Forget everything that"s happened here . . . Forget Sugar Maple and Chloe . . . Think about Steffie . . . when she was still there with you . . . Nothing else matters . . .Nothing else did.
21.
CHLOE.
I couldn"t do it.
Every time I closed my eyes and tried to catch a nap before daylight came flooding in through my windows, I saw myself at Steffie"s age, remembered how it felt to lose my parents, felt that deep loneliness inside my heart, and I flat out couldn"t do it.
I wanted to let her go, but my human blood wouldn"t let me. She was real. Spirits were real. I had lived among them all my life. The Harris family. The Souderbushes. All the souls who pa.s.sed through our town, searching and yearning for connection with the family and friends they had left behind.
Why had it taken me so long to realize this wasn"t about Luke or Karen? I saw myself in Steffie. I knew how it felt to be a very small child alone in a very big adult world. I knew how it felt to miss your parents so much it hurt to breathe. I knew how it felt to want one more story, one more silly bedtime song, one more memory to tuck away against forever.
There was order to the spirit world. A tightly woven fabric of laws that governed what happened and when and why. A fully evolved spirit who had completed his or her journey was far beyond the reach of religion or magick or even love.
Isadora wouldn"t have been able to hijack Steffie"s spirit if Steffie hadn"t still been in transit. Spirits were dimensional travelers on a mission to right a wrong, deliver a message, achieve some kind of closure before they reached their destination. If Steffie had completed her journey and claimed her own afterlife, even Isadora"s considerable powers wouldn"t have been able to touch her.
There was something Steffie needed to do in this world, some message she needed to deliver to her parents, and somehow Isadora had discovered that fact. Maybe I hadn"t done as good a job of protecting Luke from thought probes as I"d thought. It had all been there waiting for Isadora to grab: his marriage to Karen, Steffie"s death, their bitter divorce. And from there it was a simple dimensional leap to connecting with Steffie"s spirit and setting this whole thing in motion.
If Steffie was ever going to find peace, I would need to use all the magick I had at my command to make sure she completed her journey.
Unfortunately I didn"t have a clue where to start. I couldn"t blue-flame Janice and Lynette. I already knew where they stood on the topic of helping humans find their afterlife bliss. Lilith the librarian was unfailingly compa.s.sionate, but she wouldn"t understand putting a dead human child"s needs before the needs of Sugar Maple.
I paced the cottage, trying to gather my thoughts into a cohesive whole. I tried sitting down at my Schacht and spinning some Bluefaced Leicester as a way to regain my focus, but my rhythm was off and I couldn"t seem to manage a simple drafting motion. I picked up one of the dozen works in progress scattered around the place, but even plain old stockinette was beyond my ability.
I wasn"t a chess player. I didn"t know the first thing about the parry-and-thrust of fencing. Even love had me stumbling around like I had two left feet. Figuring out a plan to steal back a child"s soul without setting Isadora free as well was like trying to reconstruct the blueprints for the s.p.a.ce shuttle when you could barely push past the five times table.
The thought had barely formed when the room began to spin. Not in an I-think-I"m-going-to-faint kind of way but really spin like a carnival ride at the county fair. I sat down on the floor, hard, as the spinning turned into tumbling that sent me rolling across the room into the opposite wall. Before I had a chance to pull myself to my feet, I was yanked backward once again through that bizarre light-and-magic show that had made me feel like toothpaste being squeezed through a tube.
Who would think something like that could become old news?
Come on, I thought. I thought. You can do better than this. You can do better than this. I"d barely scratched the surface of what the Book of Spells was capable of doing and it was already treating me to reruns? I mean, I knew exactly what was coming next: another audiovisual replay of I"d barely scratched the surface of what the Book of Spells was capable of doing and it was already treating me to reruns? I mean, I knew exactly what was coming next: another audiovisual replay of Great Moments in Chloe"s History Great Moments in Chloe"s History meant to remind me that Sugar Maple was my first and only destiny. meant to remind me that Sugar Maple was my first and only destiny.
"I don"t have time for this!" I shouted into the twinkling lights. "Send me back now!" Didn"t the Book know there was a clock ticking out there?
I was the sorcerer-in-charge. I ruled the Book of Spells; the Book didn"t rule me. If I said stop, it stopped.
