Captivated

by Nora Roberts

  to get their heads above the weeds. She walked to the front entrance with Luna streaming regally behind her.

  “I have to get motivated,” he told her as he pushed open the front door. “I’ve mostly lived in apartments and condos. This is the first regular house I’ve had to myself.”

  She looked around at the high, cool walls of the foyer, the rich, dark wood of the curving banister that trailed upstairs and along an open balcony. “At least you chose well. Where are you working?”

  “Here and there.”

  “Hmm.” She strolled down the hallway and peeked in the first archway. It was a large, jumbled living area with wide, uncurtained windows and a bare hardwood floor. Signs, Morgana thought, of a man who had yet to decide if he was going to settle in.

  The furniture was mismatched and heaped with books, papers, clothes and dishes—possibly long forgotten. More books were shoved helter-skelter into built-in cases along one wall. And toys, she noted. She often thought of her own clutter as toys. Little things that gave her pleasure, soothed her moods, passed the time.

  She noted the gorgeous, grim-faced masks that hung on the wall, an exquisite print of nymphs by Maxfield Parrish, a movie prop—one of the wolves’ claws from Shape Shifter, she imagined. He was using it as a paperweight. A silver box in the shape of a coffin sat next to the Oscar he’d won. Both could have used a proper dusting. Lips pursed, she picked up the voodoo doll, the pin still sticking lethally out of its heart.

  “Anyone I know?”

  He grinned, pleased to have her there, and too used to his own disorder to be embarrassed by it. “Whatever works. Usually it’s a producer, sometimes a politician. Once it was this bean-counting IRS agent. I’ve been meaning to tell you,” he added as his gaze skimmed over her slim, short dress of purple silk, “you have great taste in clothes.”

  “Glad you approve.” Amused, she set the unfortunate doll down, patted the mangled head, then picked up a tattered deck of tarot cards. “Do you read them?”

  “No. Somebody gave them to me. They’re supposed to have belonged to Houdini or someone.”

  “Hmm.” She fanned them, felt the faint trickle of old power on her fingertips. “If you’re curious where they came from, ask Sebastian sometime. He could tell. Come here.” She held out the deck to him. “Shuffle and cut.”

  Willing to oblige, he did what she asked. “Are we going to play?”

  She only smiled and took the cards back. “Since the seats are occupied, let’s use the floor.” She knelt, gesturing for him to join her. After tossing her hair behind her back, she dealt out a Celtic Cross. “You’re preoccupied,” she said. “But your creative juices aren’t dried up or blocked. There are changes coming.” Her eyes lifted to his. They were that dazzling Irish blue that tempted even a sane man to believe anything. “Perhaps the biggest of your life, and they won’t be easy to accept.”

  It was no longer the cards she read, but rather the pale light of the seer, which burned so much more brightly in Sebastian.

  “You need to remember that some things are passed through the blood, and some are washed out. We aren’t always the total of the people who made us.” Her eyes changed, softened, as she laid a hand on his. “And you’re not as alone as you think you are. You never have been.”

  He couldn’t joke away what hit too close to home. Instead, he avoided the issue entirely by bringing her hand to his lips. “I didn’t bring you here to tell my fortune.”

  “I know why you asked me here, and it isn’t going to happen. Yet.” With more than a little regret, she drew her hand free. “And it isn’t really your fortune I’m telling, it’s your present.” Quietly she gathered up the cards again. “I’ll help you, if I can, with what I can. Tell me about the problem in your story.”

  “Other than the fact that I keep thinking of you when I’m supposed to be thinking of it?”

  “Yes.” She curled up her legs. “Other than that.”

  “I guess it’s a matter of motivation. Cassandra’s. That’s what I decided to call her. Is she a witch because she wanted power, because she wanted to change things? Was she looking for revenge, or love, or the easy way out?”

  “Why would it be any of those things? Why wouldn’t it be a matter of accepting the gifts she was given?”

  “It’s too easy.”

  Morgana shook her head. “No, it’s not. It’s easier, so much easier, to be like everyone else. Once, when I was a little girl, some of the mothers refused to let their children play with me. I was a bad influence. Odd. Different. It hurt, not being a part of the whole.”

  Understanding, he nodded. “I was always the new kid. Hardly in one place long enough to be accepted. Somebody always wants to give the new kid a bloody nose. Don’t ask me why. Moving around, you end up being awkward, falling behind in school, wishing you’d just get old enough to get the hell out.” Annoyed with himself, he stopped. “Anyway, about Cassandra—”

  “How did you cope?” She had had Anastasia, Sebastian, her family, and a keen sense of belonging.

