Totally Spellbound

Totally
Spellbound

Kristine Grayson

Copyright Information

Totally
Spellbound

Copyright © 2012 by
Kristine Kathryn Rusch

First published in 2005 by
Zebra Books

Published by WMG
Publishing

Cover and Layout copyright
© 2012 by WMG Publishing

Cover design by Allyson
Longueira/WMG Publishing

Cover art copyright ©
Davidarts/Dreamstime, Svetap/Dreamstime

Smashwords Edition

This book is licensed for
your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction.
All characters and events portrayed in this book are
fictional,
and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely
coincidental.

This book, or parts
thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without
permission.

Table of Contents

Totally
Spellbound

Copyright
Information

About the Author

Totally
Spellbound

Kristine
Grayson

For Pam Eckley,

who likes stories better
than anyone I know

Many thanks to all the readers who’ve
let me know how much they like these novels. And thanks to my
husband, Dean, for helping me brainstorm the silliest
things.

Megan Kinneally usually
liked driving at night. The silence, the empty roads, the darkness
surrounding her car made her feel like she was the only person on
the planet. Driving in darkness calmed her—usually.

But she wasn’t calm
tonight.

She blamed the road.
Interstate 15 between San Bernadino and Las Vegas had become a
superhighway. Well-lit, congested, a gazillion lanes wide, it
ruined the effect of night driving. Trucks zoomed by her Mini
Cooper, shaking it. By the time she reached Barstow, her hands had
formed new grooves in the steering wheel. Another hour later, she
wished she had taken the back roads and risked breakdowns, desert
heat, and the occasional wild-eyed loner.

Her best friend
Conchita had tried to convince her to rent an SUV.
You’re gonna be driving your nephew around Vegas.
The last thing you want is a teeny tiny car
.

Rated best in its
class for safety,
Megan
said.

In its class,
Conchita said.
The class
of David, not the class of Goliath. Not even David would survive
getting smushed by really big tires.

Megan was beginning to agree. Half the
trucks that passed her—all of them doing at least twenty over the
speed limit—could’ve crushed her tiny car with little more than a
thought. Some careless trucker, dozing at the wheel, could drive
over her and not even notice.

She blew an errant strand
of red hair out of her face and shrugged her shoulders, trying to
loosen them. She’d been unsettled ever since she had spoken to her
brother a few hours ago. Travers The Unflappable had sounded
flapped. She’d teased him about being in Sin City—Vegas, a place he
hated—and he hadn’t risen to the bait.

Instead, he swore and confessed that
he was in trouble.

Travers the neat freak,
Travers the accountant, Travers the exceptionally cautious was
never, ever in trouble. The trouble role in the family had gone to
their oldest sister, Vivian, who had blackouts and strange psychic
moments and crazy friends.

When Vivian had gotten
married in Oregon a few weeks ago, the entire family had breathed a
sigh of relief.

Then Travers, who had vowed he was
heading straight home to L.A., had somehow ended up in Las Vegas,
and now he needed his baby sister—not to help him out of whatever
crisis he was in, but to baby-sit his precocious son,
Kyle.

Megan loved Kyle more than anyone else
in the world. They were both misfits—Kyle because of his big brain
and his strange interests, and Megan because—well, because she was
Megan.

She sighed, straightened
her spine, and heard her back crack. She flicked on the radio for
company, spun through the dial, and heard talk, oldies, talk, rap,
talk, hip-hop, talk, talk, and more talk. Finally she shut the
thing off, preferring the sound of her own worries to the constant
nattering of people who thought they were in great
trouble.

She had enough of that at
her job, which was why she was shutting down her practice. She was
a child psychologist with a boatload of rich clients who all
thought Little Johnny or Little Suzy needed a little talking-to to
go with their Prozac.

She had become a
psychologist to help people. Instead, she couldn’t convince Johnny
and Suzy’s parents that when the kids had trouble, the troubles ran
through the entire family. Usually, all Johnny and Suzy needed were
some time and attention (and love would be nice too), but nothing
Megan did could get that message through to the parents. So she
tried to patch the holes where she could.

And she was getting tired of
patching.

Three more trucks zoomed by, their
horns blaring in the night. She squinted, but couldn’t see anything
ahead.

In fact, the long stretch of
interstate had cleared. Either everyone had vanished, or her
speedometer was screwed up. She’d been keeping pace with the
traffic before (not the trucks—she didn’t want the ticket), but now
there was no one ahead of her.

She glanced in her
rearview mirror. No one behind her, either.

The road was empty, and
even though it was what she’d wanted, she was a little freaked
out.

Ahead, the streetlights (unnatural
looking things on a desert highway) winked out.

Darkness surrounded her.
Darkness and silence and long, empty stretches of road.

The hair rose on the back of her
neck.

She rolled down her window, hoping a
little fresh air would calm her. Cool and dry, the air smelled of
sagebrush and sand.

