Spell or High Water Read online

  “Then why didn’t they come down to the beach and say hello?” Mag asked, her eyes scanning the trail.

  “How should I know?” But Clara couldn’t think of a good reason. Her mind kept playing imagined footage of worst-case scenarios that all ended with bodies on the beach. Hers, Mag’s, or most horrible of all, two small figures, faces gray with death. “I think your paranoia is rubbing off on me.”

  “It’s only paranoia if they’re not really out to get you.”

  “Nice sentiment. Should I embroider it on a pillow? Or we could make an appointment to have it tattooed on your backside if that works better for you.” Pique and longer legs carried Clara right past her sister, so she was the one who reached the sheltered spot at the top of the bluff first.

  One look and she figured she’d be eating crow along with her trout that night. More cigarette butts littered the ground. Enough to prove someone had spent a considerable amount of time overlooking their campsite.

  Brushing past, Mag couldn’t resist. “See, I told you.”

  “Go ahead and gloat,” Clara replied without heat. “It could still be a coincidence.”

  “You know how much I hate it when you use that word, Clarie.”

  Chapter Four

  As the sky darkened and rain clouds blew back in to leak a steady drizzle onto Pingree Beach, the Balefire witches found themselves in the screen tent, huddled around a folding card table, entertaining two children with enough energy to make Mag feel tired just looking at them.

  “Boo-ya!” Kaeden exclaimed, a smug smile pressing dimples into his round face, “You’re under the trap, Miss Mag. Time to meet your doom!” He cocked his index finger against his thumb, and with an exaggerated gesture flicked the makeshift lever. When the Mouse Trap game turned out to be missing the crank handle that ran the whole business, Clara had saved the day with a bit of ingenuity and some of the detritus rolling around the bottom of her purse.

  Mag watched, mock concern covering her face as she played it up for the boy whose genuine enthusiasm touched her heart in all its hidden places. The plastic arm pulled back to the tension point, then let go, propelling the tiny boot forward with enough momentum to knock the bucket over and release the first shiny silver ball.

  Back and forth down the zigzagged hill, the ball rolled until it fell onto the smooth, meandering track to tap the stick dangling below the diving board where another ball rested, ready to propel the little crouching man into the bucket. Except the stick only wiggled, and the little plastic man remained poised to jump. Kaeden exhaled his held breath in a huff, disappointment wrinkling his nose and wiping his face clear of mirth.

  “Aww, I got gypped.” His face crumpled.

  Xavier threw an exasperated look at his brother, “Mom says you can’t be a sore loser. It’s unbeknowing.”

  “Unbecoming,” Mag corrected absently, “And she’s right. Failure is a stepping stone to success. Do you know how many times I’ve failed in my life? What makes you a winner is dusting yourself off, learning from the experience, and trying again.”

  Kaeden listened with rapt attention that would have irritated his mother had she been there. Why is it that children can’t hear the words their parents repeat over and over, but when some stranger says the exact same thing they’re like little sponges, soaking up information?

  “I guess you’re right,” Kaeden relented, “but winning is much more funner than losing.”

  Mag winked at the little boy, “It sure is, kiddo.”

  The next turn at the crank fell to Xavier.

  “Eat my stinky cheese,” he taunted and gave the handle a spin. When the cage slid down to trap Clara’s mouse, he collapsed back onto the old camp chair and the sound of tearing canvas filled the air. Fear chased the surprise from his face as, chair and all, he pitched over backward.

  A vision, maybe even a premonition, of blond hair matted with blood rose behind Mag’s eyes and she acted without thinking twice. Magic sizzled across the small space and set the boy on his feet as the chair crashed to the ground.

  “What just happened?” Xavier looked to Clara for answers she wasn’t sure she wanted to give. “Because something did.” He would not be put off.

  “It was magic.” The wonderment in Kaeden’s voice was only half of what pinged on Mag’s heartstrings. Mostly, it was the hope. Hope that she was, indeed, a fairy godmother sent to make his wishes come true.

