Enchanted Again

“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 five 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