Mind Games (3 page)

T
HE ONLY PERSON I HATED MORE
than Evan Blackwood, I decided the night he slammed his door in my face, was my father. Or perhaps, I decided a few days later after dismissing the idea that Evan had fallen victim to some sort of spell, the only person I hated more than my father was Evan Blackwood. After all, though misguided, my father had had my best interests at heart when he meddled in our relationship. As for Evan…

Evan…

Hearts literally break. I guess I knew that because the same thing happened when my parents disowned me, but the phrase “broken heart” is unfairly synonymous with the end of a romantic relationship. Trust me, hearts break for many reasons. So my heart had already felt tender from scabbed-over wounds by the time Evan dealt his blow. After the new damage, I didn’t think I would ever be heart whole again.

I railed at my father, demanding time and again to know what he had said or done to Evan to make him leave. Dad flatly denied putting a spell on Evan and called him a coward for not telling me the whole truth. I called him a coward for the same reason but he claimed his hands were tied by some kind of debt.

I knew firsthand how the restrictions of magical debt felt. I had just lived through the experience of having my life and fortune irrevocably tied to another, subject to his every whim. Which didn’t mean I forgave my father for his silence, not when he had clearly said something to Evan to chase him off.

So I hated my father. And I hated Evan. And I hated myself for hating when it didn’t even help. It made things worse. And I knew, deep down, that I could only hate both men so much if in reality, I loved them.

Over the next few weeks everyone shared his or her advice for repairing my broken heart. (The part caused by Evan, not by my parents.) Some said it would take time, while others said I should start dating other men. Kaitlin said I should swear off men entirely as she had done, but I wasn’t the type to irrationally blame an entire gender for the actions of one or two of its members.

While I accepted the well-meaning advice of friends and family, I knew what I needed to repair both parts of my broken heart. I needed closure. I needed the truth. But my father couldn’t talk, and Evan had left town for the summer.

Life doesn’t always supply us with answers but it doesn’t change our need to live it. Truth is often subjective anyway. Time and bitterness eventually made me wonder if I should stop caring about the truth. For a while I did just that. Stopped caring. Right around the time I met a very special man who ended up claiming the tattered remains of my heart: Matthew Blair.

The Blairs and the Scots were what some people might call friends or friendly acquaintances, though I called them allies. The relationship only worked as long as each family needed something from the other. I’ve known friendships that worked the same way, but usually with a warmer regard to mask the underlying truth.

I didn’t really know Matthew, probably because we had never had the need or opportunity. At twenty-six he was five years my senior, so we had not attended school together. Rumor had it that he had also skipped a couple of grades, separating our academic ages even more. I did know that he was a state senator. I had even voted for him in the last election based on family recommendations and his stated beliefs. But my knowledge stopped there.

Then one day he slid into my life almost as if he had been there all along.

It was my fifth week back at the Barry County Sheriff’s Department, a blistery hot August day that had everyone moving too slowly to break the law. Or so it seemed from my excessively dull morning. I had one open murder case, but with no leads I spent the morning on patrol with my partner, Rick, who didn’t like me. Rick, a balding middle-aged man who liked to wear mirrored sunglasses so no one could see his eyes, was one of those who didn’t believe in magic. Either that, or he despised it, I couldn’t be sure which. He seemed to go back and forth from day to day at the flip of a switch. If I could have found the switch I would have toggled it to disbelief over hatred, but nothing I said seemed to make much difference. He was always worst on Mondays and Thursdays because his church’s pastor spent Sundays and Wednesday evenings preaching hellfire and damnation.

That particular Monday morning had been no different. By lunchtime all I wanted was a few minutes away from him, but it’s hard to shake a man when he’s driving. I did, at least, talk him into swinging by Kaitlin’s Diner so I could see a friendly face or two.

