Captivated (12 page)

“Glad you approve.” Amused, she set the unfortunate doll down, patted the mangled head, then picked up a tattered deck of tarot cards. “Do you read them?”

“No. Somebody gave them to me. They’re supposed to have belonged to Houdini or someone.”

“Hmm.” She fanned them, felt the faint trickle of old power on her fingertips. “If you’re curious where they came from, ask Sebastian sometime. He could tell. Come here.” She held out the deck to him. “Shuffle and cut.”

Willing to oblige, he did what she asked. “Are we going to play?”

She only smiled and took the cards back. “Since the seats are occupied, let’s use the floor.” She knelt, gesturing for him to join her. After tossing her hair behind her back, she dealt out a Celtic Cross. “You’re preoccupied,” she said. “But your creative juices aren’t dried up or blocked. There are changes coming.” Her eyes lifted to his. They were that dazzling Irish blue that tempted even a sane man to believe anything. “Perhaps the biggest of your life, and they won’t be easy to accept.”

It was no longer the cards she read, but rather the pale light of the seer, which burned so much more brightly in Sebastian.

“You need to remember that some things are passed through the blood, and some are washed out. We aren’t
always the total of the people who made us.” Her eyes changed, softened, as she laid a hand on his. “And you’re not as alone as you think you are. You never have been.”

He couldn’t joke away what hit too close to home. Instead, he avoided the issue entirely by bringing her hand to his lips. “I didn’t bring you here to tell my fortune.”

“I know why you asked me here, and it isn’t going to happen. Yet.” With more than a little regret, she drew her hand free. “And it isn’t really your fortune I’m telling, it’s your present.” Quietly she gathered up the cards
again. “I’ll help you, if I can, with what I can. Tell me about the problem in your story.”

“Other than the fact that I keep thinking of you when I’m supposed to be thinking of it?”

“Yes.” She curled up her legs. “Other than that.”

“I guess it’s a matter of motivation. Cassandra’s. That’s what I decided to call her. Is she a witch because she wanted power, because she wanted to change things? Was she looking for revenge, or love, or the easy way out?”

“Why would it be any of those things? Why wouldn’t it be a matter of accepting the gifts she was given?”

“It’s too easy.”

Morgana shook her head. “No, it’s not. It’s easier, so much easier, to be like everyone else. Once, when I was a little girl, some of the mothers refused to let their children play with me. I was a bad influence. Odd. Different. It hurt, not being a part of the whole.”

Understanding, he nodded. “I was always the new kid. Hardly in one place long enough to be accepted. Somebody always wants to give the new kid a bloody nose. Don’t ask me why. Moving around, you end up being awkward, falling behind in school, wishing you’d just get old enough to get the hell out.” Annoyed with himself, he stopped. “Anyway, about Cassandra—”

“How did you cope?” She had had Anastasia, Sebastian, her family, and a keen sense of belonging.

With a restless movement of his shoulders, he reached out to touch her amulet. “You run away a lot. And, since that just gets your butt kicked nine times out of ten, you learn to run away safe. In books, in movies, or just inside your own head. As soon as I was old enough, I got a job working the concession stand at a theater. That
way, I’d get paid for watching movies.” As troubled memories left his eyes, his face cleared. “I love the flicks. I just plain love them.”

She smiled. “So now you get paid for writing them.”

“A perfect way to feed the habit. If I can ever get this one whipped into shape.” In one smooth movement, he took a handful of her hair and wrapped it around his wrist. “What I need is inspiration,” he murmured, tugging her forward for a kiss.

“What you need,” she told him, “is concentration.”

“I’m concentrating.” He nibbled and tugged at her lips. “Believe me, I’m concentrating. You don’t want to be responsible for hampering creative genius, do you?”

“Indeed not.” It was time, she decided, for him to understand exactly what he was getting into. And perhaps it would also help him open his mind to his story. “Inspiration,” she said, and slid her hands around his neck. “Coming up.”

And so were they. As she met his lips with hers, she brought them six inches off the floor. He was too busy enjoying the taste to notice. Sliding over him, Morgana forgot herself long enough to lose herself in the heat. When she broke the kiss, they were floating halfway to the ceiling.

