Fire Raiser (35 page)

“
Sgë! U′ntalï udanû′hï tsägista′‘tï.
” Listen! The clotted blood is your recompense.

Her blood, binding the Fire and the Earth and the Water and most especially the Air to her need—he felt its intricacy of heat and substance and liquid, and the cells richly red with oxygen, with life-giving Air.

“
Sgë! Nâ′gwa tsûda′ntâ talehï′sani′ga!
” Listen! Now let your spirit arise!

His portion of their heritage met with hers, supported by the steadiness of Earth, the quick power of Fire, the subtle magic of Water. Alec, Nicky, Lulah: they were familiar comforting presences from childhood. This was the first time in his life that he could sense what Holly was, the bloodbeat inside her, the elegant double helix that had given him the magic but her the Spellbinding blood. A twist, a turn, a subtle chemical variation, and it would have been him.

He chanted with her, both compelled by power and willingly using it, and thanked whatever Powers had found them tonight that it
hadn’t
been him.

JAMEY THOUGHT HE MIGHT be starting to understand. There was everyday life, when small magics existed but to use major enchantments was somehow cheating, and there was a night like this, when the heavy artillery was necessary. A Witch’s reluctance to deploy the big guns made sense to him. He just wondered how the hell anybody was going to explain any of this once they got out of here and explanations became necessary.

Well, he’d trusted these people to this point.

Studying the four who guarded the quarters, and the subtle changes that shifted across their faces as Holly accepted and then gave tokens, he saw them as
these people
again and that disturbed him deeply. He had a clear view of Cam when Holly moved to kneel in the Circle’s center, and to look upon him as an Otherness was a terrible thing. This was
Cam
, not some stranger whose smile he had never seen, whose lips he had never tasted, whose mind and heart were unknown to him.

Cam, who had never trusted him with what he truly was.

It did make a difference. Of course it did. But was this—this
magic
—was this a newly discovered aspect of him to be learned and loved, or a disparity in their natures so immense that understanding and acceptance were impossible?

But this was
Cam
. Jamey had learned other new things about him tonight—his work during the past twelve years; his love for his family; the love they and the two honorary uncles had for him. He wondered suddenly why he wasn’t seeing Holly as changed, why he could watch Lulah cast a magic spell on a little talisman made of wood and not think of her as someone completely different than she’d been yesterday.

Well, he wasn’t in love with either of them, was he?

He’d tried very hard for a very long time not to compare every man he met with Cam. Even knowing how ridiculous and adolescent it was, still he’d always found a lack of one thing or another that soured any initial attraction. It was stupid, it was self-defeating, and it was always there.

What Jamey was seeing now was what Cam really was: a man unlike anyone he’d ever known, a man possessed of power and that elusive trait usually termed
presence
. Air was his perfect Element: light and gentle one moment, a fierce tumult the next, filling the space around him with a bright profusion of warmth and laughter and music and the demands of a ferocious intelligence. Watching him now, knowing this incredible new thing about him, seeing it in his eyes and even in the balance of his body—no wonder Jamey hadn’t been able to hang onto him. Calm repose, restless energy, a sudden hurricane—

“Yeah, that’s me, all right—a whole lotta wind, keeps goin’ around in circles.”
He could almost hear Cam saying it, with a tilt of his head and the hint of a dimple, wry self-mockery in his eyes.

“You already knew everything important about him.”

Maybe he did, after all. It was just Cam. His face, his fine bones and intense blue eyes. His long fingers gripping the amber, his lips forming a single word, over and over—Cam’s voice, sounding that odd word in unison with Holly, two octaves apart, then three as his voice deepened and hers soared, and the smoke spun upward. It hovered ten feet overhead, spread outward and downward in a delicate delineation of an encompassing globe. Four octaves now, that single mysterious word like a mantra:
Sgë! Sgë!
There was a sharp tinging sound, like a fingernail against a crystal goblet, and the smoke escaped the dome at its apex, a slither of white, thin as a thread and sharp as a spike.

“Nice, very nice,” Evan whispered. “That’s my girl. . . .”

And my guy
, Jamey thought suddenly—right before a slab of concrete tore loose from the ceiling and smashed to the floor.

SOMEONE WAS YELLING HER NAME.

She felt very tired, and quite out of breath. It was nice just to rest for a moment, the lazy fragrance of one of Evan’s cigars soothing her. But there was more than one voice now, most insistent that she pay attention. She blinked, surprised that she’d had her eyes shut, sank back on her heels, and looked around.

