Enchanted Again Read online

  This magic she’d discovered by accident. The gypsy journal made no mention of it.

  She placed her hands on the middle of the family tree. The connection wasn’t as good because the paper wasn’t hers, nor was the work. But her hands stuck, so there was something there. Many scenes, perhaps. And, maybe, far back in the past, the vital scene.

  Amber drew in a long breath.

  Pink-purple sparks rose from her fingers to circle her head. As she fell through the well of blue-black, her ears rang. Her magic adjusted first to any change of language. The fall was short, but the abrupt stop was hard.

  Not far back, then, a few decades. Amber blinked the dark fog away to settle into the vision.

  The colors of the world had faded as usual to black and white.

  Two men were sitting on a park bench, they both had features in common with Conrad Tyne-Cymbler. Both were wearing sixties clothes, the older man, who was in his late thirties, had on a suit and tie. The younger lounged, arms crossed and legs stretched, in jeans and sneakers and a white sweatshirt, scowling as he drew short puffs on a cigarette he held between thumb and two fingers.

  “Son, I’m sorry we didn’t meet before.”

  “Yeah, right.” He blew out a stream of smoke.

  Amber could hear the conversation clearly, but no other ambient noise.

  The older man shook his head. “I was afraid.”

  The younger laughed, cut off as he saw his father dab at his face with a handkerchief.

  “Afraid I’d die. We have this bad family thing going on. Some say it’s a curse.”

  “Come on, man....” The one in jeans glanced around, saw a bottle and dropped his cigarette precisely into it, glowing end first.

  The bottle exploded.

  Older Cymbler’s yell cut short as a fragment slashed his jugular, ripped it open. A terrible dark flow painted his throat, widened into a spurt. Younger Cymbler’s mouth opened in a scream that echoed through the years. He clapped his hand on his opposite arm, which had more glass poking out of it.

  He stared and stared at his father’s body as it slumped off the bench and rolled to the grass.

  Horror. Terror. Grief. The huge flash of feeling, of tearing emotions, slammed into Amber, plummeting her back to reality and the now. She always experienced this fall and the distortion of her senses to understand the past event, then the blow of emotions from those in the scene shocking her back to her own time and body.

  This time she didn’t have to sort the emotions, replay the words to extrapolate what had happened.

  It had been all too hideously clear. Almost as bad as battle scenes.

  She’d slipped and lay on the floor. There was movement from the threshold and her heart stuttered. Who?

  Tiro watched her.

  Gingerly Amber sat up, holding her head. Her eyes focused slowly from the dimness and dreary colors of the past to the eye-hurting color of the backs of her reference books—maroon, hunter-green, navy. The reason she kept her walls a creamy beige in this room. Easy on her eyes when she transitioned from the then to the now.

  Tiro clomped over, each footfall seeming like an ogre’s instead of a brownie’s. He stood looking down at her, shaking his head. Then he drew in a long, sniffing breath. “Ah. At least this magic doesn’t age you or your pups. Bad on your eyes and ears, though.” He narrowed his eyes. “Somewhere in your branch there is more than elf magic. Hard to determine. A touch of lesser water-naiad or naiader.” Again he snorted. “And Treefolk—maybe a different Treefolk-elf mix. Huh.” He turned and stomped away.

  Head throbbing, she was too late to ask what on earth the Treefolk were and how her magic might be affected.

  Moving muscle by muscle, she pushed from the thick carpet—this wasn’t the first time she’d landed on the floor—and back into her office chair. She stared at her own family tree on the wall. She’d become fascinated with genealogy when she’d wanted to trace back her gift to discover if there were any additional journals that would help her with the aging thing.

  She’d lost her line in the fourteenth century when a small city had been wiped out by the Black Death. She certainly hadn’t made it back to an elf named Cumulustre.

  Nor had she experienced any past moments that showed an elf. Mostly the visions of her own bloodline showed women aging and dying as they broke a curse.

