The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 1)

She rose from the hearth and went about the house slowly, with steady steps, turning on every light.

"All right," she said calmly, "if you come back, it will have to be in a blaze of illumination." But this was absurd, wasn't it? Something that could move the very waters of Richardson Bay could trip a circuit breaker easily enough.

But she wanted these lights on. She was scared. She went into the bedroom, locked the door behind her, locked the door of the closet, and closed the door of the bathroom, and then lay down, plumping the pillows under her head, and placing the gun within reach.

She lit a cigarette, knowing it was dreadful to smoke in bed, checked out the tiny winking red light on the smoke alarm, and then continued to smoke.

A ghost, she thought. Imagine it, I have seen one. I never believed in them, but I've seen one. It had to be a ghost. There's nothing else it could have been. But why did this ghost appear to me? Again, she saw its imploring expression, and the vividness of the experience returned to her.

It made her miserable suddenly that she couldn't reach Michael, that Michael was the only one in the whole world who might believe what had happened, that Michael was the only one she trusted enough to tell.

The fact was, she was excited; it was curiously like her feeling after the rescue that night. I have been through something awful and thrilling. She wanted to tell someone. She lay there, wide-eyed in the bright shadowless yellow light of the bedroom thinking, Why did it appear to me?

So curious the way it had walked across the deck and peered through the glass at her. "You would have thought I was the strange one."

And the excitement continued. But she was very relieved when the sun finally rose. Sooner or later, Michael would wake up out of his drunken sleep. He'd see the message light on his phone; and surely, he would call.

"And here I am wanting something from him again, reaching out to him right in the midst of whatever is happening there, needing him ... "

But now she was drifting off, in the warm sweet safety of the sunlight pouring through the glass, snuggling into the warm pillows and pulling the patchwork quilt over her, thinking about him, about the dark fleecy hair on the backs of his arms and his hands, about his large eyes again peering at her through the glasses. And only on the cusp of dream did she think, Could this ghost possibly have something to do with him?

The visions. She wanted to say, "Michael, is it something to do with the visions?" Then the dream swung into absurdity, and she wakened, resisting the irrelevance and the grotesqueness as she always did, consciousness being so much better, thinking--of course, Slattery could fill in for her, and if Ellie existed somewhere she no longer cared whether Rowan went back to New Orleans, certainly, for we had to believe that, didn't we? That what was beyond this plane was infinitely better; and then she fell back into exhausted sleep again.

Nine

MICHAEL AWOKE ABRUPTLY, thirsting, and hot in the bed covers though the air in the room was quite cool. He was wearing his shorts and his shirt, cuffs unbuttoned, collar undone. He was also wearing his gloves.

A light burned at the end of the little carpeted corridor. Over the soft engulfing roar of the air conditioner, he heard what sounded like the rustle of papers.

Good heavens, where am I? he thought. He sat up. At the end of the little hallway, there appeared to be a parlor, and a baby grand piano of pale and lustrous wood standing against a bank of flowered drapes. His suite at the Pontchartrain Hotel, it had to be.

He had no memory of coming here. And he was instantly angry with himself for having gotten so drunk. But then the euphoria of the earlier evening returned to him, the vision of the house on First Street beneath the violet sky.

I'm in New Orleans, he thought. And he felt a surge of happiness which effaced all his present confusion and guilt. "I'm home," he whispered. "Whatever else I've done, I'm home."

But how had he managed to get into this hotel? And who was in the parlor? The Englishman. His last clear memory was of speaking to the Englishman in front of the First Street house. And with that little recollection came another: he saw the brown-haired man behind the black iron fence again, staring down at him. He saw the glittering eyes only a few feet above him, and the strangely white and impassive face. A curious feeling passed over him. It wasn't fear precisely. It was more purely visceral. His body tensed as it might against a threat.

How could that man have changed so little over the years? How could he have been there one minute and gone the next?

It seemed to Michael that he knew the answers to these questions, that he'd always understood the man was no ordinary man. But his sudden familiarity with such a completely unfamiliar notion almost made him laugh.

"You're losing it, buddy." he whispered.

But he had to get his bearings now, in this strange place, and find out what the Englishman wanted, and why he was still here.

Quickly he surveyed the room. Yes, the old hotel. A feeling of comfort and security came to him as he saw the slightly faded carpet, the painted air conditioner beneath the windows, and the heavy old-fashioned telephone sitting on the small inlaid desk with its message light pulsing in the darkness.

The door of the bath stood open revealing a dim slash of white tile.

To his left, the closet, and his suitcase, opened on its stand, and wonder of wonders, on the table beside him an ice bucket, beaded over beautifully with tiny drops of moisture, and crammed into the ice three tall cans of Miller's beer.

"Well, isn't that just about perfect?"

He removed his right glove and touched one of the beer cans. Immediate flash of a uniformed waiter, same old load of distracting, irrelevant information. He put the glove back on and opened the can. He drank down half of it in deep cold swallows. Then he climbed to his feet and went into the bathroom and pissed.

Even in the soft morning light coming through the slatted blinds, he could see his shaving kit laid out on the marble dresser. He took out his

toothbrush and toothpaste and brushed his teeth.

Now he felt a little less headachy, hung over, and downright miserable. He combed his hair, swallowed the rest of the can of beer, and felt almost good.

He changed into a fresh shirt, pulled on his trousers, and taking another beer from the ice bucket, he went down the hallway and stood looking into a large, elegantly furnished room. Beyond a gathering of velvet couches and chairs, the Englishman sat at a small wooden table, bent over a mass of manila folders and typewritten pages. He was a slightly built man with a heavily lined face and rather luxuriant white hair. He wore a gray velvet smoking jacket, tied at the waist, and gray tweed trousers, and he was looking at Michael with an extremely friendly and agreeable expression.

He rose to his feet.

"Mr. Curry, are you feeling better?" he asked. It was one of those eloquent English voices which make the simplest words take on new meaning, as if they've never been properly pronounced before. He had small yet brilliant blue eyes.

"Who are you?" Michael asked.

The Englishman drew closer, extending his hand.

Michael didn't take it, though it hurt him to be this rude to somebody who looked so friendly and earnest and sort of nice. He took another sip of the beer.

"My name's Aaron Lightner," the Englishman said. "I came from London to see you." Softly spoken, unobtrusive.

"My aunt told me that part. I saw you hanging around my house on Liberty Street. Why the hell did you follow me here?"

"Because I want to talk to you, Mr. Curry," the man said politely, almost reverentially. "I want to talk to you so badly that I'm willing to risk any discomfort or inconvenience I might incur. That I've risked your displeasure is obvious. And I'm sorry for it, truly sorry. I only meant to be helpful in bringing you here, and please allow me to point out that you were entirely cooperative at the time."

"Was I?" Michael found he was bristling. Yet this guy was a real charmer, he had to give him that. But another glance at the papers spread out on the table made Michael furious. For fifty bucks, or considerably less, the cab driver would have lent him a hand. And the cab driver wouldn't be here now.

"That's quite true," said Lightner in the same soft, well-tempered voice. "And perhaps I should have retired to my own suite above, but I wasn't certain whether or not you'd be ill, and frankly I was worried on another count."