by Melanie Rawn
They both turned to watch as Lulah, cradling the baby in her arms, went down the front steps, the two girls in their nightgowns and robes trailing obediently behind her. Cam shivered at the sight of their apathetic faces.
“Does anybody know if they’re pregnant?” he whispered. “Or if they’re Witches?”
“No, and yes,” Alec murmured. “Dr. Cutter will look after them.”
“And you as well,” Nick said, unexpectedly appearing at Cam’s shoulder. “Get in the car.”
“I’ll drive,” said Jamey, approaching with the keys in his hand.
“The hell you will!” Cam exclaimed. “I don’t care how many gallons of espresso you poured down your throat. You got shot!”
“I’m fine.”
“What part of ‘you got shot’ do you not understand?”
“I’m fine,” Jamey repeated. “I’ve felt worse after an all-nighter before a Con Law final.”
Alec settled the question by grabbing the keys from Jamey’s hand. “Come along, children. I am a man of many talents—I can drive with only one thumb.”
“Akana mukav tut le Devlesa,” muttered Nicky, and trudged down the steps to the rental car Alec had arrived in.
Cam snorted. “I now leave you to God” was exactly the benediction for anyone subjected to Alec’s driving. But at least Jamey wouldn’t be behind the wheel. He watched them load into the big green SUV, and as Alec drove off in a spraying of mud and a slewing of tires, he murmured again, “You got shot.” Then, aware that Holly and Evan were watching him fret, he turned and said, “If this was anywhere but the back of the goddamned beyond, there’d be a news crew out here right now.”
“And aren’t we glad there isn’t,” Holly remarked.
“Are you kidding? Film coverage of this, and they’d be begging Evan to become FBI Director! Plus John Warner will probably retire from the Senate in 2008—we could run Jamey for that seat and pull down ninety percent of the vote!”
Holly met her husband’s gaze. “Did I mention that between college and law school he spent a year working for the House Democratic Caucus?”
“Can’t speak for Jamey’s ambitions,” Evan said, “but I’d rather give myself a frontal lobotomy with a baseball bat. Can we go home now, please?”
Holly pointed to Cam, then to the BMW. “Evan can take Lulah’s truck.”
“Aw, come on, Freckles—you think I’d get lost going to my own ancient family homestead?”
“I think,” Evan said, “she wants to have a talk with you.”
Cam eyed her beneath a frown. “You can’t yell at me—you destroyed my Armani.”
“I’m not going to yell at you,” she said with a smile that made him nervous. “And I didn’t destroy your Armani. But I will admit that I owe you two Cohibas.”
For the first ten minutes of the drive she said exactly nothing. That made him even more nervous.
At last she spoke, as if continuing a conversation they’d been having for years. “You don’t get it, Peaches. It’s as if you’re—I don’t know, challenging? Yeah. You challenge the caring that people give you, even the idea that they do care, because you don’t think you deserve to be cared about. You don’t believe it when somebody offers you love and support—somebody who isn’t a relative, I mean, because they’re obligated to care about you and they don’t really count—”
“Holly—”
“Shut up. I’m lecturing. You know it’s true, Cam. Your face is an open book whenever you look at Jamey—and I’m very well-read. I know you. I was the same way. If somebody wants to be around us, it’s because we’re entertaining, or because of our talents or our magic, because of what they could get out of a relationship. Nobody could possibly love us just to love us.”
“And now you’re going to tell me how Evan changed all that for you,” he mocked.
“No,” she replied seriously. “I wish I could say that, but it wouldn’t be true. I’m not that smart. It kind of snuck up on me gradually, and one day reached critical mass. Oh, I knew what I’d been doing all those years. It wasn’t entirely my fault that my relationships with men went sour, but I had more to do with it than I realized at the time.”
“Was that when Evan came along?”
“It happened pretty much simultaneously. Susannah gave me almost this same lecture, and it was finally sinking in.” She paused. “I miss her.”
