“But…” Catching her bottom lip between her teeth, she looked around the room. The gorgeous antiques, the modern electronics—which she’d noticed ran without electricity, the glamour of Ming vases, the foolishness of pop art.
Almost nothing in the room would have existed when he’d been banished here.
“Flynn, where do all these things come from? Your television set, your piano, the furniture and rugs and art. The food and wine?”
“All manner of places.”
“How does it work?” She took the wine from him. “I mean, is it like replicating? Do you copy a thing?”
“Perhaps, if I’ve a mind to. It takes a bit more time and trouble for that process. You have to know the innards, so to speak, and the composition and all matter of scientific business to make it come right. Easier by far just to transport it.”
“But if you just transport it, if you just take it from one place and bring it here, that’s stealing.”
“I’m not a thief.” The idea! “I’m a magician. The laws aren’t the same for us.”
Patience was one of her most fundamental virtues. “Weren’t you punished initially because you took something from someone?”
“That was entirely different. I changed a life for another’s gain. And I was perhaps a bit…rash. Not that it deserved such a harsh sentence.”
“How do you know what lives you’ve changed by bringing these here?” She held up the pearls. “Or any of the other things? If you take someone’s property, it causes change, doesn’t it? And at the core of it, it’s just stealing.” Not without regret, she lifted the jewels over her head. “Now, you have to put these back where you got them.”
“I won’t.” Fully insulted now, he slammed his glass down. “You would reject a gift from me?”
“Yes. If it belongs to someone else. Flynn, I’m a merchant myself. How would I feel to open my shop one morning and find my property gone? It would be devastating. A violation. And beyond that, which is difficult enough, the inconvenience. I’d have to file a police report, an insurance claim. There’d be an investigation, and—”
“Those are problems that don’t exist here,” he interrupted. “You can’t apply your ordinary logic to magic. Magic is.”
“Right is, Flynn, and even magic can’t negate what’s right. These may be heirlooms. They may mean a great deal to someone even beyond their monetary value. I can’t accept them.”
She laid the pearls, the glow and the sparkle, on the table.
“You have no knowledge of what governs me.” The air began to tremble with his anger. “No right to question what’s inside me. Your world hides from mine, century by century, building its pale layers of reason and denial. You come here, and in days you stand in judgment of what you can’t begin to comprehend?”
“I don’t judge you, Flynn, but your actions.” The wind had come into the room. It blew over her face, through her hair. And it was cold. Though her belly quaked, she lifted her chin. “Power shouldn’t take away human responsibility. It should add to it. I’m surprised you haven’t learned that in all the time you’ve had to think.”
His eyes blazed. He threw out his arms, and the room exploded with sound and light. She stumbled back, but managed to regain her balance, managed to swallow a cry. When the air cleared again, the room was empty but for the two of them.
“This is what I might have if I lived by your rules. Nothing. No comfort, no humanity. Only empty rooms, where even the echoes are lifeless. Five hundred years of alone, and I should worry that another whose life comes and goes in a blink might do without a lamp or a painting?”
“Yes.”
Temper snapped off him, little flames of gold. Then he vanished before her eyes.
What had she done? Panicked, she nearly called out for him, then realized he would hear only what he chose to hear.
She’d driven him away, she thought, sinking down in misery to sit on the bare floor. Driven him away with her rigid stance on right and wrong, her own unbending rules of conduct, just as she had kept so many others at a distance most of her life.
She’d preached at him, she admitted with a sigh. This incredible man with such a magnificent gift. She had wagged her finger at him, just the way she wagged it at her mother. Taken on, as she habitually did, the role of adult to the child.
It seemed that not even magic could burn that irritating trait out of her. Not even love could overcome it.
Now she was alone in an empty room. Alone, as she had been for so long. Flynn thought he had a lock on loneliness, she thought with a half laugh. She’d made a career out of alone.