Spellbinders Collection Page 11

  She turned the key in the ignition and listened to the starter whine uselessly. Just a little something to bring her back to earth? She slipped the brake so the truck could roll a couple of feet and rotate the flywheel. The starter worked, this time, the pinion catching the ring gear once the chipped teeth were past, and the old junker coughed to life.

  She flipped a mental coin: head over to Lew's and see if she could catch Jackie by surprise, or go straight home and hope the silly kid had finally gotten brave enough to show her face. This time, Kate promised herself, she'd keep her temper lashed down tight if it took half-inch steel cables.

  Home, she decided. Get rid of some work-sweat, some splashed mortar, Alice's tears, and the little smells of her aborted entry into the world of the sexually ambivalent. If Jackie hadn't come home, and the twit wasn't at Lew's either, and he was sober, Kate just might end up staying a while. She had some residual urges she needed to work off.

  She didn't think that was infidelity. Alice knew she still liked men. It wasn't as if they'd said vows or anything.

  And then she heard Alice's voice again, whispering clearly in the back of her brain. "Maria wasn't a widow, and she knew it. She had no reason to kill herself."

  What the hell was that supposed to mean?

  Chapter Eleven

  Ben Morgan pulled a John Deere hat down on his brow and looked away from the road, turning slightly sideways in his pickup cab as if reading something on the seat beside him. He carefully avoided eye contact with the driver of that old Dodge stake-bed. "The wicked flee where no man pursueth," he quoted to himself.

  No reason to suspect Ms. Town Constable Rowley would recognize him after all these years. Even if he had played basketball against her one-on-one in driveway games. And lost.

  Still, he was nervous. He'd rather volunteer for a root canal without Novocaine than face the current Haskell Witch. He'd brought along a sweetener that might blunt her tongue.

  Alice always had been too damn smart. She didn't have to be so hard-edged about it, though. Lainie had been just as smart or smarter, but she hadn't felt the need to prove it all the time. Maybe that was one difference between straight and lesbian. Lainie and Lys, Elaine and Alice, an alliterative study in contrast.

  He pulled into the driveway next to the old Haskell place, grateful that tall hedges screened the side and rear of the house and whatever heathen rites and goings-on that the witches wanted to hide. The rusty GMC pickup was about as anonymous a vehicle as you'd find in Sunrise County, one of a few thousand clones gradually discarding bits of themselves on the roads and trying to evade the state inspection, but he still didn't want to park it anywhere noticeable. That had been the story of his life for twenty years — keep a low profile.

  He picked up a shoebox from the seat next to him and automatically headed for the side door, following generations of feet. Front doors have always been ceremonial doors in Maine, only used for weddings and funerals. Some of them hadn't been opened in a hundred years. Daily life came and went by the kitchen. Even cats knew that. A longhaired black and white specimen appeared from nowhere, ignored him, and stared at the door. He shrugged and knocked.

  The old door opened, and the cat sauntered herself inside with the air of the undisputed owner. Ben was left facing the small dark-haired woman on his own.

  She stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips, looked him up and down with a critical eye, and shook her head. "Laws a mercy, Miz Scarlett. Look what the cat done drug in. If it ain't God's gift to Sunrise County women." She stepped back from the door and waved him in.

  Ben obeyed. He'd hoped Alice wouldn't recognize him, but that had been a feeble chance at best.

  She tilted her head sideways, studying his face, and then pointed towards a couple of Eames chairs in the parlor, elegant pieces of modern sculptured leather and wood that still seemed to fit the ancient house. So did the music she had playing softly in the background, something vaguely Celtic with an insistent beat.

  Mischief twitched her lips. "You want something to settle your nerves? I remember Lainie said you were partial to rum in various disguises."

  "Yeah. You got anything resembling a daiquiri?"

  "I think the bar can handle that."

  She paused on her way to the kitchen, pulled a blued-steel pistol out of the back pocket of her jeans, clicked the safety on, and tossed it casually on a leather ottoman that matched the chairs. Ben twitched at the sight. Reflex identified the gun as a Walther TPH automatic, a miniature of James Bond's famous PPK, only a .22 long rifle cartridge but deadly at close range.

