Spellbinders Collection Read online

  He grinned at the brujo, at Tupash. "I think you don't want to wait a year or two before you get this power."

  The man laughed quietly, and clapped him on the shoulder. "This is also true. I am an old man, older than you can guess. I have learned patience, but I have also learned that Death does not wait forever. He took my master after many years, and someday he will catch up with me no matter how far I run. I have better things to do than sit in a damp cave, staring at your Dragon and waiting for her to change her mind."

  "What is the Dragon's Eye?"

  "According to my master, these things are part of many myths. Toltec legend speaks of Quetzacoatl's Egg, in words very like your description of your Dragon's Eye. My master thought the Hebrews carried something similar in their Ark, hiding it from unclean eyes and calling on its power to destroy their enemies. That is how desert nomads would use such a thing, not hiding it deep in the earth as you have.

  "The Inca had one. The Child of the Moon they called it, and they kept it in a cave in the heart of Machu Picchu. It glowed with a silver light. My master said Pizarro took it and sent it back to Spain, and it vanished from history. It is thought that one of his priests called it a thing of the Devil and threw it overboard from the ship." The brujo shrugged and spread his hands, palm up, as if commenting on fanaticism.

  So there had been others, maybe still were. Daniel tried to wrap his mind around the concept.

  One thing still bothered him, and if Tupash was feeling chatty . . . "Why are you here?"

  "Ah. This is interesting, yes? As your neighbor said, I have some artifacts to sell: very old, very strange, perhaps very valuable. I looked among my associates for someone to point the way, someone with the right connections. The name of your neighbor seemed to glow on the page. I think that now I understand why."

  "I need time to think about this."

  The brujo nodded, stood up, and walked toward the door. He turned back, with a sad smile. "Certainly you may think. I would not think long, if I were you. Consult your watch. In two days, people start to die. People important to you. I think your darling wife might commit suicide from grief. So think hard."

  Daniel shivered.

  Tupash nodded again, when he saw Daniel understood. "Talk with your brother. I can offer him many interesting cities to be dead in. I do not recommend telling your loved ones to flee. They would not get far. We can be good to each other, or I can be very cruel. The choice is yours."

  The ice left Daniel's pendant at the same instant as the bolt clanged home on the far side of the door. He glanced up at the corner of the ceiling. The little red light on the camera glowed back at him.

  Chapter Eight

  Sometimes you just had to be firm with the House. Aunt Jean might have complained about the old shack's attitude when she'd installed the indoor plumbing, but Alice had absolutely no interest in returning to the outhouse-and-kitchen-pump days. She toweled her hair and ran a last swipe down her body, wallowing in the warm tingle of a soak in the spring's water — a soak in the spring's water after it was heated, with lavender bath oil, in a civilized tub. It sure beat the hell out of scrubbing down with lye soap in the screened garden pool out back that once had served for baths. Brrrrr . . .

  Brrrrr. Brrrrr.

  Damn. That wasn't shivering in sympathy; that was her pager. Alice snatched it up, read the code, cussed, and started grabbing clothes. Ambulance call.

  Whyinhell did people always decide to dial 911 when she was in the tub? Auto-pilot routine swapped her yard-work clothes for the blood-and-guts crash suit and EMT jacket, flipped the damper on the kitchen stovepipe to put dinner on hold, grabbed her roadkill bag, and dumped Dixie Bull out the side door to shake her ears in irritation and lick a paw to show proper feline disdain. Alice slammed the door behind them, touched the door-post for luck, and hopped into the old Subaru.

  Rossini's Lone Ranger overture rang out in her head, more accurately known as William Tell. She floored the gas pedal and spun out of her driveway in a four-wheel drift — first man to the ambulance shed got to drive.

  Two minutes later, she skidded into the lot at the town garage. Irv Watson's pickup sat by the side door, so she pulled over to the left, clear of the ambulance and fire bays. By the time she was parked and out of her car, the overhead door was rising and she heard the growl of the diesel ambulance. She'd lost the race.

  He paused just clear of the door, and had the heavy rig rolling again as soon as she'd dumped her EMT bag in back and grabbed the seatbelt buckle. She flicked switches for him as he swung right onto Main Street, activating the lights and the bee-boo of the electronic siren.

