Never Been Witched

by BLAIR, ANNETTE

  “By the looks of the affection passing between you, I think she was meant to be yours. What are you going to call her?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it,” Morgan said.

  Destiny cupped the pup’s sweet little face. “Meggie just suggested a name.”

  “This is the dog she always wanted, so what’s her name, Meggie?”

  Reggie leaned near Destiny, everyone on the floor with the pups. “Does he actually believe Meggie’s here?”

  “Sometimes,” Destiny whispered.

  “He seems less and less like the grouch I met at the castle.”

  Destiny chuckled. “Thank goodness.”

  “I can hear you,” Morgan said.

  “It’s too bad you can’t hear Meggie, because she suggested that we name the pup after her doll.”

  Morgan nodded. “Samantha, she is. Hear that, Samantha, girl? You’re named after a doll, who was named after a sitcom character on Bewitched, of all programs.” He looked at Destiny. “Don’t tell me that Meggie believes in witches.”

  “Okay I won’t, but cheer up,” she said, winking at Meggie. “It’s not a conspiracy.”

  “You’re sure about that?” Morgan asked, but he didn’t seem to expect an answer. “Nevertheless, Reggie, we need to hitch a ride to town in your boat to pick up some dog food and supplies.”

  “Nah,” Jake said. “We got all that stuff in the boat already. Destiny thought of everything.”

  Destiny saw Caramello take a flying leap from the top of the stair rail. As she caught her cat, Samantha and Einstein barked, and Caramello gave them a friendly yowl, judging by her tone as she scrambled right to Morgan.

  Empty-handed, Destiny shook her head at Morgan sitting there with Jake, Meggie, two pups, and a cat shawl crowding him. “I can’t imagine why they find him so fascinating.”

  “Can’t you?” Reggie asked.

  She shrugged. “Everybody ready for cake?” She chose plates and cups from the weird assortment left to them.

  “Me and Meggie want to take the pups out back to play,” Jake said.

  Reggie shook her head in the negative. “Wait until we’re ready to take our cake out to watch you.” She helped Destiny with the cake. “You’re sure Jake isn’t talking to thin air?”

  “He’s talking to Meggie, and Horace, the old lighthouse keeper. Meggie’s angel’s there, too, but I’m not sure Jake can see her, because I’d think he would have said something about such an imposing entity.”

  Reggie frowned. “Okayyyy. But he’s not related to you. Why can my son see ghosts?”

  “Children are open to every new experience, and Jake, especially, is so smart that even you said he sucks up knowledge like a sponge.”

  “Right.”

  Morgan rubbed his hands together. “This is my first party at the lighthouse. Between our guests, Destiny, and your generosity, our ghosts and our pets, this suddenly feels like a home.”

  “I’d say that’s one big step for a debunking man.” They kissed.

  Reggie gave them a wolf whistle as she went outside.

  The adults sat on wooden benches watching the children—one living, one not—a cat, and two pups, tumbling and laughing their way down a sandy hill, with butterflies chasing them.

  The butterflies must look peculiar to Reggie, Destiny thought. “You can always tell where Meggie is when she’s outside, because butterflies follow her.”

  “That’s freaky,” Reggie said, “but thanks for the heads-up. Jake, move closer to us and away from the dock!”

  “Meggie, let’s—Mom! Megs fell in the water!” Jake jumped off the far side of the dock and disappeared.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  DESTINY and Reggie ran and screamed, while Morgan jumped into the water and swam beneath the dock.

  Less than a second later, Jake was climbing on the dock. “An angel saved me!”

  Reggie caught him up, wept, and clutched him. “You’re gonna be punished big time, mister, but right this minute, I just need to hold you.” She pulled away. “Why aren’t you wet?”

  “I told you. An angel saved me. She scooped me up with one huge wing”—Jake spread his hands as far apart as they could get to demonstrate—“before I hit the water. You couldn’t see me because the dock was in the way.”

  “Oh God,” Reggie said. “Have you ever seen an angel before?”

  “Sure, she’s Meggie’s angel. Buffy. Why?”

