Spellbinder: A Love Story With Magical Interruptions Read online

  “This is her Measure,” he said, shaking off the memory, “to be kept safe by me until such time as judgment is required. Agreed?”

  “So mote it be,” came the responses.

  Stepping around the Circle, he held out the cord to the four guardians. Each murmured a brief wish that their wands encouraged. Simon’s ancient apple-wood coaxed the healing of Denise’s spirit; Martin’s polished blackthorn would enjoin her obedience; Kate’s hazel awakened hidden wisdom (which Elias sincerely doubted Denise would recognize if it bit her in the ass, but he supposed they had to go through the motions).

  When he got to Lydia, whose elmwood wand was useful for Work with the shadowy side of a psyche, he saw that her gentle brown eyes were unfocused, staring at the nothingness beyond the Circle. He approached cautiously, scowling his worry.

  Lydia touched her wand to the cord—and suddenly screamed. Trembling as if her slight bones would shatter, she gasped for breaths that left her lungs in high-pitched keenings of terror. Her thurible gushed smoke and her candle flared wildly at her feet, sparking rainbow fire from the opal on her hand as she pointed into the shadows.

  “Swastika!” she cried. “Swastika!”

  Kate dug into her robes for something to calm her. Martin raised his black-handled athame in instinctive defense, looking in vain for something to defend against. Simon passed his hand over his chalice, muttering swiftly. Elias let dagger and cord drop and grasped Lydia’s shoulders.

  “What is it?” he demanded. “What else do you see?”

  “Swastika and cross—flames—” Sobbing and shivering, she looked beyond him, beyond everything that was real to him. What she saw was more than real to her. “The chalice and the spear—ravens—and th-the fire—Sgë! Tsûtû‘neli’ga!” Her eyes rolled up into her skull and with a final shudder she collapsed into Elias’s arms.

  He swung her up, away from the candle, and snapped an order for the Circle to be opened. Kate did the Work after tossing a packet of herbs to Simon, who mixed them swiftly in clean water. By the time Elias had placed Lydia on the chaise in the corner, she was struggling back to consciousness. Simon placed the chalice against her lips and told her to drink.

  “You can tell us about it later,” the old man said, casting a warning glance at Elias. “Just rest now, my dear.”

  A minute or so later she lay limp with sleep. Simon covered her with his own robe and stood there in shirtsleeves and suspenders, shaking his head worriedly.

  “What the hell just happened?” Ian demanded.

  “She had a glimpse of the past, I should think,” Elias said.

  Ian gestured impatiently. “Have you ever known her to see the past in any Work we’ve ever done?”

  “But the swastika—”

  “With a cross, both in flames.”

  Elias shrugged. “The Nazis were nominally Christians.”

  “What else was it she said? It sounded nothing like French or Hebrew, which as far as I know are the only languages she speaks besides English.”

  “Ian,” murmured Elias, “you’re my friend and my colleague, and I value you tremendously. But at times your curiosity drives me utterly mad.”

  “Short trip,” Kate retorted, bending over Lydia, smoothing back her sweat-dampened hair. “Let her sleep it off. I’ll stay with her—you too, Simon. Elias, see to Holly. The rest of you, go home and get some rest.”

  There was some murmuring as they hung up their robes and put away implements and doused candles. Someone picked up Lydia’s thurible and extinguished it. Elias ignored everything but Holly—who still stood on her point of the inlaid oak pentagram, arms wrapped protectively around the Waterford chalice.

  “You can give it back now,” he said, gently prying her fingers loose.

  She looked at him as if she had never seen him before.

  “You know what she is,” he reminded her as he took the crystal.

  She nodded. “Sciomancer. Diviner of shadows.” Shaking herself visibly, she shrugged out of her silver robe as if the action would rid her of magic, too. “Why the swastika?”

  “Her grandmother was a Holocaust survivor.”

  “Diviner of the future in shadows,” Holly corrected grimly.

  “With occasional echoes of the past.” He wasn’t about to say what he really wanted to say, which was, How the hell should I know why she saw what she saw and said what she said?

  “The swastika wasn’t originally a Nazi symbol, you know.”

