Burning Books

by Sharon Gerlach

  “It’s too great a coincidence to be a coincidence.”

  His mouth flattened at having his own words thrown back at him. He drew in a breath. “All right, we’ll operate under the assumption that there are no coincidences in this. So if there are no coincidences, how did you get Idiot Woman’s necklace?”

  Cecily’s necklace. She had written diaries. She was Magnus’s friend. He was accustomed to staying overnight at her house. His eyes were brown with green flecks, and he was endearingly anxious and inarticulate around the opposite sex. Was her brother, her own beloved twin, the gentle stalker Cecily had become involved with? And if he were, how indeed had Molly ended up with the token of affection her brother had given to his lover?

  She opened her mouth to tell him about Cecily and found her tongue glued to the roof of her mouth. The words wouldn’t come. It seemed too great an effort to explain and defend her suspicion, and so she let the urge melt away and looked down at the book in her hands. Burn me and find out, it seemed to say. Burn me, and I’ll spill my secrets. The promise of enlightenment was too seductive to resist. Cary still knelt between her knees. She nudged him out of the way and snagged the stockpot with her foot, bringing it back between them.

  Turning to the back of the book, her finger brushing over her name, she looked up at Cary, holding his gaze as she said her name aloud, as flames boiled out of the pages, as the book dropped from her hands and into the stockpot at their feet with a thunk, burning without heat or smoke.

  He rose from the floor. Molly rose from her chair. He stepped around the stockpot. She moved away from the table and braced the small of her back against the kitchen counter even as her hand snaked around his neck to bring him to her. Her touch was the catalyst of his passion. She was only vaguely aware of his hands sliding feverishly over her body, shucking the T-shirt over her head, of him lifting her onto the counter, the granite cold against her bare flesh, of his mouth crushing hers in devouring kisses. The storm of magic from the book crashed into the storm of their passion, creating wave upon massive wave until she rocked on a turbulent ocean of sensation.

  The memory came on the tide of her climax, familiar from experience and strange from the amnesia of magic.

  “You’ve done admirable work this term, Molly.”

  “Much better than you expected when I signed into your class late, you mean.”

  “Much. I’ve input your grade into the system. You’ve seen it?”

  “Yes. Thank you.” She wasn’t sure she deserved a 3.8, but she wasn’t certain exactly how to approach him with her suspicions of why he had given her one.

  “A fair grade for quality work. Since the term has ended and your grade is already in the system, you are no longer my student. I would like very much to have dinner with you, Molly.” His eyes, those gorgeous eyes with the best colors of the sea, held hers captive, mesmerizing her with warmth and blatant male appreciation.

  “Professor Welch . . .”

  “Cary.”

  “Cary. I thought you were married.”

  “I am, for a brief while yet. She has informed me, through indirect channels, that she wants a divorce. For the past several weeks, she’s been living elsewhere—even I don’t know where. Do you like children, Molly? Because my children live with me. Lee—my wife—is not well. In here.” He tapped his temple to indicate his wife suffered a mental issue.

  “Oh, I understand that. My brother is the same way.”

  Dinner was served with a rich red wine, the perfect complement to the prime rib on her plate. Cary Welch was a superb conversationalist, his topics interesting, his manner engaging, his direct gaze spellbinding. When he ordered a second bottle of wine, he deflected Molly’s protests with a disarming smile.

  She sipped as he wove his intriguing conversation around her, until she was rather certain she had consumed most of the second bottle. When he paid the check and rose to help her into her coat, she felt floaty and disconnected and doubted her ability to walk to the car. His hand under her elbow steadied her. She leaned into him as they walked out to the car, her heart racing. He slid behind the wheel and half turned in his seat after starting the engine.

  “Am I driving you home, or do you want to come to my house?”

  “Your kids—”

  “Are with my in-laws. I wasn’t sure how late we would be, so I arranged for them to stay the night.”

  Her place was out of the question—she had moved back home with her parents so she could afford to continue her education. She wanted to draw out her time with Cary Welch. Wanted it desperately.

