Spellbinder: A Love Story With Magical Interruptions Read online

  “There’s a reason,” she muttered miserably.

  “Good,” Evan said. “Just so long as you’re not something out of a Stephen King novel, I’m okay with it.”

  Unpredictable? He was absolutely unfathomable. Taking a deep breath, she sat up, faced him, and announced, “I’m a Witch.”

  He arched a brow, his expression mildly curious.

  “No, I mean it. A piss-poor one, but I really am a Witch.” Holly gestured to the fire once again, and once again the blaze leaped higher. “See?”

  All he did was smile a little, as if she’d done nothing more peculiar than flick away some stray lint.

  Glaring, she huddled into herself, wrapping her arms around her shins. “What d’you expect me to do — wiggle my nose like Samantha? Stand over a boiling cauldron stirring eye of newt into the pot? Sorry, honey, my broomstick’s in the shop for repairs —”

  “I just want an explanation. That too much to ask?”

  “I told you. I’m a Witch. From a long line of Witches. But I don’t cast spells, I don’t work hexes, and I don’t mix up potions. All I ever do is bleed.”

  “You what?”

  “I can’t believe I’m telling you this.” Raking her hair back from her forehead, she took a steadying breath and went on, “I’m not a Witch in the popular sense—those silly TV shows and fantasy novels, that’s mostly drivel. I don’t have much magic at all. What I am is a Spellbinder. Other people use me. Or, more specifically, my blood.”

  “Blood,” he echoed impassively.

  “Yeah. I’m the rarest kind of Witch there is. I’m like an alchemist, except I don’t turn base metal into gold, I turn a genuinely gifted Witch’s maybe-it’llwork into stone-cold-guaranteed. Love potion? A drop of me —” She snapped her fingers, “— and it’s instant helpless devotion for life. Or until somebody works an opposing spell with another drop of my blood.”

  “Sounds like a fairly valuable thing to be,” he noted.

  “No shit, Sherlock!” She knew she was telling him too much, but she couldn’t stop herself — she was too damned mad. And anger demanded that she go on telling him things until something eventually obliterated his expression of genial interest — as if she had revealed that she collected bottle caps or had a salacious tattoo.

  “See those pretty glass globes in my windows? They’re not suncatchers. They’re spellcatchers. They get filled up with nasty Workings directed at me, and then they have to be destroyed—by an expert. There are spells of protection in the rugs, on the walls—even my goddamned front doorknob!”

  “Holly —”

  But she was off and running now. “This apartment used to belong to other Witches. When they rented it to me, all the protective spells were reWorked to focus on me. We do that for each other, in the community. No, it’s not called a coven, not in polite society. We don’t have a school, like Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books—I wish we did, because then maybe people who spend their lives wondering what’s weird about themselves could learn they aren’t really freaks —”

  “Holly! Slow down. I’m still back at people wanting your blood —”

  “Yeah, I’m popular as all hell,” she said bitterly. “When I was little, a vampire came after me — that’s how I met Uncle Nicky and Uncle Alec —”

  “Who?” He shook his head as if to clear it, then said with a resigned sigh that further infuriated her, “Yeah, sounds as if this is gonna take a while. Why don’t we go to bed and get comfortable?”

  All she could do was stare at him.

  “Bed,” he repeated patiently. “Comfortable, y’know? Warm? Blankets, pillows, all like that?”

  “You’re kidding! You don’t want to leave?”

  “Over a little thing like you bein’ a Witch?” he asked, the smile playing around his mouth again.

  “Don’t patronize me!” she snapped. “You obviously don’t believe —”

  “Don’t tell me what I believe, lady. I’m trying to understand whatever it is you’re trying to tell me. And I’d really like to be in bed with you while we do it.”

  “I’m trying to tell you I’m a Witch!”

  “You said that.”

  Completely frustrated, she jumped to her feet and, taking the afghan with her, strode over to the bar to grab the spare vodka bottle from a lower cabinet and a shot glass from the shelves. “Watch and learn,” she snarled. Bottle in one hand, glass in the other, she returned and sank down, tangled in the afghan. “Here—feel. Both at room temperature, right? Neither was in the fridge. Now pour.”

