Shades of Avalon (20 page)

“You’re doing it again,” she said, and I heard the smile in her soft voice.

“Where’s Mel?” I asked about our elder daughter.

“Gone already. Some major drama at the school newspaper.”

I grinned and slithered up behind Amanda, skimming my hands over her hips. She laughed and turned in my arms, planting a light kiss on my lips. “Megan flew out of here like her hair was on fire. You told her didn’t you?” Amanda accused, narrowing her eyes so tiny creases appeared at the corner.

Amanda tossed her dishtowel on the counter of our large kitchen. She always called this room the heart of our home. I supposed it was. There was a part of all of us in this room. I’d made the cherrywood cabinets and the long oval table surrounded by high backed chairs. Amanda decorated, spending years picking out just the right colors and the right fabric for the corner sofa that separated the family area. School reports and schedules covered the brushed chrome fridge, and lines had been etched into the frame of the pantry door—one for every year of the girls’ lives. Family photos covered the walls, along with merit award and other keepsakes.

“She beat it out of me.” I chuckled, pulling her closer.

Amanda leaned back and fixed me with mock disapproval. “Ben Pryor, you are hopeless at keeping secrets.”

I pressed forward, pouting my lips, and Amanda smiled, relaxing in my arms. Her delicate sunflower and vanilla scent surrounded both of us. She cupped my neck and drew me down to her height, brushing her mouth over mine. I shifted and dragged my lips over her jaw and down her neck, hot blood pulsing below my tongue as it swirled a light circle over her skin. My groan vibrated against her, and I felt both our heart rates picking up.

“Ben,” Amanda sighed breathlessly. “I’m late for a meeting.”

I hummed in acknowledgment and nibbled her earlobe as my hands cupped her ass.

She pushed me away, laughing, and her groomed eyebrows pulled together. The lines above her nose were deeper than they used to be. Her smile faded, and a look of confusion flittered across her expression.

“What is it?”

Amanda shook her head and retreated from my arms. “Nothing. I just got the strangest feeling I’d forgotten to tell you something.”

I snorted a laugh, plucking a piece of bacon from a plate on the counter. “And you say I’m showing my age.”

She smirked and swatted my ass. Amanda picked up her black trench coat from the back of one of the chairs. “I know you’re worried about Megan going to England alone, but Christopher will look out for her.”

I scowled thinking about my seventeen-year-old nephew with too much money and not half enough sense to go with it.

“You’re too hard on him. John and Triona raised a good boy. He adores Megan—the last thing he’d ever do is lead her astray.”

Amanda was right, despite my grumbling. I’d probably always been overprotective. I had to admit—I still held a slight grudge against my sister’s husband for keeping her in Europe all these years. I worried Megan liked it there a little too much, and I’d lose her too. Mel already planned to study in Scotland.

Amanda reached up on her toes and kissed my cheek, breaking into my thoughts. “Are you still meeting Jonathan later?” I nodded. “Good. Jennifer is going to pop over to catch up before they head back to Boston.”

She leaned in for another kiss, and I turned my face quickly, catching it with my lips instead and deepening it to something beyond a peck. Her soft lips molded to mine and parted, releasing a sweet breath. Tendrils of love glided outward from the center of my chest and wrapped every part of me. My tongue swept out to meet hers, and my fingers curled up into her hair. Amanda smiled against my mouth when my fingers strayed to the top pearly button on her blouse.

“What has gotten into you today?” She fumbled with my fingers, preventing me from getting any further with undressing her.

Amanda’s cheeks were flushed pink and glowing when she stepped back again, her hair disheveled. She glanced up from under her eyelashes, straightening her skirt. “Give me a rain check for later, okay?”

I adjusted my work pants and stepped closer. “Absolutely.”

Amanda blew me a kiss and grabbed her shoulder bag, placing a small umbrella inside though the rain had stopped. She went out the door with a final wave before I spotted her keys still out on the counter.