Nicky and Alec and Lulah were doing the shouting. Cam, she remembered, was behind her. He’d helped with the singing. She’d sensed his presence around and even within her, the strength of his magic and the suppleness of his mind, that impatient, impassioned intellect that had been his defining characteristic since childhood. He was so much smarter than she was, but just as stupid about love.

“Holly!”

Ceremonially speaking, they ought to have waited for her to get up off her knees and begin the closing of the Circle before badgering her with questions. Her fingers shook a little as she reached for the little clod of mud, and she watched bemused as the flame from Evan’s lighter danced on her trembling diamonds.

“Holly! For the love of—Holly, will you listen to me?”

She wondered if anyone had listened to what she and Cam had sung. If they had any idea what that strange duet had taken out of her.

“Holly! Don’t!”

No, it was her Circle, her responsibility. Thanking silently the spirits of Earth, she moved on to Water, then Fire, and finally Air. Pushing herself slowly to her feet, feeling a thousand years old with creaking knees and stiff muscles, she used the cigar smoke to cense her Circle again—not bothering to walk around it, unsure that she could, instead simply turning widdershins from Alec to Lulah to Nicky to Cam—

—who was on his knees, wheezing in huge gulps of air.

Now she knew what they were yelling about.

As quickly as she could without screwing up the magic, she finished opening the Circle. And was slammed to the floor and swept beneath a thunderous flood of chlorinated water.

“HOLLY? COME ON, babe, open your eyes. That’s it.” Lachlan smoothed the sopping hair from his wife’s face. She blinked, coughed, sneezed twice, and collapsed back onto the gurney, moaning. “Oh, knock it off,” he told her. “And be grateful it was the lap pool and not the Olympic you tapped into. Didn’t any of you geniuses think to figure out just what you were standing under?”

“Oh, shut up,” she muttered.

“All it said on the site map was ‘Spa,’ ” Nicky defended. “And anyway, we tried to warn her.”

“Never did listen,” said Lulah. “Not from when she was a pup. That’s the way, honey, just breathe.”

“Angling for a little mouth-to-mouth?” Evan asked with a grin. Holly glared up at him. “Yeah, you’re okay. But we’re shin-deep in water here and you know how I hate getting my boots wet.”

“Poor you,” she said without any sympathy whatsoever. “Next time,
you
stand under Niagara Falls.” She squinted up at him. “Why is it so dark?”

“You shorted out the electricity,” Evan said. “You also brought down about half a ton of cement along with all that water, ruined Cam’s spare cigar, and lost my lighter.”

“Bitch, bitch, bitch.” She coughed again and sat up, looking around at the tiny flames set at useful intervals by Lulah and Nicky. “Evan! The laptop!”

“Death by drowning,” he replied. “Don’t worry. Jamey hooked into it with his BlackBerry. The laptop told it everything it knew.”

She relaxed with a sigh. “I do love having clever friends. How’s Cam?”

“Wet.”

Watching a hole being bored in the ceiling had been kind of interesting; realizing that the hole was being bored into a pool was not. The water had dripped, then spurted, then cascaded down the dome of the Circle as chunks of concrete broke and fell, sliding off the protective magic. Only the strength of three tough-minded and accomplished Witches had held the arc aloft. When Holly dismantled it, she and Cam and Lulah and Alec and Nicky had been swept along in the sudden flood. Fetching up against walls and various bits of furniture, soaked to the skin, they’d all taken a few minutes to recover. In that time, Evan and Jamey had lugged them to gurneys and checked for injuries—a bruise or two, but nothing serious.

Weiss, the girl, and the baby had slept through it all.

Lachlan sat beside his wife with an arm around her shoulders. Cam had enlisted Jamey to help him knot sheets together, and now stood directly below the still dripping gouge in the ceiling. Like a redheaded Irish fakir charming a white cotton cobra, he sent the spelled material coiling upward—not without a flourish of fingers or two that indicated he was mindful of his fascinated audience.

Jamey was the first to climb hand-over-hand to the empty swimming pool. Lachlan admired not only his fitness but his tenacity. Then again, maybe
he
was showing off a bit, too. After a few minutes, a pair of life preservers and a dangle of yellow nylon rope were tossed down. Disdaining the offered assistance, Cam hoisted himself up the sheets. Evan helped Alec and Nicky truss up first the girl and then Weiss. After them came the baby, then Lulah, then Nicky and Alec. Finally Evan turned to Holly. She was still pale and shaky with the pummeling she’d received, but he knew it was her fear of heights that was making her look woozy.

“Come on, lady love,” he urged, his voice low and gentle. “I can’t get out of here until you do.”

