Totally Spellbound

by Kristine Grayson

  There was a certain amount of logic to her statements, but there was no logic in how he felt. And there had been no logic in how he’d felt about Marian, either. At some point, a man had to realize that sometimes he lived through his heart and not his mind. And that living through the heart was just as valid—if not more valid.

  “Did they train you to think like this in your profession?” he asked.

  Her smile widened. But it looked cooler than he’d ever seen it.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s my job to see what’s beyond the emotion, to understand it, and to help the patient understand it as well.”

  “And in this case, you’re the patient and the therapist?” he asked.

  “It worked, didn’t it?”

  “And they call economics the dismal science,” he muttered.

  “What?” Megan frowned at him.

  He shook his head. “Nothing. It just seems like a sad way to look at the world, analyzing each emotion good and bad, and figuring out the logical approach to that emotion. Sometimes, it’s better to follow your feelings.”

  “Says the man who once defied the Fates,” Megan said.

  “I don’t regret that, even now,” Rob said. “I followed my heart.”

  “And they could have imprisoned you for it.”

  He smiled. “I’m beginning to understand why they didn’t. They knew how I felt about Marian.”

  Megan nodded. “We all know.”

  He felt his cheeks heat. He wasn’t going to get past this. “Megan, I have been honest with you from the beginning.”

  “I know that,” she said. “And I think that we have tremendous potential.”

  The word stung him, and he wasn’t sure why. It was a dismissive word, one that undercut what he already felt. He grabbed his pants, which were in a pile on the floor, found his shirt, and tossed them on the messed-up bed.

  Then he took off the robe.

  Megan’s cheeks heated. She wasn’t as dispassionate as she pretended to be.

  He grabbed his pants and slid them on, then put his shirt over them, buttoning it quickly. He preferred not to feel naked any more.

  “For the record,” he said as soon as he finished dressing. “What I feel—and have felt—for you since I met you is the most quick and intense emotion of my life. Is it true love? I don’t know. But I do know that two weeks ago, I would have told you I had already experienced true love.”

  Megan watched him, her eyes glittering.

  “I don’t know how you feel, but I do know you don’t value yourself much,” Rob said. “You’re willing to settle for whatever I have to give, where me, I want this to be the best relationship of our lives. And since I’ve already had a fantastic, deep, and mutual love with a marvelous woman, I know I’m asking a lot.”

  He opened the door, finally identifying what he felt. Anger. He didn’t like the way she had somehow dismissed him.

  “But I’m asking a lot,” he said, “because I don’t settle. I never have.”

  He stepped out of the room, grabbed his suit coat, and headed back into the dining room.

  Megan wasn’t following him, and he pretended he didn’t care. He had made a promise to get that silly wheel.

  And he would.

  Twenty-nine

  Megan stood inside the bedroom and watched Rob walk across the suite. He was barefoot, which made him seem oddly vulnerable despite the expensive suit he wore.

  He was right: she was settling—and she had thought that good news.

  But he was also right about something else: he didn’t settle. She had known that about Robin Hood as long as she had known about Maid Marian.

  If he’d been the kind of man to settle, he never would have gone into the woods and assembled his now-famous band of Merry Men. He never would have taken on the Sheriff of Nottingham, and the Pretender, King John.

  He would never have taken on the Fates.

  Megan sighed. Rob was talking to her brother and Zoe as if nothing had happened. But he was slightly turned so that he could see her.

  She felt a connection to him, even now.

  How strange was that? Feeling connected to a man she hadn’t even known two days ago?

  Maybe it wasn’t strange at all. Considering all she’d learned in the past several hours, perhaps it was normal. Perhaps that was why she hadn’t hooked up with anyone—not really—because Rob had been out there, waiting to meet her.

  What had he said? She had slipped into his magic—driven into it, she had said—and no one, no one, not Marian, not the Fates— had done that before.

  Megan could accept the idea that someone like him could love her. But she had a lot of trouble accepting that he would make her the most important person in his life.

  She hadn’t been the most important person in anyone’s life before. She’d always been an afterthought: the third child, the younger sister, the second aunt, the trusted friend.

  She squared her shoulders. The one thing Rob hadn’t said, the one thing no one had said, was something she would tell her patients sometimes.

  Love took courage. To love someone—anyone, even a parent or a family member—was a risk. You gave your heart, your very being, to that person, and you risked rejection, or worse.

  You risked complete destruction of every warm emotion you’d ever felt.

  All she had done from her earliest memories was protect herself from emotion. And even though her own therapist had mined her background, searching for a single traumatic event that caused Megan to shut down like that, she had never found it.

  Her therapist had even interviewed her parents to see if the event was pre-verbal.

  The only thing anyone could come up with was that Megan had been abandoned as an infant. Had that been the traumatic event? That someone—the person who had birthed her—hadn’t loved her enough to keep her?

  Or had Megan, as an older child, responded emotionally to the news of her abandonment?

  But that had never felt right. Megan wasn’t sure she believed in pre-verbal memory, and she didn’t remember a time when she had ever felt unloved.

