Move Me (13 page)

Time to move on yourself
, Dubhghall
thought.

When it came to doing magic, intent was more
important than ritual. Danny had understood this better than his
mentor, who’d taught him just enough to get him into trouble. The
boy had watched his uncle’s failed attempts to activate the portal,
then decided to give it a try himself. What he hadn’t realized was
that Isaiah, though an adult, was no safety net. Having succeeded
in crossing dimensions, neither he nor his uncle could get him
back.

Danny had described his plan in his old
composition book. He’d supplement Isaiah’s imperfect rune circle by
burying objects at each corner of the shed, boyhood treasures with
special value for him. One cache held a sparkly geode found in the
woods, another a model muscle car he and a best friend had built
from a kit. In the eastern cache, the power spot, he’d placed his
most dearly held possession: a small stuffed bear four-year-old
Belle had bought for him with her tiny allowance on the day he was
born.

He’d slept with it so often most of its fuzz
had worn off.

Danny had argued with himself for two pages
that no other object would serve. He hadn’t wanted to let Mr.
Buttons go, not even for his grand adventure.

Coming from the passionate heart of a child,
that sort of sacrifice had power.

It was no wonder Isaiah couldn’t recreate
Danny’s method. In the end, the best he could do was board up the
shack so no one else would be lost. That Dubhghall had gotten
through the door from Resurrection was probably thanks to Mr.
Buttons’ lingering mojo.

None of this was suitable for sharing with
Danny’s sister. Assuming she’d believe him - which was assuming a
lot - he refused to get her hopes up. Her brother had been gone a
long time. He prayed Danny had landed in Faerie and not a hell
dimension. Faerie - especially the wilder territories - held
sufficient dangers for humans. Dubhghall himself would be far from
safe, depending on where he had to search. He wasn’t looking
forward to it but didn’t feel he had a choice.

Danny was Belle’s lost treasure. If he were
alive, she needed him back again.

Unable to put it off any longer, he entered
the workshed.

He hadn’t exaggerated about not having
reserves to spare for proving he was a faerie. Fortunately, he had
an ace tucked into his breast pocket: the curl of hair he’d
liberated from Isaiah’s baby book. Not only did the talisman
contain sufficient power to open the portal, the Luckes family DNA
it contained would help narrow his search for Danny.

Dubhghall’s eyes had adjusted to the dark as
well as they were going to. Careful not to smudge the markings, he
stepped into the old chalk circle. He pulled out the little
envelope with the lock, fingers tingling right through the waxed
paper. This keepsake held quite a lot of juice, perhaps enough for
one more safeguard. On the shed’s dusty lab table lay a cotton rag.
Dubhghall murmured a quick spell to it.

That seen to, he closed his eyes and focused.
First, he needed to return to Faerie, to reassure his family he was
no longer at risk from Mor. Then he wished to retrace Danny’s trail
through the dimensions, no matter how cold it had grown in two
decades.

“Do my will,” he whispered to the lock of
hair.

“Do my will,” he repeated to the spell
circle.

Do my will
, he said silently to his
heart.

The runes on the floor lit up like neon. His
heart didn’t want to leave, but he forced it ruthlessly to obey.
This was for her. So her spirit could be healed.

The tugging of the portal on all his cells
increased. Brightness flared, a single saltwater drop rolling from
his eye.

Belle
, he thought.

And then he was gone.

~

Belle ate two bites of Susi’s mom’s peach
pie, then had to set down her fork.

What was she doing, sitting here and eating?
She needed to stop Duvall.

“Excuse me,” she said to Susi. She scraped
her chair back from the kitchen table so she could rise. Susi said
something she didn’t pause to answer. By the time she’d descended
the back porch steps, she was running.

Blue-white fire radiated all around the work
shed, like it had the night Duvall first showed up.

No, she thought. She didn’t know what the
glow signified, but she suspected it was bad. Panting, she flung
the door to the shack open, the glare so bright she had to shade
her eyes with her forearm. After a moment’s blindness, she saw rays
of light bursting from a round pattern on the floor. She didn’t see
Duvall, but somehow she knew he’d gone
thataway
.

If she didn’t follow, she’d lose him
forever.

