Fire Raiser (2 page)

As often happened, especially when they were physically close like this, Holly picked up on his thoughts. She rubbed a hand across his stomach and grinned at him. “I keep telling you: I’ll ogle Brad Pitt’s perfect pecs any day of the week, but who wants to cuddle up to a marble statue?”

Lachlan snorted. “So I shouldn’t get all crazy jealous of your old boyfriend?” Who wasn’t quite as sculpted as Brad Pitt, but certainly came close.

“Only if it amuses you. And I’ve told you before, he was never a boyfriend.”

He stared at her. “You never did it?”

“No.”

Evan began to laugh. “Oh, that poor bastard! No wonder he looks at you the way he looks at you!”

“How does he look at me?”

“You wouldn’t understand. It’s a Guy Thing.”

“Whatever.” She dismissed the incomprehensibility with a wave of her hand. “What I want to know is why we’re discussing some other man when I’ve got you naked as a jaybird and ready for more?”

“Who said I’m—” When she gave him a slow, lascivious grin, every nerve below his waist started chanting her name. “Christ, woman, are you trying to kill me?”

“Time I ’fessed up, huh? I’m after the insurance money.”

“Why don’t you take that smart mouth of yours and do something useful with it?” When she did, he exclaimed, “You
are
gonna kill me!”

“Trust me, lover man—you won’t mind.”

“FOUR-THIRTY. We gotta get dressed.”

Holly hid her face in the curve of Evan’s neck. “No.”

“C’mon. If we’re going to this stupid thing—”

“No.” His skin was warm and smooth, smelling of sweat and sex and the jasmine and marjoram their sheets were folded in, and she didn’t want to leave here, ever.

“Whatever happened to ‘democracy in action’?” He poked her un-gently in the ribs. “I’ve already thought of all the smart remarks you could make about the action in here, so don’t bother.”

Groaning, she rolled out of bed and grabbed a shirt Evan had dropped on a chair yesterday—or maybe the day before. A housekeeper she wasn’t. “Have I mentioned lately that you’re an asshole?”

“Ah!” He wagged an admonishing finger. “Five bucks—pay up.”

“We’re allowed to swear in our bedroom,” she protested. “Just not around the kids.” They’d made the rule because otherwise, as Lulah had acidly observed, the twins’ first words would undoubtedly have been unprintable. The hefty fine had been Lulah’s idea as well: financial motivation. For about six months the gallon pickle jar in the kitchen had rapidly filled with portraits of Abraham Lincoln, and the twins’ college fund thrived. But it was rare these days that Holly or Evan slipped around the children.

“Door’s open,” he reminded her sweetly. “Five bucks.”

“They’re not even in the house!” Padding over to the closet, she started rummaging for clothes. She was Sheriff’s Wife tonight, not Bestselling Author, so nothing backless, strapless, or cut halfway down to Argentina. Besides, there was a tropical storm plowing its way to the Virginia coastline, which meant rain here in the Blue Ridge by midnight or so, which meant a jacket for later.

“Okay, then,” Evan was saying. “If you get to swear, so do I. Wear the Fuck Me shoes.”

Distracted from sartorial musings, she turned an incredulous stare on him. “The what?”

“You know—the choo-choos or the blah-blahs or whatever the hell they are. The stiletto things, with the straps. The Fuck Me shoes.”

“It’s Jimmy Choo and Manolo Blahnik, you ignorant lout. And I’m assuming you mean these.” She held up six hundred bucks’ worth of snakeskin sandals with four-inch heels. They were three years out of fashion; had this been New York she would have culled them from her closet long ago. Or maybe not; her husband liked them, and she was ludicrously indulgent of his whims.

He stretched wide, eyeing her and the shoes. “Too bad you can’t wear just those and that shirt. There’s nothing sexier in the world than a woman wearing stilettos, a man’s shirt—and nothing else.”

“Sorry, darlin’. The county sheriff would have to arrest me.”

“For what? Not indecent exposure. Everything’s covered.”

“I know the guy, and I’m sure he’d think of something.”