  With a restless movement of his shoulders, he reached out to touch her amulet. “You run away a lot. And, since that just gets your butt kicked nine times out of ten, you learn to run away safe. In books, in movies, or just inside your own head. As soon as I was old enough, I got a job working the concession stand at a theater. That way, I’d get paid for watching movies.” As troubled memories left his eyes, his face cleared. “I love the flicks. I just plain love them.”

  She smiled. “So now you get paid for writing them.”

  “A perfect way to feed the habit. If I can ever get this one whipped into shape.” In one smooth movement, he took a handful of her hair and wrapped it around his wrist. “What I need is inspiration,” he murmured, tugging her forward for a kiss.

  “What you need,” she told him, “is concentration.”

  “I’m concentrating.” He nibbled and tugged at her lips. “Believe me, I’m concentrating. You don’t want to be responsible for hampering creative genius, do you?”

  “Indeed not.” It was time, she decided, for him to understand exactly what he was getting into. And perhaps it would also help him open his mind to his story. “Inspiration,” she said, and slid her hands around his neck. “Coming up.”

  And so were they. As she met his lips with hers, she brought them six inches off the floor. He was too busy enjoying the taste to notice. Sliding over him, Morgana forgot herself long enough to lose herself in the heat. When she broke the kiss, they were floating halfway to the ceiling.

  “I think we’d better stop.”

  He nuzzled her neck. “Why?”

  She glanced down deliberately. “I didn’t think to ask if you were afraid of heights.”

  Morgana wished she could have captured the look on his face when he followed her gaze—the wide-eyed, slack-jawed comedy of it. The string of oaths was a different matter. As they ran their course, she took them gently down again.

  His knees buckled before he got them under control. White-faced, he gripped her shoulders. The muscles in his stomach were twanging like plucked strings. “How the hell did you do that?”

  “A child’s trick. A certain kind of child.” She was sympathetic enough to stroke his cheek. “Remember the boy who cried wolf, Nash? One day the wolf was real. Well, you’ve been playing with—let’s say the paranormal—for years. This time you’ve got yourself a real witch.”

  Very slowly, very sure, he shook his head from side to side. But the fingers on her shoulders trembled lightly. “That’s bull.”

  She indulged in a windy sigh. “All right. Let me think. Something simple but elegant.” She closed her eyes, lifted her hands.

  For a moment she was simply a woman, a beautiful woman standing in the center of a disordered room with her arms lifted gracefully, her palms gently cupped. Then she changed. God, he could see her change. The beauty deepened. A trick of the light, he told himself. The way she was smiling, with those full, unpainted lips curved
, her lashes shadowing her cheeks, her hair tumbling wildly to her waist.

  But her hair was moving, fluttering gently at first as though teased by a playful breeze. Then it was flying, around her face, back from her face, in one long gorgeous stream. He had an impossible image of a stunning wooden maiden carved on the bow of an ancient ship.

  But there was no wind to blow. Yet he felt it. It chilled along his skin, whisked along his cheeks. He could hear it whistle as it streaked into the room. When he swallowed, he heard a click in his throat, as well.

  She stood straight and still. A faint gold light shivered around her as she began to chant. As the sun poured through the high windows, soft flakes of snow began to fall. From Nash’s ceiling. They swirled around his head, danced over his skin as he gaped, frozen in shock.

  “Cut it out,” he ordered in a ragged voice before he sank to a chair.

  Morgana let her arms drop, opened her eyes. The miniature blizzard stopped as if it had never been. The wind silenced and died. As she’d expected, Nash was staring at her as if she’d grown three heads.

  “That might have been a bit overdone,” she allowed.

  “I— You—” He fought to gain control over his tongue. “What the hell did you do?”

  “A very basic call to the elements.” He wasn’t as pale as he had been, she decided, but his eyes still looked too big for the rest of his face. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

  “You’re not frightening me. Baffling, yes,” he admitted. He shook himself like a wet dog and ordered his brain to engage. If he had seen what he had seen, there was a reason. There was no way she could have gotten inside his house to set up the trick.

  But there had to be.

  He pushed out of the chair and began to search through the room. Maybe his movements were a bit jerky. Maybe his joints felt as though they’d rusted over. But he was moving. “Okay, babe, how’d you pull it off? It’s great, and I’m up for a joke as much as the next guy, but I like to know the trick.”

  “Nash.” Her voice was quiet, and utterly compelling. “Stop. Look at me.”

  He turned, and he looked, and he knew. Though it wasn’t possible, wasn’t reasonable, he knew. He let out a long, careful breath. “My God, it’s true. Isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Do you want to sit down?”

  “No.” But he sat on the coffee table. “Everything you’ve been telling me. You weren’t making any of it up.”

