Only Gilbert and I remained strong—Gilbert, because that was his nature, I because Michael needed me. (I was so foolish, Phillie, thinking I could save him, if only I loved him enough.')
Michael became more impossible with every passing day.
He tried over and over again to ride—that had ever been his passion, and love for me had never supplanted it—but his stiff knee made the pursuit wholly impossible. He was thrown on each attempt, and then there was more pain, followed by more drinking, and then more railing and cursing.
In those days when I might still have been a bride, had I wed myself to a more suitable man, I became instead a reminder of all Michael had lost. By that time, he saw himself as the victim of Winterheath's ungovernable temper, and although he must have known what venomous things were being said about him, he never showed a moment's shame or remorse. He hated me, it seemed, as if I'd brought the whole catastrophe down upon us all, and would often mutter the most vile curses at me, or shout. He even accused me of being faithless, Phillie—of betraying him with his own brother.
I don't doubt that you are wondering why I stayed. I am not sure I can answer that question, even now, when I have gained a modicum of perspective. I can only say that I loved Michael completely; my error, no doubt, was in cherishing the man he might have been, instead of the man he was.
At night I slept in a room adjoining Michael's—I did not want him to touch me in a drunken and hateful state. But he came often to my bed and claimed me roughly, and I grew to hate that aspect of marriage that I had so enjoyed at first. I didn't need my magic to disassociate myself from what Michael was doing to me—and I had almost forgotten that I possessed any powers at all.
One spring morning Lady Cheltingham's serving woman woke the household with a shrill scream. The duchess had died in her sleep and lay shrunken and staring in her lacy nightcap and high-necked gown. The ever-present bottle of laudanum stood upon her bedside table within easy reach.
A pall of gloom seemed to settle over the whole of the estate after that, even though the hillsides of Cheltingham were green with sweet grass and the ewes were lambing. Trout stirred in the streams and ponds, and the sky was that fragile eggshell blue that I have only seen in the English countryside. I wanted to be happy, but I could not.
Within a month of Lady Cheltingham's funeral, her husband went into the family chapel in the middle of the afternoon, put the barrel of his favorite hunting rifle into his mouth, and pulled the trigger. The small, ancient church where countless children had been baptized, where eulogies had been said and vows exchanged, was thus fouled by the literal and figurative carnage of Lord Cheltingham's furious despair.
Demons seemed to pursue Michael as never before, to stare out of his eyes, to torment him from both sides of his skin. Gilbert tried but could not reason with his brother at all. Michael was beyond both our reaches.
He disappeared for days on end, commandeering one of the carriages and leaving Cheltingham Castle, and me, in temporary peace. During those intervals, Phillie, I prayed that he would never come back. God forgive me, I hoped that he would die. But he always returned, angrier, uglier than before, full of terrible accusations.
By then Gilbert was the Duke of Cheltingham. Though grief-stricken, and bitterly furious with Michael, he was determined to make the estates prosper, to be a good steward. He had long loved one Susan Christopher, a young woman of excellent social standing, and they had planned, since childhood, to marry.
In the wake of the "Cheltingham Scandals," however, Susan's family withdrew their support of the marriage, and Susan herself offered no protest and wed herself to another. She was not steadfast like Gilbert, but I assign her no blame. Although I believe that my own father, as a mortal, was such a man, I have not known another like my brother-in-law.
If you are guessing that I at last knew the worst truth of all, that I had joined myself, under the laws of heaven, to the wrong brother, you are right. I came to love Gilbert, and I believe he bore me some tender sentiment, though of course something within him was broken with the loss of Susan.
Gilbert and I might have taken some comfort from each other, and perhaps not been blamed too much by a merciful heaven, but we did not. Gilbert was far too honorable, though he often looked at me with the same yearning I felt, but it was no such noble notion as honor that stayed me from sin. I might have seduced my husband's brother, so much did I want him, if the act wouldn't have given weight to Michael's constant and otherwise unfounded reproaches.
