The Lost Enchantress (23 page)

“Please don’t take this the wrong way, but are you sure something
did
happen? Maybe it was a threat . . . he might have said he was going to curse you for effect, to frighten you and even the score a little.”

His laughter was short and harsh, really not a laugh at all. “It happened. I’m sure of it.”

“What kind of curse was it?” she asked.

The moment of truth, thought Hazard. Either that or the moment of
untruth
. Which was it going to be? He’d been struggling with that question since deciding on his strategy for this evening.

He didn’t want to lie to Eve any more than he wanted to steal from her. But there was a chance that if she knew the whole truth, she would be reluctant to help him. She might refuse to let him use the pendant. That would only prolong his stay, and the longer he was around her, the more danger she was in. If tonight proved anything, it was that. Even more than he didn’t want to lie to her, he didn’t want to hurt her. He’d hurt women before without meaning to, and if he wasn’t careful it would happen to Eve. Lying to her might be the kindest thing he could do.

“It’s nothing fancy as curses go,” he told her, his tone offhand. “Just your standard bad-luck curse.”

“And it worked?”

He nodded. “It’s like living with a black cat always in my path and with every day being Friday the thirteenth. Nothing I do turns out right. You saw what happened at the auction.” He clenched his jaw and stared across the room, striking a mood between anger and despair.

“You wanted to know why I’m so desperate to get my hands on the pendant, desperate enough to fight off warlocks and pay a king’s bloody ransom. Now you do.” He shifted his gaze to her face. “I’m cursed, and the pendant is the only thing that can break that curse.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because the pendant is what he used to cast it,” he replied.

Eve was about to say that was impossible because the pendant had been lost for years . . . centuries according to Grand; then she remembered it had been lost only to them for all that time. The hull of the
Unity
was located and her cargo recovered in 1971, but the pendant hadn’t come into Dorothy Dowling’s possession until 1998. According to the provenience provided by the historical society, there had been a private sale following its recovery and then it turned up years later at an auction conducted by Sotheby’s in Dublin. That time frame certainly allowed for what Hazard said happened.

“You’re sure it was the pendant?” she asked. “You did say your memory of that night is hazy.”

“It is,” Hazard admitted. “All I actually remember is that he had something gold in his hand. I’m not relying on my memory. I’m relying on Taggart, or rather on his sixth sense for these things.”

“Who’s Taggart?” Eve asked.

“Taggart is . . . an associate of mine. I hate magic . . . for obvious reasons. But I knew if I was going to break the curse I would have to fight fire with fire. And since I don’t have any power of my own, I had to find someone willing to share his . . . for a price.”

“Oh, I’m sure he’s more than willing to share if the price is anything like what you offered me.” She tilted her head, her eyes narrowing with curiosity. “And speaking of . . . you sure have a lot of walking-around money for someone cursed with bad luck.”

“It’s old money.” He dropped his gaze and used one finger to trace the rim of the saucer beneath the cup of coffee he hadn’t touched. “I have . . . afflictions that aren’t readily visible or understood. It’s not an easy thing for me to talk about.”

“You don’t have to,” she said, as he’d hoped she would.

She had a caring heart. Everything he’d observed of her and everything he’d learned about her surreptitiously told him that. And if his back wasn’t to the wall, or if he were a better man, he wouldn’t stoop to using that against her. But he wasn’t a better man, and he was going to use her kindness, and her own distaste for magic, to get her to do what he needed her to do.

“Tell me how Taggart figured out that it was the pendant you were looking for,” she said.

“He has a wide range of contacts in the otherworld,” he explained, referring to the world of magic interwoven with this one. “And he has a talent for locating things that are impossible to find . . . that sixth sense I mentioned. It took a while, and there were a lot of dead ends, but he eventually got a strong sense that what we were looking for was in Providence. Once we were here, he zeroed in on the house on Sycamore Street. The fact that it was for sale was simply a lucky break “

“So it
wasn’t
purely by chance that you bought the house.” There was a subtle note of accusation in her voice.