  "What's the call?"

  "Dead call, 3930 Sunrise Lane."

  She punched the street and address into the mapping system and watched the software bring up a route on its display. The GPS woke up, as well, but that wouldn't matter unless they ended up way out in the puckerbrush on some unnamed tote road.

  "East on 176, then left on Salt Hay Road. Remember that blind corner beyond Gooding's Hill."

  "Roger that, good buddy."

  She caught her breath and settled into the shotgun seat, letting the distinctive ambulance reek of diesel and disinfectant kick her brain into overdrive. Dammit, this was what kept her on ER shifts in spite of the hours, this adrenaline rush of life-or-death.

  His eyes flicked right and left, checking the idiot quotient at each driveway and intersection as he accelerated. His glance rested on her wet hair for an instant. "Caught you in the shower?"

  "Every frigging time. Phone seems to be wired to my plumbing." Of course, the pager system was radio rather than telephone, but so what? The principle was the same.

  Funny thing was, the phone system actually had a wire clamped to the pipes in her cellar. Kate swore it was a ground lead and totally harmless, but Alice doubted that. The phone was just too satanic.

  A "dead call" was shorthand for a 911 call with nobody talking on the other end. It was the same sort of gallows humor that had them calling burned corpses "Crispy Critters" and crash victims "roadkill." Anyway, when they rolled, they never knew for sure whether "dead call" meant a heart attack, a robbery in progress, or a kid pressing the wrong button on a memory dialer. It could make for an interesting morning.

  "3930 Sunrise" didn't ring any bells with her — they'd renamed and numbered just about every side road in town a year ago, nailing down addresses for the enhanced 911 service. She checked the mapping system. For all its cutesy suburban sound, Sunrise Lane had been "Fire Road 13B" in its previous life, a two-rut gravel path that wound past old trailers and scattered shacks up to an abandoned quarry. Most of the "houses" wouldn't pass muster for decent chicken sheds.

  "Right at Mason's Mill Road."

  "Got it."

  Alice noticed an echo from their siren and leaned forward to scan the mirror on her side. A white car with flashing blue light-bar rounded the previous turn, and Irv slowed down. The sheriff's cruiser whipped out around them and then skidded back into their lane to avoid an oncoming car. His right-side wheels kicked up dust from the shoulder, pelting their windshield with gravel, and Irv tromped his brakes and started cussing about lead-footed county Mounties.

  She jerked another look at the side mirror, her stomach sinking. That car going in the other direction — it was the big blue Suburban from the other day, the one that had threatened Kate. What were they interested in, out this way?

  Irv swung the ambulance off the paved road and onto gravel, following the dust trail of the sheriff's deputy. Alice grabbed the side grip and held on against the sway and bounce of back roads. They could go slower on the way out, if the patient needed smooth more than he needed speed. Another turn, and Irv dropped into low for the climb. Sunrise, AKA Fire Road 13B. They passed two crapped-out trailers and two startled faces, then a shack you couldn't give to a porcupine but it had smoke coming out of the rusty stovepipe — scenic Maine coastal cottages.

  They turned again, past "Sickles" on a weath
ered pine board, and skidded to a halt behind the cruiser. Alice killed the siren but left the lights going. The place was just another shack, looked like three rooms or four and a lean-to shed with the roof caving in, and the outhouse still had a clear path showing it was in daily use. The deputy was headed toward the side door, right hand near his holster. Good news — they could let the man with the gun go in first, to find whatever he found.

  Alice didn't recognize him. Kate had said there was a new guy on the force, straight out of the Criminal Justice Academy. He played it by the book — knocking on the door, standing carefully to one side in case some drunken citizen decided to pump a few shotgun shells through the unpainted wood, and then testing the knob. It wasn't locked. Alice would have been surprised if it was.

  The deputy cautiously stuck his head inside and yelled, then vanished through the doorway. He reappeared in seconds, waving them in. Alice and Irv grabbed their bags and ran, and she shifted into her controlled-speed mode where she did everything precisely but without a wasted second. The things she did could kill people if she did them wrong, but they'd die on their own if she did them too slowly.

