Sorcery and the Single Girl (10 page)

Clara shook her head. “We certainly would have noticed, if there had been a knight standing in the doorway.”

“Not
in
the doorway,” I insisted. “Outside of it. The doorway itself was protected by the pentagram.”

“Pentagram?” Gran might never have heard the word for all the shock in her voice.

“You didn’t see that, either?” I couldn’t keep disappointment from my tone. “It was etched in the air. It glowed silver when we entered, David and Neko and me.”

“David and Neko!” Clara shook her head. “They let you go in with David and Neko?”

“Of course. David’s my warder. And Neko’s my familiar.”

Gran clicked her tongue. “But it’s not like there were any other men there. Not when we were there.” Clara nodded in agreement.

“There had to be!” My exasperation began to flow over my determination to stay calm. “You said that someone drove you out there! What happened to him? Did he just melt into the ground when you arrived?”

“Now, dear, there’s no reason to get nasty about this. We just didn’t see what you did. Now, I’m sure that you’ll get your Torch soon. In fact, as soon as I get home, I’ll give you mine. You can return it when you get your own.”

“No, Gran.” I shook my head. “I can’t take your pin.” And somehow, I knew that I really couldn’t. I knew that whatever magic rested in the emblem would object to my handling it. I couldn’t explain how I knew that, or what it actually meant, but I was certain that there’d be no transferring of Torches from one woman of the Smythe-Madison clan to another.

Clara was staring into the middle distance. I could just make out her eyes behind her sunglasses, and I could tell that she wasn’t blinking. “That man,” she said, and it sounded like she was trying to remember an elusive lyric. “He picked us up at your Gran’s apartment. He drove us out past Great Falls. He helped us out of the car….” She shook her head. “I can’t remember anything else. It’s as if he actually did disappear.”

“But weren’t there other warders? And familiars?”

“Not that I recall.” Her tone was perplexed. “You’d think we would have noticed. After all, we’ve seen enough of your Neko.”

So. No warders. No familiars. No sword. No pentagram.

There was a time, back when I was a teenager, when I had known that I knew more than Gran. I’d been certain that I was wise in the ways of the world, that I understood how people behaved, how systems functioned. I’d been exasperated with her failure to comprehend the subtle workings of the universe around us.

For example, she hadn’t appreciated the importance of passing notes in algebra, even when Mrs. Hock had already issued me two warnings. She hadn’t grasped the nuances of who phoned whom, and why I was devastated to be pruned from the after-school phone tree of one particularly snobby girl whose name I could no longer remember. She hadn’t understood—hadn’t lived and breathed and
known
—why it mattered that Karl Nelson had the locker next to mine but chose not to use it, preferring to lug around his books in a backpack all day, calling the burden “training” for the football season.

But Gran had learned a lot.

Somewhere after my high school years, while I was in college, or maybe even pursuing my useless Shakespeare degree, Gran had become a genius. She read nuances into my conversations; she
understood
my world and the people in it. She knew before I did that Scott Randall was a complete jerk. She would have warned me about the I.B., if I’d given her half a chance.

But now? Today? With respect to the Coven?

Gran had nothing. No knowledge. No skills. No witchy sensitivities whatsoever.

And, looking at Clara, I realized that she wasn’t any better off. Sure, she might have a deft hand with runes. But she thought she could read auras, and I’d never seen evidence of her having any true skill in that direction. She’d glanced through my spell books, but she quickly dismissed them, saying they bored her. She’d shrugged off my attempts to speak about potions, about charms.

I looked at my mother and my grandmother, and I realized a terrifying truth.

I knew more about witchcraft than they did. Than they ever would. I was going to be tested by the Coven in ways they could not imagine. Their failure to tell me about their visit to the safehold the month before had not been cruel. It had not been mean. It had not even been a petty oversight.

They honestly and completely didn’t realize how important it might have been for me to know. They had no frame of reference.

And for the first time I could remember, I realized I was going to have to take my next step alone. Sure, Gran and Clara would love me. They would stand by me, at least as long as they were permitted to do so.

But there was no way they could help me. And when push came to shove, come the night of dedicating the centerstone, I was going to be truly alone. Truly abandoned by friends and family. And—worst of all—I didn’t have the first idea about how to prepare for the working.