  He did so, and she smiled grim satisfaction when the hand holding the shot glass jerked a bit in response. “A trifling sample of Uncle Alec’s magic. He knows I like my vodka ice-cold.”

  Evan looked at the bottle. He looked at the glass. Then he looked at her. And the look he’d worn earlier was finally and completely gone. “You’re really not kidding, are you?”

  She shook her head slowly. When he said nothing more, she took the vodka from him and gulped it. The glacial burn down her throat made her eyes water. And that, by damn, was the only reason his face became a little blurry.

  “Holly? I thought Witches couldn’t cry.”

  A snort met a sniffle and she ended up coughing. “Oh, for the love of — Do I have to go through every single cliché and tell you why it’s wrong?”

  “Well, I know right off there’s one that’s not true.” He coaxed her close to him, one palm cupping her right breast. “Nice and warm—not cold at all.”

  Four

  ON TUESDAYS AND THURSDAYS, Evan Lachlan was assigned to protect Elias Bradshaw. Which meant that unless the judge went someplace other than his chambers or his courtroom, paperwork was the order of the day. Once upon a time, back when he’d been with the NYPD, Evan had looked on deskbound law enforcement as oxymoronic—emphasis on the “moronic.” But that had been before he’d figured out computers and discovered that legwork was much easier when you let your fingers do the walking.

  On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Lachlan worked various and sundry cases assigned him by the United States Marshals Service. The arrangement was highly experimental, but it got past the head office on Pearl Street because for him and Pete Wasserman, it worked out just fine. Pete was a twenty-two-year veteran who had done more than his share of time on protection duty at the Supreme Court in D.C.; when Bradshaw started attracting serious threats, Wasserman had been only too happy to move home to New York. And, in the way of things within any profession, he had been even happier to request the son of an old friend as his backup. Like Evan, Pete had started as a beat cop. His partner for a year or so had been Evan’s father.

  Wasserman was, in fact, part of the reason Evan switched to the Marshals Service. Watching his father move sideways, never up, taught him that he wanted more for himself. With a stint in the NYPD, a hard-won college degree, and one hell of a lucky collar (taking down a burglar who happened to be a Federal fugitive), Lachlan had found himself on the fast track. Good work since, and good friends in the right places, had allowed him to put together the unusual arrangement that kept Elias Bradshaw protected and still gave Evan three days a week to pursue other cases.

  This particular Monday morning, however, he was in pursuit of something else.

  Telling the switchboard that he was deeply busy and to hold all calls, he closed his office door and sat down at his computer. Three hours later he had found out everything he ever wanted to know about Witches.

  He also found out exactly nothing.

  Magic came in white and black varieties—anybody who’d ever given it a second thought could figure that out. But according to various Internet sites, it also could be red, yellow, purple, green, blue, brown—and probably puce, vermilion, and burnt sienna, Evan told himself with a snort. And if he saw “magic” cutely spelled with a k one more time, he was going to throw up.

  Gardnerian, Alexandrian, Dianic, Eclectic, Celtic, Welsh, Arcadian, Isian, Shamanic, Seax Wiccan. NeoGardnerian, for Chri
ssakes. And all of them with different emphases. It was enough to make a person glad to be Catholic. Most of them ascribed to the same basic idea, expressed as “An ye harm none, do as thou wilt.” Which he supposed was another way of saying “Do unto others.” Sort of.

  Eventually he realized what he was really accomplishing: avoidance of the issue. Not that he’d believed the Witch thing until the trick with the shot glass. He could still feel the raw cold of it on his fingertips.

  Someone knocked on his door. “Evan?” Susannah called. “Come on, open up.”

  He wondered suddenly if she knew about Holly. If she, too, was a Witch. Rising, he unlocked his door and motioned her in.

  She was back in a power suit—dark blue, with a severe white blouse and pearl earrings, her long blond hair confined in a French twist. He spared a sigh for the black leather of last Friday night.

  “For me?” he asked, nodding to the huge basket of flowers in her arms. “You shouldn’t have.”