“You could probably bribe him.” His arching eyebrows and innocent grin told her exactly what the county sheriff had in mind by way of a payoff.

While he showered, she searched her closet in earnest. There was still a whole section of her pre-pregnancy wardrobe she couldn’t have squeezed into with a can of axle grease and a crowbar. Evan didn’t seem to mind this more voluptuous version of his wife, so she shrugged it off, reasoning that any woman of forty-something who expected to have the body she’d had at twenty-something was out of her mind anyhow. Besides, as Lulah had remarked, “Anytime past thirty-five, you might as well enjoy what you look like now, because in five years you’re gonna look worse.”

The annoying exception was her husband, Holly mused. He was even more good-looking now than when she’d met him five years ago. It was nothing she could put her finger on—or, rather, it was everything she put her fingers on whenever she got the chance.

“What’re you grinning about?”

Startled, she dropped the skirt she’d chosen and turned quickly. He stood in the bathroom doorway with a beard made of soap, a straight razor in his hand, a towel around his hips, and a quizzical look in his eyes.

She considered leering, considered what leering usually led to, and shook her head. “Never mind. Let’s stop off and kiss the kids before we head over, okay?”

“Sure. Hey, you wanna grab that long-sleeved t-shirt out of the drawer for me?”

“No.” Holly slid past him into the bathroom.

“What, you got two broken arms?”

“No black tonight. You can’t wear the cashmere jacket, either.”

“The Goddess has spoken?”

“Yup.”

“But you always tell me I look hot in the cashmere jacket.”

“You do. Just not tonight.”

He pondered. “Oh. Too in-your-face New York, huh?”

“Not even in the same league as the Yankees jersey,” she teased, and he gave the predictable groan. “It’s just that we want people to come up and talk to you, not ask if you want a Zoloft.”

“If we don’t get out of this party by ten, I’m gonna
need
a Zoloft.”

Fifteen minutes later, he was dressed in dark-wash Levi’s, white shirt, and leather jacket. And, of course, those miserable old ostrich-hide cowboy boots. Despite the casual outfit, despite two years as sheriff of the smallest county in Virginia—even despite the cowboy boots—
New York
was scrawled all over him. It always would be. He needed a haircut, and he was as tan as any self-respecting country boy ought to be in summer, and the boots should have completed the picture of Sunday-go-to-meetin’ rural chic. But he was instantly identifiable as a New Yorker, as unmistakably as Americans were tagged as such in a single glance by Europeans. It wasn’t just the clothes—his shirt a shadow-striped silk that fit him to perfection, his jacket tailored to within an inch of its life notwithstanding the fact that it was battered brown leather. It was the way he wore the clothes, the way complete contentment fused with complete confidence—plus an intriguing insinuation of power. Nothing could intimidate him, nothing could scare him. He’d spent most of his life in the greatest city in the world, and more than fifteen years as a law enforcement officer in that city. Deposit him stark naked smack in the middle of Buenos Aires, Bialystok, or Borneo, and New York would still gaze arrogantly from his eyes.

“You’re staring again,” he remarked as he strapped on his wristwatch and snagged up the leather wallet containing his badge.

“As if this is unexpected,” she mocked.

“Back at you, lady love,” he chuckled. “Except the skirt’s too long.”

“No miniskirts after age forty.”

“And there are how many precincts of fashion police in this county? Turn around.”

She obediently twirled on her toes so that the tulip hem of her skirt flared around her knees. “Okay?” she prompted, knowing very well that the apple green silk dress was a winner—even if it had come from a catalog instead of Barneys, and even if it wasn’t hemmed halfway to her ass.

“Oh, very okay.” He tucked his Glock into the shoulder holster beneath his left arm. “Married or not, girl, you’re going home with me tonight.”

“Pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you?”

“Nah,” he replied breezily, catching her by the waist and pulling her in for a kiss. “You just look easy.”

Two

THEIR DAUGHTER HAD BEEN
Susannah
until mid-August of 2004—what would have been Susannah Wingfield’s thirty-eighth birthday. That night, Evan had found Holly standing beside the crib, tears on her cheeks. He’d read about the hormones thing, and the postpartum thing, and all the other pregnancy-labor-delivery things, so he wasn’t all that surprised that she was crying.