I
stared into my bathroom mirror, making fish-faces to guarantee that my lipstick had not coated my teeth. I had almost reached the end of my tube of Pick-Me-Up Pink. It might be time to graduate—Nars’s Fire Down Below had caught my eye the last time I was in Sephora. Sure it was red. Sure it was semi-matte. Sure it would make me look like a hooker if I applied too much.

But I was learning to control myself, learning to master the fine art of lipstick. And if I couldn’t handle a grown-up shade of crimson, then how was I ever going to master an entire relationship?

Relationship. I rolled the word around on my tongue as I ran my fingers through my just-trimmed hair. Ever since the Implausible Boob, I’d dreaded the concept of a
relationship.
I wasn’t ever going to get involved in a relationship more complicated than the one I had with my dry cleaner. I was never going to put my heart on the line again, never going to let down my guard.

After all, I was a very busy woman. I had a library reference desk to manage. I had a grandmother to assist, a mother to get to know. I had a basement full of books about witchcraft, volume after volume after volume that shouted out in no uncertain leather-bound terms that I had better start preparing for setting the centerstone.

But now I’d met Graeme Henderson. I’d been invited out for a dream date, for coffee and dessert at the Bistro Francais. I’d shared my witchy secret with a normal, nonarcane man for the very first time without totally freaking him out.

I’d agreed to meet Graeme Henderson for a Saturday night date.

Not a weeknight. Not an evening when ordinary people might work late at the office, might be called out to a business dinner, to a team-building staff meeting, to some other excuse to avoid a wife.

Saturday.

Married men never made dates for Saturday.

The I.B. had avoided them like our Founding Fathers avoided British Redcoats in the woods. I had accepted any number of his inane excuses to avoid meeting me on a weekend. Now, with the wisdom of hindsight, I knew that he’d been saving his weekends for his wife. At the time, I’d accepted his busy social life as an indication that the Immoral Brigand was truly desirable, truly admirable, truly everything a girl could ask for in a man, and more.

Okay. So I’d been deluded. A crush will do that to you—especially one that’s delivered with the full force of an anvil dropped from an open window, seven stories up. It was hardly
my
fault that I’d been designated to play the Coyote in the Road Runner cartoon of my life. Did anyone think that the Coyote really
wanted
to subject himself to the Acme Destruction Tool of the week?

I sighed. I might be on the road to recovery, but it still wasn’t easy to accept a Saturday night date as “normal.” My unease was only heightened by the fact that I had no idea what activity Graeme had in mind. He’d told me to dress comfortably, but he hadn’t mentioned whether we’d be inside or outside.

Outside on a September night. A night in the swampland beloved of our forefathers, where mosquitoes grew to the size of aircraft carriers, at least until the first killing freeze.

I knew from long experience that I reacted poorly to mosquito bites. It wasn’t so much that I swelled up when I was bitten. Rather, I developed great puffy welts that looked like globs of uncooked dough. Those bites itched like an entire forest of nettles, too; I couldn’t keep from gouging red furrows into my flesh with my still-relatively-new-to-me fingernails.

And I was certain that every mosquito in the metro area would be attracted to me. A vitamin B-12 deficiency, my childhood pediatrician had diagnosed. My shampoo. My soap. My scintillating personality. I couldn’t say why for sure, but I was an absolute magnet for mosquitoes.

Magic was no assistance. It was too difficult to craft a spell that would banish so many tiny lives—each beating mosquito heart (did mosquitoes even have hearts?) would require a separate focus of my witchy attention.

Alas, unsure of my destination for this Saturday night dream date, I did the only sane thing. I slathered my body from head to toe in Deep Woods Off! I protected my vulnerable flesh as if I were preparing for a jungle expedition. I poured lotion onto my arms and legs, rubbing it in with the vigor of the converted. I worked it between my toes, around my ankles. I even ran my fingers through my hair. I was determined not to become The Amazing Swollen Girl of Washington before the night was over.

