Daughter of the Spellcaster (14 page)

A vehicle pulled in, loud, powerful. She couldn’t see out front from her bedroom, but she could tell by the feeling in her belly that it was Ryan, so she pocketed the phone and quickly trotted downstairs to the front door, arriving just as he opened it.

Beyond him she could see a huge, shiny new truck, glittering with raindrops as more pinged off its surface. There were several items in the back, tall boxes covered in clear plastic to keep the rain off them.

She looked from the truck to his face and tried to ignore the warm, gooey feelings coursing through her veins. “What, they didn’t have a bigger one?”

“Aw, come on, you don’t like it? It’s my trusty charger. My noble steed.”

“I don’t even care what you drove, I’m just
so
glad you’re back.” She was almost embarrassed by how emphatic she sounded, but it didn’t even faze him.

“Yeah, me too. We need to talk.” He looked worried.

“What’s up?” She closed the door behind him.

“You first,” he said, taking off his boots. “Whose car is that out there?”

“Nurse Ironbottom. Though she prefers Eloise. Doc Cartwright got busy and sent her to check on Mom, though I think he had ulterior motives.”

“As in?” he asked, dropping his new keys into his coat pocket and then hanging his wet coat on a hook.

“He’s been trying to get me to hire her as a live-in until the baby comes.” She thought of the pendant. Coincidence? Would she sound insane if she told him about it? She hadn’t yet decided. “But that isn’t the big news. Mom’s awake.”

His head came up fast, eyes wide. “She is? She okay?”

“As far as I can see, she’s fine. Certainly doesn’t look like she’s had a stroke or anything like what I was thinking last night.”

“Did you ask her about the mead? The woods?” He moved to the fireplace and started adding a log as he spoke.

“I did. She doesn’t remember a thing after getting in her car to come home. But I finally remembered to check the phone.” She pulled it out of her pocket. “Take a look at these.” She handed him the phone as they walked to the stairs together and started up.

He looked at the photos, frowning as deeply as she had. “Have you asked her about them yet?”

“Not yet. I want to wait until we’re alone for that, and the nurse has been here ever since I saw them. It’s hard to see, but it looks like some sort of a ritual circle. And that’s where she was last night, before all this happened—but the thing is, they use Betty’s backyard for circles. These look like they were taken in the woods.”

“We can upload them, see if we can enhance them at all, maybe get a better look at a face or two.”

“Yeah, and I’ll ask Mom if she took any pics last night. As soon as the nurse leaves,” she whispered as they stopped at the top of the stairs. “If you click on the info tab, there should be a time stamp.”

“Good thinking.” He frowned, thumbing the phone. “Just after midnight.”

“I was afraid of that.”

He put a hand on her shoulder, and she felt heat rush straight to her toes. “Lena, there’s something else you should know.”

She gazed up at him, and if the circumstances had been less troubling, she would have been tempted to lean a little closer and see if he would turn it into a kiss. But the nurse came out of Selma’s room into the hall just then.

“She looks very good to me. I don’t see any reason to be concerned. I gave her some ibuprofen for the headache. She ate her meal just fine. She’s gone into the bathroom for a shower—told me to take a flying leap when I tried to go with her.”

“Nurse Sheldrake, do you—”

“Eloise,” she corrected.

“Right. Do you think it’s possible she had a stroke or a TIA, as Doc Cartwright mentioned?”

“I don’t see a single thing to indicate that.”

“Well, then, what
did
happen?”

“I don’t know. Frankly, we might never know. Did you phone Dr. Cartwright?”

“No, I...got distracted.” She glanced up at Ryan, then looked away when he met her eyes. What was wrong with her?

“Well, I’ll stop by on my way home and fill him in. Now, as long as I’m here, why don’t I take a look at you?”

“No.”

The nurse blinked at Lena’s quick response and even looked slightly offended. “Are you sure? Dr. Cartwright says you’ve been under intense stress for the past couple of days.”

“I’m fine. My baby’s fine. I don’t need a nurse.” Lena turned and headed right back down the stairs. “Thank you so much for coming by. I appreciate it. We’ve got an awful lot to do, though, so—”

She was at the bottom of the stairs by then, and since she’d kept on talking, the nurse had no choice but to follow. Ryan stood at the top, watching, looking surprised by her rudeness, but...whatever. She couldn’t explain it. She just didn’t like the woman. Nurse Ironbottom followed Lena to the door, and Lena took her raincoat off the hook and handed it to her.

Hint delivered. “Thanks for coming. Bye, now.”

The nurse held her gaze for an extended moment, no expression visible. She was completely impassive. Not angry, not amused, not hurt, not impatient. Just sort of
there
. She put on her coat, and then, hat still bobby-pinned in place, headed out the door into the rain.

