Scary Cool (The Spellspinners) (15 page)

He sensed my confusion and spoke before I could ask. “They’re behaving like cowards, if you ask me.
Plus
it’s not going to work. Come on. We have to act fast.”

I wanted to ask
What do you mean? What are they doing? What do they want? What should we do?
but all that came out was, “What…what…”

Fortunately, words weren’t necessary between me and Lance.

“Help me
,” he said
.
“
We’re going to build a wall around this place.”
He sent me the mental image of an invisible shield sitting like a crystal dome over
Nonny’s
house,
Norland’s
Nursery, and the surrounding fields and meadow.
The picture he showed me looked like my home in a snow globe.
“It can’t be too big,” he warned me. “I wouldn’t chance it. We can’t protect the whole town or anything like that. But between the two of us, we can protect this place. And
Nonny
.”

Nonny
!
My heart pounded in fear. “W
hy
Nonny
?
She’s got nothing to do with this.
”

“
They don’t care.
Come on.” He was
sprint
ing down the side of the house, away from the road, where we’d be less exposed.
I could only follow.
Once we were out of view, he started
taking his boots off. I didn’t understand it, but I followed his lead, slipping off my espadrilles and kicking them aside.

There wasn’t time
for him
to answer my questions; even I could see that. I tried to tamp them down, but
anxiety
gnawed at
the edges of my mind and made it hard to focus.

“Concentrate.” Lance’s voice was sharp with
authority
. I nodded dumbly, re
aching past my confusion to
grab
his thoughts. I picked up strong images but the only words I caught, slipping past like mist on the wind, were
wish she had her power stone.

Yeah. Whatever it was, it would sure come in handy right about now.

He
stood beside me. W
e faced
down Chapman Road and held out our arms like a couple of shamans summoning spirits.
I might have felt
foolish under less urgent circumstances. As it was, trust me, I had no trouble keeping a straight face.

Go with me,
Lance commanded silently. And I did. Together, we summoned Power. And I immediately understood why we’d taken our shoes off.

The Power
shot
up
from the
heart of the planet and slammed
through
the soles of our feet
. My feet burned where they touched the ground, but the feeling was e
xhilarating rather than painful.
I’d never exp
erienced the thrust
of strong magic against my bare skin before.
A hot, fierce joy filled me.
It was more than exciting; it was transcendent. I felt the strongest connection yet to what I am…the last in a long line of my kind, powerful in ways most
people
would never know. I felt primitive. Ancient.
Eternal.

My hair lifted as if a gust of wind had caught it
; it swirled in the air around me, crackling with amethyst energy—because the Power had color to it, it seemed; I was aware of Lance sparking a frosty green that was different from, yet complementary to, my violet fire. We stood in a cloud of green and purple flashes
of light.

Yes.

I don’t know whose
yes
I heard, mine or Lance’s. It didn’t matter. We were one now, fused and seamless by mutual consent. Yet we remained ourselves, too—my mind went with his to Chapman Road, just where it curves toward town, and together we built
a
invisible wall
of energy across it. We curved the wall to the left, shooting it across the field. Then—now that I’d gotten the hang of what we were doing—his mind deferred to mine.

You know the terrain better than I do.

Of course.

I sent him the mental images and he followed with me, building our shield where the land dipped toward the creek, back up the other side to the meadow—our meadow, now; we had reached
Nonny’s
property—

Not too far,
he warned me. I reluctantly discarded the idea of including the Chapman place and obediently turned the wall. We sent it along the fence line for a little way, then bent it where the creek looped back and ran through the bottom of the meadow, then turned it again and shot it up toward the road on the other side of our house
…across the road and around the back of the nursery… then looped it around to race back and meet the wall where we began it. We had
constructed
a nice, not-quite-symmetrical circle around my home.

Now we
close it,
Lance told me. He took the lead again, pulling the wall higher and higher, and curving it over our heads until it joined itself in the sky.
Stretching our arms
skyward, we sent our combined energy toward the heavens and sealed that sucker right up.

We were now standing at roughly the center of a protective dome of energy.

We’ve done it,
he told me, and I felt his
sardonic smile.

Then, together, we sent the Power back down into the earth.

My hair tumbled back into its natural place
and the colors evaporated from the air. I took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh of pure pleasure. “That
last bit
was great,” I informed him. “I never knew what to do with the Power once I was, you know, done with it. Sometimes I couldn’t get rid of it. One time I had to hide in my room for
three
hours—” Then I picked up something he was trying to hide from me. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” But he looked drawn, and his usual lithe movements were jerky as he pulled his boots back on.
And then, to my utter amazement, Lance Donovan, the most graceful and powerful creature I have ever known, fell backwards on his butt in the flowerbed.

“Liar!
”
I exclaimed. “You’re hurt.” I started to reach down to him, thinking to help him up—and then I remembered. If I touched him, that would break the banishment. Did I really want to do that? Even now?

