More Than Magic (35 page)

“You—” Grace began. Her voice shook. “Is that why you killed Pops? For the mountain?”

“Oh shut up. Everything old Zach Woodruff touched turned to gold. And my grandpap knew what it was. He knew it was in this mountain somewheres, that power.
Lily’s
power.”

Nick watched Grace as she listened to this evidence that the ancient feud still raged on, at least in Annie Taggart’s withered heart.
 

Then Grace’s headlamp bobbed wildly when Annie grabbed her arm and shoved the gun against her face.
 

“Hey!” Nick said.
 

“You shut up. And you hold still.” Annie shook Grace’s arm. “Now,
you
are going to lead, Mr. DEA, and we are going to follow. You’re bright enough to know what I’ll do if you try something, right?”

Nick glared at the woman, then looked at Grace, who looked more furious than frightened. He tried to reassure her with a nod.
 

“
Now
!” There was a strange echo and a painful snap in his head, like she’d smacked him.
 

Nick swung around to begin the laborious crawl under the low cave roof.
 

“Whoa. Stand up there, Mr. DEA. There ain’t no need to crawl. And put your hands back up on your head.”

Nick looked up then stood, ignoring the instinct to duck. This was all wrong, wasn’t it? The ceiling had been really low. He had a knot on his head from running into it. And now there was a wall of rock blocking his way. They couldn’t have taken a wrong turn—they hadn’t moved from the entrance.
 

“All he found were dead ends and loops.”

“No tricks now. See that opening?” The light illuminated a dark passage where the wall met the side of the cave. “I couldn’t see it where it was when I first come down here, but then the Princess come through it with that stupid headlight of hers and I hid myself, real tight. She walked right past.” She cackled.
 

Looking back, he saw Grace frown at the opening until Annie poked the gun at her again. He started walking.

“What do you want, Annie?” Grace asked, after they negotiated the opening and walked into a dark, twisting passageway that was completely unfamiliar to Nick.

Annie ignored her question. “She healed him, my grandpap. He had the whoopin’ cough and your Granny Lily healed him. And he was the one told me there was something in this mountain. Something that made old Zach rich. Grandpap said it healed Lily too—made her all purty again,” Annie said.

Not according to the Woodruffs, Nick thought, remembering Grace’s story of her Granny Lily hiding her scars and withdrawing from society.

“Everyone in the family thought my grandpap was a bit teched in the head. ’Cause he’d nearly died when he was a babe and Lily was burnt so bad she’d never be beautiful again,” Annie went on. “But he weren’t teched. He told me
I
was gonna be a witch, just like Lily. And he was the one found that cave.”

Something poked hard into Nick’s ribs. He stumbled a bit as Grace gasped in dismay. Annie just laughed and waved the walking stick.
 

“Mr. DEA, you can blame the Woodruffs for that meth lab. When Gabe stopped sending money, I asked her Pops real nice about where all his money come from, seeing if he’d tell me about the power. I thought he’d found it, ’cause those herbal remedies of his cured me up just fine. But he just kept saying that the boys and me could be rich if we ‘just tapped the mountain’s bounty’.” She cackled. “Stupid old fool.”

Nick kept moving, wondering where the hell this passage was taking them.

“Yeah, I tapped the mountain’s bounty just fine. I recollected the cave where my grandpap made his shine. I hated that cave. Near got myself killed when that Revenuer followed me in there. But it’s a great place for making stuff you don’t want folks to know you’re making. And I never had to go in there again,” she said with pride in her voice. “The boys did a fine job cooking up that crystal stuff just exactly like I told ’em. Just like on that show. Real fine. They’re good boys. Always do what I tell ’em, most times.”
 

Nick knew why the boys always did what she told them.
But she doesn’t. She doesn’t have any idea she has a gift.
Nick wanted to look back at Grace, to see if she had reached the same conclusion.
 

“But your Pops would be ashamed of
you
, Princess,” Annie chided, her voice echoing in the passage. “You left a trail back there that even Mitch coulda followed, if he weren’t deaf as a post and all cut up from them damn explosives. At first I was worried Boyd might find ya before I got what I needed. But he’s probably out there wandering around in the snow. Couldn’t find his ass with both hands.” She made a tsking sound.

“But
I
found ya. And surprise, Mr. DEA is here. And all healed up too.” She tsked again. “Your Pops didn’t have any idea what you’d really found, did he? Or did you even tell him?”

Nick stopped. The floor dropped away into blackness in front of them.

“What’s this?” Annie said, suspicious.

“Steps,” Grace said.

“Steps, my ass. It’s a drop off,” Annie complained.

Nick turned around. Annie poked the gun into Grace’s chin.

“No,” he said firmly. “It’s a giant staircase. Whoever made this place carved them out of the walls.”

“Heh. ‘Whoever made this place’,” Annie replied in that mocking voice. “It was the
real
old uns made this place. Way afore the Cherokee. You don’t know shit. You just go down those stairs there, Mr. DEA, and I’ll see what happens.”

Grace’s eyes were filled with terror as he backed toward the edge. Nick looked down and jumped, then looked up to see Old Annie’s face appear over the edge.

“Well,” she said. “That ain’t far at all. You go on down to that last step over there, Mr. DEA, and stand right there where I can see ya.”

Nick kept his eyes on Annie and her gun as he followed the steps around the wall and down until he was almost directly across from her in front of the opening. But something wasn’t right. He should be directly below her. The opening into the room of carvings had been
below
the ledge, not across from it.

Annie waved Grace down. “Go on down and you stay right here in front of me.” Grace sat on the edge and slid down to the step, then stood obediently. Nick could only see the halo of light from her headlamp, and her copper hair, lifting upward in an unseen breeze from below.

