Casting Spells (8 page)

Isadora was undeterred. Her attention was riveted to me.

“You owe us.” Fae anger was spoken about in whispers and it was easy to see why. The air around Isadora shimmered crimson and purple. It crackled with electricity seeking ground. A dark mist loomed behind her then disappeared as quickly as it had come. I drew back instinctively and she smiled. “We didn’t have to take you in.”

“You didn’t take me in,” I reminded her. “Sorcha did.”

“Only because we allowed it. The last thing this town needed was Guinevere’s half-breed daughter.”

“Isadora!” Lilith sounded distressed. “Enough!”

“It’s not enough. It’s not nearly enough. Am I the only one who remembers that her own mother didn’t love her enough to stay here?” Her words seemed to circle my head, pounding to get inside my brain. “Am I the only one who remembers what it cost Sorcha to stay?”

I saw myself as a terrified six-year-old. I felt Sorcha’s love all around me like an embrace. The thought that I might have caused her pain was almost unbearable and I looked away.

“Chloe was a child,” Janice said in my defense. “She didn’t ask Sorcha to stay in this realm. Sorcha stayed to protect her until she came into her powers.”

Isadora dismissed her with a glance. “Which hasn’t happened.”

“She’s right,” someone called out. “What if Chloe never gets her powers? What happens to us then?”

“Then we’re in trouble, that’s what.” Henry from Fully Caffeinated stood up on his chair and waved an angry fist. “Maybe Isadora has had the right idea all along. I say it’s time to think about moving the whole shebang beyond the mist.”

“Sorry, Chloe, but Henry’s right.” Colm Weaver shot me another apologetic look. “Truth is you haven’t been getting the job done. I grew up beyond the mist. If you can’t keep us safe, I don’t see where we have a choice but to listen to Isadora.”

“You’re nuts,” Archie shouted. “They’re a bunch of fascists in there. I’d rather take my chances and stay right where we are.”

“But we can’t stay here if we’re not safe.” Hiram was one of the itinerant house sprites who wintered in Sugar Maple. “I’d trade freedom for safety any day.”

“You’re a horse’s ass,” Archie, the diplomat, shot back.

Lilith, always the peacemaker, stepped between them and quelled the dustup with a stern look.

But the damage had been done. I looked out at the crowd of familiar faces and saw that Colm and Hiram weren’t the only villagers who were beginning to believe Isadora might have the right idea.

Isadora saw it too. The expression of triumph on her face cut me to the quick.

“Give her time,” Janice said, staring down Isadora. “I know Chloe won’t let us down.”

“We’ve given her thirty years,” Peggy Whitman called from the back of the room. “How much time does she need?”

“It’s not Chloe’s fault,” Isadora said in a mock-sympathetic tone of voice. “She can’t help that she’ll never be more than she is at this moment: a nonmagick human who can do nothing to save us from ruin.”

Recreational crying wasn’t my thing, but my eyes were starting to well up with tears I hoped no one noticed.

Gunnar, however, noticed everything, and he sounded a warning.

“Let it go, Mother. There’s no crime in being human.”

Nervous laughter erupted like tiny brushfires and was quickly extinguished.

“But being selfish is.” She swung around to face me, and it took every ounce of courage I had to meet her eyes. “Be warned: the clock is ticking. Until you claim your powers, the Book of Spells is mine for the taking.”

I opened my mouth to say something but Gunnar stepped in front of me.

I had known Gunnar all my life but I had never seen him like this. He seemed bigger, taller, more powerful. More dangerous. Nothing like the gentle friend I loved. His words were mild, his manner controlled, but anger flew from his body like thunder-bolts. For a second I almost believed I could see them heading straight for his mother. Neither one of them uttered a word, but the room started to shake with the force of their silent battle, and just when I thought the very air between them was going to split in two, Isadora vanished in an explosion of red and purple glitter that sent Gunnar crashing into the back wall of the church.

The sound as he hit the wall sent chills up my spine, but that was nothing to the sense of dread when I realized he wasn’t moving.

“I hope he’s not dead,” Archie said. “The way things have been going around here ...”

“He’s not dead,” I snapped as I ran to him, our talk of banshees screaming inside my head. “He can’t be.”

I bent down over him and placed two fingers against his wrist. Nothing. My heart thudded hard inside my chest. The first time Gunnar heard the banshee wail, my mother died. The second time Suzanne Marsden drowned in Snow Lake. The third time—

I repositioned my fingers and held my breath.
Please, please
...A tiny pulsing, faint and thready, but there! My knees went weak with relief when his eyes opened and he groaned loudly.

“My mother?”

“Your mother,” I confirmed.

Janice handed me a bottle of water. I uncapped it and held it to his mouth.

“She put on quite a display,” I said as he gulped down some of the liquid. “I think you got caught up in the afterburn.”

“Collateral damage.” He rubbed the back of his head and winced. “Maybe we should hand out crash helmets when she’s around.” His sense of humor was back. That was a good sign.

“And Kevlar vests,” I said, helping him to his feet. “She’s formidable.”

“She’s a bitch,” Renate said, hovering in the air between us. “I know she’s your mother, honey, but I went to school with her. She was a bitch then and she’s a bitch now.”

Nobody argued the point. Isadora was all of those things and one other: she was right. Sugar Maple had opened its collective arms to me years ago, and magick or no magick, it was time for me to repay the debt before it was too late.

5

LUKE

 

It was like being trapped inside a snow globe inside a Hall-mark ad inside a Disney movie.

The Chamber of Commerce information Fran printed off the web had mentioned the “old-fashioned charm” and “wonderful New England ambience” of Sugar Maple, but those descriptions didn’t even come close to the town spread out before me. The place belonged on a Hollywood soundstage from the 1940s. Maybe the 1840s.

