Witchy Woman

by Karen Leabo

  “Thanks. I’ll do that.”

  “Oh, Mr. Wagner?” It was Tess who spoke up, surprising him.

  “Please, call me Nate.”

  She fixed him with a stare, her eyes holding an otherworldly intensity. “Do be careful.”

  A chill snaked its way up his spine. “Excuse me?”

  And then she seemed perfectly normal again. “You should be more careful when you handle old things in antique shops. That cut on your finger—no telling what kind of germs you picked up. You should wash it out with alcohol as soon as possible.”

  “Yes, yes, I’ll do that.” Had he only imagined that fleeting strangeness about her? As he watched the two women walk away from him, he suddenly knew, beyond a doubt, that Tess DeWitt was in fact Moonbeam Majick.

  At five minutes until five, Tess sat at her desk with her head in her hands, utterly drained. If she had to take one more phone call or track down one more glitch in one more program, she would go mad. What she needed was a bath—a long, hot, blessedly isolating bath. The tub seemed to be the only place she could empty her mind and achieve total relaxation.

  The tension was worse than usual after her unnerving lunch hour.

  Despite the constant battle of dealing with her “gift,” she didn’t think much about the old days anymore. Fifteen years was a long time, and she’d forgotten most of the events prior to her thirteenth birthday. The nightmares had stopped years before, and the image of her mother’s face was only a blur in her mind, so infrequently had they seen each other in recent years. But seeing that blasted red panther had brought it all crashing back.

  She’d only been a child when she’d last seen the statue. But there couldn’t be two pieces so alike. Besides, she had felt the evil emanating from that unholy cat. Without her even touching it, the vibrations had reached toward her like a blackened, skeletal hand reaching from the grave.

  She had no doubt in her mind that the Crimson Cat could kill. As a child, she had watched her uncle sicken and die less than a month after finding the statue in his attic among her grandmother’s effects. She remembered overhearing whispers about a curse and, little by little, piecing together the story.

  Apparently a Gypsy woman who practiced dark magic had placed the curse on the cat statue a couple of hundred years ago, then had vindictively given the cat to Tess’s great-great-grandmother, a white witch. The curse had proved so powerful that it had been passed from generation to generation, ending with Tess’s mother.

  Tess shivered as she recalled the transformation that had taken place, the stranger her mother had become after she had inherited the statue. In Morganna Majick’s case, death would have been a kinder fate.

  It was rumored that even casual possession of the statue—holding it, or touching it—could cause bad luck. To actually own it invited disaster. And the more one valued the cat, the worse that luck became.

  Tess thought back to the shopkeeper and her broken leg. She would bet her last dollar the accident had occurred after Anne-Louise had acquired the statue. And the cut on Nate Wagner’s finger. No coincidence, that.

  Nate Wagner. A strange warmth flooded her as she rolled his name around in her mind.

  She’d noticed him right away, standing by that window and pretending to look at the dolls when all the while he was eyeing her, and his covert attention had given her a small thrill of feminine delight. After all, how often was it that a tall, dark, and rakishly handsome man looked at her twice? Or rather, how often had she allowed it?

  She had recognized his story about his sister for the subterfuge it was, and had forgiven him for it. Her ego, she supposed, had wanted to paint him as a good guy. It wasn’t any fun to flirt with a slimeball.

  But then there had been that business with the Crimson Cat, and all she’d wanted was to get out of that shop. A part of her—an unfamiliar part—had wanted to linger with the appealing stranger, but raw fear had won out and she’d fled. Only when she’d seen him again outside, in the sunlight, had she admitted that she might have overreacted a bit.

  He was undeniably sexy, even in worn corduroys and an old windbreaker that should have seen the inside of a garbage can years before. He had a lean face with a prominent, almost hawkish nose and warm brown eyes. His hair, wild and curly and brown like his eyes, blatantly defied conventional styling.