  Her family—the Kinneallys—had loved her as much or more than her biological family could have.

  She sighed. She was just reserved, that was all, and risk-averse, and afraid.

  Very afraid.

  And there was Robin, gesturing over a map of a place so dangerous, the danger spilled into the map itself. Her own brother, whom she loved dearly but never thought of as mighty courageous, had rescued his fiancée from that place. (Even though Megan still wasn’t sure how. Had he added and subtracted the Faeries to death?)

  Her nephew had taken care of three of the zaniest women Megan had ever met, had heard adult thoughts since childhood, and still had the sweetest personality of anyone she had ever met.

  And Rob. Rob had lost the person most dear to him centuries ago, and yet he kept living. Not only kept living, but was willing to try again.

  There was something wrong with her if she didn’t give this her all.

  Not many people got a chance like this.

  She slipped on her shoes and crossed the suite’s floor. The conversation was about embedded spinning wheels and transforming lights. She felt behind already.

  “All right,” Rob was saying as she approached. “So the Faerie Kings stole the wheel from the Fates, and they were able to continue on, even though the wheel was their source of power.”

  “Someone told me,” Zoe said, “and I can’t remember who because this has been a strange few days, that the Faerie Kings became a lot more powerful after that. In fact, the expansion of Faerie happened after that.”

  “So they’re not going to want to let the wheel go,” Rob said.

  “The way the Fates made it sound,” Travers said, “they won’t have any choice.”

  Rob frowned. “Why is that?”

  “Because,” Zoe said, “even Fates have prophecies, apparently, and the wheel and the Faerie Kings and someone named Great-Aunt Eu
genia are all involved in theirs.”

  “Only my great-aunt died,” Travers said.

  “This Eugenia is related to you?” Rob asked.

  “And me.” Megan entered the conversation as if she had never left. “She was the one who found all three of us, and helped with the adoptions.”

  Travers looked at her in surprise. “I never knew that.”

  “I checked the records. Great-Aunt Eugenia put Mom and Dad in touch with the agencies where we all were, and actually pointed Mom to each one of us.”

  “But she was dead before the Fates lost their powers,” Travers said.

  “Murdered, remember?” Megan said. “And Viv and her new husband caught the murderer.”

  “Fascinating,” Rob said. “So technically, your aunt was involved in all this, but as a catalyst.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Zoe said.

  “You know,” Travers said, “something strikes me, though.”

  They all turned toward him. He had moved away from the table slightly, probably so that he wouldn’t be staring at the map the entire time.

  “You mentioned told Rob, Zoe, and you’ve told me in the past that all the prophecies are about true love.”

  Zoe nodded.

  “Would that apply to the prophecies about the Fates as well?” Travers asked.

  “True love for them?” Rob asked as if the concept were as foreign as trees on the moon.

  “Why not?” Travers asked. “They’re part of the magical community, right?”

  “But who made the prophecy for them?” Zoe asked.

  “Whoever were the Fates before them,” Travers said. “Or maybe they made it for themselves.”

  Megan saw where he was going. “Which would explain why they were so willing to give up their magic. They thought they were going to fulfill their destinies.”

  Rob’s gaze met hers. His expression was cool. He seemed very distant from her. But he nodded.

  “Do you think they’ll tell us about it?” he asked.

  “It doesn’t matter if they do,” Zoe said. “Prophecies are deliberately obtuse. We’ll understand it after everything is done. No need to muddy the waters before we finish this thing.”

  “Before I finish this thing,” Rob said, then sighed. “Although I’m not sure how. If this wheel powers all of Faerie, then I don’t have the magical abilities to remove it.”

  “We need to figure out how to create a Faerie-wide blackout,” Zoe said.

  “Or not,” Travers said. “Look, when I tried to get Zoe out of there, I used the wheel.”

  Megan slid her hands behind her back. Everyone else was so comfortable discussing fantastic things, and she still felt like she had walked into the middle of a movie set.

  Only the hero was in love with her, and she’d actually experienced the magic.

  Rob took Travers’ arm and led him away from the map. “Fold that thing up, Zoe. I think we’re done with it for now.”

  Megan understood what he was doing; he was afraid that if the magic spilled off the map, it would allow someone in Faerie to hear their plans.

  Zoe nodded, grabbed the map, and rolled it up like a poster. For a moment, the table rolled with it, then Zoe slipped her fingers between the wood and the map, and the table bounced back to its normal shape.

  “You used the wheel?” Rob asked when he and Travers reached the living room.

  Travers nodded. He sat on the edge of the couch. Rob sat on a nearby chair. Megan perched on the chair’s arm. Rob put a hand on her leg, and the warmth of his skin through the cloth of her pants reassured her somehow.

  He wasn’t quite as distant as he seemed.

  “I was afraid I wouldn’t have enough power to get Zoe out of there,” Travers said. “Then I remembered the Fates saying that they didn’t need the wheel after a few centuries. All it did was augment their existing power, and they learned how to do that on their own. So, I figured, I could use it to augment my power. I reached out for it—mentally, if that makes sense—”

  “It does,” Rob said.