My hesitation hurt him even more. I was ashamed of myself. Ashamed of my fear. But I still didn’t re
ach to help him up.

So he got up on his own. Slowly. It obviously wasn’t easy. After he got to his feet he leaned one hand against the house and panted for a minute or so, white-faced. He was in pain, and he was mad at me. And I didn’t blame him.

“It’s the
banishment, Zara. You want to lift it now? Because
we have to start working together.
And
it
hurts
to work with you.
”

He was stalking angrily back toward the front of the house. I trotted at his heels like a scolded puppy. “Wait. Wait. What do you mean? What hurt? Talk to me.”

He spun around to face me. “Do you know how much easier that would have been, if I could touch you? You have no idea. Don’t you know I’m on your side? Don’t you know I’m trying to protect you? Why do you have to be so freaking
pissy
all the time?”

I blushed. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “Sorry, sorry. I know—I know things are different now.”

“Not different enough.”

He meant me, of course. He meant that he had changed, and I hadn’t. He was right—if he really had changed, that is. I sort of had to take his word for that; I couldn’t read the innermost workings of his soul. Just the top layer.

Still, he had definitely sided with me just now. He had helped me shield my house.

“Thank you,” I said belatedly. “For what you did just now.”

He gave a disgruntled snort, climbed the steps to our porch, and dropped into one of
Nonny’s
Adirondack chairs. He still looked pale. I hopped up
to sit
on the wide
porch rail across from where he was,
and studied him. “Did you say it hurt?”

“I’ll survive.”

“Com
e on. Seriously.
What hurt?”

Lance
scowled
. “It hurt to join my mind with y
ours. It doesn’t hurt to read
your thoughts, but I guess working together like that breaks the rules of my banish
ment. Not that I know what the
rules are.”

“Neither do I,” I said sheepishly. “I just sort of banished you on impulse, you know. It wasn’t planned out or anything.”
Then I remembered why I had done it, and my sheepishness vanished. “As you’ll recall,” I said tartly, “I had to act fast.”

There you go again.
“That was then. I wouldn’t hurt you now.”

“
When I’m sure of that, I’ll break the banishment
.”

“Great
.” He sounded disgusted, but then he looked at me and his expression softened. His color was coming back, too. “I can tell you this much. It hurt a lot less than it would have a week ago.”

I felt a frisson of alarm. “Are you sure?”

He almost smiled—the kind of smile that kicked my pulse into high gear. “Pretty sure.”

“So my spell is weakening.” I looked away from him so I could
glare
properly. Somehow, looking at Lance with that half-smile on his face,
it was hard to work up a frown
.

“Or you are,” he suggested
slyly
.

I
glared
in earnest.
“
Don’t count on that, Donovan. This always happens to my spells
.”

We both thought at once:
Need that p
ower stone.

Our eyes met. We were
thinking the same thing:
What if we found it?

“Okay,” I said softly. “Where do you think it would be?”

“Wherever
Nonny
put it.”

He was right.
Holy cow,
he was right.

It would have been on me when my unknown mother bundled me up, dropped me at the commune gates, rang the bell and disappeared. But nobody would have known its significance.

So where would
Nonny
have put it?

“Safe deposit box?” suggested Lance.

I shook my head. “Not
Nonny
. She doesn’t trust banks.”
Nonny
never really got over her hippie commune mindset.
If
she
didn’t have a business to run, she’d probably live on an all-cash basis. Truth be told, she’d be happiest living off the land and trading with her neighbors like
a cavewoman.

Something unpleasant occurred to Lance. “What if she sold it?”

For a second, I froze. Then I relaxed. “No. She’d never do that.
She’s sentimental.
She’d keep it, and give it to me on my twenty-first birthday or something.”

“Then it’s here somewhere.”

Excitement
shot through me. Again he was right. We stared intently at each other, as if we could somehow divine the answer from the energy that danced between us like dust motes.
“But where?” I
whispered, mentally reviewing every cupboard in the house.

“Jewelry box?”

I tried to remember the items on
Nonny’s
dresser, but drew a blank. “
The only jewelry I’ve ever seen her wear was a watch
. But let’s go look.”

I hopped off the porch rail, eager to begin, but Lance stopped me. “
Wait. If we find it, y
ou’re not going to use it against me, are you?”

I paused with one hand on the door, and looked up at him. He was standing so close to me I could feel the energy humming along his skin and reaching toward me—
but
actually
reaching me was
something he could not do. Yet.

My lips were curving into a smile almost against my will. “No
t unless I have to
,” I said. “
So don’t make me.
Come on.
”

I
made a beeline for
Nonny’
s
room at the
back of the house.
Lance followed, grumbling under his breath.

As if I would know how to use a power stone
against him
, unless he taught me. Sheesh.