The Wizard of Seattle (8 page)

Ironically, she couldn’t repair what she had wrecked, not by using the powers that had destroyed. Because she didn’t understand the technology of television or radio or even clocks, it simply wasn’t possible for her to focus her powers to fix what was broken. It would be like the blind trying to put together by touch alone something they couldn’t even recognize enough to define.

To create or control anything, it was first necessary to understand its very elements, its basic structure, and how it functioned. How many times had Merlin told her that? Twenty times? A hundred?

Serena sat down on her bed, still feeling drained. But not numb; that mercy wasn’t granted to her. The switch she had found to contain her energies could do nothing to erase the memory of Richard with another woman.

It hurt. She couldn’t believe how much it hurt. All these years she had convinced herself that she was the only woman in his life who mattered, and now she knew that wasn’t true. He didn’t belong only to her. He didn’t belong to her at all. He really didn’t see her as a woman—or, if he did, she obviously held absolutely no attraction for him.

The pain was worse, knowing that.

Dawn had lightened the windows by the time Serena tried to go back to sleep. But she couldn’t. She lay beneath the covers, staring up at the ceiling, feeling older
than she had ever felt before. There was no limbo now, no sense of being suspended between woman and child; Serena knew she could never again be a child, not even to protect herself.

The question was, How was that going to alter her relationship with Merlin? Could she pretend there was nothing different? No. Could she even bear to look at him without crying out her pain and rage? Probably not. How would he react when she made her feelings plain, with disgust or pity? That was certainly possible. Would her raw emotion drive him even farther away from her? Or was he, even now, planning to banish her from his life completely?

Because he knew. He knew what she had discovered in the dark watches of the night.

Just before her own shock had wrenched her free of his mind, Serena had felt for a split second
his
shock as he sensed and recognized her presence intruding on that intensely private act.

He knew. He knew she had been there.

It was another part of her pain, the discomfiting guilt and shame of having been, however unintentionally, a voyeur. She had a memory now that she would never forget, but it was his, not hers. She’d stolen it from him…. And of all the things they both had to face when he came home, that one was likely to be the most difficult of all.

The only certainty Serena could find in any of it was the knowledge that nothing would ever be the same again.

T
uesday was a very unsettling day for Serena. Preferring to keep busy, she went to work as usual, despite her shortage of sleep. But she couldn’t keep her thoughts off Merlin and what had happened the night before. Still, she had years of practice in maintaining a normal facade, and that enabled her to get through the day without disgracing herself by bursting into tears or snapping at everyone she encountered.

At least the “switch” she had finally discovered remained firmly off, which kept her inner turmoil from manifesting itself in another dangerous release of unfocused energies. For that she was grateful.

But a bad day was made immeasurably worse when she found Jeremy Kane waiting in the lobby of her office building.

“Hello, Kane.” Everyone who knew him, even women, called the reporter by his last name.

“Serena.” He was smiling. “If you have a few minutes, I’d like to talk to you. There’s a coffee shop just across the street. Shall we?”

His manner was less abrupt than usual, and all her instincts went on alert. She didn’t like his uncharacteristically pleasant smile, and there was a gleam in his eyes
that made her want to hold on tight to her purse. But Serena knew she had taken a risk on Friday night, and if there was going to be fallout, she intended to deal with it herself.

The last thing she needed right now was an I-told-you-so from Merlin.

Besides that, she was curious about what the reporter had in mind, so she willingly accompanied him into the coffee shop. They were shown to a booth in a corner, fairly private in the less-than-crowded shop, and Kane talked desultorily about the weather (overcast, as usual), politics (screwed up, as usual), and the latest best-seller (his name wasn’t on the cover, so he hated it) until their coffee came.

“What’s on your mind, Kane?” Serena asked after the waitress left. Ordinarily she would have let him get around to it in his own time, but she wanted to hurry home and see if Merlin had returned.

Kane sipped his coffee for a moment, pale blue eyes fixed on her face. He wasn’t a bad-looking man, but the wear and tear of nearly twenty years of a downhill slide was stamped into his features, lending them an oddly blurred, indistinct appearance that was a bit unsettling.

“Did you take me back to my apartment Friday night, Serena? After our dance?” he asked finally in a very casual tone.

As she assumed an expression of surprise, her mind worked very swiftly, examining the question and recalling every one of her own actions. Of course she knew why he was asking: because he had most likely found the draft of the announcement in his pocket and, obviously remembering she’d been with him before he passed out, had concluded that she was somehow responsible. The most logical answer, naturally, was that she had accompanied or followed him home and had, for some reason, left the paper in his pocket for him to find.

“Why would I have done something like that?” she asked in a puzzled voice.

“Never answer a question with a question.”

“No, I didn’t take you back to your apartment. I repeat,
why would I? A dance is one thing, Kane, but we certainly don’t know each other
that
well.”

He didn’t lose his smile. “Why
did
you ask me to dance, by the way? I’m hardly your type.”

Gently, Serena said, “Somebody dared me to, Kane. Sorry about that, but I’ve never been able to resist a dare.”

“And did this somebody also dare you to ask me what my address was while we danced?”

So he remembered that, too, dammit. “Your address,” she replied, “is in the phone book. I looked it up months ago when I was chairing that committee and needed a speaker. Don’t you remember?”

Judging by his tightened lips and narrowed eyes, it appeared he had forgotten that. So had she, as a matter of fact, until just now.

Going on the offensive, Serena shook her head and said, “I don’t know what you’re after, Kane, but if this is the way you react after a woman asks you to dance, it’s no wonder you don’t get invited very often.”