Rick was still on some tirade about the heat, possibly trying to blame an August heatwave on sorcery, or perhaps the wrath of God, when I got the oddest sense of foreboding. It was a tingle, one of those things that is easily dismissed in the moment but, in retrospect, makes you think,
I had a feeling…

Upon entering the diner my impression of danger strengthened, though it took me a minute to pinpoint the source of the threat. I noticed two things at once: First, Mrs. Meyer’s oddly shifty gaze as she worked the cash register, and second, the nervous expression of the stooped, middle-aged man standing opposite her.

The tinkle of bells startled the man in front of the register more than it should have. He turned slightly, took a good look at Rick and me in our deputy’s uniforms, and let out a cry of alarm. The next thing I knew he held a pistol in his shaking hands. “Don’t move!”

I froze. In that microcosm of time between instants, I gathered that Rick and I had interrupted a robbery and the man probably thought someone had called the cops. There was a sense of desperation about the man that made him seem wild and unpredictable – a dangerous combination, especially for a man holding a deadly weapon.

When time resumed, everyone in the diner began to panic. More than a few people screamed. Dishes fell and broke. Everyone scrambled for cover, most sheltering under tables.

In the midst of the chaos, the man’s shaking hand jerked upward and fired a shot into the ceiling, showering plaster and debris all over a quaking Mrs. Meyer.

“I said don’t move!” He brought the gun back down and aimed it at me. “Drop your weapon.”

With painstaking slowness, I moved my fingers toward my sidearm. To my right and just behind me Rick stood stock still, not going for his weapon at all.

“Don’t try anything!” the gunman warned. He waved the gun at Rick. “Drop your weapon, I said!”

“It’s okay,” I tried to make my voice sound soothing. “You don’t want to hurt anyone. If you put the gun down, we can work something out.”

My gun was halfway to the floor when Rick suddenly withdrew his weapon and aimed it at the gunman, pairing the two of them off in a good old-fashioned Mexican standoff. “Drop your weapon!” Rick shouted.

For a second, I truly believed I would die. The gunman looked crazy and desperate enough to start shooting at a moment’s provocation. I even thought I saw his finger tighten around the trigger.

The gunman opened his mouth as if to speak, but then something rather odd happened. The only physical signs were his eyes, which took on a sudden vacant expression, and his fingers, which went limp. His gun clattered to the floor.

Not sure what had just happened, but not about to let the opportunity pass me by, I rushed up to the man, kicked the gun away, and twisted his hands behind his back. He didn’t even resist as I forced him to the ground, slapped cuffs on him, and patted him down in search of other weapons.

Rick came up beside me. “You shouldn’t have lowered your weapon. I had it under control.”

I doubted it. I wasn’t sure what had happened, but Rick’s move might have gotten me killed. It wasn’t the right time to discuss it, though, so with one knee on the gunman’s back to make sure he didn’t move, I radioed the station for backup. After that, I scanned the crowd for signs of injury. Everyone seemed fine, if rattled, but one face in a nearby booth caught my attention.

Matthew Blair, state senator, son of the mayor, and powerful mind mage, winked at me. Casually, he unfolded his wallet, slid a couple of bills onto the table, and walked outside. But he left me in no doubt that he had used his talents on the gunman to force him into docility.

On a positive note, Rick left the department that afternoon. I’m not clear if he quit or if the sheriff fired him, but he decided to head up private security for his church. I couldn’t feel too surprised when I’d never had a partner last much longer than a month anyway.

* * *

The last weekend in August, Mom talked me into attending the family’s annual back-to-school picnic even though Dad would be there. I knew Mom felt caught in the middle where we were concerned, and at a time when she and I had only begun to heal our own fractured relationship, but I didn’t know how to change things. She had begun calling me whenever Dad left the house to give me a chance to spend time with her and the kids without him around. I appreciated that, although I knew avoiding Dad couldn’t be a long-term solution.