During this period, Mother, Papa, and Valerian kept their distance. They might have been figures from a mythical tale, for all I knew, and I resented their absence completely, and often summoned them, aloud and in tears. Later, of course, I came to understand that they had stayed away in part because these were battles I had to fight for myself, but there was another reason as well. All of them feared that they would render Michael some unholy punishment, in a moment of uncontrollable fury. and earn my undying hatred in the process.
And so I was alone, except for Gilbert….
The shrill ringing of the telephone jolted both Kristina and Max out of the paper world of the letter; Max leaned his head back on the sofa and closed his eyes, while Kristina went to answer.
"Ms. Holbrook?" an unfamiliar voice asked.
Kristina was watching Max, wondering what he thought of her now, how the information in the letters had affected him. "Yes," she said into the receiver.
The caller gave his name and identified himself as a dispatcher for the alarm company that monitored her shop. "We've had a signal from your place of business, ma'am, and we've sent the police to that address. We're calling to notify you that there may have been a break-in."
Kristina sighed, thanked the man. and hung up. Max was looking at her with raised eyebrows.
"That was somebody from the electronic security firm I deal with," she said. "They've sent the police to my shop. It's probably just a false alarm, but I've got to go down there anyway."
Max laid the unfinished letter carefully on the coffee table and got to his feet. "Let's go," he said.
Kristina luxuriated in the knowledge that Max wanted to go with her, even though she knew it didn't necessarily mean anything. He was a nice guy, raised to be polite and considerate. Silently she blessed his parents—what fine people they must be.
"You don't seem very worried," he commented when, after helping her into her coat and donning his own, he opened the front door. It was tacitly agreed that they would take his Blazer, which was parked in the driveway beside her Mercedes. "About the shop, I mean."
Something was tugging at the edge of her mind, but she couldn't quite identify it. "Like I said, it's probably just a false alarm. And even if somebody did break in, everything is insured."
Max raised the collar of his coat. An icy breeze was blowing in from Puget Sound, and the promise of a rare Seattle snowfall darkened the eastern sky. "Money doesn't matter much to you, does it?'' he asked, opening the Blazer's passenger door for her. There was no surprise in the question, and no criticism. Apparently he was just making conversation.
Kristina waited until he was behind the wheel before answering. "I've always had more than enough," she said.
"And what you wanted, you could conjure," he replied, backing carefully into the street.
"But I didn't," Kristina confessed. "Even in the early days, I wanted so much to be—well—normal."
Max shook his head and smiled. "A lot of us would have taken advantage of that kind of power," he said. "Weren't you ever tempted to strike back at Michael when he treated you so badly?"
Kristina considered for several moments, not weighing the answer because she knew that immediately, but deciding whether or not to make such a confession. "I imagined a thousand sorts of vengeance," she said. "Frankly, I've never been sure it wasn't my anger that finally finished him."
Max glanced at her. A few fat flakes of snow wafted down from the burdened sky. "Are you going to tell me about that?"
> She bit her lip. "You'll come to it in the letters," she said.
"Fair enough," Max answered.
They reached Western Avenue and the shop within a few minutes. There were two police cars parked out front, and Max tucked the Blazer neatly between them.
Kristina's uneasiness, barely the fragment of a shadow before, rose a notch or two and would not be denied. She got out of the car without waiting for Max to open the door and approached the front door of the shop, which was broken. Huge, jagged shards of glass littered the steps and the sidewalk.
There went the false alarm theory.
"I'm Kristina Holbrook," Kristina told the uniformed officer guarding the door. "This is my store."
He asked for ID, and she fumbled in her purse, found her driver's license.
The officer nodded, and both Max and Kristina entered the shop. There was almost no glass on the floor, and a quick sweep of the room revealed that very little had been disturbed. The cash register, an antique in its own right, had been slammed through the top of the jewelry counter, probably when the robbers discovered that it was empty.
A plainclothes detective approached, flashing his badge. "Ms. Holbrook? Detective Walters."
