Mind Magic

by Eileen Wilks

  He’d learned, in carrying Mike across, just how strong this ward was. He took two steps, three—and the pull on the mantle rose as power was sucked out to enforce his order. Then he was across. He took another few steps and lowered Little John. “You all right?”

  The big man was pale and clammy, but he had both arms around Harry, who was looking pretty woebegone. “Yeah, but I hope I never have to do that again. That felt like . . . I don’t know what. I couldn’t move, but I had to. I couldn’t stay still, but I had to.”

  Mike came closer and poked his fellow clansman with his nose, then snorted—meaning something along the lines of, “You’re here, so get over it.” Mike wasn’t known for coddling those under him. He’d half kill himself rescuing any one of them, but once they were safe, he’d explain in clear terms just how stupid they’d been to get in that fix. He had a knack for finding nice, simple words for such explanations. Four-letter words mostly.

  Bert sat up and scowled at Rule. “What the hell! You hit me!”

  “I apologize for that,” Rule said. “You were struggling so much I was afraid of injuring you.”

  “Getting belted on the jaw is a whole lot like being injured.”

  “More seriously injured. I suppose I could have put you down and let you—” He broke off, his eyes widening. And turned toward the east.

  Lily. Lily was there. Not splintered, fragmented, all-over-the-place in a hideous distortion. Right there.

  “Rule?” Danny’s voice was high and worried. “What is it?”

  His breath whooshed out as a burden he’d carried way too long evaporated, leaving him giddy. The mate sense was working. He could feel her. As surely as he felt the ground beneath his feet, he felt Lily. And she was close. He couldn’t tell precisely how close. She’d always been better at that, but within an easy run—no, not easy, not in these rocky hills. But she was close. “Lily.” His voice was hoarse. “She’s not far. I have to . . .” Go to her. But he also had to take care of his small company. Mike was injured, Danny didn’t know what to do, nor did Bert. Little John might be unhurt, but he was hungry and exhausted and not a leader. But—

  Mike poked Rule with his nose this time. Hard. And snorted.

  “Better go, then,” Little John said. “That’s what we’re here for, right? Rescuing Lily. Do I go with you?”

  He had no idea if the mate sense would stay functional. It might fritz out again. “Yes. I mean no, you stay with the others, Little John. Mike’s in charge. Follow me, but with caution. I don’t expect any problems, but I don’t know what’s going on. I—”

  Mike poked him again.

  “Yes,” Rule agreed. And took off.

  * * *

  LILY stepped out into open air. And night. And brownies.

  A couple dozen of them, at a guess. All female. And all talking in their high, piping voices. “My head hurts. Shut up.”

  They didn’t. They desperately wanted her to go back, and they all told her so, and told her, and told her. “Charles. Cut me a path through them.”

  The wolf moved in front, and that helped, but it didn’t get rid of them. Charles didn’t want to hurt the brownies. Lily didn’t, either—not really, though her temper was peaking along with her headache. That word Mika had sent had made her mindsense recoil. It lay curled up inside her now. She wasn’t tempted to nudge it. Not until her headache died down.

  It had seemed to take forever to reach the outside. That twisty wormhole of a tunnel had devolved into a long stretch she’d had to travel on hands and knees, with Charles following in a crouch. But the fire curtain hadn’t come back. She’d made it, and the air smelled sweet and the stars were putting on a dazzling show overhead and Rule was so close! But all those desperate, damnably cute little brownies would not get out of her way.

  She gave up and stopped. Waiting.

  He came racing over the crest of the hill in front of her, leaping from rock to rock to land on a twisty path. Which he ignored, bounding down like a two-legged mountain goat. The fire of his nearness burned through everything else as he landed on the relatively level ground at the base of the hill a dozen yards away.

  He’d been going fast. Now he speeded up. Brownies scattered.

  And at last, at last, they came together—his arms around her, her arms around him. No words, no caresses, nothing but the sweet ease of his breath stirring her hair, his heart beating so close she could feel it, his arms whole and strong, her arms tight, tight around him . . . for a long moment they stood motionless beneath the night sky and held each other. Just that. And everything that had been wrong in the world gradually righted itself.

