We parted at the door, Arianna heading into the small garage where we kept our car–an old Volkswagen Beetle we’d both grown too fond of to replace–while I walked toward the cliffs. We rarely used the Bug while we were in residence out here. Walking to and from the village was so much more pleasant, and less damaging to the earth and the air. But I supposed in this case Arianna felt she might need the advantage of speed on her side. She could beat Nathanial back here and signal me if anything went wrong.
I hoped nothing would.
The path began at the top of the cliffs, wandered at angles down them, zigging this way and that way and finding the shallowest route. As I started my descent I heard the VWs deep, froggy-voiced motor come to life, growl a few times, then fade as it moved away toward town.
The path was old. It had been here longer than I, and, Aunt Eleanor had confided, longer than she, as well. I often wondered whose feet had first trodden here, and if they’d been feet at all, or perhaps paws or hooves.
Sand-covered stone lay beneath my feet, slippery and gritty all at once. A chill breeze blew salty moisture onto my face, dampening the flannel shirt I wore with its misty droplets. I could smell the sea, taste the salt when I licked my lips, and feel it leaving wet sloppy kisses on my hair.
At the bottom my boat sat on the narrow strip of sand, dry and safe. I pushed it into the water and hopped aboard, then, crouching in the stern, tugged the rip cord and started the motor. All that remained then was to steer the little craft as the propeller whirled and pushed me forward. I sat down, felt the dampness of the sea creeping through the denim of my jeans, wished I’d brought something dry to sit on.
And then the shore was fading behind me and Duncan’s island grew larger, closer. I bit my lower lip as I stared ahead, wind blowing my hair back and chilling my face until my nose went numb and my cheeks burned with cold.
He heard my approach. I knew it a moment later when he stepped out onto the front step and stood there, hands deep in his pockets as he watched me all the way in. His face, so beautiful, just as it always had been to me. Those deep brown eyes, and dark, thick brows. His full lips and strong jawline.
But that beloved face was expressionless this morning. It told me nothing of how he felt at seeing my approach. And I wondered if perhaps he might not know how he was feeling about that.
When I killed the motor and stepped out, he came down to the beach. Bending beside me, gripping the squared-off nose of my vessel, he tugged it up, out of the water. Then he stood facing me, and I straightened and turned to face him in return.
“I decided last night to tell you to leave me alone,” he said. No greeting. No welcome. Just that.
“Did you?”
He nodded, his eyes roaming my face like a touch. “I can’t do it, though. I’ve been rehearsing the words from the moment I saw you start down that path, to the boat, and the whole time you were crossing. But it didn’t help.”
“I’m glad of that.”
He sighed, lowered his head, no longer looking at me. “Raven, I got some books on this witchcraft thing. This morning. Now I haven’t had time to read a lot, but–” He broke off, perhaps because I was smiling at him, slightly, but smiling all the same. “What?”
“Why?” I asked him. “Why did you go to get the books, Duncan?”
He took his time about answering, licking his lips, looking skyward as if for help. “Because I thought you were crazy, and I didn’t want to think that, so I thought if I understood what you were talking about, I might see that...that it made some kind of sense.”
I nodded. “And not because you were curious about your own abilities,” I said softy.
“I don’t have any abilities.”
“Oh.”
He looked down at his feet, quiet for a long moment, while I stood, waiting, knowing.
“Sometimes I know who’s calling when the phone rings.” He shrugged, looking up again. “Sometimes I reach for it before it rings without even realizing it. And then it does.” He shook his head as if to negate everything he said. “But that’s nothing.”
“Of course.”
“I mean, everyone does that. It’s like when you hum a song and then turn on the radio and it’s playing. Or when you wish the guy ahead of you on the highway would change lanes just before he does.”
“Or when you mentally tell the red light to turn green and it happens,” I added with a nod.
“Exactly.”
“Exactly,” I repeated.
That stuff happens to everyone.”
I didn’t speak. He looked at me, as if awaiting my confirmation, my agreement. I met his eyes and shook my head. “No, Duncan. It doesn’t.”
