Spell of Summoning (25 page)

She forced a bright smile. “Busy as ever, sir. But not too busy to represent you if you suddenly want to sell your home and find an upgrade.” She shrugged good-naturedly, as if she were teasing. She wasn’t. She never joked about real estate.

Her priorities may be evolving, but she wasn’t dead.

He guffawed. “You are too much.” He gestured toward the blackjack table closest to them. “Play a game with me.”

Why not? She wasn’t having any luck standing in the middle of the room thinking about Holden. So she joined him at the collapsible, felt-covered rented table with four other Chamber members.

The Wren Brothers Nissan dealership had sponsored this particular table with a Polynesian theme. Employees handed out cards for free oil changes while dressed in grass skirts, Hawaiian shirts, and coconut bras.

The mayor snapped his fingers at the colorfully dressed dealer, a tall young woman Rebecca didn’t recognize. “A stack of chips for the lady.”

The dealer placed the chips in Becca’s hand. She moved in closer, getting the feel for the table. It had been ages since she’d played blackjack. This was a two-dollar table. She glanced down, ready to separate two chips from her hand when she spotted the blood. A lot of blood. On both hands.

The mayor gasped. “Rebecca, you’re bleeding.”

She stumbled a step, not sure what to do, and her champagne flute hit the floor. Well, if she wasn’t the main attraction before, she certainly was now. Everyone in her immediate area swiveled and stared.

She glanced at each of them, memorizing names and faces. One of them—someone here—was trying to destroy her. She took another step, and Holden was there at her back, steadying her.

He grabbed her hands and yanked them palms up. “Who?” he demanded, searching the crowd. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know.” She leaned in to him, just wanting to wrap her arms around him and disappear. “I touched half a dozen people.”

“Who?”

They drew a small crowd of looky-loos attracted by the noise.

She wracked her brain. “The mayor. Derek. Kristin.” Nausea rose in waves. “You don’t think…” Her knees gave out, and then she was plastered against his chest, her bloodied hands ruining his very dapper tuxedo.

“We may only have one chance.” He released her, and she was left anchorless.

“Ned!” he called, heading to the center of the room. “Do you see anything? He’s here somewhere.” He spun in a circle. “Ned, answer me!”

Becca scanned the crowd. The jerk who was trying to destroy her was in this room. He’d had enough guts to look her in the face, take her hand, and smile.

There
. Derek headed for the exit door. Fast.

But that was impossible. No. It was someone else. Mayor Westfield. Or Damian or Charley or someone in her old home owners association.

Holden caught her eye before pushing his way toward Derek. He’d also noticed Derek’s hasty exit. But Holden didn’t seem as surprised as she was.

Derek. Her assistant. Her
friend
. How many late nights had they spent at the office? How many trips had they taken together? How many hours had they spent in her car driving from one convention or open house or business meeting to another? And he’d called a demon to infest her soul? What an asshole!

Holden tackled Derek just inside the exit doors. Someone screamed, and the crowd backed away. Becca rushed to help, her heart a jackhammer against her ribs.

The row of lights directly overhead crackled and then burst in a shower of golden sparks. Several people shrieked. Others rushed the exit, plowing right over Holden and Derek. The next row of lights exploded. And then the next. Like a crashing wave, the hanging fixtures in the ballroom popped and rained sparks onto their heads. The room went black.

Blindly, Becca struggled through the panicked, writhing crowd to the last place she’d seen Holden.

Men in red blazers appeared at the doors with flashlights. “Walk calmly this way!”

In the dim light she made her way across the room.

“You think you can hurt her?” Holden grabbed Derek by the lapels of his tuxedo jacket and slammed him into the floor.

More security appeared, and they tangled with the two men on the ground. One thick-necked guard yanked Holden off Derek. Someone else helped. They dog piled.

She shoved closer, losing sight of Holden beneath at least three other men.

“Get off him!” she cried, tugging on a red jacket.

Two hotel employees yanked Holden up by the arms. Derek, his nose pouring blood, stood and straightened his impossibly torn and rumpled suit. Everyone but her focused on Holden as if he were the more dangerous of the two. She pointed at Derek. Were they blind?

“Grab him!”

Derek turned and bolted.

