More Than Magic (Books of the Kindling) Read online

  Dedication

  For Mom, who always knew I could.

  Prologue

  “Grace!”

  Grace turned around wearily as the gray-haired charge nurse came around the counter. What was her name? Marcie? No. Maggie? Grace resisted the urge to shake her head to clear out the fog. She needed more caffeine, but her stomach was already sour. What she really needed was some sleep, but she hadn’t slept well since—

  “Or is it Dr. Woodruff now?” The nurse glanced at Grace’s casual jeans and sweater.

  “Not officially. Awaiting all the formalities.” If I can manage to live through the next week or so. “Just visiting today.”

  “Well, I wanted to tell you I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you. I—we appreciated the donation. I hope you got the thank you card.”

  “We did. It’s up on the board over there.” She motioned to the nurses’ station. “I know—I mean, Tink talks about you and your Pops and your mountain all the time so I know how close you were to him.”

  Grace managed a nod.

  “Well, I’m glad that you came by today.” The nurse moved closer and Grace read her name tag. Margaret. Maggie. That was it. “I need to warn you,” she said. “Our Tink isn’t doing so well.”

  Grace sighed. “How bad is it?”

  Maggie sighed and shook her head. “Well, you just enjoy this visit with her to the fullest. She’ll be thrilled. She’s been asking about you.”

  “Thanks for telling me, Maggie,” Grace replied, heading toward the room.

  “And it is good to see you. We’ve missed that laugh of yours around here.”

  Grace nodded. That was Maggie’s indirect way of telling her to lighten up a bit before she visited Tink. Grace reached up to check that all her hair was still somewhat secured by the clip she had jammed into it earlier, pinched her cheeks quickly, and mustered a smile as she stuck her head around the doorframe of Tink’s room.

  Tink’s real name was Isabella, but her father’s nickname of Tinker Bell had apparently stuck, and she insisted on Tink. And when you are barely seven years old, insistence can be loud and repetitive.

  However, as Maggie had warned, Tink wasn’t the slightest bit noisy today. She lay quiet in the hospital bed, her face pale beneath the bright pink kerchief tied over her bald head.

  Grace nodded at Tink’s mom, ever present and hopeful in the chair next to the bed. Her mother smiled back, but it was easy to tell that despite Grace being a welcome visitor, things weren’t going well.

  “Hey Bink.”

  Tink’s eyes flew open and, for a moment, the pale face was transformed by a joyful grin, soon replaced by a practiced frown. “Tink. You know it’s Tink, Dr. Grace.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Pink.”

  A dimple peeked through, but Tink was trying hard to maintain their routine. “Not Pink! Tink!”

  “Yes, sorry. How are things today, Dink?”

  “Tink! Like Tinker Bell. My name is Tink!” She folded her arms and lifted her chin.

  “Oh! I’m so sorry. I didn’t see the wings! Obviously you are Tinker Bell! My deepest apologies, Your Fairyness.” Grace curtsied.

  Tink sniffed. “Well, I’ve missed you lots and lots, so I forgive you this once.”

  Grace smiled and looked over at Tink’s mom, who nodded gratefully and left the room for a much needed break. Grace’s visits had been a welcome diversion now that she was off clinical rotation.

  Settling carefully on the edge of the bed, avoiding tubes, wires and monitors with practiced ease, Grace folded one leg beneath her and leaned close.

  “So, may I have my sprinkle of fairy dust, madam?”

  There was a tentative nod, then Tink dusted her carefully with a handful of sparkling nothingness.

  “Oh! Not too much!” Grace grabbed at the railing. “I don’t want to float up and get stuck on the ceiling!”

  Tink looked up at the ceiling, her face solemn. “Is that what I’ll do, Dr. Grace? Daddy says I’ll float through the ceiling right straight to heaven. But it’s solid.” Her fingers curled into Grace’s sweater. “Did your Pops float up that way? Did you see him?”

  Grace nearly gasped at the sudden pressure in her chest. It was too much, too soon. She would not lose anyone else, especially not this vibrant little being who was hanging on to life with both fists.

