Casting Spells (31 page)

LUKE

 

We exploded into the back of the knit shop in a blaze of smoke and light. Gunnar stumbled but stayed upright while I crashed to the ground like deadweight. As a cop I was used to facing the unexpected, but this was off the chart.

“Holy shit!” The words tore from my throat as my molecules reassembled themselves. I felt like a human jigsaw puzzle with a few pieces missing. And a hell of a lot of questions to ask when this was over.

The knit shop was alive with special effects not even Hollywood had dreamed of. A yarn tornado spun furiously in the center of the room while a human-sized web of knitting needles clanked and danced near the window like an empty bird cage. Magazines and papers swirled across the floor. Bookcases had been overturned, the books crushed beneath them. A dark-haired woman hovered two feet off the ground, directing the action like a crazed conductor.

I zeroed in on Chloe. That son-of-a-bitch Dane had her pinned up against the wall. His black coat was shredded. His face was splattered with blood. He looked wild, out of control, and triumphant as he wrenched her arm hard for emphasis. Pain was clearly evident in her face but she didn’t utter a sound. My respect for her soared sky high. I had known cops who went out on permanent disability after a whole lot less.

Gunnar flung himself at his brother in a blaze of silver blue glitter and heat. Dane threw Chloe to the ground and met his brother’s attack with the kind of ferocity I had only seen in stone-cold killers as I half walked, half crawled over to where she lay.

“Are you okay?” I asked. “What the hell’s going on?”

“Get out,” she said. “Get as far away from here as you can.”

“Not without you.”

I helped Chloe to her feet.

“This isn’t your fight,” she said.

“It’s your fight. That’s enough for—”

“So the knight in shining armor has come to save our heroine,” the dark-haired woman said from across the room. She was focused solely on Chloe. “Give me the Book of Spells or he dies.”

What the hell was a book of spells?

I stepped in front of Chloe as recognition dawned. “You’re the woman from the cemetery.”

“Luke.” Chloe sounded a warning. “Isadora means what she says.”

“Listen to her, Luke,” the woman said. “She wouldn’t lie to you.”

Cops aren’t real good with threats. I stepped forward and the next thing I knew I bounced off the wall on the far side of the room.

Isadora cocked her head to one side and hovered in front of Chloe. “Do we understand each other?”

“Perfectly,” Chloe said. “You’re still not getting the book.”

Isadora glanced at me over her shoulder. I felt like I was thinking my way through a headful of oatmeal.

“Detective, it looks like you should have stayed in Boston.” She spread her arms wide and a giant anaconda suddenly appeared five feet in front of me, jaws open, fangs glistening with yellow slime.

I’m not a fan of snakes. Especially not a thirty-foot specimen with a body as wide as a steel girder and a head bigger than your average trash can. It lay coiled on the floor, glistening black eyes watchful, forked tongue lazily testing the air in search of prey. Suddenly I felt the atmosphere change. The snake uncoiled slowly, deliberately, rising higher and higher until its outsized head brushed the ceiling. Its movements were sinuous and dangerously compelling, a rhythmic swaying movement that was a prelude to disaster. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to grab Chloe and get the hell out of Dodge.

Unfortunately two thousand pounds of snake were blocking the exit.

Isadora made a quick cutting motion with her left hand and the snake swooped forward, head swaying back and forth like something from a bad horror movie. Its mouth gaped open, jaw unhinging wider as a hissing sound surrounded me and the sour smell of wet ashes filled my nostrils. Chloe scrambled toward me and I yelled for her to stay away, but she didn’t listen and the snake sent her flying with one flick of its tail.

 

CHLOE

 

I slammed into the floor hard. My left hip took most of the fall, but my head hit the edge of a chair and I guess I blacked out for a second because next thing I knew the monster snake was coiled around Luke’s torso and legs. Luke struggled wildly against the increasing pressure, but he was no match for whatever fresh hell Isadora had set into motion. The sorceress side of my lineage might be kicking into high gear, but the human side was still vulnerable to pain.

The look in Isadora’s eyes told me she would take this as far as she needed to.

