Spellcrossed (11 page)

Hal tugged Lee’s arm again. As they started up the walkway, he suddenly whirled around. “I didn’t even say welcome back! Welcome back!”

Rowan smiled. “Thank you, Hal.”

“It’s so romantic! Like the end of
My Fair Lady
. Or
Gigi
. Or
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
except Maggie didn’t have to die first. Oh, I wish Helen—” Hal’s hand flew to his mouth.

“It’s all right,” Rowan said, his smile gone. “I know about Helen.”

“I’m sorry,” Hal whispered. “I didn’t mean…oh, I’ve ruined everything!”

Lee pulled him into his arms and murmured something. Then, one arm around Hal’s waist, he guided him toward the parking lot.

“When did it happen?” Rowan asked.

“A week after you left,” Reinhard replied. “How did you know?”

“I couldn’t feel her. When I crossed.” Rowan’s gaze returned to me. “Instead, I felt you. I had prepared myself for the possibility that Helen might be…gone, but I never imagined…I thought someone on staff would know where to find you. But clearly, you found a home here. Just as I did.”

“Is that why you have come back?” Reinhard asked. When Rowan hesitated, he shook his head impatiently. “Forgive me. You asked for privacy.”

“No, stay a moment. You deserve an answer. I simply resented Lee’s attempt to bully me into a public confession.”

“Lee is—”

“An alpha male defending his pack from the intruder.”

“You’re not an intruder!” I exclaimed.

“No?” Rowan’s smile was bleak.

“No,” Reinhard said firmly. “But it is only natural that we should have questions. And concerns. When you left—”

“I thought I was going home. But when I got to Faerie, I realized this was my home.”

Those impossibly green eyes looked deep into mine.

“
You
are my home.”

I drew in a shaking breath and let it out. I knew I should speak, should tell him I had come to the same realization. Only mine had occurred before he’d even left this world.”

Reinhard squeezed my shoulder and walked away. Rowan waited for the Smokehouse door to close. His expression was as calm as a teacher about to lecture his pupil. Only the trembling of the antler tine buttons on his shirtfront attested to his quickened breathing.

“Leaving you was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I thought it was the right choice—the only choice—for both of us. I didn’t want you to lead the sort of shadow existence I must to safeguard my secret. I was afraid of watching you grow old and dying centuries before me.
Most of all, I was afraid that my love—my power—would always overcome any doubts you might have about choosing a life with me.”

“But…”

“Wait. Please. I know all those arguments are just as valid today as they were the morning I left you. I tried to stay away. To lose myself in Faerie and enjoy the world I barely remembered. But without you…” He glanced around the picnic area, as if the words he was seeking were hidden in the darkness. “…it was empty. Perfect and passionless and empty.”

He shrugged helplessly. “I was as much of an outsider there as I had ever been in this world. Maybe I had changed too much. A better man would have stayed there. But I’m a selfish creature like all the Fae. I wanted you and this place and the chance to build a life together.”

He waited for me to speak. But everything was happening too fast. The earth was spinning wildly out of orbit, the ground beneath my espadrilles shifting like quicksand. Only a few minutes ago, Rowan Mackenzie had been part of my past. Now, he wanted to build a future with me. If I’d never stopped longing for him or dreaming of him, I had accepted that he was as unreachable as the moon. Now, the moon had tumbled out of the sky.

I wanted to cry, “Yes! I want those same things!” But how could anyone hold the moon in her hands?

“I know things have changed,” he said. “I saw a program in the green room.” His mouth quirked in a brief smile. “Margaret Graham, Artistic Director.”

“That’s just temporary. I’m really the executive director. We’re a nonprofit now. But we couldn’t afford—”

“A nonprofit? Already?”

“It’s been nearly two years, Rowan.”

His eyes widened. Then he nodded slowly. “Of course. Time moves differently there.”

“Funny how the Fae always know when it’s Midsummer, though.”

“What are you saying?”

“Nothing. I’m just…I don’t want to be the consolation prize because Faerie wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.”

“Good gods, Maggie! Do you really think I would turn your life upside down just because I was having trouble adjusting to Faerie?”

