The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 1)

Her tender silky arm slid up around his neck as he gathered her to himself. He could hear her heart beating against him.

Long moments later, swinging perilously close to deep sleep, he sat up with a start, and groggily stripped off his hot clothes. Then he lay naked with her, except for the gloves, his limbs against her limbs, breathing her warmth and hearing her soft drowsy sigh like a kiss, as he fell to dreaming beside her.

"Rowan," he whispered. Yes, knew all about her, knew her.

They were downstairs. They said, Wake, Michael, come down. They had lighted a great fire in the fireplace. Or was it simply a fire around them, like a forest blazing? He thought he heard the sound of drums. Michael. Faint dream or memory of the Comus parade that long-ago winter night, of the bands beating the fierce, dreadful cadence while the flambeaux flickered on the branches of the oak trees. They were there, downstairs, all he had to do was wake up and go down. But for the first time in all these weeks since they'd left him, he didn't want to see them, he didn't want to remember.

He sat up, staring at the pale milky morning sky. He was sweating, and his heart was pounding.

Stillness; too early for the sun. He picked up his glasses and put them on.

There was no one in this house, no drums, no smell of fire. No one at all, except the two of them, but she was no longer in the bed at his side. He could hear the rafters and the pilings singing, but it was only the water making them sing. Then came a deep vibrant sound, more a tremor than a noise at all, and he knew it was the big cruiser rocking in its mooring. That ghastly leviathan saying I am here.

He sat for a moment, staring dully at the Spartan furnishings. All well made of the same beautiful fine grain wood he had seen downstairs. Someone lived here who loved fine wood, who loved things put together perfectly. Everything quite low in this room--the bed, the desk, the scattered chairs. Nothing to interrupt the view from the windows that rose all the way to the ceiling.

But he was smelling a fire. Yes, and when he listened carefully he could hear it. And a robe had been set out for him, a nice thick white terry-cloth robe, just the kind he loved.

He put on the robe and went down the stairs in search of her.

The fire was blazing, on that account he'd been right. But no horde of dream beings hovered around it. She sat alone, legs crossed, on the deep stone hearth, in a robe of her own, her thin limbs almost lost in its folds, and again she was shaking and crying.

"I'm sorry, Michael. I'm so sorry," she whispered in that deep velvety voice. Her face was streaked and weary.

"Now, honey, why would you say a thing like that?" he asked. He sat beside her, enfolding her in his arms. "Rowan, what in the world are you sorry for?"

In a rush her words came, spilling so fast he could scarcely follow--that she had placed this immense demand upon him, that she had wanted so to be with him, that the last few months had been the worst of her life, and that her loneliness had been almost unbearable.

Again and again he kissed her cheek.

"I like being with you," he said. "I want to be here. I don't want be anyplace in the world ... "

He stopped, he thought of the New Orleans plane. Well, that could wait. And awkwardly he tried to explained that he'd been trapped in the house on Liberty Street.

"I didn't come because I knew this would happen," she said, "and you were right, I wanted to know, I wanted you to touch my hand with your hands, to touch the kitchen floor, there, where he died, I wanted ... you see, I'm not what I appear to be ... "

"I know what you are," he said. "A very strong person for whom any admission of need is a terrible thing."

Silence. She nodded. "If only that were all of it," she said. Tears overflowing.

"Talk to me, tell me the story," he said.

She slipped out of his arms and stood up. She walked barefoot back and forth across the floor, oblivious apparently to its coldness. Again, it came so fast, so many long delicate phrases pouring out with such speed, he strained to listen. To separate the meaning from the beguiling beauty of her voice.

She'd been adopted when she was a day old, she'd been taken away from her home, and did he know that was New Orleans? She'd told him that in the letter he'd never received. And yes, he ought to know that because when he'd wakened, he grabbed her hand and held onto it, as if he didn't want to let her go. And maybe then some mingled crazy idea had come through, some sudden intensity connected to that place. But the thing was, she'd never really been there! Never seen it. Didn't even know her mother's full name.

Did he know there was a paper in the safe, over there, behind the picture there, by the door, a letter she'd signed saying she'd never go back to New Orleans, never seek to find out anything about her family, her real parents? Cut off, ripped out of it, the past cut away like the umbilical cord and no way that she could recapture what had been thrown away. But she'd been thinking about that of late, that awful black gulf and the fact that they were gone, Ellie and Graham, and the paper in the safe, and Ellie had died making her repeat her promise, over and over.

