Secrets and Lies (Cassie Scot) (16 page)

He looked like he wanted to say something else, but thought better of it. “Let’s go.”

* * *

It almost seemed like I felt the house before I saw it, which was strange since I’m not usually all that bothered by ghost stories. Most of them are a simple combination of fear and superstition, with a large dose of fancy thrown in for good measure. Of the actual legitimate ghost stories out there, most of the spirits are non-aggressive and are not able to interact with the physical world in any kind of meaningful way – meaning they can’t hurt you. Typically, they can only even speak through a medium, someone like my sister Elena (although she’s a lot stronger than the typical medium).

The cabin stood facing the lake, a simple ranch dwelling with peeling white paint and shutters half falling off. A large porch spanned the entire front of the house, its rickety floorboards looking like they might collapse from wood rot under too much weight.

I had the oddest sense that it was looking at me, but I didn’t realize I had stopped until Evan came up behind me.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing.” I certainly wasn’t going to tell Evan that a lame ghost story had me worked up, but when he took my arm to guide me toward the house, I wrenched it free.

“Cassie?”

Brush it off, it’s no big deal
. “I just have that feeling like something’s watching.” I shrugged, and started walking determinedly toward the house, my earlier fear fading completely as chagrin took its place.

“Wait,” Evan said. He took my arm again and pulled me back. “There’s no harm in doing a bit of spell detection.”

“Oh, no. I don’t want you to go to any trouble.”

“This will take a few minutes,” Evan said, taking the satchel from his shoulder and rifling through it for a couple of white candles and a piece of chalk. I wondered how he planned to use the chalk to draw a casting circle on the rough, rocky forest ground, but of course I had forgotten his gift. Evan crushed the chalk into a fine white dust and then guided it, using his telekinesis, to form a perfect circle around him.

He lit a single white candle with a torch and let it hover in front of him while he closed his eyes and began his spell.

Would you like a little spellcasting 101 from someone who has never successfully cast a spell? I didn’t think so, but here it is anyway:

The props are to help with focus, for the most part. You don’t really have to draw a circle if you can envision one and hold it in your mind, but since a spell requires you to hold so much in your mind, it is nice to keep one element of it within physical reality. Of course, even then you have to use your imagination. A casting circle isn’t really a circle; it’s a sphere. The chalk outlines only mark the place where that sphere intersects the earth. The sphere surrounds you in every direction, closing you in with the energy of the working.

As far as the candle goes, it’s really the color that is important. Color has meaning, and the right color can help focus the right energies. White is sort of a catch-all color, since the color white is really a reflection of the entire color spectrum. It absorbs color, just as black reflects it. For that reason, black is useful in purification rituals.

Once you have your props put in place, the next thing you need to do is find your quiet place. That’s what my family always calls it, at any rate. I’ve heard other people call it “ground and center.” Whatever you want to call it, you put yourself into a deep meditative trance. Beginners have a lot of trouble with this part, but an experienced sorcerer can reach this point in moments.

After that, I’m not really sure what happens. I’ve visited my own quiet place hundreds of times, but I never found any magic there, so I was never able to do any actual spellcasting. I do know that the words of the spells are not nearly as important as the intent, and that sorcerers have been known to make up nonsense words that are only meaningful to them so no one who overhears can glean precious information about the spell.

Evan seemed to be doing that. I knew the words to my family’s version of the magic-detection spell, which are in an intentionally mispronounced Latin. Evan’s words sounded more guttural, and were very hard on the ears. They made me want to cover my ears with my hands, as a matter of fact, which may have been the point.

After about ten minutes, Evan stood. He broke the circle, put his supplies back in his backpack, then slung the pack over one shoulder. “I can’t find anything, which unfortunately does not mean there’s nothing to find. It just means that alone, and without a node to help, I can’t detect it.”

I started for the cabin, but Evan held me back. “I’m going first.” I didn’t argue.

The place smelled like an outhouse. The door, which was rotten, had been pushed in by some animal. Inside I could see a few animal feces in the corner of a large, main room. The windows were broken. Mid-morning sunlight slanted in, brightening the room, but failing utterly to remove the darkness.

Off to the left, two open doors led to what must have been bedrooms at one time, though there wasn’t a stick of furniture in the structure now. The floors were bare, except for the occasional mouse or animal dropping. There were cobwebs in the rafters, leaving the impression that a gigantic spider might leap down on my head at any moment. My desire to leave was nearly overwhelming, but I searched every square inch of that cabin, looking for anything out of place.

Evan remained in the lead, going into each bedroom a few steps ahead of me and motioning when he decided it was safe. His behavior seemed a little melodramatic to me, but it also didn’t seem worth an argument, under the circumstances. Nothing about the cabin struck me as unusual or out of place. It looked precisely as if it had not been lived in for the past thirty years or more.

Back out in the main room, the mid-morning sunlight streamed in through the eastern windows, casting light on piles of leaves and debris. Something in one of the piles caught my attention – just for a second it glinted, as if made of metal.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing.

Evan took a step closer and knelt in front of the pile, reaching for the shining object. He nearly grabbed it, but yanked his hand away sharply – as if it had been burned.

“What happened?”

“That was too close. I should have been paying more attention.” He ran his hands through his dark hair in evident agitation.

“What was it?” My heart beat faster. “Some kind of curse?”

“Yeah. Not a very good one, but it could have caused some serious damage anyway. It’s not well bonded to the bracelet, which means it had to have been forged within the last two or three days.”