He looked away, hands plunging into his pockets. “Yeah, it does,” he said. “It has to.”
I was trying to go carefully, gently. He didn’t seem ready for any of this, and I was pushing it on him. But I didn’t have a choice. “It’s my fault you’re having trouble accepting all of this, Duncan. I didn’t explain things as well as I could have.”
He shook his head. “Maybe not, but it’s all right now. I think I understand. There’s nothing supernatural going on here. And as for witchcraft, according to the books, it’s pretty much just a belief system based on–”
“No.”
He looked at me, brows knit in frustration.
“For some, that’s all it is–those things you’ve found in the books. A religion, a belief system one can study and learn and adopt. But those things are not what it is to us, Duncan. We’re different. We were born different. Witches, yes, but not like all those others practicing the Craft. Most of them don’t even know we exist, for it’s a secret we guard of necessity. We’re born with something extra, senses beyond the five. Weak, unpracticed, raw, but real.”
I was losing him. I could see the skepticism in his eyes even now, but like a fool I rushed on, because it had to be said. “We’re immortal, Duncan.”
“Immortal.” He closed his eyes and bent his head. “Dammit, dammit, dammit,” he whispered. His voice was harsh, raspy, emotional. Then he looked up again, his hands gripping my shoulders gently as he probed my eyes, and his were worried, filled with some kind of concerned sympathy that was all wrong. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I told myself it did, that I should stay the hell away from you, but I can’t do that, Raven, no matter how....” He stopped himself, closed his eyes briefly, then went on. “Listen to me. I have a wonderful therapist in Boston. He helped me beat my fear of heights, and the water thing, helped me deal with all the baggage my father has dumped on me over the years and–hell, he even helped me get rid of the dreams...” He stopped there, his voice trailing off as he frowned hard.
“Dreams?” I swallowed the hurt I’d felt at his insinuation that I was mentally unstable, and focused instead on Duncan. On his pain, his confusion.
“Damn, I’d forgot all about the dreams.”
I sighed at the way his face paled, just slightly, and closed my hand around his, turning him, beginning to walk beside him along the shore. ‘Tell me about the dreams.”
He shook his head quickly, jerkily. “It was a long time ago. I was only a little boy. They...they don’t mean anything.”
I squeezed his hand. “Please,” I said softly. “I’d like to know about them.”
He lowered his head, and his hand clutched mine tighter, reflexively, I thought. I could feel the tremor of pain move through him. He was quiet for so long I didn’t think he was going to tell me. And then he began to speak in a soft, halting voice.
“I used to dream of a woman.” He shivered. “Holding me, crying.” His voice grew even softer. “She kept whispering my name and saying she didn’t want to let me go.”
He looked at my face. I hoped my tears didn’t show. “The doc said it was a memory of my birth mother, embedded in my subconscious.”
I caught my lower lip in my teeth to remind myself to think before speaking. To go gently. Lifting my gaze, I looked out across the water,
toward the shore a short distance from my home. To the place high on the cliffs, beside the Coast Road, where I’d lost him three hundred years ago. I felt that crushing pain again, that crippling grief. My heart contracted at the memory of his beloved broken body lying lifeless on those rocks, and suddenly, going gently seemed like the least important thing in the world.
“Do you see those jagged rocks thrusting up out of the water, just offshore?” I asked, pointing. I didn’t wait for a response. “That’s where I found your body, Duncan. That’s where I found you, and I thought it would kill me. I went to you, slogged through the waves out to where you were, and gathered you close, and held you against me and cried. I cried your name, and told you I couldn’t let you go, and that I refused to go on alone, without you.”
The old tears welled up in my eyes again. I didn’t look at Duncan, but out there at those rocks, reliving the nightmare as I spoke. I half expected him to interrupt, but he didn’t. So I went on.
“Arianna had cast and conjured even as your body plummeted from the cliffs, Duncan. She willed that when you lived again you’d look the same, and that your name would be the same so that I’d be able to find you and know you, and love you again.”
