Spell of Binding Read online

  “Not exactly.” Cole rounded the sofa, snatched the remote from Derek’s hand, and turned off the TV. “Can you focus, please? This is important.”

  “Nothing’s important anymore.” But he pushed into a sitting position.

  “On the contrary. My friend Dani is important. She’s missing.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Maybe you can help me find her.”

  Derek squinted, finally showing interest. “Are you a cop?”

  “No. Do you know the name Dani Ferraro?” Cole searched the man’s drawn, stubble-covered face for signs of recognition. But there were none.

  “If you’re not a cop, and we’re not friends, then,” Derek said and stood, “you have to leave.”

  Screw that. The guy would have to toss him out. “Do you remember anything from before your accident? Anything about magic or spirits or witches? Did you go anywhere? A business or a house or a park?”

  Derek rushed through the family room and opened the front door. “I will call the real police.” His voice quivered, as if he were afraid.

  Cole wasn’t a bully, but this was important. “Sorry about this.” He pulled a folded up sheet of newspaper from his back pocket and spread it, spell side up, on the foyer floor. Next, he produced a pocketknife and flipped open the blade.

  “What are you doing?” Derek demanded. “I asked you to leave.”

  Cole’s magic came from his blood. Borrowed blood. And he had to free it to access his necromancy.

  His spirit companion, Steph, appeared at his side and nodded silently that she was good to go.

  Cole drew the knife across his forearm, avoiding the raised scars laid out like tally marks. A running count of accessed power. Necromancy had never belonged to him, but it lived in his veins.

  Blood bubbled up from the new wound and rolled down the length of his arm. Steph sent him power, and it sizzled into his fingertips.

  Cole could break Holden’s memory spell on Derek. He could return the man’s past to him, but Cole wouldn’t do that to Holden. He knew his friend had good reasons to keep Derek spelled. So Cole had to get creative.

  “Veritas,” he said to Derek. A temporary truth spell he’d cooked up that morning.

  The other man blinked. “What?”

  “Where is Daniela Ferraro?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who is the Dark Caster?” Cole asked.

  Derek shut the door quietly. “Someone I dream about.”

  Bingo. “Your memories come back in your dreams?”

  Derek nodded. “He’s an awful man who tortures me.”

  “Who? Where?”

  “I’ve driven by it a couple times, just to check if it’s real.”

  “Where?”

  “Corner of Commerce and Parkwood in Auburn,” Derek said. “It used to be a church. In my dreams it still is, and he stands at the altar and stares at me like he wants to kill me.”

  “Describe him.”

  “My height. Brown hair. Thin. Fortyish.”

  Cole got off his knees and crumpled the newspaper. “Thanks, man. Sorry I had to resort to that.” He stepped outside. “Feel better.”

  Cole hurried to his Subaru sports coupe where he typed the address Derek had given him into the map feature on his cell. The intersection was back in Auburn, twenty-two minutes away. He pulled his car onto the street and caught the eye of a second spirit, this one a male, standing in the irrigation ditch beside the road.

  Cole steered toward the address Derek had supplied, but shied away at the last minute.

  Someone was following him. He didn’t recognize the SUV on his tail, but as he slowed behind a line of traffic at the next stoplight, Cole’s engine sputtered and stalled. He had no choice but to pull to the grassy shoulder.

  A semicircle of spirits appeared around the hood of his car, and Cole knew he was screwed.

  * * *

  Dani waited for an answer to her question, studying David’s face in the dim evening light and trying to put the pieces together.

  David paled. “Died? Why would you ask me that?”

  “Because you’re either born a necromancer or you’re made. I’m guessing if you were born a necromancer we wouldn’t be having this conversation. So maybe you were made, but…” She nibbled on her finger despite the sting. “But you rejected your new self.”

  “Okay. Sure. You’re a witch and I’m a necromancer, and some douche called Carver wants us to summon a demon.” He forced a bitter laugh. “I’d rather focus on getting home.”

