The Magic's in the Music (Magic Series Book 5) (26 page)

Greta nodded, too stunned to do anything else.

Jane took a breath and got the same beatific look that Kee had just before she’d done…whatever she did. And the world went black—not the kind of black that you got in your bedroom at night, because Greta realized now that wasn’t really black at all. This wasn’t the black of a power outage, because you’d still have the ambient light of stars. This was total, isolating, no-light-has-ever-been kind of black.

She was just about to scream when the darkness vanished as though it had never been.

“I’m getting better at that,” Jane remarked as she turned back to her stove. “Used to be I’d douse the whole peninsula. I got just this room that time.” She smiled at Greta over her shoulder. “Didn’t even interfere with Kemble’s work in the office wing.”

“Oh, my, God,” Greta whispered.

“I know, right?” Kee said. “It must be pretty overwhelming if you aren’t used to it.”

“It’s all true,” Greta breathed.

“Yep.” Kee got out some sheet pans and started spreading out her eggplant slices.

“This is…awful.” That meant the Clan existed—and the danger. There really were arch villains in the world. What in the hell had she gotten herself into?

She only realized Jane had come to stand on the other side of the bar when Jane said, “Not all of it, Greta.”

Jane’s voice was so calm, so steady. It was like an anchor for Greta’s wild thoughts. Greta looked at her, certain all her worry and her pain was showing in her face.

“There’s the true love part,” Jane said, smiling. That smile came from somewhere deeply contented in Jane’s soul.

“True love?” Greta asked.

Kee stomped over to stand beside Jane. “You mean my oaf of a brother didn’t tell you about the true love?”

“He said we were meant for each other, genetically,” Greta said, uncertain. “And being parted would make us sick for a while.”

“Men.” Kee threw up her hands. “They just can’t use the L-word, can they? It’s more than that. He is your one, true, forever love, and you are his. That’s just how it works.”

“He said we were…partners.”

“Oh dear,” Jane said. “That makes it sound rather like a business relationship.”

“But you did get the bark-like-a-dog sex,” Kee smirked. “That’s another good part.”

“Kee!” Jane admonished. Greta felt herself go beet red.

“Lanyon knows that you are his destined love,” Jane assured her.

“He offered to leave.” Greta protested. “And by the way, I don’t even know him.” Had that come out like a wail?

“I know,” Jane said. “The way it’s happened to you is most unfortunate. And it’s never easy. He offered to leave because he’s as confused as you are. And he doesn’t like the idea of Destiny. It sounds so much like you have no choice.”

“Do I have a choice?”

Kee and Jane exchanged glances. It was Jane who took the assignment of responding. Greta was getting the feeling that difficult assignments always fell to Jane. “Yes. And no.” She sighed. “You can’t choose what happens to you, only how you respond to it, just like the rest of life. You two can part. The feelings will go away. Your power, whatever it is, will stay. But you won’t feel whole, I don’t think, ever in your life. It’s a heavy price to pay.”

“And Lan said the Clan would try to kill me, that I’d have to stay here, with you, give up my career, not that I’m sure I want to even be an actress, but still—to have no choice in the matter…”

Jane took one of her hands across the bar. Kee seemed to brighten at her confused speech. “The key is to take the matter in small bites,” Jane said. “It’s just too overwhelming to decide now, and you don’t have all the pieces yet.”

That was alarming. “What pieces?” With everything she’d heard so far, what worse could there be?

“You don’t know Lanyon,” Jane said quietly. She must have felt Greta stiffen. “I won’t tell you about him. That wouldn’t weigh with you. But you ought to know what you’re giving up before you decide to pay the price and leave him. He’s a good man, and you ought to get to know him. That way, when you choose, you’ll do it from a position of strength. You’re a strong person. I can tell. You’ll choose what’s right for you.”

“And we’ll stand by you, no matter what you choose,” Kee assured her. “You get the family too, though you don’t know us either. But if you want my dickhead brother to leave, I’ll personally kick him out for you.”

That was so reassuring.

“Now,” Jane continued, prosaically. “Do you think you could grate a pile of cheese while you’re getting used to the fact that you have a Destiny?”

*

Lan had felt
Greta out in the kitchen for some time now. The pull between them was palpable. And it was growing. The urge to run out there and stand next to her, touch the small of her back, coax her back to the bedroom…it was almost overwhelming.

Shit.
This was impossible. He had to get some distance, even if he didn’t leave entirely. Maybe he’d go over to the house Senior had built for Drew and Michael for a while.

He pulled on clean jeans and grabbed a denim shirt. He was about to leave when he realized he didn’t have any shoes on. Cursing, he pulled open the dresser drawer, flinging balled pairs of socks everywhere until he found some boot socks. He shoved his feet into his boots. But he couldn’t just run for the door. He was missing something. It was almost as if he was still naked. He stared around room. Was he losing it? His glance fell on the flute, leaning in the corner by the desk. Jane had put it back in his room after the birthday fiasco. He felt the tension unlock inside him, dissipate. Yeah. He needed music with him at all times, it seemed. He grabbed the flute. It felt so right in his hand. He’d just take the flute.

Pushing out in the hallway, he stopped. He couldn’t go out the front. They might see him from the kitchen. He wanted no more interrogation or advice today. He headed to the glass door down at the end of the Bay of Pigs, flung it open and turned right, away from the terrace and out to the driveway. He was practically running. He started across the circular drive.

“Shon?”

Lan stopped as though he’d run into a glass wall. He took a breath. Why in hell did that voice still have the power to stop him in his tracks? He stood there, shaking.

“A w-word?”

Lan turned slowly. His father was sitting in the small knot garden on the north side of the drive under a jacaranda tree. Lan was so not ready to have a conversation with Senior. “I gotta go,” he choked.

