Spun by Sorcery (27 page)

And, considering what was waiting for us, that was pretty funny.

Finally we were ready to go.

I hugged Janice, kissed the top of Penny’s head, returned Elspeth’s grave nod, then went eye to eye with the man who had been Aerynn’s mate.

“You understand what is needed?” he asked.

“I understand.”

“Full commitment,” he reiterated. “Anything less and they will find a way to destroy you.”

“You need to work on your motivational speeches,” I said. “That one makes me want to jump out the window and swim to shore.”

“In your world, those remarks are considered witty.”

I shrugged. “Snarky might be a better word.”

“I know that they provide cover for your emotions.”

“I’m not sure you know anything at all about me, Samuel,” I replied calmly. “But I appreciate the help you’ve given us.”

I refused to acknowledge the quaver in my voice. The fact that this man was my blood filled me with the kind of sadness that lies beyond words. How different my life would have been if he had reached out to me ten or twenty years ago. But it was too late now.

“I wish you good speed,” he said, touching my hand with his and for an instant my bitterness fell away and acknowledgment took its place.

We are one,
I thought as I met his eyes.
I know that.

I started to smile. “You’re better than a ventriloquist,” I said and, to my surprise, he laughed.

Out loud.

In a way that touched the human side of my heart.

And then, just like that, we were gone.

Samuel’s baritone was still ringing in my ears as I landed headfirst in the notch of a snow-covered maple tree.

Guess I had my answer to “Are we there yet?”

“Luke!” Chloe’s voice sounded from somewhere nearby. “Where are you?”

“Up a tree,” I hollered. “Where are you?”

“In a snowdrift.”

“Are you okay?”

“Freezing,” she said. “I think we did it.”

I righted myself and let myself down to the snow-cushioned ground. “You’re right,” I said. I knew exactly where we were.

I spotted Chloe some twenty feet away as she muscled her way out of the snowdrift. I pushed my way through and met her halfway.

“You look like hell,” she said with a small laugh.

“You don’t look so great yourself,” I shot back, laughing with her.

We had just traveled hundreds of miles in the span of a breath. The fact that we weren’t splattered globs of protoplasm seemed pretty amazing. Nothing broken, not even a tree branch.

“He’s good,” she said, glancing around.

“Pinpoint accuracy.”

“He didn’t have enough power to do it himself.” Her voice broke unexpectedly and she coughed to cover it. “Elspeth told me he called in favors from friends in other dimensions.”

“He gave me his powers, didn’t he?”

“And more,” she said. “Otherwise you probably wouldn’t have made it through in one piece.”

“Let’s hear it for magick powers.”

“Last chance to change your mind,” she said. “Why don’t you use those magick powers of yours and go somewhere safe like Afghanistan or Iraq.”

“Because I love you,” I said, “and I’m in this for keeps.”

The look in her beautiful golden eyes said it all.

There was no way we could lose.

We were standing at the edge of the clearing where we had stood the night we battled Isadora at the waterfall. In the waning moonlight we looked at the dense forest that stood in the place Sugar Maple used to be. Except for the mountains of melting snow, nothing had changed.

“I think it’s still there,” Chloe said, “but we won’t know for sure until we get through that memory foam barrier the Salem Fae set up.”

“Any idea how we can do that?”

She outlined a simple plan that had at least one or two chances in hell of working.

According to Samuel, this was the first time the talisman had executed the fail-safe plan so there were no historical references to help determine where it had taken Sugar Maple. The old man’s best guess was that the town was still in the same physical location but in a different dimension of time. That theory explained a couple of questions that had been nagging at me: Janice’s time-delayed appearance in the Buick and the untouched, almost primeval look of the forest.

“Don’t overthink it,” Chloe warned me. “That’s what always screws me up. Samuel said they’ll be using old magick.”

“Which means what?” Old magic, new magic. The difference wasn’t clear to me.

“New magick transported us from Salem to Sugar Maple. Old magick trapped me in an empty rest stop.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Old magick is more personal. It preys on your fears, so do whatever you can to keep your mind clear. Don’t give them anything to grab hold of.”

“Shouldn’t be a problem. I’ll be too busy trying to keep from turning myself into a basset hound.”

She smiled but I could see the nerves behind it. “Let your powers be an extension of yourself and your abilities. That way you won’t get into trouble.”

“When this is over—,” I began.

She pressed a swift kiss to my mouth. “—We’ll still be together.”

We started across the field toward the forest that dominated the place where Sugar Maple once thrived. One step . . . two steps . . . on the third I was walking across the top of the melting snow, not sinking into it. A loud laugh of surprise and wonder broke free and echoed around us. Chloe, eyes dancing, motioned for me to take it down a few notches. But hell, how many times in your life do you get to levitate?

Because that was what I was doing. I was walking on air at least three inches above the snow. The last time I felt this pumped I’d just taken down two perps in a home invasion sting. And let me tell you this was a hell of a lot better.

I took bigger steps, faster and faster, sure that I could take off and fly if I wanted to.

“Luke.” Chloe sounded a warning. “You’ve got to pull it back.”

She was right. Too bad there was no time to enjoy it.

We reached the stand of maples in a handful of seconds and this time we gained a foothold and began scaling the invisible wall. I’d expected a straight vertical climb but instead it felt gently curved, almost domelike.

When we were about twenty feet off the ground Chloe stopped climbing. “No point going any higher,” she said.