  “I didn’t. Holly’s forgiven you,” she told him, setting the arrangement on his desk. “I guess that means I should forgive His Honor, too, right?”

  Lachlan arched a brow at her. “Up to you. Who do I get to forgive?”

  “Well—me, I suppose.” She perched a hip on the credenza near the door. “Open the card.”

  He did, and read, Find out anything interesting lately?, and shook his head in amazement. Holly couldn’t possibly know what he’d been doing all morning. Or, then again, maybe she did. She was a Witch.

  With very little magic except her blood, or so she’d said.

  He looked more carefully at the flowers, finding their color scheme odd, to say the least. Purple hyacinths, red and pink roses, white chrysanthemums, and a lone white violet. The usual ferns, but no baby’s breath or eucalyptus.

  “None of your business what the card says,” he replied to Susannah’s questioning look, adding pointedly, “Don’t you have work to do, Counselor?”

  “Time for lunch,” she retorted. “You up for Chinese?”

  On the way out of the office he glimpsed the judge, who gave him a look he didn’t particularly like. That wasn’t unusual; he and Bradshaw didn’t get along all that well. But it wasn’t Evan’s job to like his assignment, just to make sure a long list of crazies with a longer list of grudges didn’t use Bradshaw for target practice. So far in their year’s acquaintance he’d confiscated twenty-three revolvers and eighteen knives ranging from switchblades to plastic shivs, and intercepted nine accused felons or their surrogates outside Bradshaw’s home. At first he’d wondered what the guy did to earn such devotion. Then he sat in on His Honor’s trials and sentencings, and discovered that Bradshaw shared an “object all sublime” with The Mikado’s Lord High Executioner. The punishments indisputably fit the crimes.

  Over kung pao chicken, Susannah filled him in on the details of Holly’s career. Lachlan got the impression she’d been dying to do so for months. He listened, nodded, filed the information in his brain, and wondered idly why he’d been so upset about how much Holly made. And why he hadn’t been — and wasn’t—more upset that she was a self-confessed Witch.

  “— enough money that she could quit teaching,” Susannah was saying, “and write full-time. That summer we took off together for Europe—England, Ireland, Italy, Greece —” She sighed wistfully. “Glorious.”

  “And expensive.” The money was real, tangible. Comprehensible. The Witch thing wasn’t. Unless he thought about that shot glass.

  “It’s the planes that cost big bucks—well, and Italy, of course. But we got some great deals through some friends of hers. Alec Singleton and Nick Orlov. Have you met them?”

  “Heard about them,” he allowed.

  “Alec used to work for Eli’s uncle’s firm, Fairleigh and Bradshaw. Nick owned a bookstore in the Village. They both retired last spring, which is when Holly moved into their old apartment.” She finished her rice and leaned back in her chair. “And that brings you pretty much up to date, except that Dragon Ships got published this month. So. What do you think, Evan?”

  “I think it’s my turn to pay for lunch,” he replied, taking out his wallet.

  “Thanks. Fortune cookie first.” She cracked hers open, read the slip of paper, and made a face. “‘Open your eyes; magic will find you.’ Don’t you love how generic these things are?”

  Evan kept a straight face and duly read his own aloud. “‘Know yourself before judging others.’ I think this one was meant for the boss. Shall we go?”

  Back at the office, Evan looked at the list of his morning’s downloads and was tempted to relegate all of it to the recycle bin. He supposed he could simply ask Holly to fill him in on what she believed, what she did, how she viewed being a Witch. He wasn’t entirely certain why he didn’t do just that. It would be rude, of course, and she’d probably feel she had to explain and justify herself—not something either of them would enjoy. Or maybe he was just reluctant to find out. Belief, after all, was a tricky thing.

  They’d established their mutual Catholicism early on, and their mutual lipservice to it. Evan hadn’t lost his faith, exactly, but it had undergone a radical transformation since his childhood. He supposed this was fairly typical. But how could Holly be a nominal Catholic and a practicing Witch?

  And what constituted a “practicing Witch,” anyway?

