The Lost Enchantress (13 page)

The caption below his smiling face read, “Nicholas Trevino, Journalist, Author of
When All Else Fails: Memoir of a Life Well-Traveled
.”

Memoir.
Give me a break
, she thought, recalling that besides being charming, Nick Trevino—journalist, ex-friend, ex-lover, ex-fiancé—was also exactly one year, two months and six days older than she was. What kind of self-aggrandizing know-it-all writes a memoir before he even turns forty? The answer was obvious, and also irritating. The kind who led an adventurous, dangerous, fascinating, globe-trotting life as a famous and highly respected foreign correspondent. She supposed the fact that he looked and sounded like Indiana Jones’s smarter, braver, more dashing brother probably wouldn’t hurt book sales either.

Nick Trevino was living his dream, just as he always said he would. What bothered Eve was that he was also living hers.

Or maybe it would be more accurate to say he was living
their
dream, the dream they’d once shared, the dream they’d created together. She and Nick were working as summer interns in Washington when they met and clicked. They dated long distance until graduation, and then they both sought, and won, the prestigious Wyler Fellowship to study international journalism. Their plan was to finish grad school and then follow the story wherever it took them. They were ambitious and idealistic and in love. And they were certain—the kind of certain you can be only in your early twenties—they weren’t going to simply write about the world; they were going to change it.

They’d lay awake long into the night talking about marriage and forever and how they were going to make it work, no matter what. And about how, someday far, far away, after they’d seen everything and been everywhere, they would write a book about it. Together.

It was more than a dream for Eve; it was a chance for a fresh start, and she had never believed in or wanted anything so completely.

Then Chloe called with the news that she was pregnant. Eve remembered the drive back to New York to collect her things and how certain she’d been that Nick would understand her decision to return home. He hadn’t. She’d been certain he would get over his initial surprise and disappointment and remember their solemn vow to make it work, forever,
no matter what
. But that hadn’t happened either.

Nick stayed angry and she struggled to explain and they argued, long into several nights. The more they talked, the more it became all-about-Nick . . . about how his plans were being trashed and how inconvenient it would be for him not to have her around and how draining it would be to have to drive back and forth to Providence to see her. It was as if she and Chloe were nothing more than remote satellites revolving around planet Nick, useful only as long as they remained on course. But with all the debris flying around at the time, all those jagged pieces of her plans and her dreams and her heart, Eve didn’t see that clearly until much, much later.

Eventually Nick had cut off all discussion and issued an ultimatum: he needed her with him, and if she left, even for a year or two, if she put Chloe’s needs ahead of his, they were finished, done, kaput. And Eve, hurt and desperate not to see her dream disappear completely, had done the only thing that made sense to her at the time: she told him the truth.

She’d always intended to tell him, of course. She’d sworn not to follow in her mother’s misguided footsteps and spring it on him after they were already married. She’d simply been waiting for the perfect moment. That plan seemed to have blown up in her face, leaving her no choice but to tell him everything right then.

Everything. Complete and unvarnished and as totally preposterous sounding as she knew it was. She told him things she’d never told anyone, truths buried so deep it hurt to drag them up and say them out loud. She told him the reason she felt not simply obligated but honor bound to help Chloe in any way she could was because it was her fault their parents weren’t there to do it. She told him about the Winter Rose Spell and the candles and the fire. About blood magic and enchantresses and the time before time.

Nick had listened to it all, his expression impassive throughout, like a good journalist’s should be. And when she was finished, he told her he’d changed his mind and she could forget about the ultimatum. It was off the table. And then, before she had time to make the mistake of feeling relieved, he told her to pack her stuff and leave, because she was a liability he couldn’t afford.

He had to think about his future, he told her. If she was telling the truth, if magic was real, then she was like a time bomb that could at any moment detonate and destroy his credibility and reputation, and he wanted no part of it. And if it wasn’t real, then she was either lying or crazy, and he wanted no part of that. Either way, he wanted no part of her.

Looking up and seeing Nick on the monitor had been like a sudden, hard punch to her gut. Not because she still had tender feelings for him. She didn’t. Watching him on screen, hearing him talk about his recent marriage to a pretty young photographer who traveled with him and was clearly the maraschino cherry on top of his perfect life, the only thing Eve felt was grateful that whatever she and Nick shared had ended when it did.

For as long as she could remember she’d dreamed of sharing her life with a man who understood and accepted and loved everything about her. At fifteen she’d been so sure he was out there, somewhere, waiting for her just as impatiently as she was waiting for him, that she’d cast a spell to catch a glimpse of his face. That hadn’t ended well. Then along came Nick, breathing new life into her battered dreams, and in the end providing a glimpse of hard, cold reality. For the second time, magic won and she lost. Big time.

Eventually, as her heart slowly—very, very slowly—mended, she reconciled herself to the truth. That even if the man of her silly, romantic fantasies did exist, and they did someday, by some miracle, stumble across each other, there was no way she could ever know for certain it was him . . . not without getting closer and risking far more than she intended to ever again. And she needed to be certain. Before she opened her heart to a man again she needed to know he was the right man, the man destined to love her the way she longed to be loved. She wasn’t any more willing to settle for less now than she was at fifteen. Resigning herself to the truth was one thing; resigning herself to the wrong man was out of the question. And Nick Trevino had proven himself to be the wrong man.

As she watched Whoopi thank him and toss to commercial, she was suddenly able to put a name to the other, subtle feeling that had been tugging at her heart since she walked out of Angela’s office. Sadness. The kind of sadness you sometimes feel when looking at old photographs or reading old love letters.

Seeing Nick had sent her hurtling back to a time filled with endless possibilities and grand flights of fancy. But time is always moving and shifting to let you see things from a different perspective, whether you want to or not. She could see now that nothing in this life was truly endless, and that even the highest soaring flights eventually had to come back to earth and be grounded in something more solid than a young girl’s hopes and whimsy.

