Totally Spellbound (12 page)

Rob looked at her. She really didn’t
know.

“Let me show you,” he said, and
snapped his fingers.

She wasn’t standing in the reception
area of an office building any more. Instead, she wobbled slightly
on stone-covered grass. The air smelled of the sea. Before her,
cliffs rose, their walls blindingly white in the hot
sun.

The sky was as blue as Kyle’s eyes,
and the ocean matched it. But Kyle wasn’t anywhere around, and
neither was John Little or Little John or whatever he was
called.

Instead, Robin Hood stood beside her,
watching her with a bemused expression on his face.

He looked out of place here, in that
beautiful suit, with his brown hair and his pale, pale skin. His
eyes twinkled, though. She’d never seen his eyes twinkle. That made
him seem almost human.

The first time she’d met him, he’d
looked like a fantasy man. This afternoon, he’d been a
nightmare.

And now his eyes were twinkling—on
this rock-strewn hillside, with an ocean pounding hundreds of feet
below.

“What’s going on?” she asked. She’d
been asking that too much in the last few days.

“Do you like ouzo?” he
asked.

“What?”

“Or don’t you drink?”

She shook her head.

He nodded toward a white
building she hadn’t seen until now. It was hidden against the upper
part of the cliff face. “They serve a mean ouzo. But we can go
somewhere else if you like.”

Somewhere else? Where were they now?
She made herself take a deep breath. She’d never breathed air quite
like this, filled with the sea and such sunshine and scents she’d
never smelled before.

The sun in Vegas wasn’t this bright,
and the sky wasn’t this clear. This looked as unreal as the highway
had last night, when she’d seen the rabbit and the falcon and this
very strange man dressed like a hunter.

“Take me back to Kyle,” she said, not
sure if she was away from Kyle or just having some sort of bizarre
hallucination.

“Not yet,” Robin said. “You wanted to
know what was going on, and you were wedded to your perception of
reality, even though it’s not an accurate one.”

She had spoken those words to
patients, over and over again. But her patients hadn’t understood
how the real world worked. The world she had grown up in. The world
with Mini Coopers and Las Vegas office buildings and little boys
who read too many comic books.

Not a world with psychics and people
who talked about the Fates as if they were real.

“I don’t know what you’re talking
about,” she said.

He gave her a soft smile.
It made his face seem—less harsh? Warmer? And yet somehow even more
masculine and mysterious—then he pointed in front of
him.

Her gaze followed his
finger. Ahead stood a mountain shrouded in fog. The fog looked
fake, especially in this bright, sunlit world with the clear, clear
edges.

“Mount Olympus,” he said. “You’ve
probably read about it.”

She hadn’t just read about
it. She’d been there during her junior year in college. She’d
managed to travel all over Europe that spring semester, and get
college credit for it. At the end, she had gone to Greece all on
her own, seen the Parthenon, and looked at Mount
Olympus.

It hadn’t looked like this.

Which wasn’t exactly true. It had
looked like this in a broken down, real world sort of way. The
mountain before her looked like the Hollywood version of Mount
Olympus. Certainly not the version she had seen on her
trip.

“Uh-huh,” she said.
“Where’s the trapdoor? Is this like Disneyland, where we find some
sideways exit and return to the world of neon, gamblers, and the
Blue Man Group?”

He studied her for a moment, the soft
smile gone. “There’s no trapdoor.”

“Then how did we get here?”

“Like this.” He snapped his fingers
again.

And suddenly, she was standing in the
living room of her condo. Newspapers were scattered across the
floor. The three novels she’d been reading simultaneously were all
facedown on her coffee table, along with two open cans of Diet
Coke.

The dirty dishes she had left for
later were still sitting in her sink, and the suit she’d worn to
the office two days ago littered the hardwood floor of her
hallway.

Her life really was a mess. She never
used to be this sloppy.

“Is this better?”

She jumped. Robin stood beside her.
She hadn’t realized he was still there.

He studied the portraits on her wall,
all photographs of her family taken with her black-and-white
camera. She’d been quite the photographer once, but she’d given it
up to concentrate on her career.

“Why would this be better?” she
asked.

“You were obviously having trouble
seeing Mount Olympus as the real world. I thought maybe your home
would be real to you.”

She walked to the window and looked
out. Condos, strip malls, and freeways. Yes, she was in Los
Angeles. The mountains were lost in a polluted haze, and even
though the sun was out, the sky looked a vague
gray-green.

“What’s going on?” she asked again.
Only this time, she really wasn’t asking him, she was asking
herself.

He took her hand. His fingers were
warm and dry and callused, which surprised her. She thought an
arrogant businessman like him would have soft fingers. Then she
remembered the falcon.

He led her to her couch, pushed some
magazines aside, and sat her down. He sat beside her, not letting
her fingers go.

“There really is magic in the world,”
he said gently.

She looked at him. This
man had gone from furious to tender in the space of a few minutes.
Of course, if he were to be believed, they both had gone from Vegas
to Greece to L.A. in those same few minutes.

“Why would you put it on yourself to
tell me this?” she asked.

He shrugged. She had a sense that he
wasn’t going to tell her the whole truth.

“Somehow you’ve gotten mixed up with
the Fates,” he said. “They’re dangerous women. You have a psychic
nephew who knows Zoe Sinclair, who is also magic. You’re surrounded
by people who have a power you haven’t been aware of until just
recently, and even so, they haven’t helped you see that power. I
don’t think that’s fair.”