I struggled to my feet. It was probably a good thing I didn’t know where the Book of Spells was hidden because I would have handed it over to Isadora then and there. I dragged myself across the floor, crying out as Luke’s face went from angry purple to deathly white to a waxy blue. The gargantuan snake slowly turned its head and settled its black-eyed gaze on me for what seemed like forever. I saw triumph in its eyes. Ropes of spittle dripped from its fangs as its hellish maw opened obscenely wide.

The snake reared back, exhaled an acrid plume of black smoke from its nostrils, and Luke’s head disappeared from sight.

Before the scream could tear from my throat, Luke appeared on the ground next to me. I glanced quickly around the room and realized Gunnar had taken his place.

We both watched in horror as Gunnar was slowly pulled deep into the serpent. The hideous pulsing of powerful muscles marked the deadly progress. My brain shut down in self-defense against what was happening there in front of my eyes. Nothing in my life had prepared me for the sight of pure evil.

Then as quickly as the snake had appeared, it vanished in a swirl of pale yellow smoke. I waited for a triumphant Gunnar to reappear next to us ready to take on the next comer but the room fell into a profound silence. The silence stretched longer and deeper and the realization that the unthinkable happened finally hit me when Isadora’s howl of rage blew out the doors and windows of my shop and sent the roof spinning up into the night.

Next to me Luke made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a groan. Blood poured from a gash over his right eye, and he seemed to be having trouble breathing. He also had the glazed expression of someone who was on sensory overload. He was a cop. He knew better than most that humans were capable of doing terrible things to each other, but I was certain he had never seen anything close to what he had witnessed tonight.

Our eyes met and held for an instant. We barely knew each other but somehow the bond between us was intense. I hoped it was strong enough for him to accept that this was my world, not his, and the rules he lived by didn’t apply. He had to follow my lead or we were both lost.

Around us Isadora’s towering display of grief sucked the oxygen from the room. Dane hung in midair, his torn black coat billowing behind him like a flag. Without his mother’s direction, he seemed powerless.

Right now I was the only one on her radar.

“It’s always you,” she roared. “Is no sacrifice enough to satisfy your selfish needs? Sorcha. Your parents. Now my son. All dead because of you.”

I felt Luke’s questioning glance but I didn’t dare acknowledge it.

“Sorcha stayed in this realm for you ... she sacrificed for you ...”

I tried to ignore the words, but her voice only grew louder.

“Gunnar loved you and how did you repay that love? He made the ultimate sacrifice so you could find happiness with a human ...”

I refused to listen.

“And your parents.” Her laugh sounded like metal against metal.

Next to me Luke tensed. I shot him a warning look.

“You’re a liar,” I said to Isadora. “The car skidded on a patch of black ice. It was an accident.”

“And how do you think the black ice got there?” she countered.

“You killed my parents?”

Isadora had sent Dane to do the dirty work, but he was young and inexperienced in the dark arts and he hadn’t figured on me being safely buckled up in the backseat. “Unfortunately you survived but we did manage to eliminate Guinevere.”

My mother’s death was cause for celebration. My father’s didn’t even merit acknowledgment. I realized at that moment that I was capable of murder too.

“I was six years old. What could I have possibly done to make you hate me that much?”

“You have been a thorn in my side from the first. Our town came into being as a refuge from the cruelty and fears of humans. It isn’t right that someone with human blood would have dominion over us.”

I opened my mouth to speak but Luke stepped forward. “You killed Suzanne. You melted the ice beneath her feet and you both watched her die.”

“It was the expedient thing to do. My sons both show a weakness for human females.”

Luke was either crazy or the most courageous man I had ever met. He didn’t back down an inch. “One of your sons is dead. Was that part of your master plan too?”

“Enough talk.” Isadora pointed toward Luke. “Kill him.”

“With pleasure,” Dane said as loops of heavy gold chain the width of boat mooring sprang from his fingers and began wrapping themselves around Luke, tighter and tighter, attempting to finish the job the giant snake had started.

“Another fool sacrifices himself for a worthless specimen. Sugar Maple will thank me for this.”

