“So?” Ariel asked, not sure which day in the restaurant he was referring to.
He let the puppy lick his face, then he moved Munin over his shoulder as if Munin were a baby and Darius was about to burp him. “Okay. In a nutshell. I broke a major law among my people, and to punish me, the Fates decided that I had to unite a hundred soul mates.”
“The…Fates?”
“Our governing body. Like a panel of judges with some legislative power. They’re the active arm of the Powers That Be.”
“The Powers That Be?”
“You know. The ones in charge of everything. Just like it sounds. The Fates carry out a lot of their pronouncements. Mount Olympus wasn’t that far off.”
“Wonderful,” she said.
“So I had to unite a hundred soul mates,” he said again.
“Unite? As in marry them?”
“As in make sure they were together for the rest of their lives.”
“Then what would happen?”
“They’d live happily ever after.”
“No,” she said. “To you, once you did this.”
He closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and squeezed the dog until Munin made a small squeal of protest. “I would get to look like myself again.”
“What?” How could she be getting more confused? Weren’t explanations supposed to make a person less confused?
“For two weeks out of the year,” he said, setting Munin down, “I got to look like this.”
He ran his hands along his body—his lean, trim, too-handsome body.
“I could pick those two weeks. Usually I went somewhere fun, like Cannes, only the last ten years or so I got tired of all that. I went to my place in Idaho.”
“To be alone,” she said, remembering what he had told her all those months ago. “And reflect.”
He nodded. “The rest of the time, I was being punished for thinking myself greater than everyone else because of my physical prowess, because my body worked better than other people’s even before I came into my magic. So the Fates decided to teach me what it was like to be someone whose body didn’t automatically open doors.”
“Andrew Vari,” she said.
“Andvari,” he said, putting a different emphasis on the name. “Only you don’t know Norse mythology.”
“You’re a Norse God?”
“No.” He came back to his chair and sat down. “I’m the dumb dwarf who tormented a Norse God. Loki. That’s where my Andrew Vari—Andvari—form first enters written history. That’s how Blackstone knew me. Only he met me hundreds of years later, when everyone was calling me….”
He paused and looked at her sideways, as if he didn’t want to say any more.
“Calling you what?” she asked, somehow knowing she wasn’t going to like this.
“Merlin.”
“That’s it.” She was off the couch before she knew it. “Where’s the hidden camera? Where are your friends? You can all come out now and laugh at me to my face.”
“I’m serious, Ariel.”
She whirled on him. “So Blackstone calls you Sancho because you’re the original Sancho Panza?”
“Yes,” he said.
She sank back onto the couch. Her knees weren’t working again.
“And the original Ghost of Christmas Present, if you have to know, and Shakespeare claimed that I was Falstaff to annoy me, but if you look at Puck, you see where that character came from.”
Ariel bowed her head and laced her hands over the back of it, protecting herself. She didn’t want to hear any more.
“But that doesn’t matter, Ariel.” Darius got out of the chair and came toward her. He crouched in front of her, and put his finger beneath her chin, raising her head so that she would look at him. “What matters is, I was a failure.”
She moved her head away from him, but she couldn’t stop looking at those eyes. They seemed even sadder.
“A thousand years, two thousand, almost three went by, and I still hadn’t united a hundred couples. Early on, I made terrible messes of things. I’ll tell you about it sometime. Anthony and Cleopatra, Troilus and Cressida—I was so inept.”
Ariel brought her arms down and rested them on her thighs, but she didn’t look away from him. And Darius didn’t move. He continued to crouch before her. He rested his own arms on the couch beside her, almost, but not quite, touching her.
“I didn’t tell Blackstone any of this. I can see soul mates, Ariel. I can see in a person’s eyes if they have one. Blackstone did, and I knew it. I knew one day, I’d have to help him find his ideal lover.”
“Nora,” Ariel said.
“Nora.” Darius gave her a small smile. “It took a thousand years to find her.”
Ariel let out a small breath. The confusion was lessening. This incredible story was making sense. “So you help your people find their perfect love.”
“Not my people,” he said. “All people. You have a soul mate, Ariel. I knew it when you looked up at me that first evening, on my couch. I knew it, and it broke my heart.”
He got up and moved away, as if some parts of his own story made him so restless he had to try to shake them off.
“You see, as the Fates explained it to me, my job was to unite two other people in their perfect relationship. Nora and Blackstone were number ninety-eight.”
“And you never told him,” Ariel said, suddenly remembering Blackstone’s comment. “You never told him any of this.”
Darius nodded. “He found out today. He’s mad. He’s real mad. He thinks I’ve been lying to him all along.”
Darius walked to the kitchen counter and braced himself against it, then looked at his hands, as if he hadn’t expected them to move that way.
“My friend Emma and her husband Michael were number ninety-nine,” Darius said, no longer looking at Ariel. “Then I see you and I know, I just know, deep down, that you’re part of the hundredth couple.”
Her heart rose a little. She had a soul mate. She would never have thought of that. She wasn’t romantic enough to believe in such things—or so she would have thought.