  And now, he told himself, he would be privileged to hear a lecture from one of the greatest collectors of pretty much useless information he had ever met.

  “It’s found from Ireland, where it was the Cross of St. Bridget, to India, which is where the Sanskrit word ‘swastika’ comes from. The Hopi, the Plains Indians, and the Maya used it in the Americas. About the only place it’s never been found, in fact, is central Africa.”

  “Fascinating,” he said quellingly.

  Holly was relentless. “The Sun Wheel, fertility, life, good fortune—it shows up on the feet of the Buddha, as a sign of Artemis, and it’s even been found in Jewish temples many thousands of years old.” There was an instant’s pause for breath. “What direction was it turning?”

  He gave a start, surprised at being asked a question. He’d found that usually when she got going, not much slowed her down.

  “Right or left?” Holly gestured impatiently. “Deosil or widdershins? Right is the sun and the god; left is the moon and the goddess.”

  “I don’t have the vaguest idea,” Elias said caustically. “I didn’t think to ask.”

  “Find out when you can. And those words at the end—what was that? And what about the ravens, and a spear? Those sound like Norse mythology—”

  He ground his teeth. “Let’s wait until Lydia can tell us exactly what she saw before we speculate on what it means.”

  “Oh, of course, Your Honor,” Holly snapped. “Objection—calls for speculation. Inadmissible as evidence.” She flung her robe onto a chair. “I’m going home. Good night—what’s left of it.” And with that she stormed out of the room.

  Simon ambled over. “Don’t tell me—photographic memory?”

  “No—Just eidetic.” Or, as Susannah usually put it, idiotic.

  “And a redheaded Irish temper, too,” Simon remarked.

  Elias rubbed wearily at his forehead. “It seems to be her default attitude setting. How’s Lydia?”

  “Resting. Go to bed, Eli.”

  “Simon—what about the ravens?”

  “Go to bed, Eli.”

  DENISE BLUSTERED HER WAY INTO the judge’s chambers on Friday afternoon, ignoring the secretary’s bark of “You can’t go in there!” and the fact that His Honor was on the phone. She could not, however, ignore the basketball on the floor; she nearly tripped over it, and in her fury gave it a vicious kick. It slammed into the desk and then into a pile of case folders, which erupted in a gush of flying paper.

  Elias Sutton Bradshaw hung up his phone. “And a good day to you too, Denise. To what do I owe—?”

  Glaring down into dark eyes whose tilt and amusement should have reminded her of an elf, she spat, “Lay off, you bastard. You have no right—”

  “Your Honor—”

  Denise whirled at the sound of another voice—feminine, worried, and belonging to a blonde who should have been on the cover of Vogue, not trussed up in a power suit in service to a judge of the United States District Court.

  “It’s all right, Susannah,” Bradshaw replied.

  “Shall I find the marshal on duty?”

  “Don’t bother.” It was a Friday, and Pete Wasserman was his assigned protection today; no point in troubling the man. If it had been Thursday, and Evan Lachlan’s watch, Elias might have been tempted—just to see the fireworks. “She only bites when she’s hungry—and she dined well last night, I’m told. Close the door on your way out.”

  Frowning, Susannah did so—obviously unhappy about it but also unwilling to argue w
ith her boss. Denise, furious at the interruption, stalked over to the desk to glare more effectively down at her quarry.

  “I mean it. You have no authority and no right to—”

  “You’re in my jurisdiction,” he replied mildly, addressing her as if she were a particularly dim-witted six-year-old. “That gives me the authority and the right. Just count yourself lucky I’m not using the authority of this office instead.”

  “You don’t dare!”

  “Make another mistake, and you’ll find out just how much I dare.”

  “I won’t stand for this.”

  “Denise, you make an excellent living writing clichés, but must you also speak in them?”

  “Cliché this!” she snarled, and with a muttered word and a complex gesture of her fingers, the spilled stack of file folders burst into flames.

  Bradshaw sighed, leaned back in his chair, and with a glance and a nod extinguished the little blaze.

  “Play with fire on your own time,” he said. “I have more important things to do.”

  “You can’t scare me!”

  “Shall I send you back to your own? New York isn’t New Orleans, Denise. Whatever Jean-Michel tolerated in Voodoo Land isn’t kosher here. You’d be better off back in the bayou.”

