Utterly Charming

by Kristine Grayson

  “But I do not understand. A thousand years. Surely you could have settled things in a thousand years.”

  “I could have,” Blackstone said. “But Ealhswith had other plans. She wasn’t thinking of you. Just herself. And I was trying to protect you from her.”

  “You were?”

  “Yes,” Blackstone said. “I tried a hundred things. Only this last one worked. And it worked because of Nora.”

  “Nora?”

  “Miss Barr. The woman who was with you when you woke.”

  The teakettle whistled, cutting out part of the conversation. Nora removed it from the burner. Apparently it had reminded the two in the other room to lower their voices. She could hear them talking, but she couldn’t make out the words.

  She opened her tea and coffee cupboard and dug until she found the chamomile. Then she put the requisite two tea bags into the pot, and poured steaming water over them. She continued cutting the bread, hoping they would raise their voices again.

  They didn’t.

  After the tea had steeped, she removed the tea bags. She put everything on a tray—teapot, cups, sugar, and cream, as well as the bread, and carried it into the living room.

  Blackstone was leaning toward Emma, his hands outstretched as if in supplication. Emma’s cheeks were bright red, not with shame or embarrassment, but with anger. Nora suppressed a grin. Good for Emma. The girl had some fight in her then.

  As Nora set the tray on the glass coffee table, Emma looked up at her. “Aethelstan says I have been asleep for a thousand years. Is that true?”

  Nora shrugged. “I can’t say for certain because I’ve only been involved in this mess for ten, but I’d say it’s likely.”

  “A thousand years,” Emma said. “I do not even comprehend a thousand years.”

  Blackstone reached toward her head. “I can give you the history, the memories, all of it—”

  “No!” She slapped his hand away. “You will not touch me again.” She moved to the other end of the couch. Nora sat on the leather armchair and wondered if she should pour tea. Probably not yet. Not if she wanted her china to survive this fight.

  “I don’t know a lot about magic,” Nora said. “But it might be a good idea to let him do that. I mean, time can’t run backward, can it?”

  She looked at Blackstone as she asked that.

  “You mean, can I give her back that thousand years? Of course not. She has to go forward.”

  “Forward?” Emma’s voice broke. “Forward? To where? Everything I know and love is gone.”

  Blackstone looked at her with such shock on his face that, for the first time, Nora felt sympathy for him. “I’m here, Emma.”

  “You? You are not Aethelstan! Aethelstan was a green boy whom I had just met, a boy whom I wanted to get to know. He was tall and awkward and silly. You are merely tall. And old. You are so very old.” Emma looked around the room as if she wanted to flee but didn’t know how or where to.

  “I’m still Aethelstan,” he said softly, taking her hands in his own.

  She pulled her hands out of his grasp.

  “Emma—”

  Nora reached between them. “I think that’s enough,” she said to Blackstone. “She’s made it clear she doesn’t want your attentions.”

  “But I’m all she has,” he said, looking at Nora. And in those silver eyes, she saw that vulnerability, that confusion, she had seen only once before.

  “Really?” A haughty female voice boomed from the doorway. Nora looked up, startled. The woman was tall, with hair so black that it didn’t reflect light except for the white streak along one side. She wore a black-and-white dress that emphasized her hair and stiletto heels, which made her seem even taller.

  “You have no right to be in here.” Nora stood rapidly, wondering how the woman had gotten in.

  “Oh, I have every right,” the woman said. “You have my daughter here.”

  Nora glanced at Emma. Emma had pressed herself against the back of the sofa, making herself seem very small. Blackstone had moved so that his body was between Emma’s and the woman’s.

  “She’s not your daughter,” Blackstone said.

  “By rights of law, she is,” the woman said. This had to be the famous Ealhswith that Max had once told Nora about and whom Blackstone had mentioned just this afternoon with a touch of awe and disgust in his voice.

  “What law?” Nora asked. She had pulled herself to her full five two. It didn’t make her any taller, but it made her feel taller.

  “Our law,” Ealhswith said, motioning with an elegant hand at herself and Blackstone.

