Free Casting Spells by Barbara Bretton Page B

could find out why she hates me so much.”
    He pushed back his chair and stood up. “I’m going to skip the tea and head out. It’s late.”
    “You look hungry. Why don’t I make you some scrambled eggs?”
    “Chloe, I—”
    I felt Dane before I saw him. A sharp, almost metallic presence in the room that set my teeth on edge, like biting down on a piece of aluminum foil. The cats emitted high-pitched meows of surprise then fled from the room as Dane appeared in a shower of steel blue glitter that smelled like the air just before an electric storm.
    He said something to Gunnar that I didn’t understand, in a language I had never heard before, and then I screamed as a bolt of lightning shot from his right forefinger and pierced Gunnar’s right eye. Gunnar whirled, both arms extended, and shimmering silver ropes encircled Dane’s ankles and pulled him off his feet.
    Dane’s roar of rage as he crashed to the ground sent me reeling backward against the kitchen counter. The air felt jagged. The sharp edges of their anger stabbed at my exposed skin. A deep, almost primal, terror started building inside me as the lightning bolt vanished and Gunnar’s eye healed itself while I watched.
    Everything I had ever believed about belonging here, about being the same as everyone else, disappeared as I found myself scrambling atop the counter like a terrified field mouse. The power in the room almost sucked the oxygen from my lungs. I could feel it swinging wildly like the tides from Gunnar to Dane and back again. I wanted to help but had never felt more clueless, more helpless, in my life.
    Dane placed his hands on the silver ropes around his ankles, and tongues of flame leaped to life. The bonds vanished in a shower of silver ash and the smell of burning leaves.
    My small kitchen wasn’t big enough to contain their rage as they crashed together in an explosion of broken dishes, spilled water, and body blows. A hideous creaking noise sounded overhead and I looked up in time to see the roof of my cottage tear away from the structure and rise slowly into the icy night air as if lifted by invisible hands. Moonlight flooded the room as Gunnar and Dane, locked in what seemed to me to be mortal combat, spun upward past the roofline, glowing like hot embers.
    How was I going to explain this to State Farm?
    The thought was so ridiculous I started to laugh out loud. The kind of nervous braying laughter that had nothing to do with humor and everything to do with the fact that the only thing that kept me from grabbing the cats and my mother’s stash of roving and running away was that I had nowhere else to go.
    Plates and cups and glassware swirled around my kitchen in a Martha Stewart tornado. My best friend and his brother were trying to kill each other in the airspace over my house while my roof floated down Carrier Court like a David Copperfield magic trick gone bad. You could keep sibling rivalry. For the first time in my life I was glad to be an only child.
    I thought I had pretty much seen it all. In Sugar Maple, villagers appeared and disappeared at will. I didn’t think twice when a teenage faerie appeared on the rim of my wineglass or I had to design a special ski cap for a troll. Grown men transformed into wolves, bears, and other forest creatures every full moon. Retired vampires polished their dentures then rolled out after dark in motorized wheelchairs.
    But this anger-fueled violence was new to me. Sure there had been family squabbles and disagreements, but until tonight I had never witnessed anything like the mayhem swirling over my head.
    Under normal circumstances, Gunnar would have been able to deflect his brother’s blows and retain dominance. But Dane had been steadily draining his resources, and his confrontation with Isadora earlier in the evening had compromised him further. A member of the Fae with full powers was impervious to anything a mortal could do to harm him. Neither Gunnar nor Dane had full powers. The