They'd taken her out of New Orleans to Los Angeles on a six o'clock plane the very day she was born. Why, for years she'd been told she was born in Los Angeles. That's what her birth certificate said, one of those phony jobs they concoct for adopted children. Ellie and Graham had told her a thousand times about the little apartment in West Hollywood, and how happy they had been when they brought her home.

But that wasn't the point, the point was they were gone, dead, and with them their whole story, wiped out with a speed and totality that utterly terrified her. And Ellie in such pain. Nobody should have to suffer like that. And theirs had been the great modern life, just great, though it was a selfish, materialistic world, she had to admit. No tie to anyone--family or friend--ever interrupted their self-centered pursuit of pleasure. And at the bedside, no one but Rowan as Ellie lay screaming for the morphine.

He was nodding, how well he understood. Hadn't his own life become the same thing? A sudden flash of New Orleans struck him, screen door closing, cousins around the kitchen table, red beans and rice, and talk, talk, talk ...

"I tell you I almost killed her," Rowan said, "I almost ended it. I couldn't ... I couldn't ... Nobody could lie to me about it. I know when people are lying. It's not that I can read minds, it's more subtle. It's as if people are talking out loud in black-and-white words on a page, and I'm seeing what they say in colored pictures. I get their thoughts some times, little bits of information. And anyway, I'm a doctor, they didn't try, and I had full access to the information. It was Ellie that was always lying, trying to pretend it wasn't happening. And I knew her feelings, always. I had since I was a little girl. And there was this other thing, this talent for knowing, I call it the diagnostic sense but it's more than that, I laid my hands on her and even when she was in remission, I knew. It's in there, it's coming back. She's got six months at most. And then to come home after it was all over--to this house, this house with every conceivable gadget and convenience and luxury that one could possibly ... "

"I know," he said softly. "All the toys we have, all the money."

"Yes, and what is this without them now, a shell? I don't belong here! And if I don't belong, nobody does, and I look around me ... and I'm scared, I tell you. I'm scared. No, wait, don't comfort me. You don't know. I couldn't prevent Ellie's death, that I can accept, but I caused Graham's death. I killed him."

"No, but you didn't do that," he said. "You're a doctor and you know ... "

"Michael, you are like an angel sent to me. But listen to what I'm telling you. You have a power in your hands, you know it's real. I know it's real. On the drive over you demon

strated that power. Well, I have a power in me that's equally strong. I killed him. I killed two people before that--a stranger, and a little girl years ago, a little girl on a playground. I've read the autopsy reports. I can kill, I tell you! I'm a doctor today because I am trying to deny that power, I have built my life upon compensation for that evil!"

She took a deep breath. She ran her fingers back through her hair. She looked waifish and lost in the big loose robe, cinched tight at the waist, a Ganymede with the soft tumbled pageboy hair. He started to go to her. She gestured for him to stay where he was.

"There's so much. You know I made this fantasy of telling you, you of all people ... "

"I'm here, I'm listening," he said. "I want you to tell me ... " How could he put into words that she fascinated him and utterly absorbed him, and how remarkable that was after all these weeks of frenzy and craziness.

She talked in a low voice now of how it had gone with her, of how she had always been in love with science, science was poetry to her. She never thought she'd be a surgeon. It was research that fascinated her, the incredible, almost fantastical advances in neurological science. She wanted to spend her life in the laboratory where she thought the real opportunity for heroism existed; and she had a natural genius for it, take that on faith. She did.

But then had come that awful experience, that terrible Christmas Eve. She had been about to go to the Keplinger Institute to work full-time on methods of intervention in the brain that did not involve surgery--the use of lasers, the gamma knife, miracles she could scarcely describe to the layman. After all, she had never had any easy time with human beings. Didn't she belong in a laboratory?

And take it from her the latest developments were full of the miraculous, but then her mentor, never mind his name--and he was dead now anyway, he'd died of a series of little strokes shortly after that, ironically enough, and all the surgeons in the world hadn't been able to clip and suture those deadly ruptures ... but she hadn't even found out about that until later. To get back to the story, he had taken her up into the Institute in San Francisco on Christmas Eve because that was the one night of all nights when no one would be there, and he was breaking the rules to show her what they were working on, and it was live fetal research.