by Kay Hooper
“Richard—”
“In the study. Not out here.” Leaving his bag there on the floor, Merlin crossed the space to his study door and opened it.
“That’s a dandy lock you made,” she said as she followed him into the room and closed the door, leaning back against it. She didn’t look around at the book-lined walls, or at the very old scrolls placed on several shelves, and she didn’t notice that his big desk was unusually cluttered with several opened books and a number of scrolls.
He didn’t reply or react to her faintly accusing statement, merely walking to the front of his desk and then turning to face her as he leaned against it and lightly gripped the edge on either side of his hips. Serena wondered vaguely if they both felt the need of support. No, not Merlin, she thought. Surely not Merlin.
“Who is she, Richard?” The question was blurted without tact or grace.
Very quietly, impassively, he replied, “Who she is doesn’t concern you, Serena.”
Once Serena might have heeded the warning in his tone and backed away from what he clearly had no wish to discuss, but that time was past. Her stormy emotions were clawing at her, demanding an outlet, and she could no more stop her falsely bright, brittle words than she could stop breathing.
“Well, I’m reasonably sure she isn’t a wife. A mistress then? She was surely no stranger, I know that.”
“You know nothing about it.”
“I know it wasn’t the first time you were with her. That was obvious. I know what she looks like. Boy, do I know what she looks like. Head to toe.”
“You had no right to be there,” he said slowly, giving every word a terrible weight.
Stung, she said, “I didn’t try to be there, dammit. I have no idea how I got there. I was asleep, Richard, and so far you haven’t taught me a thing about controlling my sleeping mind.”
“I will, never fear.”
“I’ll look forward to that. It wasn’t exactly pleasant to find myself in some kind of bordello.”
A faint sound came from him, an indrawn breath that was muted evidence of growing strain, and anger flickered in his black eyes. “It was not a bordello.”
“No?”
“No. But whatever it was is none of your business. I don’t have to justify myself or my actions to you, Serena. Aside from teaching you what you came here to learn from me, I have no obligation to you. None.”
She was glad the door behind her lent some support, because she definitely needed it. Every clipped word he uttered stabbed at her. It had been bad enough before, but this was so hurtful, she could hardly breathe. No obligation? And no interest in her, his tone said that, as well.
The nine years they had spent together apparently counted for nothing.
“I see.” The words were hardly more than a whisper, and she fought to shore up her composure, to save a bit of her self-respect. “You’ll … have to forgive me. It seems I’m guilty of presumption, at the very least.”
She felt behind her for the door handle, and held on to that for balance as she straightened and turned to leave.
“Serena.”
Looking at him right now was impossible, but she went still, waiting.
“I didn’t mean that.” His voice was low.
She was very much afraid he had meant every word. “No, I needed the reminder,” she said as evenly as she could manage. “You’re right—your only obligation to me is what I asked for in the beginning, what you agreed to. Anything else is … anything else is completely inappropriate. I know that; I’ve known all along.” She told herself fiercely to shut up, to stop making her pain so damned obvious.
“Serena, there are things you don’t understand. Things I can’t explain to you.” His voice was unquestionably strained now. “Some boundaries mustn’t be crossed; the penalties are … too great. What we are, you and I, is precisely defined. It has to be.”
She turned her head slowly and looked at him. Even through her pain she could sense his tension, see it in every line of his body. And there was something leaping at her out of his eyes, some intense emotion she couldn’t interpret and that she had never seen before. She didn’t completely understand what he was saying, but the gist of it seemed clear enough; the barriers separating them were not to be crossed.
“Yes, of course,” she said almost politely, still clinging to the shreds of her dignity. “Everything has to have a clear definition; I know that. Because control is so important when dealing with power. Vital, really. So you’re a Master wizard, and I’m your Apprentice. And that’s all.”
A muscle tightened in his jaw. “Anything else … anything more is impossible, Serena.”
After a long moment she repeated, “Yes, of course,” then added gravely, “I apologize for intruding into your personal life. It won’t happen again.” Quickly, she slipped from the room, closing the door behind her.
Merlin drew a slow, deep breath, trying to ease the constricted sensation in his chest. It didn’t really work, which didn’t surprise him; he had been conscious of that odd tightness for a long time now. It had been an ever-present feeling for months at least. Before that it had been an erratic thing, something of which he had been aware only occasionally.
He remembered clearly when he had first felt a hint of the strange sensation. Serena had been with him about three years then, and they had been totally immersed in study most of that time. But he had taken her out to dinner one night, and looking at her across the table, he had been jolted to realize she was wearing lipstick.
Such a small thing, and the sudden squeezing inside his chest had been fleeting, easily forgotten. Until the next time he had glimpsed some sign that the ragged urchin he had taken into his home and his life was becoming a woman. Was, actually, reveling in being a woman.
He hadn’t lied to her just now, he told himself. There were precise lines dividing Master and Apprentice, and because of the power involved, those boundaries really did have to be respected. Serena knew that, as her words had proven. But he hadn’t told her the whole truth, and he had allowed her to believe he was far more emotionally indifferent to her than he was.
