Thoroughly Kissed (7 page)

“Yes, and while we empathize,” Clotho said, “we don't want to set any terrible precedents.”

“If we allow you to lose your powers while you train, it would give lazy young people permission to put off their training until it suits them,” Lachesis said.

“Magic isn't about
your
convenience,” Atropos said. “It's about learning how to accept your own personal power.”

“Why, some mages could deny their own power for centuries,” Clotho said.

“And then it might explode out of them in damaging ways,” Lachesis said.

“Rather like it's doing to you,” Atropos said.

“Hmmm,” they all said in unison and then turned toward each other.

“But,” Emma said, afraid that they were going to start another sideways conversation, “you said I was a special case.”

“Your problems are a special case,” Clotho said.

“A very special case,” Lachesis said.

“But I'm still having problems,” Emma said.

“Of course,” Atropos said. “This is, apparently, the life that you were meant to have.”

Emma shook her head. “That's not possible.”

“Why not?” Clotho asked.

“There would be no reason for me to have gone through all of this,” Emma said.

The Fates looked at each other. Lachesis's glasses slid farther down her nose. “What is the prophecy for this one?”

Atropos frowned. A book appeared before her. She spoke in an ancient tongue. Emma didn't understand any of this.

“What prophecy?” Emma asked.

“We are all assigned one. You know that, child. It was why Aethelstan guarded you,” Clotho said.

“Of course, he misunderstood his,” Lachesis said.

“So what's mine?” Emma asked.

“Comforting, I would think,” Atropos said.

“Loosely translated,” Clotho said, “you will find the answer you seek.”

“Answer?” Emma asked.

“We do not interpret,” Lachesis said. “Merely report.”

“But the question you did ask us is what purpose your thousand year sleep served,” Atropos said.

“Well,” Emma said, “it got Aethelstan his one true love.”

“Perhaps that's it,” Clotho said, sounding tired.

“Here,” Lachesis said, handing Emma a slip of paper. “This is your prophecy. I forget which language this is, actually.”

“Well, it's not any I read,” Emma said, staring at it.

“It's yours to do with what you will,” Atropos said. “Now, we must get to our luncheon. I haven't gone this long after swimming without food and a nap since—oh, what was that?”

“The séances,” Clotho said.

“Those mediums. Amazing they could tap into things when they had no real powers,” Lachesis said.

“They weren't tapping,” Atropos said. “It was Pandora, making a mess of things. We let her go and once again, she opens the wrong box—”

“Oh, yes,” Clotho said. “It's been a hundred years or so. My memory plays tricks on me.”

“Anyway,” Lachesis said. “Luncheon.”

She lifted her arms, and belatedly, Emma realized they were going to leave her.

“No!” she shouted.

“No?” the Fates asked in unison. Lachesis still had her arms raised.

“See?” Clotho said. “She's rude.”

“I'm desperate,” Emma said. “If you can't take my powers away temporarily, what will I do now? I can't live like this.”

“You certainly can't,” Lachesis said, lowering her arms. Her eyes flashed with irritation. Emma wondered what happened to people who repeatedly irritated the Fates.

“You must be trained before you do some harm,” Atropos said.

Emma nodded. She knew that. “Can you train me?”

Clotho gave her a gentle smile. “No, child,” she said, and Emma thought she heard some sympathy in Clotho's voice. “We do not train. We govern.”

Emma folded her hands together. The longer she waited to start her training, the more damage she would do. “Then can you send me to Aethelstan?”

“No,” Lachesis said. “That's interference and we are not allowed to interfere in that way.”

“Then what do I do?”

“Follow the rules of the apprentice, child,” Atropos said.

She wouldn't need Michael Found to fire her. She would have to quit all on her own. Being an apprentice was a twenty-four-hour-a-day task. “I can't! I have a job.”

“A mortal job,” Atropos said.

“Can't we bend the rules a little?” Emma asked. “Can't Aethelstan come to me?”

Clotho shook her head. “No, child. The rules exist for a reason. You must travel to him. You cannot take lessons from him until you arrive. And then you must do as he teaches you.”

Emma suppressed a sigh. The last time she and Aethelstan spent any time alone, she had ended up throwing dishes at him. His wife Nora had mellowed him, but not enough for Emma's tastes.

“Because your powers are out of control,” Lachesis said, “you should have a traveling companion. It will be safer.”

Emma blinked. A traveling companion? All of her friends had jobs. And all of them were mortal, with no idea that magic existed. The only true companion she had was her cat.

“I'll have Darnell,” she said.

“Your cat will not be able to utter the words of the emergency incantations that Aethelstan gave you,” Atropos said.

“Can't we spell that? Can't we give him a voice?” Emma asked.

“You could,” Clotho said. “We would be able to tell you that spell.”

Emma felt her shoulders slump in relief.