“To whom?” she asked.

“To you.” His voice was still
gentle.

“Why would you care about
me?”

His eyes were a rich brown, the color
of mahogany wood, and inside them, she saw layers of emotions, so
many she couldn’t identify them all.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” he
asked. “Logically, I should have thrown you all out of my office
today and gone on with my life.”

He didn’t say any more.
After a few seconds, she prompted, “But?”

He shrugged. “I feel responsible for
you somehow.”

She dropped his hand
and stood up. No one was responsible for her except herself.
She
had always been
responsible for herself. She didn’t need anyone else’s
help.

“Take me back to Kyle,” she
said.

Robin frowned, looking confused. “What
did I say?”

“You don’t have to take care of me,”
she said. “No one takes care of me.”

“That’s pretty clear.” He was staring
at his hands, but he was probably referring to her condo. It was in
a state because she had left in a hurry, she wanted to say. But she
didn’t. Because it had been like this for months. One of the
classic signs of depression—letting herself, her home, her world,
fall apart.

“You brought us here uninvited,” she
said, and then stopped.

How had he done that? This wasn’t a
planned set like the fake Olympus. (Had that really been fake?)
This was her condo, right down to the slightly vanilla odor that
had lingered ever since she knocked over a mostly melted scented
candle behind her kitchen counter.

He looked up at her. “I wasn’t
referring to your place. I haven’t been in my home long enough to
make it this comfortable. I envy places that are lived in like
this.”

He sounded sincere and a bit baffled
at her emotion. She sank back onto the couch. “Then what did you
mean?”

“No one around you has been kind
enough to explain the magic that clearly exists in your
life.”

His words made her heart
twist. Kyle had always tried. Travers hadn’t known until recently.
And then there was that thing Zoe had done with the eggs this
morning.

“It’s more complicated than that,”
Megan said.

“It seems pretty straightforward to
me,” Robin said. “Sometimes when people learn about magic, they
learn about it slowly. It takes a while for their new reality to
filter in. But you don’t have time for a slow dawning. You’re
driving the Fates around as if you’re their personal chauffeur. You
have to know how dangerous that is.”

“You’ve used the word dangerous twice
now about them,” Megan said. “What do you mean?”

He shook his head and sighed. “Where
to begin?”

She was familiar with
this. It almost felt like a therapy session, only she didn’t want
to analyze this man. Still, she took those callused fingers in her
own.

“Begin wherever you like,” she
said.

Suddenly he was back there, the place
he never really wanted to be ever again.

The day that Marian died.

Only he wasn’t really there. He was
standing outside it, like an observer of his own life, and this
other woman was beside him, holding his hand.

They stood in the kitchen,
but they could see through the doorway into the bedroom. He had
forgotten how small and mean the rooms were. The cottage was made
of thatch, and smelled like old hay mixed with sickness and
spoiling meat. Two wooden bowls sat on the table, both filled with
an oily stew that no one had touched.

He remembered making it, just like he
remembered trying to choke it down, even when Marian hadn’t been
able to eat any at all. She had wrinkled her nose and turned
away.

She looked so tiny on their bed, her
white hair strewn across the blanket he had folded up to form a
kind of pillow. The mattress was stuffed with hay as well and had
been very uncomfortable. To this day, he remembered how it felt to
roll over at night, only to have a sharp straw poke him in the
side.

Her breath was weak and rattly, her
eyes rheumy, her hand clinging to his. He stared at himself,
looking only a few years younger than he did now, and so
devastated. Had he really looked that broken? She wasn’t even dead
yet, but he knew she was going to die.

The Fates had already
ruled that he could do nothing about it. They had reversed the
spell he had cast, the spell that had brought her back to her
younger, healthier self. And they had erased her memory of those
few days. As far as she had known, she had been in that bed for
weeks, dying by inches, her young-looking husband still at her
side.

She had liked his magic. She had found
his forever youth intriguing. Unlike the woman who currently clung
to his hand, Marian had always believed the world had a touch of
magic. She had been happy to learn that Robin held a piece of it,
even at the end, when it couldn’t save her.

“Your mother?” Megan asked
him.

Rob glanced at her. Her eyes were
lined with tears. She understood the scene before her without him
even explaining it—all except one piece.

“My wife,” he said. “My mortal
wife.”

How he hated that word “mortal.”
Technically, he was mortal too, but not in the same fragile way
that Marian had been.

Megan said nothing else. She just
observed as his younger self bathed Marian’s face.

Marian had reached up and touched his
younger self’s face. He still remembered how her hand felt—like the
finest crystal, about to break with a single touch—and cold, oh so
very cold.

“You did what you could,” she
whispered. “Take comfort in that.”

Instead of watching, Rob turned away.
He didn’t need to see this again. It was burned in his
brain.

His younger self had
shaken his head, and she had smiled at him. Her smile had never
changed. It was always fond and warm and so full of
love.

“I’ll love you forever,” she
whispered.

And then she died.

He made a small sound, tried to step
away from the old memory, and nearly tripped over a newspaper.
Somehow he had spelled himself and Megan back to her
condo.

His magic hadn’t been this
out of control since he had first discovered he had it, in the
middle of that damn Crusade, in a land that it seemed like everyone
had called Holy.