Time Travel Romances Boxed Set (139 page)

Lilith frowned. But if Sebastian was reborn
as a child, even this very day, she would be old by the time he
grew to a man again. And if it was not this day…Lilith could not
bear the thought.

She could not die before Sebastian
returned!

Lilith’s hand rose to her lips, an ancient
rumor echoing in her thoughts. Could it be true? Dritta would know.
“It is whispered that there is a way to immortality.”

Dritta nodded, her eyes bright. “I do not
know the secret, child, or on your mother’s memory I would share it
with you.” She leaned closer, her brow nearly touching Lilith’s
own. “But there are others, others who know different secrets than
we do. With your Gift, you can find them, learn what they know,
prepare yourself.”

Lilith was shocked. “But I cannot leave the
kumpania
!”

Dritta sighed, a sad sound. “You cannot
stay, child.”

Lilith noticed only now that the rest of her
Rom family lingered in the shadows behind Dritta, watchful, silent
as birds. There was a new wariness in their gazes, and their
expressions reminded her of how they watched the
gadje
. Her
uncle was no longer alone in that.

She understood that they had sheltered her
in defiance of the
gadje
. And in so doing, they had risked
their lives. Any affection Lilith had known here, any old
obligation to her mother, was gone. The only debt owing was her
own. She had been judged.

She was
mahrime
. Polluted. Unclean.
She had been intimate with a man not of her own kind, not of the
true blood, not
tacho rat
. She was tainted.

Love was nothing compared to that.

And through no fault of his own, Sebastian
left her doubly shamed – due to his death, he had not rendered the
bride price to Lilith’s
kumpania
for taking her
maidenhead.

It did not matter that Lilith had
surrendered it willingly. She stood and surveyed the others,
recognizing that her choice had cost her the only family she had
ever known.

It was a high price to pay for love, but
Lilith had no regrets. She could never have denied the passionate
touch of the man she loved. If nothing else, she had those golden
moments to treasure until – if? – she and Sebastian found each
other once more.

“
You must leave,” Dritta
said, her tone resolute. “You are of us no longer.”

Lilith lifted her chin. Even knowing this
was the way things had always been done did not take the sting from
the wound. Her own family denied her. The cast her out to the four
winds and left her open to any fate. Their disregard made her
deeply angry.

But she could deny them in return.

Knowing how they loved a tale, she would
give them no story of her stormy departure to recount in the years
ahead. She would leave silently.

And she would continue to deny them, as they
denied her, for every day and night that remained of her life.

She would never forget this rejection. For
this one deed, they would forget everything that had been between
them, all the things she had done for them, all the bonds that
bound them together. Lilith did not care if it was the Way; it
would be her way no longer.

“
You are right,” she told
Dritta proudly. “I will leave the
kumpania
. From this
moment, I am not
Rom
.”

“
You will always be
Rom
.”

“
No. I choose to be
Rom
no longer.”

Dritta shook her head. “It is in your blood,
child. Who you are will follow you.”

“
I will not let it.” Lilith
stared at the others for a long moment, noting the distrust in
those eyes. “Do not fear my taint, you who have been my brothers’
and sisters. I will leave this very night.”

If she’s hoped for an argument, Lilith did
not get one. Indeed, their relief was tangible.

So be it.

Lilith turned away, only the sight of a rare
tear on Dritta’s cheek making her pause.

Dritta reached to touch Lilith’s cheek, then
kissed her gently. “
Bahtalo drom
, child,” she whispered, so
softly that none of the others could hear her words.

Lucky road. There would be no second
chances.

It was farewell forever.

Lilith plucked the Fool card from Dritta’s
hand, then turned away, her heart aching. She did not know where
she would go, where she would find shelter, what dangers would
confront her, whether she even could discover the secret of
immortality.

But Lilith would cut a new path. She would
make a new life and find a haven for herself in some corner of the
world. She would become something other than what she had been; she
would shed the identity that had cost her everything, and shed it
like a second skin. She would wait for the reappearance of her true
love.