  And now, she’d have to do her best to make it so. Dratted kids—this was why she preferred a solitary existence.

  Nothing Mag or Clara said convinced Xavier he’d performed a feat of agility under duress, which left them with two options. Provide no confirmation and let things stand, or cast a memory spell which might have repercussions.

  An hour later, the boys went back to their tent convinced they’d seen true magic.

  “It’s not like I intended to show them my magic, it just sort of happened.” Mag defended herself when Clara shot her a look. “And really, I’m not surprised they caught on. Kids are a lot more intuitive than adults. I mean, the boogie man is real, but most parents chalk it up to their children having bad dreams.”

  “Funny, because the other day they were little invaders who were dead set on pulling kitten tails and ruining our vacation.” Clara had to work double time to keep the smile off her face. Mag had done the thing she did best: she’d saved someone from harm. She’d broken the rule of not showing magic to mortals, but it wasn’t a punishable offense. More like a guideline than a law.

  And now, in true Maggie form, she’d deflect any praise that might be heaped on her shoulders. It was her pattern, and the least Clara could do was give her the opening.

  Mag cocked a hip, realized given the condition of said hip, it was a bad idea, and settled instead for placing her hands on both of them before fixing her sister with a withering glare, “You really do know how to poop on my parade, don’t you, Clarie?”

  She raised her voice into a falsetto and proceeded to mock her sister, “Be less cranky, Maggie. Stop being such a sourpuss, Maggie. Stop wasting time looking for Barnaby’s treasure, it’s just nonsense! Play with the kids. Don’t show your magic to the kids. Maggie, why are you so difficult?”

  Pacing back and forth, Mag’s irritation spewed out in a deluge that covered how scared she’d been when she saw that boy’s head broken and bleeding.

  “I don’t know why Clarie. Maybe, just maybe, it’s because you’re an insufferable nag who can never just go with the flow. Be a cork on the waves every once in a while, for crying out loud, or you’re going to drive me completely bat-crap crazy!”

  “You did an amazing thing, you know,” Clara shot back. “I’m proud of you, but why is it okay for you to be a cranky and cantankerous control freak, and when I call you on it I’m Satan in a Sunday hat?”

  Mag raised an eyebrow and grinned, “Because I know when to let it go, and you don’t.” A completely false statement and she knew it.

  Clara was probably the only companion Mag would ever have, and as much as she liked to goad her sister, she knew deep down that they only butted heads because they knew they could spew at one another all the livelong day and then drop the malice like it never happened to begin with.

  The outburst had settled Mag’s nerves, which was exactly what Clara intended.

  “Come on, Clarie. There’s no harm done, really. They’re children with a story no one will believe.”

  “To be perfectly honest, I find that more than a little bit sad.”

  Dense fog obscured an early sky when Clara rolled over and banged her arm on the curved wall of the minibus. For the first morning since they’d parked here, no small voices whispered on the other side of the thin metal.

  How had Renee managed to keep the boys quiet when talking was Kaeden’s natural default?

  A glance showed Mag was already up and out. Probably manning the percolator on the camp stove.

  “They’re gone.” The bare statement greeted Clara as soon as her
feet touched the mossy ground. “Lock, stock, and tent. Without so much as a goodbye. Maybe they told Renee about the magic and she dragged them out in the middle of the night.”

  Clara accepted the porcelain-coated tin cup of dark brew, sipped, and waited for the jolt to wake up her brain. Sure enough, there was an empty space where the Young family had been. Well, empty except for one of Kaeden’s endless supply of balled-up socks abandoned near the cold campfire ring.

  Jinx shot out of the minibus in a blur of white fur, pounced on the sock, tossed it into the air and when it landed, pounced on it again. With his ears laid back, and his eyes wide from the thrill of the game, he tossed and pounced, and tossed again until something made him pause.

  Changing between forms with a shudder and a whoosh, human Jinx picked up the sock and turned it over in his hand. At a glance, it looked like the simple white cotton had been balled up from being carelessly yanked off a boy’s foot.