Kristina nodded in acknowledgment. Max said nothing, but he stood very close to Kristina, and she was grateful.
"We've got an odd case here, Ms. Holbrook," Detective Graham said. He was a clean-cut sort of guy, nice-looking and neatly dressed. "Looks like it was an inside job. You have any employees? Somebody who might have a key?"
Kristina thought of the glass on the sidewalk. Of course. The door had been broken from the inside. Her uneasiness grew, though she still couldn't pinpoint its cause, and bile burned the back of her throat. "No," she said. "I've always run the shop by myself."
"Any chance somebody could have hidden in here somewhere, when you closed up last night?''
"I wasn't here then," Kristina said, blushing a little. She didn't want to have to explain that she'd been with Max; that was precious and private.
Detective Walters didn't press. After all, one of the advantages of owning a business lies in setting one's own hours. "You having any financial problems, Ms. Holbrook?" he asked instead, in an almost bored tone of voice.
Kristina felt Max stiffen, willed him not to defend her. And at the same time relished the fact that he wanted to protest the implications of the policeman's question.
"No," she said. "I don't need the insurance money."
Walters had the good grace to look mildly embarrassed. "Have to ask, Ms. Holbrook. Fact is, it's an easy thing to check out anyway. Matter of a few strokes to a computer keyboard."
That didn't come as any surprise to Kristina. Her best friend, Valerian's Daisy, was a private detective, and Daisy had long since filled her in on just how easy it was to invade a person's privacy, with or without their knowledge. "I'd like to look around, if you don't mind," she said.
The detective produced a small notebook and a pencil stub from the pocket of his ski jacket. He was wearing jeans, a sweatshirt and sneakers, in lieu of the trench coat Kristina would have expected. "Here," he replied. "Make a list of everything that's missing, if you would."
It finally came to her then, what she had been fretting about ever since the telephone call from the security people had alerted her to the possibility of a robbery.
She headed directly for the back room, where she'd set the doorstop, the ugly brass monkey.
It was gone.
Kristina's knees sagged beneath her; Max caught her elbow in one hand and steered her to the little table nearby, where she took tea breaks in the mornings and afternoons. She sank into one of the cold folding chairs and laid her head on her arms, trembling.
Max touched her shoulder, then crouched beside her chair. "Sweetheart," he said softly. "What is it?"'
"The brass monkey," she whispered miserably, turning her head to look into his concerned eyes. "Oh. God, Max—the doorstop is gone!"
"Did this piece have some special sentimental value?"' Detective Walters asked, from the doorway. Kristina resented the intrusion, though she did not dislike the man himself.
How could she explain that one night, nearly a year before, a young man had entered the store, bent on tape and robbery, and she'd changed him into a brass doorstop? Obviously she couldn't—not until she and Max were alone, of course.
"Yes," she lied, making herself sit up straight, still dizzy. She knew she was wretchedly pale, and thought she might actually throw up. She hadn't known she was quite human enough to do that. "It wasn't valuable but I—I liked it." She turned imploring eyes to Max, who was still on his haunches beside her chair, watching her closely. "Would you please call my friend and ask her to come down here as soon as she can? Her name is Daisy Chandler." She gave Max the number.
"I'm afraid the perpetrator broke the telephones," Detective Walters said.
Of course. The thief—she'd never troubled herself to learn his name—would have been filled with rage when the spell wore off. It was a wonder he hadn't trashed the whole shop, or even come to Kristina's house to avenge himself. Her home address was printed on the personal cards she kept in her desk, among other places.
"I've got a cell phone in the Blazer," Max answered, and went out to get it.
"What about him?" the detective asked, cocking a thumb in Max's direction. "He have a key to this place?"
"No," Kristina said, unable to keep a note of annoyance out of her voice. "Max is the original solid citizen." She got up, filled a mug with water from the cooler, added a tea bag, and put the whole shebang into the microwave. Nausea roiled in her stomach and seared the back of her throat; maybe chamomile would soothe her nerves.
