Taltos (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 3)

"I ought to be afraid of you," he said. "But I'm not. I'm only afraid of one thing. That you don't love me."

"Oh, but I do," she said. "And I always did. Always."

His shoulders sagged for a minute, just a minute, and then he turned away from her. He was so hurt, but he would never again have the vulnerable look he had had before. He would never again have the pure gentleness.

There was a chair by the window to the porch, and he appeared to find it blindly and choose it indifferently as he sat down, still turned away from her.

And I'm about to hurt you again, she thought.

She wanted to go to him, to talk to him, to hold him again. To talk the way they had that first day after she'd come to herself, and buried her only daughter--the only daughter she'd ever have--beneath the oak. She wanted to open now with the kindling excitement she'd felt then, the utter love, thoughtless and rushed and without the slightest caution.

But it seemed as beyond reach now as words had been so soon after that.

She lifted her hands and ran them back hard through her hair. Then, rather mechanically, she reached for the taps in the shower.

With the water flooding down, she could think, perhaps clearly, for the first time. The noise was sweet and the hot water was luscious.

There seemed an impossible wealth of dresses to choose from. Absolutely confounding that there were so many in the closets. Finally she found a pair of soft wool pants, old pants she'd had eons ago in San Francisco, and she put those on, and on top a loose and deceptively heavy cotton sweater.

It was plenty cool enough now for the spring night. And it felt good to be dressed again in the clothes she herself had loved. Who, she wondered, could have bought all these pretty dresses?

She brushed her hair, and closed her eyes, and thought, "You are going to lose him, and with reason, if you do not talk to him now, if you do not once again explain, if you do not struggle against your own instinctive fear of words, and go to him."

She laid down the brush. He was standing in the doorway. She'd never shut the door all this while, and when she looked up at him, the peaceful, accepting look on his face was a great relief to her. She almost cried. But that would have been ludicrously selfish.

"I love you, Michael," she said. "I could shout it from the rooftops. I never stopped loving you. It was vanity and it was hubris; and the silence, the silence was the failure of a soul to heal and strengthen itself, or maybe just the necessary retreat that the soul sought as if it were some selfish organism."

He listened intently, frowning slightly, face calm but never innocent the way it had been before. The eyes were huge and glistening but hard and shadowed with sadness.

"I don't know how I could have hurt you just now, Rowan," he said. "I really don't. I just don't."

"Michael, no ..."

"No, let me say it. I know what happened to you. I know what he did. I know. And I don't know how I could have blamed you, been angry with you, hurt you like that, I don't know!"

"Michael, I know," she said. "Don't. Don't, or you'll make me cry."

"Rowan, I destroyed him," he said. He had dropped his voice to a whisper the way so many people did when they spoke of death. "I destroyed him and it's not enough! I ... I ..."

"No, don't speak anymore. Forgive me, Michael, forgive me for your sake and my sake. Forgive me." She leant forward and kissed him, took the breath out of him deliberately so it would remain wordless. And this time when he folded her into his arms, it was full of the old kindness, the old cherishing warmth, the great protective sweetness that made her feel safe, safe as it had when they'd first made love.

There must have been something more lovely than falling in his arms like this, more lovely than merely being close to him. But she couldn't think what it was now--certainly not the violence of passion. That was there, obviously, to be enjoyed again and again, but this was the thing she'd never known with any other being on earth, this!

Finally he drew back, taking her two hands together and kissing them, and then flashing her that bright boyish smile again, precisely the one she thought sure she'd never receive again, ever. And then he winked and he said, his voice breaking:

"You really do still love me, baby."

"Yes," she said. "I learned how once, apparently, and it will have to be forever. Come with me, come outside, come out under the oak. I want to be near them for a while. I don't know why. You and I, we are the only ones who know that they're there together."

They slipped down the back stairs, through the kitchen. The guard by the pool merely nodded to them. The yard was dark as they found the iron table. She flung herself at him, and he steadied her. Yes, for this little while and then you'll hate me again, she thought.

Yes, you'll despise me. She kissed his hair, his cheek, she rubbed her forehead back and forth across his sharp beard. She felt his soft responsive sighs, thick and heavy and from the chest.

You'll despise me, she thought. But who else can go after the men who killed Aaron?

Five

THE PLANE LANDED in Edinburgh's airport at 11:00 p.m. Ash was dozing with his face against the window. He saw the headlamps of the cars moving steadily towards him, both black, both German--sedans that would take him and his little entourage over the narrow roads to Donnelaith. It was no longer a trek one had to make on horseback. Ash was glad of it, not because he had not loved those journeys through the dangerous mountains, but because he wanted to reach the glen itself with no delay.

Modern life has made all impatient, he thought quietly. How many times in his long life had he set out for Donnelaith, determined to visit the place of his most tragic losses and reexamine his destiny again? Sometimes it had taken him years to make his way to England and then north to the Highlands. Other times it had been a matter of months.

Now it was something accomplished in a matter of hours. And he was glad of it. For the going there had never been the difficult or the cathartic part. Rather it was the visit itself.

He stood up now as this tentative young girl, Leslie, who had flown with him from America, brought his coat and a folded blanket and a pillow as well.

"Sleepy, my dearest?" he asked her, with gentle reproach. Servants in America baffled him. They did the strangest things. He would not have been surprised if she had changed into a nightgown.

"For you, Mr. Ash. The drive is almost two hours. I thought you might want it."

He smiled as he walked past her. What must it be like for her, he wondered. The nocturnal trips to far-flung places? Scotland must seem like any other place to which he had at times dragged her or his other attendants. No one could guess what this meant to him.

As he stepped out onto the metal stairway, the wind caught him by surprise. It was colder here even than it had been in London. Indeed, his journey had taken him from one circle of frost to another and then another. And with childish eagerness and shallow regret, he longed for the warmth of the London hotel. He thought of the gypsy sleeping so beautifully against the pillow, lean and dark-skinned, with a cruel mouth and jet black eyebrows and lashes that curled upwards like those of a child.

He covered his eyes with the back of his hand and hurried down the metal steps and into the car.

Why did children have such big eyelashes? Why did they lose them later on? Did they need this extra protection? And how was it with the Taltos? He could not remember anything that he had ever known, per se, to be childhood. Surely for the Taltos there was such a period.

"Lost knowledge ..." Those words had been given to him so often; he could not remember a time when he didn't know them.

This was an agony, really, this return, this refusal to move forward without a bitter consultation with his full soul.

Soul. You have no soul, or so they've told you.

Through the dim glass he watched young Leslie slip into the passenger seat in front of him. He was relieved that he had the rear compartment entirely to himself--that two cars had been found to carry him and his little entour

age northward. It would have been unendurable now to sit close to a human, to hear human chatter, to smell a robust female human, so sweet and so young.

Scotland. Smell the forests; smell the sea in the wind.

The car moved away smoothly. An experienced driver. He was thankful. He could not have been tossed and pushed from side to side clear to Donnelaith. For a moment he saw the glaring reflection of the lights behind him, the bodyguards following as they always did.