  “There’s something tied into the toe.” Working out the knot, damp now from a combination of dew and cat spit, Jinx finally tipped a sparkling tennis bracelet out into his hand.

  “May I see that?” Sunlight glittered off the brilliant cut jewels as Clara weighed the bracelet in her hand. “Those are real diamonds, feels like three carats. Maybe four. Looks expensive,” was her initial conclusion, and she handed it over to Mag for a professional appraisal.

  “It’s vintage Cartier, and it’s not a fake. See the stamp? You can tell by the clarity of the engraving. It’s an older piece; there’s some wear on the clasp. At first glance, I’d say it’s worth somewhere between three and four grand.”

  Clara contemplated Kaeden’s grimy sock while she tried to come up with a plausible reason for it to contain a diamond bracelet. “Frankly, I don’t think that looks like Renee’s style, and even if it is hers, this is a weird place for it to turn up.”

  “Look! There’s—” Leaving the sentence unfinished, Jinx hunched and folded and sprouted fur, ran a few yards up the trail and shot into the air to land on another hunk of white cotton. Unable to help himself, he tossed the second sock around a few times, then set his teeth into the cloth to carry it back.

  The sock had no more hit the ground when he raced off to return with yet a third. Sock number two yielded a pair of earrings, but the third was empty.

  A stripe of fur stood up in stark relief down the line of Jinx’s spine. His alarm was enough to convince Pye, who took feline form and stalked the perimeter of the former campsite.

  Near the spot where the tent had been, she dived under a bush, pulled out a fuzzy, gray ball, and shuddered back to human form to hand Jerry the elephant to Clara.

  “Kaeden wouldn’t have left this behind.”

  Mag turned to Jinx. “Do your thing.”

  “Jinx has a thing?” He’d never shown Clara any indication of a thing, so this she had to see.

  He turned his head to shoot her a look of utter disdain and she noticed his eyes, normally blue and wide, were now a glittering green and had refined in shape to a dangerous slant. A ripple passed over his fluffy exterior leaving behind a sleek, shining coat of fur draped on a muscled frame.

  For a moment, he sat on his hunches as if considering an attack plan, and then he rose to prowl toward the beach. From the campsite, the sisters and Pye watched the flash of white as a series of long leaps took Jinx in a zigzag pattern across the sand.

  “You didn’t tell me he could go all Clark Kent like that.” Impressed, Clara finally got a sense of the true partnership between Mag and her companion, but couldn’t help thinking it was one more secret she hadn’t been privy to before.

  “You never asked.” Worry kept Mag’s smirk to little more than a fleeting twist of the lips. Senses once honed by dancing on the knife edge of danger roared back to life and she opened to them fully. It felt like welcoming home the prodigal son and was only slightly awkward because Clara stood watching.

  Ill intent, and Mag could see it, lay over the campsite like a smear of dark smoke. The Young family had not left by choice. She’d bet her best wand on it. Not that she had her best wand in the pack she carried. Or any of her best hunting spells. Drat the safe and comfortable feeling of routine that had led to putting aside the tools of her former trade.

  Energy spent in conjuring her tools now would be energy lost when it came time to use them. Better to move forward with what she had and trust her sister to make up the difference. If one Balefire witch could take on the worst witchkind had to offer, two of them were an invincible force.

  Moving with panther-like speed and agility, Jinx returned from the beach and as he landed in front of her, flowed into human form, and handed over the fork he’d been carrying between his teeth.

  “Found this on the beach along with a lot of boy-sized footprints and a few holes where they’d been digging. Suppose they found Barnaby’s treasure and took off with it?”

  “Unless Barnaby shopped at Tiffany, I’d say not. This is a rare set, though. Sterling silver, and worth a lot of money, but it’s not old enough to have been part of a pirate’s booty.”

  Kaeden and Xavier had spent half the day picking up “treasure” from the beach, and no one bothered to look at what they’d found.

  Or maybe someone had.