“So it’s a bracelet?” I wanted to get it back to Tracy and Vera to see if either one of them recognized it. “Could you pick it up inside a handkerchief or something?”

Evan nodded, then unslung his satchel and began digging through it for a handkerchief.

“What kind of curse is it?”

“It’s a weak attempt at a love spell – or lust spell.”

I blinked. From the way Evan had been acting, I’d expected it to be an attempt to maim or kill. Using the handkerchief, he picked up the tiny silver charm bracelet. A single heart dangled from the fragile chain. He wrapped it up and slid it into his front pocket, part of the white handkerchief still sticking out.

“That’s it? A lust spell?” I said.

Evan stood, heading for the door. “I don’t ever want to see what happens if I get hit with a spell that weakens my self control.”

I saw the danger then. The danger of Evan getting hit with a lust spell wasn’t to him, of course. It was to me. If only the idea of what he might do to me if he had touched that bracelet made me feel in the least bit afraid. Part of me even thrilled to the idea. Swallowing past a lump in my throat, I followed him back into the woods.

There was no reason to be afraid, I chided myself. He had detected the spell before it was too late, after all. It would have been nice if he’d spotted it earlier, though, when he made his sweep of the premises.

My eyes widened with sudden realization. “Evan!”

He was back at my side in a second. “What?”

“Why didn’t you detect that spell when you were in the woods inside your casting circle?”

He licked his lips. “That is an excellent question. It’s amateur work, poorly bonded and with no protections from detection, but it was inside the cabin.”

We looked at one another, then back at the cabin, which continued to look as peaceful and innocent as ever. Only now we knew better. Something wasn’t right about that building.

“I think it’s time to leave,” Evan whispered.

I started to agree, but then had a flash of inspiration. I remembered the advice I had given the sheriff just a few hours ago, about looking at things through a camera in order to dispel illusion. Not that I knew whether illusion shielded the cabin or not, but since most cell phones could take short videos, it was a quick thing to check.

“Can I borrow your phone?” I asked.

“Here.”

Taking the phone from his outstretched hand, I switched it to video mode and held it up to the cabin. Evan stood right behind me, looking at the video over my shoulder.

The cabin did look subtly different, but before I had a chance to figure out how, something shifted in the air. There was a sizzle and a pop.

The next thing I knew Evan had thrown me to the ground. He landed heavily on top of me, shielding me with his body, his face inches from mine. I barely had the chance to notice the rocks and twigs pressing into my back before the cabin exploded.

The earth shook and the air grew hot. Shrapnel flew above and around us, pummeling the ground with heated, deadly force.

I screamed and tried to twist my body away. It was an automatic flight response, I think. Luckily, the weight of Evan’s body kept me firmly pressed to the forest floor.

He leaned in close until his lips almost touched my ear, so he could be heard over the roar of the explosion. “I’ve got you. It’s okay.”

The words managed to penetrate my fog of fear and I saw the scene a bit more clearly. Shrapnel flew around us, but it didn’t touch us. There was heat, but not enough to burn. If Evan hadn’t needed to stretch a magical shield over the two of us, he probably wouldn’t have felt even that much.

As the shock waves of the magical explosion continued to pulse around us, I clung to Evan, my anchor in the storm. My arms flew around his back and I pressed my cheek against his, letting his nearness fill my awareness. Perspiration covered his usual, vaguely woodsy scent, the only outward sign that he was under any special strain.

Seconds or minutes later, the explosion subsided, but neither one of us moved. My heart still pounded, echoed by the obvious thudding of Evan’s heart. At that moment I wanted to stay in his protective embrace forever. It didn’t matter that I wanted my independence. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t sure of his feelings, or that he wanted me for any of the right reasons. I would remember all that later and feel ashamed, but for the moment, Evan made me feel safe.

Slowly, he lifted his weight from me and backed away, though he didn’t take his eyes off me. Nor, I soon realized, could I take my eyes from him, and it wasn’t because he had just saved my life. Again.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes.” It was a lie. I felt too confused to be all right. How could I resist someone I wanted so badly?

I sat up, finally tearing my gaze from Evan. He got to his feet and started straightening himself, first his rumpled shirt, and then something white, half-sticking out of his pocket. Something with a glint of silver.

I realized what he was about to do a split second before it happened. The words, “Evan, stop!” were halfway to my lips, but they never made it.

His eyes suddenly lost their focus and he stared at me in an entirely different way. Not, as before, with compassion. Instead I saw raw hunger and determination.

“Oh, God.” I started to scramble to my feet, not taking my eyes off Evan. Would he fight the lustful compulsion? Could he?

I got my answer in the next instant.

Evan fell atop me. His hands fumbled with the hem of my shirt while he tried to kiss me everywhere he could reach.

I turned my head away, desperate that he not kiss me on the lips. If he did, we would both be lost to lust spells. One of us had to stay sane, for all the good it would do.

Hadn’t the idea of Evan losing control thrilled me just a few minutes ago? If so, I had been the worst kind of fool. This grasping and pawing felt exactly like what it was – an attack.

Evan wasn’t really there with me, only someone who looked like him. This shadow of Evan didn’t care about me, only about slaking his own need. When I turned my head away so he couldn’t kiss me on the lips, he didn’t press the issue, instead going for my ear and throat.

“Evan, stop!” I kicked and struggled, but he held me still with more than the superior strength of his muscles. He also used the superior strength of his magic. He easily pinned me to the ground while he stripped off first my shirt and bra, and then my pants.

Tears filled my eyes. Panic welled in my chest, and all I could think was:
Not like this. Oh, God, not like this.