  Ben hated guns, and studied them only out of self-defense. After all, people kept them as a protection against thieves.

  Alice noticed his reaction. "Hey, you called, you gave me a name I didn't recognize, and the old verbal stress-meter said you were lying. What's the point of being a witch if you can't live to a ripe old age and frighten the kids at Halloween?"

  She vanished into the kitchen, leaving him to wonder about the ways of witches and bitches. He took a deep breath to calm himself, the herb-smells of the kitchen blending with old wood and beeswax to waken memories of visits long ago. His mother would bring over a couple of lobsters or a loaf of home-baked bread; "Aunt" Jean would swap them for a jar of honey or a bag of apples from the orchard out back. Then the women would sit and gossip for half the morning while Dan and Ben got into mischief in the ancient place.

  It still felt the same, even though Aunt Jean was dead ten or fifteen years. The house didn't change. Alice must have changed a bit, to fit in so smoothly. After a few quiet clinks and gurgles, she returned and handed him a cold glass. He traded the shoebox for it. "That's your fee, whether you can help or not. It needs to go home."

  She set herself in a chair and the box in her lap, lifted the lid, and pulled out wadded tissue paper. He saw the faded yellow of corn shucks, and then she hastily repacked and covered the box and whisked it away into the older part of the house. He sipped the daiquiri. It tasted wonderful.

  She came back, shaking her head. "Where'd you get that?"

  "Private collection. It wasn't the item we went for, but it didn't belong there."

  "Uh-uh. I know some people who will be very glad to have her back where she belongs. Thank you for keeping her covered." She settled down in the other chair again, the one next to the ottoman with the gun on it.

  He nodded. "So, it's genuine?"

  "Oh, yes. Not one of the tourist replicas. Couldn't you feel her power?"

  Ben relaxed a notch. "I don't know about power. That's your territory, not mine. I just felt it wanting to come here."

  She sat quietly, studying him. "Well, you going to talk about it?"

  Ben stared at the drink in his hand. He found it hard to start. These were secret things, ancient things, crazy things, and the Alice he remembered had a very low bullshit threshold. Besides, he was afraid of her. He looked up, straight into a sardonic smile.

  She shook her head. "Look, I interrupted some serious business for you. Shit or get off the pot."

  He had to chuckle at that. "Yeah. I saw her leaving." He still couldn't find a place to start on this tangled thread. There were things he wanted to keep out of it.

  She started drumming quietly on the side of her chair, matching the quiet music, and then chanting with the beat.

  "This I tell you.

  "The Sea People came on the south wind, the warm wind,

  "The Sea People came in their great swan canoes.

  "The Sea People came in their great swan canoes,

  "The Sea People came from the land of the dawn.

  "The Sea People brought the bright Egg of the Dawn,

  "The Egg of the Dawn in their great swan canoes.

  "Thus it is said, from mother to mother,

  "Thus it is said since the day of the dawn."

  South wind? Oh, yeah. You had to go around Nova Scotia and turn north. Simple geography, but Ben had always visualized his people sailing into the ba
y out of the rising sun.

  She broke off. "Your family keeps records scribbled on parchment. Mine has a verbal history. That sounds a hell of a lot more impressive in Naskeag, and it scans better too. I doubt if you're prepared to listen to twenty or thirty hours of it, though.

  "I think you'll find it easier to talk if you realize that I already know the weird parts. That's what witches do, you know. It's our job description. Your family and mine have been intertwined for nearly a thousand years. You're probably more'n half Naskeag yourself. Ever try to grow a beard?"

  Ben rubbed his chin, ruefully. He could get by with shaving twice a week, but he'd never thought about what that meant. Sixty, eighty Welsh men and women, even twice that, alone in a wild land far from Europe? That gene pool wouldn't last long, wouldn't stay pure in the five hundred years between landing and the coming of the English. Trading and fishing voyages couldn't tip the balance much.

  She grinned. "Works both ways. The Naskeag language is probably about as much Welsh as Abenaki. Nobody's noticed because nobody has been crazy enough to look."