I snatched them up and flung the door open to dash after her. My breath caught in my throat, and my eyes peeled wide. Every muscle in my body seized as I teetered precariously on the edge of utter blackness. There was nothing there. Nothing at all. The outside world didn’t exist…

I woke up to an agonizing pain in my chest and a shock that almost toppled me out of bed. The sheets around me were soaked thorough, probably why Amanda had rolled away from me at some point and curled up on the opposite side of the massive bed. She mumbled something about corduroy but didn’t wake. I sat up, still panting, and wiped my hand down my drenched chest, overwhelmed with a sensation of heart-wrenching loss. Tears pricked my eyes as reality raced back. When I closed them, I saw the faces of my children and their friends, and Triona’s handsome son with her dark red hair and John’s brown eyes. I sucked in a choking sob, biting my knuckles to restrain the wail of grief threatening to tear from my lungs. How could this be?
How?

I slid from the bed, coiling up on the chilly wooden floor. The despair was relentless, and one side of my mind battled to accept it had all been a dream. Yet my heart and soul couldn’t be convinced. I had been there when my children were born, held them, and watched them grow. Those memories were as real as any in my mind. I couldn’t fight the waves of torment assaulting me. All I could do was lie there on the wooden floor and hope it would pass.

Eventually, as an angry tide receding from a shore, the pain eased. Like the coast, the waves left me beaten and bruised by the onslaught. It was nothing physical or measureable, but at the same time, the experience had changed me in a significant way. I smelled magic all over it.

After a blazing hot shower, I found Merlin in the library, a two story room with a mezzanine surrounded by a carved rail. I closed the door and false shelves allowed it to slip into invisibility, leaving a solid wall of aged leather volumes. I thought of Caleb, sparked by his notable absence from our gathering. What I knew of his personality, this room would be exactly the sort of place he’d feel at home. I imagined him sprawled on one of the long, studded leather couches in front of the stone hearth or pouring over his research papers at the desk in front of the diamond leaded windows. In the dream, there was no Caleb. There were no Guardians.

It was still bright out—I’d slept only minutes—but evening threatened over the horizon. Two figures holding swords circled each other down near the edge of the lake to the rear of the house. I recognized their outlines as Triona and John and observed them for a moment. The memory of their wedding and their son lingered in my heart and mind.

Triona had moved to London after school, just as she had planned. She’d met John and, without Caleb in the way, they eventually married. I needed answers. Satisfied they were engaged in a training exercise, I directed my attention back to Merlin sitting forward on one of the couches.

Archú lifted his head from where he lay on a woven rug by the empty hearth and let out a whiny noise, quickly settling back down. Regardless, I approached Merlin with caution. He wore fresh clothes, and his clean hair gleamed the color of mercury, smoothed away from his tanned and scarred face over his shoulders. There was no mistaking the return of his health, and his skin had filled out, giving him a more youthful appearance. In human years, I would have guessed him as late fifties, still the oldest looking Guardian I had ever encountered.

He didn’t seem to notice me at all, too distracted with a large globe on a mahogany stand. He spun the sphere with both hands, rocking back and forth, observing it until it slowed and eventually stopped. Then he spun it again.

“What did you do to me?” I demanded, standing over Merlin and casting the globe in shadow.

Archú’s ears twitched at my tone. Merlin, however, appeared completely unperturbed.

“I gave you a gift,” he said without lifting his head.

I flicked my neck to my shoulder with an audible crack and forced out an exasperated breath. Tension stiffened my muscles, an unmistakable and instinctual call to attack an enemy. “A gift, magic man? Is that what you call the torture you put me through? I don’t know—”

“No!” Merlin roared. The sound thundered unnaturally through the room. “You do not. You do not know anything!”

I recoiled from his cold blue eyes. One moment he was there on the couch, the next his minty breath blew across my face and spittle dampened my skin. He was several inches shorter, but it didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest.

