CHLOE.

I'd lived in Sugar Maple all my life, but until Gunnar told me, I'd never heard a word about a series of tunnels that started near one of the logging roads south of town and terminated beneath the Inn. Apparently they had been used during the French and Indian War as a sanctuary for the native peoples and townspeople under siege.

Everything was exactly where he said it would be. I found the marker for the opening with no trouble and eased myself down the frayed rope ladder to the ground. The tunnel smelled like the dead groundhog we found under my front porch last month and the smell sent me racing for the other end.

I hauled myself up another worn rope ladder and popped up in the Weavers' bas.e.m.e.nt. My eyes had adjusted to the pitch-black darkness of the tunnel so I was quickly able to zero in on the shelves of canned goods, jars of pickles and olives and hot peppers, huge bins of flour and sugar necessary to run a four-star restaurant.

Now the question was how to get from the bas.e.m.e.nt to the third floor, where Karen was-I hoped-still locked in the honeymoon suite. The Weavers and their children a.s.sumed human dimension when dealing with the outside world, but the rest of the time they were pure Fae. I knew that Renate and Colm had their own suite of rooms under the windowsill in the parlor. Their teenage daughters hid away beneath the first-floor staircase while the married Weaver children and their families maintained homes under floorboards, and behind the dieffen bachia in the garden room. And that didn't take into account the enormous staff of itinerant Fae and house sprites who kept the Inn running smoothly or the constantly changing parade of guest spirits who pa.s.sed through on a daily basis.

Before I set out, I had armed myself with as many protective charms as I could conjure up, but I was still the pink elephant in the room. There was no way an almost-six-foot-tall half-human sorceress could blend in with the crowd.

Gunnar had promised he would help me if he could, but the forces of interdimensional communication were beyond our control. For the most part, I was on my own.

Fortunately I knew the layout of the Inn like the back of my hand. As a teenager I'd worked in the kitchen, the garden, and as an occasional chambermaid, which gave me a pretty thorough knowledge of how the enormous structure was laid out.

Unfortunately I also knew that the odds were against me.

The back staircase wasn't used half as much as the others. It went only as high as the second floor, but if I made it that far, just try and stop me.

I hugged the wall as I started up the first flight with minimal squeakage. So far, so good. I rounded the bend and was halfway to the second floor landing when it happened.

"Chloe?" Paul Griggs, wielding a menacing-looking wrench, stepped out of the darkness. "What the h.e.l.l are you doing here?"

KAREN.

The golden-haired ghost had made me promise I would stay put until he came back or materialized or whatever it was ghosts did, but that was hours ago. Even Midge and Verna and Bettina had stopped popping in to monitor my lack of progress.

Most important of all, there were no more calls from Steffie.

I guess I'd been holding on to the hope that Chloe and Luke would come bursting through the door to tell me that the problem had been solved and Steffie's spirit was safely on its way to eternal happiness, but by the time darkness fell, I knew it wasn't going to happen.

I had to get out of there. Lying here on this squishy mattress pretending to be communing with some New Age source of light was getting old. This was my problem too. Steffie was my daughter. She had reached out to me for help. I wasn't going to abandon her now.

There was a knock at the door and I leaped back onto the bed and closed my eyes. I heard the squeak as someone opened it a crack.

"Karen?" The male voice was unfamiliar.

I opened my eyes. He was tall, dark, and hairy. "Yes?"

He opened it wider and Chloe slipped inside. "I won't forget you for this, Paul," she said. "I owe you."

The door closed quietly behind him.

"He's Verna's husband," she said as we heard his footsteps recede down the hallway. "He was repairing the boiler in the bas.e.m.e.nt."

"How did you find me?"

"It's a long story," she said. "Let's just say I had help."

"The ghost with the blond hair. He said he was going to find you."

"You saw saw Gunnar?" Gunnar?"

"He didn't tell me his name."

She grabbed my hand. "How did he look? How did he get in here? Tell me everything you know."

"I blinked and he was sitting on the bed. I could see right through him but he was still the most gorgeous man I've ever seen in my life."

"That's Gunnar," she said and tears filled her eyes. "He was my best friend and he's the reason Luke is still alive."

"Is Luke here?" I asked.

She shook her head. "Just me."

"How are we going to get out of here?" I asked. "Can you magick us out?"

"The Weavers are a powerful Fae family. When it comes to security, they have this place rigged up pretty good. We'll have to go out the way I came in." She told me about the system of tunnels that ran beneath key points in Sugar Maple. "They're old and n.o.body thinks about them anymore. Lucky for us, the Weavers forgot to arm the entrance."

"Shh," I whispered. "Someone's coming."

Chloe ducked into the adjacent bathroom. I leaped back into bed as the door squeaked open and the usual suspects walked in.