  It was difficult to get the words past the painful constriction in her throat. “Well, Pops was on his mountain under a beautiful blue sky, so he had a pretty good shot at heaven without any ceilings getting in the way.” Grace took a deep breath. “Besides, fairies don’t have problems with ceilings. And if you float off, who’s going to sprinkle me? I haven’t gotten the knack of this flying thing yet!”

  “But I’m not really a fairy. I’m a girl.” The lower lip was out now. “And I wanna go home now. I don’t want to go to heaven yet.”

  Dammit, dammit, dammit. Had Brian been right? Should she have come back from the funeral, grabbed her diploma, and headed off with him to the Amazon? Turned her back on everything else, everyone else?

  No. She took a deep breath. “So, is your tummy upset today? Is that what’s wrong? Or are you hurting—”

  “You can fix me so I can go home, Dr. Grace. I know you can.” Tink’s voice trembled, but she leaned forward to whisper. “Your mountain sang to me.”

  “My—my mountain sang to you?”

  “You know. It sings.” The pink kerchief bobbed with certainty. “About the magic.”

  Grace tried to recall what she might have told the little girl about the mountain that would have spun this tale.

  “Go ahead and fix me. I won’t tell anyone. And I—I can be home in time for my birthday.” The little hand trembled as she held it out toward Grace.

  “Wha—”

  “It’s like fairies. You just believe in the magic.”

  Grace couldn’t do anything but take the little hand between her own. “I do?”

  “Say it.”

  “What?”

  “Say you believe.”

  “I—I believe, but sweetie—”

  “You have to close your eyes.”

  “Of course.” She closed her eyes, playing along, “I be—”

  Inky black nothingness, poisonous and vile, smothering the last vestiges of bright glowing life of Isabella, of Tink, like some malignant fog, choking her.

  “—lieve.”

  Grace started, opening her eyes. Tink was lying back on her pillow, eyes closed, one hand wrapped around Grace’s fingers, murmuring fervently, “I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe.”

  She knew it was only a vivid hallucination brought on by her lack of sleep and emotional exhaustion—just like the oily blackness she had seen in her nightmares that suffocated Pops before she could reach him. But this had been so…real, so present. She tightened her grasp on Tink’s hand and glanced around the room, taking a shaky breath.

  Poor Tink expected Grace to be the funny student doctor whose touch always made her feel better, but instead she got this mournful, demented echo of her. And Tink looked so hopeful, sitting there with her little face screwed up in concentration, her eyes tightly shut. It wouldn’t do to have her open them and find Dr. Grace sitting there looking nervous—not even trying. Grace could at least pretend. So she obediently squeezed her eyes shut once more.

  Which was a mistake, because this time the image was more intense. She knew it wasn’t real, but she fought the urge to retreat—and the darkness rolled away from her. She nearly opened her eyes in surprise, but then she caught a sense, a feeling, a hint of bright sweetness—light and innocent—beneath that foulness. Tink.
She knew it was Tink. Like sweet sunlight behind the churning black of a storm—a storm that boiled around the edges of Grace’s vision, crowding in, malevolent and possessive. She reached for that sweetness and the smoky stain slunk away again, but then coiled upward over her head, like some noxious living thing.

  This was too much like her nightmares, reaching for Pops only to see him swept away by the blackness. But Tink was alive and breathing and real, ready to sprinkle her magic fairy dust on anyone who came within reach.

  You just believe, Tink had said. Believe in magic and mountains that sing. Believe in fairy dust. But she couldn’t believe in any of this. She couldn’t trust any of this. She was a doctor. A scientist. Yet when she looked down, in this strange dream of hers, her hands were full of the sparkling stuff. No. It was impossible. Impossible. And half in anger, half in frustration, she flung it at the blackness around her. Shimmering gold cascaded out in a wide arc, dissolving the smoke the way the sun melted away fog on the mountain.