  “Or we could take in a late movie, if you like.” He delivered this last option nonchalantly, with a flat inflection that let her know he had no interest in a movie.

  “No. No movie. I’m not ready to go home yet, so . . . I guess that means your place.”

  What it really meant was the low growl of her zipper, the whisper of her black dress and his clothes floating to the floor. It meant his breathless sigh, her wordless moan, and the melody of passion rising and falling, conducted on the springs of his huge four-poster bed: a symphony of sensual pleasure with a wrenching crescendo.

  Then, it meant sleep.

  Cary slid her off the edge of the counter and lowered her to the floor, jolting her out of the memory. She gasped in air, breathless from both the cold wood against her back and the shock of remembrance. He rolled them over, bringing her atop him, his fingers digging into her hips as he tried to press her even closer, as though longing to absorb her into his body. At last in control, Molly froze above him, one hand on his bare chest keeping him from yanking her to him and reasserting his dominance.

  “I remember you.”

  ∞1∞

  Molly sat huddled in a wingback chair by the fireplace, wrapped in a blanket to ward off the chill. But she still shivered, because the chill was inside her, working its way to her skin from her deep subconscious. The clothes in her closet—the risqué ones—now made sense. She was that kind of woman, the kind who allowed herself to be seduced by an older man in a position of authority over her. A married man. Knowing he was married.

  And what did that make him? A philandering husband? A predator of the innocent coeds under his charge? Or just an unhappy, lonely man who had inadvertently fallen for his student?

  She darted a glance at him. He hadn’t moved in fifteen minutes, not a single muscle except to breathe and to blink. Passion had fled after her blurted announcement. After tugging his T-shirt over her head, wrapping her in a blanket, and igniting the gas fireplace, he’d gone upstairs to put on some clothes. Now clad in knit shorts and a T-shirt, he stared into the gas flames, elbows digging gouges into his knees, his clasped fingers covering the lower half of his face and hiding his reaction to her news.

  Her feet were cold. She drew them up under the blanket, tucking them against the arm of the chair, drawing his gaze. Worse than his silent, unblinking stare at the fire was his silent, unblinking stare at her. When the tension grew nearly unbearable, he spoke at last.

  “You suspected it already. Are you really that surprised to find it’s true?”

  “No,” she said quietly. “But I’m very disappointed in myself. I wasn’t that kind of woman before the superstorm. Or the magical event. Whatever. Why would I . . . how could I . . . Did you buy me those clothes?”

  He blinked and recoiled as though she’d slapped him with her accusation. “I don’t know. I don’t, Molly,” he insisted at her skeptical look.

  “Have . . . have you ever . . . bought clothes for someone? A lover, I mean.”

  His expression turned bleak. “Is that what you think of me?”

  “What am I supposed to think, Cary? You’re an attractive older man, charismatic, sexy, charming, surrounded by naïve young women awed by your presence and authority. If you had an affair with me, why am I supposed to think I’m the first?”

  “Because you are the first!” His shout seemed to spring him from his chair. He paced to the fireplace
, rubbing a hand from his forehead to the back of his head, and stood that way for a long time, arm curled over his head, fingers grasping the unruly waves at the nape of his neck, elbow braced against the high mantle. He was beautiful in a rough, imperfect way, with a broad, sculpted back and lean lines and strong muscles. His hair was a bit shaggy, and the face scruffed with stubble was perhaps for some women a little too bookish. But his sensual mouth made her heart race, and his eyes . . . those kaleidoscope eyes . . . She wanted to be the only transgression those lips had ever made, the only distraction those eyes had ever seen.

  “You are the first,” he repeated hoarsely. “Maybe I wasn’t the best husband, maybe I wasn’t even a good husband, but I was a faithful one.”

