Page 7 of Spellbound

Exotically tilted in his beautiful face, they were framed by darker and thicker eyelashes than I’d ever seen on anyone, male or female. The whole effect was exquisite. But was it unnatural?

In nature, beauty and bright coloring often served as a warning signal, indicating that a particular plant or animal might be poisonous and to stay away from it. I decided I’d be wise to not be fooled by his looks and be very wary of him.

I had recognized him, of course, almost immediately when he stepped up to my truck, even though I hadn’t seen any recent pictures.

I wondered what he was thinking as he blinked up at me.

I just kept staring and taking him in. Obviously, I made him nervous, because when he got in the passenger side, or I should say, when I put him in after seeing him struggle, he kept his chin high in the air and folded his arms over his chest to show me he wasn’t intimidated by me in the least—though I knew he was, a little. And honestly, he had good reason to be.

I knew from Rosalyn that he’d recently had an accident and had badly broken his leg.

I’d checked into it, and there hadn’t been any kind of “climbing” accident, like he’d claimed—like he was still claiming.

He had been hiking—illegally, of course—up the side of a waterfall in a state park nowhere near where he lived.

There were warning signs all over the place and it was clearly posted. He ignored them all.

He had slipped and fallen some forty feet, though the fall was broken up several times by landing on one ledge and then slipping off it down to another.

It was terrifying to even think about, so I could hardly imagine what it had been like to live through it.

And he was damn lucky that he had lived.

I was determined to get to the bottom of it as soon as I could.

And to get my hands on him too, to investigate.

I’d told Rosalyn to call her sister as soon as he got out of the hospital and make sure she made this visit happen.

If I had anything to say about it—and I did—his “climbing” days were over.

Now that I had my hands on him, I was locking him down and taking him into my custody one way or another.

I was going to find out what was going on with him if it were the last thing either of us ever did. It was long past time.

How did he keep being involved in these things and then claiming he had no memory of them later on?

He had to be lying. From what Rosalyn told me, he was accident prone and had suffered other close calls over the years.

He’d been struck by a car while he was crossing a street, not long after his seventeenth birthday, and he had nearly drowned in Florida the very next year.

A year after that he had been involved in an accident at an amusement park, when one of the rides had malfunctioned out of nowhere and actually killed a few people.

What kind of freak accident had that been, and had he been the one to cause it?

He’d come out of each accident mostly unscathed, but this latest fall had left him with serious injuries.

Either he had a death wish or it was the curse that was on him. And it was his magic, bound or not, that kept managing to save him. I intended to find out more about all this and then deal with it—and at the same time deal with him.

When I’d first heard about him and discovered who he was, I’d been told to leave it and him strictly alone until he was older, because of a promise the Council made to his father before he died.

He had begged the Council to do no more investigations until Asher had his twenty-first birthday, which had just come and gone, a month ago.

It hadn’t been all that that hard for me to leave him alone. After all, I had achieved the lofty and very important age of twenty-two that summer. And a seventeen or eighteen-year-old kid, no matter how good looking he was, or how dangerous, held little real interest for me.

Okay, that was a lie. I’d definitely had an interest. As a healthy young man, I’d lusted after the photo of him I’d been shown. He was beautiful even then, but I felt as if he were too young and immature for me to do anything about it.

What had he done to bring the binding down on himself?

The few people who knew weren’t talking about it.

When I’d asked, I was told that I’d find out in due time, but knowing his story would serve no real purpose now—not until I was ready to deal with him.

I knew the general gist, anyway, but I wanted to eventually hear it from him, though I’d settle for hearing it from his grandmother’s perspective first.

When I’d become aware of Asher and his grandmother coming up our road earlier that evening, I’d sent the fog out to disorient them and slow them down until I could get to them.

I didn’t know what Rosalyn’s mood would be like—it could be really unpredictable these days—and I thought it would be better if I were there when they arrived, just in case.

I didn’t care much for visitors at the farm when I wasn’t there.

Rosalyn was showing a few disturbing signs of increasing intellectual impairment, like sudden bursts of anger and occasional paranoia.

She was only recently recovering from another cancer health scare, too, so I tried to keep a close watch on her, and I knew she’d really been looking forward to her sister’s arrival.

Rosalyn had been talking about it and cleaning and cooking for several days now.

Rosalyn had once been a witch of considerable power, a magistrate, and my father’s partner.

She’d lost a lot of that power because of the radiation treatments she’d had to undergo when she developed ovarian cancer as a younger woman.

They’d found it early, but the treatment had burned the magic right out of her, and she’d had to retire.

It was when she was around fifty that the early signs of Alzheimer’s had begun.

I could only imagine that this more recent treatment for the breast cancer could have made it worse too.

Despite all the health problems, she definitely still had a little power for things like simple healing or little spells of no real consequence, but her magic was much reduced and far quieter now than it once had been.

