The Paladins (11 page)

I nod, fear an invisible fist in my gut.

“I didn’t.”

“Why?” I trace the delicate lines in her palm. Each crease is supposed to mean something, but I don’t know what. I do it mainly to keep sane while I listen.

“Last night, I dreamt my mother was talking to me in the park. Warning me actually, about good trees, and bad trees, and I can’t remember what all. Then these vines started growing out of her body, and when I woke up …
voila
, real plants.” She slides her hand from mine. “Gideon, this is going to sound insane, but Maggie thinks I called them, and I think she’s right.”

Wait … “What?” I feel my expression hardening. “I don’t understand.”

“I mean I woke up literally covered in these huge, thick vines that encased me like a mummy. Poor Edgar went ballistic trying to get me out. Maggie, too. I don’t know how I did it, but I’m pretty sure I wished them there. And then it got weirder.”

How the hell can this get any weirder?

Her gaze flits everywhere but my face.

“Because … ” I prompt. My fingers wrap hers, both to stop her trembling and keep me grounded.

“
Because
, when Maggie went for an ax, I felt sick that the plants would die when they were only trying to help. I wished they would save themselves, and Gideon, they did! Wound out the window as easily as rolling up your everyday garden hose.”

On instinct, I cup her cheek. Her belief in me, in us, is so solid, right or wrong; I question my ability to leave.

“The magic is still here,” she says, finally pulling away. “Maybe it’s different, but it’s alive.”

A glass-shattering scream sends Raven bolting into my arms. The cry came from the dining room down the hall. In seconds I’m up, and with Raven safely behind me, we’re racing out the door.

Wind roars as loud as any locomotive.

Another scream. Rae’s fingers are a vice on my hand as we run up the long hallway. Ahead, closed double doors rattle on their hinges. White light shines through every gap around the dark oak frames.

It takes all my strength to force the doors open. Once I do, wind blasts the hair from my face. Sheer drapes snap and blow around closed windows as though a hurricane were unleashed, yet outside the leaves on the trees are calm and still.

Wall sconce lights flicker. Dane holds a hysterical Maggie near the fireplace, while Cole sits in a chair at the far end of the ten-foot table. Vibrating.

“This way!” Rae’s panicked shout eclipses mine. When she steps toward Mags, I fist her flimsy blouse and draw her back.

Dane meets my gaze, but Cole grabs our attention as his choppy, broken movements increase in speed. Something makes my old schoolmate’s body jerk wildly. His image blinks on and off again, as grainy as bad TV reception. And then he’s gone, reappearing two chairs away.

He’s standing by the window, then the doorway, on top of the table, under a chair, knocking it over. Now he’s nearly on top of Dane and Mags. I can’t keep up. Both hands cover his ears. His chest pumps up and down as though he’s hyperventilating. And he’s screaming.

Doors on the buffet slam open and shut. A vase blows off the mantle, smashing on the glossy wood floor. Glass shards fly through the air as jagged missiles.

“Bloody hell, make it stop!” Cole bends at the waist, arms wrapping his torso as though that will keep his quaking body from coming apart. He looks across the room and just that fast, he’s there.

This is more than being tossed around by a storm. Cole’s completely vanishing and reappearing in other places. Raven believed she
called
the vines. That she wished them into being. Could Cole be doing the same without knowing it?

“Calm down!” My words die in the gale. Wind rocks the chandelier overhead. Another chair topples, blowing across the floor and into a window with a crash. “You’re doing it yourself!”

“I’m what?” Cole vanishes only to appear halfway up a paneled wall. His body falls to the floor in a heap of arms and legs.

Driving against the wind, I deliver Raven into Dane’s arms alongside Maggie. My head throbs, chest squeezes too tightly as I pivot back and forth, tracking the ever moving Cole. I sound like a lunatic, but I’m determined to try Raven’s theory. “Try to relax!”

“Sod off,” Cole shouts, before disappearing again. He pops up behind me, nearly knocking me down. I whirl, grabbing both of his arms. “Tell the wind to stop.”

“Are you mad?”

“Take deep breaths,” Rae volunteers. “It helps.”

That’s my girl.

The doors swing open behind us as my employees enter. Jenny shrieks as she’s flung against a wall, her enormous bust bouncing on impact.

