Bedeviled (13 page)

“Hey, I didn’t kill it.”

“I didn’t know I was going to—never mind.” She’d had to come to grips with the fact that she’d actually killed something, but she didn’t want to spend a lot of time talking about it. “Why’d the demon have the damn thing in a pendant with a crystal front if it could be broken that easily?”

“What am I?” the pixie demanded, “a demon psychologist? How do I know?”

“God, you’re annoying.”

“Yeah?” His long hair whipped about his face, and he shook it clear of his eyes. “You’re no vacation in Tamre yourself.”

“What’s Tamre?”

He screwed up his forehead as he thought about it. “Think Tahiti, only better.”

“In Otherworld?”

“
No
,” he sneered. “In this one. It’s a secret country. Man, dealing with trolls is easier than this.” He tugged at his chin whiskers. “Now, are you going to show me how you kill a demon or not?”

“I’ll try.”

“There is no try,” he intoned slowly, pompously. “There’s do or don’t do.”

Maggie laughed and goggled at him. Could her life get any weirder? “You’re kidding me. You’re giving me Yoda?”

His silvery eyebrows wiggled as he smiled, and his teeth looked bright and sharp. “Great flick.”

“What kind of pixie are you?”

“You think we don’t get over here to see movies?” He looked insulted. “I told you we come and go whenever the
Ifreann
we want to. Besides,
everybody’s
seen
Star Wars
.”

Stalking off a few paces, he spun around on his wide flat feet and glared at her from a distance. “Now, are you going to see if you can blow Faery dust or not?”

She’d slipped into a truly bizarre world, Maggie told herself as she straightened up and fought to concentrate. A world where pixies quoted Yoda, demons wore Faery dust as fashion accessories and she herself was being taught how to kill enemies she hadn’t had until a few days ago, just by blowing on them.

Very strange indeed.

“Take a breath, damn you, and focus!”

She did as Bezel said, gathering herself, pulling together the power that continued to hum and buzz inside her, then blew a fine whisper of air from her lungs. Finally, when a shimmer of gold dust sparkled in that breath, her personal triumph was lost in the hopeless wish that Faery dust had the power to shut Bezel up.

Culhane found her in her studio.

The night was quiet, and an old clock somewhere in her house was chiming midnight when he shifted into being right behind her.

She sat at an easel, the painting before her glimmering softly in the glow of dozens of candles she had set about the room. Her features were luminous in the flickering light, and her dark blue eyes were fixed on the project at hand. There was fire in her hair, he thought, and fought the urge to touch, to bury his hands in the thick mass.

He hadn’t counted on this. In the years he’d watched over her, there’d always been a distance between them. Time and worlds had kept them apart. Now, though, it was as if he were seeing her for the first time, and hunger for her had become his constant companion.

He sensed more than saw that she was aware of his presence, and the fact that she no longer jolted when he appeared pleased him.

“Just pop in to say howdy?” She didn’t bother to turn and look at him, just kept painting, her hand steady with the fine brush she wielded.

Culhane lifted an eyebrow, then walked to her side and went into a crouch to study the painting as she worked. After a long moment he spoke quietly. “I thought to find you asleep.”

At this, she did give him a look that he couldn’t quite read. “Are you telling me you sneak into my house when I’m sleeping to watch me?”

He shrugged, a casual move that belied his interest in her. The fact that he had watched over her while she was sleeping more times than he wanted to count was an irritation to him. She was a means to an end. Nothing more.

Or so she should be.

“I’ve an interest in you, Maggie Donovan. It’s up to me to see that you’re safe.”

“Hmm.” She turned back to her work, leaned in closer to her painting and touched the tip of the brush to the edge of the lighthouse she was capturing on canvas with color.

On the canvas, its gray stone gleamed with the spray of a painted sea. Culhane almost thought his fingers would come away damp should he reach out and touch it. The ocean she’d created was wild and rough, whitecaps frothing on a bleak, dark surface. The painted sky was caught in a storm, with lightning hidden beneath banks of clouds until it was no more than a pale shimmer of a threat.

The beach the waves rushed toward was empty—as he’d already realized that most scenes in her paintings were. There was the sense again of loneliness. Of waiting. And again he wondered if she’d ever noticed that what was missing in her creations was people.