They were quiet for a time. Cam sank deeper into the leather seat, watching the paling clouds and the silvering rain as daylight asserted its claim on the sky.
“And now here you are, with Jamey ready to give whatever you need whenever you need it, and he’s not asking for anything more than the chance to love you the way you deserve to be loved—and you’re still pushing him away, convinced you’re not good enough for him.”
“You know him. Am I?” he asked bitterly. “I’ve spent my life hiding a whole lot of who and what I am—but he just—it’s part of him to be honest, completely honest. About everything.”
“Scary. Yeah, I’ve gotten to know him. He’s a sweet man. And I know exactly why he loves you.”
Another silence, smaller this time. Cam spent it thinking determinedly about nothing at all.
Holly cleared her throat. “I was up with Bella one night—she has a terrible time teething, poor sweetie—and I was watching a talk show. One of the West Wing guys was on, being rather rueful and self-deprecating about the fact that whereas his ancestors had raised cattle and worked the land, he had to admit to his kids that he had a favorite moisturizer. Made me want to smack him upside the head, because it reminded me of something John Adams wrote—something about how he studied war so his sons could study politics and their sons could study poetry. That this guy became an actor—that’s exactly what his ancestors had in mind when they came to this country and cleared the land and fought in the wars. They did it so we can study poetry, and if we’re lucky we get to create a little poetry of our own. Whether it’s crafting a character and speaking other people’s words in front of an audience, like he does, or writing books like I do, or keeping people safe the way Evan does, or making sure the law does what it’s supposed to do, like Jamey—or teaching people how to get a government going that will let them live their lives—”
“Poetry?” He smiled. “I can’t say that I ever saw it like that.”
“You heard Jamey tonight. You think that wasn’t poetry?”
“I think that’s when I started thinking about the Senate seat—”
“I think you’re full of shit. I think you need to stick around PoCo for a while and convince that man that you really are worth what he feels for you.”
He considered his answer for a little while before saying, “Numquam poetor nisi podager.”
“Oh, Christ—don’t you dare start! Rom and Hungarian from Nicky, Jamey with his infernal Latin all the time—”
“—when the only person worth quoting is you, right?” He grinned, and she glared.
He waited. Sure enough, within a mile or so she said, “Well? Translate it.”
“Ennius. ‘I only spout poetry when my feet hurt.’ ”
“I’ll make you walk the rest of the way back to Woodhush,” she threatened. “That ought to produce an entire sonnet cycle.” She braked for a stop sign and drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “Or I could let you out here, and you’d be at his house in twenty minutes.”
Cam strained to see the street sign. “Where are we? I can’t read the—”
“Oh, that’s right—when they divvied up the Addair plantation they put in a new access road. Turn right, take the second left, and four miles later—”
“You’re kidding. That’s where he lives?”
Shifting back into first, she tossed a smile at him. “The old carriage house, yes. Backs right up onto Dragon Swamp. From his upper windows you can even see the chimneys.”
Dragon Swamp—named not for any actual swamp on the property but because the original Bellew land along the James Ri
ver had borne the same name—had been the inheritance through their mother of Thomas and Tallulah McClure. When Thomas married Margaret Flynn, he traded his share in Dragon Swamp for her sister Elizabeth’s share in Woodhush. Upon her marriage to Cam’s father, Lizza had bought out Tallulah’s interest in the property, the McClures having their main residence in the village of Willowmere. The Griffens had lived in the five-room cottage at Dragon Swamp until Thomas and Margaret were killed, had returned there for a few years during Cam’s childhood, and finally sold the land to the county in preference to selling it to a developer. It was county property still, and no one had lived there in more than twenty years.
“Want to hear something weird?” Cam leaned his head back and watched the rain. “I dreamed a few weeks ago that I was back in that house. It was empty, and needed a wash, and there were sheets on the furniture. I walk through the parlor and into the kitchen, and then open the door to the cellar stairs.”