  Molly dropped her gaze to the floor. He’d been faithful to his wife—up until she’d left him. And after that . . . No reconciliation, no marriage counseling, no attempts to work it out? Just . . . walk away and wash your hands of commitment? Was he really that kind of man? And if he were, she would have to accept that he could walk away from her as well, as completely and without regret as it seemed he’d walked away from Lee. But . . . he didn’t remember Molly, and he didn’t remember Lee leaving him. Many things could have happened in that missing year to create irreconcilable differences.

  She seemed happy with him. They seemed happy together.

  Harvey Cohen hadn’t sensed anything amiss with his daughter and son-in-law. I have a cop’s instinct on this, he’d said. And whatever had stolen the year of memories from Earth’s inhabitants, be it a solar superstorm or magic, Molly and Cary had been drawn together in the aftermath, finding each other even though they were once again complete strangers. That had to mean something.

  Molly let the blanket fall. The thick carpet muffled her steps. He must have heard her, anyway, or sensed her coming up behind him, for he didn’t jump when she laid her cheek against his back and slid her arms around him. After a moment, he turned in her arms, his own circling her shoulders tightly. She settled her cheek against his chest.

  “What do we do now?”

  Molly tipped her head to look up at him. She laid a hand against his cheek, banishing his bleak expression.

  “We need the books your father still has. And I want to ask him what he meant when he said that he knew what they were but wanted nothing to do with them.”

  “I meant about us.”

  “The best thing we can do for us is find out what happened in that missing year.”

  “And if it’s as bad as you think it could be?”

  Molly shrugged, withdrawing her hand to slide it around his back again. She put her cheek to his chest again and tightened her embrace. “Then we know. Knowing’s half the battle.” Acceptance was the other half, but she didn’t say it. She pulled away, snagging his hand as she went. “It’s been a long day. Let’s go to bed.”

  They lay in a tangle on Cary’s bed, her head pillowed on his shoulder. She stared at the wall, sleepless, while he stared at the ceiling, equally sleepless. Molly’s thoughts travelled down black alleys of suspicion and dread. When at last she slept, her dreams were dark and twisted and violent.

  ∞

  “I think just the smell of food might make me ill,” Molly said by way of protest as Cary held the door for her. The scent of bread and bacon wafted out of the restaurant, aggravating her already churning stomach.

  “Can you manage for a bit? Maybe nibbling on some toast will settle your stomach. He wouldn’t let us come to the house.”

  She preceded him through the door and let him take the lead from there. Spotting their quarry in a secluded corner booth, he sidled between tables, snaking his way to the back of the restaurant, finally sliding into the half-circle booth, pulling Molly in next to him. He ended up at the apex of the curve, putting Molly directly across from his father, as though he were only spectating and not participating in the meeting.

  “Dad, this is—”

  The elder Welch cut across Cary rudely, not looking at him but at Molly. “I don’t care who she is. I don’t want to know.” He plucked a package from the seat beside him and thrust it across the table at Molly, narrowly missing his coffee mug. Black silk tied closed with silk ribbon. The remaining books. She was almost afraid to take them. The responsibility was removed from her as Cary snatched them up and set them on the seat beside them, frowning irritably at his father’s rudeness. Before he could chastise, the elder Welch spoke again, brusque to the point of unfriendly.

  “I wouldn’t have looked at the books at all, but I wanted to see if it was them. Their . . . methods leave behind certain trademark signs.”

  Molly held his gaze steadily, willing back the bile that had risen in her throat. “If I understand you correctly, you’re saying the books have not been chemically doctored to burn. You’re saying they’re magic.”

  His gaze held steady for long, silent moments. The colors of his eyes testified that Cary’s central heterochromia was hereditary, although the elder Welch’s weren’t as patchwork as those of his son. A ring of yellow-brown circling the pupil swam in a sea of deep ocean blue. Startling eyes, beautiful eyes, but not mesmerizing like Cary’s, perhaps because of the hostility in them.

  Their server stopped at the open end of the table. They both ordered coffee and toast. Cary’s father ordered nothing, barely even seemed aware of the server as he glared across the table at Molly. When the server moved away, he leaned his elbows on the table, thrust himself forward, and spoke in a low growl through a tightly clenched jaw.

