The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 1)

She nodded. "You have to tell me everything about these other people," she said. But she also said without words, Do you know how much I love you and desire you?

She turned sideways in the chair, the better to face him. She rubbed the back of her arms, again, and hung the heel of her shoe on the chair rung. Looking up at him, she saw his hips again, the slant of his belt, the shirt tight across his chest. She couldn't stop wanting him physically. Best to get it over with, wasn't it? Oh, all right, let's eat all this delicious ice cream just to get rid of it. And so you can tell me what you're talking about with all this, and I can tell you. About the man on the plane. And the old woman's question. Was it better than a mortal man?

His face darkened as he looked at her. Loved her. Yes. This man, just the best man she had ever known or touched or wanted ever. What would all this have been like without him?

"Michael, talk straight to me, please," she said.

"Oh, yeah. But Rowan, don't freak out on me. Just listen to what I have to say."

He picked up one of the dining room chairs from along the wall, swung it around so that the back faced her, and straddled it cowboy style, folding his arms on the back of it, as he looked at her. That was pornographic too.

"For the last two days," he said, "I've been holed up about sixty miles from here, reading the history of the Mayfair family compiled by these people."

"The Talamasca."

He nodded. "Now, let me explain to you. Three hundred years ago, there was this man named Petyr van Abel. His father had been a famous surgeon at the University of Leiden in Holland. There are books still in existence that were written by this doctor, Jan van Abel.

"I know who he is," she said. "He was an anatomist."

He smiled and shook his head. "Well, he's your ancestor, babe. You look like his son. At least that's what Aaron says. Now when Jan van Abel died, Petyr was orphaned and he became a member of the Talamasca. He could read minds, he could see ghosts. He was what other people might have called a witch, but the Talamasca gave him shelter. Eventually, he went to work for them, and part of his work was saving people accused in other countries of witchcraft. And if they had real gifts, you know, the gifts that I have and you have and Petyr van Abel had, well, he would help those people to reach the Motherhouse of the Talamasca in Amsterdam.

"Now, this Petyr van Abel went to Scotland to try to intervene in the trial of a witch named Suzanne Mayfair. But he came too late, and all he was able to do, which was plenty as it turned out, was take her daughter Deborah away from the town where she might eventually have been burnt too, and bring her to Holland. But before he did, he saw this man, this spirit. He saw too that the child Deborah saw it, and Petyr conjectured that Deborah had made it appear, which proved to be accurate.

"Deborah didn't stay with the order. Eventually she seduced Petyr, and by him had a child named Charlotte. Charlotte went to the New World and it was she who founded the Mayfair family. But when Deborah died in France, a convicted witch, that brown-haired man, that spirit, went to Charlotte. So did this emerald necklace that is lying right here in this box. It passed along with the spirit, to Charlotte.

"All the Mayfairs since are Charlotte's descendants. And in each generation of those descendants down to the present time at least one woman has inherited the powers of Suzanne and Deborah, which included, among other things, the ability to see this brown-haired man, this spirit. And they are what the Talamasca calls the Mayfair Witches."

She made a little sound, half amazement, half nervous amusement. She drew herself up in the chair, and watched the little changes in his face, as he silently sorted all the things he wanted to tell. Then she decided to say nothing.

"The Talamasca," he said, choosing his words with care. "They're scholars, historians. They've documented a thousand sightings of that brown-haired man in and around this house. Three hundred years ago in Saint-Domingue, when Petyr van Abel went there to talk to his daughter Charlotte, this spirit drove him mad. It eventually killed him."

He took another drag off the cigarette, eyes moving around the room again, but not seeing it this time, rather seeing something else, and then returning to her.

"Now as I explained before," he said, "I've seen that man since I was six years old. I saw him every time I ever passed this house. And unlike the countless people interviewed by the Talamasca over the years, I've seen him other places. But the point is ... the other night when I came back here, after all these years, I saw that man again. And when I told Aaron what I saw, when I told him that I'd been seeing that man since I was yea high, and when I told him that it was you who rescued me, well, then he showed me the Talamasca's file on the Mayfair Witches."

"He hadn't known I was the one who pulled you out of the ocean?"