  Without her thinking about it, something uncoiled inside her. And spread out a bit . . . oh! Oh, of course his mind felt like that, so dear and familiar even though she’d never sensed it like this before . . .

  Guess what I can do? she said—then, out loud: “Ow.”

  “What the—that was—are you okay?”

  “My head hurts, that’s all, and I gave myself an owie just now—but I can do it! I can mindspeak. That’s why the—ah, that’s why you could find me.” Couldn’t speak of the mate bond in front of all those pint-size witnesses. “I’m not good at it, not yet, but I know the basic trick. But mindspeaking Mika left me with such a headache . . . shit.” She shouldn’t have mentioned the dragon. But surely they—the dragons—didn’t expect Mika’s changed condition to be a secret forever?

  “Mika?” He straightened enough to frown down into her face. “What do you mean?”

  “Long story, and I can’t . . . but you’re okay? You got out on bail?”

  “Not exactly. That also is a long story. Come on. We need to get out of here. Whoever snatched you—”

  “Isn’t really an enemy.”

  “You must define enemy differently than I do.”

  “It’s complicated.” The scattered brownies had begun to clump up again a few feet away—all of them chattering madly, of course. She raised her voice to be heard over them. “The brownies aren’t enemies, either, though I’m not too happy with them. They did aid and abet the one who snatched me.”

  His eyebrows drew down. “And held you prisoner.”

  “And held me prisoner, at first by keeping me asleep all the time.”

  “You were drugged?”

  “No drugs. After a while it wasn’t possible to keep putting me to sleep and I figured out that the fire was a bluff, so Charles led me out and we escaped. We just walked out, really, though I did have to crawl part of the way.”

  For once, Rule was flunking poker face. Confusion flickered in his eyes. Urgency or anger tightened his mouth. When a couple of the brownies darted forward and tugged on Lily, he bared his teeth at them.

  They squeaked and jumped back. Another brownie stepped forward.

  “Rule Turner,” Gandalf said sternly, frowning with all the severity her round, wrinkled face could muster. “Behave yourself.”

  “Address your corrections to your own people, t’laptha.”

  “But you are here with my people, on our land.” Gandalf shook her head. “This was a bad idea, wolf. A very bad idea.”

  For some reason that made Rule burst out laughing.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  “A terrible idea. I told him!” Dirty Harry told the other brownies. “But how do you make a stupid, stubborn werewolf listen? I sure couldn’t!”

  There were a lot of others for him to address. Everyone had gathered in the village green—that’s what they called it, though it was mossy and tree-shaded rather than open and grassy. A vast mob of brownies nodded, exclaimed, and called out questions or suggestions on how to get a werewolf’s attention.

  Lily paid little attention to them. She had a hamburger. A big, juicy hamburger with lots of pickles.

  At Gandalf’s strenuous urging (“We have to get that stubborn wolf away from you-know-who! He’s not dying! You know he can’t be here, Lilyu!”), they’d walked to the brownie village. One of the villages anyway. There wer
e at least two—one in the tourist section, where Big People could snap pictures of the adorable little people churning butter or whatever. And one where the brownies actually lived.

  Most of the brownie great-mothers had stayed at the tunnels, but Gandalf, Shisti, and three other brownies had accompanied them. Lily had agreed to go on one condition: they had to bring her things to her. Purse, weapon, everything. They agreed, but at first Rule didn’t. He wanted to wait for the rest of his party, which consisted of a wolf, a teenage girl, and two men, one of them human, the other one lupus and carrying Dirty Harry. The wolf was wounded. They would all be tired and hungry, Rule had added. Especially the wolf.