He shook his head to empty it of ramblings. “Did you think I’d trust in only a pixie to keep you safe?”

She laughed lightly, and the sound seemed to weave its way around him.

“Safe?” she asked. “Usually I get the feeling Bezel would be happy to see me keel over dead.”

“It’s his way.”

“Doesn’t make him a pleasant companion.”

Now he laughed at the very notion. “Nothing about Bezel is pleasant, but he knows what he’s doing, and he can help you stay alive.”

“Good. I’m all for that.” She leaned back, studied her canvas, then set the small brush aside, grabbed another and reached to a palette filled with splotches of colors. The brush she wielded now looked like an open fan, and she pressed it into a shade of green blended with white. Then, carefully, she laid the tips of that loaded fan to the edges of the whitecaps on her canvas.

Though Culhane would have thought before that the water was complete, he saw now that she was making it even more alive, like a hungry beast waiting to swallow the unwary.

“Why is it,” he wondered aloud, “that you waste your time painting foolish scenes on glass when you’ve this kind of talent inside you?”

Even in the dim glow of candlelight, he saw the flush of pleasure fill her cheeks, her eyes. In only a moment, though, that flush had passed, and she turned to look at him.

“I like eating,” she said simply, with a shrug. “Artists don’t make much of a living. So I use what talent I have to run my own business, and this I do for myself.”

“A practical woman,” he mused, and stood up, walking around her, looking at both her and the painting she was creating. “I wouldn’t have thought so from our other conversations.”

“Practical?” Her laughter faded into a chuckle, and still she shook her head at the notion.

“Why is that funny?”

“Because a practical woman wouldn’t be sitting here in the near dark, painting at midnight, chatting with a Faery.”

One corner of Culhane’s mouth curved in a brief smile. Outside, the night crept closer to the windows, yet seemed to be held at bay by the candlelight. “I thought painters needed light. Any I’ve seen are always in the bright light of sun or in the glare of electricity.”

She went back to lovingly bringing her ocean to life. “I used to need the extra light, too. But since . . . well, my vision’s strong and clear enough now without it, and I like candlelight.”

“It likes you as well.” The moment the words were out, he thought of how he might pull them back in. But it was too late. She was already turning her head to look at him with curiosity.

“Was that a compliment?”

“It might have been,” he admitted roughly. “Though it’s not why I’m here.”

“Figures.” She sighed. “Why are you here, then?”

“To watch. To see. To learn.”

“Why? Worried that I’m not your ‘chosen one’ after all?” She set her brush down, stood up and faced him, chin high and eyes flashing with something that was all female and all confusion to Culhane. “Think if you watch me close enough, you’ll find out you picked the wrong woman?”

“No,” he said, and thought he caught the brief shine of disappointment in her eyes before it was quickly gone again. “You’re the one, Maggie. And I think, inside you now, you’ve admitted that truth, as well. I’ve known who you were your whole life. I only waited,” he said, “for the day to come when you would know it, too.”

She staggered a little, and in her eyes he saw the surprise of his words strike home.

“My whole life?” She worked on that for a bit, then asked, “So you watched me. All these years?”

“You’re not that old,” he pointed out with another brief, rare smile. Why was it, he wondered, that with this woman he could smile more than he had in hundreds of years? Why was it she who touched something in him he’d never thought he had? And why was he allowing himself to be drawn away from the point?

“You’re only thirty, Maggie Donovan. Hardly more than a blink in the grand scheme of things.”

“And yet, in all that time,” she mused thoughtfully, “I never felt you. Saw you.”

Now? Was the time right to tell her that she had seen him, felt him, long ago? He looked at her in the soft dance of the light and knew that it was now or never. She had to be aware of just how closely they were linked.

“You did.”

The stunned disbelief on her face would have been funny had he not also seen the worry in her eyes. It took her only a moment to shake that off and snap, “You’re nuts. I think I’d remember seeing a Faery pop up out of nowhere.”

“Do you?” He walked toward her with quiet steps. His gaze locked on hers, when he reached her he lifted one hand, cupped her chin and turned her face gently toward the painting she’d forgotten all about. “Why is it, do you think, that you so often paint that lighthouse?”