Chapter Eighteen

Holden head butted the security guard on his right, elbowed the other in the face, and then ran after Derek. Rebecca chased them through the crowded lobby, tripping over her heels. Derek sprinted for the stairwell, and in another ten seconds both he and Holden slammed through the exit door and disappeared.

She followed, swallowed by the pitch-black parking garage. The lights had gone out down here, too. Crunching through shards of glass and plastic casing, she stumbled along with a few dozen other party guests running scared from the power outage.

But there was no sign of either Holden or Derek. Rebecca ran, panting, up a ramp to the second level.

“Holden!”

There were fewer people and fewer cars here, so it was even quieter. And darker.

“Holden! Where are you?” Every macabre possibility crashed through her mind. He’d been tossed in a trunk and abducted. He’d been attacked and gravely injured. The necromancer—she still had a hard time believing it was Derek—had cast a spell on him. Or just shot him with an old-timey handgun. Whatever had happened, he wasn’t answering her.

Each ticking second seemed to steal him farther and farther away from her. The more time passed, the less chance she had of finding him. Her pulse rocketed around her torso and thrummed through her temples.

Where would Derek go? Home? Would he take Holden to another location, some godforsaken patch of land in the woods somewhere? Becca got a glimpse of a future where Holden remained missing indefinitely. Tears choked her, clogging her throat. She couldn’t let that happen. Not when she’d barely found him. She’d search all night.

Rebecca ran past a scuffed spell circle. “Holden?” she called, but her voice echoed off the asphalt unanswered.  She dialed Holden’s cell phone, but it rang and rang, and then a quiet buzzing reached her ears.

She ran faster, eyes scanning. The hulking shapes of vehicles rose around her in the dark. There, at the far end of the level, lay an overturned black dress shoe. She sprinted. A little farther down, sprawled beside a beige Lincoln Continental, lay Holden. Face down on the concrete.

She didn’t think anything could be scarier than imagining him lost forever. But seeing him lying motionless was worse.

“Holden,” she hissed, dropping to her knees beside him. She shook him but got no response. “What’s wrong? Talk to me.” She shoved him onto his back and sucked in a terrified breath. His face was white as copy paper and completely expressionless. There didn’t seem to be anyone home, and her panic escalated until she could taste it like battery acid in the back of her throat.

She laid one hand over his mouth and nose and the other to his throat, checking for any sign of life. Breath puffed in and out of him, and his pulse was strong. Good. That was good. She ran her fingers through his hair but found no bumps or blood or any other sign of head trauma.

“Holden?” She shook him a little gentler because something was wrong. Big time
wrong.
“Honey? I need you to open your eyes.” Nothing. Not a shudder, not a tremor, not a finger wiggle. Holden was gone. Absolutely and completely gone.

Then she knew what this was. He’d been hit with magic. Something she knew almost nothing about. She dug her phone from her purse.

As the call rang, Becca laid a hand, feather soft, against his cheek on the off chance he could sense her presence.

When he answered, she blurted, “Cole? It’s Rebecca Powell. Holden is under some kind of spell, and I need your help. Now. Right now. It’s an emergency.”

“What happened?”

“We found the necromancer. Holden chased him, and now Holden’s on the ground. He’s not waking up.”

“Where are you?”

“At the Westin Hotel in Auburn, but I’ll meet you half way.”

“I’m not at The Repository. I’m at home in Sailor’s Bay. Um.” A pause. “Can you get him to the corner of Highway 17 and Wilmington Highway? The dirt lot across from the gas station?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Can you move him?”

“I’ll figure it out. Just keep your phone on. I’m on my way.”

“I’m leaving now.”

Becca stood and scanned the dark parking lot. “Excuse me,” she called to the nearest straggler from the ruined fundraiser. When he turned she recognized Roger Belkin, the owner of a bakery and sweet shop in town. She waved him over.

“Roger, I need your help. My boyfriend had too much to drink and passed out,” she fibbed. “Would you be a dear and help me get him in our car?”

Roger scrunched his nose, probably thinking what a big guy Holden was, but Becca smiled and shrugged, and he agreed.

“Thank you so much. You’re a lifesaver.”