  Of course, when he’d told her and Judy what he was up to, she had realized that his interest in her hadn’t been personal. That hadn’t stopped her from feeling a strange, sensual pull toward him. She shivered with delight at the memory.

  She hoped a cut finger was the worst that would come of his brush with the curse. But as she’d held his business card ever so gingerly, she had felt the aura of danger that surrounded him. She’d given him the best warning she could under the circumstances. Anything stronger, and he would have dismissed her as a nut.

  She wondered if there was any other precaution she could take for his benefit.

  His card was in her purse. Though she seldom deliberately called on her extrasensory abilities, this time she really had no choice. It was her fault that Nate Wagner had touched the cat in the first place. If she hadn’t seen it and stared at it with her mouth gaping open, he wouldn’t even have noticed the statue. She owed him this small bit of effort.

  She plucked the card from her purse and studied it: NATHANIEL WAGNER, FREELANCE WRITER. An address in Cambridge. Next she held the card between her clasped hands, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath.

  The first sensations to hit her mind were comfortable ones, like a warm breeze on a languorous summer day, adding to her favorable impression of the man. But, gradually, the comfortable feeling became less so. Warmth turned to heat, languor to need, and the breeze became a caress, a human caress. She felt his touch against her face, on her neck, her breasts.…

  She wrenched her eyes open and the vision disintegrated. “Good gravy,” she muttered. That sort of information was hardly pertinent. Unfortunately her powers were unpredictable at best. The sensitivity was almost always there, whenever she came into physical contact with a person or thing, but Tess had no control over which vibrations she received when.

  She cleared her mind, took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and tried again.

  There was a crowd pressing against her from all sides, and a roar reverberating in her ears. A sudden shove, the sensation of falling … panic, a mad scramble for safety, a hot wind that brought near death and—

  A sharp tap on her door and pop! The vision was gone.

  The door opened and Judy stuck her head inside the office. “Aren’t you ready to go home yet?”

  Tess glanced at her watch. It was already five-twenty. Quickly she thrust Nate’s business card back into her purse. “Come on in. I was just finishing up.” She began stuffing papers into her briefcase, papers she probably wouldn’t even look at once she got home. But executives at her place of employment always carried briefcases. It was part of the uniform, as were the conservative suit and low-key jewelry.

  “Hey, Tess,” Judy began in a low voice, “I’m sorry about hassling you today.”

  “Hassling me?”

  “Outside the antique store. I realized, too late, why you were upset.”

  If Judy knew why she was upset, Tess would have to give her friend credit for a few psychic abilities of her own.

  “That panther statue,” Judy continued. “Did it remind you of something from your past?”

  Hmm, not a bad guess. Judy was Tess’s closest friend, and thus one of a select handful who knew about her past as Moonbeam. But even Judy knew only the barest facts about Tess’s nightmarish childhood. The only people who had known the whole truth were a social worker, since transferred to another city, a kindly judge, who had died years earlier, and the psychiatrist she had seen during her teenage years.

  And her mother, of course.

  Even her aunt, who’d ended up as Tess’s dutiful but distant guardian, didn’t know how bizarre life with Morganna had become t
oward the end.

  “Yes, it did bring back the past,” Tess answered. “I know my behavior must seem irrational to you.” Judy, while entirely sympathetic to the hardships Tess had endured, didn’t believe in anything remotely supernatural. That was one of the reasons Tess liked her so much. She didn’t have to hide her abilities around Judy, because Judy would never believe in them anyway.

  “It’s okay,” Judy said, dismissing the apology with a wave of her hand. “Anyway, you were right. Aunt Dora doesn’t even like cats. Come on, let’s get going. I have an aerobics class to get to.”

  Per long-standing arrangement, Tess walked Judy to her car, then Judy dropped Tess off at the Copley Square T station.