  That had elicited worried glances and Gandalf’s quick assurance that the men, the wolf, and the girl would be brought to the village, too. They’d call the horses and everyone who wanted to could ride, though someone might have to help the injured wolf—no, no, don’t worry, Happy Feet would carry a wolf if they asked him to, he was not at all excitable, and of course there would be food, but brownies didn’t eat animals so they couldn’t offer—

  “My people do eat animals,” Rule had said, “and it’s easier for us to be calm and rational when we eat meat instead of thinking about how much we want to eat meat.”

  More worried glances.

  “You have meat. You sell hamburgers and hot dogs to tourists in the public area. Four or five hamburgers apiece would be about right. My people are very hungry right now.”

  “You mean I could have had a hamburger?” Lily had said indignantly. “All this time I’ve been eating trail mix, and Charles has had to get by on jerky—”

  That had brought on a burst of brownie chatter, the gist of which was that brownie mothers could not touch meat, that was in the ithnali, not for the whole time they were serving. But the males could—it wasn’t forbidden in the ithnali—so maybe it would be all right for male brownies to bring hamburgers to the village. “But not here,” Gandalf said urgently. “We need to go to the village. We need to go now.”

  “They’re right about that,” Lily told Rule. “At least I think they are. Explanations later, okay?”

  So they had walked to the village, talking on the way. Mostly it had been Rule who talked, at Lily’s request. She couldn’t tell him who had kidnapped her—not without thinking it through, at least, and maybe not at all. He didn’t like that, but he seemed to accept her assurance that they weren’t in danger.

  He’d been right. His story was long. Also complicated, scary, and in spots it hit pretty high on the shocked disbelief scale. She tried not to interrupt, but he kept tripping her “Oh, shit!” switch. Especially when he told her about breaking his house arrest.

  She’d stopped and stared, stricken. “That’s not going to go away. Even if—when—we prove you were framed—”

  “Later,” he told her. “That isn’t our priority. We’ll deal with it later.”

  Twice as they walked, she felt something brush against her mind. Felt it with her new sense, and knew who and what it was. Mika was keeping track of her. By the time they reached the village, Rule had finished briefing her. He’d done a good job of summarizing, but it was still a summary, and she had a gazillion questions. She didn’t get to ask them. That’s when the others in his party joined them—riding enormous horses. She hadn’t known horses came that big.

  The village was—surprise!—adorable. Rather than using a clearing, the brownies had built their little houses in and around tall pines, oaks, and cedar—with “around” meaning that some of them were literally built around the trunks of trees. Mage lights glimmered and danced among the trees. No electric lights; brownies were selective about where they used electricity. Mostly they didn’t. Aside from the tourist area, only a few public buildings were wired.

  They didn’t much care for right angles. The little adobe houses seemed to have sprouted from the earth like oversize mushrooms, their walls festooned with vines or pebble mosaics, their roofs like moss-covered caps—some coming to jaunty peaks and others more like berets. Most of those houses must be empty, she thought as she finished her hamburger, judging by the number of brownies gathered on the green. For the first time she saw brownie children. She couldn’t tell which were boys, which girls. It didn’t matter. Even the ear-splitting pitch of their voices didn’t matter—at least, not much. Brownie kids took cute to a whole new level.

  They’d even carried someone out on a litter which they set down carefully near Gandalf. The litter’s occupant was tiny, shrunken, muffled in covers, and looked comatose. Actually she looked dead, but Lily didn’t think even brownies would bring a corpse to the party.

  Still . . . brownies. To be sure, she oh-so-gently nudged her mindsense in that direction. A couple of ibuprofen from her recovered purse had her headache on its way out, but it wasn’t gone. Sure enough, there was a shiny brownie-mind associated with that unmoving body. Lily let her sense coil back up inside her. “Is that the oldest great-mother?” What was the name . . . “Old Talla?”

  “Oh, yes,” Shisti said. She’d managed to wedge herself in on Lily’s left side despite considerable competition. “She wouldn’t want to miss this.”