  All her life she’d yearned to understand her talent, to mitigate or circumvent the consequences of it, the aging, studying each word of the journal…experimenting with small curses, ill will cast by children with magic at each other.

  The past few years she’d lived at Mystic Circle, she’d come to believe in magic and had even more hope that somehow she’d discover how to help people and not pay the high cost.

  But today her mind scrabbled to understand this new world and find her way among concepts she didn’t understand, to glean what could work for her.

  She took some aspirin from her drawer, tossed them down with cold coffee. Then she went to work on her computer. Sure enough, the freak accident had happened, Conrad’s grandfather had died—and Conrad’s father had an injured arm that had never quite healed. That curse wasn’t quite a death curse. Apparently if the men didn’t meet, the elder could live until old age and die of natural causes. Very strange.

  Next she searched for more journals of her ancestress. It had been several years since she’d done that and online resources were so much better now. She sent some requests to antiquarian dealers.

  Branches tapped on the window, the wind was rising. Rafe’s chart fell down. Steps slow, Amber went over to it, picked it up. As always she was hit with the slick evil of the curse, the tingle of magic—stuff she was sensing more and clearly all the time—and something about the man and the family tugged at her.

  Drawing in a good breath, she rolled the chart out on the worktable, too.

  She shouldn’t care what happened to the man. But like she’d done on the database, she traced the Davail line back and back and back, and the sense of the curse and the magic was all along the chain of lives. To the beginning of the chart, three hundred years before.

  Too tired and sad to want to experience another vision, she went to her chair and swiveled in it, thinking about curse breaking. Nothing in the journal said that a major curse, one that would last generations because the curser knew what he or she was doing, had a release, too. Amber’s eyes went to the top notebook on her bookshelf. The black one detailing the curse that had cost her the most—five years and her old cat, Jasmine. Hurt and guilt still twisted inside her at that. She hadn’t realized until then that she paid the price for fixing curses. Probably why her mother and her aunt had cut all ties with her when she was a child.

  Even then she’d felt when their love had dropped away from her, when they’d abandoned her to relatives who only valued the pay they got to raise her.

  She shivered. She’d felt cold and wondered what her aunt and mother felt. She’d believed her mother and aunt had loved her. Had they? She’d always question that.

  Swinging back and forth, she stared at the black notebook. She’d been twenty-three at the time and new to her business…and already passing for older than she was due to various small curses broken over the years. Roger Tremont’s daughter had had the curse, an ill-health thing that would shorten her life.

  Amber hadn’t been able to resist—she never had, much—and had done the preparations as noted in the journal. She’d asked Roger and his daughter over for their last genealogical meeting and took the girl’s hand while Roger was reviewing his family tree. Amber pulled, drawing out a fine net of gray magic. It shattered as it hit the air, but had also drained Amber. She’d collapsed, fallen and seen her cat go into convulsions and die.

  Roger had helped her up and she’d gotten him out of the house. Over the next minutes, she had aged and some of the obscure language in her ancestress’s journal that she’d never understood about consequences had become obvious. Later, she figured she’d lost f
ive years. How many years she’d given Roger’s daughter, she didn’t know.

  Another result of that action was that her perception of curses became more sensitive, and the images of what they were doing to their victims grew worse. And the need to break them and help became difficult to ignore.

  Slowly she stood and took down the notebook. But as she recalled, the curse hadn’t been going on long. Roger had consulted her to discover if there were any genetic reason for his daughter’s sickness.

  Putting the book on her desk, she didn’t open it. Not tonight. But if there was someplace to start looking for a curse that might have had an unbinding built in when it was cast, that was the case.

  She turned and left the room, flicking off the lights and closing the door behind her.

  Already too late for her, and her cat, they’d paid the price and that was still harsh and bitter in her blood.

  She walked by a glowering Tiro, who lurked in the hall and drank a mug of hot cocoa.

