Copyright © 2012, 2001 by Kristine K. Rusch
Cover and internal design © 2012 by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover design by Jodi Welter/Sourcebooks
Cover images © Blake Little/Getty Images, John Lund/Getty Images, Burly/Shutterstock
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The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
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Originally published in 2001 by Zebra Books, an imprint of Kensington Publishing Corp., New York.
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
An excerpt from Charming Blue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
For my niece, Kathryn MacNally, with love.
Chapter 1
Emma Lost cleared the last of the winter debris from her yard, put her dirt-covered hands on the small of her back, and stretched. The air had a sweet, fresh odor, and the sky was a warmer blue than it had been a month ago.
Spring had finally arrived—and not a moment too soon. Sometimes she questioned her sanity, moving to Wisconsin from Oregon. Oregon, at least, had had winters like those she had grown up in—wet, chilly, and rainy. Nothing like the hip-deep snow she had had to endure, the layers of ice beneath it, and temperatures so far below freezing that they barely registered on the thermometer the house’s previous owner had glued to the outside of her kitchen window.
And even though she had been a member of the modern era for the last ten years, there were still things she didn’t completely understand. Like wind chill. The concept was clear enough—it got colder when the wind blew. But she had no idea how anyone would be able to measure how much colder, or why they couldn’t build a thermometer that incorporated it.
She’d asked one of her colleagues at the university, and she had looked at Emma as if she were crazy, a look Emma should be used to by now. If she told most people her history, they all would think she was crazy, or at least delusional. They would have no idea that she was telling them the truth.
She didn’t even try anymore.
An angry yowl sounded from her front door. She turned, just as she was expected to. Her black cat, Darnell, sat behind the screen, his ears back, his green eyes slit. When he realized she was looking at him, he put a paw on the screen door.
“No such luck, pal,” she said. “You have never been an outdoor cat, and I’m not starting the habit now.”
Darnell’s ears went even flatter, if that were possible. His eyes flashed.
“You’re twenty years old,” she said. “And I don’t care that the vet just gave you a clean bill of health, you wouldn’t survive a day out here. Sometimes I wonder how I do it.”
Darnell huffed at her, then butted his head against the screen.
“One more time,” she said, “and I’ll close the door. You won’t even get the fresh air.”
He moved his head away from the screen so fast he nearly fell over. Then he wrapped his tail around his paws as if he had no interest in leaving the house.
She grabbed her pruning sheers off the pile of tools she had placed on her brick stairs, then headed for the tulip bed. The previous owner of this house had loved flowers—especially spring flowers, especially bulbs. She had so many tulips on the south side of her house that it looked as if she had moved to Holland. The daffodils were planted around back—just as many if not more.
The tulips and daffodils were nearing the end of their season and needed to be deadheaded. Not that she minded. She would be working near the lilac bushes, which were just beginning to flower. The lilac scent was heavenly.
Before she started to change the flower garden, she would have to wait to see how many more surprises the warm weather would bring. She had rented the house last fall, when the University of Wisconsin hired her as an associate history professor. Her specialty was the Early Middle Ages in England, commonly known as the Dark Ages—the years from 500 to 1100 AD—but she’d been teaching everything from survey classes of the whole medieval period to graduate seminars on everything from the Roman Conquest to the Crusades.
But it was her lecture series—England in the First Millennium—that made her one of the most popular professors on campus. Her popularity, and her book, Light on the Darkness: England from 450–1000 AD, a pop culture bestseller, which had inspired the university to ask her to teach in the first place, convinced Mort Collier, the chairman of the history department, to recommend her for a permanent position.
To celebrate, she had bought the house. She loved it. Her refuge in a world that was too modern for her. She had friends here—a lot of them, actually—but none of them knew who she was—or why she specialized in the Dark Ages.
And she would never tell them.
Imagine, sitting with her girlfriends at Mother Fool’s Coffee House, sharing lattes, and explaining that she taught about the Dark Ages because she had been born in them. That would go over well. Just about as well as telling them that when she was twenty years old, she kissed a young man named Aethelstan and went into a magically induced coma for the next thousand years. Then, when she woke up, it was to find herself in a glass coffin in the back of a decrepit VW microbus, facing Aethelstan’s lawyer—the pretty, petite woman who later became his wife.
And she could have him. Emma shuddered as she always did when she thought of Aethelstan. He had lived those thousand years—aging slightly, as all mages did—and becoming a person she didn’t know. She liked him now, but she couldn’t imagine being attracted to him—or wanting to kiss him.