“But—”
“Yeah, I know. That house doesn’t have a cellar. But there it was, and it didn’t seem weird at all, I just accepted that now there was a cellar. No sense of disorientation or anything. There was a lot of stuff in storage, things I didn’t recognize, boxes, some furniture. Then this iron door, the kind you see in a loft apartment, with a security bar that swung down. This didn’t strike me as strange, either. I didn’t wonder what needed to be locked in like that. I was just wondering what was on the other side of the door.
“So I open it and inside is this twenty-by-twenty room, really high ceiling, no windows. There’s a bed, a dresser, a microwave, a frosted glass door into a bathroom—like a studio apartment. But the incredible thing is that the walls are covered in a painted forest. Somebody had drawn trees on each wall, connected up by ivy and Spanish moss meandering all over, and on every branch was a scene of something or somebody. Imaginary stuff, all painted like those early American portraits. The ones where the painters would travel around with the background already done, and then they’d paint the kid’s face or the lawyer’s face onto it—I forget what that school of art is called. American Primitive or whatever. But that’s how all the people were—”
“Without faces?”
“Yeah. Landscapes and interiors—somebody was getting ready to put people into whichever scene they’d chosen and paid for. I’m walking slowly around the room, peering at all these little paintings—there are hundreds of them, like on one of those family tree things with spaces to put photos. Then this voice says, ‘Well, it’s about time you got here!’ The guy is—I don’t know, just ordinary. Maybe thirty, maybe forty, hard to tell. Not thin or fat or tall or short, just a regular ordinary man, the kind you pass on the street a thousand times a month and don’t notice. He’s sitting in this armchair, and he’s smiling at me like he’s been expecting me. I’m the one who’s there to let him out. He’s been living in this little apartment and painting the walls with trees and faceless portraits and landscapes, just waiting for me to come and let him out. He’s not angry, and he’s not in any hurry. It doesn’t occur to me to be surprised, even by the implication that I’m the one who put him in there. I know I wasn’t, that’s the thing. It wasn’t my doing that he was there. But I was the one who’d come to let him out.”
Cam half-turned in the seat to look at Holly’s profile. She was smiling a little.
“So you’re wondering,” she said, “if you’re psychic, psycho, or truly psychotic.”
“Can we leave Freud out of this? I know what the stupid dream means.”
“It’d be pretty hard to miss,” she acknowledged. “We’re almost home, so tell me just one thing: did you let the man out and take up residence yourself?”
“No. I went back up the stairs and out the front door. I decided not to reopen the house after all, I guess. I don’t know what happened to the guy.”
“Did you leave the door open?”
“Yeah.” He peered through the rain at the familiar outlines of Woodhush—smiling in spite of himself, as always, at the preposterous pillars-and-portico out front. “Should I have gone back and dragged him out?”
“I think it’s his choice, now that the door’s open, whether he wants to stay or leave.” She parked the car and switched off the engine. “I’m so tired I don’t know if I can even sleep. Is there a level of exhaustion beyond exhaustion?”
“If so, I’m right there with you, Freckles.”
“Not too tired to do something about whatever Uncle Alec did to protect my kids, I hope. I mean, it’d be nice to be able to get into my own house.”
He gestured with one hand, then the other. “Your wish, my command—sometimes I get them mixed up.”
It amused him, once they were inside, to watch her turn into Lady of the Manor. Tim and Laura, splendidly ignorant of what had surrounded them for the past few hours—and Alec had learned a couple of new ones, Cam had discovered while untangling the layers of Wards—required nothing more than thanks and a crisp fifty each for staying until dawn to watch the kids.
“You might want to go pick up your brother Matt, by the way,” Holly added as she saw them out. “He should be over at Dr. Steinmetz’s place—he can tell you how much fun we all had tonight.”
“That was just evil,” Cam chided as she closed the front door.
“Not my problem,” she said serenely. “Come upstairs and meet the twins.”
