More Than Magic

Chapter One

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’ s**t 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.”

Nick looked at the smoky hills again.

“Nothing sinister. Just bad luck and bad wiring.” Matt sounded resigned. “So, where are you staying up there?”

Nick smiled at Matt’s tone. “Some place called Woodruff Herb Farm.”

“Woodruff.” Matt hunkered over his keyboard once more. “That name sounds familiar for some reason.”

“And the old investigator raises his pointy head. I better get up the road before it gets dark and I get lost up in one of those ‘hollers’ of yours.” Nick replaced the photograph, picked up his jacket and headed for the door. “And before you find another reason I shouldn’t go up there.”

And before one of the gangs in Atlanta stumbles onto the source for Smoky Mountain Magic and all hell breaks loose right here in your own backyard.

Matt stood, coming around the desk. “Can’t you at least have supper and stay the night tonight? Cheryl’ll kill me if—”

“So don’t tell her. I promise I’ll come back. I have to meet this future quarterback of yours. Maybe Thanksgiving?”

Shaking his head, Matt sighed. “All right then. Thanksgiving. Absolutely.”

Nick started to open the door and Matt reached out to hold it shut.

Nick looked pointedly at the offending hand. “And I promise to bring a good bottle of wine this time?”

“Whatever’s really going on up there, whatever that sixth sense thing of yours is leading you into, be careful. You may not have a little quarterback waiting for you at home, but— Well, maybe you should. It kind of changes your perspective.”

I bet it does. But it’s not going to happen.

“And stay in touch with somebody this time. You know who your sister calls when she gets worried about you.”

“I’ve got my cell,” Nick said, then added quickly. “And before you tell me cells are useless up there, the place I’m going to has a cellular extender.” Which is one of the reasons I narrowed my target down to that mountain.

Matt frowned. “Really?”

“Yeah. Really.” Nick grinned. “Now can I leave, Dad?”

Matt opened the door and waved him out. “Wait until you have one of your own,” he said to Nick’s back.

Nick rolled his eyes at Matt’s assistant, who returned a knowing smile as he left the outer office.

Despite the lecture, he was glad he’d stopped by. It was a good idea for the one person he had ever trusted with his life to know where he was. Not that he didn’t trust his boss, who was the only person who knew the details, or the local guys who only knew he was in their backyard on some special project. But even though Matt had left the Agency, Nick liked to think Matt still had his back. And with luck Matt would never need to know that Nick had pulled the wool over his eyes. He hoped that would be the worst part of this case, deceiving his closest friend. But his gut told him that wasn’t the worst part. Not even close.

His gut told him that, one way or another, he was a dead man.

*****

“Poison.” It was a whisper in the air, but when Grace spun around there was no one there. Nothing except the filthy blackness boiling along the forest floor, devouring everything in its path.

Grace ran on, slipping on leaves and damp rocks, listening desperately for signs of pursuit, hearing nothing but the mountain’s murmurs and her own ragged breathing.

“Blight,” came the same soft voice, behind her again, but she knew she would see nothing if she turned.

She clambered sideways, up a rocky outcropping, her fingers slipping on the damp surface so that she nearly fell back into the shadowy miasma. For a moment she looked down at it coiling beneath her like some smoky serpent. She pulled herself up, barely, and staggered on, exhausted.

But no matter which way she went it followed her, slithering toward her home, toward everything and everyone she was trying to protect.

“Bane.” The voice was urgent and loud at her back now, and the mountain was singing again—that same raw, penetrating sound she had heard in the hospital.

Her own shadow loomed up before her, lurching wildly as if some bright light bloomed and faded behind her. Then the crackling of flames and the smell of burning fabric overwhelmed every other sense.

“Ward!” The voice, from behind her once more, and the song rose to a crescendo.

Grace spun to see the oily darkness stop and crest, like an ocean wave trembling over her, but moving and bubbling beneath the surface. In front of her stood a woman, her hand upraised, facing the reeking void. Flames leaped up her long skirts to catch her sleeve and then crawled up her long red hair.

Granny Lily?

Overwhelmed, Grace stumbled, falling sideways onto the forest floor as the black wave towered over them and Granny Lily screamed, shrieking defiance at the darkness as half of her face bubbled and burned. “WARD!”