  “Never mind.” Reggie pulled her son close again, while Destiny stepped out of her shoes, worried about how long Morgan had been under.

  Jake squirmed. “Mom, you’re hurting me.”

  “Morgan hasn’t resurfaced,” Destiny said, going in after him.

  Destiny found him at the deep end of the dock. He looked dazed, but he was focused on Meggie holding his hand and bringing him up. Destiny took his other hand to get him out more quickly.

  They surfaced to a circus of noisy animals and Reggie’s helping hands. “Jake, you’re okay,” Morgan said, still trying to catch his breath as he gave the boy a bear hug. “Thank God. You know, I think I hit my head down there. I was having hallucinations.”

  Destiny rolled her eyes. He’d seen his sister, and still he called her a hallucination. “Here’s where the dense don’t believe what’s right in front of them,” Destiny told Reggie. “Morgan, go get some dry clothes on before you catch pneumonia.”

  He went, still looking dazed. Maybe his doubt was more like a last bid for sanity.

  “Meggie’s okay, too, Mom,” Jake said. “She can walk on water. I wish I could. Hey,” he said to Meggie as they met on the beach, “you’re not wet, either. Why do butterflies like you? Do you see Meggie’s butterflies, Mom?”

  “I see them,” Reggie said. “Come here. We need to have a talk.”

  Jake came, but he knew a scolding was in store.

  Reggie took her son to the bench where she sat him down and knelt in front of him. “Don’t try to save Meggie again. She can’t die, if she’s already dead. My point,” Reggie said, “is that I can’t see Meggie, and neither can Uncle Morgan. So, if you had fallen in that water, and drowned, I wouldn’t be able to see you anymore, or hug you, and I sure wouldn’t want that to happen. So you stay out of the water, unless I’m with you!”

  Jake threw his arms around his mother’s neck. “I love you so much, I could hug you forever.”

  “Same here, baby.”

  Jake held on. “I’m not a baby, anymore, remember?”

  “Right, sorry. But you’ll always be my baby, no matter how big you get.”

  Jake sighed as if he understood these things. “I know. How come Aunt Destiny and me can see Meggie, and you can’t?”

  “Let me answer that,” Destiny said, taking Jake on her lap. “You and I have a gift, Jake. We can see ghosts. But not everybody will believe you, if you talk about seeing them, so let’s keep your gift to ourselves for a while, until you get older and learn how to handle it better.”

  “I can do that. Me and my mom kept lots of secrets on our way here to find Grandpa.” Jake jumped off her lap to follow his pup tugging at his pants with its teeth, and he went back to playing. Jake and Meggie with Samantha, Einstein, and Caramello—two kids rolling in the grass, three pets yipping, yowling, and rolling as well.

  “We need to get back to Salem,” Reggie said. “I closed the shop for a few hours, but it’ll get busy tonight. Let’s get Morgan’s pup supplies out of the boat.”

  “Sure thing,” Destiny said.

  “You want to tell me what’s going on with you two?”

  “What? Nothing. We’re sharing the place.”

  “I can see that. Playing cards with enough water on the stove to fill a bathtub. All very innocent, except for the fact that I saw Morgan zipping his jeans as the door opened. Strip poker, I take it?”

  “Geez, Regg, you expect me to confess?”

  “No, but the priest might.”

  “Where did you hear that bit of skewed and incorrect informat
ion?”

  “From a crazy woman who came into the Immortal Classic this morning to tell me that my sister was seducing her son, the priest.”

  “When you go back to the shop, neutralize the negativity with a smudge stick the way we taught you. That woman’s certifiable, and I’m not kidding. Plucking patchouli, I’m gonna smudge her son, too.”

  “Is smudging what they’re calling it these days?”

  Destiny raised a brow. “Morgan had a narrow escape from the asylum he was born into, but his sister didn’t. It’s a wonder he’s almost normal.”

  “Des, you’ve been calling him crazy for months.”

  “I’ve revised my opinion, mostly.”

  “That good, is he?”

