Page 51 of The Water Witch (Fairwick Chronicles 2)

Duncan smiled again, but guardedly. “I just don’t want them to force you into a conflict prematurely. I thought I should warn you that they’re here.”

He touched my arm and I felt the gold spirals tightening inside me. I studied his face. The high cheekbones and strong jaw, the aquamarine eyes, skin the color of honey…Yes, he looked like a creature from another world, but was hemycreature? Shouldn’t I be able to look into his eyes and recognize him?

But I didn’t. And when he dipped his head to mine and brushed his lips against my cheek, the spirals flared up in theair between us and singed the lock of hair that was always falling over his eyes.

“Damn,” I said, “I’m so sorry. I don’t know why…”

Duncan smiled, his jaw tight. “I think I do,” he said. “As long as you’re still bound to the incubus, no mortal man will be able to come close to you. It’s your decision, Callie. I’ll be here when you make it.”

He turned and left. I watched him walk down the porch steps and toward the driveway, where I now noticed Bill’s truck was parked. Had he just arrived …? But then I spotted the ladder leaning against the side of the house and saw Bill climbing down from it. He reached the ground just as Duncan walked past him. As the two men nodded at each other I thought I saw the air between them sizzle, but it might have been a trick of sunlight. Bill, cap pulled low over his eyes, looked from Duncan to me. I was suddenly aware of what the scene looked like: Duncan leaving my house early in the morning, me standing in my flimsy nightgown and sweater in the doorway. I blushed.

I closed the front door—slammed it, really, in my frustration at myself. The panes of glass in the fanlight trembled with the impact. I looked up—into the stained-glass face that so resembled my incubus lover. His full lips and almond-shaped eyes seemed to mock me.You are bound to me, they seemed to say,You will be mine forever. I will keep you in this house for all time.

“Like Lura,” I muttered as I stomped up the stairs, taking my anger out on the old, worn, and bowed stair treads, which creaked and groaned as if personally offended. Like Lura, who was moldering away in her decaying house because she’d been jilted by her fiancé. I’d live alone in this house while it fell apart around me, bound to a fantasy lover.

At the top of the stairs I turned to go down the hall to myroom, but paused outside of the door to the room that had been Liam’s study in the brief time he’d lived here. I’d never cleaned his stuff out of my house. I had thought I’d recovered, but I’d never even gotten up the nerve to go into his room. If I really was over him, I should be able to.

I turned the doorknob, steeling myself for the sight of his desk, where he used to sit looking out the window to the street.

I paused, the door half-open. I recalled my dream from last night—the way Liam had made me come by just grasping my hand—and felt my knees go weak.

I opened the door…and froze on the threshold, stunned. The room was empty. The desk and chair Liam and I had bought together at an antiques market in the country were gone. The windowsill, which he’d lined with stones and bird’s nests and pieces of wood, was bare. For a moment I suffered the vertiginous sensation that maybe Liam had never existed at all. I’d made him up. An incubus indeed! It sounded like the delusion of a crazy person.

But then another explanation occurred to me. In the weeks I’d raved in the shadows, while my friends sat watching me, someone had decided it would be a good idea to remove all trace of Liam from the house. So they had emptied the study. They probably told themselves that they were sparing poor hapless Callie any further heartache.

I was so overcome with rage that my vision blurred and I thought I might faint. I clenched the doorframe to steady myself and noticed that my arm was glowing. Spirals and knots moved beneath my skin like a nest of angry snakes. My bonds, but also my protection. They were made out of my own power. I could let them control me or I could control them.

I straightened and stepped back into the hall. I held up both arms and splayed my fingers, willing the energy inside me togo out—all the hurt and anger, the disappointment and fear. Sparks sizzled off my fingertips, gold rays shot out of my hands. The spirals and knots inside me uncoiled. I felt them stretching within the boundaries of the house, from attic to basement.No one willevertake something from my home again, I swore. I closed my eyes and pulled the spirals back inside.Or frommeagain. The wards snapped back through my fingertips like a rubber band and coiled up inside me, hotter and more powerful for their walk on the outside. I felt like I’d swallowed the universe. It feltgood.

---