by Melanie Rawn
But when he looked at her—at her eyes that were the wrong color and her face that was the wrong shape and her mouth that was the wrong curve — he kissed her anyway. She parted her lips, and kissed him back.
And if, on that stretch of deserted windblown beach, with his jacket for a bed and the long grass to hide them, either of them called out for someone who was gone, no one else knew.
After, they silently smoothed rumpled clothing and walked back up the beach, not touching.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” she said all at once. “To realize you’re still alive.” She slanted a look at him. “I have this feeling I ought to thank you.”
“Depends on why that happened.”
“Compassion?” She looked amused. “Altruism? Not bloody likely. I’m not that nice a person, Elias—and neither are you.”
“Comfort, then.”
She shrugged.
“What about Lachlan? Where does he fit in?”
“He doesn’t,” she said flatly. “This wasn’t about him.”
“Then why did you say his name?”
“Habit. You called me ‘Susannah.’”
“Did I? Christ.” He raked his hair back. “What a hell of a situation.”
“Why? You don’t really want me, and I don’t really want you. We both just had to make sure we were still alive.”
“You make it sound so damned cold.”
“I’m sorry you see it that way, because it didn’t feel like that to me at all. And there’s no ‘situation,’ Elias. None at all.” She smiled briefly. “You don’t have to send me a dozen red roses.”
He swore softly, remembering now that Susannah had shared that bit of his grandfather’s credo with her.
Holly rummaged in her purse for a comb, and gave it to him. While he was dragging it through his tangled hair, she said musingly, “Last weekend I made a try at convincing myself I was still alive. Still a whole human being. I wasn’t much good at it. In the past year I haven’t met anyone I’d care to spend ten minutes with—let alone half an hour on a sand dune.” Another little smile as he gave her back her comb. “But I know you, Elias. I feel comfortable with you. Because there’s never going to be a repeat. You know it, I know it. We’re just not each other’s type.”
“Yet she loved us both.”
“Susannah knew how to love. So few people saw that in her. The dedication to whatever she chose to do, whatever she found worthy of her. The work, friendship, loving …”
He tried to lighten things. “Sounds as if there’s a book character in this.”
“Oh, no,” she said very seriously. “I could never do her justice. And I’ve discovered that you can’t transpose people that way.” She hesitated, and suddenly her eyes were hard and cold again. “This wasn’t vengeance against Evan, Elias. That was published in June.”
“I know. I read it.”
They kept walking, up the beach to find their shoes, then to the church. The parking lot was deserted but for Elias’s Lincoln Town Car.
“Where can I drop you?” he asked.
“Where are you staying?”
He shook his head. “I’m not.”
“You can’t drive back to Manhattan today. We have to talk.”
“We already did.”
She opened his car door and slid inside. “There’s something else, Elias. About the people who kidnapped Susannah. And the one I think killed her.”
“Why the fuck didn’t you say something before?” he roared.
“Because I wasn’t sure you’d be able to hear it yet. Now I’m sure-Magistrate.” She slammed the door and folded her arms, jaw set and rigid.
He stood where he was, so angry, he shook to the bone. His title asserted its own identity, then demanded his full awareness. “All right, Spellbinder,” he muttered, striding to the driver’s side. “Your way or no way, as usual.”
JEMIMA AND HER HUSBAND WERE at the Wingfield home. The kids were in school. Elias and Holly had the big rambling house to themselves. In the kitchen with coffee brewing, she told him flatly, “She left a note.”
“How the hell could she have—?”
“Shut up and read.” Taking the Xerox page from her pocket, she handed it over. Musical notation. “Translation is on the back.”
He read. And read again.
“We had a project in college for a composition class. She used the code we made up then, which I won’t bother to explain, to write that. As for Noel — I think I finally figured out who he is.”