She rallied a little, and managed a smile. “I swear on the lives of our children, if you
don’t
tell me not to look down, I’ll buy a ten-pound bag of M&M’s.”

“Deal. I think we’ll have to share them with Cam and Jamey, though. Wouldn’t be right not to, dontcha think?”

Twenty

THE DEMOLITION of a swimming pool—Olympic-sized or not—quite predictably attracted notice. By the time Holly was freed of the ropes and life preservers, and Evan had clambered up, someone was pounding on the outer doors of the spa.

“What’d you do with Weiss?” Evan panted.

“Deck,” Jamey told him, bent over, hands on knees as he caught his breath.

“Freckles, darlin’,” Cam said as he allowed the sheets to drop back down into the clinic, “you know I adore you, but—” He looked down at his Armani trousers. “What the hell did you do to my pants?”

“Oh, stop whining, and dry me off.” She dug in her pockets—well, his pockets—and pulled out two strips of fabric to wave in front of his face. “See? I saved the rest so you can put them back together again.”

“Two cigars and a suit,” he replied crossly as he dried her off. “You now owe me two cigars and a suit.”

“Thank goodness!” Alec’s voice boomed over-loudly from the foyer. “You got the door open! I thought we were going to be stuck in here all night!”

Holly turned to Evan. “You guys get Weiss—let me do the talking. And make sure his hair’s wet!”

“His hair?” Cam echoed.

Evan looked at her for a minute, then down at his own soggy self. “Plot away, lady love,” he told her with a grin. “And douse those lights, Cam.”

Holly was just as glad he waited to do so until after they’d run up the pool steps. She spared a glance for Weiss, sprawled on the deck. Cam hadn’t bothered to dry him off. Good. She inhaled deeply, knotted her soaked hair at her nape in hopes it would look like some sort of overgelled coiffure in the dimness, and switched on Helpless Female Mode.

“Uncle Alec!” she cried, running into the foyer. “He’s still unconscious—oh!” She skidded to a stop, looked wide-eyed at the three guards, and clasped her hands piously together under her chin. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re here! Mr. Weiss was giving us a tour—gracious, simply hours ago!—and he slipped on some tiles by the pool. The next thing we knew he was in the water! I think he must have hit his head—he’s breathing okay—my husband—he’s the sheriff, Sheriff Lachlan—got him out pretty fast but he hasn’t woken up!”

Nick nodded his congratulations—a bit too soon, Holly was sure. She was right. She was definitely getting too old for this. Twenty or even ten years ago the big-blue-eyes act would have worked within moments. These gentlemen were quite discourteously unimpressed.

“Where’s Mr. Weiss? What was all the noise? And what happened to the lights down here?”

On the other hand, maybe it was the clothes. She much preferred to blame their lack of instant chivalry on the shirt—ripped now where she’d made a bandage for Jamey—and the sawed-off pants. “I think my uncle must have done something funny to the wiring—he was—I don’t know—” She turned to Alec. “What was it you were doing?”

“Hot-wiring the keypad,” he said, aiding and abetting. “It would’ve worked, too, except it isn’t wired to standard. I assume that’s for your own security. It’s quite common to switch the colors of the wires so that expert burglars don’t know exactly how they can get around the—”

“Uncle Alec!” she wailed. “You could’ve been electrocuted!”

“Don’t worry, my dear,” he soothed. “No harm done. Except to the lights, of course. I’m not entirely sure how that happened.” He turned to the guards. “You really ought to have an electrician out here to check the whole system. It should have worked.”

Holly gave a nervous little fidget, looking back over her shoulder. “Oh, good—they’ve brought him out. Are there any blankets? That’s my husband, the sheriff—Evan, darling, has he said anything? Is he awake yet?” Turning to the guard, beseeching: “You have to get him upstairs and call an ambulance. None of our cell phones worked! Of course, we must be simply miles underground here, but still—could one of you gentlemen go make the call, and you two carry Mr. Weiss upstairs? Or is there an elevator? No, things have blinked or shorted or whatever it’s called—there won’t be any power for the elevator, will there?”

“It’s all right now, honey bunny,” Evan said, patting her shoulder. “They’re here and they can take care of him now. That’s it—nice and easy. You guys get him upstairs and we’ll be right behind you.”

They did as told. Once their backs were turned and their attention entirely engaged by their prone and insensate boss, Holly hissed at Nicky, “Where’s Lulah?”

“Massage room with the girl and the baby. Alec? Shall we?” And he slipped off down a side hall, Alec at his heels.

Holly peered up at Evan. “ ‘Honey bunny’?”