“I do
not
like her,” Lena said, watching through the small oval glass inset until the nurse was in her car and bouncing back down the rutted driveway.

Ryan was halfway downstairs, but Lena headed right back up. “I’d better get into the bathroom, make sure Mom doesn’t fall and bash her head in.”

“Good idea.”

“I know you wanted to talk about...something.”

“And you wanted to show me something. Something about a storybook, you said?”

She looked at him. “Yeah. That’s right.” Then she gnawed her lip. “Later tonight, after Mom’s in bed and we can be alone. Okay?”

“It’s a date. I’ve got plenty to keep me busy until then.”

She looked at him curiously, but he didn’t fill her in. “You’re heading back to those woods, aren’t you?”

“Actually, no. I called Sheriff Dunbar on the way home. He asked me to hold off until tomorrow, so he could come along. Didn’t want to risk my disturbing anything out there.”

“You agreed?”

He nodded. “I think the rain’s probably already erased anything we might have found, anyway. Another day won’t make a difference. And I kind of like the guy. He seems...real.”

“I’ve always liked Larry, too,” she said. “He and Molly are a real pair of characters. Punch and Judy, only playful, you know?”

He nodded.

“So what’s going to keep you so busy today?” she asked.

“I’m going to finish the baby’s room for you. I know, I know. You had your own notions, and I’m gonna stick to them, just maybe add one or two of my own. And you’re not allowed to see it until I’m finished.”

She blinked. “You...know how to do that sort of thing?”

“I knew you’d doubt my construction skills. But yes, as a matter of fact I do. I actually do a lot of this sort of thing.”

“How did I not know this?”

He drew a deep breath, let it out. “Because it was one of the parts of me I kept away from you. I was an idiot, Lena. Do you trust me now?”

Trust him? Trust him when he seemed to be trying to convince her he was the prince she had always believed him to be—after convincing her that he wasn’t? Hell. “What if I hate it?” she asked.

He smiled. “You’re going to love it. I promise.”

“But what if I hate it?”

He crooked a brow. “Fine. If you hate it, we’ll strip it back down to the drywall and start over.”

“Promise?”

“Yes. Now go take care of your mother before she hurts herself.”

So she did.

10

A
side from a big blank spot in her memory and a persistent headache, her mother seemed fine. Still, Lena spent the entire day sticking close to her side. She finished her stenciling project in the kitchen and decided to declare the rest of the afternoon a baking day. It was something she and her mom did every so often, especially on really cold days, so the oven would do double duty by heating up the house. Today wasn’t particularly cold, but it was damp and miserable.

Her mom fell right into the rhythm. They spent hours mixing and kneading and rolling and measuring. And laughing. Lots of laughing. They had music blasting from the iPod, nestled in an impossibly small speaker dock that had concert sound quality. They sang along at the top of their lungs, puffed flour into each other’s faces and tasted their efforts way too often, and they laughed until their sides ached.

They enjoyed each other. Always had.

It was a good way to distract herself from giving in to her curiosity about the nursery. Ryan had been upstairs all afternoon, and he’d made several trips out through the rain to the truck and back, carrying stuff upstairs each time. Big stuff. Lena smelled paint. She’d seen the cans he’d carried up the stairs, but it had been impossible to tell the colors. She’d already had paint picked out, and she hoped he wasn’t replacing her colors entirely. She was just about dying to peek by dinnertime.

He came downstairs, not even a speck of paint to be seen anywhere on his person, the cheat. He’d showered, changed clothes. He took one look at the kitchen counter and his eyes went round. “Is
this
what I’ve been smelling every time I poked my head out of the nursery?”

“Uh-huh,” Selma said, waving a hand like a TV spokesmodel. “Apple pie, carrot cake, chocolate chip cookies, cinnamon-swirl bread, whole wheat rolls and, since we had extra pie-crust, homemade chicken and veggie pot pies for dinner.”

“This, after the night you had?” he asked.

“Pssh. Lena did most of the work.”

But Lena saw the color rushing into her mom’s cheeks. She was eating up the flattery.

And
he
was eating up the chocolate chip cookies.

“Dinner is only five minutes out,” Lena told him. “Save some room.”

“Oh, trust me, I’ll manage to stuff it in.” He popped another cookie into his mouth. “If I stay here very long I’ll have to take up jogging again.”

“Yeah, well, if you stay here very long,” Lena said, “you can tag along behind me. ’Cause I’m gonna need to jog off a ton of baby weight pretty soon.”

He stopped with a cookie halfway to his lips, and his eyes took her in, head to toe and up again, slowly. “You’ve never looked more beautiful, Lena. And that’s the truth.”

Not only did the blood rush into her face, but hot moisture flooded her eyes, as well. She had to turn away to hide it from him, because it was so inexplicably sappy of her. Her excuse was to reach up into a nearby cabinet for dinner plates.