Grace started awake, the scream still ringing in her ears. Her heart pounded wildly as she jerked upright and caught sight of her own face, pale as smoke, wavering before her on the dark screen of her laptop. Another nightmare. She took a deep breath. And Granny Lily again. This had to stop or—

Another shriek had her shivering and rubbing her arms. She looked out at the garden.

Jamie tumbled around in the leaves outside with Pooka, giggling madly. Apparently raking said leaves had been abandoned in favor of some fun with the old hound. Not a nightmare then. A daymare. Grace sighed and took out her hair clip with unsteady fingers, pulling her hair into a sloppy pony tail. She watched her ghostly reflection disappear as the laptop woke up and the results she had been reviewing flickered onto the screen.

At least the numbers were moving in the right direction. Hard to believe that she would be glad to see the Goldenseal seedlings they worked so hard to propagate actually slow their growth rate. Hopefully, the rhizomes on this group weren’t developed enough to test yet, which would be further proof her efforts were paying off. It had been sheer luck that their last batch of herbs hadn’t been sent to their contract testing lab.

Grace’s cell phone chimed and she checked the display. Daniel.

“Hey, you,” she answered. “What time is it there?”

“Konnichiwa, sis. It’s tomorrow here.” Daniel didn’t sound like his normal self. But then again, nothing had been normal for a while now.

“And where’s here, other than in Japan somewhere?”

“Tsukuba. Just north of Tokyo. I’m at the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science, for the moment.”

“Continuing your never ending quest to learn to say ‘I love you’ in every language on earth,” she teased.

“Yeah, well. Would you believe I’m homesick for the mountain?” Daniel replied.

“So, if you’re so homesick, why are you there and not here?” she prodded, only half joking.

“I hope to get home sometime during the holidays,” he said. “Can you hang in there till then?”

Grace stood and paced to the sunroom doors. “You’ve been talking to Ouida. I’m fine.”

“You shut down production. You cancel the holiday rentals. You send Ouida and Eddie off on vacation. I don’t even think Eddie’s been off that mountain since he was born.”

“I had to overnight Ouida’s recipe card file to her sister’s place, so she seems to be settling in. And Eddie’s grandson texted me a photo that you will not believe of Eddie and a very large fish. So I think they’ll survive for a couple of weeks,” Grace sighed. “I just…I need some peace and quiet.”

Jamie came running up to the doors into the sunroom with Pooka barreling along behind, barking loudly. “Is that Dr. Daniel? Is he coming home?”

“And I can see that you are getting that peace and quiet.” Daniel sounded amused.

“Well, at least Jamie doesn’t hover and try to feed me comfort food at every hour or follow me around constantly asking me if I need anything,” Grace responded. “Besides, your girls won’t respond to just anyone.”

“How are they?”

“They’re doing well. Jamie’s an excellent beekeeper.”

“The girls’re fine as frog’s hair, Dr. Daniel!” Jamie shouted. “But they miss you somethin’ awful.”

Grace passed the phone into Jamie’s small and grimy hand so that Daniel could get a quick update on his bees. And since Jamie would chatter non-stop given the chance, Grace went in to put on water for tea.

Jamie’s mom, Beth Campbell, was a neighbor and a close friend. And, because she was single and working as a trauma nurse with an insane commute across the mountains, Grace got an extra pair of hands to help around the place and Beth got free babysitting.

Grace smiled as she turned on the teakettle.

Despite being only nine, Jamie was a wiry little dynamo who was willing to learn anything and do anything, no matter how distasteful. In fact, the most distasteful tasks seemed to be the ones undertaken with the most enthusiasm. Many a time Grace had found it necessary to call Beth to explain the smell and the mess before it arrived on Beth’s doorstep.

“Dr. Grace? He wants to talk to you again.” Jamie ran into the kitchen waving the phone, followed closely by Pooka, who’d stopped obediently at the kitchen door.

“Thanks, sweetie. You go on and do what you can with the leaves. It’ll be dark soon,” Grace said.

“Don’t worry. I’ll get ’em to the compost pile afore I head home.”

“Hopefully tomorrow we’ll manage to find some time for your NISC project,” Grace added.

“Good! I’ll work on the puzzles tonight and then go out on Thursday or Friday to find ’em.” A flat grimy hand hit an equally dirty fist emphatically. “And I’m gonna nail ’em this time.”

“I’ll make a botanist of you yet.”

“No ma’am. I’m gonna be a cryptologist!” Jamie grinned and bounced out the doors and through the sunroom into the garden. Pooka hesitated at the door, then followed.