  So he started talking, and for the first time Ben could remember, Alice Haskell actually kept her mouth shut. He tried to tell things in some kind of order, but he kept skipping back and forward with connections and she either nodded politely to show she followed him, or raised her eyebrows in silent question when she didn't. Most of all, she listened, and he remembered that his image of Alice Haskell was more than twenty years old, an image of a rebellious hellion of a younger sister always jealous of Lainie's interest in men.

  His thoughts ran in parallel with the story, wondering what changes old apple-dumpling Aunt Jean had worked on this woman seated across the room. He could almost see the old witch as a ghost image around Alice, the soft round woman with thinning white hair and deep-seamed mahogany face a quiet presence that had both awed and comforted him from his earliest memories. The power of Stonefort sat here, in this room, in this house. It always had. Now the power listened, and he found he no longer feared it.

  Finally he ran out of words, and looked plaintively at the bottom of his glass. Alice took it, made clinking noises in the kitchen, and returned it full. While she was gone, he checked his watch and was surprised to see that he'd lost an hour somewhere in the telling.

  She sat quietly for a few minutes, weighing his story, her eyes focused on the far side of the kitchen wall. Then she came back, and he felt as if her gaze pinned him to the chair. "So Daniel warned you. What went wrong? What happened with Maria?"

  A woman had died. That was the important part. Daniel and Gary were secondary. He remembered where he was sitting. The Haskell house was a woman's house, a woman's fortress.

  He shook his head. "We've got alarms, I was out all night prowling the grounds, there's other stuff I'm not going to tell you about unless you've got that famous 'need to know.' She was fine last night. This morning we found her floating off the point. I guess this brujo that Dan told me about is for real."

  "How are Gary and the girls taking it?"

  "Rough. Gary knows Dan is still alive, and he knows we're in a fight. He's not too bad. Ellen and Peggy are still in shock."

  "Okay. Item one, we get the girls over here. You can take care of young master Gary however you want, but Ellen and Margaret sleep in this house, stay on these grounds. I'll follow you over there and bring them back myself. I don't care what you tell them. Nobody has ever harmed a woman in this house. Nobody ever will."

  Her tone sent icicles down Ben's back. The room seemed darker and colder, suddenly, and the doors and cupboards were watching him with unfriendly eyes. He remembered legends of the Haskell Women. He sipped the fresh drink in his hand and wondered if there was a slight bitterness that he hadn't noticed in the other one.

  "Um . . . Ellen's twelve. Peggy is eight. Are you sure it's a good idea for them to live in this house?"

  She glared at him, glared at the thought hidden under his question. "You know, if I wasn't a particularly softhearted and forgiving type of witch, you'd be hopping around in the grass and going 'gribbit' right about now. There's a hell of a big difference between a queer and a pedophile."

  She took a couple of deep breaths as if she was counting to ten in Naskeag. "If they're straight, they'll stay straight. If one of them turns out bent, don't blame me or the house. I don't run classes in beginning and advanced lesbianism."

  She paused again, and a speculative look flitted across her face. "I might teach them to be witches, though. Is that better or worse?"

  Ben kept his mouth shut. Anything he said at this point would only get him in deeper.

  "Item two," she went on, "is Daniel tough enough to last it out? It's awful damn noble to say we can't let this Evil Sorcerer get his hands on your Dragon. Oh, yeah, there are lots of bad things he could do with it, starting with world domination and the destruction of modern civilization. Problem is, that doesn't weigh too heavy when you balance it against the safety of your children."

  Ben sat and thought about it. "Dan sounded really rocky when I told him about Maria. Not that their marriage was close. But I think he'd give this Peruvian spook the Dragon if it wasn't so damn obvious that he knows more about it than we do. What Dan'd try to do, he'd try to set up some kind of trick or trap. Now he doesn't think that would work and he's desperate. I'm not sure what he plans to do."

  "Ugh. You tell Daniel Lewellyn ap Morgan something for me. I'll cut off his balls, mince them fine, and fry them in fish oil for Dixie's dinner if he dares to give that Dragon's Egg to his frigging brujo. The bastard gets that kind of power, we'll all be gone to shit."