  “Did you die, or didn’t you?”

  He stood abruptly from his pallet. “One thing I’m not is a victim.” He fisted their now-empty water bottle and used the mouth as a tool, attacking the brick wall next to the steel door, scraping mortar. As the muscles in his arms and shoulders strained, it didn’t seem possible his life could ever be in jeopardy.

  David stepped around Dani and ran his fingertips along the grooves in the brickwork. “I think whether I died or not is none of your business. No offense.”

  Ah ha! “So you did. Holy crap. When? How?”

  “It’s not a joke.” He dropped his eyes and swished the dust on the bare concrete floor around with his shoe. “It’s personal. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  She wasn’t sure she wanted to talk about it, either. An icky feeling creeped under her ribs at the thought of his heart stopping. She’d rather discuss their present predicament.

  “Okay, well, let me break this down for you. That Carver dude knows you’re a necromancer and I’m a witch. He’s going to pressure us to work together to do this demon spell.”

  “That’s never going to happen. Sorry. I don’t know any spells, and I’m not a necromancer.” He returned to the wall and, despite the absence of light, attacked it with near manic ferocity.

  “I could teach you some easy spells.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  He didn’t seem likely to listen to anything else she had to say about magic, so she slumped onto her mattress and went through the contents of the manila envelope again. Chalk, photo, a scruff of hair, and a smear of browned blood in a baggy. No food. No water. If the Carver didn’t come back soon, he’d find two dehydrated mummies in his basement funhouse.

  * * *

  David tried to be calm and serene like Dani and lay down on his thin mattress, but he couldn’t manage it. It didn’t matter that it was dark and he was trying to break through bricks and mortar with, basically, his bare hands. He couldn’t sit and wait for the Carver to return. He had to do something.

  Maybe Dani didn’t have people she cared about. A year ago she’d been single, childless, and living alone. It was very possible, considering her cold and standoffish demeanor, that nothing had improved in her personal life. And that’s how she could lie there staring at the plaster ceiling as if she were at a day spa near the beach. But not him.

  David had a supersized motivation for getting the hell out of this place as fast as possible. His little boy needed his daddy. Yeah, Dani had showed him Ryan was home with his grandma, but that didn’t ease his fears a bit. Because if her watch was right, he’d been missing for over a week. Eight days.

  Ryan was only four. Eight days was like eight months to him. All that time without his father. Days and days to forget his dad, to get over him, to move on.

  David knew all about losing people. When he’d lost Jordyn, it had taken weeks before he could wake up without reaching across the bed for her warm body. And in those first few days, he’d thought about her at least a dozen times an hour. But, with time, he’d moved on to the point where he wasn’t haunted anymore.

  Every hour that passed, Ryan was leaving David behind.

  He ran his fingers around the metal door, not even sure what he was looking for. It would be nice if, like in a fantasy movie, a concealed button went click and the door swung open. But he wasn’t in a movie. Nothing clicked. The door stayed closed.

  Rage and frustration built
inside his chest to almost unbearable heights. Something flickered to his right, caught in a beam of moonlight, and David squinted at the hazy figure. Even though the room was pitch dark, the figure glowed. It reminded him of photos he’d taken of Jordyn with the morning sun behind her. It had made her look ethereal and smoky around the edges like an angel or a fairy in a dream.

  Eyes came into focus, and David freaked out a little. “Go away,” he said to the apparition. “You’re not real.”

  “What did you say?” Dani asked, sitting up. “Did you hear something out there?”

  “No.” He wasn’t an idiot. The moment he let people know he saw spirits, he’d be reduced to that wretched, widowed, crazy man.

  “You’re thinking about Ryan?”

  Good guess. “I’ve been away from him for eight days,” David said. “He and my mom must think I’m dead. What other explanation is there? They know I’d never pick up and leave Ryan behind. He’s my whole world.”