  “Not good enough,” Nora said. “You happen to be in my apartment which happens to be in the United States, and as long as you are here, you are governed by my country’s laws.”

  “Horseshit,” Ealhswith said delicately. “With a simple flick of my finger, I could turn you into a toad.”

  “Perhaps,” Nora said. “But that still doesn’t change the fact that here, in the United States, a person who is twenty years old or one thousand and thirty, depending on how you want to count it, has reached her majority and belongs to no one if she so chooses.”

  “Is that true?” Emma whispered to Blackstone.

  He didn’t look at her. He was staring at Ealhswith. Nora couldn’t help thinking at that moment that long ago this battle had ceased to be about Emma and had become something personal between Ealhswith and Blackstone. Something personal and something ugly.

  Nora put a hand on Emma’s shoulder in reassurance. Emma jumped. “It’s true,” Nora said.

  “And irrelevant,” Ealhswith said. “You cannot stand in my way.”

  “Sure I can,” Nora said. She didn’t know how, but she knew she would try. “I will do anything I can to protect my client.”

  “Emma’s not your client,” Blackstone said.

  “That’s right,” Nora said. “But she is under my protection at the behest of my client. I answer to him, not to either of you.”

  Blackstone turned to her with a stunned expression on his face. “Surely you don’t mean that.”

  Nora raised her eyebrows. “You were the one who first reminded me of it ten years ago,” she said.

  “You know that was a ruse to protect Emma from Ealhswith.”

  “I don’t know anything, remember?” Nora snapped. “It was better that way. And because I don’t, I follow the letter of the law in which I was trained. And that letter instructs me to act in my client’s best interest.”

  “Who is this ‘client’?” Ealhswith asked.

  “Sancho Panza,” Nora said, feeling, even now, slightly ridiculous when she said the name.

  “Sancho—?” Ealhswith frowned. “She doesn’t mean that disgusting little man who once pretended to be my assistant?”

  “Merlin?” Emma whispered.

  “He’s in the South of France,” Blackstone said. “At least, I think he’s in the South of France. He promised to stay away while Emma and I became reacquainted.”

  “He didn’t tell me that,” Nora said, “so I can only act on his ten-year-old instructions, and those were to take care of the things within my protection and to make sure, if I couldn’t handle it personally, to find someone who could help me.”

  “Enough of this,” Ealhswith said, extending a hand. “I think a toad is too good for you. I would rather summon a bolt of lightning—”

  “I wouldn’t,” Nora said. Her heart was pounding, but she wasn’t going to back down.

  “You are being a bit clichéd,” Blackstone said to Ealhswith.

  “You shut up too.”

  Blackstone shrugged. “I’d love to see how you’re going to get yourself out of this one.”

  Emma wrapped a hand around Nora’s wrist. “Don’t,” she whispered. “Not for me.”

  “Listen, Emma,” Nora said. “They’ve been fighting over you for a thousand years, and no one has defended you. Well, now someone is.”

  “You don’t know what she can do.”
/>   “I have a pretty good idea,” Nora said, remembering that neighborhood.

  Ealhswith’s magnificent eyes narrowed. “Then you shouldn’t argue with me.”

  Nora put her hands on her hips. “I think too many people have been intimidated by those threats over the years and have given you what you want. I suspect that’s why you’ve been so angry at Blackstone for so long, because he was one of the few who dared stand up to you. Well, you don’t scare me, lady. I don’t know what you get out of keeping your thumb on Emma, and I don’t really care. All I know is that you have to go through me to get to her.”

  “Don’t worry,” Ealhswith said, splaying her hand against the air. “I will.”

  “But you should know,” Nora said, “that my ex-husband, schmuck that he is, can remember what you did to that neighborhood ten years ago, and if I’m found dead any time soon, especially if the circumstances are strange, both you and Blackstone fall under suspicion.”

  “As if that matters,” Ealhswith said.

  “It might,” Nora said, “if your magical presences here are discovered. Then you might have to be subject to our laws after all. And the penalty for murder here is life imprisonment.”