His father didn’t get up, of course. Instead, he said, “N-never figured you for g-gutlessh.”

Oh, that was priceless. So his father wanted to have a ‘talk’. Well, great. “Gutless?” He strode over to where Senior was seated on a wooden bench with a scrolled back. “I’m the only one with guts enough to tell you to go to hell with this Destiny crap.” His flute was almost like a club in his hand.

His father’s smile was lop-sided these days, but still plenty annoying. “Ish that what you’re d-doing?”

Was it? Hell, he’d agreed to try and work it out with Greta. Sort of. At least he’d explained the whole mess to her. And he was only going over to hide out for a while in Drew’s house.

That actually sounded bad.
Shit.
“Did it ever occur to any of you that I might not want to be pushed into an arranged marriage?”

“Arranged m-marriage?” His father looked puzzled.

“Well, practically.”

“You’re f-frightened.”

“Of the Clan? I’m the only one who has the guts to go out the front gate these days.” He folded his arms around the flute to keep himself under control.

Senior shook his head. “Falling in l-love w-with her, g-getting a p-power.”

“I’m going to do right by her, whatever that means,” he gritted out. “And I got a power. I can write music. Big fucking deal. You can now have elevator music any time you want.” There, he’d admitted he was never going to be what they all wanted him to be. Admitting that to Senior, more than anyone else, was like grabbing a knife by the blade.

“Where were you g-going?”

Lan deflated like a popped balloon. He knew very well that Senior had not changed the subject. His father had always been able to see right through him. Well, at least up until the attack. He glanced over to the house across the bluff. “I guess I just need some distance.” He liked to think that was all it was, that he wouldn’t have started running to Drew’s house and not stopped until he hit Hollywood, or maybe Wisconsin. But he wasn’t a hundred percent sure.

“Not what y-you n-need.”

“Yeah,” he whispered. “So, you gonna give me ‘the talk’?”

Senior shook his head. “T-too much effort.”

“I have a feeling you have some advice.” Lan heaved a breath and let it out.

“You w-want control. N-no one has that. But have the g-guts to think th-things will w-work out.”

Lan shook his head. “I hate to tell you, but that was a talk.” How strange that a man who had been made into a former shell of himself could speak with such optimism.

Senior managed a lopsided shrug. “Ab-breviated.” He looked thoughtful. “I l-like her. She’s had a hard l-life.”

“A spoiled pretty girl with too much money and too much attention?” Lan scoffed.

Senior raised his eyebrows and just nodded. “Ashk her.”

Senior knew things about her Lan didn’t. And Senior had told her he’d been attacked. They…they had a relationship, strange as it seemed. More than she had with Lan. He thought of Tris telling him to get to know what Greta’s favorite color was. They were all in this together. Lan stared at his boots. His father didn’t say anything else. Damn it. Lan would gut it out, because he owed Greta that, not because that was what his father wanted. He looked up the drive, lined with oleanders, toward the road he wasn’t taking north to Hollywood.

“I’ll give it a week.” Lan said it like a threat. “A week of hopeful optimism.” Yeah, like you could just turn it off and on.

Senior nodded. “Sit with m-me for a while.”

He hadn’t slurred his ‘s.’ Huh. That was the first time Lan had heard that. He threw himself down into the opposite corner of the bench, clutching the flute. “No lectures,” he warned.

“D-deal. W-watch the sunset. M-maybe play?”

Wow. Two non-slurred ‘s’s. But more than that, his father was making sense. He wasn’t drifting in and out of the conversation. He was totally aware. And he wasn’t angry. When had Senior gotten better? Not that Lan had been around to notice.

“Elevator music, coming up.”

They both turned a little in their seats. The sun was turning into an orange step-pyramid as it sank below the steel-blue horizon of the sea. Lan felt himself slowly unclenching. He picked up the flute and fitted the mouthpiece to his lips. The music was in him. He just had to let it out, let it speak for him. The music floated out, plaintive, tentative.

His father was still in there. Lan had thought he’d become pretty much a vegetable after that head wound and coma. But he wasn’t. In fact, maybe he was a little more understanding than he would have been before. It struck Lanyon that if anyone knew about fear, about having no control over your life, even about not being enough to do the right thing or face the future, it might just be his father. He chanced a glance Senior’s way. The notes spiraled up into the evening air. He expected his father to be watching him, a look of disapproval or something on his face. But he was just watching the sunset, its ruddy glow bathing his face.

Lan turned back to the sunset himself. The music took on a more determined, tense feeling. A week. He could do a week.

‡

First Lan had
to get through dinner. Greta spent the meal staring at her plate and blushing, while the family pointedly ignored her distress in order not to increase it. It was hell knowing the whole lot of them knew exactly what Lan and Greta had been doing, knew they were irrevocably linked by their DNA, and knew the pair hardly knew each other. Lan felt like a heel, because he was tongue-tied and didn’t know how to help. He sat there like a lump, eating Eggplant Parmigiana. A lump with a huge erection under his napkin. How was he going to try to get to know Greta if he was painfully erect the whole time? He could smell that she was aroused as well. His senses were almost overwhelmed by the whole intensity thing, but he could pick that scent out of all the others drifting in the room like some kind of damn bloodhound. Senior was trying to give him encouraging looks. Tris, on his right, elbowed him in the ribs a couple of times and jerked his head toward Greta. His mother was bestirring herself as she hadn’t in ages to be attentive to their guest. The whole experience was excruciating. The air felt oppressive. He elbowed Tris back, ignored Senior and gulped some of the Chianti in his glass. He couldn’t concentrate on the conversations swirling around him. Hell, he could hardly breathe. He needed to get out of here. Greta was getting fidgety in her seat, too.