Halfway Hunted - Halfway Witchy Read online

  We stood outside the door, listening to him go through a series of ablutions that must have felt heavenly given his long rest, and the one that followed his waking. By my calculations, the man had barely been awake at all in the past one hundred years, so it was nothing short of miraculous that his disorientation was at a relative minimum. That spoke to a mind of some strength, which pleased both Gran and me. He’d need it in the coming hours.

  After some time, Exit emerged from the bathroom with wet hair and a face that was shining, if not shaved. “I feel remarkably well, considering what I can now remember. Did we have tea somewhere, Carlie?” Puzzlement creased his face.

  “We did, and then you began to fall ill. I assumed it was from the effects of your ordeal, and we set out for Gran’s. You barely made it.” I took his elbow, but in truth, he stood with much more authority now. He seemed bigger, more vital.

  “Ahh, the diner. Yes, that much I can recall.” Then his manners kicked into high gear and he nodded deeply to Gran. “Forgive me, good lady. I don’t seem to remember meeting you at all. Exit Wainwright, late of—well, apparently a mineshaft.” His grin was rakishly genuine.

  “I’m known to this one”—she cut her eyes at me with a twinkle—“as Gran, but you may call me Tess, if you’d like. I’m sure you’ve earned it.”

  “I shall consider it an honor to call you Gran. I’m certain that you’ve earned it as well.” With deliberate steps, we moved like a small but determined school of fish toward the kitchen table that figured so heavily into so many of the important moments from my life. When he sat down and endured our fussing in good spirit, I began to truly grasp the enormity of what he’d gone through. I didn’t even know where to begin, plus Gran was right here, and my natural instinct was to defer to her.

  Gran intervened. “Let’s begin with something more substantial than tea, and when you’re feeling up to it, we can begin discussing the finer points of how you came to slip upstream in time by a century. Perhaps more importantly, we can discuss what to do about it now, and why it was done at all. I’m afraid that magic of this caliber is rarely invoked without intent.” At that, she turned and began to ferry massive amounts of food to the table in an array of containers.

  “Gran, it’s just us.” My protest fell on deaf ears as she finished her stockpile with a three-tiered dish of candy and nuts that appeared to be an edible relic from the 1960s. “Really? The man is hungry, not hollow,” I chided her, but she ignored me with a prim sniff before busily building sandwiches for Exit, which she placed on his plate with a nod.

  “We start with sandwiches, and move on to something hot. I’ll set tea and coffee in a moment, but for now, start with this.” She produced a bottle of thirty-year-old whiskey and poured him a generous splash. His smile was incandescent.

  “Lady, you are nothing short of a miracle worker.” Exit buried his nose in the fumes before taking a sip. The joy on his face was almost childlike. “As an aperitif, this surpasses my wildest dreams. It’s good to know the world has not lost the art of a fine barrel.”

  “Nor have we abandoned good food. If anything, food is far better than when you were last dining out and about. Now, eat as the mood strikes you, but we have all the time you need to discuss your predicament.” Gran indicated a roast beef sandwich with sharp cheese on it. Mustard dripped from the edges, and Exit nearly laughed with pleasure at the first bite. He chewed, grew meditative, and then asked, “What predicament is that? My waking up in the future, so to speak?”

  Gran stood and walked to the stove where she initiated the complexities of tea and coffee delivered together. Her face darkened with concern. “No, although that’s something we will discuss. I’m more worried about finding out if the person that did this to you is still alive.” She stirred cream into a steaming mug of dark coffee, then tapped the spoon against the lip in a ringing staccato. “And if they are, do they know you’re awake? Because it strikes me that if an enemy went to the effort to incapacitate you with a spell so powerful it could stop time, then that same foe will be aware of your awakening. And then, they will try to do the same thing to you again.”

  “Or worse,” I added grimly.

  “Just so.” Gran’s voice was flat, but her eyes glittered with anger.