  “I’m not going back and you can’t make me.”

  “No?” He smiled, but his eyes were bleak. “It’s true, Jean-Michel has done me a favor or three. Sending you back wouldn’t earn me his undying devotion.”

  “Whatever he told you was a lie.”

  “No, it wasn’t—and we both know it. Just stay out of trouble, Denise. You know what I mean—and what I won’t stand for in my city.”

  “Fuck you,” she responded, and turned on her heel and marched out.

  The furrows that forty-nine years had carved into Elias’s brow deepened, as if someone had suddenly drawn his face in blacker ink. He sat very still for a few moments, then roused himself and took a can of air freshener from a desk drawer. The fire hadn’t burned anything—Denise wasn’t that good, and he’d been very quick—but there was a slightly scorched smell in the air.

  With a quick spritz of aerosol, a corporate concoction of cinnamon-and-apple filled the office. Elias’s nose twitched. Perhaps Holly could brew him up something sultry and Southern, magnolias maybe—scratch that, she was a lousy cook. A pity she had only a minor Talent, one requiring no education at all. She’d done the basics back home in Virginia, of course, but at an age when others manifested their special gifts, she had been found to have nothing special at all. Except the one. Except that strange, dangerous, damned-near unique one.

  Reminding himself to ask Kate to raid her stillroom for something soothing, he punched the intercom switch and said, “Mrs. Osbourne, can you bring me the Castello case file, please?”

  ONE STEP AHEAD OF ’EM, always one step ahead, Swinnerton sang to himself as he opened the door of his hotel room.

  It was only when he saw a big grin above a shiny five-pointed star of the United States Marshals Service that he realized the door had already been unlocked.

  “Hiya, Harry,” said the grin. Handcuffs dangled from the fingers of the man’s left hand; the right one was dead-steady around a Glock. “You’re gonna be a good boy, right?”

  One step ahead—except when I’m one step behind. Harry Swinnerton sighed, calculating his chances of taking the big guy.

  Lousy.

  He held out both hands, wrists together. “Do it, Lachlan.”

  “Now, that’s what I like to hear. Philosophical.”

  Swinnerton was cuffed and Mirandized—the latter technically unnecessary, for as a fugitive convicted felon he had never not been under arrest, but Lachlan had begun his career in the NYPD and the right-to-an-attorney speech was hard-wired by now. Harry heard it all out, then turned mournful eyes on his captor. “Where’d I go wrong?”

  “Besides offing that guard while you were stealing way too many pretty little figurines, you mean?” The deputy exchanged gun for cell phone and punched a button. “Well, Harry, you’ve just got to learn to stay off the Internet.”

  That bitch at the cybercafe. Had to be. She’d come on to him, he’d told her to take a hike, and—

  “Or at least if you do go surfing, don’t browse every antiques dealer on the East Coast who’s interested in Etruscan bronzes.” He paused long enough to say into the phone, “Got him,” before perp-marching Harry out of the hotel room.

  In the elevator, Swinnerton looked up at six feet four inches of Deputy U.S. Marshal on the hoof. “Y’know, Lachlan, you’re a real asshole.”

  “So my girlfriend tells me. Into the car, and let’s get you back to jail. C’mon, Harry, cheer up. I hear Friday is meatloaf night.”

  One

  AS HE SET HIS THIRD Corona down after taking a long swallow, Evan Lachlan felt Elias Bradshaw looking at him across the table. When he glanced over, there was a quizzical smile on the judge’s face. Lachlan arched a brow in query.

  “You really don’t know, do you?” Bradshaw asked.

  “Know what?” He returned his gaze to the fascinating sight of Holly McClure dancing with Susannah Wingfield—yeah, two women, like this was a dyke bar or something. A Bonnie Raitt CD was thundering from the sound system while the band took a break at what Holly swore was the only halfway decent blues bar in New York. And whoever would’ve thought they’d run into Bradshaw and Wingfield at a place like this? An upscale restaurant or exclusive club was more their style—or so Lachlan would have said before getting a good look at Susannah.