Then again, she didn’t want to kiss anyone again. Ever. For any reason. Too risky.
She knew the spell that had put her in the magical coma had supposedly ended ten years ago, but sometimes magic was tricky. It didn’t always do what people expected. And sometimes it came back. So Emma protected herself, and her lips. She didn’t need a real man with real problems and real needs. She had Darnell. He was cranky enough for one lifetime.
A UPS truck drove by and stopped in front of a house down the block. Emma set down her shears beside the tulips and hurried to her brick sidewalk. Sure enough, the UPS truck had stopped in front of the house at the corner. She slipped her dirty hands in the back pocket of her jeans. She hadn’t expected that. The house had been empty ever since she had moved into the neighborhood last fall.
She kept an eye on that house because it was a companion house to hers. Bot
h had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright who had spent much of his life in the Madison area. Apparently, he had designed the houses for sisters who wanted to live in the same neighborhood. Emma’s sister had died young, and the next owner had remodeled the house—leaving the Wright exterior, which blended so beautifully with the lot, and meddling with the interior. But the other Wright house was just as it had been when it was built—furniture and all.
Emma had wanted to go in it since she’d heard that, but the owner was out of the country. No one knew when he was coming back.
The UPS driver opened the back of the truck, and grabbed a huge cardboard box. He staggered with it over the curb and toward the front door of the sister house. Then he leaned on the doorbell.
The door opened, but Emma couldn’t see who was inside. She walked to her lilac bushes, and hoped that the branches would hide her just enough to prevent her neighbors from knowing how nosy she really was.
The box disappeared out of the UPS driver’s hands, and then he went back to the truck, peering inside it as if he were facing a herculean task. After a moment, the door to the mystery house opened, and a man came out.
Emma caught her breath. He was gorgeous. Broad-shouldered with a narrow waist that tapered into long muscular legs. He had hair so blond that it could rightly be called golden, and his features seemed, from this distance at least, to be perfect. Women these days would call him “movie star handsome” but an old term from her past rose in her mind. He was wulfstrang—powerful enough to defend anything.
Then she shook herself. It didn’t matter how good-looking he was. She wasn’t going to allow herself to be attracted to anyone, for any reason. The last time it had happened cost her a thousand years of her life.
Darnell yowled from the house, and she shushed him over her shoulder. Obnoxious cat. He had originally belonged to Aethelstan’s wife, Nora, but then became enamored with Emma, and cried for her when she wasn’t with him. Nora had given him to Emma and, at the time, she’d been very happy to have him. She still was, if truth be told. But she didn’t like the yowling or the jealousy. And that cat was jealous of everyone.
The blond man with the broad shoulders took a box from the UPS man, who then took one of his own. They carried the boxes into the house. The blond man seemed to have no trouble with the box’s weight, while the UPS man staggered yet again.
Emma frowned. What was in them? His possessions? It would be a strange way of moving in this day and age, but she was the first to admit she didn’t understand many things about the modern era. She had spent the last ten years in school—first catching up on the time she’d missed while learning practical things like how to read, how a stove works, and how to drive a car.
She’d come a long way in a short time—from an illiterate to a PhD. Or perhaps, more accurately, from a woman who was afraid of a shower to someone who occasionally was interviewed on A&E or the History Channel as an expert on the past.
Sometimes the person she had become amazed her. There would have been no way to explain this life to the girl who had been kissed into a magical coma. She would have seen this entire world as make-believe, or magical. And she never would have believed that she would be able to do all the things she did without magic.
But she had none, and she was relieved. She would become a mage one day but, for the time being, she was as normal as the next person. If, of course, the next person had been in a magical coma for one thousand years.
The men left the house again. The blond man glanced in her direction and she cringed behind the lilac bush, hoping he didn’t see her. Men had terrible reactions when they saw her. They acted just like Darnell. They became enamored, entranced, attracted. And she hated it.
When she had complained to Aethelstan, he had laughed at her. This culture’s story of Sleeping Beauty is based on your life, my dear. Of course men are going to find you incredibly attractive. You are.
She didn’t see it. Her skin was too pale, her cheeks and lips too red, her eyes too blue. And her hair was a glossy black in a culture that seemed to worship blondes. Blondes with hair the color of that man across the street.
She peered over the lilac bush. He was still carrying boxes. The UPS man had paused to wipe the sweat off his face, even though it wasn’t that hot. He didn’t look her way once.