  Now that was the Alice Haskell he knew and loved. "What about Gary and the selkie change?"

  "Sorry, we don't do skin-changers — that's not a Haskell thing. We like ourselves the shape we are. There's a guy I know up near Katahdin, his family's into that scene. I'll send him an email, see if he has any suggestions."

  "Huh? You're talking as if this was vanilla stuff, post a question on the Internet about how to set the timing on a '72 Chevy truck."

  "Believe me, Greg knows the selkie change is possible. He's a werewolf. Not the fantasy novel kind — he's a totemic shaman shape-changer, becomes a silver wolf when he wants to. It's something his family has done for generations — learned it from some cousins of ours."

  Ben just sat there, his jaw down somewhere around his chest. For an instant, he wondered if Alice was pulling his leg. That was the kind of thing she'd do, the Alice he remembered from twenty years ago. Then he read her face again and decided she was dead serious.

  "You've got a whole computer network for this crazy shit?"

  She threw back her head and laughed. "Man, there's always been an underground, shamans and witches and such. Somebody knows somebody else with the Craft, with the Blood, with a voice from the oracle or the house snake or the spirit drum. With the Internet, I can toss a question out and get parallels and suggestions from frigging Siberia, from the Outback, from Kalahari Bushman witch doctors.

  "Thing is, it's private. It's still underground, organized into cells like a terrorist conspiracy. I know Greg. Aunt Jean knew his father and his grandfather. He's genuine, vouched-for, got a pedigree. Anybody he asks will have the same credentials. And everything is encrypted against snoops. Your secret is safe."

  Ben felt lightheaded, either from the daiquiris or the swirling changes she threw at him. Things he'd thought were deepest, darkest secrets seemed to be common gossip in the village. Things like . . .

  "You didn't seem surprised that I was alive, that Dan was alive, just that I came to ask for your help. I mean, after all the history between us."

  "I told you, we've watched your tribe for centuries. Witches see things. There's a way Morgans behave for a real death, and a different way they act when one of you needs to vanish. Don't panic — only people with good eyes and long memories could ever put two and two together and come up with five Morgans instead of four."

  "Lainie knows? How's
she doing?"

  "Elaine is doing fine." Her emphasis made it clear she didn't think he had any further rights to the familiar form. "She knows. Got herself a husband, a reliable man you never met, and more children than I can keep track of." She paused, as if calculating something. "Caroline is doing fine, too."

  Ben racked his brain, but he couldn't remember a girlfriend named Caroline. His blank face must have been a dead giveaway, because Alice nodded with a wry smile.

  "Your daughter."

  Ben felt as if she'd picked up that damned pistol and shot him in the gut. The Dragon had made her decision, and he'd had to disappear. That had left a number of things hanging in mid-air. Elaine had been one of them.

  "I never knew. If you'd told Dan . . ."

  "Humpf. Yeah, you Morgans have a real attractive way of dealing with that sort of thing. No thanks. We've never made a habit of naming the father of a Haskell child. Caroline's a Haskell, not a Morgan. We take care of our own."

  "Look, if I can pay for school or something . . ."

  Alice choked back a snort of laughter. "She's got a full scholarship out in Arizona, studying anthro, working on her doctorate before she can get past the bouncer at a bar. For her Ph.D., she's doing fieldwork in the pueblos, trying to trace the woman's side of the mystical tradition back to the Anasazi. Maybe she can pick up some secrets from the women's kivas before she settles down here. She's my heir."

  Ben blinked, trying to shake off three fast jabs to the chin. First she told him he had a daughter he never knew, then this daughter was some kind of genius, then this unknown addition to the Morgan family was the next Haskell witch. He was glad he was sitting down.

  She watched him work through all that, then nodded. "You want to pay something to soothe your conscience, pay forward. Send some of your ill-gotten gains up to the rape crisis center in Naskeag Falls, or the Domestic Violence Project. Sell off a few of those Mimbres pots you nabbed to build a homeless shelter. Whatever will help you sleep at night."