“But we should warn you,” Lachesis said, “we have tried this before.”

“Cats do not follow instructions,” Atropos said.

“They have a wicked sense of humor,” Clotho said.

“They enjoy torture,” Lachesis said.

“In the past, they have withheld the words just to see what would happen next,” Atropos said.

“And,” Clotho added, “have you ever had a conversation with a cat? It's quite limiting. They're mostly interested in food.”

“And birds,” Lachesis said.

“That's food,” Atropos said.

“Not in their original form,” Clotho said.

“All right,” Emma said, hoping she wasn't being too rude again. “So I spell Darnell. Will that work?”

Lachesis shook her head. “Ultimately, we believe you will need a human companion.”

“Who?” Emma asked. “All of my magical friends are in Oregon and you won't make them appear in Madison.”

“Then take a nonmagical one,” Atropos said.

“My nonmagical friends would never understand this. Besides, they have jobs too.”

Clotho sighed. “Not only are they rude,” she said softly to the others, “but their priorities are strange. I would think friendship would be more important than work.”

“I think survival comes first,” Emma said.

Lachesis shook her head. “I will never understand mortals.”

Emma wasn't sure she would understand the Fates. “Please,” she said, “I came to you for help. Can one of you accompany me to Aethelstan?”

They looked at each other.

“Be in the mortal world?” Atropos said.

“Could you imagine?” Clotho said.

“We've discussed it,” Lachesis said.

“Oh, it would be interesting,” Atropos said.

“I could wear my nose ring,” Clotho said.

“And my tattoos,” Lachesis said.

“The only drawback would be—”

“Mortals!” they said in unison and then they shuddered, also in unison.

“It was tempting,” Clotho said, “but it is not possible.”

“Besides,” Lachesis said, “we don't intervene. We govern.”

“Sometimes governing means helping your subjects,” Emma said.

Atropos smiled. “We have helped you, dear. What you must do is really quite simple.”

“Travel to Aethelstan,” said Clotho.

“With a companion who will be able to help you should the need for emergency incantations arise,” said Lachesis.

“And train until you can control your magic,” said Atropos.

“We know you can do this,” Clotho said. “You've already done things twenty times more difficult.”

“Because I had no choice,” Emma said.

The Fates smiled in unison.

“And you have no choice now,” Lachesis said.

“Change your attitude,” Atropos said.

“This could be an adventure,” Clotho said.

Then Lachesis raised her arms and looked at her companions. “Lunch?”

“Oh, please,” Atropos said as all three of them vanished.

For a moment, Emma stood alone in the empty courtroom. An adventure? No, it was going to be a nightmare. Just like getting back to her office would be.

Whoever she invited would find out that magic was real. That person would have to be strong and courageous—and able to deal with Emma.

She knew no one like that. No one at all.

Then she looked around the courtroom. “Hey!” she yelled. “Sorry to be rude, but I have no training and no idea how to get out of here!”

“Ooops,” a voice said from the air. It sounded like whoever was speaking had her mouth full. “That we can fix.”

And then Emma was back in her office, staring at the Portland poster. She heard a small sound behind her. She turned—and found herself face to face with Michael Found.

Michael Found looked extremely confused. He glanced over his shoulder at the door behind him, then frowned at her. “Weren't you wearing a dress a minute ago?”

Emma looked down. She was still wearing the purple silk power suit that the Fates had given her. Even the briefcase had arrived—landing at her feet beside her.

Professor Found glanced at the door again. She knew what he was thinking. He had obviously been in here before her, and he hadn't seen her—which he should have, since this office was so small.

She wondered if he would ask the question. Did he have enough guts to say that he had seen a woman appear out of thin air? Or was he going to focus on her clothing?

“Um,” he said softly and ran a hand through his thick blond hair. It fell back into place messily, making him seem young and vulnerable. “I—didn't realize you were in here.”

She swallowed. What could she say? That she had been visiting the Fates? That her magic was out of control? Or should she lie and tell him that she had been here the entire time?

She opted for a third choice. “It's my office,” she said, managing to sound slightly offended.

“Yes, it is.” He glanced at the door again. “I must be very jet-lagged. You were wearing a dress earlier, right?”

“Yes,” she said.

“And you were standing there the entire time?”

“The entire time what?”

“The entire time that I have been in your office?”

“Frankly, Professor,” she said, “I have no idea how long you've been here. I've been trying to deal with my future.”

He brought his head back as if he'd been slapped.

“I suppose that's why you came down here,” she said. “To make it clear that I won't be put up for tenure any time soon?”

“Actually,” he said, and then looked over his shoulder again. It was almost as if he didn't believe the door was behind him. “I came to apologize for the weirdness in my office. But now I—”

“You wanted to apologize?” She wasn't sure she heard him correctly. What would he have to apologize for? She was the one who had caused the “weirdness” as he so delicately put it.