She pulled away, and he didn’t want to admit that he missed the touch of her.

“Why wouldn’t I?” she asked, her voice deliberately light, unaffected. “Maybe because it’s sitting out in the bay, big as life? Artists come from up and down the coast to paint that lighthouse. I’ve seen it my whole life. And it’s haunted—well, supposedly.”

“It is.”

“Really?”

“Another time,” he said abruptly, wanting her attention back on the painting. Back to where he was leading her memory. “There’s another reason you’re drawn to that lighthouse, isn’t there, Maggie? Something personal happened there, near that lighthouse. Something that haunts you as much as the ghosts that swirl about in the fog.”

She frowned, pushing one paint-stained hand through her hair, and the fact that she had no care for vanity touched him, as well.

“All right, yes,” she said, folding her arms over her chest, inadvertently tugging tight across her breasts the thin, stretchy fabric of the shirt she wore. “When I was a kid I nearly drowned there.”

She looked at the painting, but the faraway glint in her eye told him she was looking back, just as he’d wanted.

Her voice went soft as the candlelight, and as she talked a sharp wind lifted outside and battered at the glass.

“I wasn’t supposed to be out that day. There was a storm coming in, and I used to love to go to the beach and watch it blow across the ocean. My grandmother didn’t mind that I went to the beach, but she made me promise to stay out of the water.”

Maggie huffed out a rush of air, and Culhane wondered if she even noticed the hint of Faery dust that sparkled in her breath.

“Naturally,” she was saying, a small smile curving her mouth, “I didn’t listen. I was twelve, like Eileen is now, and I figured Gran was old and nervous.”

“As most children do.”

“I guess. Anyway, the water was choppy and the waves were slamming into each other. The wind was so strong it was blowing sand into my skin, and it stung, but I still didn’t leave. It made me feel . . . powerful to be a part of it, you know?” She glanced at him, and he nodded. “I couldn’t stand staying on the beach. I wanted to be out in it, and I knew I was a strong swimmer, so I wasn’t scared. So I swam out and fought the water for every stroke.”

Maggie stared down at the painting, seeing that storm in her memory, as she’d tried to re-create it on canvas, and she couldn’t believe she’d done something so foolish.

“I was headed for the jetty that leads out to the lighthouse. But a rogue wave caught me and tossed me farther out.” She wrapped her arms around herself now as the memory took hold and made her feel again the slap and pull of the cold water. “I was so scared, and thinking maybe Gran wasn’t so dumb after all. I even remember wondering if she’d be mad when she found out I drowned.

“The water was rough and the spray so thick I couldn’t draw a breath when I surfaced without taking in gulps of water with it. I was cold and tired, and my arms ached and my leg was cramped from kicking so hard and there was no one around to yell to for help.” Her voice was coming fast now, and she couldn’t seem to stop it. Strange, she hadn’t thought about that day in years. Had buried it deeply enough that she was able to go into the ocean again without feeling that bone-deep fear she had once felt so long ago.

She tore her gaze from the painting and looked up at Culhane instead. His gaze was locked on hers, and his sharply carved features were as still as a statue carved by the hand of a generous god. He was so near she could have reached out to touch him. The candlelight in the room threw shifting shadows over his face and danced across his eyes. But he only stood still, watching her. Waiting.

“I was a good swimmer,” she told him, “but it was too hard, and I started sinking. The waves pulled me under, and it was so dark I didn’t know which way was up. I remember thinking that dying wasn’t so bad, because by then I was more exhausted than scared. I even thought,
Now I’ll get to see Mom and Dad again,
because they’d died a couple of years before. That’s why Nora and I were living here with Gran and Grandpa.”

“Tell me,” he said, his voice soft and nearly lyrical, with the hint of an accent she couldn’t quite place.

She pulled in another breath to steady herself for the end and said it in a rush. “I was underwater. I opened my eyes, and everything was dark and still, like it wasn’t on the surface. There was no sound, nothing. And then . . .” Maggie laughed a little, almost embarrassed to confess this part of her experience. “This is the craziest part, so hang on.”