  Charles and Rule had already finished their hamburgers. Charles lay behind Lily, dozing again. Rule sat on Lily’s right, talking with the alleged terrorist, who’d chosen trail mix over meat. At the moment the terrorist was exhausted, possibly traumatized, and enraptured by brownies. Rapture, with Danny, took the form of lots and lots of questions. Lily could relate, though she hoped she wasn’t quite that much of a pest herself. Danny went in pursuit of brownie facts with the single-minded excitement of a puppy chasing its tail.

  She was also apparently capable of nearly defeating the NSA single-handed. Nearly hadn’t been enough, but Lily badly wanted to talk to that young woman.

  “. . . and their horses!” Danny’s hands flew out, narrowly missing Rule’s nose. “Aren’t they the most beautiful things you ever saw? I’d read someplace that brownies kept horses, but I thought that meant little ponies. You know, brownie-size. But they’re Clydesdales!”

  The three nearest brownies all started explaining at once that their horses were not Clydesdales, but a breed called Shires, which were superior to other horses in every way. They set out to explain each and every one of those ways.

  Lily leaned against Rule, mostly because she could. He put his arm around her, probably for the same reason. “You haven’t told me a bloody thing,” he murmured.

  “I know.” She was almost as unhappy about that as he was, and he was pretty damn unhappy. Again that shivery, barely there touch brushed her mind. She didn’t have to uncoil her own sense to feel it. She wanted so much to tell Rule about it. “I have to figure out—”

  “Rule Turner.” That was Gandalf, rising to address him. “We have fed you. Are you calm?”

  “Moderately.”

  “Then explain to us why you violated your sworn—eep!”

  Rule had moved suddenly, rising to his feet. “Be careful. Be very careful what you say.”

  Gandalf tilted her head back to glare up at him. “You were not to use the privilege of entry save when it was utterly necessary in the war against our common enemy.”

  “I swore not to use it save in an emergency. Is there something about being chased by a helicopter spraying machine gun fire which doesn’t strike you as an emergency?”

  “You know what was intended—”

  “I know what I swore. If you intended something else, why did you not put that intention in words?”

  The brownie babble that arose was summed up pretty well by Harry’s comment: “Got you there, Gandalf.”

  Gandalf did her best impression of a fierce scowl. She looked so damn cute, trying to scowl. “You shouldn’t be here. You weren’t supposed to come here. You were supposed to stay in the government city.”

  Rule’s voice was low and every bit as fierce as Gandalf’s wasn’t. “My mate was taken. Did you think I wouldn’t come looking for he
r? No,” he said more loudly when a couple dozen of them protested that they hadn’t snatched Lily. “Don’t tell me you didn’t actually kidnap her. You were part of it.” His voice kept gaining volume. “All of you conspired with someone else—someone whom no one will name—to kidnap and hold my mate against her will. My people have gone to war for such an act!”

  The last sentence rolled out like thunder. No one spoke. Or moved.

  Rule let the silence drag out before breaking it. “We have been allies. Because of that, I give you a chance to explain. Were you forced to cooperate? Did you act against your will?”

  The brownies responded like a class of unruly, overeager philosophy students prompted by their teacher. They burst into discussion. What was the real meaning of force? Could fulfilling a racial duty be considered acting against your will? What did “act” mean in this usage? What about “will”? It wasn’t the same as intent, but did it encompass intent, or was it the other way around? Before long, they were locked in multiple debates about the meanings of various words.

  “You invited them to talk,” Lily told Rule. “You actually asked them to talk.”

  Gandalf, still standing nearby, sniffed. “Because he wants something. The wolf doesn’t plan to make war on us.”

  Deliberately, Rule sat again. “Why is it, t’laptha, that you keep referring to me as wolf? You know that is only part of my nature, and what my wolf wants right now wouldn’t please you. You might do better to address the man.”

  A grin popped out. She quickly wiped it off her face, but the twinkle in her eyes said it hadn’t gone far. “All right, man. What do you want?”

  “Sanctuary here for all those of my people who need it, for as long as they need it.”

  Gandalf’s eyes widened to excessive roundness. “You don’t ask much, do you?”

  “A great offense requires great reparations.”