Once outside, Margarete says: “You are seeing my brother.”
“Yes,” Shannon says. She is not quite sure how to approach this. Has Lucien mentioned her? Is she supposed to play dumb about their relationship? They haven’t rehearsed this, obviously.
“Well, don’t,” Margarete says abruptly. She reaches in her jeans pocket for a pack of cigarettes. She offers it to Shannon. “God, I’m dying for a smoke. You want one?”
“No, thanks, I don’t smoke.” Shannon is beginning to be irritable. “What’s this all about and what is it to you if I am dating your brother?”
“He hasn’t spoken about you to us, for sure.” Margarete lights up, blows a smoke ring into the air and doesn’t apologize for it.
“He hasn’t spoken much about you either to me.”
“So he intends to keep you a secret.”
“We are not exactly secretive about going out. Anyone would have spotted us in a dozen places. He isn’t married, and we’re not exactly creeping about behind anyone’s backs.”
“No. But you don’t know everything there is to know about him.”
“I do know plenty, yes.” Shannon senses the challenge, and she refuses to back down from this bossy woman.
“Then know this.” Margarete takes a long puff of her cigarette. “Since he was sixteen, he has been engaged to a girl named Flora Janssen. She lives in Seattle and she is due to visit him this weekend.”
Shannon is taken aback. OK, that would be putting it too mildly. She is sucker punched in the gut. Shock impacts every sense she possesses.
“Wh-what?” she says.
“You heard me right. Since he was sixteen – ”
“I heard that.” Shannon’s head is reeling, and the ground suddenly feels a lot closer than a second ago.
How does anyone in this day and age in the Western world get engaged when they are sixteen unless they are royalty? Even royalty doesn’t do that anymore. But even as the thoughts tumble in her head, she thinks she knows why.
Flora Janssen must be a witch. The witch clans must have gotten together and decided that a union between the eldest Walker son and the daughter of the Janssens would produce further lines of powerful witches.
“Then which part of what I said didn’t you understand?” Margarete says.
Shannon doesn’t think she said that to be cruel. Margarete is simply someone who has the E.Q. of a worm.
Margarete continues, “My brother is taken. He has been spoken for. You have no future in his life, and I’ve come here to you today to ask you not to complicate things. Things are complicated enough for our family as it is already.”
Shannon has to fight hard to keep her lower lip from trembling. “Then how come he doesn’t tell me about her himself? Does he even have a choice in who he is marrying?”
Margarete clicks her tongue impatiently. “I don’t know what he does or does not tell you, though I suspect he is telling you more than he should be.”
She pauses significantly at this. I know he told you we are a family of witches.
“Lucien Walker isn’t like other people. He has a birthright. He comes from a very structured lineage, and he is expected to toe the line or lose his inheritance and standing in our family completely. My parents had an arranged marriage, as did my grandparents on both sides. I will have an arranged marriage. In fact, I have been engaged to man from Boston since we were both fourteen. We are both simply continuing the tradition passed to us by our parents and their parents before them.
“You are a distraction to him. You are just another one in a long line of Lucien’s girlfriends – girls he has been seeing and having casual sex with to bide his time until he is married to Flora. He may have been seeing more of you than the others, true, but it still doesn’t change the fact that he will be married to Flora by the end of October.”
The end of October. Shannon knows what that signifies.
Samhain.
Halloween.
“Flora knows about Lucien’s girlfriends,” Margarete continues. “She tolerates his wanderings with understanding, dignity, and a worldly eye because she knows he has to sow his seeds before settling down. And that is exactly what he is doing with you. Sowing his seeds. Nothing more.”
Shannon can’t help feeling like her world is sinking around her.
“But he doesn’t love her,” she blurts out.
“What do you know about their relationship? Does he love you?” Margarete says meaningfully.
Lucien has never dropped the ‘L’ word with her. Shannon can feel the blood draining away from her face. Is that why he never gave her any hope regarding these matters? Is that why he never brought it up?