That would make every sacrifice
worthwhile.

She did not miss the fact that Sebastian was
not the only one to step toward a new horizon on this night of
nights.

*

Toronto – August 1999

It was hotter than Hades in the city, the
kind of sticky steamy summer day that most people consider more
characteristic of New Orleans than the great white north. The
humidity was oppressive and tempers were wearing thin on that
Saturday afternoon.

And Mitch Davison had the misfortune to be
moving.

“
I wanna go swimming!”
three-year-old Jen wailed from the back seat of the much-abused
Honda wagon. She kicked her feet against her car seat impatiently
and Mitch caught a glimpse of her trembling lower lip in the
rearview mirror. The treasured toys she had refused to entrust to
the professional movers filled most of the back seat of the car –
at least what was available after the family wolfhound staked his
turf.

“
I’m hot,” her brother
Jason agreed.

Both children looked expectantly to their
father, as though he could solve everything.

Mitch tried. He really did.

“
Well, you’re just going to
have to wait a little bit longer,” he said with as much
cheerfulness as he could manage. “What kind of Kool-Aid should we
make first?”

The dog nudged Mitch in the back of the neck
with his wet nose, demanding an open window. Mitch rolled down his
window and got a great furry head beside his ear as a bonus. Colley
panted like a blast furnace on his shoulder.

“
Cherry! And I wanna swim
now
!” Jen cried, as though volume could make it
so.”

The combination of a restless night and an
unsettled day was affecting the toddler’s usual sunny disposition.
It was a tough day for the kids, Mitch knew, but he wasn’t having a
lot of fun himself. The traffic was brutal, the air conditioning
had given out in the car and the sweat was running down his back
like a river. Not for the first time, he knew why parents usually
came in teams.

Not that Janice would have done any better
with this day than Jen was doing. That thought did just about
nothing to improve Mitch’s mood.

Maybe,
maybe
, Andrea was already at
the house. Mitch could really use his stepmother’s help this
weekend.

Which pretty much guaranteed she had
forgotten the whole thing and gone to the Caymans instead. The last
trait Mitch would attribute to Andrea was reliability.

Charm she had by the bucket, though.

“
I’m working on it, Jen,”
he said. “Just hang with me. How about a song for our new
house?”

Jason started ‘Old Macdonald’ and much to
Mitch’s relief, Jen went for the diversion. They got through the
intersection on the next green light, and entered a miraculous
stretch of unjammed road. Within moments, Mitch was turning into
the common driveway that ran behind the houses on their new street.
Ramshackle garages were interspersed with new ones. Gangly tomato
plants and grapevines dangled over fences with such abandon that he
thought they might take over the lane, given half a chance.

“
Look at those sunflowers!”
Mitch pointed to the flowers in an effort to distract the kids when
their song ended.

“
Those ones are really
big,” Jason said, in his usual quiet voice.

“
Orange!” Jen shouted, the
contrast marked as always. She shook her beloved Bun by the ear. “I
wanna swim!”

“
Any minute now.” Mitch
turned into the driveway behind the house and his heart
sank.

The yard that was now his was a chaotic mess
of greenery. The dandelions certainly had been more manageable when
he had looked at the house.

Two months before.

Well, Jen would have to make do. Mowing the
weeds was hardly on the agenda today.

A striped grey cat sat on the fence between
their disaster of a yard and artfully lush garden beyond. The cat
was backed by a brilliant array of bobbing flowers. It eyed the
Honda’s occupants, then calmly licked its paw.

Cooley took one look and barked, the noise
enough to deafen a normal man at such close proximity. Mitch had
already started to open the door, only to have 140 pounds of
wolfhound muscle him aside and explode across the yard.

Barking his brains out the whole way.

Well, it was no secret that they’d
arrived.