On their way past portraits familiar to him from childhood, past the gorgeous antique quilts on display that he had helped to preserve, he said, “You’ll have to come up with a story sooner or later for what went on. You might as well try one out on me.”
“I assume you’re referring to what we called up by way of your cigar.”
“Was that what did it?”
“I don’t know.” She linked her elbow with his as they climbed. “I’m just the Spellbinder, all I ever do is stand around—”
“—with your thumb in the air. Yeah, Evan said. You did a lot more than that tonight.”
“Not on purpose, believe me. But when you think about whose land this used to be—all of it, from Virginia down to Georgia—and whose blood is in our veins, it’s not terribly surprising that to summon Earth, Air, Fire, and Water brought that particular magic. If we were in Ireland, or Wales—or even Portugal, where the Madeiras line comes from—”
“Because of who we are? Or because the genius loci can hear us better there?”
“Again with the Latin. And come to think of it, the last time anything like that happened to me, I was on Long Island, which isn’t exactly Cherokee territory. So it’s probably all bullshit.” She opened a door—her old room, he noted—and conjured a tiny flame to a candle high on a shelf. “I don’t believe it,” she whispered. “They’re asleep.”
They tiptoed over to the beds. Kirby sprawled on his back, black hair curling around his forehead and cheeks, mouth open, one arm tight around a stuffed panda bear. He looked ridiculously like his father, even at two years old. Bella was a little curl of clenched fists and hunched shoulders, as though she went about sleeping with the same determination she would bring to anything else in life. Though she had inherited the Flynn dark auburn hair and pale complexion, she had exactly three freckles that Cam could see—one on her left cheek, two on her right. He touched the long widow’s peak—also Evan’s—with one finger, smoothing back her hair.
“Gorgeous,” he murmured.
“They are, at that,” Holly replied complacently. “I’m completely without prejudice, of course.”
“And so am I.” He hesitated, then asked in tones more wistful than he’d intended, “Lend ’em to me every so often?”
“You say that now, when they’re silent and immobile,” she teased. “Wait until they wake up.”
CONSIDERING THE HOUR and the events of the previous night, Lachlan thought it might be rational for everybody to go to bed until noon and start the inevitable discussions after everyone had slept. The only rational person proved to be Nicky. Growling somethi
ng about being too old and feeble for this nonsense, he disappeared upstairs into the Wisteria Room. Cam was too wired and too worried about Jamey to follow his uncle’s example—and when Holly made noises about making breakfast, he barricaded the kitchen door with his own body and threatened to dissect her with a rusty hoof pick if she so much as looked at an egg.
“You don’t know where anything is anymore,” she protested.
“I’ll figure it out.” He turned and let the door slam behind him.
Evan grinned his congratulations at his wife. “Give him something to do? Nice. Gets us all fed, too.”
“And lets us hole up in the office with Jamey’s BlackBerry.” She produced it from the pocket of the abbreviated Armani trousers.
“You’re a devious bitch, and I’m glad you’re on my side. Come on, let’s see what we can get out of the thing.”
Downloading into his computer was the work of ten minutes. While he watched the screen pop file after file, not knowing yet if any were as incriminating as he hoped, Holly went on-line for information she eventually shared with him.
“The first thing we do is have all of them tested.”
He looked up from financial reports he didn’t want to slog through anyway. “HIV?”
“Sex trafficking is a driving force in the global spread of AIDS.”
“We can’t test without consent. And the results are privileged information.”
“We have the names of all the johns. We’ll make some discreet phone calls.” She rolled her chair over to the printer and snatched up some pages. “Listen to this. ‘The younger, the better,’ this one pimp says. ‘At ten or twelve, they’re free of diseases.’ And how about this one—‘If a man isn’t getting it at home, what’s he going to do? They come to a house, buy what they need, and you know what? When men pay for it, the nice local girls are safe from getting raped. Better the foreign whores than our own girls.’ ”
“Holly—”