Gas lamps lined the main street. Candles burned in front windows. Wreaths of holly and pine decorated front doors. Even the snow drifts looked like someone had airbrushed them until they were ready for prime time. I could almost hear Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas” in the distance.

The only thing missing was a flyover from Santa and his reindeer.

Perfect?

Definitely.

Weird?

Just weird enough to bump my cop’s curiosity up another notch. The original plan was to do a quick drive-by on my way to the motel north of town where I’d be staying, but maybe a closer look wasn’t a bad idea.

The bridge let me off at the corner of Osborne and Bishop. I made a right on Osborne and rolled past a bank, an apothecary, and a candle store before I rounded the curve that led me to the lake.

Snow Lake was more like Snow Pond, a perfect oval that I would have guessed was man-made if I hadn’t skimmed a few paragraphs about Sugar Maple’s geographical features over a Big Mac earlier in the day.

I was a New England kid. I’d grown up playing hockey on the lake behind our school. You didn’t have a Zamboni maintaining the ice. You learned to skate over tree trunks, broken branches, divots and pits and soft spots. And you did it on hockey skates, not three-inch Manolo Whoevers.

What the hell had Suzanne been thinking? The guy who found her body said she had been wearing some kind of scarf, a cocktail dress, and her skates. She must have been drinking. Nothing else made any sense. I walked the perimeter, trying to see it with Suzanne’s eyes, but my attention was drawn to the cracked portion left of center from where I was standing.

That was where she had gone in. I could hear the cracking sound the ice made when she broke the surface. Her yelp of surprise as she dropped into the shockingly cold water. I knew the gut-twisting despair she must have felt when she realized it was too late.

A small wooden bench was positioned near the skate rental shack. The bench was piled high with snow except for two long indentations. On closer inspection they looked like prints from a pair of women’s high-heeled shoes.

Reading about Suzanne’s death had been tough enough, but seeing this last reminder of her vibrant, complicated self punched it home. I felt like I had been Tasered. I stood there for a few seconds, looking down at the snow prints, letting my mind spin back through the years.

Trips down memory lane aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

I turned away from the bench and scanned the terrain. Mostly I saw trees. Sugar maples with a few pine, spruce, and fir thrown in to keep it interesting. Nothing out of the ordinary.

I scanned the rest of the area as I started back to the truck. Not that I expected to find anything, but without a police presence in town, it was possible major pieces of evidence might have been left behind. Suzanne’s death was probably accidental but there was a five percent chance it wasn’t. And that five percent was where I needed to put my energy.

There was no pattern to any of the vegetation, at least not as far as I could see. Except for the rental shack and the bench, humans had walked softly on the land, which was why the tree caught my eye. A scruffy maple flanked by a pair of stubby Douglas firs, it had suffered its share of lightning strikes and all-you-can-eat deer buffets. The bark had been stripped in spots, gnawed in others. The surprising thing was that the tired old tree was still standing.

Scratch that. The really surprising thing was the circle gouged into the bark on the north side. I’m no naturalist but even I knew that deer weren’t into decorative munching.

In a way I was glad to see a sign of teenage rebellion in Sugar Maple. Maybe it was cop humor, but there was nothing like a little defacement of public property to humanize a town, and from what I’d read, this town needed it.

It took two tries to get the engine to turn over, but it finally caught and I headed back toward Osborne Avenue and went east. The stores were shuttered. The streets were empty. Nobody out walking the dog. Nobody on a quick run to the convenience store for milk and bread. I had a strange sense of déjà vu as I drove around but chalked it up to the fact that there was a built-in sameness to all northern New England villages. It was part of what made people love them the way they did.

Certain things were nonnegotiable and Sugar Maple had them all. The village green. The skating pond. The old whitewashed church with brightly painted red doors and stained glass windows with lights blazing from inside.

At ten o’clock on a Wednesday night in December?

I cut my lights and rolled down my window as I moved closer. A blue and white school bus with the words SUGAR MAPLE ASSISTED LIVING painted across the side was parked in the no-parking zone along with a beat-up VW van. Tomorrow that might be a problem but tonight I was still a civilian. I let it slide.

Loud voices spilled out into the street. It didn’t sound like a religious service to me unless liturgical language had changed a hell of a lot since my days at Saint Aloysius. And it definitely wasn’t a party.

I made a left and parked along the dark side of the narrow wooden structure. Snow drifts lined the cleared sidewalk and the path that led around to the front of the building. I slipped into the shadows and made my way toward the small window near the rear door.

I melted a small circle of ice beneath my thumb then peered inside. I couldn’t see much, but my line of sight landed on a knot of people who stood where an altar would have been. They were all vying for the attention of a tall, skinny blonde, one of those disheveled types who always seemed on the verge of a meltdown. A taller, blonder man stood next to her, nodding in agreement at everything she said.

I melted a larger circle and zeroed in on the skinny blonde. I know a fair bit about body language, and it was easy to see she was in charge and the tall guy with the six-pack was probably riding shotgun. A Julia Roberts type with long red hair was talking animatedly while a Catherine Zeta-Jones curvy brunette texted someone on a Blackberry. Even the old guy in the wheelchair looked like an aging Cary Grant. The skinny blonde was the plainest one in the group and she would rate a second look just about anywhere.

What the hell was in Sugar Maple’s water anyway?

The meeting, or whatever it was, finally came to an end. The blonde started bulking up beneath layers of sweaters and scarves while the tall guy waited patiently. Poor bastard. It was clear he was the beta in the mix. I felt sorry for them if they were a couple, because she’d be wearing his balls as earrings before they hit their first anniversary.