  Neither of them said anything.

  The blue eyes followed Rafe into sleep. They stared, then the eyelids closed and Rafe saw that they were fringed with silver. Not white lashes, not gray. Silver. Like the elf’s hair.

  In the dream he knew the man was not a man, but an elf.

  In the dream he was not alone. There were men behind him, many of them. He could feel them, like many shadows at his back. Yes, the sun was before him, and the bright blue eyes had vanished into the bright blue sky. With clouds edged with silver from the sun.

  Rafe shuddered. He knew this dream now. The one he’d had as a child. The yearning one.

  The first yearning had been for a father, a man who would love him. Hell, a man who would spend a few minutes of time with him, even a damn weekend morning that some of his friends had with their fathers who’d been divorced from their mothers.

  Next came the yearning for the dagger.

  A couple of the shadows had been with him then.

  During the hot, sexual dreams of puberty, he’d yearned for a girl. Some specific girl. He didn’t know her, but figured he’d know her if he saw her. Or touched her. Or plunged his body into hers.

  And the dagger dreams had increased.

  More shadows had been at his back, then.

  He’d banished the dream after college. When he knew that he wouldn’t have a special woman. Not with his family history. No wife or son for him. He’d known then, too, that the blade was an unattainable magic he didn’t believe in.

  And he knew that he’d become a gray shadow behind another boy and man.

  Chapter 8

  THE ELF HAD brought the dream back to Rafe.

  No. In the way of dreams and his unconscious that formed them, he knew the crow-bat-evil-things had brought the dream back. That had started the countdown to his death.

  He wouldn’t be able to outrun it, or speed away by cycle or car or boat.

  And the dagger was back.

  It floated before him horizontally, blue-steel and glittery as if there were an enamel coating on it with silver and gold sparkles embedded in it.

  Or maybe those were stars.

  His heart thumped hard. He wanted that blade. The shape of the weapon was more triangular than a regular sword blade and the length was less than a sword but more than a long dagger. The simple grip was a silver wire-wrapped handle.

  He’d forgotten how the need for that blade…and maybe the girl…swallowed him, an ache that filled him, the dream, the universe.

  As much as the longing to live, not for three more months, but until he passed away in his sleep from old age. After seeing his children, his sons—first and second and however many more—and daughters grown.

  He wanted life with a passion that others couldn’t understand. He wanted the woman and he wanted the children.

  But the elf’s eyes in the dream opened again and glittered like the blade and Rafe knew in his core that if he wanted to live and love, he must find the dagger.

  Rafael Barakiel Davail, the elf said and Rafe woke up in a cold sweat.

  Hell! What a dream. He rubbed his eyes, his face. And found that he had dried perspiration on his skin.

  Flinging the sheets and heavy comforter aside he went to the bathroom and the mirror. His left wrist burned. The light was soft but didn’t make him look any better. His eyes appeared sunken, the skin on his face white and tight. When he looked down at the inside of his left arm, the veins looked black, not blue.

  The sight caught at his throat, closed it. Fear shot through him. The type of fear that he clamped down on hard, refused to acknowledge, buried beneath other physical fears.

  Three o’clock in the morning, of course, and it was time for the hardest question.

  Did he believe that he would die before he reached thirty-three?

  He tried to put the question off, but it throbbed in his brain like a splinter. How could he believe in something so irrational as a curse?

  Conrad’s curse had come true.

  Rafe didn’t have to look at the family tree file on his computer pad to know that every first son in his family had died before thirty-three for generations, and the family name had gone to a younger son or a nephew. That was beyond weird. What were the odds?

  Could he afford to not believe in the curse? Face it. His life was on the line and there were no stakes higher. His eyes narrowed and he shifted from foot to foot, thinking that that was wrong. But what could be higher stakes to him than his own life?

  That of his brother’s.

  But his brother was safe. Gabe’s firstborn son wouldn’t be, a tragedy to come, that Rafe wouldn’t be around to suffer.