  Destiny turned to lift a bag of doggie chow.

  After Reggie and Jake left, Destiny and Morgan skipped the bath for a reunion shower, then they went to bed, where she spelled them some gentle privacy.

  “Thank you for Samantha,” Morgan said as they lay entwined afterward, their naked bodies slick with sweat, the sea stroking the shore outside their window lulling them further. With her head on his chest, his heartbeat matched the slowing cadence of hers. She traced the line of hair arrowing toward the sated, sleeping giant.

  The doorknob turned on the closed door, and in fell Caramello and Samantha, who’d been standing on their hind legs. “Great,” Morgan said. “Between them, they can turn doorknobs.”

  Their pets jumped onto the bed, curled up at their feet together, and went to sleep.

  “Sweet sassafras tea,” Destiny said. “I think Samantha has replaced you in Caramello’s affections.”

  “Good. Now I won’t be afraid to kiss you and piss her off.”

  As Destiny smiled and drifted toward sleep, Morgan’s stroking touch went from soothing to agitated and chafing. “What’s wrong?” she asked, looking up at him and covering the now tender skin of her arm.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was thinking.”

  “About?”

  “You’re psychic. You should know.”

  “Stop being a smart-ass, and answer me.”

  “I got to thinking about Meggie and how my parents felt about her being psychic. I remembered something, but I’m not happy about it.”

  Destiny hit the light switch and sat up to face him. “Something about your childhood?”

  “Meggie made predictions of the future, no matter how angry it made my parents. I, on the other hand, kept my mouth shut, unlike her, to protect myself from their anger.”

  Destiny settled herself against the headboard, ready for a long talk. “Let me get this straight. You’re admitting that you’re psychic?”

  “I know you’ve suspected.” He brought the blankets up to cover her shoulders. “I’m afraid I am, or was.”

  “There is no was. It isn’t curable, and it isn’t a disease or something to fear.”

  “When you screw it up, it is.”

  “How did you screw it up?”

  “Before Meggie died, I got a vision of the school’s tower falling—not of Meggie dying, just the tower—but I convinced myself that it was a dream, and by then I’d bought into the concept that no one would believe me if I told them what I saw anyway.”

  “Don’t torture yourself like that.” Destiny tried to pull him close, but he wouldn’t let her, as if he’d break if he didn’t finish.

  “For months after Meggie died, I thought if I’d spoken up, my parents would have gotten her out in time, and she’d be alive today.”

  “Oh, Morgan, no.”

  He swallowed hard. “I blamed myself for her death, until I went to the seminary and buried my guilt in school-work. I studied hard, and my dark memories went into deep cold storage. I doubled up on my majors, took night courses in architecture at a local college, continued my day studies in theology at the seminary. Architecture, I enjoyed. Theology, I endured.”

  Destiny couldn’t imagine what it cost him to reveal his guilty memories. “I’ve met your mother. She wouldn’t have believed you. Meggie knows that. Time for you to realize it.”

  “You might need to keep telling me that.” He went into her arms then, his eyes glistening.

  Eventually, they made love again, gently at first, then almost savagely, and lastly with a burgeoning freedom, as if a damn had burst and Morgan had been set free.

  As they drifted afterward, Destiny sat straight up. “Oh good Goddess. Just shoot me now. A falling tower, and I painted another. I must have gotten my psychic messages mixed. Was Meggie’s tower made of brick, too?”

  “It was brick. That’s it then? The mistake I hoped for?”

  “What made you hope for that?”

  “The painting of the school tower in the upstairs hallway at your house.”

  Destiny had never been so relieved. “You’re psychic, too. You must be right. I could have gotten the towers mixed up.” She hoped. “When I think of what you went through, no wonder you were a grumblestiltskin.”

  “I thought you were a spoiled brat, but always the most gorgeous woman I’d ever seen.”

  “I look exactly like my sisters.”

  “No you don’t. But your psychic energy is off the charts. I’m still worried about our tower. I hope the worry is not the psychic in me. Des, why didn’t I tell somebody about Meggie’s tower? Anybody.”

