The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 1)

But was this his Deborah, the woman he had seen in the visions? He didn't know. No shock of recognition came to him no matter how long he studied it.

Taking off the gloves and handling it yielded nothing, only the maddeningly meaningless images of intermediaries and incidental persons he had come by now to expect. And as he sat on the couch holding the photograph, he knew it would have been the same had he touched the old oil painting itself.

"What do you want of me?" he whispered.

Out of innocence and out of time, the dark-haired girl smiled back at him. A stranger. Caught forever in her brief and desperate girlhood. Fledgling witch and nothing more.

But somebody had told him something this afternoon when Beatrice's hand had touched his! Somebody had used the power for some purpose. Or was it simply his own inner voice?

He put aside his gloves, as he was accustomed to do now when alone here, and picked up his pen and his notebook, and began to write.

"Yes, it was a small constructive use of the power, I think. Because the images were subordinate to the message. I'm not sure that ever happened before, not even the day I touched the jars. The messages were mingled with the images, and Lasher was speaking to me directly, but it was mixed together. This was quite something else."

And what if he were to touch Ryan's hand tonight at dinner, when they all gathered around the candlelighted table in the Caribbean Room downstairs? What would the inner voice tell him? For the first time, he found himself eager to use the power. Perhaps because this little experiment with Beatrice had turned out so well.

He had liked Beatrice. He had seen perhaps what he wanted to see. An ordinary human being, a part of the great wave of the real which meant so much to him and to Rowan.

"Married by November 1. God, I have to call Aunt Viv. She'll be so disappointed if I don't call."

He put the photograph on Rowan's bedside table for her to see.

There was a lovely flower there, a white flower that looked like a familiar lily, yet somehow different. He picked it up, examining it, trying to figure why it looked so strange, and then he realized it was much longer than any lily he'd ever seen, and its petals seemed unusually fragile.

Pretty. Rowan must have picked it when she was walking back from the house. He went into the bathroom, filled a glass with water, and put the lily in it, and brought it back to the table.

He didn't remember about touching Ryan's hand until the dinner was long over and he was alone upstairs again, with his books. He was glad he hadn't done it. The dinner had been too much fun, what with young Pierce regaling them with old legends of New Orleans--all the lore he remembered but which Rowan had never heard--and entertaining little anecdotes about the various cousins, all of it loosely strung together in a natural and beguiling way. But Pierce's mother, Gifford, a trim, beautifully groomed brunette, and also a Mayfair by birth, had stared at him and Rowan fearfully and silently throughout the meal, and talked almost not at all.

And of course the whole dinner was, for him, another one of those secretly satisfying moments--comparing this night to the event of his boyhood when Aunt Viv had come from San Francisco to visit his mother, and he had dined in a real restaurant--the Caribbean Room--for the very first time.

And to think, Aunt Viv would be here before the end of next week. She was confused, but she was coming. What a load off his mind.

He'd sock her away in some nice comfortable condominium on St. Charles Avenue--one of the new brick town houses with the pretty mansard roofs and the French windows. Something right on the Mardi Gras parade route so she could watch from her balcony. In fact, he ought to be scanning the want ads now. She could take cabs anywhere she had to go. And then he'd break it to her very gently that he wanted her to stay down here, that he didn't want to go back to California, that the house on Liberty Street wasn't home to him anymore.

About midnight, he left his architecture books and went into the bedroom. Rowan was just switching off the light.

"Rowan," he said, "if you saw that thing you'd tell me, wouldn't you?"

"What are you talking about, Michael?"

"If you saw Lasher, you'd tell me. Right away."

"Of course I would," she said. "Why would you even ask me that? Why don't you put away the picture books and come to bed?"

He saw that the picture of Deborah had been propped up behind the lamp. And the pretty white lily in the water glass was standing in front of the picture.

"Lovely, wasn't she?" Rowan said. "I don't suppose there is a way in the world to get the Talamasca to part with the original painting."