Which was why I drove to my parents’ private lakefront pavilion that weekend, where my extended family had already amassed for the celebration. Dad and his brother, John, had hamburgers cooking on the grill while Mom guarded the dessert table from tiny fingers. John’s wife, Leslie, spoke animatedly to my mother, while her three teenage children played Frisbee golf with Juliana and Isaac. Dad’s elderly uncle sat with his son and son-in-law, playing a card game, while his daughter and daughter-in-law filled balloons with water and stored them in an ice chest. They had five children between them, from two to nine, adding to the cacophony. When the whole family got together, a state of advanced chaos joined in, so it was a while before I noticed the new additions to the group.

Grace Blair managed to look regal even seated on the wooden plank bench of a picnic table. The white-haired seer had predicted:

Beware your heart and soul, for before he is done, Evan will have broken them both
.

I had stubbornly refused to believe it at the time. Now I believed, but did not understand, particularly when it came to the part about Evan breaking my soul.

Grace’s daughter-in-law, Caroline, sat across from her, daintily nibbling on a carrot stick. James Blair, the town mayor, stood next to the grill with my father, sipping a Coke. His two sons, Robert and Matthew, sat with my brother, Nicolas, who looked less than thrilled with the seating arrangements. He had an odd, strained expression on his face, as if he were deep in concentration. Or perhaps in the middle of casting a spell.

Even though my parents had dealings with the Blairs, their presence at a private family outing baffled me. My parents made frequent campaign contributions that they traded for favors, but they typically mingled at campaign fund raisers or town hall meetings, not at family picnics.

Among other things, the Blairs weren’t “out” as sorcerers. They had done a better job than any other family I knew at hiding their magical identity, possibly because mind magic allowed them to make slight alterations of memory to anyone who found out. My immediate family knew, but only because it suited the Blairs for us to know and because we held the information as a closely guarded secret.

The extended family, on the other hand, did not know. At least, I didn’t think they knew. Almost all had magical talent in abundance, but they lived quieter, subtler lives than my parents, and did not have access to the sort of money we had. Dad had never told me how he’d learned alchemy, but the knowledge hadn’t come from his family and he didn’t share it with them, even if he did share some of the monetary results. I sometimes got the impression that Dad’s brother, John, resented him for it. John flatly refused to take money from Dad, but they always got along well enough.

The next few minutes were full of hugs and greetings, during which time Adam sneaked at least two cookies. Since he passed one to me I decided not to rat him out.

“Cassandra,” my father said, leading me away from the family and steering me toward our unusual guests. “You remember James Blair, his wife, Caroline, his mother, Grace, and his sons, Matthew and Robert?”

I nodded to each in turn, my gaze lingering on Matthew as I remembered the assistance he’d provided a few weeks earlier. I have to admit that I had never really thought of him as an individual until that day, only a part of the nebulous whole that was the Blair family. Everything I knew about him was a product of what I knew about them – that they were mind mages, secretive, and political.

Looking at him now with fresh eyes, I wondered what else lay beneath the mysterious surface. He looked a lot like his father, not all that tall but powerfully built, with sandy hair and green-gray eyes. His face wasn’t precisely handsome, but it had a certain charm that could become more appealing with time. He smiled at me, the expression transforming his face, and I suddenly wondered if he had caught me staring.

Turning my head quickly away I acknowledged my father’s earlier question with a slight nod, but refrained from asking the question burning through my mind:
Why are they here?
“I hope you don’t mind the intrusion,” Matthew said as if he could read my mind. “We heard some rumors yesterday that troubled us, and we wanted to talk to your father about them. Didn’t realize you had a get-together today.”

“I told you it was no problem,” Dad insisted, though his agitated tone belied the words. “There’s always too much food anyway. I invited them to join us.”

“What kind of rumors?” I asked.

The Blairs hesitated, looking around at the gathered horde. They were probably making sure no one could overhear. With all the noise I didn’t think they needed to worry. After a minute, James nodded, as if satisfied.