“I think we’d better stop.”

He nuzzled her neck. “Why?”

She glanced down deliberately. “I didn’t think to ask if you were afraid of heights.”

Morgana wished she could have captured the look on his face when he followed her gaze—the wide-eyed, slack-jawed comedy of it. The string of oaths was a different matter. As they ran their course, she took them gently down again.

His knees buckled before he got them under control. White-faced, he gripped her shoulders. The muscles in his stomach were twanging like plucked strings. “How the hell did you do that?”

“A child’s trick. A certain kind of child.” She was sympathetic enough to stroke his cheek. “Remember the boy who cried wolf, Nash? One day the wolf was real. Well, you’ve been playing with—let’s say the
paranormal—for years. This time you’ve got yourself a real witch.”

Very slowly, very sure, he shook his head from side to side. But the fingers on her shoulders trembled lightly. “That’s bull.”

She indulged in a windy sigh. “All right. Let me think. Something simple but elegant.” She closed her eyes, lifted her hands.

For a moment she was simply a woman, a beautiful woman standing in the center of a disordered room
with her arms lifted gracefully, her palms gently cupped. Then she changed. God, he could see her change. The beauty deepened. A trick of the light, he told himself. The way she was smiling, with those full, unpainted lips curved, her lashes shadowing her cheeks, her hair tumbling wildly to her waist.

But her hair was moving, fluttering gently at first as though teased by a playful breeze. Then it was flying, around her face, back from her face, in one long gorgeous stream. He had an impossible image of a stunning wooden maiden carved on the bow of an ancient ship.

But there was no wind to blow. Yet he felt it. It chilled along his skin, whisked along his cheeks. He could hear it whistle as it streaked into the room. When he swallowed, he heard a click in his throat, as well.

She stood straight and still. A faint gold light shivered around her as she began to chant. As the sun poured through the high windows, soft flakes of snow began to fall. From Nash’s ceiling. They swirled around his head, danced over his skin as he gaped, frozen in shock.

“Cut it out,” he ordered in a ragged voice before he sank to a chair.

Morgana let her arms drop, opened her eyes. The miniature blizzard stopped as if it had never been. The wind silenced and died. As she’d expected, Nash was staring at her as if she’d grown three heads.

“That might have been a bit overdone,” she allowed.

“I— You—” He fought to gain control over his tongue. “What the hell did you do?”

“A very basic call to the elements.” He wasn’t as pale as he had been, she decided, but his eyes still looked too big for the rest of his face. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

“You’re not frightening me. Baffling, yes,” he admitted. He shook himself like a wet dog and ordered his
brain to engage. If he had seen what he had seen, there was a reason. There was no way she could have gotten inside his house to set up the trick.

But there had to be.

He pushed out of the chair and began to search through the room. Maybe his movements were a bit jerky. Maybe his joints felt as though they’d rusted over. But he was moving. “Okay, babe, how’d you pull it off? It’s great, and I’m up for a joke as much as the next guy, but I like to know the trick.”

“Nash.” Her voice was quiet, and utterly compelling. “Stop. Look at me.”

He turned, and he looked, and he knew. Though it wasn’t possible, wasn’t reasonable, he knew. He let out a long, careful breath. “My God, it’s true. Isn’t it?”

“Yes. Do you want to sit down?”

“No.” But he sat on the coffee table. “Everything you’ve been telling me. You weren’t making any of it up.”

“No, I wasn’t making any of it up. I was born a witch, like my mother, my father, like my mother’s mother, and hers, and back for generations.” She smiled gently. “I don’t ride on a broomstick—except perhaps as a joke. Or cast spells on young princesses or pass out poisoned apples.”

It wasn’t possible, really. Was it? “Do something else.”

A flicker of impatience crossed her face. “Nor am I a trained seal.”

“Do something else,” he insisted, and cast his mind for options. “Can you disappear, or—”

“Oh, really, Nash.”

He was up again. “Look, give me a break. I’m trying to help you out here. Maybe you could—” A book flew off the shelf and bopped him smartly in the head. Wincing, he rubbed the spot. “Okay, okay. Never mind.”