She hurried and drove the Jeep closer, and together they lifted Holden into the rear of the vehicle.

“Thank you!” She climbed between the seats and made Holden as comfortable as possible.

“You owe me,” he called back good-naturedly and jogged away.

“You’re going to be okay,” she told Holden, situating his head onto a soft knapsack.

Was this what a demon breakthrough looked like? Was he possessed? Her spell was taking months to complete. How did a person cast a possession spell in minutes? But if it wasn’t a possession, what was it?

Rebecca found his car keys in his suit jacket and dropped them on the floorboards. “Shit!” She found them again and crawled into the front seat. She tried the first key, but it wouldn’t fit. She swore again, checking over her shoulder for Derek. She couldn’t afford for him to sneak up and incapacitate her, too. Not when Holden needed her.

Finally she chose the correct key and got the Jeep started.

Driving fast, she turned onto the 17 south. The tall pine trees on either side of the highway, many of them choked with kudzu, blurred into one never-ending green funnel. What should have been a ten-minute drive seemed to last forty.

Finally she pulled into a bare lot at the turnoff to Sailor’s Bay, her tires crunching over weed-choked gravel. She called Cole’s cell again, but he pulled up in a nice-looking sports car before she hit send.

He hopped out of the car dressed in pajama bottoms, a white T-shirt, and flip-flops and stood in the wedge of light cast from his headlights. Mute, he found Holden in the back of the Jeep and clasped his wrist. Cole studied him, squeezing his hand, until Becca couldn’t take the silence any longer.

“Is it a spell?”

“Oh.” He stepped back, startled. “Yeah. It’s a nightmare spell.”

“A what?” She rounded the Jeep to stand directly in front of him. “What does that mean?”

Cole seemed uneasy as he returned to his car and rooted around in the trunk. “It means he’s trapped in a nightmare.”

She imagined the cold, dark water of Wade Lake in Minnesota, and her body froze up, turned to ice. Her voice didn’t even sound like hers when she said, “Break. It.”

“I’m going to.” He slammed the trunk and approached with a can of spray paint and a knife.

“What can I do to help?”

“Stay out of the way.” Cole created a neon-pink circle in the dirt in the light of his headlamps and added symbols at the four points of the compass. He knelt in the dirt and stabbed himself on the forearm, adding a new wound to several older—and some not so old—scars. In a low, shaky voice he called on spirits. After a few moments, he chanted a spell.

Becca stood by Holden’s head running her fingers down the side of his face and through his hair. When she imagined Holden’s nightmares, her skin prickled in that icky way it did after rolling by a bad car accident. He shouldn’t have to suffer this way. And there was nothing she could do to help him. She folded her arms and hugged herself as a ticking started up in the cluster of dark trees behind her and got louder.

Without any warning, Holden jerked into a sitting position and with a garbled shout, catapulted out of the Jeep to sprawl face first in the dirt. Scrambling, he righted himself and bolted for the open space of the highway. Cole stepped into his path half a second before a semi-truck roared past.

Cole held up his hands. “Just breathe, buddy. Get your bearings.”

Holden backed off, finding a quiet spot away from the vehicles and the trees. He didn’t speak. He hardly moved. But he was there and safe and conscious.

“Holden?”

He tore off his suit jacket and threw it into the underbrush. His breath coming hard and fast, he wrestled out of his dress shirt and his one remaining shoe. The loss of clothing seemed to bring him down a notch.

“Holden?” Becca stepped into his eye line. “Honey?”

He didn’t blink at all.

“Can you hear me?”

Cole pulled on her. “Give him time to adjust.”

“We don’t have time.” Rebecca wrenched herself from Cole’s grasp. “We found the necromancer, and he knows we know. Time’s up.”

“You’re not real.” Holden turned wild eyes on her. “None of this is real.”

Her stomach twisted, and she tasted bile. “Holden, is your grandma with you? Can you see her?”

No. She’d forgotten for a moment that Grams was shielding her. He was on his own. For the first time in fourteen years.

“None of this is real.”

“Yes, it is.” Rebecca got right up in his face without actually touching him. “You’re real. I’m real.”

He stared at her, fear and desperation blowing off him like heat off an engine. “How do you know? How do you
know
this isn’t a dream?”