  But there was too much of the darkness, boiling away into crevices and cracks, crawling off to hide from the brilliant corrosion. Death and disease and shadow. This was what had taken Pops from her, and now it threatened to drain the bright life from Tink. And nothing made a difference. Not science. Not magic. Nothing.

  There was a roar in her ears that might have been music, if it weren’t so raw and penetrating. And suddenly it was as if she had become light, pouring from somewhere that wasn’t here, throbbing with power. She could only aim it at the darkness, scrub at it, obliterate it, and cancel it out. But she could feel her strength starting to fail before the task was finished. She had to hang on until nothing remained but glowing life.

  Yet, when she opened her eyes once more, she still sat on the edge of the bed clutching Tink’s hand, and it seemed scarce seconds had passed. Only now Grace was sweaty and dizzy and nauseated, and Tink lay pale and unnaturally still against her pillow.

  There was a scream from somewhere, as Tink and the room and the world spun away from Grace into gray smoke.

  Chapter One

  Smoky, and old. Older than any mountains Nick had seen before, and he had seen a few. But he couldn’t say why, or what it was he was sensing from them. They simply felt ancient. He gazed out Matt’s office window at the riotous color still clinging to the foothills and the purple ridges marching away into the fading light.

  “Looks like someone dumped a paint box up there.”

  “Paint box? You taking up a new hobby?” Matt looked like he was struggling not to smile. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m really glad to see you slowing down enough to notice that there is such a thing as a tree, much less that the leaves change color.”

  But Nick heard the unspoken question. Even if Matt was too much of a Southern gentleman to ask it outright, he was too much of an ex-agent not to ask it in his own way—What the hell are you up to, McKenzie?

  “So, you’re withdrawing the invite then? You’ve been after me for a long time to come and bask in the glories of your mountains.” He held up the framed picture of Matt and his wife and a tow-headed toddler that he had picked up off the desk. “And meet Nathan.”

  Matt’s eyebrows rose. “Riiiiight,” he drawled. “And this has nothing to do with that new ‘Smoky Mountain Magic’ shit in Atlanta. Or your special assignment in the Deputy Administrator’s office—”

  Nick turned back to the view. “I’m on leave, remember?” Damn. He should have known that Matt, despite settling happily back into his old haunts with his new bride and a cushy private sector job, would manage to keep up with all the news from the Agency. “And they’re talking about making it permanent.”

  “Sorry, Nick.”

  “Actually, if you can believe it, I’m writing my memoirs,” Nick added.

  “You’re right, I don’t believe it.”

  Maybe he should’ve skipped this visit. But Matt was his closest friend and his office was just down the street from Asheville’s Federal Building, where Nick had checked in this afternoon. Of course the local guys knew little more than Matt—only that Nick was undercover on a case assigned by the DEA Deputy Administrator himself.

  “Undercover DEA’s apparently all the rage. Right up there with CSI and FBI profilers,” Nick quipped. “Sure to be a bestseller.”

  But he was really here for the same reason that he had visited his mom and his sister and his nephew this past weekend—to remind himself of why he was taking on this one last assignment. He rubbed the gilded wood of the framed photograph. A happy and healthy family, unthreatened by a filthy drug lab in the house next door or a frenzied addict in the street.

  “Right. Be sure to hang on to the movie options,” Matt replied.

  For a moment the only sound in the office was the soft shushing from the air vents and the muffled voice of Matt’s admin on the phone out front.

  “So, you’re still not cleared for duty then.” It was a reflection of their long friendship that Matt could read between the lines and get right to the heart of the matter.

  And it was a reflection of how dog-tired he felt that Nick didn’t even bristle. “Not yet. The guys in the white coats told me to take it easy a while longer.”

  “But…I thought you were…Uh—”

  “You can say it, Matt. Driving a desk. Apparently they don’t even want me doing that at this point.” Nick shrugged. “Special assignment or no.”

  “Well, whatever it is you are really here for, you can stay with us.”

  Nick shook his head. “Not right off. I wouldn’t surprise Cheryl like that. But I’m going to be here a while. Got a cabin at some health resort up in the mountains.”