Until she said, “I can’t call her that. I just can’t. It was a mistake.”

Brilliantly, he asked, “Huh?”

“Naming her ‘Susannah.’ Every time I say it—Evan, I just can’t. It’s more than two months, but it just doesn’t feel right. We have to think of something else.”

Slipping his arms around her, he ventured, “Middle name?”

“Maybe.”

“We could tack on another one,” he said.

Holly nodded against his shoulder. “It’s just—she deserves a name of her own, you know? Not have to share it. And we have to remember Susannah as herself, not replace her, not even with our own child. Am I making any sense at all?”

“Shockingly, yes,” he teased. “We’ll think of something, lady love. Until we come up with a nickname or whatever, we can just call her Hey You. It’s not like she’ll know the difference.”

They’d tried variations for a while, but it turned out she wasn’t a Susan, Suzy, Anne, Anna, or any of the usual variations thereof. They experimented with Rowan, shook their heads, then went with Ro for about five minutes—until Lulah started singing, “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,” and that was the end of that.

“This is ludicrous,” Holly had announced. “I’ve named hundreds of characters, and I can’t come up with a name for my own daughter?”

“It’ll come to you,” Lulah said serenely.

It did. A couple of evenings later the four of them were sprawled on the nursery carpet, bedtime being a frangible thing at Woodhush, when Holly suddenly announced, “Bella.”

“What?”

“Bella.” She scooped their daughter up from the floor and held her out for examination. “That’s her name.”

He looked the baby in the eyes and thought it over. “Bella?”

Holly nodded. “Susannah’s middle name was ‘Dolcebella’—for which she had as many reasons as you have stories about those damned cowboy boots.”

Evan tried it out. “Bella.” And damned if the pudgy little arms didn’t wave at him. Complete coincidence, of course. “Hey,” he said to his wife. “Five bucks.”

Both of them were rather unlikely children—and this was clear to Evan even though he was their father. It never failed to amuse him that his genes and Holly’s had combined in two such radically different ways—as if their DNA had undergone nothing so organized and stately as the regular process of reproduction, and had instead been tossed into a blender, all the traits of coloring and character whirling around in total chaos until things spliced together and produced these small, amazing persons. He recognized himself and Holly in both kids, plus a lot of stuff uniquely their own. Elias Bradshaw had summed it up neatly during his June visit this year for the twins’ birthday party—to which he had brought enough paint to supply an art college, half a library of books, and a closetful of clothing they would grow out of by October. Watching them play with their new goodies, Elias had said, “They’re timeless. Practically archetypal. Can’t you see them in the ancestral caves? He’s happily painting away, creating Lascaux, and she’s pacing outside, trying to invent grammar.”

Lachlan had to admit that at times it was unsettling to look into his son’s eyes. Kirby was completely self-possessed, uncannily self-aware, yet not at all self-absorbed. His smiles were rare and sudden, enchanted with the discovery of some new sight or sound or flavor in his world—or with the rediscovery of his father’s arms holding him safe as he was carried up to bed, or his mother’s voice singing him to sleep. That the carrying and the singing happened almost every night did nothing to lessen his delight in them, a kind of half-surprised wonder that such good things could happen again and again with only slight variations. It was as if he expected but never took for granted the security of his father’s arms and the beauty of his mother’s voice, greeting each night’s repetition with renewed pleasure and gratitude.

As for Bella—she was an even more unlikely child for a cop and a writer to have produced. Her hands and pockets were always stuffed with one thing or another—from smooth creek stones to mostly dead bugs, all sorts of feathers to samplings of different grasses. A scrap of broken eggshell meant to be compared with a similar souvenir earned equal reverence with the four types of pine cones (and matching needle clusters) conscientiously laid out on a shelf. That she could not yet pronounce the scientific names of things in all their polysyllabic splendor was an inconvenience of youth that frustrated her terribly. It was as if she found nature so compelling that she had to have it with her at all times, so fascinated by the world that she couldn’t bear to let go of even its smallest manifestations. Evan called it
collecting evidence
; Cousin Clary Sage avowed that it was the mark of an Apothecary. It would be many years before they’d find out if either prediction was true.