  As soon as Tess pushed her way through the turnstile, it hit her. The subway! That was the atmosphere she’d sensed in her vision. Now she wished she had taken the time earlier to relax with Nate’s business card. Maybe she could have encouraged him to take a cab or something. Because what she’d seen in her mind’s eye had already taken place. She knew it.

  TWO

  Tess breathed a sigh of relief after she closed and bolted the front door of her condo in South Boston, her personal refuge. The vibrations she’d dealt with during the day had been particularly taxing.

  Most unsettling had been her run-in with Nate Wagner—both physically and mentally. His bodily presence had done wild things to her restless hormones. But the vision she’d experienced when holding his business card … Just by closing her eyes, she could vividly relive those fleeting, exquisite images that suggested a future sexual encounter.

  She kept her eyes resolutely open as she hung her purse on a hook by the door and kicked off her shoes. She ordered herself to focus instead on the pleasure of being home.

  She had scrimped and saved for years to buy this two-bedroom, split-level town house. The building was brand-new, made of clean stucco with a Spanish-tiled roof, oddly out of place in Boston, but she liked it anyway—especially the commanding view of the ocean.

  She wiggled her stockinged toes against the plush white carpet. Most everything she owned had been purchased new when she’d moved in, from the white furniture, to the pictures on the white walls, to the snowy sheets and towels that touched her body so intimately. She hadn’t yet found a place completely free of the psychic vibrations that plagued her, but this was as close as she’d ever come. This was her haven.

  Tess still intended to have that hot soak in the tub. But first there was the matter of Nate Wagner. She would have to call him, or she would drive herself crazy wondering what had happened to him on the subway.

  She took the card out of her purse again and sat on her sofa, leaning back against the pastel silk pillows. She didn’t consciously seek vibrations from the card, but a few reached her nonetheless. This time she got a distinct impression of deception—not an evil or malicious sort of lie, but a mild omission of the whole truth. Nate Wagner, apparently, hadn’t represented himself with a hundred-percent honesty. Interesting.

  She dialed his number, her heart thumping wildly. The phone rang once, twice. Come on, she thought. Please, be okay. Despite her apprehension, she was actually breathless at the idea of talking to him again.

  He answered the phone on the fourth ring.

  She was unbearably relieved to hear his voice. Whatever bad luck had transpired, he was still alive. “Hi, this is Tess DeWitt. From the antique store?”

  “Yes. Hello, Tess.” He sounded both surprised and pleased to hear from her. “Did you remember where you saw that other vase?”

  Oh, yeah, the vase. She had lied to him too. She didn’t like lying, but sometimes it was a necessity. He wouldn’t have understood if she’d told him the truth—that the instant she’d touched the cool, artificially aged porcelain of the “Ming” vase, she had seen a sweatshop in the Philippines where those vases had been manufactured en masse no more than two years before.

  “No, I really don’t remember,” she said.

  “Oh.” She could almost hear what he didn’t say: Then why are you calling?

  “Actually, the reason I called is …” She thought about telling him of her premonition that the two of them would become lovers. Depending on how much the idea appealed to him, he might or might not accept her ridiculous explanation. “… because I was wondering,” she said instead, her words coming totally from impulse. “Do you want any help with your antiques story?”

  “What kind of help?”

  “Well, I’m no expert or anything, but I do know most of the shops, and sometimes I can distinguish a reproduction from the real thing. I might also be able to point out some of the more ridiculously overpriced items. Would that be helpful?” What was she doing? she thought in a mild panic. Making a date? Was that smart? Was that sane? Was she trying to bring on a self-fulfilling prophecy?

  “As a matter of fact, it would. But your friend said you didn’t like antiques.”

  “I don’t happen to have any in my own home, but I still appreciate their quality and beauty.” As long as she didn’t have to touch them a great deal. “Are you interested?” Why was she doing this to herself? She was uncomfortable around old things; the older the object, the more vibrations it stored.

  “Sure. How soon can we get together? You could bring Judy too. Sounds like she might have some interesting anecdotes to get me started.”

