“And found the sources who had found corroboration in your time,” she said.
“My time.” He picked up his wine glass and drained it. “My time. No wonder your book read like a novel. It was biography and memory.”
“Yes.”
“And I said you had made everything up.”
“And I told you that everything was based in fact.”
“And it was.” He sighed. “I’m a fool.”
She shook her head. “You’re just a man who needs a lot of proof.”
He smiled. “Still, you think?”
She shrugged. “You had quite a few rationalizations for the furniture. And I seem to recall a mention of David Copperfield and student pranks.”
He sighed. “I did have some rationalizations, didn’t I?”
It was her turn to smile. “Yes.”
“That seems like a long time ago. I’m amazed at how much I’ve learned since then. It’s as if I’m not in the same world anymore.”
“You’re not. You’re in my world now.” And I was wishing I could stay in yours, she thought, but did not say. She had lost the twenty years she had been hoping for, and no amount of wishing would get them back.
“It can’t be such a bad place,” he said.
“Imprisoned for a thousand years,” she said softly, “turned into a toad, sent into a world I knew nothing about, and now all this. I don’t think it’s a wonderful place.”
“I didn’t hear about the toad. You were a toad for a thousand years?”
“Only a few hours,” she said. “That was long enough.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Of course not.” She dipped her bread in the olive oil. “It’s a long, confusing story.”
He was silent for a moment, as if he were thinking. “This acquiring of magic, it’s like puberty, isn’t it?”
She dropped her bread in the oil. “What?”
“I mean, we all want to grow up, but we have to go through puberty first. Boys have incredible growth spurts, and our voices change—always at the wrong time—and we have embarrassing emissions.”
She smiled at that.
“And girls—well, everything changes for you, too, doesn’t it?”
“I guess it does. I didn’t think about it much.”
He studied her, as if he were trying to comprehend all of this. “You went through puberty over a thousand years ago.”
She nodded.
“At a time when there was no concept like ‘teenager.’”
“No,” she said, “either you were a child or you were old enough to have your own children.”
Her voice was flat. There were a lot of memories of that time, memories she didn’t care to explore.
“And girls got married at thirteen, were parents by the time they were fourteen.”
“Or dead in childbirth,” she said.
His intrigued look faded. He leaned forward slightly. His hand moved on the tablecloth as if he wanted to touch her, then thought better of it. “So when you were put in your magic sleep, you lost more than parents. You lost a husband and children too.”
“No.” Her voice was soft. “I was an old maid.”
He frowned. “I have no idea how someone as beautiful as you could be an old maid.”
She flushed. Why did this man always make her blush?
He saw the color rise in her cheeks. “You know you’re probably one of the most beautiful women in the world. Don’t you?”
She felt her flush deepen. Her skin was so hot she wanted to pour water on it. “How am I supposed to answer that? If I say yes, I’m vain, and if I say no, I’m fishing for more compliments.”
“I’m serious, Emma,” he said softly. “I don’t think our idea of beauty has changed that much in a thousand years.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “When I was a girl, a fat woman was the envy of all.”
“Because she was rich,” he said.
She nodded. “Plump women were beautiful. Full-figured girls were desirable because they could have babies. These skinny models would have been considered horribly ugly.”
“But Emma,” he said, “I wasn’t talking about your figure—which, I think, would have been acceptable in either culture. I was talking about your face.”
“The face that launched a thousand ships?”
“Yes,” he said.
She leaned back. “I told you that you weren’t ready to teach my classes. That was Helen of Troy. I’m not that old.”
To her surprise, he laughed. “I like your sense of humor.”
“It comes in handy,” she said. “Although it’s not as effective as my temper.”
“It is less annoying.”
“I suppose.” She picked up her bread, then dropped it. It was soaked in oil—the bread actually looked green. She picked it up and dumped it in her salad.
“No one wanted to marry you?” Michael asked.
She wondered why he was focusing on that point. “Well, someone thought he did.”
“Thought?”
Her smile was small. “It’s part of the long story.”
“We have days.”
She nodded.
“And you don’t want to talk about it.”
“Michael—”
The waiter stopped in front of them, a tray balanced carefully on his left hand. He lowered it, and removed their dinners. Michael was having some sort of chicken. Emma had ordered beef tenderloin marinated in a wine and mushroom sauce. The meal set before her was an artistic concoction of beef, mushrooms, and sauce piled on mashed potatoes, with some steamed asparagus on the side.
It smelled good.
The waiter told them to enjoy their meals, and left swiftly. Michael watched him go. “Do you think they’re told to escape the tables quickly or do we just frighten him?”
“I think we frighten him,” Emma said, picking up her fork.
He picked up his silverware and pushed at the chicken. It was covered with some sort of peach-colored glaze. “A thousand years,” he said softly.