  Exit sat in a fugue of concentration, chewing. I watched him brush crumbs from his mouth with an odd formality, before realizing that I was unused to such a stalwart display of manners. He may have earned his trade in a mine, but he hadn’t been raised by wolves. That much was obvious in his speech and willingness to use a napkin. I’d seen some of the same traits in Wulfric, and thought, not for the first time, that there were some parts of the past that would be welcome if they were brought back. Other things, like smallpox and no ice cream, I could do without. Call me a softy, but there’s something about modern dentistry that just warms my heart.

  “I won’t be put back into a hole.” Exit’s words fairly hummed with the strength of conviction.

  “Nor would we let you.” Gran sounded equally determined. Between the two of them, even I believed it.

  Exit studied us both for a quiet moment. “The fog is starting to clear.” He tapped his head with a finger, smiling. “Beyond stealing my entire world, I have to consider that this forced sleep was due to a reason I don’t understand. I’m an engineer, and a man who spent his life digging holes. I don’t search for lost treasures, nor have I found gold. So what, I must ask, is the reason for me being put into a state of sleep—and perhaps, forgetting?”

  “Who are you, Exit?” Gran’s clear blue eyes pinned him with a stare so intense I felt myself look away. She was using her power; anyone with a pulse would have felt that something supernatural was afoot.

  Exit twitched under her scrutiny. “If this is the moment where I reveal that I’m a king or some other person of stature, I assure you, lady, I am not. I’m a miner who was sent here to revive a dead mine. Let me parry your inevitable questions about what we were looking for; it was titanium. Yes, it’s valuable, but hardly anything of note given that it was only a possibility and not a guaranteed strike.”

  “Where else have you been? Mining, that is? And Exit, where are you from?” I was genuinely curious about the latter.

  He didn’t dither. “As for me, I’m from Syracuse. I’m the child of an iron worker and a seamstress. They were gone before I was—before this thing happened to me. I had a wife, and a daughter. My son was a cavalry officer in the army, and every second that I’ve been awake since I crawled out of that pit, they have all been heavy on my mind.” He glared at us before his anger subsided.

  Tears welled in my eyes at the realization that this man not only lost himself, but a family.

  “I’ve been in Canada, Africa, and all over the United States. I’ve worked in more mines than I can remember; some were known, others were little more than scratchings in the middle of a fetid jungle. I’ve had malaria, dysentery, and any number of fevers, and none of those things were capable of rendering me as helpless as this unknown affliction we speak of.”

  Gran narrowed her eyes in thought. “In your travels, have you ever seen anything that challenged your understanding of the natural world?”

  Exit’s bark of laughter made me jump. “Natural? Gran, much of the underground world seems to defy that which we consider natural.” He shook his head in amazement. “There are caverns too large to be seen with any light, reeking of age and secrets. Bones of animals that shook the ground when they walked, and the weapons of men who hunted them. There are rivers, and pools, and washouts where a man can sift fractured gems like grains of wheat. In Africa and France, I saw paintings of people dancing among flames that leapt from the ground. They’d left their handprints as a . . . perhaps as a sign that they had once existed. A sign so we could know that once, they had lived. It was sad, and triumphant, too. I could feel the presence of their ghosts from a time long ago, huddled around a flickering torch just to leave their mark on the world. It’s easy to understand why
mankind believes demons—and worse—are real. I saw all of that and more in my years in the darkness.”

  We were all quiet as Gran and I attempted to process the powerful images Exit had drawn in the space between us with his passionate recollection. And then, I asked the one thing that Gran might not, because I have a tiny streak of suspicion in me that will never fade.

  “Other than stones, did you ever bring anything else back with you from one of these jobs?” I posed the question as innocuously as possible, given that the option was to accuse him of being something like a grave robber.

  His smile deepened into something wide, sweet, and sad. “Only one thing. My wife.”

  Chapter Six: Playing Catchup

  I expected to hear a tale of an accursed relic, black with age and venom, but instead Exit brought about complete silence with his confessional. Gran expected the same sort of thing as me; after all, magic had left him moldering in a mine, not love, plus as witches, we tend to look for things along the edges of reality. It’s in our nature.