The cat gave Cooley the disdainful look that
cats everywhere reserve for non-felines and proceeded to clean the
other paw with great care. Cooley was beside himself, running back
and forth beneath the cat’s perch.

At least he was occupied.

And he
was
flattening some of the
weeds.

Jen began to bellow for escape; Jason was
out the door and off to explore – no doubt to look for bugs – and
Mitch was left to manage the details. Once he had broken trail
through the yard and unlocked the kitchen door, he wasn’t surprised
to find no sign of Andrea.

The movers were ringing the front bell.

It was going to be a long day.

And he was, one more time, all on his
own.

*

Lilith was in a funk. She rattled through
her house, picking listlessly at this crystal or that astrological
chart. She was dimly aware of the moving van disgorging possessions
next door, but wasn’t really interested.

She was hot in more ways than one.

It was their 579th anniversary and – just
like the last 578 times – Sebastian hadn’t shown.

Yet, even given that, today Lilith couldn’t
evict Sebastian from her mind. The memory of the evening they’d
spent together tormented her. The echo of his last pledge rang in
her ears. She had dreamed of him the night before, relived that
precious time so vividly that she’d been sure she could feel his
hands on her when she awakened in the morning.

But he wasn’t there.

Lilith was alone.

Still.

Maybe it was the heat that tried her
patience.

Maybe it was this marathon run of celibacy
that was getting on her nerves. Lilith had been patient, but
immortality alone wasn’t a lot of fun. She was tired of being
resilient and optimistic. She was tired of being cheerful in
solitude.

Lilith was done with the waiting.

And Sebastian was late, but any
calculation.

Tarot card reader, astrologist and crystal
therapist, Lilith had adopted all the trappings of the occult to
mask her Gift. She was reluctant to give any hint of the real
nature of her talent, so she blamed everything on the tarot cards.
People found it easier to believe that a stack of cardboard cards
held the secrets of the future than that Lilith could see the truth
in their eyes.

For the fact was that the draught for
immortality – when Lilith had ultimately earned the right to a sip
– had added an interesting twist to her innate Gift. After drinking
that elixir, Lilith could see anyone’s match right in their eyes.
Regardless of where that lovematch was in the world, she could set
anyone on the path to connecting with his or her soulmate.

Maybe it was because her heart had been so
full of Sebastian when she had that precious sip.

It was a bitter kind of irony to make her
living consoling the lovelorn when she was so lonely herself.
Lilith didn’t even know how many weddings she’d been invited to
attend, mostly because she had in some way been responsible for
introducing the bride and groom.

Always a bridesmaid, as the saying went.

The experience was getting old. She’d
stopped going stag to weddings five years before, but it didn’t
make her feel any better. The invitations were bad enough.

Sebastian was taking his own sweet time
returning to her, that much was for certain. Lilith remembered the
way he had kissed her and her skin heated. She closed her eyes and
leaned back in her favorite chair to remember every caress, one
more time.

The only time.

So much for promises made on the
gallows.

Lilith frowned at the room, and caught the
knowing glint in D’Artagnan’s eyes. That cat saw too much, and it
was a blessing he couldn’t talk. He had moved in with purpose two
years before, characteristically disinterested in Lilith’s opinion
of his presence.

She wondered whether the cat knew that she
only let him stay in deliberate defiance of
Rom
norms. Cats
licked themselves, polluting inside with outside. Cats were dirty
in
Rom
terms. Cats were
mahrime
.

But then, Lilith had been
mahrime
herself for a long time. Maybe there was a twisted kind of justice
in D’Artagnan’s deliberate adoption of her. Maybe they belonged
together.

That wasn’t the most optimistic thought she
could have had.

Lilith wondered why she had any concern with
mahrime
conventions. It wasn’t as if the
Rom
and
their ideas had anything to do with her. Nope, she was just a witch
who told fortunes, not a gypsy at all. She had studied
gadje
witchcraft, learned to mix potions and cast spells, draw circles
for the moon and read astrological charts, too.