As easily as that, she snapped from doubt to
faith. Duvall was a faerie. She needed to go into that light after
him.

She’d run outside in her sweat clothes and
socks. As if she were an Olympic long jumper, she leaped from the
door to the brilliant circle, terrified but not caring.

The light immediately dimmed by half.

She thought her socks must have scuffed the
marks. That was never good when people did magic on TV shows.

Then she saw the rag.

Seemingly by itself, it was busily wiping out
the spell circle around her, like the enchanted mop and bucket from
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
. Though she tried to grab it, it
evaded her. In seconds, the light went out completely.

Belle breathed raggedly in shock, her blood
roaring in her ears. The shed was empty. Through the single window,
light shone secondhand from the house. Rubbed-out chalk smeared the
planks she stood on. The rag lay still, an inanimate cloth once
more. It had done its job so well she had no clue what the original
pattern was.

She had a feeling that was no accident.

“Duvall,” she gasped, her throat clogging up
with tears she hadn’t begun to shed.

Her beloved didn’t answer - couldn’t, she
supposed. Like her brother so long ago, he wasn’t there to hear.
Also like her brother, she had no way to follow him.

BELLE
hadn’t planned on staying in
Kingaken. For the first few days after Duvall disappeared through
the magic door, she was too wrecked to drive to Manhattan. How
could she, when she’d have to pull over every twenty minutes to sob
her heart out again. When that mortifying trend wore off, she tried
reminding herself Kingaken wasn’t home any more. She had two sets
of bad memories here, three if you counted her folks not being
model parents even before Danny disappeared. A sensible person
would have headed back to the concrete hills.

As the weeks drew out and she still hadn’t
packed her suitcase, Belle concluded the world of sensible people
didn’t include her.

When the real John Feeney returned from his
trip to Utah, Belle hired him to finish the fixing-up Duvall had
started. John Feeney wasn’t as easy on the eye as his imitator - or
as charming. On the plus side, his handyman skills appeared to have
been earned honestly. Together with his equally curmudgeonly - but
not divorced - cousin Bob, they painted the siding, replaced the
roof, rehabbed the shutters, cleared the front yard, and dug a
little fish pond she thought would be nice to sit by come
spring.

In a strange way, Susi’s original prediction
had been correct. She and John Feeney did hit it off. His grumpy
but not ill meaning company was exactly what Belle needed. His
presence reassured her she was a part of life without expecting too
much of her in return. By the time the first real snow blanketed
the Catskills, she let Susi convince her to join a girls’ night
out.

Girls’ night in Kingaken involved bowling,
beer, and no small amount of good-natured griping about husbands
and children. Considering Belle had neither, she should have hated
it - or at least felt alien. Instead, she found the evening
soothing. Susi’s friends were good people, and Susi herself had
depths Belle had been too young to appreciate twenty years ago.
Susi didn’t push Belle. She let Belle take her own time
recovering.

Bit by bit, Belle progressed in her therapy.
She cleared the furniture from Uncle Lucky’s bedroom so it could be
painted, then bought some antiques she liked better to move back
in. With a coat of soft blue-gray on the walls, it hardly seemed
this had been his space. She didn’t sense his presence around the
house, haunting or otherwise.

It seemed he’d accomplished whatever he’d
come back for.

Duvall’s presence, by contrast, seemed to
have soaked into every board and nail. She smelled him on the
sheets even after she washed them. She remembered how his footsteps
sounded, the feel of his arms around her, the clear cut beauty of
his profile. None of the memories faded. They were as vivid after a
month as they’d been that first day.

Possibly the fact that this made her happy
meant she was wrong in the head. Belle didn’t care if it did.
You are loved
, he’d said.
Never forget that
.

As long as she stayed here, she wasn’t able
to.

Once two months had passed, she sold her
rent-a-maid business in New York to her eager-beaver assistant. As
she continued to make Isaiah’s house her own, ideas began to come
to her of businesses that could succeed here. Kingaken might be
feeling the pinch these days, but Belle doubted that pinch would
last forever. This town had been here too long. Like her, when the
going got tough, Kingaken dug its heels in and got stubborn.

Belle pretty much loved that.

