Page 8 of Spellbound
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.Hedid 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 feelbetter. 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.
Chapter Four
“Oh, come on. It’s just a bunch of hocus-pocus.”
~Max,Hocus Pocus
I was dreaming again, and the dreams were interrupting my sleep just like they had before we set out for North Carolina. Such crazy dreams—could they be a warning that I should never have come here?
In my dream, ancient spruce trees were crowding the edges of the long, winding driveway that led up to the Cromwell house. One or two of them had stretched their roots across the overgrown dirt track to trip any would-be trespasser, like me, and all of them had crept closer to what was only burnt-out ruins of the house, shaking their limbs furiously in the cold breeze, reclaiming their land, demanding to know why I was there, disturbing their peace.
Or were they trying to give me some kind of warning? There was a sign hanging on a tree, and it was slightly askew. I peered at it through the dim light and saw the sign from theWizard of Ozmovie—I’d Go Back If I Were You.
As I stared at it, I could hear someone laughing in the woods. It sounded like whatever that had been earlier that evening on the road, the thing that had whistled at me and called my name. I turned to run and something grabbed my hand.
I came awake suddenly, breathing hard and fighting shadows as I lay on a sofa in a darkened room that I didn’t remember being in before. I must be inside the Cromwell house, startled into wakefulness by my grandma, who was laughing softly nearby. I sat up quickly with the feeling that somethingwas dreadfully wrong. My heart was beating too fast, and I couldn’t seem to take in a full breath.
“Grandma!” I called out, reaching blindly for her in the dim room, but instead a large, strong hand slipped inside mine—the same one as in my dream—and Ben Jackson was pushing me gently back down against the pillow.
“She’s fine. Don’t alarm her by shouting for her like that. You’re safe and so is she. You’re here at the Cromwell farm, and you fainted.”
“W-what? I fainted? I’ve never done that before in my life.”
“There’s always a first time, I suppose. My dog tried to knock you over.”
“And that caused me to faint? No way,” I said, my voice sounding winded and incredulous, but my heartbeat was slowing down, and I found I could breathe a little easier at least. For some reason, his presence made me feel safer, though I couldn’t imagine why. It must have been that nightmare that had made me feel so alarmed.
“What happened?” I asked him again, unable to figure out why I’d blacked out.
“Like I said, we came up toward the porch, and my dog Dolly got excited and tried to knock you down to get to me. She didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“That doesn’t sound…” I trailed off, because I wasn’t sure how to finish that sentence. Didn’t sound what? Like the truth? What the hell? I sat up, shaking my head and swung my legs over the side of the couch. “No, you did something.”
“I caught you and put you back on your feet.”
“B-but you were nowhere near me.”
“I used magic, like I told you, Ash. You know that, so stop pretending. I’m not going to indulge you like the others have in the past.”
I felt my eyes widen. “W-what?”