Holly told him about her visit to the store, and Nick and Alec’s worries, and reminded him that she’d asked him to check it out last year after she’d recognized the scent in Denise’s bedroom as incense or oil from Noel’s collection. “And do you remember that night my Witching Sphere went psychotic? Alec did a read while he was cleansing and respelling it. The main feel to it was Voudon, which logically leads back to Denise. She hates me and she knows what I am.”
“How does that connect with this Noel?”
“She bought things at his shop. She knows him. Nox incarnata sounds just like her kind of homefolks, doesn’t it? He might even have been there the night Scott Fleming was killed.”
“If so, why not trade him for immunity or a lesser charge?” he objected.
“I’m supposed to know this how, exactly?” she snapped. “Who knows what goes on in her little pea-brain? But consider this: Fleming and Susannah both had their necks broken. Some forensic comparison might be interesting.”
The thought of reading Susannah’s autopsy report made him want to smash his fist into a wall. “You’re a novelist. You —”
“I make up stories for a living? I’m also a biographer. Is that a little more precise and scholarly for you, Your Honor? I can recognize a coincidence when one bites me in the ass. Blood rites on Hallowe’en — when the veil between worlds is vanishingly thin.”
“A vanishingly thin connection.”
“We’re not in your courtroom. The rules of evidence don’t apply.”
He flattened his hand on the note. “How many people have touched the original?”
Holly stared, perplexed. “What?”
“Susannah, the cops who found her—who else?” he asked impatiently.
“Well—the crime scene people, and somebody put her personal effects together, and made the copy to give to her mother —”
“It might be possible,” he muttered.
“What are you talking about?”
“Lydia.”
Holly got to her feet. “You’re crazy. We don’t know what happened to Susannah. We don’t know what it might do to Lydia, to sense her memories. And how will you get hold of the original?”
He only looked at her.
“Okay, okay,” she conceded. “Stupid question.”
Elias finished his coffee, rose, and said, “We have to get moving on this. I’ll go back tonight, and —”
“You’ll stay here in town,” Holly shot back, “and get a decent night’s sleep. I’ll drive back with you tomorrow morning. We can phone the others from here. Don’t fight me on this, Elias. We’re neither of us in any shape to do the drive and then get ready for this kind of Work.”
“We are not going to do anything. You are going to go home and stay there until Samhain.”
Holly slammed her coffee cup down on the table. “Ifyou think you’re going to wrap me in cotton and stash me away, you’ve got another think coming!”
“It’s a damned good bet that he knows you’re a Spellbinder. You can’t risk—”
“Don’t even try, Elias,” she warned. “You’ll need me for Lydia’s sake.”
“Since when did you ever give a shit about Lydia—or the rest of the Circle, for that matter?” When she turned pale beneath her freckles, he made a little shrug of apology. “Sorry. I’m wound pretty tight. At least go stay with Alec and Nick.”
“No. In fact, I think we should all go about our normal business, because if Noel is watching — and you know he is
—anything out of the ordinary might tip him off that we’re aware of him.”
Bradshaw grunted reluctant agreement, and almost asked if she’d taken fool-the-perp lessons from Lachlan. At the thought of whom, an idea formed.
“We have to do this right,” Holly was saying. “That means preparation, and caution, and waiting until we’re all rested and ready. I’ll bleed buckets for this if necessary, but not for some half-assed attempt that gets tried too soon because you’re in a rage. After all, it’s my blood we’re talking about here.”
There was no replying to that.
She acknowledged it with a wry half-smile, and sat back down at the table. “I’ve already made a few contingency plans. I called Pete Wasserman. He says the lab reports on the dirt in her pocket will be in on Friday.”
“How’d you like to make yourself useful?” he asked, a contingency plan of his own developing. “I’ll have him okay it with the lab to release the reports to you. Go pick them up on Friday.”
“Why me?” she asked, suspicious.
“We’re holding a sale on excuses and justifications today,” he countered. “Which one are you buying? I could say it’s because I want you surrounded by law enforcement as often as possible, or because everybody in the office is going to be hellishly busy and I want this report picked up in person instead of getting lost in the bureaucracy. Or maybe because giving you something to do will keep you from going crazy.”