Indifferent? Christ, if she only knew …
Merlin pushed himself away from the desk and went around behind it, where his chair was pulled back. He didn’t sit, but put his hands on the smooth oak of the desk and leaned forward, staring down at an old, old book lying open. Like so many of the books in this room, its fragile parchment pages were hand-lettered in a strange language that would have baffled even the most erudite linguist, but Merlin read it easily because it was the language of his kind.
It is forbidden for any Master, or any wizard of any level, to encourage or teach a woman to understand or implement any part or the whole of spells, incantations, or any other tool of the wizard’s craft. No wizard of any level may reveal his true nature to a woman at any time without the prior express permission of the Council of Elders. Any wizard encountering a woman of innate power, whether or not she be aware of that power, must instantly report the discovery to the Council. Failure to obey these laws will result in the most severe of penalties, up to and including total banishment and the deprivation of all powers….
Merlin didn’t have to look at the other books and scrolls on his desk, because he had pored over them for many hours already. Without exception, each of them pronounced the same laws in an identical tone of dire warning. The words might have differed slightly from source to source, but there was no ambiguity, no loophole through which to pass. What it all boiled down to was quite simple.
He had broken an ancient law in accepting a woman as his Apprentice—teaching her secretly, without the knowledge of the Council—and with every day that passed he was compounding the original crime.
It had seemed such a foolish law then, when a half-starved and half-drowned girl had turned up on his doorstep, her untapped powers practically radiating from her thin little body in an aura of promise. How could he turn his back on that promise merely because sh
e was female? He couldn’t.
He hadn’t.
Since wizards tended to isolate themselves, and no other lived in Seattle, he’d had no trouble in keeping his activities secret from the Council and others of his kind, even over the span of nine years. Serena had been so consumed with the desire to learn that she had been unquestioningly obedient to his carefully devised rules, and he had been able to shield her developing abilities so as to escape notice. So far.
But what Merlin had not anticipated were his own confused instincts and emotions. The more Serena matured, the more he found himself overwhelmingly aware of her. She held his total attention with startling ease, no matter what she was doing, with her voice and her grace and the laughter in her green eyes, and even the way she had of charmingly and cleverly manipulating people and her surroundings to suit her—whether or not she used her powers to do it.
Their years together had given them knowledge of each other and a certain familiarity, and of course she had become a beautiful woman, so his notice and interest should have seemed perfectly normal and hardly surprising. And though he couldn’t be sure of Serena’s feelings any more than he could read her thoughts, he would have to have been blind and stupid not to recognize, even before today, that she saw him as something more than a teacher.
So why was he fighting his own feelings? There was, after all, nothing standing between him and Serena except a ponderous ban in some old texts Serena had never even seen. And since he’d already broken the law, anything else had to be an insignificant matter of degree. At least that was what he told himself. But what seemed simple on the surface turned out to be far more complicated underneath.
He had found himself withdrawing from her time and time again, feeling a strange and senseless apprehension whenever something reminded him she was no longer a child, that she was a woman only nominally under his control. The feelings grew stronger and stronger, the tightness in his chest, the wariness, the inexplicable urge to be on guard, as if against a threat.
Serena … a threat. Why? Why?
Her innate power was truly incredible; that was beyond question. She frequently startled him with the strength of some ability he was in the process of teaching her—as well as an occasional seemingly natural or unconscious skill that was unknown to him even after a lifetime’s study of his art—but he had no logical reason to feel apprehensive or threatened by Serena nevertheless.
It had occurred to him only recently that what he felt was far too powerful to have originated in the simple breaking of a law, that surely there was little power in dry words of warning written in ancient books and scrolls—certainly not enough to cause this turmoil inside him.
No, this was something else, something embedded in him, inherent to him, to who and what he was, that he could only sense. It was as if all his deepest instincts recognized a prohibition so vitally important, it was more like a taboo, a primitive command demanding instant, wordless obedience. Part of him wanted to obey, struggled to obey, but part of him didn’t want to and fought against it. Since he was a logical man, and since that command stirred an increasingly stormy conflict he didn’t understand in himself, Merlin had begun searching for the reasons behind the law.
So far he hadn’t found them.
Sitting down in his desk chair, Merlin leaned back and gazed across the room at nothing. How could he explain to Serena what he didn’t understand himself? About what he felt and what he recoiled away from feeling…. And how could he even begin to tell her that the closed, secret society of wizards she aspired to join wanted nothing to do with her?
“Have you seen today’s paper?”
Serena peered at the clock on her nightstand—a replacement for the one she’d zapped—and made a muffled sound of indignation when she realized it wasn’t yet seven o’clock. In the morning.
“Jane, do you know what time it is?” she asked into the phone, yawning.
“Of course I know what time it is. You weren’t awake? Serena, you’re always up by six on a weekday.”