Merlin glared, his enlarged pupils dancing over my shocked face. I’d been brought up to respect my elders. As much as I wanted to stamp the old coot out of existence, Carmel’s disapproving expression hovered in the back of my mind. Nurture kept nature in check. Still, fury swelled, a perfect storm of unhelpful emotion.

“Your confusion betrays your every decision, Benjamin Pryor, blood of Danu. It cripples you, makes you feeble. You and your
family
.” He snarled the words as though they tasted bitter on his tongue. “You have forgotten the old ways of our people.”

I stepped back, my nails biting into the palms of my hands. My scalp prickled, and hair stood on end down the length of my arm. “Was any of it real?” The sharp sting of loss bit into my chest.

Merlin’s lips pulled into a tight smile. He blinked, and for one horrifying instant I saw him disappearing again, morphing into a shell of a man before I gained closure. I battled the urge to grab him by the shoulders and shake answers from him. I wasn’t confident I could stop. He shrugged and walked away from me, spinning the globe as he passed.

“All of it.”

“How is that possible?”

“Time is a matter of perception, the future, the past, possibility…other realities, and we exist in almost all of them. Sometimes the same, sometimes different. The only way for most to make sense of it is to travel one path from start to finish with no knowledge of the others.” His hands sliced through the air in front of him, illustrating the beginning of life and the end—death.

Merlin shrugged noncommittally.

“But it wasn’t me,” I argued, scratching the base of my skull and wishing I had taken philosophy so I could unravel this lunacy. “I mean, it was me, but it wasn’t. I was human and for me to exist as I am, I would have to be a Guardian.”

His eyes rolled upward, condescending. “And yet you were not. Who can know why…dormant blood never awakened, destiny unfulfilled, or perhaps it was a dream within a dream. What does it matter?”

I slammed my fist into the palm of my other hand, pacing the room. “It matters because that’s my family, my children.”

Merlin laughed. “But you are a boy. You have no children. They don’t exist on the path you walk.”

“Then why bother showing me?”

“You wonder about that possibility, and the life you could have had. Now you do not have to wonder. You know there are other possibilities.”

I slumped on the couch and dropped my head into my hands when my vision blurred. Drowsy with emotion, I was scared to death I would never get a handle on the existence of magic in my life. It all seemed so simple when I discovered my mother was a Guardian, so exciting. I didn’t know much about Celtic legends, but I had imagined myself a god on Mount Olympus from the movies I watched as a kid. Something far removed from humans but able to walk among them at my choosing. I groaned. “I don’t understand.”

I shook my head because in a bizarre way, I could see how Merlin might truly believe he had given me a gift. Although this was one gift I wished came with a receipt.

“Do you know what will happen to us?” I asked seriously, looking up at him to gage his reaction.

“No,” he answered within a split second. No consideration of the question at all. “Only what could happen, and that I can’t share. We have all been thrown off course. We are a spinning coin, and I cannot say who will end up on top.” Merlin’s eyes glazed. He closed them languidly and swayed to unheard music. “We must wait and see.”

I still had many questions, perhaps more than when I entered the room. I wanted to trust the people around me, but obviously it was easier to trust some more than others. Caleb’s family wanted him back. John would do anything for Triona, and Emma would do anything for him. I would trust Amanda with my life. Merlin and Guinevere had no allegiance to any of us. Guinevere had her own agenda, and I hadn’t quite worked it out yet. Who knew what went through Merlin’s head. I had a feeling he would look out for himself primarily.

I cracked my knuckles and stood. “Just tell me one thing. No verbal flourish or linguistic gymnastics. Do you remember where the Stone is yet?”

Merlin smiled knowingly and tented his fingers under his chin. His gaze drifted toward the window, and he stared into space for a moment or two. “The Stone is near, but it has not yet achieved full potency. When the time comes, the Philosopher’s Stone will be ready.” He inhaled, puffed out his chest and returned to the globe. When Merlin sat down and began to rock again, our conversation was over.