He ignored the latter part of her statement. “What I’m after? Answers, Serena. I’m a very curious man. I’d like to know, for instance, just who you are. You certainly weren’t born Serena
Smyth—
that much I’ve found out. I believe you took the name, legally, at sixteen. That was after you came to Seattle, of course, and moved in with Richard Merlin.”

She allowed one of her eyebrows to climb in mild amusement. “You make a perfectly innocent and commonplace act sound criminal, Kane. So I changed my name—big deal. If you must know, after my drunken father wrapped his car around a telephone pole when I was six and made me an orphan, I was passed from relative to relative for ten years. That was when I ran away.”

“To Merlin,” he said in a silky tone.

Serena ignored the tone. “To Richard. I decided to change my name, since I was old enough and since I wanted nothing further to do with any of my other relatives.”

“Other relatives? So you still claim he’s an uncle?”

She smiled. “No, he’s actually some kind of third cousin. But calling him an uncle simplifies matters. Are you planning a story for the tabloids, Kane? One of those juicy headlines like, ‘Uncle and Niece in Incestuous Relationship’? Why don’t you just write that I’m going to have Elvis’s baby? Or an alien’s, maybe.”

He flushed an ugly red. “I think the society page would be interested in the story,” he said tightly. “Wouldn’t all your tight-assed friends just love to know the real relationship between you and Merlin?”

Serena couldn’t help it; she giggled. “Sorry, Kane, but you seem to have lost track of what really matters to people these days. Do you think you’re the first to suspect Richard and I are lovers? Don’t be ridiculous; those rumors pop up about once every year or so, as regular as clockwork, until something else comes along to stir up interest.” Because she made very sure to distract anyone who suspected the relationship was in any way unusual.

“Can you deny it?” he snapped.

She looked him straight in the eye and replied with a calmness that was far more convincing than histrionics would have been. “Of course I deny it. Richard has been a lot of things to me, but never my lover.”

“Maybe not,” Kane insisted, “but there’s something screwy in your relationship. What name
were
you born with, Serena? The court documents are sealed, oddly enough.”

“Oddly? You know, for an investigative reporter, you seem to have a blind spot regarding facts. I was a minor; of course the court documents are sealed. The name I was born with is no longer mine, and is certainly none of your business. As for my
screwy
relationships—with Richard or anybody else—they also are none of your business.”

“I’ll find out what I want to know,” he warned her softly. “Sooner or later I’ll find a way through all the walls I keep hitting in Merlin’s background. And it’s just a matter of time until I figure out all your secrets. There’s a story here somewhere, Serena. I can smell it.”

Serena slid out of the booth and smiled pleasantly at
him. She had kept her cool easily until he mentioned a search into Merlin’s background, and then she had felt a surge of anger mixed with worry. That was all she needed, to have unintentionally put this story-hungry reporter onto Merlin’s trail.

“The only story here concerns a desperate search for lost glory, Kane,” she said. “And it’s a bit pathetic, you know. If you can’t find something a hell of a lot more important than us, then it’s no wonder you’ve fallen so far. Thanks for the coffee, and don’t get up.”

She walked away without a backward glance, which was a pity. If she had looked back, she might have seen the look of obstinacy on his face. And it might have warned her.

Serena got home to find that Merlin had not yet returned. She changed out of her business suit and into slacks and a sweater, went into the kitchen long enough to say hello to Rachel and fix herself a glass of iced tea, then wandered back to the entrance hall. Merlin’s study opened into this foyer, and Serena headed toward it, intending to look for another of the books on her reading list.

Two feet from the door she suddenly stopped as though she’d run into a wall.

The study was always locked except when he was in it, but Merlin had never barred the room to his Apprentice. The lock was easy for her to undo, since it was intended only to keep out Rachel and any visitor to the house who might find the contents of the room a bit odd. But the door was blocked now by something a great deal stronger than the impotent man-made lock. And no Apprentice wizard could breach that barrier.

After several moments Serena retreated to the stairs and sat down on the third tread, staring toward that solid oak portal and feeling more than a little shaken. How long had he been doing this? Certainly not always; several times she had entered his study while he was away, looking for a book or scroll or something else she needed. When had she last gone into the room when he was absent?

Months ago, she remembered. She had undone the lock easily and automatically, and there had been nothing else to keep her out of the room.

She set her half-finished glass of tea beside her and hugged her upraised knees as she continued gazing at the forbidden door. Why? Why had he shut her out? Was this just another sign of his withdrawal from her, or was there something else going on, something he hadn’t told her about? Something he didn’t trust her to know?

No matter what the answers were, the questions had sown even more seeds of anxiety and fear in Serena. Coupled with the pain and fury of what she had discovered in the night, this new sign of trouble between her and Merlin made her emotional state so turbulent, she couldn’t even think straight. She could only sit there on the stairs and wait, the confused emotions simmering, until he came home.

When he finally opened the front door almost an hour later, she didn’t move or greet him. She just watched as he set an overnight bag on the floor, shrugged out of his raincoat, and hung it on the coat tree by the door.

His lean face still, the handsome features composed, he turned and looked steadily at her. After a moment he said calmly, “You found the switch.”

It didn’t surprise her that he knew. He had sensed her power from the first time he’d set eyes on her, so of course he could sense that she was now able to completely contain that power.

Serena rose slowly and stepped down to the bottom of the stairs. “That’s not all I found,” she said, and she could hear the strained note in her own voice contrasting sharply with his utter self-possession.