He nodded. “I'm pretty convinced that my students did something while I was away. You see, I was in England doing research on my next book, which is a history of magic, and I—”

“You are writing about magic?” she asked, amazed that she was able to keep the contempt from her voice.

“Yes. That's why I've been studying your historical period. So many of our current beliefs about magic—at least of the Western kind—seemed to come from that time period. Of course there are others—”

“Of course,” Emma said. That same calm tone was in her voice, but she felt as if she had dropped into another time period. One similar from the one she left, but just different enough to confuse her.

“—voodoo, for example, which—”

“I'm familiar with the history of magic, Professor,” she said. “What do you think that has to do with me?”

“It doesn't.” He sighed and shrugged. Then he glanced over his shoulder yet again. “I mean, I think the students set up an elaborate practical joke and you just seemed to walk in on it.”

“Oh,” she said. Her legs could barely hold her. She walked to her desk and sank into her comfortable leather chair. Aethelstan had warned her about this. He had said that mortals would always find a way to rationalize what they had seen. They now believed they were too sophisticated to believe in magic, so when magic happened before them, they made up elaborate stories to deny what their eyes had told them.

“So,” Professor Found said. “I wanted to apologize for that. I would like to continue our discussion at some point.”

“I don't think it was a discussion,” she said. “You've decided that I'm incompetent and I doubt anything I do would convince you otherwise.”

“Well,” he said, “it's not like we can return to the Middle Ages to see which scholar has a direct line on the truth. We must use the evidence that they left us, and it seems to me that you haven't used any of it.”

She sighed. “I used more of it than you gave me credit for. If we could go back to the Middle Ages, you would see that I am right. In fact I'm so right—”

A clap of thunder sounded and the entire room shook. Lightning flared and Emma felt the words die in her throat. The energy didn't leave her this time. Instead, it picked her up and moved her as if she were a bit of cloth. She was in a white whirling light, and somehow Michael Found was in it with her. His mouth was open, his hair streaming back, and his eyes were wild.

They landed in a filthy street and Emma winced at the nearly forgotten stench of pigs, manure, and good old fresh English mud. A goose flapped its wings near her and honked. Several carts rode past, and ahead, she heard merchants hawking their wares.

She looked forward, knowing what she would see. Sure enough, she was at the old market. Tradesman were calling for custom in her native tongue, a group of dogs were fighting near the entry to an alley, and four half-naked children played in the fetid water near the meat stall.

“Oh, no,” she whispered in English.

Michael Found looked stunned. He took a step forward, then touched the faded wood wall beside him. An elderly woman slapped his hand as he went by.

“That'd be off-limits to the likes of you,” she said in what Emma had learned to call Old English. It probably sounded like Danish to Michael.

He snatched his hand back, clutching it to his chest. Then he looked at Emma, who said to the old woman, “He's new here. He doesn't understand.”

“Well, teach him fast. And get on proper clothes. You cannot go to the market looking like that.”

“Yes, mistress. Thank you,” Emma said, nodding her head.

The old woman smiled, revealing a mouth half full of blackened teeth, and then moved on. Emma looked down. Her new shoes were buried in the mud—only from the smell she had a hunch there was more than mud surrounding her.

She had lived like this, and she hadn't known any better. All that she had learned in the past ten years of germs and bacteria and infections had made her squeamish. She wanted, more than anything, to take a shower.

“Where are we?” Michael Found asked.

“You don't want to know,” Emma said.

He shook his head and took a step toward the market. “This looks like—”

“Be ye outsiders, then?” a man asked, speaking in Old English, from behind Emma.

“No,” Emma said in the same language, knowing that some villages hated outsiders. “We are here to see our family.”

“Tell me who that be and I'll find them for ye.”

“What is this?” Michael Found asked in modern English.

“Shut up,” she said under her breath. This was getting more complicated all the time. If he weren't quiet, they might have to go before the village elders and pay a poll tax or worse. Be judged part of an enemy tribe and then be tortured into giving up secrets.

If only they could go back to her office. She had thought time travel impossible—

Thunder clapped and light flashed around them. She staggered forward, realizing she was in the office again. The stench of the village clung to her nose—and her feet. The new shoes were completely ruined, and her single step had left a large muddy manure print on her tile floor.

“What just happened?” Michael Found asked, cradling the hand that had been slapped. Then he held it out and stared at it. It was still red.

“You don't want to know,” she said.

He lifted one of his mud-caked feet and sniffed, then made a terrible face. “It really happened, didn't it? All those things, this morning. They had nothing to do with me. You're doing it.”

“Please,” she said. “You wouldn't understand.”

“Try me.”

She shook her head.

“This was no trick, was it? There was no way, even with practical jokes and a special effects budget the size of David Copperfield's that you could make an entire medieval village appear and then disappear. We were actually there, weren't we?”