  Dani’s dark eyes seemed black in the fading light. “You’re not dead,” she said. “There’s no body. They’ll hold out hope for a while longer.”

  But how much hope could a four-year-old maintain for eight days and nights? With or without a body, Ryan’s daddy was gone, and there was no assurance he’d ever come back.

  His mom would be frantic. Joan Wilkes did not handle stress very well. She’d call the police, Mayor Westfield, the FBI. She’d organize a search and rescue team of volunteers. But after more than a week, even she would have to accept the idea, no matter how traumatic, that David wasn’t ever coming home.

  David sank onto the mattress across from Dani. “Do you have family that will look for you?”

  “I’m an orphan.”

  Of course she was. If he’d had to guess, he would have said she was an only child. But what of friends, boyfriends, husbands?

  “You haven’t gotten married recently?” David asked.

  Dani wiggled around to see him better and curled an arm under her head. “No. I haven’t even dated since…”

  Their date. After which she’d managed to make him feel like both a letch and a sleazeball all at the same time. “Why didn’t you tell me you’re a witch?” He wouldn’t have believed her, but it was another rejection that she hadn’t trusted him with such an important part of her life.

  “I don’t advertise. While we chewed our bruschetta you didn’t exactly tell me the story about that time you died, did you?”

  He smiled wryly. “Good point.” Memories of the accident and its aftermath hovered very close tonight, as if it had just happened. Maybe it was being separated from Ryan that was bringing up all these old feelings. Or maybe Dani was just easy to talk to. He lay down on his cold bed and turned his gaze upon the ceiling. “You were right,” he admitted. “I died four years ago after a head-on collision.”

  Silence stretched and settled like a fog over the room. David closed his eyes briefly, but all he saw were the mangled remains of his ‘63 Camaro.

  “Was that when your wife died?” Dani asked.

  “Yes.” He saw Jordyn as she’d been that day, young and beautiful, the sun in her hair. “I was driving them home from the hospital after Ryan was born. He was in the car, too, but his car seat saved his life. He didn’t have a scratch on him.” He exhaled in one long rush. “I hit my head, and then my heart stopped. But here I am.”

  “Do you remember it?” she asked.

  Only the parts he wanted to forget. “A motorcycle cut me off, and I steered the car into the side of a restaurant. The next thing I knew, it was days later and I was in the hospital.”

  “No, I mean the other side. Do you remember what it was like when you were dead?”

  No one had ever asked him such a thing. He actually considered it. Did he have memories of heaven or hell or whatever his afterlife was? He searched his fragmented recollections of the accident. No. Nothing.

  “I was only gone for maybe a minute,” David said. Hardly long enough for a proper near-death experience. “They had to use a defibrillator once in the ambulance on the way to the hospital and once in the ER.”

  “And then you could see spirits,” Dani guessed.

  “Sometimes.” He didn’t mention the lanky teenager with the black hair. “When the doctors started whispering about brain scans and anti-psychotic drugs, I ignored the hallucinations until they went away.”

  He couldn’t talk about this anymore. The emotions were too raw. “Do you know the guy in the photo?” David blurted out.

  “No.” She studied the picture in question, front and back.

  It had been taken, without the subject’s knowledge, with a high-powered lens similar to ones David had used back in his photography hobbyist days. But that didn’t reveal anything about the person in the photo or who’d taken it.

  But the picture didn’t matter. It was what the Carver expected them to do to the guy in the picture that unnerved him. Suddenly chilled, David scrubbed his hands up and down his arms and the sound ricocheted off the walls in the abnormally quiet basement. Not even the hum of traffic or anything to soften the edges. No voices or construction or kids playing. Just him and Dani and creepy, expectant silence.

  “There’s no way on earth I can sleep tonight,” David confessed.

  “Me either.”

  The stillness went on and on and on. In the absence of ambient noise, he heard every breath Dani took. And then she turned to face him, and her scrubs whispered against her skin. Even her hair made a soft sound all its own, like silk and tulle rustling between a pair of feminine thighs.

