Spun by Sorcery by Barbara Bretton

Author:Barbara Bretton
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-09-21T22:00:00+00:00

22

CHLOE

Nothing prepared a girl for being swept up inside a water-spout. I don’t care how many times you’ve seen Twister: watching Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton cower under a bridge won’t help you one bit.

I mean, who would have expected the impact to be softer than a whisper? Or that the sensation of piercing the funnel would be like stepping into one of those fancy multijet showers like Janice had installed in the spa section of her salon? The water was silky soft, fragrant with lavender and a touch of pine. Warm . . . buoyant . . . deeply relaxing. If Janice could harness this sensation for her spa, she would rule the world.

The fight left me in a giant whoosh and I settled back into the cocoon of warmth that happened to be a giant water-spout. Nobody sane wanted to spend even a second in the eye of any storm, much less one as potentially deadly as a water-fed tornado, but the sense of peace I experienced was narcotic. I wanted as much of it as I could get.

The words Don’t worry resonated inside me like a mantra. My anxieties about Luke and Janice and Penny the cat, about Sugar Maple and the friends I loved and our combined future, all vanished.

I suddenly realized I was being held aloft by an army of knitters, dozens of them, all in period dress, kindred spirits from across the centuries. Hippies and flappers, Gibson Girls and Civil War belles, Colonials and rustic early settlers. They laced their hands together and kept me from going under. They whispered my name like a litany in tones that were warm and loving and strangely comforting. I tried to speak but no sound came out. There was only the soft rush of their voices filling the spaces where the water wasn’t.

My sense of direction was suspect in the best of times even with landmarks and street signs and GPS to help me out. Put me in the middle of a churning steel-blue sea and I might as well be on Mars. Land was nothing but a memory. The sky melted into the ocean. The ocean was absorbed into the sky. I didn’t know if I was flying or drowning. I only knew that I was safe.

I was drifting away, in danger of disappearing altogether, when a beam of silvery light pierced through all of that nothingness and a small white and black lighthouse rose up in the distance.

My mind turned into white noise. My heart skidded into my ribs. My breath caught deep in my throat. All of the adrenaline that hadn’t flooded my veins when I saw that funnel of water broke free now. I felt like I’d consumed two pots of espresso on an empty stomach. I wasn’t exactly scared but I was alert in a way that was almost painful.

The lighthouse grew closer. Except for the size differential, it was identical to the kitschy ten-foot-tall replica that resided in the center of Sugar Maple.

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