“You’d prefer ‘M&M Girl’?”

“I bet
you
would,” Cam murmured irrepressibly.

“What is it with you people and—”

“Jamey, sugar lump,” Holly purred, “consider their slogan.”

“ ‘Melts in your—’ ” He stopped. He blushed. “Oh.”

She spent a rewarding moment appreciating his embarrassment, then turned to her husband. “Where’d you stash the cars? I want to go home, Evan.” All at once she felt completely used up. “I want to hug the kids and fall into bed and sleep for a week.”

“Best idea anybody’s had all night. But we have to secure things here first. Where’s Lulah? I want some good solid wards on the door to the pool before anybody else wanders down here.”

“Oh, shit!” Cam exclaimed. “She’ll have to undo the locks on all the doors—the guests are probably climbing out the windows by now!”

ALEC’S CHARM WAS DEPLOYED on the panicky guests—once Lulah had undone the magic that locked them in their rooms. Jamey took care of the staff milling around in the upstairs hall. Three astonished maids succumbed to his smile (and Holly’s suggestion about a couple of strategically undone buttons on his shirt), but the two bewildered janitors were infinitely more impressed with his District Attorney credentials than his shining white teeth.

Evan unclipped his badge from its leather wallet, hung it from the silver chain of his St. Michael medal so it was nice and bright and obvious against the plum-colored sweater. Which was still waterlogged, because Holly’s little impromptu fantasy story required it. Kissing the kids was first on his list, too, but before the sleep-for-a-week part, he wanted a hot bath.

He cursed the instinct that had told him to provide for a surreptitious escape. In his SUV, stashed in the bushes down the road, was a five-mile supply of yellow POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS tape. He had to make do with silver duct tape to cordon off the upper door to the spa. The pool entry downstairs was similarly marked off-limits. Both tape barricades sported Holly’s handmade signs:
Keep Out—by order of the Pocahontas County Sheriff.
Standing back from affixing the improvised warning to the tape, he noted the tiny smear of blood on the paper that meant one of the Witches had been at work and Holly had helped. What spells had been set, he neither knew nor cared; all he wanted was to know that his crime scene, for lack of a better term, was secured.

Eventually the guests were all back in their rooms, the staff had returned to whatever duties occupied them at this insane hour of the morning, and the security guards had carted Weiss up to the lobby entrance to wait for the ambulance. This was done under Alec’s suave supervision, with Nick ready to apply special persuasions if necessary. Cam carried the girl, Lulah had the baby; during the general chaos they slipped into the ladies’ room down the hall. Lachlan surveyed the blessedly underpopulated lobby and trudged over to join Holly, who had just collapsed onto a chair.

She looked up at him with a wan smile. “Where’d you leave the Beemer?”

“Out back by the kitchen. I’ll get the keys from Cam and drive it around.”

“Remember to take an umbrella.” Her voice was all sweet solicitude.

In reply, he pulled a double handful of clinging sweater from his chest and wrung it out onto the carpet. She laughed.

“Evan!”

He turned as Cam ran up, groaning at the burgeoning panic in the blue Flynn eyes. “God, what now?” Evan asked wearily.

“The girl. She’s gone.”

“Of course she is,” he muttered. “Perfect.”

“We were settling the baby down—she’d started to cry—”

“Of course she did.”

“—we didn’t have our backs turned for more than a minute or two—”

“Of course you didn’t,” Holly said.

“Will you knock it off? How was I supposed to know she’d—”

Holly pushed herself to her feet. “I’m getting too old for this shit, too. Trust me, she hasn’t gone far. I’ve given birth. I know.”

“She’s about two dozen years younger than you are, too.”

“Piss off, Peaches,” said Holly. “It was your string thingy she got away from. Let’s go find her.”

SHE WASN’T INSIDE. Not in the ballroom, the manager’s office, the men’s room, the kitchen, the library, the restaurant, nor even hiding under the piano.

“A girl in a nightgown,” Alec said hopelessly.

“Yeah, she’d really stand out among all the guests in their bathrobes.” Evan paced a few steps, squelching in his cowboy boots. “Upstairs? She’d need a key—and to the supply rooms, too.”

“We’ll check,” Nick offered.

“She wouldn’t go outside, would she?” Jamey asked. “She’d need keys as well for any of the cars.”

Alec turned to his partner. “Do they teach people to hot-wire ignitions in Hungary?”

Outside it was still raining. The short-outs had been confined to the spa and clinic; the outdoor floodlights were as just as bright as ever, and just as useless in the downpour. Evan went to a window and squinted out into the night, thinking that the girl must be either incredibly desperate or incredibly stupid to try escaping through this.