“No! But it still hurts. It took me about a minute to realize how much I loved you, how much I wanted you in my life. And for you to need two years…”

“I didn’t need two years, Maggie. Or two months or two days.”

Finally, he walked forward. But instead of sitting beside me, he slumped onto the far end of the bench and rested his forearms on his knees.

“There was something I had to do. I’ll tell you about that tomorrow. For now, please believe that I love you. That it took all the self-control I possess to keep from running to you as soon as I realized you were here. That I could never regard you as a consolation prize.”

His face, sculpted by the lamplight, was as calm as his voice. His long tapering fingers, knotted tightly together, provided more trustworthy evidence of his emotions.

“If you don’t want me…if there’s someone else…”

“Would I be wearing your chain if there were? I’ve never taken it off since the day you gave it to me.”

A tremor rippled through his linen shirt.

“You’re a pretty hard act to follow.”

“So are you,” he replied.

Which was the part I still didn’t get. He’d listed all his reasons for loving me in his farewell letter, but when you can have any woman in the world, why choose me?

“Why do you always doubt yourself?” he asked.

I wondered if he’d added mind reading to his lists of talents, but decided he was merely reading my expression. Never a tough task.

“Why are you always so sure of everything?” I countered.

“Because I’m centuries older and infinitely wiser.”

“And incredibly humble.”

He chuckled. “Someone once described me as an arrogant prick with a God complex.”

“Someone once described me as a pit bull. And a coward. And—”

“Beautiful.”

His gaze roamed over me, as intimate as a caress. Heat flushed my body and traveled rapidly faceward.

“Someone needs faery spectacles,” I said a bit breathlessly.

“Someone needs—” He leaned away from me and shook his head. “If we give in to that temptation, neither of us will be able to think clearly. And we must.”

I had a million questions, a million concerns—about us, about where he would fit in at the new Crossroads Theatre. But those could wait. Right now, there was only one thing I needed.

“I really want to touch you.”

His breath caught.

“The picnic table won’t spontaneously combust or anything?”

“No. But I might.”

“Let’s both go down in flames, then.”

As I slid closer, he tensed, wary as a wild creature. My fingertips touched his hair. His eyes closed, and he took a deep, shuddering breath.

I traced the wild-winged brows, the sloping cheekbones, the ridge of that beautiful, beaky nose. Like a sculptor, I molded the boyishly smooth cheeks, the line of his jaw, the curve of his chin.

My fingers trembled as I fumbled with the antler tine. Then I pushed it through the buttonhole and parted the collar of his shirt to reveal the thick red weal at the base of his throat.

He shuddered again as my fingertips caressed the mark of the iron collar that the vengeful Mackenzies had
forced upon him more than two hundred years ago. He would always bear the scar—and the deeper scars of memory: the agony of the iron burning his flesh, the slow but inexorable draining of his power, the long years of exile and isolation and loneliness.

So much pain burned into his flesh and his soul. And so little I could do to relieve it.

His eyes opened, soft and green as moss. And for the first time, he allowed his power to touch me. Just a whisper of his love, gone in an instant, but as tender as his expression, as warming as single malt whisky.

To my questing fingers, it seemed that the grooves around his mouth were deeper. But the soft lips were the same. And his scent, honeysuckle sweetness and animal musk.

Heat flooded my body, his desire feeding mine. He groaned and shook his head. Before he could slide away, I captured his face between my palms and pressed my lips to his.

For a moment, he remained perfectly still. Then his lips parted. His tongue rasped again mine, sandpaper-rough like a cat’s, and the heat ramped up to mildly volcanic.

He slid to the far end of the picnic bench, breathing hard, and held up his hand as I began inching after him.

“Any closer and I will throw you to the ground and ravish you.”

“It’s the dress. Hal swore he’d do the same thing if he were straight.”

Rowan’s smile froze.

“What?”

He was beside me in a blur of movement, his hands gripping mine. “Do you trust me?”

“Yes, of—”

“Then don’t say anything. And try to forgive me. Stay with her,” he added as he strode toward the stage door. Only then did I notice Reinhard hurrying toward me.

“What is it?” he asked. “What is wrong?”