  The entry stank of poverty: boiled cabbage, rotting potatoes, rancid bacon grease, damp wood and plaster. Generations of stale tobacco smoke overlaid the other smells, making them even fouler. An old man lay on the kitchen floor, next to the dangling phone. His eyes were open but fixed, not a good sign. She checked for a pulse, for breathing, she touched his eyelid. Nothing. His skin felt cool already. She grabbed eye protection and snapped on a pair of sterile gloves.

  Irv had started to set up for CPR. Alice glanced at her watch — fifteen minutes since her beeper signal, allow another minute or two for the dispatch. Too damn fast for the man to feel like that, even if he'd died the instant he finished dialing. Someone else had placed that call. She glanced up at the deputy.

  "Check the rest of the house."

  CPR started, Irv leaning on the victim's chest in a steady rhythm. She marked the time, then set up the plastic airway and started to share breath with a corpse while she dug out a preloaded hypo. Natural division of labor — small as she was, she had to work too hard to move a man's ribcage, even with her full weight.

  She'd spell him, though. Or the deputy would — CPR was part of cop training. The ambulance really needed a three-man crew, minimum, but Stonefort couldn't swing it all the time. Guys had to dig clams when the tide called, or pull their lobster traps.

  "You've got some more customers."

  The deputy had reappeared in the doorway. Alice grabbed her bag and chased him through the house. Now the air smelled like a bad nursing home — unwashed bodies, cheap disinfectant, and aging bedpans. The front room had been turned into a sickroom, and an elderly woman lay on the bed, eyes closed, no visible breathing. Another gray-haired woman lay face-down on the floor beside it.

  Both bodies were cold, even through the gloves. She moved one hand, then another. Semi-stiff. Rigor was setting in on both bodies. Both corpses.

  Sickles. Alice remembered the name-board out by the road and finally matched it up with a face. The man on the kitchen floor had been Charlie Sickles, Kate's sometime carpenter. She'd met him once or twice, remembered he had a wife and old mother at home, both ailing. Just seeing the name hadn't meant much: there were about as many Sickles families in Sunrise County as there were rabbits.

  She looked up at the deputy. He stared back, no clue about the random thoughts zipping through her head, wondering if there was a hope here, the way she'd paused.

  She shook her head. "Not a chance." Then she started linking things, back to business. "Guess is, the old woman died in her sleep. From what I've heard, she was over ninety. Younger woman had a bad heart herself, emphysema, lifetime smoker: died from the shock of finding the body. Man came home, found both of them, and tried to call for help. Don't think we can revive him."

  The deputy nodded. "Looks like. Still have to have an autopsy. Unattended deaths. I'll call for the medical examiner." He spun on his heel and headed back out through the house to use the radio in his cruiser. Probably the handheld on his belt wouldn't work this far from base.

  Something still didn't add up. Alice remembered the feel of the old man's skin, much too cold to have died ten or fifteen minutes ago. She touched the inside of her wrist to the woman on the floor. Cold — colder than room temperature, impossible as that seemed.

  She'd felt that cold before. It didn't really have that much to do with temperature. The bodies felt as if not only the people had died, but all their cells and all the bacteria in their guts and even the mites living on their skin and hair. These bodies were more dead than dead.

  Aunt Jean had called it chi, stealing a term from Chinese lore in her eclectic way. Life force, or energy. All of the chi was gone out of these bodies. They felt like the rabbits Aunt Jean had bought and used to teach the draining witchery. Used on meat animals, the "spell" was no more evil than any other form of slaughter. Alice had to learn to take energy before she could give it out to others. Chi had to balance, just like any other form of accounting. Nothing ever came from nothing.

  They'd eaten rabbit stew for the next three days — Aunt Jean wasn't one of those vegetarian witches. As she used to say, "Everybody is somebody's lunch." Like all the Haskell women, she'd been buried unembalmed in a plain pine box, to move on through the stream of life.

  Alice shook herself out of those thoughts. Another siren moaned to silence outside, the fire department crash squad. Now they'd have some muscle to move the man. She glanced at her watch again, automatically. Eighteen minutes since the beeper woke up.