“I never said it was chance. I said it had nothing to do with you, and that at the time I bought it I knew nothing about you. That’s the truth. And I said the location being well suited to magic was a deciding factor—also true.”

She acknowledged that with a slight nod.

“It was only after we arrived here that Taggart honed in on the auction,” he explained, “and as soon as I saw the photograph of the pendant in the preview catalogue, I knew he was right . . . that it was what Pavane had in his hand when he cursed me.”

She looked at him with surprise. “The sorcerer’s name was Pavane?”

“That’s right. Phineas Pavane.” He saw her chest lift with a sudden deep breath and sensed her excitement. “Do you recognize the name?”

She nodded eagerly. “If my grandmother is right—and she usually is about these things—Phineas Pavane is the man responsible for our long-lost family talisman being
long lost
in the first place ... and for worse things. Not the same Phineas Pavane who cursed you,” she added and then rolled her eyes at herself. “Obviously.”

“Obviously,” he murmured, captivated by the sudden guileless sparkle of her in a way he had no right to be.

“This rural, horse-loving village you were talking about . . . was it by any chance in Ireland? A place called Gleng—”

“Glengara,” he said at the same time she did. “Near the west coast. That’s the place.”

“That’s where my family is from . . . originally, I mean. Grand was born there.”

She tossed her hair back, making the bells on her ears dance against the pale skin he longed to touch. It was an effort to focus instead on what she was saying.

“I don’t know if this is a coincidence,” she told him, “and if it’s not, I have no idea what it means, but if there was a Pavane involved, I’m sure he played dirty. You can use the pendant. And I don’t want any money, or papers drawn up. A handshake is good enough for me.”

She offered her hand; he hesitated.

“Do you trust me that much?” he asked.

“I’m not sure how much I trust you,” she admitted. “But I’m willing to give it a try. We’ll keep it simple: I’ll let you use the pendant to break the curse, and you promise to return it to me afterwards, safe and sound. No exceptions. No excuses.”

They shook on it. And even though the light was low, designed to hide flaws and soften what’s real, he saw Eve clearly for the woman she truly was. The woman he needed her to be.

Caring. Trusting. Gullible.

He really was a bastard.

 

 

So sayeth the witches in Macbeth, and their words had been running through Eve’s head all day, as impossible to shake as the refrain of a popular and God-awful song you hear on your way to work and find yourself humming all day. They struck her as timely; she only hoped they weren’t a bad omen. Tonight was the night she was going to Hazard’s, talisman in hand, for what she’d come to think of as—for want of a catchier term—the Great Decursing.

It had been two days since their dinner at Settimio’s. She’d offered to get together to do the deed as soon as possible, but Hazard had things to take care of first, and so they’d agreed on this evening. It was a good thing he hadn’t needed more time, because thinking about it was really interfering with her work. Flubbing lines, daydreaming during meetings and having to double- and triple-check appointment times was all very unlike her.

She was accustomed to work being her consuming passion, the thing that drove and excited her; work was the first thing she thought of in the morning and the last thing at night, and it was unsettling to have something else kick it from first place to a very distant second. She told herself that her curiosity and anticipation were natural; after all, it wasn’t everyday she got to witness someone use a magical talisman to break a bad-luck curse. Whatever excitement she felt had less to do with Hazard the man than Hazard the victim.

In fact, it might not even be excitement she felt; it could be . . . compassion. It could be wild, intense compassion waking her up in the middle of the night and making her pulse race, suddenly and at odd and sometimes inconvenient moments.

There was no denying that compassion was at least part of her feelings toward Hazard. His story had touched her deeply, probably because she understood it like few others could. She had the misfortune of knowing firsthand what it was to get caught in the backwash of a power far greater than yourself, a boundless, unaccountable power willing and able to pluck you from the fabric of reality as you knew it, spin you around and toss you back into a world radically different from the one you knew, leaving you to find your way as best you could.