“How about because you asked me to, instead of issuing an order the way you usually do?”
“Works for me,” he said with a shrug.
It worked even better when he made a brief call later that afternoon, when Holly was busy with her friend Jemima. Contingency plan A, he thought to himself, and really smiled for the first time since Sunday morning.
Twenty-two
HOLLY WAS AT One Police Plaza by eleven o’clock Friday for the results of the soil analysis, Pete Wasserman having called in a favor with a friend in the NYPD labs. If the dirt in Susannah’s pockets had come from some obscure and unique area, they’d be a step closer to finding Noel—or at least one of his haunts.
The dirt turned out to be just dirt. Long Island dirt, but — just dirt. She thanked the clerk who gave her the report, hiding her frustration. Not that she’d expected much to come of this; she’d told herself Tuesday that it would have been too easy. Still, there’d been a hope. She felt it die inside her, a wretched little death. Reaching to punch the elevator button, she saw the glitter of diamonds on her wrist.
Susannah had lost her bet. Her mother had known nothing about that, of course, when she gave Holly the bracelet.
“We have to go see them. Elias, five minutes. Just to pay our respects. Neither of us showed up after the memorial yesterday. Her mother will be hurt.”
“Do I look as if I care?”
But he drove to the Wingfield house anyway. They arrived to find the sisters, brothersin-law, nieces, nephews, and various other relatives preparing to go home. Mrs. Wingfield would soon be all alone in the house. Holly felt guilty about that, though she knew what she and Elias planned to do would mean more to Susannah’s mother than a few hours of their company.
In the midst of a reserved New England chaos, Mrs. Wingfield took Holly and Elias aside. “The police returned her things. In her will she left this to you.” She fastened the bracelet around Holly’s wrist. “There are a few other things — and for you, Judge Bradshaw. Just some tokens to remember her by.”
As if Susannah was forgettable. Holly saw the flinch in Elias’s dark eyes, and hastily thanked Mrs. Wingfield, made their excuses, and escaped.
In the car, Elias said, “I could hardly look at her. I kept seeing Susannah in thirty years.”
“I know,” Holly murmured, fingering the bracelet. “Me, too.”
“I should have given her that.” He nodded at the jewelry.
She considered a moment, then said, “It was the roses that mattered, Elias. The red roses, and everything that went with them.”
Now the diamonds shone up at her, and she knew without even thinking about it that she’d always wear them. Just as she knew Evan still wore the St. Michael medal, and always would.
Everything came back to him in the end, even after more than a year. She couldn’t still be thinking this way, not after all this time. But her body still ached at the thought of him, and the heart he’d broken bled anew.
Giving up on the sluggish elevator, she headed for the stairs. Seven flights — but she could use the exercise. Settling into a rhythm that didn’t quite plod, she tried to listen to her footfalls instead of her thoughts.
He should’ve been the last man she’d fall for—and she’d fallen hard. But why him? She liked them tall and lean; highly educated and perceptive; men of style, elegance, and sensitivity. How had it happened that her heart had been irrevocably stolen by a big, broad-backed, blunt-spoken Irish Deputy U.S. Marshal?
Educated? He knew the streets, he knew people, he knew himself. And her.
Perceptive? He’d plowed through her books, genuinely liked them, and discussed them with her so astutely that she found new insights into her own work.