She took a long slow breath, repositioned herself, then let go with her right hand. She flexed her fingers twice then pointed toward a spot about five feet away and closed her eyes.

At first I sensed rather than saw the heat. A faint hissing sound was followed by a spray of sparks spilling from her fingertips. I watched, impressed, as her eyes opened and she focused in on the spray, refining it, focusing it, until the sparks burst into flames worthy of an industrial-strength blowtorch.

A hole the size of a half dollar appeared. A faintly sulfurous smell wafted toward me. Chloe’s concentration didn’t waver. The flames grew hotter. The hole grew wider and wider still until it could accommodate a grown man.

Which was a damn good thing since a second later we were both sucked through it and plunged straight into hell.

Nothing prepared me for the darkness as the opening we had been pulled through closed behind us. Moonless nights fell hard in northern Vermont. Far away from big-city lights, the deep velvety blackness absorbed everything it touched.

But this was different. This darkness had weight and dimension. The silence was profound.

“Don’t move,” I warned Luke and he grunted his assent. We could be standing above a river of piranha or poised at the edge of a cliff. It was anybody’s guess.

Seconds passed. I had hoped that our eyes would adjust to the intense darkness but no such luck.

“Maybe we’re in a cave,” Luke said.

My stomach clenched at the thought of bats. I instantly pushed the image out of my head. No point giving our opponents extra ammunition.

“We’re not in a cave,” I said with more certainty than I felt. “Caves smell cool and damp.”

And this was anything but cool. In fact, it was getting downright steamy.

I wasn’t getting a good feeling.

And neither was Luke. “Can you burn another opening for us? I’m starting to feel like a burger on a grill.”

I tried but nothing happened. “Damn,” I whispered as waves of heat closed around us. “Nothing’s happening.”

I tried again. Still nothing.

“Did you hear that?” Luke asked.

“You mean that sloshing sound?”

“And what about the stench?”

I sniffed the superheated air. “Rotten eggs and tar.” And something darker, more malevolent.

“Shit,” Luke said. “I’m burning up.”

“So am I.” Sweat stung my eyes and poured down my back. “It must be one hundred twenty degrees in here.”

“This is worse than Phoenix in July,” he said.

I wouldn’t know. I had never been anywhere but Sugar Maple in July.

I tried to burn us a way out but whatever firepower I had was dwarfed by the heat bouncing off the walls. Even the soles of my feet were starting to burn.

Imagination is a powerful tool. Most of the time what you imagined was far more frightening than anything reality could dish up.

Not this time.

The walls surrounding us began to glow a faint orange and with the light the details came clear. We were standing on an outcropping of rock overlooking a bubbling, steaming pool of golden red molten lava that overflowed the sides of its enclosure and spilled down into the bowels of the earth. Every few seconds a huge plume of lava erupted from the center of that pool and scalded our faces with its unbearable heat as it shot up past us in a shower of multicolored sparks.

This wild sea of lava stretched as far as the eye could see and was punctuated by more than a dozen boulders of varying sizes that had yet to vanish beneath the molten flood.

“I’ve seen this on Discovery Channel,” Luke said. “We’re inside an active volcano.”

Which we both knew was impossible because we would have been turned into toast within the first nanosecond.

“This isn’t real,” I reminded both of us. “This is an illusion.” Old magick specialized in illusions.

Still, I had to admit it was a good one.

And, if I remembered what Samuel had told me about old magick, it was every bit as deadly.

It didn’t seem possible, but the heat had intensified to the point where I was having trouble standing upright. The sweat that had been running freely dried up. My mouth felt parched as desert sand. I was dizzy, chilled and burning at the same time. Framing a sentence became a challenge.

If possible, Luke was suffering even more. Not even the overlay of magick was enough to shield his mortal body from the onslaught.

“I changed my mind,” he managed with a wobbly gesture toward the inferno beneath us. “This isn’t just a volcano: this is hell.”

Luke had spent eight years in Catholic school. The notion of hell as a specific place had been ingrained in him from an early age. It would have been easy for them to grab his memories and shape them to their own advantage.

“Empty your thoughts,” I begged. “Don’t give them anything to use against us.”

I wondered what fears I had already given away. Driving over thirty miles an hour, driving on ice, driving in general, snakes, spiders, rabbits, creepy crawly insects, enclosed spaces, splitty yarn, slasher movies—

Stop!
I willed my brain to go blank, which was a whole lot easier said than done. Why hadn’t I paid more attention to Janice when she tried to teach me how to meditate?
Take a deep breath,
she always began.

But every breath I took made me feel like my lungs were being scalded from the inside, which made the extreme dizziness even more fun. I wasn’t sure if the world had suddenly tilted on its axis or I had. I also wasn’t sure which was worse.

I had to sit. I didn’t care how hot the rocks beneath me were. If I didn’t sit down in the next ten seconds, I was going to fall headfirst into the deadly magma.

Get out,
a voice inside my head urged.
You don’t need this. You could make a life in Salem with Luke. Open a new yarn shop. Start all over without all the old Sugar Maple baggage. This is the twenty-first century. Don’t be mired in decisions made hundreds of years ago.

The logic was hard to argue. No more fighting. No more struggling to prove myself. No more apologizing for my mother’s decisions. Everything would be all shiny and new again, including me.

All I had to do was take Luke’s hand, admit defeat, then slip back into the mortal world where I would be Chloe Hobbs, knitter and spinner and shop owner. A tall gawky blond human female who would be living only half a life without magick.