“The problem was,” he said, still not facing her. “I fell in love with you the moment I saw you walking on that path.”
Ariel raised her head. She was holding her breath, and her heart was still rising—floating, almost.
“You were so confident and so strong,” he said, head bowed. “You moved with such grace. And then when the ground dissolved beneath you, you did everything right. You didn’t panic. You used all your resources to save yourself, and when it was clear that wasn’t enough, you let yourself go with the moment. I’ll never forget that.”
Ariel swallowed. “There was no ledge, was there?”
“No.” His voice was soft. “I created it. And screwed up, just like I always do.”
“What do you mean?”
“You were so broken when I got down there.” He turned. She could still see the traces of fear on his face, and she wondered what he had gone through that afternoon. “Internal bleeding, damage everywhere. I fixed it. I stopped the bleeding, got you breathing again, made sure everything was all right. But I missed the ankle.”
His lips thinned and he moved away from the counter, walking to the window.
“I didn’t know about it until you woke up, and by then it was too late. I couldn’t spell it back to normal. I couldn’t fix it or you’d know about the magic. And you couldn’t know. It wasn’t right. Those aren’t the rules we live by.”
I thought I went all the way down your leg, he had said when she had first told him about the broken ankle. She hadn’t understood it at the time, thought it was a non sequitur. Then he had apologized.
I didn’t know you had broken your ankle.
And he had seemed so guilty. That entire day, he had acted guilty and she hadn’t understood why.
She did now.
“You were an athlete,” he said, “and I ruined it. I got in the way of your trip. You could have kept going, but
I shortened it. Then I was afraid there was permanent damage. There was nothing I could do. I was so glad when you started to run again.”
He meant it. He was saying all of this like he meant it. “And all the time you were so strong. Taking everything with grace and humor.”
She stood. Maybe, when she heard things that made her uncomfortable, she was as restless as he was.
“I looked into those eyes of yours, and I was so lost.” He emphasized the word “lost” and she wondered if he knew that she had thought of Andrew Vari as lost, in a different way. Like a lost soul. “You had me from that moment.”
She took a step toward him.
“Then I saw someone else in there, someone lurking. I didn’t know who it was—I never do. I only know when I see you both together. The soul mate. He was in there, waiting—for how long I had no idea, and I knew. I knew I would have to pair you with another man, and I couldn’t face it.” He leaned against the window frame, still not looking at her. “God knows, I couldn’t face it. So I tried to shove you away. I only had one more couple to put together, and I figured that if I didn’t see you, I might meet another pair of soul mates, someone else. Someone who wouldn’t break my heart.”
Ariel took another step toward him.
He turned, slowly, and for the first time, she saw both of them at the same time in his face—Andrew Vari and Darius—tall and short, handsome and homely, warm and cynical, all wrapped in one person, and looking at her with such sadness, and such love.
“And there I was,” he said. “A full-time troll pretending to be Prince Charming. I thought it was a plus. I thought you’d never have to see me again. I thought you’d never recognize Andvari as Darius.”
“So you ran away,” she said.
“I didn’t run away.” Then he shook his head slightly. “All right, that day, I stayed away. And I didn’t expect you at the airport. Everywhere I turned around, there you were.”
He ran his fingers through his hair again. She had never noticed that as one of his nervous ticks before. There was so much she didn’t know about him.
“I fell for you so hard that I thought it had to be some kind of spell. I even went to Cupid, because he had visited me that morning, and told him to take the spell off.”
“Cupid?” she asked. “The real Cupid.”
“The real Cupid,” Darius said. “Not the cherub you’re thinking of. A grubby little man who occasionally wears wings. He lied to me. He said he’d hit you with an arrow, not me.”
Her entire body froze. She had seen that man in the woods just before she met Darius. But Cupid hadn’t hit her with an arrow. He had missed, then snapped the arrow in half and tossed it in his quiver.
“I don’t,” she started, stopped, and then tried again. “I don’t understand. Who did he hit?”
“No one. He screwed up. The Fates have sent him away, permanently. Those wings and arrows were a sentence just like mine was.”
“How romantic,” Ariel said.
Darius smiled. “I guess, yeah. It’s weird that he’s become the spitting image for all that’s romantic. He’s the least romantic man on the planet.”
“So what are you telling me?” she asked.
“I went to the Fates,” he said. “I asked them to give you your life back, to take the spell off.”
She slipped her own hands in the pockets of her jeans. For some reason, she was feeling very nervous.
“And they told me there was no spell, and that you were my soul mate, and that we were the hundredth couple. We were always meant to be the hundredth couple. And they congratulated me, took their spell off me, and gave me my life back.”
He blinked hard, then crouched and whistled for Munin. The dog came right to him.
“Only they didn’t give me my life back. They took it from me. I’ve been Andvari for almost three thousand years. I don’t know how to be Darius. Blackstone won’t speak to me. No one will recognize me. And you—they thought I was honest with you, but I wasn’t. I didn’t know how to be. I thought it wasn’t possible, you and me, so I didn’t pursue it. I sent you away at every turn. And there’s just no hope. I’ve done horrible things to you, Ariel.”