"Stop!" I yelled. "Stop!"
Instead of stopping, I was pulled faster through a tunnel of disco lights leftover from the seventies, a tunnel that was growing longer instead of shorter with every millisecond until I was dumped on the floor of a very dark, very weird room. Earsplitting elevator music made thinking an exercise in futility.
"Not funny," I shouted to the Book. "Take me home now!"
Nothing. Not even a ripple of acknowledgment.
I forced myself to block out the bad music and creepy decor. When it came to the Book of Spells, everything happened for a reason. Was this the answer to one of my questions? Was it a warning? I guessed this was the human part of my equation talking, but I wouldn"t have minded a few plain old declarative sentences right about now.
"Okay, Book," I said, moving deeper into the room. "You brought me here. Now, what is it you want me to know?"
Nothing happened but I had the sense I wasn"t alone.
"Is it about Steffie? Can you show me Steffie? Can you let me speak to her?"
Still nothing but I was getting warmer.
Literally.
I was too young for hot flashes but sweat started pouring down the back of my neck.
The music grew louder. The walls of the room began to ripple like a sixties-era psychedelic dream, pushing inward until I found myself standing at the midpoint and able to touch opposing walls with my fingertips.
I"m not exactly claustrophobic, but when the room really did start closing in on me, fight-or-flight syndrome definitely kicked in.
No doors. No windows. No way out.
My heart was beating so fast I couldn"t breathe. I was a half second away from total meltdown when the music stopped, the walls disappeared, and the ceiling lifted away. There was no sky, no horizon, no sun or moon to help me orient myself. The ground beneath my feet was cushioned, and it felt like I was standing on a bed of whipped cream. Ambient light emanated from the surroundings. Each particle of air glowed from within. Tightly swirling clouds, like minitornadoes or dust devils, rotated all around me as concentrated pulses of light shot off in different directions from under my feet. As soon as a thought formed in my head, no matter how fragmented or foolish, one of the clouds rushed toward me and transformed that thought into my own private virtual reality.
Was this the next level of understanding? I felt strangely energized, lit up from within like the glowing particles that traced the contours of my body in a free-form CT scan.
My human concept of time and s.p.a.ce was irrelevant here. I knew instinctively that it would take hundreds of earth years to master the possibilities offered by this new level. The thought of how many other levels might exist was staggering.
As soon as that thought formed itself, a small round cloud raced toward me. It stopped inches away from my face, shuddered, then turned a pearlescent white as thousands of platforms appeared before me, rising into the distance.
"Focus," I said out loud and turned my thoughts to Karen. The second her image formed in my brain, the platforms collapsed and drifted off into the distance. The round white cloud in front of me evaporated and a silvery gray cloud took its place.
"Show me Karen," I commanded. I wasn"t comfortable with commands but they were big in magick circles.
Karen was lying flat on her back in the center of what I a.s.sumed was a bed. Her face was the only detail I could clearly make out. Her eyes were closed. For a second I was afraid she was dead, and a sick feeling of dread grabbed my chest and squeezed hard.
"Stay with us," I murmured. "Don"t pull away."
I moved deeper into the room, sinking, then rising into the buoyant floor with each step. A midrange tone seemed to fill the air around me. I had the sense there were others in the room besides Karen and me, but they remained invisible to me.
The thought probes, however, weren"t. Tiny crystalline devices radiated from Karen"s head like a glittering crown. I frowned and moved closer. These were nothing like the torpedo-shaped thought probes I was used to. I reached out and touched her shoulder. At first contact a sizzle of current burned through me and my mind swelled with images of Sugar Maple. People. Places. Magick. All from Karen"s perspective.
Even the sight of Steffie trapped inside that transparent cage.
It was all being siphoned away by the probes and replaced with newly constructed memories of a knitting workshop in northern Vermont that had never happened.
The magick at work was powerful because not even the Book of Spells was able to pierce the camouflage that cloaked her location. I tried every trick I could summon up to slide inside the shield surrounding Karen. Astral projection. Mind-twinning. Locus charting. They all failed.
There was only one thing left to try: old-fashioned police work.
I needed Luke.
22.
LUKE.