  Tess was a bit disappointed that he’d requested extra company. But he probably wasn’t interested in her as a woman, she reminded herself. Maybe the “vision” she’d had was nothing more than the fantasies of a frustrated, twenty-eight-year-old virgin who in all likelihood would remain a virgin, until someone invented a way to make love without prolonged touching.

  “I’ve committed myself to help Judy pick out a gift for her aunt Dora on Saturday,” Tess said brightly, “but maybe we could meet you afterward—say around one o’clock?”

  “Great. How about in front of that same store?”

  “No,” she said quickly. She didn’t want to go anywhere near that shop. “There’s a store on Newbury Street called the Picket Fence, at the corner of Gloucester. Horrendous prices. Let’s start there.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Tess realized the conversation was quickly winding down, and she still hadn’t achieved her true purpose. “How’s your finger? Did you wash out the cut?”

  “The cut was so tiny, I couldn’t even find it when I got home. I appreciate the concern, but I don’t think you need to worry about gangrene.”

  He was teasing her, but in such a good-natured way that she actually enjoyed it. “You can never be too careful,” she said. “I had an uncle who once got a splinter in his toe. He ignored it, and they ended up amputating his foot. Danger can lurk in the most unlikely places.”

  “Hey, no kidding. I almost got killed in a T station today.”

  “Really?” She was relieved at how easy it had been to manipulate the conversation. “What happened?”

  “There were a bunch of people waiting for the next train. When it came into view, this nutcase bulldozed his way through the crowd, knocking people over right and left, screaming something about being first to board. I got pushed onto the track right in front of the train. If I hadn’t scrambled back out of that pit in a hurry, I would’ve been dog food.”

  Tess shivered as the scraps of her vision took on a new meaning. “Thank goodness you have quick reflexes,” she said. The memory of Mr. Woodland, the talk-show host, and his tragic end came suddenly, uncomfortably to mind. He had touched her shoulder, and she had immediately envisioned the accident. She’d always regretted that she hadn’t given him a better, more specific warning.

  Not that he would have believed her. He had enjoyed having her as a guest on his show, but he’d been a total skeptic.

  Tess quickly concluded her conversation with Nate, worried that in her present state of mind she might slip and reveal something she would rather keep to herself.

  When she was alone with just the silence around her, she
once again held Nate’s card between her hands. She was suddenly voraciously curious about him. This time, however, she felt absolutely nothing, indicating she had already sensed all the stored information that was hers to receive from this particular object.

  It was probably just as well. It wasn’t fair for her to learn things about Nate with extrasensory methods when he couldn’t do the same with her. She resolved that she’d have to glean any other information she wanted about him in the ordinary way.

  Nate couldn’t believe his good luck. He had asked Tess to bring Judy along on their antiquing jaunt because he hadn’t wanted Tess to feel pressured or uneasy. He was going to play this little fish very carefully. But as it turned out, Judy was busy with something else. Nate had Tess to himself for the entire afternoon.

  He couldn’t even hint, of course, that he harbored anything but a professional interest in her knowledge of antiques—although he did. The more he talked to her, the more he saw of her, the more he was drawn to her.

  Maybe it was a good thing he couldn’t act on his attraction. How wise was it, after all, to become involved with a witch?

  She looked even less witchlike than she had at their first meeting. Wearing a fuzzy, oversized lavender sweater that skimmed her thighs, white corduroy jeans, and lavender canvas sneakers, she presented a wholesome-but-sexy image that made him want to protect her and seduce her all at the same time.

  But she was Moonbeam, of that he was sure. The warning she’d given him as they’d stood on the sidewalk had been enough to send a shiver down his spine; almost getting squashed by a subway train not twenty minutes later had been downright spooky.

  Not that he believed in psychic stuff. But he did believe in subconscious suggestion. His own carelessness no doubt had caused the near accident, carelessness brought on by his preoccupation with the warning.