  “Tell me about her.” I looked to Gran, who merely nodded and smiled. If his wife was the most important thing he’d ever seen in a world filled with wonders, then we should certainly start with her.

  Knotting his workman’s hands together, he pursed his lips in thought. “She was everything that I wasn’t, and the first day we met, I felt like a gigantic, fumbling oaf standing next to her.” A smile of rueful brilliance lit his face; it was impossible not to return the infectious gesture of joy. His wife must have been rare indeed to have her memory light a room one hundred years in the future. “It took me five months and two ships to reach Morocco in 1906, and the rest of my life to get over the first sight of Reina. I stood in the slim shelter of an acacia tree, scrawling directions on a map to send for supplies. There were miners from all over the world in those hills; we’d been summoned by various companies to rush in and exploit one of the largest strikes in African history.”

  “What did you find?” Gran’s words were bright with curiosity. I felt the same way. There was an exotic quality to the tale that swept my imagination across the ocean to a place far away in time and distance.

  Exit laughed again, but this time it was in admiration. “What didn’t we find? The Moroccans avoided being overrun by foreign powers, but that didn’t mean we weren’t there. In the Atlas Mountains, there was metal to spare for all. I was organizing nearly a thousand men to open one of the richest silver mines I’d ever even heard of, and along the way we found gold, titanium, zinc, wolfram . . . the list didn’t seem to end. It was like another planet, and it had never been mined. But it was a wild and dangerous place, filled with Berber tribesmen who regarded our presence as an affront to their nomadic lifestyle. We were vigilant, but still, men went missing at night.” He took a drink and winced with a memory. “And sometimes, they went missing during the day, too. As I said, a most fearsome place, but rich. And poor.”

  “I know what you mean.” And I did. Despite living in a small town, I knew that there had been similar injustices in the Adirondacks during Exit’s time. The Robber Barons weren’t known for paying much in terms of wages, and the bones of many men rested through the park after they died looking for wealth in all forms, be it timber, fur, or gold.

  “I remember this branch, of the acacia?” He angled his hands like a Y, then held it up over his head. “I saw what I thought was an angel, so I tipped my aching head so that the shadow of that branch fell across my eyes. Reina stood there, looking at me with this furtive half-smile, as one might regard a child in the midst of doing something incredibly stupid. She asked me why we were working in the heat of the day, knowing it might kill us. I didn’t have an answer, but with that one question I was enchanted, and I felt a grip on my chest like the touch of a cruel master. I was in love. I know you might not think such a thing possible, but there it is. Love, and so besotted with the girl that I walked away from my men without a second glance, leaving them staring at me like I’d gone mad. She had a pencil behind her ear like an accountant or a reporter, and she carried a small journal bound in ostrich hide. She was constantly jotting things down, making sketches and notes. I think she fancied herself part emissary of God, and part news writer on the edge of civilization.” His smile was pure admiration, and it was impossible not to feel what his memory stoked in the hearth of his recollection.

  “Reina offered me a drink from her canteen, smiling up with enormous dark eyes in a face that was perfection itself. Her accent was light, Spaniard, and educated. I asked her if she would dine with me under my rude tent, but she refused, and I thought my heart would break there and then. Instead, she invited me to her home, which was less than a mile away. I dismissed my astonished men for the day and began following this willowy slip of a girl into the heat of a desert that killed men every day. I’d never been happier.”

  “Was she Moroccan?” Gran asked.

  “In a sense, yes. She’d been born there, but she was the daughter of Spanish missionaries. She wasn’t small, but rather slender, and possessed of a grace that was nearly liquid. Her hair was blacker than a mine, and somehow, she had the lightest touch of the sun on skin that was like milk. She had a birthmark on her neck in the shape of a heart. I could see the pulse underneath it like a declaration of her vitality; it was enchanting. I don’t mind telling you, I decided at that moment that I was going to marry her and love her for the rest of my life. And I did.” His words rang with pride.