"I don't know," he said. "Probably not likely. But you know that flower is really remarkable. This afternoon, when I put it in the glass, I could swear it had only a single bloom, and now there are three large blooms, look at it. I must not have noticed the buds."

She looked puzzled. She reached out, took the flower carefully from the water and studied it. "What kind of lily is it?" she asked.

"Well, it's kind of like what we used to call an Easter lily, but they don't bloom at this time of year. I don't know what it is. Where did you get it?"

"Me? I've never seen it before."

"I assumed you'd picked it somewhere."

"No, I didn't."

Their eyes met. She was the first to look away, raising her eyebrows slowly, and then giving a little tilt to her head. She put the lily back in the glass. "Maybe a little gift from someone."

"Why don't I throw it away?" he said.

"Don't get upset, Michael. It's just a flower. He's full of little tricks, remember?"

"I'm not upset, Rowan. It's just that it's already withering. Look at it, it's turning brown, and it looks weird. I don't like it."

"All right," she said, very calmly. "Throw it away." She smiled. "But don't worry about anything!"

"Of course not. What is there to worry about? Just a three-hundred-year-old demon with a mind of his own, who can make flowers fly through the air. Why shouldn't I be overjoyed about a strange lily popping up out of nowhere? Hell, maybe he did it for Deborah. What a nice thing to do."

He turned and stared at the photograph again. Like a hundred Rembrandt subjects, his dark-haired Deborah appeared to be looking right back at him.

He was startled by Rowan's soft little laugh. "You know, you are cute when you're angry," she said. "But there's probably a perfectly good explanation for how the flower got here."

"Yeah, that's what they always say in the movies," he said. "And the audience knows they're crazy."

He took the lily into the bathroom and dropped it into the trash. It really was withering. No waste, wherever the hell it came from, he figured.

She was waiting for him when he came out, her arms folded, looking very serene and inviting. He forgot all about his books in the living room.

The next evening he walked over alone to First Street. Rowan was out with Cecilia and Clancy Mayfair, making the rounds of the city's fashionable malls.

The house was hushed and empty when he got there. Even Eugenia was out tonight, with her two boys and their children. He had it all to himself.

Though the work was progressing wonderfully, there were still ladders and drop cloths virtually everywhere. The windows were still bare, and it was too soon to clean them. The long shutters, removed for sanding and painting, lay side by side like great long planks on the grass.

He went into the parlor, stared for a long time at his own shadowy reflection in the mirror over the first fireplace, the tiny red light of his cigarette like a firefly in the dark.

A house like this is never quiet, he thought. Even now he could hear a low singing of creaks and snaps in the rafters and the old floors. You could have sworn someone was walking upstairs, if you didn't know better. Or that far back in the kitchen, someone had just closed a door. And that funny noise, it was like a baby crying, far far away.

But nobody else was here. This wasn't the first night he'd slipped away to test the house and test hi

mself. And he knew it wouldn't be the last.

Slowly he walked back through the dining room, through the shadowy kitchen and out the French doors. A flood of soft light bathed the night around him, pouring from the lanterns on the freshly restored cabana, and from the underwater lights of the pool. It shone on the neatly trimmed hedges and trees, and on the cast-iron furniture, all sanded and newly painted, and arranged in little groups on the clean-swept flagstones.

The pool itself was completely restored, and filled to the brim. Very glamorous it seemed, the long rectangle of deep blue water, rippling and shining in the dusk.

He knelt down and put his hand in the water. A little too hot really for this early September weather, which was no cooler than August when you got right down to it. But good for swimming now in the dark.

A thought occurred to him. Why not go into the pool now? It seemed wrong somehow without Rowan--that the first splash was one of those moments that ought to be shared. But what the hell? Rowan was having a good time, no doubt, with Cecilia and Clancy. And the water was so tempting. He hadn't swum in a pool in years.

He glanced back up at the few lighted windows scattered throughout the dark violet wall of the house. Nobody to see him. Quickly he peeled off his coat, shirt and trousers, his shoes and his socks. He stripped off his shorts. And walking to the deep end, he dove in without another thought.