  The prim attorney was surely a sight to behold, a Friday night fantasy (the last thing he’d ever admit to Holly) in black miniskirt, black stiletto heels, and crimson silk shirt with three—count ’em, three—buttons undone. As for the black leather biker-chick jacket that draped the back of her chair … incredible. He’d seen her legs before, of course, but never this much of them, or in black silk hosiery. And they were well worth looking at.

  Susannah Wingfield, off-duty. Lachlan shook his head in amazement. He would’ve bet good money that this blonde carbon copy of Audrey Hepburn could never laugh and toss her long hair and sing and shake it like—well, better not go there. He had to work with the lady, after all.

  Besides, he preferred watching his own lady. Holly was dancing with as much abandon as Susannah, but her moves were sinuous as a cat’s. Above boots with three-inch heels and tight faded Levi’s she wore the blue-and-white baseball jersey that had been Evan’s congratulatory gift on publication of her Village Voice article, “Property of U.S. Marshals Service.” Three inches taller than Susannah’s five-seven, and outweighing her by at least twenty-five pounds, Holly looked chunky by comparison. Then again, anybody but Gwyneth Paltrow would look chunky next to Susannah—who was, to Evan’s discerning eye, too skinny. He liked a woman he wasn’t likely to pulverize in bed if he shifted wrong in his sleep. On the Evan Liam Lachlan Scale, Holly McClure rated an eight in most departments. Plus a ten for the eyes.

  “You have no idea who she is,” Bradshaw’s voice said.

  “Why, who is she?” Evan asked. Besides the slinkiest thing in this bar.

  “I’m surprised the subject never came up. I thoughtyou’d been seeing her for several weeks.” Bradshaw drank Scotch and leaned back, watching Susannah.

  “So?” Lachlan prompted.

  “What? Oh. We had quite a chat about it when she came to the office regarding her research.”

  The judge was enjoying this. The marshal was not. But Lachlan’s voice was silken smooth as he said, “Holly went to that ritzy college with Susannah. You saying that puts her out of my league, Your Honor?”

  “Not at all,” Bradshaw assured him, taking another swallow of Scotch. He looked amused. Lachlan hated that expression on anybody, but especially on Elias Bradshaw.

  This was not the couple he would have chosen to double-date with. As a U.S. Marshal assigned to judicial protection, Bradshaw was Lachlan’s duty—and sometimes his cross t
o bear—three days a week. It was Lachlan’s Irish luck that the judge’s clerk was a woman well worth looking at who, moreover, had interesting friends. The weird part was that from a couple of hints Holly had dropped, Susannah and Elias had become an item about the same time he and Holly had. Lachlan knew how the women had met: Susannah the pre-law and Holly the history major were sopranos who had stood right next to each other in the Women’s Chorale.

  “Susannah can sing?”

  “Like an angel with a solid gold halo,”Holly affirmed digging her hands into the pockets of her coat. Cold wind off the Hudson ruffled her hair and burned bright color into her skin, emphasizing the freckles across nose and cheekbones.

  He shook his head in disbelief, then eyed her. “What about you?”

  “Me? A halo?” She grinned.

  “God forbid! C’mon. Prove you can sing.”

  “Right here in the middle of Central Park?”

  He stood back from her, arms folded. “I dare ya.”

  “That, my dear Marshal, was a mistake.”

  And right there in the middle of a frosty Sunday afternoon stroll she ran through the scale up to a note that hit the bare treetops—and then soared on into the sky.

  Lachlan, aware that people were looking curiously at them, made a grab for her. “Exhibitionist,” he growled, and she broke off to laugh as he whirled her around, catching her back against his chest. She leaned her head onto his shoulder, chortling. Wrapping his arms around her, lips buried in russet hair, he hefted her a few inches off the ground. “McClure, behave yourself!”

  “Oh, do I have to?”

  He smiled to himself as he drank beer and watched the two women. They shared the same taste in music—and maybe in men, too. Though Lachlan couldn’t see it himself, women did appreciate Bradshaw: the frank appraisal he gave them, the honest enjoyment he took in watching them, the intent way he listened to them. Susannah had certainly fallen for it. She was directing a genuinely fiendish shimmy at her boss right now, laughing.