The mountain snowfalls grew heavier, turning
Kingaken into a Grandma Moses painting and Belle into a lover of
her wood-burning fireplace. Susi’s fourteen-year-old son came by to
help her hang Christmas lights. Occasional fistfights aside, Jaime
was a nice kid.

“You should have a tree,” he said, his husky
arms loaded with firewood he’d helped her split. “A real one. Mom’s
making me get you a present.”

Apparently, if he had to get her a present,
he wanted a decent shelter for it to sit under.

“I haven’t had a real tree in twenty years,”
Belle said, amused and startled by his idea. Her parents stopped
doing Christmas after Danny disappeared. Almost as bad, the two
years she and Tom had lived together, he’d insisted on “tasteful”
white tinsel with all-white ornaments.

Jaime dropped the firewood into its holder,
after which she and he stood shoulder to shoulder, contemplating
the spot in her living room where a real Douglas fir would fit.

“We’d come by,” Jaime said, clearly meaning
his family. “Maybe for Christmas Eve. You could bake cookies and
serve eggnog. Then, if you wanted, you could come with us to
church. The sermon’s generally okay, and singing with the choir is
fun.”

When it came to apples, Jaime’s didn’t fall
too far from the tree. Belle saw he’d adopted her into his circle
of loved ones as easily as his mom. She had to clear her throat
before she could speak. “It might be safer if I bribed your
grandmother to bake for me.”

“Grandma J would like teaching you better.
She never gets bored of having pupils. Plus, if you made at least
one batch yourself, the house will smell like it should.”

Not wanting Jaime to feel uncomfortable,
Belle wiped away the tear track that was trickling down her
face.

“You have a point,” she said. Duvall had
smelled like Christmas: spicy and sweet. Plus, he’d sparkled like
the holidays. Smiling at that, Belle decided. “All right. I’ll host
cookies and eggnog for Christmas Eve. I warn you, though, I’ll be
inviting John Feeney.”

Jaime groaned, but he was grinning.

This is good
, Belle thought.
This
is more than coming back to life again
.

~

Susi’s mother, aka Grandma J, was as quirky
as Belle recalled. She was so passionate on the subject of baking
that she sometimes sounded as if she were discussing sex. The blue
ribbons she’d won at fairs filled numerous shoeboxes, her entries
often inspiring judges to return for seconds. On the Friday before
Christmas, she arrived at Belle’s place with two canvas totes
bulging with supplies. Belle had bought flour and such, per
instructions, so these supplies were tools. Belle suspected Mrs. J
had scoured every junk shop in thirty miles for them.

Though she was as short as her daughter, Mrs.
J was strong. She clucked her tongue at Belle’s attempt to take the
heavy bags from her.

“This is your Christmas present,” she said,
carrying them to the kitchen. “And your housewarming. Secondhand is
fine for baking, but you need the right equipment for good results
- which I happen to know your uncle never bothered with.”

Isaiah’s old electric stove made her thunk
the bags on the table and shake her head. “You need a real oven if
you’re going to get serious about this. I’ll keep an eye out for
one on eBay.”

Mrs. J seemed to take her getting serious as
a foregone conclusion.

“I saw that eye roll,” she warned, nodding
her permission for Belle to start unpacking. “I’ll have you know,
baking is a great way to catch a man, especially these days. People
love feeling cared for that way. Also, faeries have terrible sweet
tooths.”

Belle nearly dropped the beaters for a stand
mixer. The floor beneath her riding boots seemed to rock. “Excuse
me?”

Mrs. J broke into a brilliant smile. “Faeries
love sweets. And orange juice makes them tipsy. Susi told me about
that character ‘Duvall’ who pretended to be John Feeney and then
took off. When she said how pretty he was, I figured I knew what
was what.”

Belle pulled out a chair and sat heavily on
it. “Susi didn’t say a word.”

“Susi doesn’t know what she saw, but when I
was seventeen, one of Them turned my world upside down.” She sat
down herself, smiling kindly across the appliance strewn table. “No
one but a faerie could steal a girl’s heart so fast. Mind you, they
can’t be kept unless they want to be, but - oh my - what a ride
before they go!”