The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 1)

It was the same infallible sense she'd had that day out on the ocean when she'd hoisted the drowned man, Michael Curry, onto the deck with the winch, and touched his cold gray flesh. Yes, there is life in there. Bring him back.

The drowned man. Michael Curry. That was it, of course, that was what she had made a note to remember. Call Curry's doctor, Curry's doctor had left a message for her both at the hospital and on her machine at home.

It had been over three months since that bitter cold evening in May, with the fog blanketing the distant city so that not a single light was visible, and the drowned man on the deck of the Sweet Christine had looked as dead as any corpse she'd ever seen.

She stubbed out the cigarette. "Good night, Doctors," she said rising. "Monday, eight o'clock," she said to the interns. "No, don't stand up."

Dr. Larkin caught her sleeve between two fingers. When she tried to pull loose, he held tight.

"Don't take that boat out alone, Rowan."

"Come on, Chief." She tried to free herself. Didn't work. "I've been taking that boat out alone since I was sixteen."

"Bad news, Rowan, bad news," he said. "Suppose you hit your head out there, fall overboard."

She gave a soft polite laugh, though she was in fact irritated by this talk, and then she was out the door, heading past the elevators--too slow--and towards the concrete stairs.

Maybe she should take one last look at the three patients in Intensive Care before she made her exit; and suddenly the thought of leaving at all oppressed her. The thought of not coming back until Monday was even worse.

Shoving her hands in her pockets, she hurried up the two flights of stairs to the fourth floor.

The gleaming upper corridors were so quiet, so removed from the mayhem inevitably going on in Emergency. A lone woman slept on the couch in the darkly carpeted waiting room. The old nurse at the ward station only waved as Rowan passed by. There had been times in her harried intern days when, on call, she had strolled these corridors in the middle of the night rather than try to sleep. Back and forth she'd walked, covering the length of one floor after another, in the belly of the giant submarine, lulled by the faint whisper of countless machines.

Too bad the chief knew about the Sweet Christine, she thought now, too bad that desperate and frightened, she'd brought him home with her the afternoon of her adoptive mother's funeral, and taken him out to sit on the deck, drinking wine beneath a blue Tiburon sky. Too bad that in those hollow and metallic moments, she had confessed to Lark that she didn't want to be in the house anymore, that she lived on the boat, and sometimes lived for it, taking it out alone after every shift, no matter how long she'd been on, no matter how tired she was.

Telling people--did it ever make things better? Lark had piled cliche upon cliche as he tried to comfort her. And from then on everybody at the hospital knew about the Sweet Christine. And she wasn't just Rowan the silent one, but Rowan the adopted one, the one whose family had died out in less than half a year, who went to sea in the big boat all alone. She had also become Rowan who would not accept Lark's invitations to dinner, when any other single female doctor on the staff might have done so in an instant.

If only they knew the rest of it, she thought, how very mysterious she really was, even unto herself. And what would they have said about the men she liked, the stalwart officers of the law, and the heroes of the fire brigade hook and ladder trucks whom she hunted in noisy wholesome neighborhood bars, picking her partners as much for their roughened hands and their roughened voices as for their heavy chests and powerful arms. Yes, what about that, what about all those couplings in the lower cabin of the Sweet Christine with the police-issue .38 revolver in its black leather holster slung over the hook on the wall.

And the conversations after--no, call them monologues--in which these men with the desperate need so similar to that of the neurosurgeon's relived their moments of danger and achievement, of moxie and dexterity. Scent of courage on their pressed uniform shirts. Sing a song of life and death.

Why that kind of man? Graham had once demanded. "You look for them to be dumb, uneducated, thick-necked? What if one of them puts his meaty fist into your face?"

"But that's just it," she'd said coldly, not even bothering to look at him. "They don't do that. They save lives, and that's why I like them. I like heroes."

"That sounds like a fool of a fourteen-year-old girl talking," Graham had replied acidly.

"You've got it wrong," Rowan had answered. "When I was fourteen I thought lawyers like you were the heroes."

Bitter flash of his eyes as he'd turned away from her. Bitter flash of Graham now, over a year after Graham's death. Taste of Graham, smell of Graham, Graham in her bed finally, because Graham would have left before Ellie's death if she hadn't done it.

"Don't tell me you haven't always wanted it," he'd said to her in the deep feather mattress in the bunk of the Sweet Christine. "Damn your fire fighters; damn your cops."