I faced him, so that the sight of him alive, and whole, and here beside me could chase my most heartbreaking memory from my mind. Hands trembling, I reached up to stroke his face. “And that’s exactly what happened.”
I could see his skepticism. But I could also see the man I loved, alive and well behind his eyes, yearning to escape, to love me again.
“If I’m immortal, then how did I die?” he asked slowly.
“You weren’t immortal then, Duncan. I was, though. They pitched me from those cliffs for witchery. You tried to save me. You’re immortal now because in that other lifetime, you died trying to save the life of a witch. That’s how the gift is earned.”
Shaking his head, sighing heavily, confused and frustrated and torn between his instinctive knowledge that I spoke the truth and his absolute certainty that all I said was impossible. He turned away. I drew my dagger. “Look at this,” I told him.
Slowly he turned. I did something then I was taught never, ever to do. I handed my blade over to another being. I gave Duncan my only means of defense. And he frowned as he turned it over and examined it.
“The man you call your father has one just like it, doesn’t he? One he carries with him everywhere he goes.”
Slowly Duncan’s dark gaze rose from the blade, to my eyes. “Yes. He does. But that doesn’t mean–”
“I know it isn’t enough, alone. But there is more, Duncan. More that I can show you.” I stepped closer to him, my hands, trembling, going to the button of the jeans I wore. Duncan went utterly still, his gaze riveted to my fingers as he dropped my blade to the sand.
“You have a birthmark, Duncan. When we were together here, before, you only took off your shirt. So I couldn’t have seen it. But I know about that mark all the same. It’s in the shape of the crescent moon, and it’s on your right hip.”
Blinking, he said nothing. But I saw the amazement in his eyes. And then they darkened as I tugged my zipper down, and pushed the jeans down over my hips. They tripped my feet, making me clumsy, so I stepped out of them, right there on the shore in the biting October wind. I lifted the T-shirt slightly, moved the panties I wore so my right hip was revealed to him, and whispered, “Look.”
He did. And then the color drained from his face.
“We’re all born with the crescent, Duncan. That’s how I knew you had it.”
That...that can’t be real. You put it there.” I could hear the desperation in his voice.
“Do you really think so?”
His knees bent. I never knew whether he knelt deliberately or simply lost the ability to stand, but the result was the same. Duncan on his knees in the sand, his face very close to my hip. I felt his warm breath on me there, and closed my eyes. This was no time to let carnal desires overwhelm me. But then his fingers came to me, running over the crescent, tracing its shape, making me shiver more even than the cold wind was doing.
“Madness,” he whispered, so close I could almost feel the movements of his lips. This is madness....” And then his mouth touched my hip. His lips moved over it, pressed to it, parted as if to taste my skin, leaving it damp and vulnerable to the wind. I drew in a jerky, noisy gasp when his tongue ran along the mark, hot and wet. Hungry.
Shuddering, I sank into the sand in much the same way he had done, until I knelt before him, facing him, seeing the desire burning in his eyes just the way it used to do. “Duncan,” I whispered.
He kissed me–pushing me backward into the sand, pressing me down with his body, he kissed me. And it was as if he felt the frustration of the three hundred years of waiting as desperately as I did. Or maybe it was a different frustration. That of wanting so badly to remember and not being able to. I didn’t know. I only knew he wanted me as much as I wanted him, for I could see it in his eyes and feel it in his touch. He wasn’t gentle. I didn’t want him to be.
Already atop me, he ate at my mouth with unrestrained greed, then lapped a path over my throat. One hand gripped and squeezed my breast while the other battled my flannel shirt, and the T-shirt underneath, relentlessly striving to bare my body. As if he couldn’t wait, his mouth closed on that breast, despite the T-shirt barrier. The shirt grew wet from his nursing, my nipple felt sore, deliciously hurting when he bit and tugged at it. And at last he shoved the clothes away, tearing them over my head, shoving my panties down now as his hands closed on my buttocks, fingers parting, exploring the dark, damp places of me. His mouth found my breast without defenses now, exposed, and returned to applying exquisite torture.