"Had to ask," Walters said. "Not much more we can do here, today at least. We'll write up a report and ask you to sign it. You probably should get somebody over to either replace that glass or board the place up."
Protecting the rest of her merchandise was the least of Kristina's worries. "Thank you," she said. She didn't exactly mean it, but that was the closest thing to sincerity she could manage at the moment.
Max returned as Walters and the others were leaving. "Daisy's on her way," he said. "While I was on the telephone, I called a friend of mine, a contractor. He'll see what he can do about the door."
Kristina had collected her tea from the microwave. She made her wobbly way back to the table and sat down. She used both hands to raise the cup to her lips, she was still shaking so badly.
"Do you want to tell me what you meant by that remark about the doorstop?" Max asked when they had both been silent for some time. The police were gone, and a cold draft blew in from outside. Both Max and Kristina were still wearing their coats.
She shook her head. "When Daisy gets here," she promised. "I can't stand to tell it twice."
Max drew back the other chair and sat down across from her. "Daisy would be the woman who gave the Halloween party for the neighborhood kids. The one who keeps a white wolf for a pet and considers herself the wife of a vampire."
It might have been funny, so ludicrous was the situation, if it weren't for the fact that an angry robber and rapist had been turned loose. Kristina couldn't find it within herself to smile. "That's her. She's also a private investigator."
"Figures," Max said wryly. "Never let it be said that your friends and relations lead dull lives."
Kristina managed a ghost of a grin. "Before she came to Seattle, Daisy was a homicide detective in Las Vegas. The word dull is not in her vocabulary."
Max pushed his metal folding chair back on two legs, his arms folded, regarding Kristina in thoughtful silence for several seconds. "I'm almost afraid to ask this question," he began. "But what can Ms. Chandler do that the police can't? Isn't she mortal, just like them?"
Kristina let out a long breath. She nodded. "Daisy is quite human. She's also very, very good at what she does."
"And she, like you, has some very powerful allies."
"Yes," Kristina repli
ed. She was counting on Valerian and perhaps Dathan for some aid and advice, but she didn't plan to bother either of her parents with the problem. Calder was doing important work of his own, and Maeve was occupied with the search for Gideon and Dimity.
'"How about some more tea?" Max asked, seeing that Kristina's cup was empty.
"Are you always such a nice guy?'' Kristina countered, surrendering her mug. "I keep expecting to find out something awful about you."
Max grinned as he dropped a tea bag into water and set the cup back in the microwave. "I leave dirty socks around sometimes," he confessed. "And I'm a sore loser at racquetball.'"
Kristina spread a hand over her upper chest in mock horror. "Oh, no."
Max leaned down, while the oven whirred behind him, and kissed Kristina lightly on the mouth. "I'm a long way from perfect, okay?"
Suddenly Kristina felt the weight of the ages settle on her slender shoulders. "Maybe," she admitted sorrowfully, "but there's a definition in the dictionary for what you are. I'm something that doesn't even have a name."
The microwave bell chimed; Max took the tea out and set it down in front of Kristina and dropped back into his chair across from her before grasping her hand. "You're a woman," he insisted quietly. "Trust me. I know."
A tear trickled down Kristina's cheek; she dashed it away with the back of her hand. Before she could say anything, however, there was a stir at the front of the shop and the sound of a familiar voice.
"Kris?" Daisy called. "Are you in here?"
"Back here," Kristina replied, rising shakily to her feet.
Max followed her into the shop, where Daisy stood near the broken counter, surveying the damage.
"What happened?" she asked. She was wearing jeans, a turtleneck sweater, hiking boots, and a baseball cap, and her adopted son, Esteban, was perched on her hip. He, too, was bundled against the cold, and his enormous brown eyes were wide as he looked around.
Kristina shoved her hands into the pockets of her coat. Max stood beside her. "You know Max Kilcarragh, don't you?" she asked, stalling.
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