Stop arguing with him. Stop thinking about him. Ellie never knew you went to bed with him, or why you thought you had to. So much that Ellie never knew. And you are not in Ellie's house. You're not even on the boat Graham gave you. You're still safe here in the antiseptic quiet of your world, and Graham is dead and buried in the little graveyard in northern California. And never mind how he died, because nobody knows the story on that, either. Don't let him be there in spirit, as they say, when you put the key into the ignition of his car, which you ought to have sold long ago, or when you walk into the damp chilly rooms of his house.

Yet she still talked to him, still carried on the endless case for the defense. His death had prevented forever any real resolution. And so a ghost of him had been created by her hatred and her rage. It was fading, yet it still stalked her, even here in the safe hallways of her own domain.

I'll take the other ones any day, she had wanted so to say to him, I'll take them with their ego and their rambunctiousness, and their ignorance and their rollicking sense of humor; I'll take their roughness, their heated and simple love of women and fear of women, I'll even take their talk, yes, their endless talk, and thank God that, unlike the neurosurgeons, they don't want me to say anything back to them, they don't even want to know who I am or what I am, might as well say rocket scientist, master spy, magician, as say neurosurgeon. "You don't mean you operate on people's brains!"

What did it matter, all this?

The fact is, Rowan understood "the man question" a little better now than in those days when Graham argued with her. She understood the connection between herself and her uniformed heroes--that going into the Operating Room, and slipping on those sterile gloves, and lifting the microcoagulator and the microscalpel, was like going into a burning building, was like going into a family fight with a gun to save the wife and the child.

How many times had she heard neurosurgeons compared to fire fighters? And then the slick criticism, but it's different because your life is not at stake. The hell it isn't. Because if you failed in there, if you failed horribly enough and often enough, you'd be destroyed as surely as if the burning roof had come down on you. You survived by being brilliant and courageous and perfect, because there was simply no other way to survive, and every moment in the Operating Room was a mortal test.

Yes, the same courage, the same love of stress and love of danger for a good reason that she saw in the crude men she loved to kiss and stroke and suckle; the men she liked to have on top of her; the men who didn't need for her to talk.

But what was the use of understanding, when it had been months--almost half a year--since she'd invited anyone into her bed. What did the Sweet Christine think about it? she sometimes wondered. Was it whispering to her in the dark: "Rowan, where are our men?"

Chase, the yellow-haired olive-skinned palomino cop from Marin, still left messages for her on the answering machine. But she had no time to call him. And he was such a sweet guy, and he did read books, too, and they had talked once, a real conversation, in fact, w

hen she'd made some offhand remark about the Emergency Room, and the woman who'd been shot by her husband. He'd latched onto that at once with his string of shootings and stabbings and pretty soon they were going at them all from two sides. Maybe that was why she hadn't called him back? A possibility.

But on the face of it, the neurosurgeon had for the moment subsumed the woman quite completely, so much so that she wasn't sure why she was even thinking about those men tonight. Unless it was because she wasn't all that tired, or because the last beautiful male she'd lusted after had been Michael Curry, the gorgeous drowned man, gorgeous even when he lay there, wet and pale, black hair plastered to his head, on the deck of her boat.

Yes. He was, in the old school-girl parlance, to die for, a hunk--just an out-and-out adorable guy and her kind of adorable guy completely. His had not been one of those California gymnasium bodies with overdeveloped muscles and phony tans, topped off with dyed hair, but a powerful proletarian specimen, rendered all the more irresistible by the blue eyes and the freckles across his cheeks which made her, in retrospect, want to kiss them.

What an irony to fish from the sea, in a state of tragic helplessness, such a perfect example of the only kind of man she had ever desired.

She stopped. She had reached the doors of the Intensive Care Unit. Entering quietly, she stood still for a moment, surveying this strange, icy-still world of fish tank rooms with emaciated sleepers on display beneath oxygen tent plastic, their fragile limbs and torsos hooked to beeping monitors, amid endless cables and dials.

A switch was suddenly thrown in Rowan's head. Nothing existed outside this ward any more than anything existed outside of an Operating Room.

She approached the desk, her hand out to very lightly touch the shoulder of the nurse who sat hunched over a mass of papers beneath the low fluorescent light.

"Good evening, Laurel," Rowan whispered.

The woman was startled. Then recognizing Rowan, she brightened. "Dr. Mayfair, you're still here."