Style? Elegance? Nothing could outclass him in a tuxedo, naked he was glorious, and anything in between was a privilege and a pleasure to look at. Except for those ostrich-hide cowboy boots …
A sound halfway between laughter and a sob escaped her throat. Evan Lachlan and his godawful ostrich-hide cowboy boots …
… And his long fingers, so gentle as they framed her face. And his strong arms, wrapping her in warmth and safety. And his impossible grin. And his tenderness, and his deep searching kisses, and his powerful, generous body—
This was ridiculous. No man could possess such a glamour, in the sense of the old Gaelic: to cast an enchantment. This past year she had imbued him with qualities he’d never possessed—
Who was she trying to fool? He was everything she’d ever wanted. He’d given her strength for strength, fight for fight, loving for loving. And she’d lost him. Somehow all the pieces had come together and fallen apart. His fault, her fault, their fault—it didn’t matter anymore. She’d loved him and she’d lost him.
Damn him for doing this to her. For having this much power. For leaving her and yet never leaving.
She’d been terrified he’d come to Susannah’s memorial. She had no idea what she would have done if he had — except that she wouldn’t have taken that walk with Elias. She still wasn’t entirely clear on why she’d even tried to help him, other than that Susannah would have wanted her to. There’d been more than three hundred people in the church, but somehow Holly had felt herself an alien with all of them except Elias. Three hundred people—but not Evan. Maybe nobody had told him. He wouldn’t have stayed away just because Holly would be there. He’d been too fond of Susannah, admired her too much. Maybe he knew, but had to work.
She emerged from the stairwell and bumped into a bulky lawyer-type who snarled at her and hurried on his way. Apologizing to the man’s back, she hiked her purse over her shoulder and continued through the lobby.
And stumbled when she saw him. Hair a little longer, tall body sleek in a black suit and white shirt and those godawful cowboy boots, moving with that powerful saunter that always took her breath away. There was gray in his hair now, silvering his temples, and a few lines around his eyes, and he was maybe ten pounds heavier—and he was still the most beautiful man she had ever seen.
A frantic hand to her hair — would he like it short? — and a glance down at her clothes—how completely perfect Fate’s joke was — she wore the brown Armani suit—he always said it made her look like a goddamned lawyer—
He saw her then, and stopped walking midstride. He caught his balance easily—she had forgotten how supple he was, especially for a man his size. His height and breadth of shoulder and the strength of him made her bones go all hollow. His eyes narrowed, brows quirking downward as if not believing it was her, then went wider than ever. A
nd the gold came into them, brilliant with joy.
Her heart thundered and her body cried out and the suddenness of it put tears into her eyes that she damned because they obscured the sight of him. She scraped them away with a goddamned brown pinstriped Armani sleeve. He saw the tears, and his eyes grieved that she could even think of crying. He shook his head slightly, and the sweep of dark hair fell across his brow. She made her legs move, walk toward him. He started walking, too—faster and faster, and the sudden embrace suffocated whatever breath remained in their lungs.
But she found voice enough to whisper, “Evan — a chuisle—”
And after a short, sharp inhalation, as if the sound of his own name wounded him in some way, he answered in a voice that shook with the pounding of his heart, “Holly—oh, lady love —”
She tilted her head back to look up at him. Those eyes. Those incredible hazel-green gold-lit long-lashed luminous dragon’s eyes …
Helpless. Just like before. Damn him. How she would love to hate him for his power over her.
His voice was low and quiet, his face deadly serious. “Are you free?” She saw it in his eyes: Is there anyone else? Is there? She couldn’t speak. “Are you?” he insisted. Are you free of everything and everyone—except me, the way I’ve never been free of you and never want to be?
“Yes,” she whispered. “Oh yes.”
The gold in his eyes began to burn. He took her elbow, guided her outside. The wind was blowing hard, and she stumbled as if she had no strength to resist any force of nature—especially not him. His arm around her waist steadied her. His touch was a pleasure almost too painful to be borne. A taxi appeared in front of her, and he opened its door, and she got in. She didn’t hear what he said to the driver. She turned, trembling, unable to think of a single word to say.
“I’m still yours, Holly. If you’ll still have me.”
She hid her face against his chest. He rocked her in the old familiar way, and for the length of the cab ride they simply held each other. At last she stopped crying. He gave her a handkerchief to wipe her eyes and nose.