“Stop!” The word exploded from the depths of my soul. “Let him go!”

We all stared in amazement as my cry caused the chains to snap then disappear. Luke slumped to the ground, knocking over the almost empty basket of roving. He lay perfectly still, and for a second I thought he was unconscious. But there was a different quality to his stillness this time, a tension that made me believe we still might have a chance.

“This is growing tedious,” Isadora said, visibly unsettled. “Perhaps I’ll kill you both now.”

“You won’t kill me,” I said. “You know as well as I do that if I die before you can claim the Book from me, it will be absorbed into the Universe.”

“We don’t need the Book any longer,” Dane said. “Gunnar is dead and I inherited all of his powers. We can claim the town and make the transfer without it now.”

Isadora’s eyes burned with a zealot’s fire. Whatever grief she had felt over Gunnar’s death was swiftly fading as dark excitement took its place.
Hello, Mommy Dearest.

Isadora, brandishing a flaming sword, swooped down like a bird of prey. The sword spiraled from her hands and headed straight for Luke, who rolled out of the way a moment before it plunged into the wall behind him.

Dane lunged for me, but somehow Luke was on his feet and he tackled him. They careened off the minitwister that was still spinning in the center of the room, then slammed into the cage of double point needles bouncing along the ceiling. Luke’s blood splattered the walls.

With a mighty cry, Isadora launched a death bolt. Instinctively I flung out my hand and a glass shield spun outward into the path of the bolt, stopping it just inches before it reached Luke.

Isadora’s bolt bounced off the shield, turned end over end over end, sparkling in the moonlight that flooded through the space where the roof used to be, then jackknifed through Dane, slicing him cleanly in two. Like matching halves of a perfect diamond, the mirror images began to rotate slowly at first, then gathered speed until they vanished in an explosion of steel blue glitter.

Isadora’s screams were the stuff of nightmares. They came from a hell I couldn’t imagine. They peeled the skin off her hands and exposed the purple veins lying beneath.

She turned to face me, and I knew only one of us would still be standing when this was over. Our eyes locked as a death bolt split the air just left of my ear.

This wasn’t the Isadora I had known all my life. This was the woman I’d first seen at the Town Hall meeting: angry, vengeful, out of control. She began to spin like the twister, flinging lightning bolts and flaming swords wildly at Luke, but one after the other missed the mark. Enraged, she turned on me. I glanced toward the cage of double point needles clanking in the corner then back again at Isadora and jumped back in amazement as it surrounded her slender body, imprisoning her.

If this was what it was like to have magick, I think I liked it.

She burst from the cage and I was immediately slammed into the north wall, crushed against the bricks by an invisible panini press.

A pure Fae couldn’t be harmed by the actions of a human, but I wasn’t a simple human any longer. I had three centuries of magick coursing through my veins. Somewhere inside me was the power to stop her heart forever. All I had to do was use it and the battle would be won.

My fury matched hers. My need for revenge was equal to hers.

She deserved to die. To be erased from this world and any other she might inhabit. She deserved no more mercy than she had showed to my parents or to Suzanne or, in the end, to Luke.

But there was one important difference: I couldn’t bring myself to take that final step.

“Fool,” she spat. “I wouldn’t hesitate.”

Her huge turquoise eyes were focused directly on me with the kind of concentration only the Fae possessed. Luke, motionless on the ground, no longer mattered to her. I was all that mattered, and my time was running out.

I knew I would have only one chance and I had to get it right. Would a flaming sword appear in my hand when I needed one? Isadora’s powers were at their peak while mine were just beginning to flow through my body. She knew exactly what to do and how to do it. Me? I was still flying blind.

But I had watched enough TV crime shows to know not to react when I saw Luke lift his head and take in the situation. Relief that he was still alive threatened to undo my resolve. I couldn’t let that happen no matter how much I wanted to run to him.

Luke started to crawl slowly toward the flaming sword embedded in the wall behind Isadora. I forced my expression to stay neutral, but there was nothing I could do about the fact that my heart was pounding so hard I had trouble breathing.