The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 1)

"I'm surprised you haven't hit upon the obvious answer," she said, "the one that is so clear and so neat."

"What do you mean?"

"Maybe your purpose is simple. It's to kill me."

"God, how could you think of such a thing?" He drew closer to her, brushing her hair back out of her face, and gathering her near to him.

She looked at him as if from a long long distance away.

"Honey, listen to me," he said. "Anybody can take a human life. It's easy. Very easy. There are a million ways. You know ways I don't know because you're a doctor. That woman, Carlotta, small as she was, she killed a man strong enough to strangle her with one hand. When I sleep next to any woman, she can kill me if she wants to. You know that. A scalpel, a hat pin, a bit of lethal poison. It's easy. And we don't do those things, nothing on earth can make most of us ever even think of them, and that's how it's been all your life with you. And now you find you've got a mutant power, something that exceeds the laws of choice and impulse and self-control, something that calls for a more subtle understanding, and you have that understanding. You have the strength to know your own strength."

She nodded; but she was still shaking all over. And he could tell that she didn't believe him. And in a way, he wasn't sure he believed himself. What was the use of denying it? If she didn't control this power, she would inevitably use it again.

But there was something else he had to say, and it had to do with the visions and the power in his hands.

"Rowan," he said, "you asked me to take off the gloves the first night we met. To hold your hands. I've made love to you without the gloves. Just your body and my body, and our hands touching and my hands touching you all over, and what is it I see, Rowan? What do I feel? I feel goodness and I feel love."

He kissed her cheek. He kissed her hair and brought it back off her forehead with his hand.

"You're right in many things you've said, Rowan, but not in that. I'm not meant to hurt you. I owe my life to you." He turned her head towards him and kissed her, but she was still cold and trembling, and far far beyond his reach.

She took his hands and moved them down and away from her, gently, nodding, and then she kissed him gently, but she didn't want to be touched now. It didn't do any good.

He sat there for a while, thinking, looking at the long ornate room. Looking at the high mirrors in their dark carved frames, and the dusty old Bozendorfer piano at the far end, and the draperies like long streaks of faded color in the gloom.

Then he climbed to his feet. He couldn't sit still any longer. He paced the floor in front of the couch, and found himself at the side window, looking out over the dusty screen porch.

"What did you say a moment ago?" he asked, turning around. "You said something about passivity and confusion. Well, this is it, Rowan, the confusion."

She didn't answer him. She was sitting crouched there, staring at the floor.

He went back to her and gathered her up, off the couch and into his arms. Her cheeks were still splotched with pink, and very pale. Her lashes were dark and long as she looked down.

He pressed his lips against her mouth softly, feeling no resistance, almost no awareness, as if it were the mouth of someone unconscious or deep asleep. Then slowly she came back to life. She slipped her hands up around his neck, and kissed him back.

"Rowan, there is a pattern," he whispered in her ear. "There is a great web and we're in it, but I believe now as I believed then, they were good, the people who brought us together. And what they want of me is good. I gotta figure it out, Rowan. I have to. But I know it's good. Just as I know that you are good, too."

He heard her sigh against him, felt the lift of her warm breasts against his chest. When at last she slipped away, it was with great tenderness, kissing his fingers as she let them go.

She walked out towards the center of the long room. She stood under the high broad archway that divided the space into two parlors, and she looked up at the beautiful carving in the plaster, and at the way the arch curved down to meet the cornices at either end. She seemed to be studying this, to be lost in contemplating the house.

He felt bruised and quiet. The whole exchange had hurt him. He couldn't shake a feeling of misery and suspicion, though it was not suspicion of her.

"Who gives a damn!" she whispered as if she were talking to herself, but she seemed fragile and uncertain.

The dusty sunlight crept in from the screened porch and showed the amber wax on the old boards. The motes of dust swirled around her.

"Talk, talk, talk," she said. "The next move is theirs. You've done everything you could. And so have I. And here we are. And let them come to us."

"Yes, let them come."

She turned to him, inviting him silently to draw closer, her face imploring and almost sad. A split second of dread shocked him, and left him empty. The love he felt for her was so precious to him, and yet he was afraid, actually afraid.

"What are we going to do, Michael?" she said. And suddenly she smiled, a very beautiful and warm smile.

He laughed softly. "I don't know, honey." He shrugged and shook his head. "I don't know."

"You know what I want from you right now?"

"No. But whatever it is, you can have it."

She reached out for his hand. "Tell me about this house," she said, looking up into his eyes. "Tell me everything you know about a house like this, and tell me if it really can be saved."

"Honey, it's just waiting for that, just waiting. It's solid as any castle in Montcleve or Donnelaith."

"Could you do it? I don't mean with your own hands ... "

"--I'd love to do it with my own hands." He looked at them suddenly, these wretched gloved hands. How long since he'd held a hammer and nails, or the handle of a saw, or laid a plane to wood. And then he looked up at the painted arch above them, at the long sweep of the ceiling with its fractured and peeling paint. "Oh, how I'd love to," he said.

"What if you had carte blanche, what if you could hire anybody and everybody you wanted--plasterers, painters, roofers, people to bring it all back, to restore every nook and cranny ... "

Her words went on, slow yet exuberant. But he knew everything she was saying, he understood. And he wondered if she could possibly understand all that it really meant to him. To work on a house like this had always been his greatest dream, but it wasn't merely a house like this, it was this house. And back and back he traveled in memory, until he was a boy again, outside at the gate, a boy who went off to the library to pull down off the shelves the old picture books which had this house inside them, this very room and that hallway, because he never dreamed he would see these rooms except in books.

And in the vision the woman had said, converging upon this very moment in time, in this house, in this crucial moment when ...

"Michael? You want to do it?"

Through a veil, he saw her face had lighted up like the face of a child. But she seemed so far away, so brilliant and happy and far away.

Is that you, Deborah?

"Michael, take off the gloves," Rowan said, her sudden sharpness startling him. "Go back to work! Go back to being you. For fifty years nobody's been happy in this house, nobody's loved in this house, nobody's won! It's time for us to love here and to win here, it's time for us to win the house back itself. I knew that when I finished the File on the Mayfair Witches. Michael, this is our house."

But you can alter ... Never think for a moment that you do not have the power, for the power derives from ...

"Michael, answer me."

Alter what? Don't leave me like this. Tell me!

But they were gone, just as if they'd never come near, and here he stood, with Rowan, in the sunshine and on the warm amber-colored floor, and she was waiting for him to answer.

And the house waited, the beautiful house, beneath its layers of rust and soil, beneath its shadows and its tangled ragged vines, and in its heat and its dampness, it waited.

"Oh, yes, honey, yes," he said as if waking

from a dream, his senses flooded suddenly with the fragrance of the honeysuckle on the screens, and the singing of the birds outside, and the warmth of the sun itself coming in on them.

He turned around in the middle of the long room. "The light, Rowan, we have to let in the light. Come on," he said, taking her hand. "Let's see if these old shutters still open."

Thirty-one

QUIETLY, REVERENTLY, THEY began to explore the house. At first it was as if they had crept away from the guards in a museum, and dared not abuse their accidental freedom.

They were too respectful to touch the personal belongings of those who had once lived here. A coffee cup lying on a glass table in the sun room. A magazine folded on a chair.