But he was behind her, pressing up against her back and reaching around to get the plates himself. “Let me do that. You should be sitting with your feet up. It was a long, hard night, and you’ve obviously been knocking yourself out all day.”

She frowned and looked up at him.

Don’t do it. Don’t fall head over heels again, not until you know for sure he’s not up to something.

But he
wasn’t
up to anything. He couldn’t be. She would know. Wouldn’t she?

Both Bahru and the ghost tried to warn you. Maybe you should check the chalice again later. Maybe you can scry for the truth. It’s the most powerful tool you’ve ever had. Use it.

Or maybe she could just check his cell phone. See who he’d been calling. If he’d been talking to a custody lawyer just before coming here, it would probably still show up in his call log.

Absolutely not. I’m not that woman.

“Lena?” Ryan was looking at her funny, probably because she’d stopped moving to have her internal argument. “Okay. I’ll sit. Come on, Mom. You too.”

“I think I could get used to this royal treatment, Lena. Maybe we ought to keep him around.”

She was pretending to be teasing, but Lena knew she wasn’t really.

* * *

Dinner was over and the dishes waiting for morning, because she was beat. But she and Ryan kept their date. Doc Cartwright had come by to quickly check on Selma, who had gone to bed afterwards, still seeming fine. Now Lena and Ryan were sitting together on the little sofa in front of a roaring fire.

Lena and the Prince in the Oasis
was open on his lap, and he was smiling indulgently as he flipped the pages.

“I hope you’re right and our baby is a girl, and I hope she’s just like her mother,” he said.

“That’s a lovely sentiment, but it’s not why I showed you these.”

He met her eyes, and she swallowed hard. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. He thought he wanted her and the baby in his life, well, he might as well know it all. “I didn’t just make up these stories, Ryan. I...I
saw
them.”

“I don’t...follow.”

She pursed her lips. “I saw them in a magic mirror when I was first learning how to scry.”

“Scry?”

“You know, when someone sees images in a crystal ball? That’s scrying. We can do it in rippling water, in dancing flames, in black mirrors. The very first time Mom let me try it, I saw this entire story unfolding before my eyes.”

He didn’t laugh, didn’t look at her as if she was nuts. That was gratifying.

“It’s not supposed to happen that way. Usually you see bits and pieces, or symbols that you have to try to interpret. This was different. Powerful and full-blown. As a little girl, I thought they were dreams. Fantasies, you know? And so did Mom.”

“Sounds like you don’t think that anymore,” he said, flipping another page, looking from the crayon drawings and painstakingly printed words on construction paper back to her.

“No, I don’t. In hindsight, it’s very clear to me that these stories were coming to me from a past lifetime.”

“
Your
past lifetime?”

She held his gaze steadily as she nodded. And then she forced herself to say, “And yours.”

He blinked. “Mine.”

“You were the prince. I recognized you the very first time I saw you. You’re identical.”

“Well, yeah, clearly I have purple hair and everything.” He was smiling, trying to lighten the mood a little.

Lena smiled back. “Obviously you’re not identical to the drawings. I was barely eight. I couldn’t draw what I was seeing. But what I
saw
in that mirror, and in my dreams so many times from then on, was you. Everything, your eyes, your smile, your mannerisms. I was seeing
you
in those visions. And I know it probably sounds crazy to you, Ryan, but I believe those dreams and visions are true. I believe we were together in another lifetime. Long ago, in some desert kingdom. I think...I think it was Babylon. And...I don’t think it ended well. I think I was murdered. And you were trying to save me, but you couldn’t get there in time.”

“Holy shit. You’re serious about this.”

“I know, this probably makes you— Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything, but...”

“Hey.” He covered her hand with his. “It’s okay, Lena. I’m starting to think there’s more to all this stuff you believe in than I knew.”

“Thanks for not laughing at me,” she said.

“Maybe that’s why you’re having these weird dreams now, because you’re...seeing me again. You think?”

“I think it’s connected, but I just don’t know how.”

He nodded very slowly, his eyes thoughtful. As if he was seriously turning everything over in his mind, not just humoring her. “So that’s it, that’s what you wanted to tell me tonight.”

“Yeah.” She sighed, relieved that it was out and he hadn’t reacted with disbelief or ridicule. “That, and that I think we found each other again for a reason. To make it right this time around somehow. Finish something we didn’t get to finish back then. But yeah, that was it.” She studied his eyes. “What did
you
want to tell
me?
”

He was staring into her eyes, seemed to have gotten lost in them, and then he shook his head a little and blinked. “Oh, right. Um... There were some guys in the hardware store today. They were talking about a couple of animal murders right here in Milbury.”

“Animal murders? What...?”

“Someone apparently slit the throat of a calf last night and caught all the blood. They must have taken it somewhere for...something.”

She grimaced at him. “That’s terrible.”