  Sifting through the events of the weekend, Mag remembered a pile of cigarette butts and a hushed conversation between two boys huddled outside the van. Her brain examined the events, turning them this way and that until the puzzle clicked into place. “They found the loot from the rash of summer house thefts.”

  The blood drained from Clara’s face. “Then they’re in danger, and we have to find them.”

  Chapter Five

  “Is that another one up ahead?” A flutter of white hardly showed against a carpet of pale moss. “There have been too many of them, which means those smart little cookies left us a trail to follow.” Mag took the sock from Jinx while Pye prowled on ahead. As eager as their witch companions to see the children safe, the familiars were playing bloodhound for the day.

  Jinx had even let Mag darken his fur with a handful of ash so he wouldn’t stand out as starkly against the browns and forest greens. Not that Mag or Clara blended, mind you, but a pair of silencing charms went a good way toward hiding their progress.

  Voicing the concern uppermost in both their minds, Clara said, “The parking area is in the opposite direction, and if they keep to this trail, they’re headed toward the cliffs to the south. A perfect place to stage a tragic accident.”

  “Then we have to hurry and hope we are not too late,” Mag said, pushing herself to move faster than her bum hip usually allowed. “If anything happens to those boys, I’ll never forgive myself.”

  For once, Clara agreed with her sister’s melodramatic take on the situation.

  Pyewacket surged on, her nose twitching as she picked up the scent and led the foursome onward and upward, toward the craggy peaks of the bluffs overlooking the ocean. Clara shivered as her mind sifted through a list of possible outcomes, each more gut-wrenching than the last.

  Finally, as the sun slid toward the top of the sky, the troupe cleared the last wisps of fog, approached the final summit, and stopped short at Pyewacket’s hissed warning. Her fur stood on end, and her tail puffed out to three times its normal size. Raised voices signaled the end of their hike, and Mag’s danger meter began to ding.

  “Tell us where you hid the rest of the stuff and I won’t have to tell Bob to drop your parents off this cliff.” A menacing male voice cut through the air, eliciting a gasp and whimper from Kaeden, whose chubby ankle was visible around the corner of the boulder from where Mag and Clara crouched. Barefoot, his feet were caked with dirt and bits of dried blood from where they’d scraped against jagged rocks on his way up the hill.

  Mag stuck her head a bit further out and took in the scene before her. Xavier huddled near Kaeden, a protective arm around his little brother, his face arranged in a brave expression while his eyes fixed on something out
of Mag’s line of sight.

  Behind the children, a second figure paced, his hand firmly planted on a large bowie knife dangling from his belt. “I think they need a little incentive, George.” When Bob stepped forward and turned his attention to what was happening on the other side of the boulder, Mag caught Kaeden’s eye and sent up a silent prayer to the Goddess that he wouldn’t give away their presence to anyone other than his brother.

  Wisely, the little boy maintained a straight face while poking Xavier lightly in the ribs and pointing toward the witches. Xavier’s eyes quickly flitted to something behind and above himself and Kaeden, and then flicked his fingers pointedly in the direction Mag and Clara couldn’t see.

  “We need to be able to tell what’s going on,” Clara whispered, pulling a wad of items from her pocket as the two men continued to threaten bodily harm. She spread a crumpled Yahtzee score sheet against the side of the boulder and motioned to Mag, who recognized this trick from their childhood and searched her fanny pack for a jar of castor oil. When one didn’t turn up fast enough, she went with the next best option and yanked out a bottle of clear nail polish from the pack around her waist.

  Clara unscrewed the cap and dumped the liquid onto the paper, spreading it with the little brush as quickly as she could. Once covered, Clara lifted the wet score sheet back against the rock and uttered a spell for clarity. Immediately, the paper turned crystal clear, along with the rock and earth behind it, creating a peephole that illuminated what was happening on the other side.

  Renee and Tim huddled in a mirror image of their children, their eyes darting back and forth between their children and the armed Bob and George. Renee’s eyes were wide with terror, but Tim’s lit with the fire of a man watching helplessly while another person threatens his family: blind hatred and intent to inflict some bodily harm of his own playing clearly across his features.