  “You’re an orphan?” he asked, just to say something because he did not need to be thinking about Dani’s thighs or hair or any other part of her admittedly amazing body.

  “Yeah.”

  There was so little light from the window that David could only see Dani’s outline. The inability to see her eyes in the dark strangely calmed him. It made it easier to talk to her. The harsh light of day only reminded him of the cruelty of her abrupt rejection outside Papa Luigi’s.

  He stretched out of his thin mattress. “So, you were adopted?” he guessed. That’s what happened in his mind when babies were abandoned. Kind hearted nurses and their firemen husbands adopted them.

  “No. Never.”

  A stone formed in the pit of his stomach as he began to understand something important about Dani Ferraro. Maybe something she didn’t share with a lot of people. Something he should have figured out before now.

  “Foster homes?” he guessed.

  “Quite a few, yeah.”

  The memory of the accident returned like a dog to its bone. “I worried for a long time about what would have happened to Ryan if I’d died with Jordyn.”

  “Ryan’s lucky,” Dani said. “He probably has several grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins who would take him into their homes and love him like he was their own child.”

  Why that made him even sadder, David didn’t know. “You never told me you grew up that way.”

  “What, on our first date? It’s not the ideal time to tell sad stories. You didn’t tell me you were in the car when your wife died, remember?”

  “Yeah, you’ve got a point.”

  She moved again, drew her legs up nearer her belly and punched the pillow under her head. David wasn’t sure if he imagined it or not, but he smelled dark fruit and tropical flowers on a waft of air.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  It took him a second to remember what they were talking about. Oh. Right. The accident. The worst day of his entire life, even worse than waking up in a basement cell with her.

  “It was awful,” he said. Maybe it was the dark or her scent or the soft sound of Dani’s breathing, but he wanted to say things he’d never said to anyone. “I had a lot of really bad days. Right after.” Remembering them now was like reliving a past life, one spent under a shroud. A time when there hadn’t been any light in the entire world. “I blamed myself. I thought I’d killed her.”
>
  “David—”

  “No, it’s okay. It took a therapist and a lot of time, but I know it wasn’t my fault. It was an accident. I didn’t act with any premeditation or malice.” David closed his eyes. “But I still felt responsible.”

  “Of course you did.” Her breathy voice was like a caress. “How could you not?”

  Exactly. He’d been the one with his hands on the steering wheel when the car rammed the Chinese restaurant.

  Dani didn’t say anything else for a long time, and he couldn’t handle anymore small talk, anyway. Not with all these agonizing memories floating just below the surface. No, he appreciated the silence. He eventually closed his eyes, but he didn’t think he’d fall asleep. Dani’s quiet, rhythmic breathing, though, lulled him into a troubled sleep.

  Chapter Four

  Dani woke up surprised she’d slept at all. The night before had lasted eternally long as she wavered between panic that the Carver would return with a new spell and utter physical and mental exhaustion. She must have dozed, though, because she’d dreamt of Bailey Haas. Except it wasn’t him who’d been blinded. It was her.

  The dream sucked, but reality wasn’t much better.

  According to her watch it was almost ten in the morning. Sunlight streamed through their window, illuminating their subpar accommodations and the fact that nothing had improved overnight.

  Rolling an ache out of her shoulders, she announced, “I can’t stay here for much longer.”

  David hunched against the red brick wall, silent.

  “I have an idea,” Dani added. It had come to her during one of the interminable sleepless hours the night before. “I’m going to freeze the walls until they shatter and we can climb out.”

  David perked up. “Can you do that?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m going to try.” She stretched her arms over her head to work out the remaining kinks. Her mattress wasn’t much more than a thick pad, and the cold seeped up from the concrete below. It had been like sleeping on a glacier, and her body had suffered for it. Aches and pains on top of aches and pains. “I’m not waiting around for those two losers to come back. Wouldn’t it be funny if they got here and we were gone?”