She couldn’t move. She felt that if she said anything, she would stop him from speaking.
“I don’t expect you to forgive me,” he said. “I don’t even really expect you to believe me. I’ve seen what happens to soul mates when things don’t work out, when something gets in the way, and I have to be honest, usually it was me getting in the way. I’m not just Merlin. I’m the mythological Lancelot, and half a dozen others because I was a fool. Just like I’ve been a fool with you.”
“Lancelot?” she asked.
“He got blamed, actually, for what I did. My life, my history, it’s not pretty, Ariel.”
“You’ve learned from it,” she said. “Right?”
“The Fates think so.”
“Do you think so?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve only looked like this for thirty-seven-thousand days out of the last twenty-seven-hundred years, in two-week intervals. And now, I’m trapped in this body for the rest of my life.”
“It’s not a bad body,” Ariel said, with great understatement.
“It’s not the one I’m used to. It’s the one that made me an arrogant bastard the first time. I might revert.”
“I doubt that,” she said.
His gaze met hers. Munin wasn’t even wriggling in his arms. “Thank you for that.”
“I don’t mean to be kind,” she said.
“Sure you do,” he said. “You’re overwhelmed. I’ve just told you the moon is made of green cheese and I’ve shown you proof. Everything you believe is different now.”
“Or maybe you just explained some parts of my life that seemed very odd to me,” she said.
He walked toward her, still holding the puppy. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I’m sorry I did this wrong. I’m the one who is supposed to know all about love—that’s what my life lesson was supposed to be—and I screwed it up. I hurt us both, and I didn’t mean to.”
Darius stopped in front of her and put a hand on her cheek. His skin was warm, his touch gentle.
“Dar—”
“Shh.” He put a finger on her lips. Then he leaned in and kissed her. It was a slow kiss, a gentle kiss, so tender that it broke her heart.
Then, just as he had before, he pulled away. “I love you, Ariel. I will until the day I die.”
With his thumb, he wiped his kiss off her lips and walked out the front door.
For the briefest of moments, she didn’t move. He was right. He had turned her world around, but not for the reasons he thought. She had seen hints of things on the side of her vision, things that didn’t seem quite normal. Believing in magic was not a stretch for her.
Believing that someone could love her was.
And he loved her enough to walk away because he thought he had hurt her beyond repair.
She ran toward the door and threw it open to see the last of a white light fading away in the driveway.
He had vanished. Literally. And she had no idea where he had gone.
NINETEEN
DARIUS HAD ZAPPED himself and his car home because he couldn’t face the drive across town. He landed in the driveway, in the shade on the side of the house, and closed his eyes, no longer feeling safe here.
But he hadn’t known where else to go. He knew he’d replay that disastrous conversation in his mind until the end of time. What he wanted the most was to distract himself from it.
He couldn’t go back to Quixotic. Blackstone had made that clear, and Darius didn’t dare see Ariel again.
He needed to leave Portland, start all over. Sell the house that no longer suited him, discover who Darius was without Andrew Vari, and figure out what he would do with his life. He no longer had a mission.
He was free.
Then why did he feel so trapped?
Darius got out of the car, then
helped Munin out of the back. It felt as if he had had the puppy all his life. Munin seemed to feel that way as well. He wasn’t disconcerted by the magic or the changes in Dar’s appearance. He seemed to accept all of it as normal.
“Sancho?” A female voice said.
Darius turned. Nora was standing on his front porch. He’d never realized how tiny she was. She had always been taller than he was. But not any longer. She was petite and compact, her blond hair catching the sun.
She was holding her purse in front of her, looking uncertain. He hadn’t seen her look uncertain in years. But she clearly didn’t recognize him. There was only one way she could have known it was him.
Blackstone had told her everything.
“I’m sorry, Nora,” Darius said. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. It’s just—”
“Nonsense,” she said, coming down the steps toward him. “All you did was hurt Aethelstan’s pride. He wasn’t thinking about you. He was wondering how he could have missed all of this when the evidence was there. He was thinking about himself, forgetting that this isn’t about him.”
“It’s about him, Nora,” Darius said. “I haven’t been honest with him from the start.”
“Fiddle,” she said, using a word he’d never heard her use before. “You were as honest as you could be. You wouldn’t have been able to help us if Aethelstan had known that you were our matchmaker. He’s so stubborn, he would have found a way around you. He would have chastised you or ignored you or made your life hell. You did the best you could. You always have.”
“You’re very kind,” Darius said.
“No, I’m not,” Nora said. “I’m a lawyer. We’re never kind.”
He smiled in spite of himself.
“I figured you need a friend right now. You were there for me. I’m here for you. I don’t have magical powers yet. I can’t give you your heart’s desire, but I can listen.” She slipped her arm through his. “Let’s go inside. I’ll make you some tea, we’ll talk about your new puppy, and if you want to tell me what you’re feeling, you can. And if you want to be the strong silent type, you can do that too.”
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