“They said it was the second time in a month. And when I kind of insinuated myself into the discussion, they asked who I was. I said I was out here visiting you, and the hardware store guy said he’d heard you and Selma were witches, and that these animal murders hadn’t started until after you’d moved to town.”

“Oh,
hell,
Ryan. This is awful. People out here won’t understand, especially if they think we’re out sacrificing baby animals by moonlight.” A shiver whispered up her spine as she recalled sidelong glances and murmurs behind hands the last few times she’d been in town. She’d written them off as the result of old-fashioned attitudes about unwed mothers, but now she understood.

“It’s more than awful,” he said. “It’s dangerous. And I couldn’t help but wonder if someone else got the same idea and maybe did something to your mom the other night in the woods.”

“Or not.” She frowned, processing the thoughts swirling through her head into logical order. “She saw something out in the woods, right? Something that made her get out of her car and go out there for a closer look. She came across what looked like a ritual circle, and she must have thought it was important, because she took pictures of it.”

“Did you ask her about those pictures today?”

“Yeah. She doesn’t remember taking them. But she does remember her circle with her friends, and she says she definitely didn’t take any pictures there. Which I pretty much already figured. It’s very bad form to take photos in a Wiccan circle, especially when there are broom-closeted practitioners taking part.”

“So she took the photos in those woods,” Ryan said. “And
then
something happened to her. Maybe it wasn’t someone blaming her for calf murders. Maybe it was someone trying to keep her quiet about them instead.”

“But how? I mean, what the hell could they have done to make her lose her memory like that?”

“A roofie would do it,” he said softly. “And they could have poured some liquor into her so everyone would assume she’d been drinking.”

“Dammit, Ryan, I don’t like where this is going. I don’t like it at all.”

He put a strong, reassuring hand on her shoulder. “I don’t think you need to be too concerned. I mean, think about it. You’ve got some kids messing with the occult, they kill a couple of animals and maybe roofie your mom to keep her quiet when she stumbles onto them. That might be the extent of it. I’m betting they got a good enough scare by almost being caught to make them give it up, or at least take it somewhere else.”

She shook her head slowly. “What if they’re not just a bunch of kids who don’t know what they’re doing, messing around with the occult?”

He blinked, clearly not having considered that.

“Magic is real, Ryan. Dark magic as well as light. And the people who know how to wield it have real power. If they don’t have a moral code along with that power—then they could be truly dangerous.”

He nodded. “I’m not even doubting you on that. Listen, that’s double the reason you and your mother need to be very careful from here on. Not just so you don’t get blamed for what’s going on, but so no one targets you for any reason.” He sighed. “I’ll watch your backs. You’ve got nothing to worry about as long as I’m here. I promise.”

Lena looked up at him, and she went all soft inside. “I believe you.”

He slid his arms around her, pulled her close, and slowly bent nearer, then nearer still. She felt his breath, featherlight on her lips, and let her eyes fall closed. “Ryan,” she whispered.

And he kissed her. Just like that, he kissed her, and all her warnings about taking it slow, about making sure, about not falling for him again, melted away like snow in the springtime sunlight. She opened her mouth to him, and he tasted her with his tongue. She was on fire, her fingers splaying in his hair, her mouth feeding from his, reveling in his hands on her back and tickling up and down her nape beneath her hair.

The quiet chirping of his cell phone shattered the spell, and their lips parted, clinging, reluctant to let go. Ryan rested his forehead against hers. “Sorry. I’ll shut it off.” He pulled the phone from his pocket, and she lowered her eyes, since he was holding it practically under her nose.

Even though the caller’s name was upside down, it was clear enough.

P. Reynolds Atty
.

Atty? Attorney!

Something hammered in her chest, and she jerked backward, breaking contact. “Go ahead and take it. I...this was a mistake.” She fled upstairs, heading straight into the temple room. He called her name, but she just kept on going. She didn’t owe him any explanations. Bahru was right. He
had
been consulting a lawyer.

He just inherited several billion bucks, and a buttload of businesses, dummy. There are a thousand reasons why he might be talking to a lawyer.

Right, and Bahru’s warning—not to mention the one from her own house ghost—were what? Coincidence?

“There’s no such thing as coincidence,” she whispered.

She took a deep breath, knowing by her frantic squirming that she was upsetting the baby. Okay, time to calm down. This wasn’t good for either of them. She lit a few candles, enough to let her shut off the lights and still see what she was doing. And then she opened the big old cabinet that lined one wall and inhaled the scents that spilled from it. The familiar aromas she associated with witchcraft soothed her mind instantly. Sandalwood, sage, mint, roses, vanilla, her personal favorite, dragon’s blood, and more all mingled together in an almost visible cloud. They were a trigger for the ultra-calm state of mind known as alpha. The state in which magic could occur.