Maybe she should pull over. Maybe she
was asleep and dreaming. Maybe—

A creature ran into the road, so fast
she couldn’t see what it was, only she knew it was in front of her.
She slammed on the brakes, and the car skidded for a moment on the
empty pavement before coming to a stop.

Ahead of her, the creature—a
rabbit?—had frozen in her headlights, its round eyes staring at her
as if she were the very image of death.

Then, out of nowhere, a
falcon swooped down, caught —the rabbit??—in its talons and carried
the thing, screaming, into the air, disappearing in the
darkness.

Now Megan knew she was dreaming. There
weren’t rabbits in the Nevada desert. Nor were there falcons. And
creatures being carted off to certain death didn’t scream like
that, did they? Not unless they were human creatures.

She glanced in her rearview mirror.
Still no cars. She took a deep breath, and limped her vehicle to
the shoulder. Then she got out, and slapped herself hard across the
face.

Didn’t work. Nothing had
changed.

Except now her face hurt.

A man stepped onto the shoulder from
the side of the road. He had a leather glove on his wrist, and held
a tiny hood in his hand. In the swirling dust illuminated by her
headlights, he looked like a ghost.

“Did you see a bird?” he
asked.

He was tall but slightly built. His
hair was long and brown, tied into a ponytail with a leather cord.
He seemed to like leather—not the shiny black leather that bikers
wore, but soft brown leather, maybe even some kind of suede. If she
had to label his shirt, she’d call it a jerkin—it even looked
handmade—and his tan pants seemed just as crude. Even his boots
looked medieval—all fabric with soles too soft for the desert on a
cold summer night.

He was looking at her like he expected
something from her. Then she realized that he did—an answer. To his
question. About a bird.

“Um, yeah,” she said. “I think it ate
a rabbit.”

“Nonsense,” he said.

“That’s what I thought,”
she said. “But it took the rabbit in its talons and flew
off—”

“You didn’t see it eat the rabbit
then, did you?”

“No.” She couldn’t believe she was
having this conversation. “I saw it capture the poor rabbit and
cart it away. I think the rabbit was screaming.”

He nodded. “They do that.”

As if it were the most normal thing in
the world.

“Which way did they go?”

She pointed.

He stepped out of the headlights and
into the darkness of the road. By reflex, she looked over her
shoulder. Still no trucks or cars or SUVs. No sign of anything but
her, the mighty hunter, and his bird.

Only she hadn’t seen the bird for
nearly five minutes now, and the screaming had ended long ago
(except in her memory) and even though she squinted, she no longer
saw the man on the road.

The streetlights flicked on one by
one, and then a truck whizzed past, the wind in its wake so strong
that she nearly toppled into her car.

Standing on the shoulder was not the
brightest thing she could do.

She got back into her car
as more trucks and SUVs and sedans went by—all the things she had
thought she missed. Her breathing was hard, and she wasn’t quite
sure what had happened.

She’d have said she had
fallen asleep at the wheel, but she had felt the wind and smelled
the truck exhaust. She knew she hadn’t taken any drugs, so she
wasn’t hallucinating. And she wasn’t prone to wild flights of
fancy—those were reserved for Vivian and their late Great-Aunt
Eugenia.

And Kyle, of course.

Kyle, who saw superheroes and monsters
behind every tree. Kyle, who kept saying that Vivian’s new husband
looked just like Superman.

Megan could not see the
resemblance. But then, she rarely read comic books. Relaxation
wasn’t her forte.

Maybe it should be. Maybe this was
some kind of psychotic episode.

Because it certainly
hadn’t felt like a dream. Her cheek still stung from her
self-administered blow, she was a little chilled from the night
air, and her eyes had taken a minute to adjust to the increased
light.

And somehow, she had gotten to the
side of the road.

Somehow.

She couldn’t quite believe
she had driven there in her sleep, without hitting anyone, without
being hit.

That was as much a miracle as seeing a
medieval hunter in the darkness, following the trail of his falcon
into the desert.

She glanced at her watch. Somehow,
she’d lost about fifteen minutes.

If she were being logical
and practical, she would find a place to turn off and get some
sleep before going any farther. But she only had an hour to drive,
less if she kept up with the trucks, and the way her heart was
pounding, she wouldn’t get any sleep anyway.

She’d known the stress was
getting bad, but she’d had no idea it was this bad.

Maybe she should call Travers and
flake out on Vegas. She wasn’t in the best shape to deal with
trouble.

But Kyle needed her. And just as a
baby-sitter, Travers had said.

She could baby-sit her only nephew.
That couldn’t be stressful, not compared to life in L.A.

She’d be all right.

At least for the time
being.

How had she gotten into his
bubble?

Rob Chapeau stood beside
the interstate for a good minute, watching the Mini Cooper slam on
its brakes and then limp to the side of the road. When the pretty
woman had gotten out of the driver’s side and slapped herself, he
knew that she saw his magical little world.