  “You’d been brainwashed, taught since birth to deny the existence of anything that couldn’t be explained, psychics especially. All along, I thought it was the priest in you that couldn’t accept my magick and psychic abilities, when in fact, it was your upbringing coupled with trying to deny your own psychic ability.”

  “You think I subconsciously denied my ability to keep my parents happy?”

  “On some level, eventually. But wouldn’t it make more sense if your determination to debunk psychics and paranormal activity was a deep-seated, unacknowledged need to prove that you couldn’t see the future? Therefore, you couldn’t have saved your sister, because you couldn’t be a psychic, since they don’t exist.”

  “You’re pretty smart for a sex goddess.”

  “I grew up learning to pay attention to the signs. Having a sixth sense makes you a mighty powerful listener.”

  “Guess I buried plenty when I buried Meggie, because I stopped listening as well.”

  “We’ll work on resurrecting your sixth sense the way we resurrected the big guy.”

  “He’s always ready for a resurrection. My sixth sense, not so much.”

  Disappointment and frustration filled Destiny. But she figured there was more than one way to awaken Morgan’s gifts.

  Chapter Forty

  “I’M hungry,” Morgan said, recognizing the imminent arrival of dawn outside the window.

  Destiny turned on her side, snuggled her bottom against his boner, closed her eyes, and sighed in contentment. “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “It’s still dark, but it’s nearly dawn.” He jumped from the bed and put on some sweats. “Wear warm clothes and meet me at the top of the lighthouse tower in fifteen minutes for a sunrise picnic. I’ll teach you how to ring the fog bell.”

  Destiny moaned in frustration and tried to keep warm without him.

  “Tower picnic,” he coaxed, pulling her blanket slowly away from her and toward the foot of the bed.

  She grabbed it to stop its defection, but she shivered anyway.

  “Sex in the tower at sunrise. An experience to—” Tell their kids about? Was he nuts?

  “To what?” she grumbled, as she got up. “And it better be good.”

  “An experience to make us come every time we remember it.”

  “I’m holding you to that.”

  “Now who’s the grumblestiltskin?”

  “Breakfast better be ready when I get there.”

  Morgan saluted and left.

  AT the top of the tower, Destiny stole his breath when she arrived wearing makeup and a pair of purple sweats with a matching hair band, her blonde hair curling ar
ound it. What a stunner.

  “I love it up here,” she said, walking the birdcage around the Fresnel lens along the lantern room gallery, then going out onto the main gallery, the boxy deck surrounding the square tower, then a smaller gallery lower down that connected them to the fire escape.

  Afterward, she came back inside, shivering. “What’s for breakfast?”

  “Champagne and birthday cake.”

  “Now that’s something to wake up for.”

  “And sex, isn’t?” he asked, making a bed for them on the main gallery around the caged lens, with enough blankets to throw over their shoulders while they watched the sunrise.

  “Breakfast first, sex after,” she said. “I worked up an appetite last night.”

  An unannounced and silent visitor startled them. A white owl landed on the gallery railing and stared right at them.

  “Hello, Owl,” Destiny said. “This is Morgan. Morgan, Owl.”

  “Kismet, you scare me sometimes.”

  “If an owl sits nearby, face your fears, for a great mystery is about to unfold. Grandmother Owl is the totem of psychics, a link between the seen and unseen. She encourages us to make peace with our pasts. She must understand your need, Morgan, or she wouldn’t be here. Owls are night eagles, and since the owl is my totem, that makes us both eagles, Boy Scout.”

  “She could be here for you, Kismet.”

  “I embraced Owl a long time ago. She’s here for you, believe me.”

  “I’m making peace with Meggie’s presence.”

  “How about your parents?”

  “I’m making peace with their presence, too.”

  “And how about your psychic ability?”

  “It would be easier to make peace with that if I hadn’t blown it first time out of the gate.”

  “You were twelve years old. You couldn’t have saved Meggie’s life, but you can still clear her memory. You can’t let anyone continue to believe that your sister was crazy. You have the power to correct that misconception.”