Evan was content to have it so. In spite of all he’d seen and done—and had had done to him—before his marriage, there had yet been a portion of his mind that didn’t quite wrap around the magical aspects of his life with Holly. She was a Witch from a long line of Witches, but she had no magic other than her Spellbinding blood. His experiences of magic had not been of the everyday kind. In truth, some of them had been horrific. But then he’d come to live at Woodhush Farm, where Lulah McClure would flick a finger to keep a spoon stirring the spaghetti sauce (always clockwise), or murmur a few words to activate a spell that whisked the dust from the paintings hung along the staircase. All Holly ever did was light a candle or the hearth fire.

So when he contemplated his children, Lachlan felt himself torn. Magic was part of their heritage, and if they were gifted with it, they would have excellent teachers and role models. But magic was also a dangerous thing that could threaten and even kill. So he was never quite sure whether he wanted Kirby and Bella to be Witches or not.

“I’m not walking down to Lulah’s in these,” Holly warned as she descended the stairs. Evan spared a moment, then a few more, appreciating hair, makeup, dress, and especially shoes; it wasn’t often these days that he saw her all put together the way she’d always appeared for a night out in New York.

Not that he was complaining. Nope, not him. He gave her a courtly bow from the waist to make her laugh, then escorted her out the door, down the front steps, and into the dark green Chevy SUV with a five-pointed gold star and
Pocahontas County Sheriff
painted on its doors.

Renovation of the overseer’s house at Woodhush should have been easy. Clear out the accumulated junk, have somebody inspect it from shingles to foundation, get the hardwood floors sanded and polyurethaned, paint it inside and out, and hang new curtains. What no one had counted on was that the laws of physics were about to take their revenge for having been toyed with for so many years. Unused since the late 1930s except for storage, the house turned out to be held together with hundred-year-old plumbing, two-hundred-year-old beams, and magic.

Research done during the winter of 2004 had yielded fresh magic that kept the old place upright long enough to fix it. Concoctions, decoctions, gemstones, Holly’s blood, and some plain old crossed-fingers wishing were employed throughout the spring and part of the summer as workmen virtually gutted the place. The huge stone sink in the kitchen and the graceful oak banister were all that remained of the original dwelling. The three bedrooms upstairs were transformed into one large and one small, with a bath between. Nothing was kept of the other furnishings, which, after more than sixty years of neglect, consisted mostly of wormholes or rust, and sometimes both.

It became a tidy, creak-free, comfortable little home, finished three weeks after the twins were born, and as familiar to them as their own sprawling house two hundred yards up the gravel drive that meandered among oddly spaced apple, pear, peach, and apricot trees—stubborn leftovers from attempts by various generations to establish orchards. For all the magic in their blood and bones, assiduously applied, farming on more than a for-the-table basis had never paid off for the Flynns. It had taken an infusion of McClures to pay off the last of the mortgages, and this had left Lulah free to pursue horse breeding as a profitable occupation.

She spent a lot of time baby-sitting, too. Before she even moved into the redone cottage, two days of intricate, esoteric magic had made both houses childproof. Or so they had all thought. About half an hour after Bella learned to walk, she figured out how to circumvent the baby gates. Every one installed in both houses had to be spelled so she couldn’t do it again and it took Lulah a week to get it right; baby gates were not of her generational experience. When Kirby outfoxed her by scaling instead of unlatching them, their doting aunt was compelled to contribute thirty bucks to their scholarship fund—and respell the gates yet again.

As Evan got out of the SUV, boots crunching on the drive, he heard Holly cussing him and the gravel and the Fuck Me shoes—but under her breath, mindful of her bank balance, because from within the house came two ecstatic little voices: “Mommy!”

The Progeny pelted from the house, alarmingly coordinated and wickedly swift for being only twenty-seven months old, wearing denim pants and t-shirts given by their adored Uncle Elias. Kirby’s shirt was green, Bella’s was yellow, and each bore the words
Warning: I Am Two
.

