Casting Spells (5 page)

I guess I must have dozed off somewhere between my second glass of wine and the bag of Chips Ahoy I’d sworn I wouldn’t open until Saturday night because the next thing I knew I was startled awake by one of Renate’s beautiful daughters.

Calliope was balanced on the rim of my wineglass, all teeny-tiny tattoos, piercings, and hot pink iPod permanently set on Stun.

“Wake
up
!” she said. “You have to get to the Stallworths’ place right now or else.”

“Calli?” I stifled a yawn. “What’s going on?”

She shrugged and faerie glitter left over from Transition sent the cats running for cover. (That’s the thing about the Fae: no matter how hard they try, they can’t always cover their tracks.) “My mom says you’d better get there fast.”

She vanished in another shower of glitter I would be vacuuming up for days.

The temperature had dropped considerably in the last few hours. A wicked northerly wind slashed through my heavy down-filled coat and penetrated three layers of wool and quiviut sweaters. As much as I hated the thought of driving the icy half mile between my cottage and Town Hall, I hated the thought of walking it even more.

It took forever to warm up my ancient Buick, long enough that I started wondering if maybe I needed Janice to devise a protective charm to keep the engine running one more year. Finally I shifted into drive and white-knuckled my way down Osborne Avenue. I slid to a shaky stop at the corner of Carrier and Osborne and saw the lights blazing at the Stallworth Funeral Home.

Beads of sweat broke out along the back of my neck and I yanked off my scarf and tossed it onto the seat next to me. I told myself that the Stallworths were nocturnal by nature and 2 A.M. was midday to them, but the knot of cars in their driveway wasn’t a good sign. I mean, we weren’t all vampire in Sugar Maple.

Gunnar’s banshee talk swooped in on me like a swarm of bees. Was it possible he had been right and we had lost one of our own? I refused to wrap my mind around the concept. The death of my father was the last true death I could remember. Sorcha didn’t die in the traditional sense; she literally passed from this dimension of being into another one. I had been present at the moment she left us, and while I had been unable to actually see her pierce the veil, there was no denying the fact that in the blink of an eye, her physical self was gone.

That was how it was with most of the villagers. When they moved into another realm, their physical selves moved with them, and there was nothing for the Stallworth Funeral Home to do but organize a gathering in their name.

Maybe one of those businessmen I had seen choking down porterhouses the size of my Buick had keeled over at the table after Gunnar and I left. It could be anything, I told myself as I turned into the circular driveway and glided to a stop behind our only school bus.

Janice, wearing a plaid flannel nightgown and Uggs, was waiting for me at the door. “The blond woman who bought your Orenburg is dead.”

I stopped unbuttoning my coat. “What?”

“She’s dead.” A blaze of color stained her cheeks. “Paul Griggs and his sons were coming out of the woods on the north side of the skating pond and they saw something on the ice—”

Janice kept talking but her words were lost to me. I felt like the oxygen had been sucked out of my lungs. “It’s a mistake,” I said. “You saw her: she was meeting her boyfriend for dinner at the Inn. She wasn’t exactly dressed for ice skating.” The skinny heels. The naked dress. That beautiful, vibrant woman ...

“Colm said she waited two hours for the guy to show up but he never did. She paid her bar tab then left around nine o’clock. That was the last time anyone saw her alive.”

“You don’t know that. You’re guessing. You don’t know anything.”

“She’s here, honey. She’s in the—” She stopped and looked away, clearly searching for the right words, but there weren’t any.

Slowly the rest of the room came into focus. Paul and his sons Jeremy and Johnny were slumped on the sofa against the far wall. They still bore the marks of Transformation on their forearms and along their jaw lines, dark wiry tufts of gray-brown fur that always reminded me of steel wool. His normally rambunctious sons stared down at their bare feet. The powerful claws were almost fully retracted, but what remained glittered brightly in the overhead lights. All three were swaddled in huge white blankets with bright yellow daisies embroidered in each corner. I had tried repeatedly to woo Midge Stallworth over to knitting, but she was staunchly in the embroidery camp, as evidenced by the profusion of daisies on every textile she owned.

“What are we going to do?” Midge cried the second she saw me. She was a small, round, motherly woman whose high color was the result of a recent feeding and not blusher. “We haven’t ordered supplies in at least ten years. By the time we get a delivery, she’ll be so stiff we won’t be able to—”

The next thing I knew, I was looking up at the ceiling through a grayish mist. The voices were familiar—Janice and Paul and Jeremy’s croaking adolescent tenor—but the faces weren’t. I closed my eyes again, willing myself to pull the disparate images back into focus. When I opened them this time, everything was as it should be.

Except for the fainting part, that is.

“It’s her blood sugar,” Midge was saying as she drizzled Dr Pepper into my mouth. “They’re always having trouble with their blood sugar.” Midge blamed all my problems on being a nonmagick human.

“It’s not my blood sugar.” I pushed the soft drink away. “And don’t talk about Suzanne like that. She’s not even cold yet.”

“Oh, she’s cold,” Paul volunteered from the sofa. “She was near frozen when we pulled her out of the water.”

The room started to spin again, but this time I managed to keep myself from fading.

“I want to see her.”

They exchanged looks.

“I want to see her,” I repeated, rising to my feet. “We can’t just leave her alone in that room while we try to figure out what to do next.”

The rituals surrounding human death were alien to all of us, but I knew her passage had to be marked even if the thought of actually seeing Suzanne Marsden’s corpse was making it hard for me to breathe.

Midge led me down a flight of carpeted stairs and through a maze of dimly lit corridors painted an eerie silvery gray. Every ten feet or so a huge steel door with a tiny electronic locking system broke the monotony. Music, so quiet it was almost subliminal, softened the hard edges, but as we moved deeper into the core of the house, my fear of the unknown began to override my sense of what was right.