  “No, I wasn’t making any of it up. I was born a witch, like my mother, my father, like my mother’s mother, and hers, and back for generations.” She smiled gently. “I don’t ride on a broomstick—except perhaps as a joke. Or cast spells on young princesses or pass out poisoned apples.”

  It wasn’t possible, really. Was it? “Do something else.”

  A flicker of impatience crossed her face. “Nor am I a trained seal.”

  “Do something else,” he insisted, and cast his mind for options. “Can you disappear, or—”

  “Oh, really, Nash.”

  He was up again. “Look, give me a break. I’m trying to help you out here. Maybe you could—” A book flew off the shelf and bopped him smartly in the head. Wincing, he rubbed the spot. “Okay, okay. Never mind.”

  “This isn’t a sideshow,” she said primly. “I only demonstrated so obviously in the first place because you’re so thickheaded. You refused to believe, and since we seem to be developing some sort of relationship, I prefer that you do.” She smoothed out the skirt of her dress. “And now that you do, we can take some time to think it all through before we move on.”

  “Move on,” he repeated. “Maybe the next step is to talk about this”

  “Not now.” He’d already retreated a step, she thought, and he didn’t even know it.

  “Damn it, Morgana, you can’t drop all this on me, then calmly walk out. Good God, you’re a witch.”

  “Yes.” She flicked back her hair. “I believe we’ve established that.”

  His mind began to spin again. Reality had taken a long, slow curve. “I have a million questions.”

  She picked up her bag. “You’ve already asked me several of those million. Play back your tapes. All of the answers I gave you were true ones.”

  “I don’t want to listen to tapes, I want to talk to you.”

  “For now, it’s what I want that matters.” She opened her bag and took out a small, wand-shaped emerald on a silver chain. She should have known there was a reason she’d felt compelled to put it there that morning. “Here.” Moving forward, she slipped the chain over his head.

  “Thanks, but I’m not much on jewelry.”

  “Think of it as a charm, then.” She kissed both of his cheeks.

  Warily he eyed it. “What kind of a charm?”

  “It’s for clearing the mind, promoting creativity, and— See the small purple stone above the emerald?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Amethyst.” Her lips curved as they brushed his. “For protection against witchcraft.” With the cat already at her heels, Morgana moved to the archway. “Go sleep for an hour, Nash. Your brain is tired. When you wake, you’ll work. And when the time is right, you’ll find me.” She slipped out the door.

  Frowning, Nash tilted the slender green stone up to examine it. Clear thinking. Okay, he could use some of that. At the moment, his thoughts were as clear as smoke.

  He ran a thumb over the companion stone of amethyst. Protection against witchcraft. He glanced up, through the window, to see Morgana drive away.

  He was pretty sure he could use that, as well.

  Chapter 6

  What he needed to do was think, not sleep. Though he wondered that any man could think after what had happened in the last fifteen minutes. Why, any of the parapsychologists he’d interviewed over the years would have been wild to have a taste of what Morgana had given him.

  But wasn’t the first rational step to attempt to disprove what he had seen?

  He wandered back into the living room to squint at the ceiling for a while. He couldn’t deny what he had seen, what he had felt. But perhaps, with time, he could come up with some logical alternatives.

  Taking the first step, he assumed his favorite thinking position. He lay down on the sofa. Hypnotism. He didn’t care to think that he could be put in a trance or caused to hallucinate, but it was a possibility. An easier one to believe now that he was alone again.

  If he didn’t believe that, or some other logical explanation, he would have to accept that Morgana was exactly what she had said she was all along.

  A hereditary witch, possessing elvish blood.

  Nash toed off his shoes and tried to think. His mind was full of her—the way she looked, the way she tasted, the dark, uncanny light that had been in her eyes before she’d closed them and lifted her arms to the ceiling.

  The same light, he recalled now, that had come into her eyes when she’d done the trick with the brandy decanter.

  Trick, he reminded himself as his heart gave a single unpleasant thud. It was wiser to assume they were tricks and try to logic out how she had produced them. Just how did a woman lift a hundred-and-sixty-five-pound man six feet off the floor?

  Telekinesis? Nash had always thought there were real possibilities there. After his preliminary work on his script The Dark Gift, he’d come to believe there were certain people who were able to use their minds, or their emotions, to move objects. A more logical explanation than the existence of poltergeists, to Nash’s way of thinking. And scientists had done exhaustive studies of pictures flying across the room, books leaping off shelves, and so forth. Young girls were often thought to possess this particular talent. Girls became women. Morgana was definitely a woman.

  Nash figured a research scientist would need a lot more than his word that Morgana had lifted him, and herself, off the ground. Still, maybe he could . . .