It was still there, a small, quiet pool of it, rather than the torrent it once had been, and I could feel that her elder sister Janet had the same kind of magic inside her.

Although I thought hers may have always been that way.

Magic ran in families. It was in the DNA, and just like any other family trait, some had it and some didn’t. And when it did appear, it could be present in a wide range of varying degrees.

I wanted to meet the visitors and make sure they weren’t going to be any kind of problem before they got to Rosalyn’s house.

I figured they’d be fine, and I’d been the one to insist Rosalyn make sure they came so I could meet Asher properly at last, so I had to make sure for all our sakes.

Roslyn had been a little better lately, but she could be erratic, with occasional flashes of real power, like she’d had in the old days.

If she’d tried something, or lashed out in some way, it could be a big problem.

Asher could retaliate, as his magic had already shown that it would protect him, but he was too much of an unknown.

His magic seemed to be instinctive, and I had no idea how he even accessed it at all when it was bound so tightly.

It hinted at him being more powerful than anyone had previously even imagined.

So, I’d caused the fog to disorient them and slow them down and then came around behind him and his grandmother so they couldn’t escape. I’d disabled their car with a little ill wish, until I knew more.

With them following behind me, I drove slowly out to the farm and the old house. We didn’t have many lights to lead the way, and the skies were so cloudy tonight that I made sure they followed close behind me.

When we pulled up in the yard, Rosalyn came out to greet Janet, and they had a little reunion.

Rosalyn was chattering away a mile a minute and she wrapped an arm around her sister’s waist and began to take her toward the porch.

Meanwhile, Asher had taken one of the big suitcases from the trunk of their car and was optimistically trying to move it toward the front porch.

I turned to help him, and that’s when one of the dogs, Dolly, spotted me and came bounding over to greet me.

She was a big, black and white bird dog with terrible manners, who pushed past Asher on the narrow walkway to the house and struck him a glancing blow in her mad, careless dash to get to me.

The luggage was heavy, and I saw him lose his balance.

He might have still been able to right himself if not for the big rocks Rosalyn had insisted on using to line the pathway to the porch.

Asher made a valiant effort to keep to his feet as he stumbled over one of them, but even as I reached for him, Dolly turned around in front of him and came back for another try at me.

She got Asher instead and he stumbled again, back over one of the big rocks and would have taken a hard fall, maybe twisting his ankle or even reinjuring his leg if I hadn’t intervened.

I made an instinctive sign with my hand just before he hit the ground to catch him in midair.

His cane went flying off in another direction as I flipped him back upright and set him gently back on his feet again on the path.

His eyes widened dramatically as he landed upright on his feet again, and he swayed, staring straight at me, my hand still raised in the air.

“Oh, my goodness!” Rosalyn exclaimed, rushing back down off the porch to take Asher’s arm. “I’m so sorry! That crazy dog. Thank goodness you caught yourself.”

“No, I didn’t,” he said in a shaky voice, staring right at me. “ It was you, wasn’t it? You did something.”

Rosalyn kept talking, trying to talk over him. “Come on up here on the porch and sit down a minute, honey, and catch your breath. No, just leave the luggage. Ben can get it for you.”

She put an arm around Asher’s slim waist and tried to draw him away to sit on the steps. But he resisted, pulling away—gently, so as not to be rude or hurt her—and kept staring right at me.

“W-what the hell just happened? What did you do?”

“I think you know what I did, Asher,” I said, and his eyes got bigger.

His grandma came down the steps to stand beside him and put a hand on his arm. “Come and sit down and catch your breath, honey. You almost fell but you managed to catch yourself.”

“No,” he said, gently shrugging off her hand. He glanced back over at me. “Stop saying that. He did it. Tell me what that was.”

I began slowly walking toward him. “Magic, of course. But nothing for you to worry about,” I said softly, holding up my hand again to stop Rosalyn and his grandma from interfering.

“You’re tired, that’s all.” I put a hand on his shoulder, because it was always easier to influence someone if you touched them.

“Why not go inside now and sit down and forget all this for now? We can have some dinner, and you can rest, and you’ll feel better.

You’re feeling calmer already, because you know that no one here wants to hurt you, and we can talk about this later.

You need to go inside and shake all this off, don’t you?

Rosalyn made a delicious pot roast. You’re tired and hungry and that sounds really good, doesn’t it? ”

I was compelling him, of course, or trying to. But he was intelligent, and his will was strong, and both of those things always make compulsion more difficult. He was staring at me, his head slightly tilted to one side, staring straight into my eyes. I pushed more power at him.

His long eyelashes fluttered, his eyes rolled slightly back up in his head and I saw his knees buckle.

I managed to catch him before the night he’d had and the power I was exerting on him finally became too much for him.

I made a grab for him, sweeping him up in my arms and carrying him up the steps and into the house.