  Back to the kitchen, check again for a pulse in a gap of Irv's chest-pressure sequence, snap decision balancing the man's age against zero response to CPR.

  Prep the hypo, inject. "One milligram Epinephrine." Announce all medication — keep both partners working on the same page.

  No response. She caught her partner's eye and shook her head. "Flatliner."

  He nodded, agreeing, but kept up the rhythm. EMTs and RNs didn't have a license to declare people dead. They'd hauled cold meat before, once saw it warm up again into a young wife and mother. That sort of thing was enough to give you religion.

  The door was too narrow for the gurney. They loaded him into a Stokes basket they carried for wilderness rescue, then still couldn't make the turn in the little mudroom between kitchen and shed. Finally cleared out a window with a fire axe and pulled him out that way.

  Alice cornered the cop for an instant, first free breath she'd had since they'd hit the site. "Why'd you pass with a car in your face? Damn near ran us into the ditch and didn't save ten seconds!"

  The deputy turned white with the memory. "I looked! I swear the road was clear! Damn truck must have pulled out of a driveway!"

  Truck? "Take a look when you go back. No driveways between Felt Brook and that turn."

  Alice finally slowed down enough to actually notice the guy. He'd just been a mobile uniform outside her focus, but now she realized he was kinda cute in a steely-jawed clean-cut Mountie sort of way — big and young and solid, hadn't had time to work up a belly and go soft from too much time in the cruiser and too many donuts on night patrol.

  They had the man strapped to the gurney now, loading him in the back, CPR continuing. Irv climbed in, along with Ed Guptill, another EMT from the fire squad who hadn't been on call so they hadn't waited for him at the garage. Alice slammed the doors behind them. Twenty minutes from the pager's beep. Adrenaline junkie.

  She hopped up on the driver's seat and ran it forward enough so she could reach the pedals. Irv was about a foot taller than she was, and he wasn't tall. She hit the siren again, hauled the wheel around, and jiggered twice before getting the rig aimed back down the driveway. Damn good thing the bus was automatic and had power steering.

  The cop was stringing yellow tape around the shack, protecting evidence. Too bad they wouldn't find any.

  Out the gravel road, past more cu
rious faces. Alice kept a lid on her lead foot, cruising around potholes rather than crashing through them. Irv and Ed weren't strapped in, and some of the stuff in the back had sharp edges.

  "Hey, Irv! What'd you see when that deputy cut us off?"

  He grunted. "Damn fool swung out," grunt, "pulled up," grunt, "damn near took our," grunt, "bumper off cutting," grunt, "back in." He grunted again, the CPR chest massage. "No need."

  Ed must be doing the breathing, two-man routine. She pulled out onto the pavement and goosed the ambulance. This was where the fun started. Her personal best was the full ton, a hundred, but Irv claimed he'd hit one-twenty once — weather clear and track fast. Probably downhill, too. 'Course, you needed to be careful about that stuff. Heavy as the rig was, you didn't want to have to stop or turn in any hurry.

  "Did you catch the license of that car?" Failing to yield to a siren could cost that Suburban a few hundred bucks.

  "What car?"

  An electronic voice mumbled in the back, the hopped-up AI defibrillator warning everybody to stand clear so it could calculate and time a charge. She missed the pop of the capacitors firing, lost in the rattle of loose gear as the ambulance wallowed over a frost heave. She slowed up a tad, knowing the man in the back was truly dead and she couldn't justify risking three other lives to rush him to the ER. Even if it was fun.

  Irv had never even seen that blue Suburban. The deputy hadn't seen it until they were nearly head-on, and he thought it was a truck. That was some powerful mojo.

  Mojo that had killed a man and two women. Mojo that threatened Kate, if Alice had correctly read the malice in that slow pass of the Suburban. Mojo that might be attacking Kate, cutting away her friends and crew and leaving her to stand alone, as well as sucking chi from dirt-poor throw-away old people whose deaths would be written off as "natural."

  Alice swung the ambulance north onto Route 17, headed for Downeast General. Damn good thing tourist season hadn't hit full stride — all those Massachusetts and New Jersey rubberneckers could add half an hour to the run. She cranked the diesel up to eighty and watched two cars dive for the paved shoulders of the road, heeding her lights and noise.