Slathering completed, I tugged on my newest black T-shirt acquisition. This one was lightweight silk. Its fabric twisted across my chest, accenting my somewhat lacking cleavage with soft folds. The shirt’s hem rode right on top of the waistband of my short black skirt. I twisted to look at my back end in the mirror—I thought the skirt was slimming, but what if that was only an optical illusion? What if that was only a side effect of my contorting in front of the mirror? What if my skirt was like television, and I secretly gained fifteen pounds just by closing up the side zipper?

I glanced at my watch. There was no time left to change. Besides, I’d already tried on everything else in my closet. Graeme Henderson might be murder on my psyche, but he was great for Goodwill Industries. Each date with him, I found another pile of clothes to pass on to the charity.

I grimaced and told myself that this dressing-for-dates thing would be a lot easier if there were just a uniform, like the costume that I wore for work. I tried to picture Graeme’s surprise if I greeted him in an embroidered overdress and hoops. The confining outfits had certainly acted like catnip on the I.B.’s libido.

A sharp knock at the door interrupted bad memories of the Immature Baby and his strange attraction to my eighteenth-century attire. I offered up one more fish-face to appease the lipstick gods, and then I took a deep breath, bracing myself to answer the door.

And there was Graeme.

My heart started pounding against my silk T-shirt, and I wondered if he could hear it echo in my living room. He was more gorgeous than I remembered—that quarterback build, the perfect blond hair, those almost-too-light blue eyes, with all the intelligence and shrewd goodwill of a husky.

Without fully intending to, I stepped forward, greeting him with a quick pursing of my lips which he took only seconds to transform into a knee-buckling kiss. I was grateful for his arms around me, for the rigid structure of his fingers spread across my back. All of a sudden, the window unit air conditioner, which had done such a noble job keeping my cottage cool in the sticky September night, seemed to stop functioning. The heat of Graeme’s greeting melted my spine, leaving me winded—and desperate for more.

When he pulled back infinitesimally, I gasped, “Good evening.”

“Quite,” he said, and I felt his gaze on my T-shirt like a physical thing.

I was about to invite him in. I was about to close the door behind us, lock out the heat, secure us in the air conditioner’s chilly grasp. I was already calculating what refreshments I had in the refrigerator—a bottle of tonic water, some salty olives that Neko had dragged back from the gourmet grocery store, a jar of Marcona almonds from the same source.

Surely we could survive on cocktail fare for the rest of the night? Cocktail fare and love…Was I even thinking that thought?

He sighed with the regret of a man who must choose his grade-school daughter’s princess birthday party over free tickets to the Super Bowl. (Not that he had a grade-school daughter. Not that he even knew the first thing about American football.) He said, “The car is waiting.”

“Car?” I tried not to sound disappointed.

“Just a little something that I arranged for the evening.”

Curiosity trumped my libido, and I reached for my house keys. Then, I let Graeme steer me down the path that cut through the garden. His fingers hovered just above the small of my back; I felt their heat through the sheer silk of my shirt. I imagined them touching my bare skin, imagined his palm flat against my spine. Once again, my breath caught in my throat, and I forced myself to offer up a little mind-clearing cough.

“Summer cold coming on?” he asked solicitously.

“No!” I sounded too anxious, and I lowered my voice by an octave. “Not at all. Just a tickle at the back of my throat. Maybe some pollen from the garden.”

I—or he—was spared any more of my demented babble as we rounded the corner of the library. I looked out at the street and stopped dead.

A limousine. A jet-black limousine, stretching half the block, complete with liveried chauffeur. Automatically, I glanced at the license plate, expecting to see the H that indicated a rented car.

No H.

Someone owned this vehicle. “Is this yours?” I finally asked Graeme.

“Let’s just say that it belongs to a friend of a friend.”

I glanced down at my T-shirt and miniskirt, suddenly feeling underdressed for the evening. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I should go back inside and put on—”

“Nonsense,” Graeme interrupted me, settling a fever-spiking palm on my forearm. “The chauffeur is the one in uniform. We wear what we want. When we want.”

I heard the promise purr at the back of his words, and I wondered exactly what proposition was curled inside his English accent. I scarcely had time to blush, though, before the chauffeur was holding the door for me.