  It didn’t, Megan thought, but she didn’t say that. They didn’t need to explain more to her.

  “—and drew power from it, literally. My magic became stronger—I became stronger—and Zoe and I got out.”

  Rob nodded. “It still strikes me that it’ll be hard to remove if it is the power center.”

  “But what Travers is saying is that he thinks you can use the power of the wheel to remove the wheel,” Zoe said.

  Megan was really frowning now. “Is it, like, plugged into something? The power has to come from somewhere.”

  Travers waved his hand dismissively. “In a scientific world, maybe.”

  “I believe in a scientific world,” Megan said in a small voice.

  “So do I, most of the time,” Travers said, “but not in a place like Faerie.”

  “There is a science to magic,” Rob said. “I’ve just never studied it. Power does come from somewhere, just like electrical current. But walls aren’t imbued with electricity. They’re wired, and the wires are attached to a series of lines that are ultimately attached to a place where the power is manufactured. Magic has a similar system, which I don’t entirely understand—and that’s my own people’s system. Faerie may use a completely different one.”

  “The wheel has to be mobile,” Zoe said. “The Faerie Kings stole it from the Fates. They had to do that somehow.”

  “Maybe we should ask the Fates how,” Megan said.

  Everyone looked at her as if she had just suggested jumping off a cliff.

  She shrugged. “They probably know more about that wheel than we ever would.”

  Rob sighed. “She has a point.”

  “I know she does,” Travers said. “But I was hoping that I wouldn’t have to talk to them any more. It’s confusing.”

  Zoe gave him a fond smile. “They’re not confusing. Just breathtaking sometimes.”

  “And not in a good way,” Rob added.

  Megan nodded. “But last I remember, John was cooking chili, and Kyle was watching anime, and the Fates had told us…”

  She stopped herself and flushed.

  Rob grinned at her. “They told us to get a room. But you already had one.”

  “Oh, not this again.” Travers stood up. “Now I’m voting for a conversation with the Fates.”

  He marched toward the front door.

  “Wow,” Zoe said softly to Megan. “You really do know how to push his buttons.”

  “Twenty-five years of practice,” Megan said with pride.

  Zoe shook her head. “Maybe I’ll have to take lessons.”

  “Naw,” Megan said. “I just irritate him. You want to get under his skin in other ways.”

  Zoe grinned. “Truer words have never been spoken.”

  She followed Travers to the door.

  Rob stood, but Megan stayed seated. She reached for his hand, and somehow missed.

  “I wanted to say—”

  “Later,” he said. “Let’s finish this spinning wheel thing first.”

  “But it worries you,” Megan said. She could feel it, an amorphous concern, a sort of in-over-his-head kind of anxiety.

  “Of course I’m worried,” he said. “I think they’re all asking the impossible.”

  “But you’re going to try,” she said.

  He nodded. “I’ve always liked the impossible,” he said, and headed out of the room.

  Thirty

  The moment Rob entered the hallway, he realized he had forgotten his socks and his shoes. But he wasn’t about to go back for them.

  He felt a low-key irritation at Megan, one he didn’t want to thrash out with her at the moment. He’d never been attracted to someone who settled before. That bothered him more than he cared to think about.

  The carpet in the hallway was cold and slightly damp, probably from the air-conditioning. He walked to the next suite over, and heard Kyle’s voice mixing with his father’s, John’s, and
the barking of that silly obese dog.

  Then the door beside him clicked shut.

  He didn’t want to look. Megan was probably sitting inside her suite, trying to make sense of the day.

  Not that he blamed her. Everything had changed for her, and he had made it worse, pressuring her into something she apparently wasn’t ready for.

  And he didn’t know how much of his own emotion had bled over. How much he had coerced her—in an inadvertent way—just because she could feel what he had been feeling?

  He would have to discuss that with her when—if—he got out of Faerie with the wheel.

  “Forget something?”

  He started, and looked beside him. There was Megan, holding his shoes, his socks stuffed inside them. She looked charming, her own feet bare, her hands clinging to his ridiculous, expensive, twenty-first century leather shoes.

  In spite of himself, he smiled at her.

  “Thanks,” he said, taking the shoes from her.

  “You know, those probably aren’t world-conquering shoes,” she said softly.

  “That’s not what the salesman said.” Rob stepped inside the other suite. It smelled of chili—rich and thick and enticing—and fresh baked bread.

  Megan walked in with him. “The salesman told you the shoes would help you conquer the world?”

  “The well-dressed man always controls his environment,” Rob said in a modern, stuffy, upper-class British accent. “Shoes make the man.”

  “Really?” Megan said. “Because I’d think that world-conquering shoes would be some kind of miracle boots or tennies.”

  “Never tried conquering the world in tennies,” Rob said. “It might work.”

  He pulled the door to the suite closed. John was still in the kitchen, removing the bread from the oven. The Fates were setting the table, going around it in circles and placing settings down as if they were playing a game of Duck, Duck, Goose.

  Kyle was talking animatedly to his father, and Zoe was petting that overweight dog.

  The entire scene in front of him should have made him calmer. Instead, it made him tense.