“Hey,” she said softly into the phone, taking two teabags out of her stash of breakfast tea.

“Well, our Jamie hasn’t changed a whit.”

“If we could just figure out how to bottle that energy and sell it,” Grace sighed.

“So, Jamie tells me you don’t smile much anymore. Ouida tells me you’re not sleeping well and that you spend every hour you’re awake in the lab. And Eddie tells me you keep going out looking for Pops’s walking stick.”

“Lovely,” Grace growled and poured the boiling water into her mug. “Good to see I can still have secrets.”

Pops’s prized walking stick, which he was never without, had disappeared the day he died. It hadn’t been found near his body or anywhere on the farm. Only days before, Pops had called Grace and told her to come home for the weekend, that something was wrong with the mountain. Not on the mountain, but with the mountain. But apparently he hadn’t shared his concerns with Eddie, the farm’s long-time handyman, or Ouida, their live-in cook and Grace’s surrogate grandmother.

“You know something more about his death, don’t you?” Daniel’s voice was tense. “Look, this project can wait. I can get on a plane—”

“No, Daniel. There’s nothing more to know. The sheriff says he fell. Probably forgot his walking stick or mislaid it, and without it he lost his footing,” she recited the words like a coroner’s report. “I just want to find it. It’s been in the family a long time.”

“Yeah. I get it.” Daniel sounded like he wanted nothing so much as to drop everything and come home. “So—I mean—Well, I’d like to hear about you smiling again sometime soon at least. I know you shut down production because some of the testing was off for that last batch of herbs. Have you figured it out yet?”

“That’s what I’m working on right now,” she said. She hadn’t really told him what was off about those herbs…yet.

“Okay. I know you are usually pretty happy when you are noodling with something in the lab, so if it’s not Pops, is it that foundation thing? Or that i***t boyfriend of yours?”

“I told you. Brian is ancient history. I haven’t heard from him in months.”

“Well, he was sort of fixated on saving the rainforests.”

“Singlehandedly, as it turns out.” When Grace had decided to delay their plans for the sss so she could settle her grandfather’s estate, Brian had just packed up and headed out on his own. That had been a bit of a shock.

“Sorry, sis,” Daniel said softly. “So what is going on?”

“It’s complicated and I can’t talk about it on the phone. I’ll tell you all about it when you come home.”

“You are freaking me out now.”

“Like back when we were teenagers, and I had that kudzu in my room?” Grace tried to layer as much meaning into that as she could.

“Kudzu?” There was a long pause. “Oh.”

“Exactly.” She took a deep breath, choosing her words carefully. “It’s best right now if I keep the visitors up here to a minimum, at least until I can get this…get things under control.” If I can.

Another long pause. “Gracie?”

Grace smiled. “Yes, Danny?”

There was a long moment of static and silence.

“Whatever’s going on, whatever has you burrowed in up there, I’d hate for you to give up your plans. The rainforests are vanishing pretty damn quick.”

“I know.” Along with the medicinal plants Grace had hoped to find. “But—”

“You can’t shut yourself off from the world forever.”

“Not forever.” Not if I can help it.

“Good.” He sounded relieved.

“So, what are you doing to celebrate Pops’s birthday tomorrow? I mean today?” Grace asked.

“Going to Mount Tsukuba. It’s called the purple mountain and from what I hear, it’s a lot like home.”

And by home, he meant their mountain. “Sounds lovely. We’re doing the soul cakes for him. Ouida made the dough before she left. And, of course, I’ll set a place for him at supper.”

“Just like he used to do for Gram.” Daniel sounded like he missed their annual ritual.

“Yes. And the wreaths and cider out at the cemetery.”

“Drink a toast for me.”

Grace smiled. “I will. And you— You dream good dreams for me, baby brother.”

There was a long pause. “I will.”

“Love you.”

“Daisuki desu, big sis.”

Grace slid the phone back into her pocket and walked out through the sunroom to check on Jamie’s progress in the garden. The youngster waved from the other side of a huge pile of leaves and Grace gave a quick thumbs up, barely managing to hold back the tears that suddenly threatened.

Normally she would be out there laughing right along with Jamie as they tried to keep the pile of leaves intact against Pooka’s determined onslaughts. But Daniel was right. She had forgotten how to laugh. And she realized she couldn’t even remember when the leaves had put on their brilliant show of color, much less when they had fallen.