Some would say they had both brought it on themselves by opening the door to the mysterious power of magic without knowing where it would lead. That was probably true . . . but with one major difference between them. She had been warned of the danger and had chosen to cast the Winter Rose Spell anyway. Hazard was never warned and had no way of knowing the potential consequences of his actions; he hadn’t even known magic was real, for pity’s sake. It was a stretch to think of the Hazard who’d bulldozed his way into her life as an innocent, but that’s what he’d once been.

There was also another important difference between them. What she did, she did for herself; she’d cast the spell in hopes of seeing what love and happiness might be in her future. Hazard had been thinking of someone else’s future happiness. He had unselfishly put himself at risk for the sake of a stranger. Neither of them
deserved
what happened to them, but the balancing scales in Eve’s heart decreed that he deserved it less.

For that reason alone she was willing to help him any way she could. It would be a bonus if she could also even the score a little with the iniquitous Pavane, both the man who had cursed Hazard and the earlier one who had caused her own family so much pain and trouble.

Phineas Pavane had stolen more than the talisman from them, he’d stolen possibilities. Generations of them. There was no way of knowing exactly how many, but Eve was convinced the number was staggering. He’d stolen the possibility of love and joy and contentment from so many women who shared her blood, and, maybe worse, he’d stolen the possibility of all the good they could have done with the power meant to be theirs and theirs alone.

She understood bad luck because she’d seen her share of it, and she knew the return of the talisman brought the possibility that T’airna luck could change. She resisted thinking about it because the potential for disappointment was too great. But gradually those thoughts began slipping through cracks in the wall she’d put up, more frequently since her dinner with Hazard. She wondered if that was because he represented another new possibility . . . the possibility of a man she could be completely open and honest with. A man she could dare to love.

Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’t think about it
, she told herself. She wasn’t even sure Hazard was a man she could love. She was drawn to him in a way that confused her, but she really knew very little about him. The other night had filled in some of the blanks, and hopefully more of her questions would be answered tonight. She would also get to meet the mysterious Taggart, who would be in charge of the decursing. And she would find out if he was right about the pendant having the power to break the curse and set Hazard free. Maybe luck was about to change for both of them.

Provided she didn’t miss the witching hour, she thought, noticing the time. She took off her glasses and began to pack up to go. The script she’d been working on, the one that should have taken no more than an hour to write but that was still unfinished after several, would have to wait until tomorrow.

“H
ow many times are you going to watch that thing?” asked Taggart from somewhere behind him.

Hazard heard him amble into the study a few minutes earlier, but he hadn’t turned then and he didn’t turn now. He had no intention of squandering his newly restored vision on Taggart’s homely self when he could be looking at Eve. Watching her image on a television screen was a poor substitute for the real thing, but it was better than nothing.

He had no interest in current trends or trinkets unless they simplified his research or advanced his cause. The box known as a DVR was such a device. He’d originally mastered its system of buttons and menus so he could record information that might someday prove useful, but recently he’d discovered a much more pleasurable and instantly gratifying use for the thing; he recorded Eve’s news reports and replayed them. Over and over again, like an opium addict driven to feed his craving with increasing frequency until his need becomes the center of his existence, the fulcrum upon which everything else turns.

Hazard had never allowed anything—or anyone—to become that all-important to him, and he’d long ago vowed he never would. As a child and then as a young man, he’d witnessed that kind of obsession in his mother. He’d been powerless to do anything about it, but he’d seen how lethal it could be. His mother hadn’t been an addict in the common sense of the word; her obsession had been the man who was her lover, and his father. Assuming you measured paternity by blood alone. Her love and her need for the man had been without limits or conditions. And in turn, the Earl of Shafton’s regard for his mother had been without the complication of either love or need. He’d looked on her as a pleasing commodity, like a fine cigar or a new cravat, to be enjoyed and used up and discarded. And that’s precisely what he did.