“Michael, I don’t—”
“Want to talk about it, I know,” he said. “But I have only two more questions.”
And she had an entire plateful of food. She was going to be with him at least a half an hour. She had to be civil. “All right, two. Then we change the subject.”
He nodded, and cut into his chicken. As he did, some rice skittered across his plate. His meal looked a lot less appealing than hers did.
“You said that you were in a magical coma for over a thousand years, that you were twenty when it happened, and you were born a thousand and forty years ago, and you’re thirty now. So that means you were asleep for a thousand and ten years, and you’ve been out of it for ten years, right?”
“Right.” She took a bite of the steak. It was juicy and rich, just like she expected. There were a lot of perks to this modern world, and good food was just one of them.
“So did you wake up with a complete knowledge of everything that had changed?”
She remembered that moment in the glass coffin when her eyes opened. The air was stale and old. Apparently she hadn’t been breathing in her magic state. She had taken a thick mouthful of air, touched the coffin’s walls, and panicked. Somehow she had managed to push it off. She sat up—
And there was the strangest looking woman, petite with blond hair, helping her, a woman who spoke a foreign language, and had Emma trapped in a metal cave, which Emma later learned was a VW minibus. Everything had been so different. And terrifying. That first afternoon, the car ride, the entry into Nora’s loft apartment. Discovering sinks and refrigerators and tea that seemed to make itself.
All in the space of maybe an hour.
“No,” she whispered. “I didn’t wake up knowing anything had changed.”
He stared at her so long that she was afraid he could see right through her. He was probably imagining how ignorant she had been, how she had to learn elementary and personal things. He would probably be appalled to know that she had cried through her first shower, and had been terrified of the noise a toilet made. How she had believed that people actually lived in the television set, and that the only thing that really soothed her in those dark early days was the quiet rumble of Darnell’s purr.
“My God,” he said finally. “I was trying to imagine it. I can’t. Not really. It must have been awful for you.”
Her gaze met his. His eyes were a soft blue, and this time, he did take her hand. She was trembling. She wanted to pull away, but he held her tightly for a moment. Then he squeezed and released her fingers.
She slid her hand back. “You saw the world I came from.”
“That was your home?”
She nodded.
“You went from living in that village to being a history professor—a famous history professor, with a bestselling book—in ten years?”
She eased her fingers into a protective fist. She knew what was coming next, and she didn’t want to hear him say it. So she asked the question before he could. “And you want to know how much magic that took?”
He glanced at her fingers. His hadn’t moved. “You told me you didn’t have any magic until two days ago.”
“But my friends do.” She kept her voice flat, and emotion off her face.
“You said there are rules,” he said. “I bet there are rules for this.”
She shook her head. “There are no rules for this. We’re in completely new territory.”
“I wasn’t thinking about the magic.” His voice was gentle. “I was thinking how remarkable you are. Here I was worried that everything was too easy for you, and you’ve lived through something that would have driven most people mad.”
Her breath caught in her throat, and she blinked hard. Then she looked down at her plate. No one had ever said anything like that to her before.
When she had woken up, she had panicked Nora. Nora was out of her depth. She had gotten help for Emma, but it took some time. Aethelstan was no help at all. He had problems of his own then.
So when she had come out of that spell, she had been a problem for everyone around her. They had all tried to help her, but none of them had really thought about what it was like for her, all alone in a world she couldn’t understand. It was as if she had been born anew, with all her faculties in place, and expected to function like an adult when she was still a child.
“Emma?” Michael asked. “Did I say something wrong?”
She shook her head. She had to be alone, for just a moment. She had to have some air.
“I’ll be right back,” she managed, and hurried away before she could see the expression on his face.
***
Michael sighed and watched her disappear in the direction of the ladies room. He wasn’t quite sure what her reaction to his words had been. Her eyes had teared, then she blinked and the tears receded, but the sad expression remained.
Then she had left him.
He shouldn’t have pushed her. She asked that he leave the subject alone, and he pressed for two more questions to satisfy his curiosity. He hadn’t been thinking of her at all.
But a thousand years. He’d heard of people coming out of comas after ten years, and having trouble adjusting to their lives. She had been born into a world where England was composed of warring tribes. The Roman wall wasn’t buried under mounds of earth, and London was a filthy, dirty city barely one square mile in size.
If she had been raised in any way traditionally, she wouldn’t have been able to read or write. She hadn’t even been out of her village for her entire life, and now she had driven in one day what would have taken her weeks to do by foot.
She was remarkable. And beautiful. And stronger than he had given her credit for. He had never met anyone who had survived the things she had—or who could have.
He valued intelligence, and she had used hers to carve a world in a place that was more alien to her than Mars was to him.