“It looks like our feet still are,” she said lamely and wished she could laugh. Then she remembered that it was the wishing that changed things. She didn't dare wish anything.

She couldn't stay here.

Michael Found frowned. “Your research is based on that, isn't it? Trips like that. Did you invent a time machine?”

She let out a small, desperate chuckle. “No.”

“Then what? I know that this was real somehow. I've studied enough magic to know there are things that can't be easily rationalized or explained.”

She closed her eyes and leaned on her desk. The office stank of mud and cow dung, and she probably did too. Imagine how she must have smelled for the first twenty years of her life.

She shuddered. Amazing how the last ten years had changed her.

“Professor Lost?” he said.

“So well named,” she murmured.

“What?”

She opened her eyes. His beautiful face wasn't far from hers. He had long blond lashes that accented those marvelous blue eyes. “You may as well call me Emma,” she said wearily. “I don't really like the reminder that I'm lost at the moment.”

His frown grew deeper. “What?”

She sighed. “Professor Found.”

“Michael.”

Was that kindness she heard in his voice? She didn't deserve kindness at the moment.

“Michael,” she said. “You already think I'm a fraud and a cheat and a terrible professor. And I've botched this meeting horribly, and I can't stay anyway, thanks to the Fates, so I guess there's not much more I can do.”

“About what?”

“I mean, if I tell you the truth, it won't make things worse.” She almost made that last statement into a question. It just might make things worse. But the job was going to go away anyway. Her dreams of a normal life were over.

He was watching her, his expression wary. But his arms were no longer crossed. If anything, he was a little too close to her. And, strangely, she didn't mind.

“What truth?” he said gently.

“I'm a witch,” she said. “A young witch. Well, maybe not that young.” And then she snorted. “Purple! You don't think they knew the poem, do you?”

“What poem?” He looked at her as if she were still speaking Old English.

“Nora's mother quotes it all the time. Something about old women wearing purple because it's their right to wear purple and to act eccentrically.” She shook her head. “Were they telling me that I'm old? Or was this the royal purple? Or was it simply a color they liked?”

“Who?” Michael asked.

“The Fates.”

“What?”

She shook her head. “Never mind. It's not important.”

“Emma, I'm not following any of this.”

“I know,” she said. “It's my fault.”

She stood and brushed off the purple skirt. In her brief moments in the past, she seemed to have acquired bits of hay on the front of it. She straightened her shoulders, looked Michael in the face, and pretended at dignity.

“I'm a witch,” she said again. “A young witch who just came into her powers. Unfortunately, I never bothered to learn how to control them. So everything that happened, everything you saw, I did. And I didn't mean any of it. I just don't know how to stop this from happening.”

He stared at her for a long moment. His frown had become a look of concentration, his blue eyes seeming to peer right through her own.

“I'd make some kind of sarcastic response,” he said, “but I'm half convinced. Maybe it's the mud on the shoes.”

“Or the fact that you lost all your furniture.”

He smiled. “I got it back.”

“You did?”

“You didn't know?”

She shook her head. “If it happened, it happened by accident. All of it. Including that little foray back in time.”

“You've done that before.”

“Not really,” she said.

“But your Old English is fluent.”

She was tired. “That's another story.”

“Emma—”

She held up a hand to silence him. “I'm sorry, Michael. For all of it. I'm even sorry for your suspicions. I'll buy you a new pair of shoes too, once I get all of this under control. But I just came into my powers this morning, and I'm afraid what will happen if I go to my classes today. Can you find someone to take my class? I'm in no condition to teach anyone anything.”

“I'll take it,” he said softly.

That didn't surprise her. Of course he would. That was what he had wanted all along.

“And not because I feel I should be teaching it,” he said quickly, as if he had heard her thought. (He hadn't, had he? Oh, that would be embarrassing!) “But because you need the assistance.”

Then he peered at her. Before she could stop him, he put a hand on her forehead. His touch sent a tingle through her. His palm was warm and smooth and dry. And comforting. “You don't look well.”

She blinked hard. She wasn't fighting tears, was she? She never cried. She hadn't even cried when she found out she had lost a thousand years of her life.

She wouldn't cry now just because she had found a life she loved and was going to lose that too.

She moved her head away from his hand.

“I'll be all right,” she said and left.

***

Wounded dignity. He'd never completely understood that phrase before.

Michael Found stood in front of Emma's desk, his hand still tingling from touching her skin. It had been so smooth and soft, and she had looked so sad.

It was her sadness that startled him the most.

From his encounter with her the day before—from the times he'd seen her interviewed—and even from her book, he had thought her a capable, no nonsense woman who never allowed anything to upset her. He had thought that she had chosen a time period that allowed itself a lot of interpretation and then had written her pretty little piece of fiction—all as a rational, calculated way of setting herself up in some major university somewhere, a place where she could be a celebrity with minimal effort and summers off.