Still trying to make sense of Rowan’s sudden change in mood, I just shook my head.

From inside the barn, a muffled voice called Rowan’s name.

“I’m right here,” Rowan replied.

“Maybe there really
was
an intruder,” I whispered.

“Then it is one Rowan knows.”

A head peeped around the doorframe. All I could make out was a tangle of long, white hair before it ducked out of sight again. For one unreasoning moment, I thought it was Helen. Then logic kicked in. Rowan Mackenzie might possess extraordinary powers, but resurrecting the dead wasn’t one of them.

“Come out,” Rowan urged. “These are friends.”

Seconds ticked by while his hand hung suspended in the air. Then another reached out of the shadows to grasp it.

A figure shuffled into the light. Not Helen, but Rip Van Winkle. A skinny scarecrow of a man whose knobby knees protruded from the frayed holes in his jeans. Those had faded to so pale a blue that they looked almost as white as his long hair and beard. The right sleeve of his shirt was neatly buttoned at the wrist; the left hung in tatters from his elbow.

He darted frantic glances at us as Rowan coaxed him forward, his right arm around the man’s waist, his left hand resting lightly on his bicep. In spite of the soothing murmur of Rowan’s voice and the calming power that must be flowing into him, the old man held his battered guitar before him like a shield.

There was nothing about him to suggest that he was a faery; maybe they came in different varieties, like humans. But faery or human, there could only be one reason why Rowan had brought him here: if anyone needed the kind of healing to be found at the Crossroads, this poor, terrified creature did.

The lamplight revealed a face far younger than his
hair suggested. The skin of his forehead and nose was roughened by exposure to sun and wind. Judging from the freckles, he must have been a redhead in his youth.

“My name’s Maggie. What’s yours?”

For a long moment, he just stared at me. Then he flashed a smile and I saw the little gap between his front teeth and the ground slipped out from under my feet once more.

The dark blob on the front of the guitar. All that remained of the Gibson’s teardrop-shaped pickguard.

The bright splash of yellow on the guitar strap. Barely visible as it curved over his shoulder, but I knew it was the sun. A smiling sun whose features I had traced countless times.

Those huge, frightened eyes, the same indeterminate shade of blue-green as mine.

I wanted to tell him I was sorry, that I hadn’t meant to frighten him, that I was just as scared as he was. But all I could manage was a single, whispered word:

“Daddy?”

R
OWAN GRIPPED MY ARMS HARD. The black dots swarming around the edge of my vision receded. Calm washed through me, stilling my chattering teeth and slowing my frantic heartbeat.

Then I heard Daddy whimper, and it all crashed down on me again. Not just the moon this time. The whole fucking universe.

My father was alive. The playmate of my childhood. The obsessed stranger, searching through his mountain of books for something that would explain his haunted memories. The broken man who had walked out of my life, leaving my mother to pick up the pieces.

How many years had he wandered through this world seeking a portal to the other? And dear God, what had happened to him after he found it? For he must have found it. He was the mysterious “something” that had kept Rowan in Faerie.

“They began playing with him. Petting him. Teasing him. Heightening their glamour to enthrall him.”

That chance encounter with Rowan’s clan had nearly destroyed him. What was left of him now, after spending years in that place?

Rowan’s hands cupped my cheeks. Rowan’s voice whispered my name.

“I need you to listen to me.”

I nodded, obedient as a child.

“He’s lost twenty years of his life. He has no idea how much time has passed. If you tell him you’re his daughter, the reality will shatter him.”

I was eight when he left. Ten when we received that final postcard. Twenty-four years without knowing whether he was alive or dead. And now I had to pretend he was a stranger?

“I know what I’m asking. But while he’s so fragile, I don’t think we have a choice.”

Rowan’s calm pulsed through me, as steady as Reinhard’s arm around my waist. Reinhard who always reminded me that I was very bad at hiding my feelings.

“Maggie?”

But I didn’t have to hide them. Only the fact that I was his daughter.

Only…

“Maggie.”

Three times, Rowan had spoken my name. Three times for a charm, Mairead Mackenzie had written. Maybe the charm worked for I heard myself say, “I can do this.”