Darnell yowled again. She sighed. She got up and went to her front door, pulling open the screen. Darnell bolted for the great outdoors, but she blocked him with her foot, and then pushed him inside. He gave her an affronted look as she pulled the heavy oak door closed, locking him inside.
The screen door whapped her in the side. She moved away from it, and headed back to her lilac bush.
As she did, she heard the truck start up. The UPS man was driving away, and the door was shut on the blond man’s house. She had missed him.
But they were neighbors. She would see him again. She couldn’t get near him—that would be risking too much—but she could watch him from afar. There weren’t many men in this modern age who were wulfstrang.
Perhaps he had an old soul.
She sighed and went back to her tulips. A big bouquet of the last of them would look beautiful in her entryway. A little bit of spring indoors.
Just the thing to pick up her mood—and make her forget the mysterious stranger who had moved in across the street.
***
He wasn’t ready to be back. Five days ago, he’d been standing at Stonehenge—now fenced off, so that no one could deface the marvelous rocks—and now he was back on campus. Strange that it all looked the same.
Michael Found rubbed his eyes. The sky was a lovely shade of blue, but the ground was still brown from the harsh winter. A few blades of grass made Bascom Hill look as if it were a patchwork quilt—a patchwork quilt covered with student ants. The students all looked the same too, in their tattered jeans and carefully funky coats. Backpacks were back in style—ergonomically designed, of course (it was a new century after all)—but still packed to the brim.
The air was just warm enough to bring most of the vendors to the Library Mall. T-shirts hung from stalls, and he could smell falafels even though it was only 10:00 a.m. A juice bar was open and had a line; so did the new coffee vendor, who hadn’t been in business when Michael left Madison last July.
It was May and he was back, the sabbatical over. He had to step into his new job as department chairman whether he was ready to or not. The previous department chair, Mort Collier, had chosen the end of spring term as his retirement date. Michael had just barely made it home in time for last night’s private party. Mort had looked happy and younger than Michael had seen him look in years.
“It’s a good job,” Mort had said. “It just drains you. But you’ll have the break to get your feet under you—and summer’s an easy term. The hard stuff won’t start until fall.”
It felt like the hard stuff was starting now. His mind was still in England, thinking about the research he was doing for his current book, and instead, he was here, about to jump into the fray. Michael had been Mort’s assistant and heir apparent for three years now. He knew the drill. He just wasn’t ready to be the one responsible.
But he was. Mort made it clear that he would only help in cases of extreme emergency—and Michael had no idea what those cases would be, although he suspected they would all be political.
Michael was not looking forward to the political part of his new job.
Nor was he looking forward to the first thing on his morning’s agenda. He was going to a lecture. Mort had urged him to see the history department’s newest acquisition, a female medieval history professor who had somehow gotten a long-term contract in the space of a single semester.
At the party, all Mort could do was rave about this woman. Michael hadn’t had the heart to tell Mort he’d already heard of her—and had read her so-called masterpiece.
He jogged up the steps leading to the 1970s eyesore the university had deemed the Humanities building. Built after the Vietnam war protests (in which one group of misguided university students had bombed the UW’s Army-Math research center), the Humanities building had thick concrete walls, steel doors, and pencil-thin windows in only a few of the offices. There was an interior courtyard—and there were windows facing that—but all they showed was a patch of grass and the rest of the building. Sometimes, when he’d been hunkered in this building for weeks, he felt as if he were in a 1950s underground bomb shelter, waiting for the end of the world.
He let himself inside. The interior smelled of blackboard chalk and processed air—he doubted this place had had a breeze inside it since it was built. What surprised him was that he had missed the smell. The musty, fusty buildings he’d been in while he was in England usually smelled of ancient dust and mold. For some reason, the processed air smell to him was the scent of cleanliness.
There were no students in the hallways—for obvious reasons, no one hung out in Humanities—and those who were here were already in class. He hurried to the lecture hall where Professor Lost was teaching her two hundred–level undergraduate survey on the Early Middle Ages, and sighed softly.
He wished he were hiking in Cornwall. He had planned to end his trip there, but he had run out of time. He was going to use his favorite bed-and-breakfast in Mousehole (pronounced Mozzle) as his home base, and he was going to go around to all the historic and magical sites—even to one of the many purported sites of Camelot. Jogging concrete stairs and hallways in the Humanities building was a poor substitute.
The door to the lecture hall was open, and he slid into the back. It was a huge room, with stairs descending to what the faculty unaffectionately called “the pit”—a small floor with a large blackboard behind it, screens that could come down for film viewing, and a movable podium up front.
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