She wasn’t quite cynical enough to entirely rule out the possibility of finding love, or having it find her. She supposed it was still possible. She supposed anything was possible. But these days she was a much harder sell. It would require a pretty spectacular twist of fate for her to believe it was really meant to be, and she wasn’t counting on that happening or holding her breath waiting for it. And it certainly wasn’t the reason she refused to part with the pendant for any price.

She might not be entirely convinced it was as powerful a talisman as Grand claimed, or that it could change the family’s historically dismal record in finding true love, but the more she considered the possibility, the more she found herself wanting it to be true. Not for herself. She wanted it for Chloe and for Rory. She wanted them to have all the possibilities she’d lost or surrendered along the way. With all of her own heart, she wanted it to have enough magic to safeguard theirs.

E
ve arrived home to an empty house and the blinking of the small red New Message light on the telephone.

She hit Play and smiled at the sound of Chloe’s voice.

Things were going absolutely, fantastically well in Greece, she reported. And even if they weren’t, thought Eve, her perennial optimist of a sister would say they were out of utter confidence in her ability to fix everything and make them that way. She had finally found just the right musicians for the traditional prenuptial walk through the historic streets of the village, where the locals would applaud and shout “
Na zisete
” to the bride and groom, which, according to Chloe, meant “long life.” Now she was on a mission to round up enough native sea daffodils to satisfy the very temperamental bride. She described the island as “too beautiful for words,” and the luxury hotel where they were staying as being carved into the hillside overlooking a white sand beach and turquoise sea, and she said she loved them all very, very much, kiss, kiss.

There was a slight hesitation and what sounded like a tiny tremor in her voice when she spoke again.

“I’m just missing you all a lot right now,” she said. “I mean, I always miss you when I’m away, but today, for some reason, you’re on my mind even more than usual and I just wish I were there with you.” She laughed softly. “Silly, I know. Anyway, I miss you and I’m thinking of you and I just wanted you to know. So there. And I’ll be home before you know it. Bye for now . . . and Rory, extra hugs for you, baby.”

Eve hit the Save as New button so she wouldn’t forget to tell Grand and Rory about the call. She wondered where they were. Usually when she got home the lights were on, there was music coming from Rory’s room and, if she was lucky, something heating in the oven. Not tonight.

“Grand? Rory?” she called, not really expecting a response. In a strange way the house didn’t feel just empty, it felt
really
empty, and she tried to shrug off a creeping uneasiness.

She knew where Grand was . . . sort of. Which is to say she knew as much as she wanted to.

“I have something to take care of tomorrow,” Grand had told her last night, just as Eve was heading off to bed, exhausted.

Through the years, by unspoken agreement, the phrase “something to take care of” had come to signify any activity of a magical nature, and when she heard it, Eve didn’t ask for details. Grand could pretty much take care of herself; she was more concerned about Rory.

Had she mentioned plans for after school? Eve couldn’t recall any. But then, she
had
been just a tiny bit preoccupied with her own thoughts this morning, replaying the events from last night and wondering what might happen next. And she hadn’t had to wonder for long. She was suddenly sidetracked by images of Hazard with his arms filled with roses and Hazard leaning against the window ledge in her office, watching her in that intent, bewildering way of his, as if he was suspicious and captivated in equal parts. Just as she started to wonder exactly what that look meant, she caught herself, stopped and shook her head to clear it. The last thing she should be doing right then was wasting time trying to figure out what made Hazard tick.

She checked the front of the fridge, but there was no note clipped to any of the magnets there. Next she checked Rory’s room. No Rory; also no clothes tossed on the bed and no book bag in sight. That might explain the lack of a note. Maybe she hadn’t come home after school. Maybe something came up on the spur of the moment and Rory was off studying or hanging with friends.

It just wasn’t like her not to check in or at least call to leave a message.

They didn’t have a lot of house rules. They’d never needed them. Rory was a good kid. If anything, she’d always tended toward being too mature and levelheaded for her age. In Eve’s amateur-shrink estimation that was a direct response to her mother’s head-in-the-clouds, pie-in-the-sky approach to life and love and the universe in general. Chloe—at least the old, a-little-too-free-spirited Chloe—might get caught up in the moment and take off without thinking to let someone know where she was going, but not Rory.

It was still too soon to worry.

But not, she decided, too soon to risk appearing overprotective by giving her cell phone a call. It went straight to voice mail, which told Eve exactly nothing. Rory could have turned her phone off because she was at the library or watching a movie with friends or for any one of a dozen other innocuous reasons.

Or, thought Eve, recalling the sound the warlock’s laser made as it slashed the air inches from her head, she could be in serious trouble.

Another wave of uneasiness, this one stronger and more tenacious, propelled her to Grand’s kitchen to check on the pendant. They’d agreed it would be safe in the small hidden compartment beneath Grand’s sink, but Eve had a bad feeling even before she opened the cabinet door, reached inside and came up empty. The pendant wasn’t there and something dark crept along her spine.

Grabbing a flashlight, she knelt and checked again, straining to see around the pipes and running her fingers back and forth over the place it should be, as if it might have become invisible overnight. Stranger things, she thought. But all she felt were the remnants of Grand’s protection wards fluttering against her hand like torn silk.

The wards, the magical equivalent of an alarm system, would have prevented anyone who wasn’t a family member from touching the pendant. That limited the possibilities considerably. If Grand had taken it, she would have let Eve know. And Chloe was thousands of miles away. That left only Rory, who had no idea the talisman even existed, much less that it was hidden beneath Grand’s sink. The odds of her happening upon it accidentally were somewhere in the range of nonexistent.