  Conrad was safe, too. Rafe had gotten a short text from him. He was still hurting, but determined to find Marta.

  Curses.

  Just too much to believe in. Because if he believed in curses he’d have to rethink his whole life…and believe in other stuff, too. Like creatures that weren’t birds or bats but nasty, oily something-elses with hollow bones that disintegrated. And believing in blue-eyed elves that could snare you with a direct gaze. And dreams of magical blades and women.

  And death in under eight months.

  Nope. He just couldn’t believe. Not now, not even in a Victorian bathroom with cream-colored paper and lights in colored glass that looked like flowers that seemed more fantasy than real.

  If he believed in the curse, he would have to act in some way to forestall it. And he didn’t know what to do, and from the past, all the other men in his family had been helpless to change their fate.

  He couldn’t be helpless.

  Since he wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep, he decided to do a little research of his own and pulled out his computer notepad.

  The man-elfman had known his full name. Rafe turned on his tablet and pulled up search engines, keyed in his full name. Nothing. Not much under Rafael Davail or Rafe Davail, either. His wins, that made him smile. A few pics of him on the slopes or in the wind or waves, and that was good, too. Some with a lady or two on his arm. No special woman.

  He recalled the name of the man—Pavan—and searched for that. Nothing that referred to a male individual who might have pointed ears. Definitely no social pages.

  Then there was Eight Corp. Also very low-key. A closely and privately held corporation based in Denver and doing something in the energy sector. Which could mean about anything.

  The low-battery icon on his screen flashed and Rafe swore. He hadn’t been quite ready to quit. Rolling off the bed, he crossed to his duffel and pulled out the cord, attached it to his computer, hunkered down to plug in the thing.

  Shock sizzled up his fingers, flung him back into the middle of the room.

  The lights went out.

  His limbs flopped. Wha’?! Shaking his head, he levered himself up. He knew he hadn’t touched the prongs of the plug, or the outlet.

  But he’d been shocked, for sure. If he had been closer to the outlet, touched it or the metal of the plug, he’d be dead
.

  His nerves still quivered under his skin. He lifted his hand and sniffed. Didn’t smell burned and that was a relief. He rubbed his fingertips together. Still working, still could feel them. Also good.

  Moonlight from the large window pasted a pale square of light on the rug, but the lamps he’d had on were dark. He staggered to his feet and pulled the lamp chain, then tried a wall switch. Nothing.

  Glancing out the window toward the corner, he saw that streetlights were on.

  Again he shook his head and considered going to the lobby. He opened the door, no light in the hallway except from the skylights. Tiptoeing to the staircase, he listened. Nothing, no commotion. Which, if they hadn’t already noticed the electricity was off, must mean everyone else was in bed and probably asleep. So he went back to his room.

  A rectangular red light blinked at him from the bed. His tablet. The screen looked like it was covered in blood spatter. Frowning, he picked it up. The screen went from red to black with dripping scarlet letters. Time has run out. The bomb exploded. You die.

  Swallowing hard, he touched the pad. The end logo of the game, “Fly or Die,” scrolled down for a few seconds before the computer turned off.

  Shaken, he sat on the bed in the dark. Yeah, of course he had the app “Fly or Die.” He’d played it a few times.

  He’d never lost.

  He shoved the tablet onto the bedside table, squinted. Something else was luminous.

  It was the pale green business card he’d gotten that evening. Odd. He picked it up again, eyes widening when he saw a new word on it. “Pavan,” it said, then below, “Troubleshooter.”

  Rafe began to think that he’d need someone to help him shoot the trouble in his life.

  He crawled under the covers. It was a cold night. He waited to hear the heat turn on, but it didn’t. The old-fashioned wind-up mantel clock ticked the seconds away.

  In the morning he was awakened by an apologetic host, informing him that the inn would have to close. There had been a freak accident that had blown the electrical system.