A Little Magic(21)

As the eggs cooked, she spooned up porridge, plopped the bowl on the table, and went back to slice bread. “A world where I have no place.”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” Cal said evenly. “Did I choose to be, Bryna, or did you will it?”

She uses you. She’s drawn you into her web.

“Will it?” Insulted, struck to the bone, she whirled around to face him. “Is that what you think? After all I’ve told you, after all we’ve shared?”

“If I accept even half of what you’ve told me, if I put aside logic and my own sense of reality and accept that I’m standing in the kitchen with a witch, a stone’s throw away from an enchanted castle, about to do battle of some kind with an evil wizard in a war that has lasted a millennium, I think it’s a remarkably reasonable question.”

“Reasonable?” With clenched teeth she swept back to the stove and shoveled eggs onto a platter. “‘It’s reasonable,’ says he. Have I pulled him in like a spider does a fly, lured him across an ocean and into my lair?” She thumped the laden platter down and glared at him. “For what, might I ask you, Calin Farrell? For a fine bout of sex, for the amusement of having a man for a night or two. Well, I needn’t have gone to such trouble for that. There’s men enough in Ireland. Eat your breakfast or you’ll be wearing it on your head like a hat.”

Another time he might have smiled, but that sly voice was muttering in his ear. Still he sat, picked up his fork, tapped it idly against the plate. “You didn’t answer the question. If I’m to believe you can’t lie to me, isn’t it odd that you’ve circled around the question and avoided a direct answer? Yes or no, Bryna. Did you will me here?”

“Yes or no?”

Her eyes were burning-dry, though her heart was weeping. Did he know he was looking at her with such doubt, such suspicion, such cool dispassion? There was no faith in the look, and none of the love she needed.

One night, she thought on a stab of despair, had not been enough.

“No, Calin, will you here I did not. If that had been my purpose, or in my power, would I have waited so long and so lonely for you? I asked you to come, begged without pride, for I needed you. But the choice to come or not was yours.”

She turned away, gripping the counter as she looked out the window toward the sea. “I’ll give you more,” she said quietly, “as time is short.” She inhaled deeply. “You broke my heart when you shut me out of yours. Broke it to pieces, and it’s taken me years to mend it as best I could. That choice was yours as well, for the knowledge was there in your head, and again in your heart if you chose to see it. All the answers are there, and you have only to look.”

“I want to hear them from you.”

She squeezed her eyes tightly shut. “There are some I can’t tell you, that you must find for yourself.” She opened her eyes again, lifted her chin and turned back to him.

Her face was still pale, he noted, her eyes too dark. The hair she’d bundled up was slipping its pins, and her shoulders were stiff and straight.

“But there’s something that’s mine to tell, and I’ll give you that. I was born loving you. There’s been no other in my heart, even when you turned from me. Everything I am, or was, or will be, is yours. I cannot change my heart. I was born loving you,” she said again. “And I will die loving you. There is no choice for me.”

Turning, she bolted from the room.





8




SHE’D vanished. Cal went after her almost immediately but found no trace. He rushed through the house, flinging open doors, calling her. Then cursing her.

Damn temperamental female, he decided. The fury spread through him. That she would tell him she loved him, then leave him before he had even a moment to examine his own heart!

She expected too much, he thought angrily. Wanted too much. Assumed too much.

He hurried out of the house, raced for the cliffs. But he didn’t find her standing out on the rocks, staring out to sea with the wind billowing her hair. His voice echoed back to him emptily, infuriating him.

Then he turned, stared at the scarred stone walls of the castle. And knew. “All right, damn it,” he muttered as he strode toward the ruins. “We’re going to talk this through, straight. No magic, no legends, no bullshit. Just you and me.”

He stepped toward the arch and bumped into air that had gone solid. Stunned, he reached out, felt the shield he couldn’t see. He could see through it to the stony ground, the fire-scored walls, the tumble of rock, but the clear wall that blocked him was cold and solid.