One hand moved around to the front of me, cupped me, and then two fingers pushed my folds apart, wide apart, while another explored. I arched against him, whispered in his ear, “Don’t make me wait, my love. I’ve waited so long already.”
His breath shuddered out of him, but he complied, loosening his own jeans, pushing them down, and then pressing his erection against me. A second later he filled me, and the sigh that initial thrust drove from my lungs seemed to contain all the longing of the past three centuries–for it all melted away with that first joining. It was as if I’d come home.
I held him, kissed him, moved with him there in the sand, told him I loved him over and over. My hands on his back, his shoulders, feeling him, knowing him so well. And then I forgot everything as Duncan drove me higher–to points beyond those where conscious thought existed. To a place where only feeling lived. My body writhed with pleasure as I cried his name aloud and clutched him tight with every part of me, and he cried mine, when he emptied his passion into me.
Then he was still, braced up on his elbows, staring down into my face with something–wonder? Awe?–sparkling in his eyes. His fingers tangled in my hair, and he bent to kiss me.
“You’re going to be all right, Raven. I promise you that. I’m going to make you all right.”
Blinking away the haze of pleasure, slowly understanding that he still didn’t believe me, I felt all my joy fall to the ground like the dying spark of a felling star.
“You still don’t believe me.”
He stroked my forehead, pushing my hair away. There’s something to what you’re saying, I realize that. The birthmarks...that’s too much to be coincidence, I know. And whatever it is, it’s feeding this...this–”
“Fantasy? Delusion?”
He smoothed my hair again, kissed it. “Don’t worry about that now, Raven. All that matters is that you get past it. I want you well, because I...I feel something for you. Something I can’t explain.”
“I’ve already explained it.”
He kissed me again, my forehead this time. “I’m going to call my doctor and force my father to go along with us on this. Arianna, too, if she’s involved. Then I’ll take you there myself, and we’ll get to the bottom of this, one way or–”
“Your so-
called father has the mark as well, Duncan.”
He stopped talking, went silent, looked down at me with such sweet sympathy and genuine worry in his eyes that I almost laughed at him.
“I know you think I’m insane, but before you drag me off in a strait-jacket, at least do me the honor of checking. Nathanial Dearborne bears the same mark we do, but his is on the left flank, just as it is with all the Dark Ones.”
“Raven, you have to let this go–”
“He adopted you, didn’t he?”
Rolling off me, slowly righting his clothes, Duncan nodded. “But that has nothing to do with any of this.”
“No? Then why do you both have the mark? Not heredity, Duncan. Look at the man. Find a way and you’ll see I’m right. He wants me dead, Duncan, and that’s why he adopted you.”
“No,” he said.
“He used you. He knew you’d find me again one day, and when you did, he would as well. Because he wants me dead.”
“Stop it, Raven. He wouldn’t–”
“My Goddess, I wouldn’t be surprised if he were even instrumental in getting your natural parents to give you up. Perhaps he even harmed them once he realized who you were! All just to–”
‘That’s enough!” Duncan sprang to his feet, glaring down at me. “God, I must be as crazy as you are to have let this happen.”
I gasped, cut to the quick. But slowly, I sat up, gathering my clothes, retrieving my dagger from where it lay in the sand. “I’m sorry it hurts you, Duncan, but it’s true. All of it, and you have to know.”
“It’s impossible, that’s what it is. You’re spinning yarns too farfetched to even be called a fairy tale, and expecting me to turn against my own father based on them. God, Raven, do you know what a vile thing that is to say? That he had something to do with my birth parents dying in that accident?”
I lifted my head, met his eyes. “Then they are dead.” I lowered my eyes. “That bastard.”
He fell silent and lowered his head.
“Duncan–”
“He’s my father,” he whispered.
I’d gone too far. I knew it, then. “I’m sorry, Duncan.”
Eternity: Immortal Witches Book 1 (The Immortal Witches) Page 25