The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 1)

"She knew I was going to do it to her. She foresaw it, and then she calculatedly provoked me. I could swear she did."

"Why?"

"Part of her scheme. I go back and forth thinking about it. Maybe she meant to break me, break my confidence. She always used guilt to hurt Deirdre, and she used it probably with Antha. But I'm not going to get drawn into the lengthy pondering of her scheme. This is the wrong thing for us to do now, talk about them and what they want--Lasher, the visions, that old woman--they've drawn a bunch of circles for us and I don't want to walk in circles."

"Yeah, do I ever know what you mean."

He let go of her eyes slowly, and rummaged in his pocket for his cigarettes. Three left. He offered her one, but she shook her head. She was watching him.

"Some day, we can sit at the table," she said, "drink white wine together, beer, whatever, and talk about them. Talk about Petyr van Abel, and about Charlotte, and about Julien and all that. But not now. Now I want to separate the worthy from the unworthy, the substantial from the mystical. And I wish you would do the same thing."

"I follow you," he said. He searched for his matches. Ah, no matches. Gave them to that old man.

She slipped her hand in her pants pocket, drew out a slender gold lighter, and lighted his cigarette.

"Thanks," he said.

"Whenever we do focus on them," she said, "the effect is always the same. We become passive and confused."

"You're right," he said. He was thinking about all the time he'd spent in the darkened bedroom on Liberty Street, trying to remember, trying to understand. But here he was in this house at last and except for two instances last night--when he'd touched Townsend's remains and when he'd touched the emerald--he hadn't removed the gloves. The mere thought of it scared him. Touching the door frames and the tables and the chairs that had belonged to the Mayfairs, touching the older things, the trunk of dolls in the attic, which Rowan had described to him, and the jars, those stinking jars ...

"We become passive and confused," she said again, commanding his attention, "and we don't think for ourselves, which is exactly what we must do."

"I agree with you," he said. "I only wish I had your calmness. I wish I could know all these half truths and not go spinning off into the darkness trying to figure things out."

"Don't be a pawn in somebody's game," she said. "Find the attitude which gives you the maximum strength and the maximum dignity, no matter what else is going on."

"You mean strive to be perfect," he said.

"What?"

"You said in California that you thought we should all aim to be perfect."

"Yes, I did, didn't I? Well, I believe that. I'm trying to figure the perfect thing to do. So don't act like I'm a freak if I don't burst into tears, Michael. Don't think I don't know what I did to Karen Garfield or Dr. Lemle, or that little girl. I know. I really do."

"I didn't mean--"

"Oh, yeah, you did too," she said with slight sharpness. "Don't like me better when I cry than when I don't."

"Rowan, I didn't--"

"I cried for a year before I met you. I started crying when Ellie died. And then I cried in your arms. I cried when the call came from New Orleans that Deirdre was dead, and I'd never even known her or spoken to her or laid eyes on her. I cried and I cried. I cried when I saw her in the coffin yesterday. I cried for her last night. And I cried for that old woman, too. Well, I don't want to go on crying. What I have here is the house, the family, and the history Aaron has given me. I have you. A real chance with you. And what is there to cry about, I'd like to know."

She was glaring at him, obviously sizzling with anger and with the conflict in herself, gray eyes flashing at him in the half light.

"You're gonna make me cry, Rowan, if you don't stop," he said.

She laughed in spite of herself. Her face softened beautifully, her mouth twisting unwillingly into a smile.

"All right," she said. "And there is one thing more that could make me cry. I should tell you that, in order to be perfectly truthful. And that is ... I'd cry if I lost you."

"Good," he whispered. He kissed her quickly before she could stop him.

She made a little gesture for him to sit back, to stay serious, and to listen. He nodded and shrugged.

"Tell me--what do you want to do? I mean what do you want to do? I'm not talking about what these beings want you to do. What's inside you now?"