  “No prison can hold me,” Ealhswith said.

  “Or death,” Nora added. “Can death hold you?”

  “Sometimes,” Blackstone said, and this time there was no amusement in his voice. He tilted his head toward Ealhswith. “Neither you nor I know where the glass coffin is. If the husband knows where it is, and he finds Nora dead, today of all days, then that much at least will back up his story.”

  “I’ll make him forget his story,” Ealhswith said.

  “You cannot.” This came from Emma. She leaned into Nora as if she needed Nora’s strength. “Not if the information came from a source with which you are unfamiliar.”

  “When did you learn the intricacies of magic?” Ealhswith asked, inadvertently confirming what Emma said.

  “When I first moved in with you,” Emma said. “I had to learn how to protect myself.”

  “I was going to teach her more,” Blackstone said.

  “She couldn’t have used it for another thirty years,” Ealhswith said.

  “And then you would have had to watch out, wouldn’t you, Ealhswith? Especially if she had been taught by someone like me?” Blackstone stood. He moved between Nora and Ealhswith. “Nora has done us all a great favor. She has brought Emma back to us. You will not repay her by venting your petty rage on her.”

  “She is an inconvenience.”

  “She is Emma’s protector, as she said. You might be tempting more than her silly ex—?” he turned to Nora to confirm. Nora nodded once. He half smiled and shook his head. “Her silly ex-husband’s desire to reveal our presence.” Something in Blackstone’s tone made Nora believe that he didn’t believe that Max would do anything of the sort. “You might be tempting the Fates.”

  “The Fates?” Ealhswith crossed her arms. Obviously the mention made her forget that she was going to destroy Nora with a bolt of lightning. “That group of legalistic crones. They—”

  “They’ve been trying to pin something on you and me for years. Killing a civilian has been illegal since the sixteenth century, or have you forgotten that, Ealhswith?”

  Ealhswith actually shuddered. “How could I?” she asked. “If they hadn’t made that ruling and held it up with the absolute death decree, I wouldn’t have been hanged in Salem in the 1690s. I still am due some revenge on that, I think.”

  “But the hanging didn’t last,” Blackstone said. “It would have if you’d had real revenge.”

  Ealhswith touched her neck. “The mental scars remain.”

  This time it was Blackstone’s turn to snort. He glanced at Nora in something like amusement, but she didn’t smile in return. This was not funny. It was her life they were discussing so casually.

  “I could still turn her into a frog,” Ealhswith said.

  “But you’d have to turn her back.”

  “Eventually.” Ealhswith’s smile was slow and cruel.

  “And she’d have to forget the entire incident. You know the rules,” Blackstone said.

  “Rather defeats the point, doesn’t it?” Nora asked.

  “No one spoke to you,” Ealhswith snapped.

  “Only about me. And I really don’t like to be discussed in the third person.”

  “You’re still the powerless one here,” Ealhswith said.

  “Actually, sounds like I have more power than I’d thought.” Nora smiled. “And since we’re discussing rules, entering a person’s home without her permission is also against the law. Should I call the local authorities?”

  Ealhswith’s eyes narrowed. “You wouldn’t.”

  “I would.” Nora reached for her phone.

  “Looks like you’ve been kicked out,” Blackstone said. “The uninvited. So sad.”

  Ealhswith turned the glare on him. “I’ll give you one warning, Aethelstan. Don’t kiss the girl. Don’t even consider it.”

  Nora put her hand on the receiver of the phone. She was watching this interchange with great interest.

  “Couldn’t think of a new spell, could you?” Blackstone asked.

  “I didn’t have to,” Ealhswith said. “The old one hasn’t worn off yet, at least, not entirely. So act accordingly. You wouldn’t want to lose your one true love now that you’ve found her again?”

  Emma made a small whimpering noise. Nora picked up the receiver and started to dial 911.

  “I’m a lot more sophisticated than I used to be,” Blackstone said. “I’m sure I can handle one kiss-and-tell spell.”

  “Are you?” Ealhswith asked. “Are you sure it’s that simple?”

