Spun by Sorcery (5 page)

“What’s wrong with this picture?” Janice muttered.

“You mean, besides the fact that Penny deigned to put her paws on damp ground?”

“I was thinking more like why aren’t we in there instead of out here?”

“Because we can’t get in,” I said.

“You tried?”

Luke and I exchanged eye rolls. “Of course we tried,” I said. “What do you think we were doing before you showed up?” I was having trouble keeping the
duh
out of my voice.

Luke brought her up to speed on the shield that guarded the perimeter.

“What about the field?” Janice asked.

“Neutral territory,” he said.

“Well, it made for some hella bad driving,” Janice said.

“That’s the Buick,” Luke said with a grin in my direction, “not the spell.”

“How did you know we were here?” I asked, ignoring Luke’s comment. “I mean, what did you do between the time Sugar Maple vanished and now?” For that matter, how did she even know we were here?

Janice’s eyes widened. “I—I’m not sure.”

“You must’ve done something,” I said. “It’s been a couple of hours.”

She seemed lost in thought. “I can’t remember anything after the town blinked out. Next thing I knew I was driving that bucket of bolts you call a car across the field.”

“Do you think you fell asleep for a while?” Luke asked.

“Not exactly the time for a nap,” Janice pointed out.

“In a trance of some kind?” I asked.

“I guess it’s possible but until you asked I hadn’t thought about the time lapse.”

“We need to make a list.” I rummaged through one of my knitting bags for paper and pen. And ignored the laughter behind me. “I don’t hear any better ideas.” I pulled out a battered Bic that was almost as old as my car and a take-out menu from Wong Foo’s with the first few rows of a lace pattern scribbled across the back. “You first, Luke. What did you see when you walked the perimeter?”

“You mean, besides the missing town?”

I loved him, but he was a wisecrack away from being turned into a hood ornament.

“The town is gone,” he acknowledged, “and so is the bridge. There’s a forest there instead.”

Janice groaned but I tried to put a positive spin on things.

“That’s a good thing.” My Pollyanna imitation needed a little work. “No bridge means no traffic into town, which means we’ll go undetected a little longer.” The Toothaker Bridge was the only way in or out of town.

“What town?” Luke retorted. “Just wait until UPS comes rolling in with a delivery for Sticks & Strings. This story will explode.”

“Crap!” Sometimes passion trumped eloquence. I checked the time on Luke’s watch. “Joe usually hits my shop around nine fifteen.”

For three hundred years Aerynn’s protective charm had shielded our truth from prying eyes but now that there was no town to shield, the protective charm no longer existed and a missing town would be impossible to explain.

“Anybody have a really big tarp?” Janice asked and we laughed despite ourselves.

“Maybe one of Forbes’s granny square afghans,” I said. Forbes was our resident mountain giant.

“One of Midge Stallworth’s bathrobes might work.”

“Or you could create another protective charm,” Luke offered.

Leave it to the cop to come up with a solution. He was definitely more optimistic than I was. So far my powers seemed to have gone the way of Sugar Maple itself. Had he forgotten my pathetic attempt to call down some spending money?

“Go for it,” Janice said to me. “There has to be something in the Book of Spells that will help.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell my friend that so far the Book of Spells was MIA and we just might be on our own.

The Janice I had known up until now was a wisecracking, self-confident Julia Roberts look-alike who had the real world and every other world by the short hairs. She balanced a big family, a happy marriage, and a thriving business and made it look easy.

Sometimes I almost forgot she was a witch descended from a long line of witches who could take me out without breaking a sweat.

I’m not sure she ever forgot I was human.

The Janice next to me now was a mess. She grabbed my hand as Chloe tried to call the Book of Spells to her side and she squeezed tighter and tighter with every failed attempt.

“She’s struggling,” Janice whispered in my ear. “What happened at the waterfall? Is she okay?”

“She’s exhausted,” I said as her nails dug deeper into the palm of my hand. “She’ll be fine.” I was straddling the line between lie and wish.

The more Chloe tried, the more tongue-tied she grew. Her hard-won magick seemed a distant memory. Bursts of yellow flame erupted at her feet with every failed effort, then fizzled swiftly and died. Mostly it was like watching a slow-motion train wreck.

“Where’s Penny?” Chloe darted over to where we stood by the car. “I need Penny!”

She swept the enormous cat into her arms then dashed back to the center of the field.

“Uh-oh,” Janice said. “That doesn’t sound good.”

I’m not going to tell you I understand it, but that mellow old cat served as some kind of interdimensional courier between Chloe and the world the rest of us can’t see. Today, however, not even Penny made a difference.

I shot a quick look at my watch. We had maybe another ninety minutes before the real world and all its problems descended on what used to be Sugar Maple.

“I’m getting nowhere,” Chloe said as she rejoined us. Penny was draped across her shoulders like a knitted shawl. “I’ve tried every spell I know short of abracadabra.”

A brisk wind blew in from the west and I realized the sky had grown noticeably grayer over the last few minutes. Early April in Vermont is a crapshoot. The day can start cold, turn warm, and end with a blizzard, all within one twenty-four-hour period.

On cue, a few big fluffy white flakes drifted down.

“Oh, great,” Chloe muttered. “Just what we need.”

“I hate snow,” Janice said. “Our ancestors should have settled in Boca.”

A few more pieces of the puzzle shifted, collided, then dropped into place. “I’m thinking snow is exactly what we need.” Lots of snow. A blizzard of it, aimed right at the heart of the place where Sugar Maple used to be.

Chloe and Janice exchanged a
what can you expect from a human
look.