Jamis totters like a drunkard in the swirling gusts. “What shall I do, sir?”

“Help me hold him still!”

Jamis digs his ancient, claw-like fingers into Cole’s shoulders. His body rattles beneath our hands, energy rolling off in constant waves. My chest grows uncomfortably warm, then hot in response, as though I’m absorbing his energy. A powerful current zings down the veins in my arms to my fingertips, fans through my legs burning the soles of my feet. “I think it’s you, man. You’re controlling the wind!” A sudden gust nearly bowls us over.

Or not controlling it.

“Shite!” Cole’s gone again, popping up a few feet away. His back is hunched, head hanging below his shoulders with his palms pressed flat on the floor.

The chandelier swings so hard, it hits the ceiling. Crystal shatters to swirling white dust. Snow in a snow globe blizzard. As the chain snaps, my arms rise just in time to shield my face. What’s left of a hundred-year-old light fixture cracks the top of my dining table and rolls to the floor.

Cole has digressed to the fetal position, his lips moving continuously. By degrees, the lights stop flashing, and the wind slows until the room’s curtains hang beside blown-out windows in limp tatters. One has caught fire.

Abandoning the girls, Dane bolts across the room, tears the sheer from the rod, and stamps the fire out.

Cole rolls on his back with a groan. “Am I dead?”

“No. Are you all right? Did you break anything?” Raven asks.

“Everything, I’ll wager.”

“I meant bones,” she says, breaking from Maggie’s hold. That’s when I notice the red welts running the length of her cheek.

A sudden shriek trips and crashes down each vertebra in my back like an old man falling down the stairs. Jenny’s pointing to the far wall where the words “Wednesday’s Child” are scrawled near a portrait of Mathias Maddox. Crimson drips down the cream plaster forming a garish puddle on the floor, but whether paint or blood, I can’t say.

“Saints preserve us,” Jenny breathes.

“Wednesday’s child is full of woe,” Jamis says, quoting a children’s verse I’ve heard before. Fear and warning reflect in his rheumy eyes. “The message is meant for you, master. Born on a Wednesday, you were. Like every male Maddox before you. The magician sends a taunt.”

I swear the room is colder, now. My bones crust over with frost. “What do you mean?”

“The words appeared before, the last a challenge to your grandfather.”

I’ve read the ledgers mentioning a magician, but that was over a hundred years ago. “Are you sure?”

Jamis lifts his chin when annoyed, which is pretty often. The old man has been with us forever, but his comment goes way beyond the general knowledge I assumed he had of the curse. I’m ashamed I never bothered to learn anything about him personally, Jenny either for that matter.

“Of course you are, Jamis. Forgive me.”

A curt nod suggests my apology is as obvious as it is overdue. It’s true. No one’s going to nominate me for boss of the year.

“Let’s everyone calm down and think.” Raven’s walk is a bit uneven. She rights an overturned chair and sits unceremoniously, keeping her knees pinned together like a small child. Her gaze flits to the words still bleeding on the wall. “From the beginning, can someone tell us what happened?”

Maggie pipes up. “We … we’d just started looking though some books. Dane and I here,” she points to two chairs as she and Dane sit, “Cole over there.”

Jamis helps a shaken Jenny slip quietly out the door, and for now, I let them go.

Cole resumes his seat at the far head of the table. His hair juts out in static, black spikes reminding me of a towel just removed from the dryer. I take my regular place at the other end. Our eyes meet and hold a tense moment before he glances away.

“I’m sorry. I never meant … ” Cole jerks his thumb indicating the sum total of my newly destroyed dining hall. “Maddox, what you said during the storm. I thought you were crazy, but I would have tried anything to make it stop. It took a while, but once I focused … I found, no I
felt
my connection to the wind. Everything stopped
when I told it to!
How’s that even possible?”

“How is any of it possible?” Dane asks.

“Hang on.” Cole peers under the table, searches the floor around his chair. “Everything started when I read, uh … Here!” His fingers grasp a crumpled, brown leather diary from amongst the debris. “All right, just let me find it again.” He straightens, thumbing through the yellowed pages until finding the passage he wants.

Maggie snaps the hair from her face. “If you’re going to read that, stop short of another
X-Men Apocalypse
episode, okay?”

“Right.” His voice clears.

