“What did you expect me to do, Row?” she asked, blurting the words, all of which were underscored by a sharply defensive tone. “I’ve watched you go through too much these past few years. Then when I called home yesterday, and you said it was happening again… I couldn’t just stand by and watch. Not again. Not this time.”
“You did this yesterday?” I asked, surprise in my voice.
“Yes. When I got home and you weren’t here,” she said as she nodded. “But I didn’t expect it to work as quickly as all that, then.”
“Yeah, well we all know you’re a hell of a Witch. Guess this just proves it.”
“Is that what I think it is?” Cally finally drummed up the courage to ask.
“It’s some kind of a binding,” RJ interjected before I could answer.
I glanced over at her and nodded. “Yeah. I’m afraid so. And just like any other binding done where strong emotions are involved, it backfired.” I leveled my gaze back on my wife as I dropped the box onto the table in front of her. “Unless it was your plan all along to bind this crap to yourself.”
“Of course not.” She shook her head at me quickly and then screwed her face into a scowl as if I had just made the stupidest comment she’d ever heard. “It was only supposed to bind you from the ethereal. It wasn’t supposed to bind anything to anyone.”
“Well, let me ask you this: If you wanted this to all go away, then why didn’t you just do a banishing instead? That would seem more appropriate.”
“That was my original plan after we got off the phone,” she answered. “But then the thing happened with Brittany Larson, and I started thinking… And, I couldn’t be sure… And, if I had done a banishing, that could be far more permanent, and…” She kept halting, searching for words to explain. Finally, she gave up trying and simply said, “I just didn’t want to close any doors, that’s all.”
“Even so, Felicity, of all people you know better than this,” I admonished.
“Don’t lecture me, Rowan Linden Gant,” she returned. “It’s nothing you wouldn’t have done yourself and you know it.”
“That’s not the point,” I told her.
“It is as far as I’m concerned,” she countered. “Do you think you’re the only one who’s allowed to do the protecting?”
She had me there. I shook my head and glanced around the room in resignation. “I never said that. But, to be honest, right now I don’t want to argue about this. I know why you did it and I appreciate it, really I do. But,” I reached out and pushed the shoebox closer to her, “undo it.”
“What if I say no?” she contended.
I sighed. “You know as well as I do that there are ways to get around bindings, especially now that I know about it.”
She didn’t reply. She knew I was correct.
I pressed forward. “Look, we’re both just going to be wasting our energies with this, and that won’t do anyone any good. Undo the binding, and let’s get back to normal.”
She let out a ‘hmph’ then told me, “In case you haven’t noticed, Rowan, our lives haven’t been normal for a few years now.”
“All right then, status quo or whatever you want to call it, Felicity. Just break the spell. Please?”
She stared back at me in silence for a moment then turned her head slightly to the side and looked past me.
“Cally,” she said with quiet resignation. “There are some scissors on the altar shelf in the living room. Could you bring them to me and a book of matches please?”
I gave my wife a thin smile and then said, “Thank you. I’ll go call Constance now.”
“Mandalay.” The federal agent’s businesslike voice issued from the earpiece on the telephone amid a rumble of indistinguishable background noises.
I had parked myself in the bedroom so that I wouldn’t disturb the magickal workings in the kitchen. On the way through the house, I had taken notice that Ben had finally slumped over to the side and was now snoring at a somewhat lower volume.
Cally had been taking pity on the unconscious cop and was covering him with an afghan at about the time I was making the turn into the hallway.
“Hey Constance, it’s Rowan,” I replied, as I finished picking up some of the items the cats had scattered. I piled them back on the nightstand before taking a seat on the edge of the bed.
“Oh, hi Rowan.” Her voice brightened a notch but remained all business. “I’m just a little busy at the moment…”
“I know, Ben told me you were working the Larson abduction,” I interjected before she could rush me off the line. “I wouldn’t have called you if it wasn’t important. Can you talk?”
There was a brief pause then she replied, “Hold on a second.”
I heard shuffling noises, some voices- hers included- and then footsteps. A handful of moments and a few more unidentifiable sounds later, the background noise dropped noticeably.
“I’m back” her voice came again, and then she barreled straight into questions of her own. “So have you talked to Storm recently? He missed a seven-thirty briefing and that’s not like him. I’ve been trying to call him all evening, but I keep getting a message that his phone is turned off and no one picked up at his house either.”
I hesitated for a moment before answering. I guess I’d been the lucky one when I got hold of Allison. “Actually, he’s passed out on my couch.”
“Passed out?”
“Long story.”
“Is that why you called?”
“I wish it were,” I replied.
“Okay, so what’s up?”
“Nothing good I’m afraid.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Your kidnapping just became a homicide,” I offered succinctly.
“How do you…” she started. “No, forget I even said that. So fill me in, what’s going on?”
“Well, it gets a little complicated.”
“Un-complicate it for me.”
“Okay, in a nutshell, Felicity had two ethereal episodes tonight and…”
“Felicity?” she interrupted. “Felicity did the woo-woo stuff? Not you?”
“That’s the complicated part.”
“Okay, I’ll catch up on that later. Go on.”
“Well, she had the two episodes, and just before she came out of the second one, she started telling us that Brittany Larson is dead.”
“Us? You mean you and Storm?”
“No, me, Cally, and RJ.”
“So what about Storm? Was he there or not?”
“He was already passed out,” I replied. “That’s pretty much why I’m calling you.”
“Why is Ben passed out, Rowan?” Her words were more of a demand than a simple question.
It was obvious that him missing the briefing was a sore spot for her, and what she had said was dead on- Benjamin Storm didn’t shirk his responsibilities. Unfortunately, this new little tidbit of information just added another layer to my worry over his situation.
I wanted desperately to cover for my friend, and so I tried to think of a feasible way around answering her without telling an outright lie. Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of a single thing to say other than the cold truth, and before I knew it, that was exactly what came tumbling out of my mouth. “He’s drunk, Constance.”
There was a spate of silence on the line, and then her voice issued again, this time with a hard edge. “Wake him up and get some coffee into him, Rowan. I’ll be there in half an hour.”
Knowing the way she drove, I suspected it would be more like fifteen minutes.
“Okay, but listen, Constance,” I appealed. “Go easy on him. He’s got just about as good a reason for this as anyone can have.”
“Yeah, well he’d better, Rowan because I had to throw some Federal weight around to get him back on the MCS for this investigation.”
“Yeah, I think he knows that,” I replied. “Or he suspects it at least.”
“Well, if he makes me look like a fool then he’s going to have someone besides Lieutenant Albright after his ass,” she snarled. “And I can be a hell of a lot nastier bitch than she can.”
That was it. I’d had enough arguing. I already felt like I was perched atop an inordinately narrow balance beam eighteen hours out of every twenty-four. Between Felicity’s binding spell, Ben’s marital problems, and now Constance being on the warpath, I felt like what little normalcy I had left in the world was crumbling away beneath my feet, and I wasn’t ready to fall quite yet.