I blew it off. I knew I was onto something. “This is the answer. Maybe if you combine your powers, you can create a blizzard and block out the town.”

“I don’t have much right now,” Chloe said, clearly distressed. She turned to Janice. “How about you?”

Janice put on her game face. “We’ll find out.”

The plan was simple but if it worked it would buy us time to figure out what was going on and, with luck, a way to restore the town.

Janice’s powers were of the earth. The natural world was her element and, under normal circumstances, this should have been child’s play. Chloe’s powers were less easy to characterize and more mercurial. Their potential, however, seemed unlimited.

They moved to the middle of the open field that separated us from the woods that were once Sugar Maple, then Chloe called to Penny the cat, who had wandered off while we talked. Penny glided across the field then leaped effortlessly and once again draped herself across Chloe’s shoulders as the two women clasped hands. I’d been warned to keep my cop vibe at a distance so I leaned against the Buick and watched the show.

I went deep, deeper than ever before, and came up empty every time. Sugar Maple wasn’t the only thing that was gone. The Book of Spells was gone and so was my magick.

“Come on,” Janice urged. “You can do it.”

“I can’t. The Book isn’t responding.”

“What do you mean, it’s not responding? It has to respond.”

“It doesn’t have to do anything. It’s the Book of Spells.”

“It’s not the boss of you. Make it listen!”

Easy for her to say. She’d been magick all her life. Magick was as natural to Janice as breathing in and out. For me it was still like patting my head and rubbing my stomach while standing on one foot in a hurricane.

“I can’t make it listen, Jan. I’m still learning.”

“You can make it do anything you want.”

“No, I can’t. It does what it does and I go along for the ride.”

“You sound like you’re giving up.”

She was right. I was giving up. In the face of trouble, I was sliding back into my nonmagick self. Except my nonmagick self didn’t exist anymore. I owed it to everyone who had come before to remember that.

“Try again,” Janice urged. “You’re the alpha dog around here now.”

I saw the fear in her eyes and tears welled up in sympathy. I had cried more in the last few hours than at any time in my life and I didn’t like it.

“Don’t you dare,” she warned me. “If you start, I’ll start again and this time I won’t be able to stop.”

I had no blood family of my own at stake but she had a husband and children, a mother and father and siblings and nieces and nephews, an entire web of family lost out there somewhere with Sugar Maple. If I was in any way responsible for this, I had to try to make it right.

I burrowed down and gave it my best shot. I begged, coaxed, cajoled, pleaded with, and downright ordered the Book of Spells to show itself and help us out of this jam but it remained out of reach.

“Screw it!” Luke looked over at me in surprise. “To hell with the Book of Spells,” I said. “I can do this without the Book.”

I would gather up what skills I’d already mastered and put it all in the hands of my ancestors.
Aerynn, if you’re out there, please help us!

Luke was watching us but there really wasn’t much to see. Whatever had occurred here had changed more than the landscape. Both Janice’s and my magick had been severely depleted and would take time to replenish. Time that we didn’t have.

But we were relentless. The air around Janice moved in vertical waves, like heat rising off a summer pavement, but there was still no sign of magick.

Janice had laid the groundwork and it was up to me to figure out a way to build on it. Last night I had done the impossible and saved a little girl’s spirit from an eternity in hell. Conjuring up a snowstorm—even with diminished powers—should be easy.

Of course there were women who said childbirth was easy, too, so I guess it was all relative. I wove my spell around Janice’s energies, adding mine to the mix, commanding the clouds to open up and spill a blizzard exactly where we needed one.

But no matter how hard I tried, nothing happened. I knew what magick felt like now. I knew how it felt when magick moved through my body, the way the muscles in my arms and legs tensed, the accelerated heartbeat, the almost sexual feeling of anticipation. And, believe me, it wasn’t there.

Penny had abandoned us and returned to the car and was now peering out at me through the rear window. Her golden eyes, strangely like mine, seemed to glow with an energy that warmed my skin like summer sunlight. I could feel myself growing loose and relaxed. The moment lengthened and I sensed a change. Instead of speeding up, my heartbeat slowed. A chill washed over me, raising goose bumps up and down my arms.

Next to me Janice let out a shriek. “It’s snowing!”

Flurries at first, big soft white snowflakes that landed like powdered sugar, then it quickly upshifted into serious snow.

The kind that showed every intention of turning into a blizzard that closed down schools and shops and roadways and took a town off the grid.

I mean, seriously, you’ve got to love magick.

Luke was euphoric when we joined him by the car. “Another fifteen minutes and nobody will be able to get within a mile of home.”

The heavy storm would also make aerial views impossible. There would be no planes flying overhead in the foreseeable future. No nosy news choppers looking to fill a twenty-four-hour cycle.

But still we couldn’t leave anything to chance.

“I’ll call the county and report the downed bridge and the whiteout conditions and tell them I’ll let them know when to send in the plows and the repair crew,” Luke said. As chief of police, his word would be taken at face value. Besides, if Mother Nature and our powers cooperated, they’d have more than enough snowplowing to keep them busy once the storm stopped.

With a little luck, that would give us forty-eight hours. I didn’t know what we were going to do with those hours but we would figure that out as we went along.

Except for the fact that Sugar Maple was still MIA and we were tired, hungry, and broke, things were really working out.

“Did you say something before about Fig Newtons?” I asked Janice. I may have drooled a tiny bit but I wouldn’t swear to it.

“You’re not getting my Fig Newtons.”

“Jan, we’re starving. We have no food and no money to get any food. Give up those cookies or I’ll hurt you.”