His Honor believed in truth in advertising.

“Mommy!”

“Munchkins!”

Steps negotiated at a breakneck pace, Bella and Kirby raced for Holly, four little hands covered in chocolate reaching for her skirt. Lachlan fell in love with her all over again when, instead of leaping back and warning them off, she laughed and crouched down to seize the twins in her arms.

“Chocolate fingers!” she exclaimed. “My favorite!”

By the time they noticed their father, and were duly tickled and kissed, the mess had pretty much been transferred from them to Holly’s clothing. But why scold them? The kids were washable; the dress was washable; she was washable; what was the point?

It was a measure of Evan’s adjustment to the ambiance of his Virginia home that he didn’t jump two feet in the air and draw his Glock when he heard a miniature roar, and then another, and then a high-pitched shriek from inside the house. Lulah was indulging herself again.

All the plants were gathered into a jungle in the parlor. Across a hundred-year-old Moroccan carpet, through cacti and succulents, herbs, flowers, and the two potted palms from the dining room, prowled a throng of dinosaurs. Lulah McClure, past sixty and still as supple as a teenager, sat cross-legged on the floor, flicking a finger here and there to direct a splinter of magic to this or that plastic rendition of an extinct creature, seeming not to notice that her playmates had abandoned her. Evan ducked instinctively as a winged whatsis swooped up to perch on a curtain rod, and heard a frustrated roar from the t. rex near Lulah’s right knee. She used a careful finger to coax a lumbering herd of long-necked herbivores toward a pot labeled
catnip
—while Brigand, the plant’s rightful beneficiary, watched from an armchair and yawned. The cat had played this game before, and knew from experience that soft, furry prey held infinitely more promise of amusement—not to mention flavor—than cold, hard plastic.

It had come to Evan’s attention rather slowly—because nobody talked about it in the open, and he’d had to piece it together from hints and casual remarks—that Lulah was one of the most gifted Witches of her generation. She hadn’t turned her back on it, and indeed enjoyed using her talents, but the power she might have had outside Pocahontas County was considerable and she had never pursued it. Principally because of Holly. After Tom and Margaret McClure died, Lulah had been happy to raise their only child. Evan—and not a few others—wondered sometimes if Holly hadn’t provided her with the perfect reason not to take a more prominent place within the community.

As for Holly—it must have been like growing up the slight, bookish son of a five-Superbowl NFL-Hall-of-Fame linebacker father. No matter how much you were loved, no matter how much you were valued for your own abilities, no matter how proud you knew your dad was of you, there was always the knowledge that you could never compete in the eyes of the rest of the world. Lulah’s prodigious magic was treated quite matter-of-factly within the family; Holly never seemed intimidated by it; but the awareness of it was always there.

Evan grinned suddenly as Kirby scrambled across the rug to pluck a wayward dinosaur from the predatory reach of something with a lot of white plastic teeth. The linebacker-and-son scenario was not one he’d ever worry about: not only was Evan not exactly the intimidating type in any area of endeavor, but if a vote had been held, Kirby would be unanimously elected Least Likely To Be Intimidated In This Or Any Other Lifetime. Certainly not by his parents, and not even by his formidable great-aunt.

At the moment she was admonishing him to pick up the stegosaurus by her bony spine plates
and
spiked tail, please—otherwise the tail would lash out and the spikes would do what they’d been meant to do, and they’d do it to his hand. There was some sort of esoteric follow-up about useful evolutionary adaptations and medieval weapons. Lachlan tuned it out. He’d learned how to do that. Holly on her own was pedantic; put her together with Lulah, and a man could be up to his neck in trivia and swimming for his life before he knew it.

“We’ll be back by midnight or so,” Holly told her aunt. When Lachlan turned a look of outraged betrayal on her, she added, “There’ll be a lot of hands to shake, and you know very well that Mr. Warren will want to talk about putting in a traffic light over in Flynton, and—”

“I thought that was the kind of conversation you’re supposed to rescue me from. Don’t political wives do that?”