  Matt’s mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. “You. Up in the mountains.”

  It was Nick’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “Hey. I know my way around in the woods.”

  “Tropical forests maybe. Columbia. But you’re more at home in the canyons of the big city and the halls of power.”

  “I was born down here, you know.”

  “I know where you were born and trust me, you are a city-boy in every way that counts. Anyway, that proves it’s not an assignment. No one in their right mind would send Slick Nick into those hills. One of the locals would have your metropolitan hide tacked on the wall in no time, alongside the painter skin.”

  Nick grimaced. Only Matt got away with bandying about that particular nickname. “I’m trying real hard not to visualize Van Gogh’s head mounted on a wooden plaque. They have something against art, these mountainfolk?”

  “Art?” Matt seemed baffled. “Oh. Painter.” He snorted. “See? Perfect example. You better not be on a case.”

  Another raised eyebrow from Nick changed Matt’s expression to a barely concealed smirk.

  “A painter is a panther. A mountain lion really, but they’ve called them painters up there since the first settlers. Not many left in these mountains now, if any. But bears? We got tons of bears.”

  Matt seemed to enjoy this far too much, but Nick couldn’t really blame him. He had done his own share of ribbing when the soft-spoken Southerner was stranded away from his beloved mountains in Nick’s more cosmopolitan canyons.

  “So, do I need a translator or a shotgun or both?”

  That succeeded in wiping the smile completely off Matt’s face. “Likely both, but not for the wildlife. Don’t get me wrong, the majority of folks up there are fine, upstanding citizens. But the isolation of those coves and hollers—hollows,” he managed not to smile, barely, “attracts some interesting individuals.”

  “Attracts? You mean people move up there on purpose?”

  Matt looked suddenly serious. “Maybe I should go up there with you.”

  Nick grinned at the concern in his friend’s voice. “Nah. But you could loan me a dictionary. Smoky Mountainese. What is it, a dialect? Or do they have an official language up there?”

  “I’d loan you mine, but it’s too big for you to carry around with you.” Matt glanced over at his bookshelf
.

  “You’re kidding.” Nick followed Matt’s gaze and walked over to find there was such a book: an academic looking hardcover of pretty good size.

  “No joke. It’s a special place up there,” Matt said. “The culture and language of the settlers and the culture and language of the native tribes, then the land itself…well it created something a bit magical. Lots of New Age types attracted to it, plus the back-to-nature types, and the plain old completely off-the-grid types.”

  “Magical huh? Off-the-grid and back-to-nature and New Age I’ve seen.”

  Matt’s serious demeanor slipped back into that easy grin of his. “You ain’t seen off-the-grid till you see some of the serious self-sufficiency stuff going on up on the balds, and then there’s the way some of the folks back up in those hollers still live. Pure turn of the century.”

  “Balds?”

  “Hell Nick, why do you want to go up there?” Matt was obviously through with the banter. The concerned friend was showing again. “There’s no way you’ll be comfortable without at least some city life nearby. And if you’re supposed to be resting—”

  If my boss is right, that is exactly what this is about—an excuse to get the sick guy out of his hair and off for a nice rest in the mountains.

  “I’ve had enough rest. I need to get back into shape. Someone keeps telling me about the beauty of nature up in those mountains. I figure a few hikes, some fresh air, good food…”

  “Stay down here. The fall color’s pretty much peaked out up there. And Cheryl’s on this vegan kick.” Matt patted a non-existent paunch. “I need to get out and do some walking myself. There are some excellent trails.”

  Nick shook his head. “I already have a reservation. And from what they tell me, that place is pretty well known for good food and natural cures. And there’s a hot spring nearby where you can go soak your tired ass, which is sounding real good to me right about now.”

  Matt nodded. “Patton Springs. I know the place. It was pretty famous back in the day. Lots of folks came for the ‘cure’ before it fell out of fashion.”

  “The magic got used up?”

  “Heh. No, it was more mundane than that. Curative waters weren’t so popular anymore. That, and the hotel kept going up in flames.”