"This should work," Bettina said. "I ran the probes over to the Falls to have them energized."

"Energized?" Midge sounded puzzled. "You mean like Lilith does with her crystals?"

"It's a Fae thing," Bettina said. "You wouldn't understand."

"You and your Falls," Verna said with a laugh in her voice. "It's just a big Shower Ma.s.sage, honey. Nothing more."

I held my breath as Bettina's gentle hands inscribed tiny circles on my forehead, my temples, across my cheekbones. Please don't work . . . Keep those energized crystals or probes or whatever they are away from me . . . Please don't work . . . Keep those energized crystals or probes or whatever they are away from me . . .

I was about to slap Bettina's hands away when the bed started to shake and I had to force myself not to grip the edges of the mattress to keep from rolling off.

"Oh c.r.a.p!" Midge said in her cartoon-girl voice.

"It's started." Verna sounded like the voice-over to a horror movie.

"Isadora," Bettina whispered. "She's flexing her muscles."

They were gone in an instant, hurrying along the hallway, then clattering downstairs in their noisy clogs.

Chloe popped out of the bathroom, eyes wide. "What the h.e.l.l was that?"

I sat up and tugged my clothes back into position. "It felt like an earthquake."

"We don't have earthquakes in northern Vermont."

"I think you just did."

We heard the sound of voices floating up from the street below. We took turns peeking through a crack in the blinds. Apparently everyone else in town thought it was an earthquake because villagers were pouring out of their houses and gathering across from the Inn.

"They're all out there," Chloe said, moving away from the window. "Let's go while we still can."

A surge of panic erupted in my chest. "That was an earthquake earthquake ," I reminded her. "You want to run through a tunnel after an earthquake?" ," I reminded her. "You want to run through a tunnel after an earthquake?"

"We don't have a choice."

She was right. We didn't.

She led me along the dimly lit hallway to the back staircase. It was narrow and steep and I had to concentrate to keep from breaking my neck. The twists and turns made my head spin.

"How many flights?" I asked, starting to breathe hard.

"Two more," she said. "Don't look down. It will only make you dizzy."

Outside, the crowd was growing louder. I was able to make out some of what they were talking about and I didn't like it.

"Isadora?" I asked Chloe as we rounded the landing and began to make our way down the flight of steps that led to the bas.e.m.e.nt. "Do you think she caused the earthquake?"

"Most likely."

"That's crazy. You said her powers were limited."

She shot me a look over her shoulder. "They are. Imagine what she could do if we set her free."

The prospect was terrifying and went far beyond the Sugar Maple town limits.

"Now here's the really scary part," Chloe said when we finally reached the bas.e.m.e.nt. "How do you feel about rope ladders?"

"About the same way I feel about the dentist."

She gave my hand a squeeze. "I knew I liked you."

Our eyes met and the insanity of the last few days vanished. For a second we were two women, both knitters, who probably could have become good friends if the circ.u.mstances had been different.

But they weren't, and right now I had a rope ladder with my name on it waiting for me.

28.

CHLOE.

We both made it down the shaky rope ladder with no trouble, then began moving through the pitch-black tunnel toward the opposite end. We gripped hands and that connection with another person helped keep my panic level from going over the top.

"Claustrophobic?" she asked as the tunnel narrowed, then widened again.

"How did you guess?"

"Sweaty palms."

"Swell," I said. "Now you know all my secrets."

She laughed softly and I grinned into the darkness.

"I'm afraid of spiders," she said. "If a spider landed on me right now, I'd be able to tunnel up to the surface with my bare hands in three seconds flat."

I opened my mouth to speak but the deep rumbling freight train sound coming from the ground below our feet stopped me cold.

"Oh G.o.d," Karen said. "Not again."

Add fear of earthquakes to our list.

"Crouch down and cover your head." It was the only thing I could think of. "We'll ride it out."

I sounded so confident, so in control, that even I almost believed we would, but when you're afraid the ground beneath your feet was going to split apart like the Grand Canyon and take you with it, it was hard to believe in much of anything.

After what seemed like an eternity, the rumbling stopped and we cautiously stood up.

I carefully ran my fingers along the flimsy wooden supports overhead. "We'd better make a run for it," I said. "I'm not sure these supports can take another temblor."

"Great," Karen said. "Just when I thought we'd run out of things to worry about."

No such luck.

"Why aren't we moving?" she asked. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," I lied. "It's just-" I cleared my throat. "I think we got ourselves turned around when we stopped."

"We're lost?" Her voice rose with each word. "We're in a tunnel. How can you get lost in a tunnel?"

Good question.

"I'd flip a coin," she said, "but it's too dark to tell if it's heads or tails."

Which for some strange reason struck us both as hysterically funny, and we laughed until we were hanging on to each other for support.

The laughter stopped the second the earth started to move.