  He stopped, realizing he was thinking, reacting, the same way the fictional Jonathan McGillis thought and reacted in his story. Was that wha
t Morgana wanted? he wondered.

  Listen to the tapes, she’d told him. All right, then, that was what he’d do. Shifting, he punched buttons on his recorder until he’d reversed the tape inside and pushed play.

  Morgana’s smoky voice flowed from the tiny machine.

  “It’s not necessary to belong to a coven to be a witch, any more than it’s necessary to belong to a men’s club to be a man. Some find joining a group rewarding, comforting. Others simply enjoy the social aspects.” There was a slight pause, then a rustling of silks as she shifted. “Are you a joiner, Nash?”

  “Nope. Groups usually have rules somebody else made up. And they like to assign chores.”

  Her light laugh drifted into the room. “And there are those of us who prefer our own company, and our own way. The history of covens, however, is ancient. My great-great-grandmother was high priestess of her coven in Ireland, and her daughter after her. A sabbat cup, a keppen rod, and a few other ceremonial items were passed down to me. You might have noticed the ritual dish on the wall in the hallway. It dates back to before the burning time.”

  “Burning time?”

  “The active persecution of witches. It began in the fourteenth century and continued for the next three hundred years. History shows that mankind usually feels the need to persecute someone. I suppose it was our turn.”

  She continued to speak, he to question, but Nash was having a hard time listening to words. Her voice itself was so alluring. It was a voice meant for moonlight, for secrets, for hot midnight promises. If he closed his eyes, he could almost believe she was there with him, curled up on the couch beside him, those long, luscious legs tangled with his, her breath warm on his cheek.

  He drifted off to sleep with a smile on his face.

  When he awakened, nearly two hours had passed. Heavy-eyed and groggy, he scrubbed his hands over his face, then swore at the crick in his neck. He blinked at his watch as he pushed himself to a half-sitting, half-slouching position.

  It shouldn’t be a surprise he’d slept so heavily, he thought. He’d been burning energy on nothing but catnaps for the last few days. Automatically he reached out for the liter bottle and gulped down warm soda.

  Maybe it had all been a dream. Nash sat back, surprised at how quickly those afternoon-nap fuzzies lifted from his brain. It could have all been a dream. Except . . . He fingered the stones resting against his chest. She’d left those behind, as well as a faint, lingering scent that was exclusively hers.

  All right, then, he decided. He was going to stop backtracking and doubting his own sanity. She had done what she had done. He had seen what he had seen.

  It wasn’t so complicated, really, Nash thought. More a matter of adjusting your thinking and accepting something new. At one time people had believed that space travel was the stuff of fantasy. On the other hand, a few centuries back, witchcraft had been accepted without question.

  Maybe reality had a lot to do with what century you happened to live in. It was a possibility that started his brain ticking.

  He took another swallow, grimacing as he capped the bottle again. He wasn’t just thirsty, he realized. He was hungry. Famished.

  And more, much more important than his stomach was his mind. The entire story seemed to roll out inside it, reel by reel. He could see it, really see it clearly, for the first time. With the quick thrum of excitement that always came when a story unfolded for him, he sprang up and headed for the kitchen.

  He was going to fix himself one monster sandwich, brew the strongest pot of coffee on the planet, and then get to work.

  * * *

  Morgana sat on Anastasia’s sunny terrace, envying and admiring her cousin’s lush gardens and drinking an excellent glass of iced julep tea. From this spot on Pescadaro Point, she could look out over the rich blue water of Carmel Bay and watch the boats bob and glide in the light spring breeze.

  Here she was tucked away from the tourist track, seemingly a world away from the bustle of Cannery Row, the crowds and scents of Fisherman’s Wharf. Sheltered on the terrace by trees and flowers, she couldn’t hear the rumble of a single car. Only birds, bees, water, and wind.

  She understood why Anastasia lived here. There was the serenity, and the seclusion, her younger cousin craved. Oh, there was drama in the meeting of land and sea, the twisted trees, the high call of the gulls. But there was also peace within the tumbling walls that surrounded the estate. Silent and steady ivy climbed the house. Splashy flowers and sweet-smelling herbs crowded the beds Ana tended so gently.

  Morgana never failed to feel at ease here, and she was unfailingly drawn here whenever her heart was troubled. The spot, she thought, not for the first time, was so much like Anastasia. Lovely, welcoming, without guile.

  “Fresh from the oven,” Ana announced as she carried a tray through the open French doors.

  “Oh, God, Ana—fudge cookies. My favorite.”

  With a chuckle, Anastasia set the tray on the glass table. “I had an urge to bake some this morning. Now I know why.”

  More than willing, Morgana took the first bite. Her eyes drifted closed as the smooth chocolate melted on her tongue. “Bless you.”