  “I don’t know what you’ve gotten my son into, but those books are dangerous.” He jabbed a finger in the general direction of the books, laying on the bench seat between her and Cary. “These people are dangerous. They have come a long way since the last time I came across their work. Your books leak magic—that’s a new trait. I can only assume it’s deliberate, a magical call to you to find them, open them, read them. They came to me wrapped in white silk, and I could not resist the temptation to study them. It was a compulsion almost beyond resistance. Once I wrapped them in black silk to attract and absorb that magic, that compulsion waned considerably.”

  “And the people responsible for this magic,” Molly ventured. “Are they the Augury Group?”

  He leaned back, interest burning away the hostility in his eyes. “Very good. You know more than I expected.”

  He said no more for a long time. Molly sat equally silent, pinned by his intense gaze. Their server came with more coffee and their toast. He held out a crisp ten-dollar bill and asked her to leave them alone until they signaled her. The apprehension in the woman’s eyes assured Molly that she’d be reluctant to return even then; she apparently had not been as oblivious to the tension at the table as they had thought.

  Cary clasped his hands around his coffee mug and leaned on the table. “Dad, you’re saying the Augury Group made these books. I can accept that—it was a conclusion I’d come to myself. But . . . why?”

  His father jabbed a finger across the table at Molly and pronounced, “Her.” Not a revelation, but an accusation. He sipped his coffee, staring at Molly through the steam. “What’s your name?”

  “Molly McK—”

  He held up a hand to cut her off. “Your given name is enough. I don’t care to know any more. You can call me Ed.”

  “Is it your name?”

  “One of them. You’ve deduced already that the magic is keyed to you.”

  “Yes. But I don’t know why. And I don’t know what triggered it to begin with. I couldn’t read them at first. Then suddenly, the words started making sense.”

  Something sparked in his eyes, but he waved her to continue. “Go on.”

  “I tried writing a summary of the story through what I’d read—the first book and most of the second book—so Cary would know what they were about. Until we burned the summary, I lost the ability to read the books.”

  Ed flicked a glance at his son. “You’re to leave him out of it.”

  “I did
n’t deliberately drag him into this. I didn’t think the books were dangerous. They just bothered my brother so deeply, I agreed to have them studied.”

  “You misunderstand. You’re to leave him out of it. The magic is keyed to you, and for some reason, you’re to tell the story, not write it for others to read.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not the one who commissioned the magic.”

  Molly blinked in surprise. “Commissioned? Someone paid the Augury Group to terrorize my brother and me with this story?”

  “I don’t know the purpose of the magic, Molly. I can’t even tell you the target. But you’re at the center of it—the catalyst, so to speak. I know that much because it’s obvious from what Cary has told me that the magic is keyed to you.”

  He shifted in his seat to lean forward. This time it wasn’t an aggressive move. Molly relaxed a little, although her stomach still churned.

  “To understand any of what is happening to you, you must understand about the Augury Group. I’ve come across their work a few times in my life, enough to know I want nothing to do with them or their activities.”

  “So they’re black magic.”

  “Black magic, white magic . . .” Ed waved a hand, dismissing both ideas. “It’s just magic, period, an unnatural warping of the forces of nature and the supernatural. Back in the 1980s, I knew a woman with memory problems. She had a week in her memory that seemed vague, or foggy. Her doctors chalked it up to the death of her child, which coincided with the period of time she struggled to remember. Shortly after her child’s death, she and her husband divorced. A few months after the divorce, she began having very vivid dreams, where she saw her husband in flagrante delicto—both literally and euphemistically speaking.” At Molly’s perplexed frown, he elaborated, “She kept having a recurring dream of her husband having very violent sex with minors, both female and male.”

  Molly understood now. “And the recurring dream was true?”

  “It was. They’re better at covering their tracks now, the Augury Group. Better at magic. They could make her forget what she’d seen, but only for a while. A few months. Then the magic began to unravel, and her memory started to return.