Michael shook his head. "He'd come to San Francisco to see me because of my hands. That's their territory, so to speak, people who have special powers. It was routine. He was reaching out to me, as routinely perhaps as Petyr van Abel went to try to intervene in the execution of Suzanne Mayfair. And then he saw you outside my house. He saw you come to pick me up, and do you know he thought you'd hired me to come back here? He thought you'd hired a psychic to come back here and investigate your background."

He took a final drag off the cigarette and pitched it into the grate. "Well, for a while anyway, he thought that. Until I told him why you'd really come to see me, and how you'd never seen this house, or even seen a picture of it. But there you have it, you see.

"And what you have to do now is read the File on the Mayfair Witches. But there's more to it ... as far as I'm concerned, I mean more to it that has to do with me."

"The visions."

"Exactly." He smiled, his face warm and beautiful. "Exactly! Because you remember I told you I saw a woman and there was a jewel ... "

"And you're saying it's the emerald."

"I don't know, Rowan. I don't know. And then I do know. I know as surely as I know I'm sitting here that it was Deborah Mayfair I saw out there, Deborah, and she was wearing the emerald around her neck, and I was sent here to do something."

"To fight that spirit?"

He shook his head. "It's more complicated. That's why you have to read the File. And Rowan, you have to read it. You have to not be offended that such a file exists. You have to read it."

"What does the Talamasca get from all this?" she asked.

"Nothing," he answered. "To know. Yes, they'd like to know. They'd like to understand. It's like, you know, they're psychic detectives."

"And filthy rich, I suppose."

"Yeah," he said, nodding. "Filthy rich. Loaded."

"You're kidding."

"No, they've got money like you've got. They've got money like the Catholic Church has got. Like the Vatican. Look, it's got nothing to do with their wanting anything from you ... "

"OK, I believe it. It's just you're naive, Michael. You really are. You really are naive."

"What in the hell makes you say that, Rowan! Christ, where do you get the idea that I am naive! You said this before and this is really crazy!"

"Michael, you are. You really are. OK, tell me the truth, do you still believe that these visions were good? That these people who appeared to you were higher beings?"

"Yes, I do," he said.

"This black-haired woman, this convicted witch, as you called her, with the jewel was good ... the one who knocked you off the rock right into the Pacific Ocean where ... "

"Rowan, no one can prove a chain of controlled events like that! All I know ... "

"You saw this spirit man when you were six? Let me tell you something, Michael, this man is

not good. And you saw him here two nights ago? And this black-haired woman is not good either."

"Rowan, it's too early for you to make these interpretations."

"OK. All right. I don't want to make you mad. I don't want to make you angry even for one second. I'm so glad you're here, you can't know how glad I am that you're here, that you're here with me in this house, and you understand all this, that you're ... oh, it's a terrible thing to say, but I'm glad I'm not in it alone. And I want you here, that's the whole truth."

"I know, I understand, and the important thing is, I am here, and you aren't alone."

"But don't you make too many interpretations either. There is something terribly evil here, something I can feel like the evil in me. No, don't say anything. Just listen to me. There's something so bad that it could spill out and hurt lots of people. More than it's ever hurt in the past. And you're like some starry-eyed knight who just rode over the drawbridge out of the castle!"

"Rowan, that is not true."

"All right. OK. They didn't drown you out there. They didn't do that. And your knowing all these people, Rita Mae and Jerry Lonigan, it's all not connected."

"It's connected, but the question is, how is it connected? It's crucial not to jump to conclusions."

She turned back towards the table, resting her elbows on it and holding her head in her hands. She had no idea now what time it was. The night seemed quieter than before; now and then something in the house would snap or creak. But they were alone. Completely alone.

"You know," she said, "I think about that old woman, and it's like a cloud of evil descending on me. It was like walking with evil to be with her. And she thought she was the good one. She thought she was fighting the devil. It's tangled, but it's tangled even more obscurely than that."

"She killed Townsend," he said.

She turned and looked at him again. "You know that for sure?"

"I laid my hands on him. I felt the bone. She did it. She tied him up in that rug. He was maybe drugged at the time, I don't know. But he died in the rug, I know that much. He chewed a hole in it."

"Oh, God!" She closed her eyes, her imagination filling in the implications too vividly.

"And there were people in this house all the time and they couldn't hear him. They didn't know he was dying up there, or if they did they didn't do anything about it."