to remind myself that it hadn’t been real. Donovan had manipulated me into his bed, and that didn’t feel any better because it was through mystical means instead of smooth talking, low lights, soft music, and liquor.
Taylor and Beth were taken in by him, though. They practically said, “Awww,” as they came tentatively into the room. Their instincts wanted a happy ending.
We were a long, long way from that.
“Wh-what do you think?” I asked them. “Donovan says this old magic book of his will help us get my father out of that place where he’s trapped. Should I help him?”
“Well,” Beth said, “if there’s a chance that it might help your dad, you sort of have to, don’t you?”
That was what it boiled down to, right there. No matter how I felt about Donovan, my father was cut off from his family and this world partially because of me. My impulse was not to believe anything Donovan said because he’d lied to me in the past, but he had a stake in this, too. His mother was stranded in that cold, empty place just like my dad, and of course he wanted to rescue her.
So maybe he was wrong about the old book. Maybe it wouldn’t do us a bit of good. Tinkering with it might even make things worse, I reminded myself. You always ran that risk with magic.
But if there was a chance…any chance at all…
“All right,” I said, hoping I wasn’t making a terrible mistake. “I’ll w-work with you. But God help you if you’re l-lying to me, Donovan Cole.”
Chapter 3
Several weeks had gone by since then. During that time Donovan and I had worked in closer proximity than I liked. When we were together, concentrating on unlocking the spells and wards that protected the book, it was easy to forget what he had done. He was handsome, charming, and intelligent, after all, and those were the things that people noticed, not that he was a lying, duplicitous rat.
Whenever I said anything like that around Taylor and Beth, I got the feeling they thought I was being too hard on him. They were both blond, beautiful, and successful, though. They’d had boyfriends in the past, although neither of them was involved with anyone at the moment, and I had no doubt that eventually they would both marry wonderful guys, have gorgeous children, and live spectacularly fulfilling lives.
I would be doing good to not live the rest of my life alone and haunted by guilt. And Donovan was partially to blame for that, so I thought it was perfectly all right to hang on to some of the anger I felt toward him.
But oh my, it was hard sometimes, like when he was really thinking and he got this cute little frown on his face, or when he was tired and he would stretch and yawn. That always made me yawn, too, and that made me think about how good it would feel to snuggle up on the sofa with him and take a nap…
“I wish this damned thing was in Latin,” I said to take my mind off that scenario. “Latin would be easier to translate than this stuff.”
In addition to magic, we used all the resources of the computer age, like the Internet and language translation programs. There were plenty of resources for translating modern-day Gaelic, but while there were plenty of similarities between that and Middle Irish, the differences were significant, too. It didn’t help matters that the book would slam closed on its own if we did anything wrong, almost as if it were a sulky child. Then it took some coaxing to get it open again.
We were working late one night, something I had sworn to myself we weren’t going to do. Beth h
ad an overnight shift at the hospital and Taylor had already turned in, which meant that Donovan and I were alone in the apartment living room except for Matilda, who sat on the table watching us with that sweet, curious look on her fuzzy face. Even though she had been possessed once, there was nothing magical about Matilda. She was a completely normal cat, if there is such a thing.
Donovan rubbed a hand over his face and said, “Boy, I’m tired.”
“If you’re angling to spend the n-night, even if it’s on this sofa, you can f-forget it,” I told him.
He gave me a reproachful look. “Come on, Aren, be fair. Have I done anything like that since we’ve been working together? Anything at all?”
“No,” I admitted. “But you’re p-probably not the best person to be accusing somebody else of not being fair.”
“Touché,” he said, then added under his breath, “for the hundredth time.”
I let that one go. Instead I pointed at a phrase in the book and asked, “What does…fuel fabkun mean?” I struggled to pronounce the words. All I could do was make a try phonetically.
“Spell them,” he said with his fingers poised above the keyboard of his laptop.
“Easier said than done,” I told him. “This guy Eamon didn’t have the best handwriting in the world, and anyway, a lot of letters looked different back then.”
“It was a thousand years ago. Few people could read and write so the rules were whatever they said they were.”
I made my best guess as to how the words were spelled, and Donovan typed them into the translation program. Then he shook his head.
“Evidently those aren’t words. Try again.”
I changed a few of the letters I wasn’t sure about and gave him those spellings. He frowned as he looked at the laptop’s screen and said, “Well…I’m not sure about this…but they might mean ‘blood falcon’.”
Misadventures of a Tongue-Tied Witch: Boxed Set Humorous Witch Series Page 15