  Gran shifted in her seat, hesitated, and then finally mustered the courage to ask, “Was she in Halfway when you were taken?” If we could find out what happened after he was enchanted, we stood a better chance of understanding everything else.

  “She was, yes. My heart is heavy even saying such a thing, but I expect that she still is.” Grief colored his words as the reality of a hundred year sleep came home yet again. I didn’t know how many body blows like that he could tolerate, nor did Gran. Her gently pleading expression said as much.

  There are certain things that one can casually introduce into a conversation without too much trouble. A new restaurant, or movie. Perhaps the birth of a child or a promotion. Those all fall under the heading of topics that are, well, natural. They’re expected. So it was easy for me to hold my tongue when I thought of Gran’s friend Maggie, who would almost certainly know if Reina was buried in the town cemetery. Maggie had been our town realtor for forty years until her retirement, and to say she’s well connected is selling her short.

  She’s also a ghost.

  Maggie died a couple years back, but that hasn’t had any effect on her social life or ability to gossip. If anything, she’s better at it now because she doesn’t have pesky things like sleep or work holding her back from the serious business of networking. If she could hold a pen, she’d sell five times as much real estate in her ethereal form; that’s saying something, considering she dominated the market here since my parents were young. I shot a meaningful glance to Gran, then cut my eyes up toward the graveyard. She gave a tiny nod and returned her attention to Exit. There were few people who could hold their cards closer than Gran when she was working out one of her plans, so I sat playing the dutiful granddaughter while she got up and fussed about for a moment to buy us some time.

  When Gran spun back from the counter, a half-smile told me she was readying some weapons-grade truth, and that I’d probably be needed to hold Exit upright in his chair when she was finished. I edged my chair closer to him, smiling to seem friendly instead of like a pickpocket snuggling up for the lift. He grinned nervously, sensing the change in the air.

  “Exit, I know you’re tired and bewildered despite how well you’re holding up here—no, don’t protest, I can tell that this is on the cusp of overwhelming. It speaks to your character and toughness that you didn’t wake up stark raving mad after enduring a century in the darkness, but now you’re in a different place, and I think you should understand that above all else, you’re safe here.” Gran took her seat again, g
iving him an even look.

  “Where is here? Halfway?” he asked.

  “No, not entirely. When I said you were safe, I mean that quite literally, because Halfway is under my—and Carlie’s—protection. This is our land, and you’ll not be troubled from this moment forward. Not while we draw breath.” It was a bit grandiose for my tastes, but she got the point across. Also, the statement had the added benefit of being utterly true.

  “Your lands?” Exit looked confused. It did sound rather feudal when you put it that way.

  “Halfway and the surrounding area is under our family protection. Therefore, you’re under our protection as well, and there’s no time like the present to tell you why.” Gran pointed east, then swept her hand through the air in a confident arc. “Without further ado, we’re both experienced witches, and I suspect you were the victim of some extremely powerful blood magic, though to what purpose I can’t yet grasp.”

  The air hummed between us with an expectancy born of the unknown. Then I saw a smile begin to creep into the corners of Exit’s mouth and remembered that this was a man who’d seen the edges of reality every day while digging in the earth. Witchcraft might be on the near end of his weirdness meter.

  “Hmph. Witches, you say? Carlie demonstrated her magic. Remarkable.” Exit’s tone was openly admiring.

  Gran nodded, but said nothing. I did my best to look friendly and incapable of turning someone into a toad. Flowers were good. Toads, not so much. I probably could if I had time to write the spell, but that wasn’t the point, perception being reality and all that.

  “And you protect these lands? For how long?” His question was directed at Gran, for obvious reasons.

  “Since Europeans arrived here, and possibly before that,” Gran said. She was being vague, so I left it be. Her reasons were usually two steps ahead of mine in the game of protecting our familial magic.