“This isn’t a sideshow,” she said primly. “I only demonstrated so obviously in the first place because you’re so thickheaded. You refused to believe, and since we seem to be developing some sort of relationship, I prefer that you do.” She smoothed out the skirt of her dress. “And now that you do, we can take some time to think it all through before we move on.”

“Move on,” he repeated. “Maybe the next step is to talk about this”

“Not now.” He’d already retreated a step, she thought, and he didn’t even know it.

“Damn it, Morgana, you can’t drop all this on me, then calmly walk out. Good God, you’re a witch.”

“Yes.” She flicked back her hair. “I believe we’ve established that.”

His mind began to spin again. Reality had taken a long, slow curve. “I have a million questions.”

She picked up her bag. “You’ve already asked me several of those million. Play back your tapes. All of the answers I gave you were true ones.”

“I don’t want to listen to tapes, I want to talk to you.”

“For now, it’s what I want that matters.” She opened her bag and took out a small, wand-shaped emerald on a silver chain. She should have known there was a reason she’d felt compelled to put it there that morning. “Here.” Moving forward, she slipped the chain over his head.

“Thanks, but I’m not much on jewelry.”

“Think of it as a charm, then.” She kissed both of his cheeks.

Warily he eyed it. “What kind of a charm?”

“It’s for clearing the mind, promoting creativity, and— See the small purple stone above the emerald?”

“Yeah.”

“Amethyst.” Her lips curved as they brushed his. “For protection against witchcraft.” With the cat already at her heels, Morgana moved to the archway. “Go sleep for an hour, Nash. Your brain is tired. When you wake, you’ll work. And when the time is right, you’ll find me.” She slipped out the door.

Frowning, Nash tilted the slender green stone up to examine it. Clear thinking. Okay, he could use some of that. At the moment, his thoughts were as clear as smoke.

He ran a thumb over the companion stone of amethyst. Protection against witchcraft. He glanced up, through the window, to see Morgana drive away.

He was pretty sure he could use that, as well.

What he needed to do was think, not sleep. Though he wondered that any man could think after what had happened in the last fifteen minutes. Why, any of the parapsychologists he’d interviewed over the years would have been wild to have a taste of what Morgana had given him.

But wasn’t the first rational step to attempt to disprove what he had seen?

He wandered back into the living room to squint at the ceiling for a while. He couldn’t deny what he had seen, what he had felt. But perhaps, with time, he could come up with some logical alternatives.

Taking the first step, he assumed his favorite thinking position. He lay down on the sofa. Hypnotism. He didn’t care to think that he could be put in a trance or caused to hallucinate, but it was a possibility. An easier one to believe now that he was alone again.

If he didn’t believe that, or some other logical explanation, he would have to accept that Morgana was exactly what she had said she was all along.

A hereditary witch, possessing elvish blood.

Nash toed off his shoes and tried to think. His mind was full of her—the way she looked, the way she tasted, the dark, uncanny light that had been in her eyes before she’d closed them and lifted her arms to the ceiling.

The same light, he recalled now, that had come into her eyes when she’d done the trick with the brandy decanter.

Trick, he reminded himself as his heart gave a single unpleasant thud. It was wiser to assume they were tricks and try to logic out how she had produced them. Just how did a woman lift a hundred-and-sixty-five-pound man six feet off the floor?

Telekinesis? Nash had always thought there were real possibilities there. After his preliminary work on his script
The Dark Gift
, he’d come to believe there were certain people who were able to use their minds, or their emotions, to move objects. A more logical explanation than the existence of poltergeists, to Nash’s way of thinking. And scientists had done exhaustive studies of pictures flying across the room, books leaping off shelves, and so forth. Young girls were often thought to possess this particular talent. Girls became
women. Morgana was definitely a woman.

Nash figured a research scientist would need a lot more than his word that Morgana had lifted him, and herself, off the ground. Still, maybe he could . . .

He stopped, realizing he was thinking, reacting, the same way the fictional Jonathan McGillis thought and reacted in his story. Was that what Morgana wanted? he wondered.

Listen to the tapes, she’d told him. All right, then, that was what he’d do. Shifting, he punched buttons on his recorder until he’d reversed the tape inside and pushed play.

Morgana’s smoky voice flowed from the tiny machine.