  The basics were straightforward enough. The wand was expected — after all, what was a Witch without a magic wand? He’d read Harry Potter. (He’d had to, or there’d be nothing to talk to his niece and nephews about.) But the variety of wood that could be used was amazing. Alder, apple, birch, blackthorn, elder, hawthorn, hazel, myrtle, oak, pine, poplar, rowan, spruce, willow — Evan was a city boy and half these trees he’d never even heard of.

  Sometimes crystals were set into the wand’s tip. A smoky quartz to amplify earth magic, a garnet for courage and energy; a black onyx to repel dark magic, an amethyst for protection. That was just for starters, of course, in the crystal magic department, but he took one look at the huge list of stones (more than half of which he’d never heard of) and went back to looking at the tools.

  Specifications for a cauldron were definite: black cast-iron, three-legged, with a handle, in which potions were brewed. The cauldron was distinct from the chalice, which held wine—just like Holy Communion. In fact, he was running across several things that corresponded to Catholic ritual. The thurible was used to burn incense, swung back and forth on its chain to spread the smoke around, purifying the air. Witches used candles, too, in more colors and scents and attendant meanings than he really wanted to explore. Fire, Air, Water—he suddenly recalled his mother’s funeral, when the priest had thrown clods of Earth on the coffin.

  Were Catholics more pagan than they knew? He knew enough Irish folklore to know that Brighid had been revered on the Emerald Isle long before Patrick arrived to make a Saint out of her. Clever, really, the way the Church had coopted local deities, aligning the new religion with the old by turning pagan gods and goddesses into Blesseds and Beatifieds and Canonizeds.

  Shelving that concept for later—right beside so much else he’d discovered this day—he went on through the list. Robe; cingulum (they even used the Latin word for the “cord around the waist”); something called a bolline, used for cutting herbs and inscribing candles and so forth. The major thing, though, seemed to be the athame: a double-bladed dagger with a black handle. It was never used to cut anything in the physical world — bread or herbs or whatever — but only for magical purposes. The twin edges symbolized that power cut both ways. As far as he could tell, all Witches had an athame. They just couldn’t agree on how to pronounce it.

  Evan learned about casting a Circle, about the broom used to sweep the Circle metaphorically clean, about the Book of Shadows that recorded spells and charms and incantations, about the bell of brass or crystal that some traditions used (and there was his own religion again)—

  Bell, Book, and Candle?

  An
d then he ran across something that made him laugh for the first time. It was a simple acronym: IRAB. It stood for I Read A Book — a satirical term for “Witches” who presented themselves as authorities after having done just that.

  Well, at least some of these people had a sense of humor.

  Changing positions to ease his stiffening back brought the basket of flowers into his line of sight again. He stared at them thoughtfully. Not the usual orchids or carnations or calla lilies—not Holly. Something about the flowers was peculiar enough to evoke his curiosity anew—as if he hadn’t already been inundated in information today. Something he’d read this morning came back to him, and after some searching, the Internet yielded its trove of pictures, descriptions, and Victorian flower symbolism.

  Three purple hyacinths: forgive me. Three red roses: I love you. Three pink roses: believe me. Three white chrysanthemums: truth. And a single white violet for take a chance on happiness. All thirteen flowers nestled in ferns, for magic.

  TO HIS SURPRISE, THE DOORMAN at Holly’s building—a tall black man with muscles on top of his muscles—greeted him by name before he could even open his mouth to ask if Ms. McClure was at home.

  “No mystery about it, Marshal,” Mr. Hunnicutt said with a grin. “Ms. McClure phoned down at noon to have you put on the list. She gave us the time of your arrival in her company last night, we pulled the tape, made a print of your picture, and started a file. And if whoever’s on duty doesn’t recognize you at once whenever you arrive, heads will definitely roll.”

  Evan approved of security, but this was … excessive? Then he considered who Holly was—or, rather, what she was. And wondered if Mr. Hunnicutt and his relief security guard were Witches, too.

  And what about the other people who lived in the building? There were eight separate luxury apartments here. Were all of them inhabited by Witches?

  From now on he’d be thinking about that wherever they went, whomever she spoke to. He couldn’t decide whether such musings were paranoid or not. Well, hell; he was in law enforcement—paranoid was in his job description.