Desperate, he decided. If the knotted string had slipped off, as it apparently had, then it was a clever young woman indeed who had kept her mouth shut and her body limp until opportunity presented itself. So if she wasn’t stupid, why would she go gallivanting out into the rain?

“She’s not out there,” he said suddenly. “She’s still inside. Hiding. Waiting.”

Holly studied his face. “For what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do.” She frowned up at him. “And so do I.”

“Well, I don’t,” Cam stated. “Care to enlighten me?”

“Think about it,” Lachlan invited. “You’ve spent the last nine months—at least—locked up in a place you can’t get out of. You’ve just given birth to a child that probably isn’t even yours—”

“But wouldn’t she want to get the hell away from here as fast as she could?”

“How? Walking?” Evan shook his head. “No, she’s still inside someplace.”

A wailing siren and a dizzying display of flashing lights distracted them. The county ambulance—a converted 1972 Cadillac hearse—rolled out of the floodlit rain and stopped at the verandah steps. Evan was grateful to see a paramedic he knew climb out of the driver’s seat.

“Go find her,” Evan said. “I’ll take care of this.” Shouldering open one of the double doors, he walked out onto the verandah and called out, “Hey, Matt! You couldn’t pedal that thing any faster?”

“The hamsters went on strike last week,” the young man said, opening the back doors and sliding out a rolling gurney. “I tried squirrels, but they kept gettin’ their tails caught in the treadmill. Whatcha got for us?”

“Mother and newborn.” He waited, hoping he wouldn’t have to suggest it himself. All unknowingly, Matt came through for him.

“Hmm. Steinmetz is physician on call tonight, but if it’s an obstetrics case, we’d better take them over to Dr. Cutter. No complications?”

“None that I know of.” Except for the tiny problem of having lost her.

Matt finished unloading the gurney and got out a stack of blankets, wrapping them beneath his orange raincoat to keep them dry. “Good party?”

“Swell,” Evan said, straight-faced. He turned, and Bernhardt Weiss smiled at him.

“It pleases me that you enjoyed yourself, Sheriff Lachlan.”

“What the—?” Matt began.

Evan hushed him with a quick gesture. Flanking Weiss in the doorway were Jamey, Holly, and two security guards. One guard was pointing an 8mm Beretta at Jamey’s head; Jamey was holding the baby. A second man had Holly by the scruff of the neck, with a .45 stuck in her ribs.

“You know what happens next,” Weiss continued.

If this was New York City,
Evan thought,
I’d already have ordered up a hundred cops in Kevlar vests, and more firepower than fuckin’ Fallujah on a Friday afternoon, and you wouldn’t make it to the bottom of the steps before a sniper took you out.

This wasn’t New York City.

There was him, and that was all.

“Actually,” he drawled, “your idea of what happens next probably doesn’t coincide with my idea of what happens next. Why don’t we compare notes? For instance, I thought all you wanted was the kid.”

Weiss shrugged and made a dismissive gesture with his left hand—which no longer wore Cam’s little woven restraint on the thumb. Lachlan didn’t waste time wondering how he’d gotten free of it.

“That was before,” Weiss said. “Now I can have the child
and
your charming wife.”

“Plus she’s your insurance,” Evan remarked. “You can control everyone else by threatening her.” Which explained where Lulah and Alec and Nick and Cam were—or, more to the point,
weren’t
. Quite apart from anything she meant to them personally, she was a Spellbinder. Protecting her was their top priority.

She was his wife and the mother of his children. Protecting her was his only priority.

Yet it couldn’t be. Of all the clichés he hated, the one he hated most was
I’m a cop—it’s not what I do, it’s what I am.
What he hated most about it were the times he was forced to admit it was true.

Weiss shifted forward. “I have no wish to harm anyone—which is more than can be said for you, Sheriff Lachlan. Take out your gun, set it down, and stand aside.”

Lachlan pretended to consider as he took a step up. “Mmm, not so much, no. You could order me shot, sure. But they tried that once before, upstairs.” Another step. “Anybody go take care of those two guys I left bleeding on the floor, by the way? Oh, and Leather Dude. Forgot about him.”

“Stay where you are.”

Lachlan forced a smile, hoping it looked convincing. “Educated opinion around here is that you can sense magic.” He unclipped his badge from the chain so that the St. Michael medal showed. “Haven’t you figured out yet what’s hanging around my neck? Haven’t you wondered why your hotshots upstairs fired three or four times—and missed me?”