I slid across a leather seat as smooth as polished stone but far more inviting. A bar occupied the space across from my knees, and a bottle of champagne glistened in its ice bucket. Two flutes glinted in the overhead light as Graeme joined me. The chauffeur made a short bow and closed the door. In moments, we were gliding through the Georgetown streets. For the second time in a week, I was being conveyed through Washington, D.C., in a luxury vehicle.

I took great pride in not owning a car. I was a city girl. I walked where I needed to go, or took the subway; I even knew the city’s bus routes pretty well.

But much more of this fine driving, and I could be converted. I wasted a moment, remembering that my last car ride had taken me to a Coven meeting, that I’d come back from that session with a responsibility. I had no business being out and about on a date—I should be learning everything possible about setting the Coven’s centerstone.

But Samhain was still seven weeks away.

And Graeme was beside me right now. And the limo’s suspension was incredible—even the cobblestones seemed to melt to smoothness under the whisper-smooth tires.

“May I?” Graeme asked, gesturing toward the champagne.

“Please.” I couldn’t help but smile as he leaned forward. His movements were so confident, so spare. He poured with an expert twist of his wrist, capturing even the troublesome last drop on the bottle’s lip. When he passed me my glass, I let my fingers slip against his, and I had to catch my breath against the confusing tremble of heat and cold.

“To the past and to the present,” he said. And then, touching his glass to mine, he added, “And to the future.”

“Past?” I asked, because I couldn’t fold my mind around the word “future.”

“I figured we’d take a night tour of the monuments. Your nation’s past.” Unbidden, I thought of the movie
No Way Out,
of Kevin Costner and Sean Young writhing their way around a midnight Washington while suggestive images of the Washington Monument’s obelisk filled the screen. I glanced toward the front of our compartment, but the chauffeur had already raised the opaque window that separated us. Graeme and I were blessedly alone.

I needed to say something, to fill a silence that was rapidly becoming awkward. “I’d like that,” I said. I lubricated my enthusiasm with a large mouthful of champagne. “Very much.”

And so we became tourists. The nameless driver was an expert at his job. He wove his way through crowded streets, stopping at necessary traffic lights but never jarring us, never disturbing the cocoon that we wove for ourselves in the backseat. Graeme did his part as well—he kept my champagne flute full, and he produced a series of snackable tidbits, including a tiny crystal bowl of Marcona almonds that nearly set me to laughing, because they mimicked the love-nest fare I’d contemplated in the cottage.

D.C.’s night monuments never failed to disappoint—the white marble glinted beneath creamy lights, with tourists silhouetted against the stone as if they were placed by some exacting movie director. As we circled around the Greek temple of the Lincoln Memorial, Graeme reached out to tuck a strand of wayward hair behind my ear. “Are you up for a bit of a stroll?”

A stroll? Well, I’d rather stay here in our private air-conditioned retreat, truth be told. But that wasn’t very sporting of me, was it? If the man had something else in mind, I should play along. Be more flexible. Even the thought of that word—flexible—made me blush. What was it about this guy? Why did I find him so compelling? I set down my glass with a firm nod. “Of course,” I said.

Graeme smiled, and he rolled down the compartment window to speak with the chauffeur. In moments, we were walking around the Reflecting Pool, staring up at the Washington Monument. A pair of red lights blinked at the top, like benevolent eyes keeping watch over us.

He nodded toward the marble. “From here, it looks like the color changes partway up.”

“Oh, it does,” I said. “They worked on it for about a decade before they ran out of money. It just sat there, unfinished, for nearly twenty years, and when they started again, they took stone from a different quarry. They didn’t set the aluminum cap until 1888.”

“Aluminum?”

“Aluminium, I suppose you’d say. At the time, it cost as much as silver. But of course, it doesn’t tarnish.”

“Of course.”

I winced at his droll tone and realized how much I’d been babbling. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I sound like a textbook.”

“You sound like a woman with a lot of facts at her fingertips. And
that
is a trait I find quite attractive.”

Before I could figure out what to say to that, Graeme wove his fingers into mine. He started to wander toward one of the side paths, away from the well-lit Reflecting Pool. “Where are we going?” I asked, barely making the words audible above my pounding heart.