Spring, 1865

Today, Gordon confided, while dressing me for dinner, that he overheard the cook and delivery man discussing the death of Mrs. Lawrence. Her bruises apparently so plentiful, she was rarely seen in public this season. Having missed her presence at both the Sales Hollow Christmas Ball and the Johnson’s cotillion, I believe it must be true. My poor, sweet Emma
…

“He blathers on about his long lost love, yadda, yadda, yadda … ” Cole runs a finger down the crinkled page. “Here’s where he plots his revenge against her husband Jonathan Lawrence, the man who killed her.” Cole’s head pops up. “I knew him by the way, old man Lawrence. Met him in The Void.”

My eyebrows hike.

“Real wanker, that one.” Cole returns to the journal.

I traveled to The Grey Horse Saloon again two weeks prior to this entry and met with one Professor Pan, the magician. No price is too high. He will give me the means to avenge her death, though the path gives me pause. It is a clever plan, to send Jonathan through the rabbit hole where no one may follow. Were I to make a bargain with this devil, Pan, I would be trading one evil for another, even risk my soul. Yet your blood calls to me from the ground, dearest Emma, and I cannot bear the sound. Take heart, beloved. Jonathan is as vain as a peacock. The whole of Colleton County knows he cares more for his white gelding than you, my darling. Let them rot together then.

I will stand in the graveyard of Pan’s ancestors and speak the words he gave to me. Those with power enough to unlock the door between worlds. To bring justice. To be together again.

Cole lifts his head again. “Mathias is talking about The Void here. He made a deal with Pan for some magical verbiage and poof, the door to the labyrinth was opened.”

“What sort of deal?” Dane asks.

“Doesn’t say how much he paid, just goes on about a ‘rabbit hole’ and the means to avenge Emma’s death being the catalyst for the whole mess. And here’s the bit about the pictures …

One simple photograph with the enchanted camera traps him for an eternity. A gilded frame will be his cell, the walls of my house, his jail. He will spend his prison sentence ruing the day he hurt you and crossed the man who truly loved you. The one whose heart you hold for all time.

Mathias Maddox,

“The more I read, the more agitated I got. My head hurt. The pressure was crushing, and just when I thought I couldn’t bear it anymore, everything blew apart.” Cole peers at the surrounding chaos. “And I’m no closer to helping Rose.” His gaze finds me, eyes hard and accusing. “Your people did this. Punishing criminals is one thing, but she’s innocent.”

His anger sparks mine. “How do you know?” Cole might be right about her. He’s definitely right about my family, but loyalty makes me defend them anyway. The last thing I need is a lecture on morality from the guy that made my life at school a living hell.

Cole stands. His face wads up, muscles twitching like an angry squirrel. Not the harmless type old people feed in the park. He’s the annoying, bushy-tailed rats we southern boys like to shoot out of trees. Gut them, peel their skin … cut off their heads.
Where’s my rifle?

“You guys, quit it,” Maggie says. “We’ve got enough problems without ya’ll fighting, too.”

When Cole and Raven share a look, jealousy threatens my plan to let her go. If only I didn’t want to squeeze his tiny British brain until it popped.

“He’s right,” Rae says. “About the headaches, I mean. I thought it was sinus, or summer allergies to pollen. But after this morning’s scare with the plants, my head was hurting.”

Cole perks up. “Hang on. What plants?”

While Rae retells her story, my mind drifts. Cole’s mention of a mirror mixes with the dream I had in the hotel.

“Look, damn you! There’s magic. Inside the glass. Magic is elemental. It’s in the earth, the water, even in the air we breathe. Understand?”
My father’s words hammer through my head, battering open the memories I’d shut out for so long.
Magic is elemental
…
elemental, elemental
…

A prickle of awareness creeps up my neck. If trees are perhaps a symbol for earth, Cole’s uncontrollable shifts could be wind. The fires … What if elemental components are somehow erupting through the three of us? However farfetched, it’s the only explanation that makes sense. The idea’s worth exploring, anyway. The strange occurrences are an outpouring of elements, each of us representing a different aspect.

My hands fist and release with pent up energy. “I might know what’s happening.” The room goes quiet. “I’ll have Jenny box these books to bring with us. Get packed everybody. It’ll be tight, but we’ll go in my Jeep.”

“Road trip,” Dane says.

I catch his eye. “Can you get away from work for a few days?”