  And then, with a twirl of her arm, she disappeared.

  Nora hung up the phone before it even rang. She stared at the place where Ealhswith had been. “Somehow I expected to see a puff of black smoke after she’d done that.”

  “A bit of fire and brimstone,” Blackstone said, arms crossed.

  “I did not realize she was here,” Emma said, her voice so soft that it almost sounded as if she had whimpered.

  Blackstone and Nora turned around at the same time. Emma was cringing against the couch, clutching the leather fabric in one hand. “You did not tell me she had come here too.”

  “I was getting to that,” Blackstone said. “It’s hard to cover centuries in the space of a few minutes. I wish you’d let me do the spell. It would—”

  “Actually,” Nora said, “on this one, it’s not that hard. They’ve been fighting over you for the past thousand years. She put the kiss-and-tell”—Nora looked at Blackstone for confirmation. He rolled his eyes but nodded—“spell on you, and it nearly killed you. He stopped it by putting you in a coma, but no one could wait the requisite time to get you out. They kept stealing your damn coffin, back and forth and back and forth—”

  “For a thousand years?” Emma whispered. “A thousand years?”

  Blackstone swallowed so hard that Nora saw his Adam’s apple bob. “It was more complicated than that.”

  “Why could you not set aside your differences for even ten years?” Emma asked him. “God’s blood, that is barely a heartbeat in the amount of time you let go by.”

  “Emma, if you would give me a chance—”

  “Why?” she asked. “You gave me none.” Then she bowed her head and hid her face against the cushions. She apparently felt that she had nowhere else to go.

  And she didn’t. Not really.

  “I think it’s time you should leave,” Nora said.

  Blackstone smiled at her, the full-watt, how-can-you-refuse-me? smile. She had forgotten how very gorgeous it was. It sent shivers all the way through her and reminded her how long it had been since anyone had touched her.

  “I’ll take Emma with me, then, and get out of your way,” he said.

  “Sorry,” Nora said. “You can’t have her. Not unless she wants to go with you.”

 
; “Emma,” Blackstone said, putting his hand on her shoulder. She jumped so violently he had to pull his hand back. “Would you come with me?”

  “You can stay here,” Nora said as Emma raised her head. “I’ll do my best to protect you. I think you’d be safest here.”

  Her thin bloodred lips narrowed. “I do not want to go with you,” she said to Blackstone. “I am not even sure I want to see you again, Aethelstan.”

  “Now, Emma—”

  “You heard her,” Nora said. “I think it’s time you leave.”

  “Nora, you know better—”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t. I told you, ten years ago, that I’m an attorney with ethics and one who likes to play by the book. I expected you to honor that then, and I expect it now. She has no tie to you, not as far as I’m concerned, and you are in my house. I am telling you to leave. If you do not, I will call the police.”

  “You know I can manipulate them.”

  “I know,” Nora said. “But I can keep calling them until one of us tires of this game.”

  “I’ve been known to have a stubborn streak,” Blackstone said.

  “A thousand-year-long one,” Nora said. “That still doesn’t change my mind. Get out.”

  “Emma—”

  “It’s better for her to have you leave.”

  “I want to hear her say that.”

  “You have become obtuse in your old age, Aethelstan,” Emma said, turning her back on him and crossing her arms. “You have been asked to leave.”

  Again, that vulnerable, wounded look filled his silver eyes before he had a chance to mask it. He reached for Emma, then curled his fingers into a fist. Then he turned to Nora. “You’re making a mistake.”

  “Threats don’t bother me,” Nora said.

  “It’s not a threat,” he said. “It’s a fact. You don’t know what Ealhswith can do.”

  “No, I don’t,” Nora said, “and at the moment, that’s not my concern.” She inclined her head toward the door. “Are you planning to leave now?”

  He raised his hands in a gesture of mock surrender. “I’m going,” he said. “But call me if you need me.”

  “What, am I suppose to call out your name in rhyme?” she asked, thinking of Dr. Bombay in the old Bewitched television show. “Or am I supposed to use the phone?”