The village blazed with screaming purple light from the clock tower. And if that wasn"t enough, the purple light was coupled with a steady fall of purple glitter that made a snapping, crackling sound when it hit the ground. Not to mention the oily stink of sour ashes from a long-dead fire.
The tourists were going to get an eyeful when they rolled into town later that morning.
Daybreak was less than a half hour away. I drove out to Snow Lake figuring Karen might have gone there to see if she could contact Steffie. I pulled into the small lot and walked the perimeter, but there was no sign of her. The water was still. The park was empty. All traces of Isadora"s fury were gone. I tried Karen"s cell but it flipped into voice mail. I drove up and down our small grid of streets but the only thing I saw was one of the Weaver boys loading newspapers into the basket of his bike in front of the Inn.
He didn"t acknowledge my wave.
There was only one way out of town, straight up Osborne to the Toothaker Bridge, then follow the two-lane road to the highway.
The road intersected with some old logging trails at various points, but if you weren"t looking for them, you"d never find them. I popped on my high beams and scanned left and right as I drove. She could have tripped over a branch or stopped for a rest. Anything was possible.
Winter was brutal on the roads in northern Vermont. Endless days of subzero weather, snow, and ice took their toll. The road was littered with gigantic mud-filled potholes I had to navigate around or lose a wheel.
I swung right to avoid a nasty one when the truck began to vibrate at a decibel level high enough to take out your hearing. I"d bounced over a fallen branch a mile or so back. Maybe it had punched a hole in an exhaust pipe.
Or maybe it was the sound a sorceress made before she crashed through the roof of your truck.
"Holy s.h.i.t!" I slammed on the brakes and skidded to a muddy stop in the middle of the road.
"Holy s.h.i.t!" I said again for good measure.
Chloe was half on the seat, half off, clinging to the roll bar. "OhmiG.o.d . . . ohmiG.o.d . . . ohmiG.o.d . . ."
"Breathe," I told her as I unsnapped my lap belt. "Does anything hurt?"
She met my eyes and a strangled laugh escaped. "You mean besides my dignity?"
"You crashed through the roof of my Jeep," I said. "Something"s gotta-" We both looked up at the same time. The roof was intact. "What the h.e.l.l-?"
"Don"t ask me," she said. "I was inside the Book of Spells and then I wasn"t."
"You were in in the Book?" the Book?"
"It"s not the first time." She gripped my hand in hers. "I saw Karen. They"re trying to erase her memory."
There was a limit to how much a human brain could absorb without exploding. "Karen"s in the Book?"
"I don"t know where Karen is. All I know is they"re draining all of her memories of Sugar Maple."
"Who are they?"
"I don"t know."
"You have to have some idea."
"Colm and Renate. Verna Griggs. Cyrus Pendragon and his sons. And that"s just for starters." She spread her hands wide. "It could be just about anyone. Karen doesn"t seem to be in any distress. For all I know, our friends might think they"re doing us a favor."
"How do you know they"re only s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g with her short-term memory?"
Her cheeks reddened. "I don"t know that either."
"Looks like we"re flying blind."
"Pretty much." She leaned against the door and closed her eyes. "I wouldn"t blame you if you let me out on the side of the road and drove as far away as you can."
"I"ve thought about it."
Her eyes opened. "Any decisions?"
This was a h.e.l.l of a time for a discussion of our future together. "Boston could probably use another yarn shop."
Her eyes filled with tears.
"Just throwing it out there," I said. "Something to think about."
"Luke, I-" She stopped. "Did you hear that?"
"You mean that whooshing sound?"
Which was when the giant ball of fire smashed through the back window of the truck and engulfed us in flames.
CHLOE.
"Get out!" Luke ordered as the car skidded to a stop again. "Run and don"t look back."
"I"m not leaving you here."
"I"m behind you. Now run!" he roared.
I flung open the door and took off at top speed, breathing a sigh of relief when I heard his footsteps close behind me.
He caught up to me, grabbed me by the wrist, then threw me down into a ditch, where he covered me with his body a split second before the gas tank exploded.
We lay there together for what seemed like a lifetime. His heart pounded hard against my back. Even blanketed by his warmth, I couldn"t stop shaking. How many times could we escape disaster? Sooner or later our luck was going to run out.