Unwilling to explain that she hadn’t slept well in the two nights since the confrontation with Merlin on Tuesday, Serena merely said, “I was up late last night. What’s this about the paper?”
In a parient tone Jane said, “Thursday is when Kane’s column runs, remember?”
Serena thought about it. “Yeah, I remember. So what? Did he call me the whore of Babylon?” She wasn’t very interested; since most of her concentration and emotional energy had been taken up with the urgent need to act as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened between her and Merlin whenever he was present, she had completely forgotten that Kane might have decided to make trouble for her.
“Let me put it this way. If at all possible, you’d better hide the relevant section of the paper before Richard sees it.”
Pushing herself up in bed, Serena frowned. “Did Kane attack Richard?” she demanded fiercely.
“Weil, he certainly didn’t nominate him for citizen of the month, but Richard is not going to like the publicity, and I doubt he’ll be terribly pleased at the stuff printed about you—even if none of it’s new. Really, Serena, just get to the paper and read it, okay? And call me later.”
Serena hung up the phone on her way out of bed. She was in such a hurry that she used her powers to get ready for work in three seconds flat, going from a nightgown to a businesslike skirt and sweater between her bed (which made itself up as soon as she left it) and the door. It always felt a bit unsettling to have shoes appear on her feet while she was walking, especially high heels, but she adjusted and hurried from her bedroom after a quick glance to make sure the shoes matched. At least twice, hurrying like today, she had ended up with a weird combination.
Merlin’s bedroom was down the hall, and the closed door didn’t tell her whether or not he was up.
They hadn’t talked, beyond what was absolutely necessary and then with distant courtesy, since Tuesday. He had spent his evenings in the house closeted in his study, so she had seen him only at meals. As she went quickly down the stairs, she could only hope that a late night of work, or whatever he was doing in his study these days, had kept him in bed past his usual time. Both of them tended to rise early, usually before six A.M., as Jane had noted.
The front door was still latched, and Serena breathed a sigh of relief when she opened it to find the morning’s newspaper lying on the porch. Rachel always entered the house through the kitchen door in the mornings, and so the newspaper was brought in by whoever happened to come downstairs first.
Pushing the door shut, she rifled quickly through the sections until she found the one that always held Kane’s column.
“Looking for something, Serena?”
Swearing silently, she replied in a light tone, “The life-style section. You know I always read my horoscope in the morning.”
“And you know it’s meaningless,” Merlin said as he joined her in the foyer.
“It amuses me.” Serena shrugged, then handed the remainder of the newspaper to Merlin and followed him toward the kitchen, from which came the smell of frying bacon. She would have much preferred to steal away somewhere private to read Kane’s column, but didn’t want to do anything that appeared suspicious.
She sat down across from him at the table, casually greeted Rachel, and sipped her coffee before unfolding her part of the paper. She forced herself to turn the pages without haste, but had to struggle not to stiffen in silent fury when she saw the title of Kane’s column.
“Uncle and Niece …?”
Thinly disguised as one of those Meet a Couple of Our Leading Citizen commentaries (which would fool no one; Kane’s articles were eagerly read because he invariably trashed somebody), the piece was actually not as bad as Serena had feared, and certainly not as bad as it might have been. Obviously Kane knew better than to go over the line and risk libel. Other than with the title, he didn’t even make implications about Serena and Merlin’s true relationship, in fact—perhaps because her scornful c
harge that he would resort to “tabloid journalism” had touched him on the raw.
Nothing he said about Serena in the article bothered her in the slightest, especially since most of the details of her various relationships had already been made public. He didn’t refer to her as the whore of Babylon, though the picture he painted wasn’t far off the mark.
But what Kane had done with his malicious article was focus a spotlight on Merlin, as well as Serena, which was the kind of unwelcome publicity the wizard had always studiously avoided. And he must have battered his way through a few of those walls he’d mentioned, because he had unearthed several hitherto unpublished facts about Richard Merlin’s background. Facts that surprised Serena and pointed out to her how very little she actually knew about Richard.
His father, for instance, was a judge in Chicago. Mother deceased for a number of years, her death caused by some accident. No siblings. Merlin had attended Harvard University, earning a degree in political science “at an unusually young age.” Never married or engaged, he had lived briefly in Boston after college, then had moved to Seattle almost fifteen years ago. From all appearances—and no doubt to Kane’s immense disgust—he seemed to have led a blameless, fairly unremarkable life.
Deliberately unremarkable, Serena thought shrewdly. After all, the best way to escape undue notice was to lead an outwardly bland existence with no unusual highs or lows.
“What is it?”
She looked up with a start to find Merlin watching her. “What’s what?”
“Your horoscope. Isn’t that what you’re reading so intently? What fascinates you so much?”
Looking into those unreadable, impenetrable black eyes, Serena suddenly knew it was useless to try to keep him ignorant of the article. He was, after all, Merlin. Trying to keep something hidden from a Master wizard—especially this one—was rather like trying to hide a storm from radar.
With a sigh she said, “It’s going to be a bad day.”