When Midge stopped in front of the last door and pressed a series of numbers on the keypad, it was all I could do to keep from running.

Stay, daughter.
Sorcha’s voice filled my head.
You are doing what you are meant to do.

I turned to Midge. “Did you hear that?”

Midge frowned as the keypad beeped its disapproval. “You made me punch in the wrong number,” she chided me.

“Are you sure you didn’t hear anything?” I persisted.

“Only my creaking knees,” she said as she punched in the code again.

There’s nothing to fear.
Sorcha’s dear, familiar voice hummed against my breastbone.
Do as I would do and with a full heart.

But what would Sorcha do? She had left me on the night of my twenty-first birthday and not a day went by when I didn’t think of her with love. She had taught me many of the healing arts but not how to cope with the end of human life. We had never faced anything like this before. No tourist or nonvillager had ever died within our township limits. Aerynn’s spell had made sure of it. Everyone was looking to me for answers but I hadn’t a clue.

If I had ever doubted that the spell was spinning to the end of its life span, I didn’t doubt it any longer.

I couldn’t turn to Midge and her family for help. Most of what the Stallworths knew about the mortuary business they had gleaned from repeated watchings of
CSI
and
Six Feet Under.
Faced with reality, they were as much in the dark as the rest of us.

Janice. Renate and Colm. Manny and Frank from Sugar Maple Assisted Living. Lilith. Lynette and Cyrus. Not even my best friend, Gunnar. There wasn’t a single soul in town who would be able to guide me through this maze. I was going to have to trust myself and pray that Sorcha’s wisdom would somehow give me strength to make the right choices for all of us.

The keypad emitted a series of three beeps then swung open. Midge took my hand and squeezed. “Not to worry,” she said. “It happens to all of you sooner or later.”

Suzanne lay face up on a gurney in the middle of the room. A harsh puddle of fluorescent light washed over her, leaching out what was left of her color. Midge had wrapped her body in a pale pink blanket edged with embroidered violets and pansies. The naked dress was draped over the back of a metal chair in the corner. The Orenburg scarf lay in a sodden heap on the floor.

“Isn’t she beautiful?” Midge made one of those clucking noises that reminded me of a brood hen about to lay an egg. “If only Paul and the boys had come out of the woods a moment earlier.” She shook her head. “Such a shame. We could have helped.”

I knew what she was thinking. There was life as Suzanne and I experienced it, and there was life the way the Stallworths knew it. If there had been time, they could have offered Suzanne the kind of choice most people believed existed only in fiction.

Eternal youth and beauty were powerful incentives, but I didn’t think a shadow life would have been enough for a woman like Suzanne.

Then again, maybe she would have jumped at the offer. I had to remind myself that I’d known Suzanne Marsden for maybe ten minutes. There wasn’t much you could learn about a woman in six hundred seconds.

Midge took my hand and squeezed. “Honey, don’t be scared. There’s nothing to fear.”

Easy for her to say. She had been part of the living dead since 1793. But even Midge had her limitations, and sunlight was one of them. Dawn wasn’t far away. We needed to get on with it.

I forced myself to really see what was in front of me.

“You’re right,” I said as I approached the body. “She’s still lovely.”

“I told you.” Midge gave me one of her fifties TV mom smiles. “It’s all a part of the Great Plan.”

Whatever that was.

Someone had smoothed Suzanne’s wet hair back from her face, exposing her perfect bone structure. She looked like a porcelain doll. All of the fire and flash she had brought with her to Sticks & Strings existed only in my memory.

“It’s the soul,” Midge said with a sigh. “It makes all the difference.”

Surprising talk from a vampire, but this was Sugar Maple, where nothing was as it seemed.

I struggled to find words to convey what I was feeling but I failed. The realization that if I had magick, this wouldn’t have happened filled me with remorse.

I stayed with Suzanne until daybreak. I tried to think deeply spiritual, philosophical thoughts about life and death and the hereafter, but my mind was a blank. I wished I had brought some knitting. Would Suzanne have minded? I didn’t think so but I was only guessing. Had she been a church-going Catholic, a lapsed Episcopalian, an observant Jew, a questioning agnostic? What prayers or rituals were part of her heritage? I had nothing to offer her but my physical presence, no blessings or incantations meant to ease her way between worlds. Her own people would have to see to that when they came for her.

I wondered who her people were. Did she have a family whose hearts would be broken when they got the news? What about the boyfriend she had worn the naked dress for—how would he feel when he heard? Did she have children, a job, friends who depended on her for laughter and support? Who was out there waiting for the call I would make as soon as the sun rose?

I didn’t have any answers, only the certainty that, like it or not, we were going to have to let the world in, if only for a while.

3

LUKE
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS—LATER THAT SAME DAY

 

I was up to my ass in dead matter when I finally got the call.

“Luke MacKenzie.” I balanced the receiver against my shoulder while I fed more paper into the shredder under my desk. Forget
CSI
and all those TV cop shows. Most of a real cop’s day was spent figuring out what the hell to do with all the paper the job generated.

“Are you still looking to leave us?” Fran, the chief’s admin assistant, asked.

We both knew the question was rhetorical. I had been looking to leave Boston PD for two years, three months, and eleven days, but up until now nobody in the contiguous forty-eight had work for a cop who wanted to disappear and still get paid for it.

“I have something for you.” I heard the click of computer keys in the background followed by one of those hacking coughs that said winter in New England. “It’s temporary and I know you’re looking for permanent but when I saw who and—” She stopped. “I’m sorry, Luke, but there’s no easy way to say this. Your friend Suzanne is dead.”