"I want to stay here," he said. "I wish to hell I hadn't stayed away so long. I don't know why I did."

"OK, now you're talking," she said. "You're talking about something real."

"No doubt about it," he said. "I've been walking--back there, in the old streets, where I grew up. It's not the old neighborhood now. It was never beautiful, but it's squalid and ruined and ... all gone."

He saw the concern in her eyes immediately.

"Yeah, well it's changed," he said with a little weary and accepting gesture. "But New Orleans never was just that neighborhood to me. It was, never Annunciation Street. It was here, the Garden District, and it was uptown, it was down in the French Quarter, it was all the other beautiful parts. And I love it. And I'm glad I'm back here. I don't want to leave again."

"OK," she said. She smiled, the light glinting on the curve of her cheek and the edge of her mouth.

"You know, I kept thinking, I'm home. I'm home. And no matter what does happen with all the rest--I don't want to leave home."

"The hell with them, Michael," she said. "The hell with them, whoever they are, until they give us some reason to feel otherwise."

"Well put," he said. He smiled.

How mysterious she was, such a baffling mixture of sharpness and softness. Maybe his mistake was that he had always confused strength and coldness in women. Maybe most men did.

"They'll come to us again," she said. "They have to. And when they do, then we'll think and we'll decide what to do."

"Yeah, right," he said. And what if I took off the gloves? Would they come to me now?

"But we're not holding our breath until then."

"No." He gave a little laugh.

He grew quiet, filled with excitement, and yet filled with worry though every word she spoke gladdened him and made him feel that this anxiety would lift any second.

He found himself looking off to the mirror at the far end of the room, and seeing their tiny reflection there, and the repeated chandeliers, caught in the two mirrors, marching on, countless, in a blur of silver light, to eternity.

"Do you like loving me?" she asked.

"What?"

"Do you

like it?" Her voice had a decided tremor in it for the first time.

"Yeah, I love loving you. But it's scary, because you aren't like anyone else I've ever known. You're so strong."

"Yes, I am," she said thickly. "Because I could kill you right now if I wanted to. All your manly strength wouldn't do you any good."

"No, that isn't what I meant," he said. He turned and looked at her, and for one moment in the shadows her face looked unspeakably cold and cunning, with her eyelids at half mast, and her eyes gleaming. She looked malicious the way she had for one instant in the house in Tiburon in the cold light coming through the glass into a darkened room.

She sat up slowly, with a soft rustle of cloth, and he found himself shrinking from her, instinctively, every hair standing on end. It was the hard wariness you feel when you see a snake in the grass two inches from your shoe, or you realize the man on the next bar stool has just turned towards you and opened a switchblade knife.

"What the hell's the matter with you?" he whispered.

But then he saw. He saw she was shaking and her cheeks were blotched with pink yet deathly white, and her hands reached out for him and then shrank back and she looked at them and then clasped them together, as if trying to contain something unspeakable. "God, I didn't even hate Karen Garfield," she whispered. "I didn't! So help me God, I ... "

"No, it was all a mistake," he said, "a terrible mistake, and you won't ever make that mistake again."

"No, never," she said. "Even with that old woman, I swear, I didn't really believe it."

Desperately he wanted to help her but he didn't know what to do. She was quivering like a flame in the shadows, her teeth stabbing her lower lip, her right hand clenching her own left hand cruelly.

"Stop, honey, stop--you're hurting yourself," he said. But she felt like something made of steel, unbending, when he touched her.

"I swear, I didn't believe it. It's like an impulse, you know and you don't really believe you can possibly ... I was so angry with Karen Garfield. It was outrageous, her coming there, her walking into Ellie's house, so stupidly outrageous!"

"I know, I understand."

"What do I do to neutralize it? Does it come back inside me and burn me from within?"

"No."

She turned away from him, drawing up her knees and peering out into the room dully, a little calmer now, though her eyes were unnaturally wide, and her fingers were still working anxiously.