And now she was being surprised by a magic that she didn’t want. She hadn’t agreed with his puberty analogy, but he was beginning to think it was more and more apt. Or at least it put things in terms he could understand.
He knew how it felt to have his body disobey him, to lose powers he had had—the power of innocence, the powers of childhood—and suddenly be trapped in a growing, out-of-control body that didn’t always obey his commands. Multiply that feeling by a thousand and he might get close to the way Emma felt now.
He pushed at the chicken cooling on his plate. He had treated her horribly these last few days, and she had been in a hell he was only beginning to understand.
What she needed was compassion. What she needed was a friend. And no one else had been there for her. He had come along under duress.
No wonder she was overprotective of that silly cat. The cat was the only true friend she had.
Michael would get her to Oregon. And then he would make sure these people she was running to would really assist her. If they didn’t, he would help her find someone who could.
Magic or not, he would do whatever he could to make sure the next thousand years of her life would be a lot better than the first.
Chapter 9
She couldn’t hide in the bathroom forever. Emma sat on the red velvet stool in front of the lighted mirror in the ladies lounge and rested her elbow on the marble counter. The face that looked back at her—with its sad eyes, pale cheeks, and thin lips wasn’t a face that launched a thousand ships. It was a face that lost a thousand years.
Yes, she knew she was a world-class beauty—celebrated in story and song, she thought with a lot of irony—but that was part of the problem. And it was an even bigger problem now that he had noticed.
Because she liked him. He was kind, and worse, he understood—or tried to. What he had said—his compassion—had choked her up, left her feeling restless and unworthy and terrified.
What if he tried to kiss her? What if she let him?
She had kissed Aethelstan once—just after he had rescued her from her evil stepmother. It had been ten years ago, and nothing had happened. But Aethelstan, who was a lot more experienced now than he had been as a boy, could have blocked the spell.
Michael had no magic at all. And Emma’s was useless.
Like puberty. She smiled faintly at that. He had been trying to understand—and for a mortal, that was pretty close. But not quite it.
A woman came out of one of the stalls and sat three stools away. She reapplied her lipstick, then used a Kleenex to blot it. She kept stealing glances at Emma.
Finally, she said, “Hey, are you famous or something?”
Emma’s stomach clenched. This had happened to her a few times. It usually happened the day after a TV appearance.
“No,” she said.
The woman frowned. “You look really familiar.”
Emma shrugged. “I have one of those faces.”
“I’m sure I’ve seen you before,” the woman said.
“Probably around town.” Emma stood. The woman had forced Emma’s hand. She had to leave now. But she wasn’t sure how she would face Michael’s sympathetic eyes.
“Weren’t you on, like, some documentary?”
Too close for comfort. Emma slipped out of the restroom, pretending she didn’t hear the last question.
Michael was still sitting at the table. His chicken looked untouched. His hand rested near the wine glass, but it didn’t look as if he had touched that either. He was staring out the window, his features pensive.
H
is blond hair caught the light, showing all the different highlights. His features were clean, the bones in his face strong. He would have been considered handsome in the world of her birth, just like he was considered handsome now.
He was wrong. Some looks never went out of style.
She squared her shoulders and walked back to the table. As she slipped into her chair, she said, “Sorry.”
He turned toward her. His features were masked. “I didn’t mean to pry.”
She shook her head. “I’m just not used to talking about myself.”
“How about I make it up to you? Ask me any embarrassing question you want.”
She thought for a moment, feeling tempted. Then she said, “How about no more embarrassing questions for the entire evening?”
For a brief moment, he looked disappointed, and then he covered it with a smile. “Fair enough. Light and frivolous conversation it is.”
And it was. They talked baseball (a sport which Emma had fallen in love with), theater (which Emma knew little about), and news (which seemed to interest both of them).
The rest of the meal went quickly. Emma managed to finish her beef, and even enjoy some dessert. Michael was a witty and engaging dinner companion, who even insisted on paying for the meal. She tried to argue with him over that, but she lost.
“I was the one who chose an expensive restaurant,” he said. “When it’s my choice, I buy.”
They drove back to the hotel in companionable silence that lasted until they reached their rooms. From Emma’s, the blaring television didn’t manage to cover Darnell’s wailing howls.
“He doesn’t do that the whole time you’re gone, does he?” Michael asked.
“I don’t know,” Emma said. “I’m gone.”
Michael rolled his eyes and opened his door. Emma followed him into the room. Before she had been too stressed to notice it much. It was the mirror image of her room, down to the colors. The stripes on her bedspread were the same color as the solids on his.
His suitcase was open on the suitcase rack, and she could see his clothes, neatly folded. It made her feel as if she had seen something personal.
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