“All this time, and I coulda got here through my grandpap’s cave, like you done.” Annie sat awkwardly, letting the walking stick drop until the tip touched the step below but managing to keep the gun trained on Grace. “Your Pops wouldn’t bring me here. I told him we’d stop making the meth if he’d just show me where the power was hidden. But he wouldn’t.” She shook her head. “I didn’t kill the stubborn fool. I just let him fall.”

And as Annie slid down, Nick saw Grace lift her hand to her head, and the light went out.

“Grace!” The ground shifted and he fell to his hands and knees, losing all sense of direction in the darkness.

Then silence. No one had screamed. There was no echo of the earth’s sudden movement, of anything falling. Nothing.

“Grace!” He scrabbled forward on the rock looking for the edge with his hands.

“Grace.”

It wasn’t an echo.

He spun around and blinked. A dimly lit woman stood on the edge of the pit, strands of silky red hair floating upward in a breeze he couldn’t feel. She pointed behind him.

“Grace.”

Through the dark opening in the wall behind him he saw the carvings. He looked back to find the woman had stepped closer.

“Burden.”

He swallowed and stepped back. Dammit, she looked a little like Grace, but she wasn’t. She wore a long, old-fashioned dress. “Who are you? Where’s Grace?”
 

“Grace.”

She pointed again through the opening to the carvings.

He turned and found himself standing right in front of the carvings again without taking a step. Spinning back, he saw the woman with red hair sitting on a rock against the wall. But she wasn’t wearing a long dress and there was a headlamp shining on her head.
 

“Are you real?” she murmured, as if in a trance.

“Grace?”

“Nick?” she stood up.

He ran to her and hugged her, then pulled the headlamp off her head so he could see her face clearly.

“What—what just happened?” she asked. “Where’s Annie?”

“You—” He blew out a breath. “I thought you fell with her.”

Grace looked aghast. “She fell?”
 

“You turned off your headlamp and I didn’t see—”

Grace shook her head. “I didn’t. I was sitting on the—” she looked around and swallowed, “—edge of the stairs. And then I was sitting here.” She looked behind her at the rock against the wall. “I thought— It was like one of my dreams.”

Nick swept the room with the light from the headlamp. Pops’s twisted walking stick leaned against the wall next to their daypack. The shotgun, his handgun, and his sat phone lay on the ground beside it.

But the only passage that remained was the one that led back to the meth lab. The opening to the staircase was gone.

Grace was shivering.

Nick set the headlamp on the floor beside them, and grasped her hands in his.

“Are you all right?”
 

Those deep green eyes met his and, for a moment, he swore he saw the handprint from the wall reflected in them.

“Old Annie,” she said. “She sat right beside me. She didn’t see me sitting there. She was talking to Granny Lily.” Her fingers were cold.

“She— What?” Nick said.

“I saw my Granny Lily,” she went on. “I was sitting there watching Annie talk to my Granny Lily, who was standing…on nothing.”

Nick squeezed her hands. He had seen her too. He just hadn’t realized the woman had been floating in the air, and the light she’d switched off hadn’t been from any headlamp.

“Annie said she’d just let Pops fall and then she slid off,” Grace went on. “And the light went out. She thought it was me.”

Nick pulled her into his arms and held her, thinking about the woman who had looked so much like Grace.

“She didn’t even know she had a gift. The way she pushed those boys around, got them to do what she wanted,” Grace sighed. “She was looking for something she already had.”

“I have a feeling your old magic just does what it does, Grace. We probably couldn’t stop it if we tried.”
 

She took a shuddering breath. “Pops used to say something like that.”

“He was right. It’s something…unimaginable,” he said. “And very powerful.”

“I just never imagined it could—would cause harm.” Her voice was hoarse, as if she hadn’t used it in a long while.

“Just the opposite, in my experience.” He interrupted her and laid his hand over the hole in his vest meaningfully. “I think Old Annie sealed her fate long before she climbed down into this cave. Maybe…maybe what comes to you is based on what’s already inside you. You want to heal, and Annie…”

“…wanted to control,” Grace finished. Her fingers extended reverently to touch the back of his hand. The cool brush of her fingertips sent an unexpected flash of heat straight to his core.

“If you weren’t here, I would think this was some mad dream,” she said. “And none of that really happened.” She looked behind her at the bare wall where the exit to the stairs should be.
 

He could imagine the panic of her thoughts. “Next thing you know there’ll be a bottle with ‘Drink Me’ written on it and a white rabbit will hop past,” he said.

She blinked a couple of times, then color seeped back into those pale, freckled cheeks. Her fingers lifted from his hand to touch his face. “I would have said fairies rather than a white rabbit, but you’re not the fairy type.”

Nick put his fingers over hers. “Not dreaming,” he said, smiling at her.

“Sorry. I—” she looked around. “But we were going to check on Jamie. Do you think she made it before the snow hit?”

“You know a snowstorm would
not
stop our Jamie,” Nick said.

She smiled. “True. And it seems we have to go back to where they are most likely to find us.”

“Mmmm,” he agreed and reached for the headlamp, trying not to think of the carvings waiting behind him in the dark. As he picked it up, the light illuminated something on the wall behind Grace. Something familiar.

“Those journals you are searching through. The ones with the old handwriting and the pictures of plants. What’s that all about?”

“The journals?”
 

“Yes.”

“They’re Granny Lily’s. I found them in a trunk in her office. The back of the lab.”

“You seemed to be searching for something in them, while you were waiting for me to wake up.”

She looked around as if for an escape. “I—Nothing.”
 

Nick raised his eyebrow and gave her his best skeptical look.