Time's Convert Read online

  “I do?” Phoebe stopped worrying about what she was supposed to do long enough to thoroughly enjoy what Marcus was actually doing with his mouth and tongue. She gasped.

  Marcus looked up at her with the wicked expression that only she saw. “Yes. Which is completely impossible, because you were perfect before. So how could you be more perfect now?”

  “Do I—taste—different?” Phoebe asked, her fingers threaded through his hair. She gave it a little tug.

  “I’ll have to do more research to be sure,” Marcus said, giving her a grin before delving into her once more.

  Phoebe discovered that, like most things in life, vampires had no need to rush when it came to pleasure. She could expand her being into every moment of their lovemaking, unconcerned about the time, never worried if she was taking too long or if it was her turn to please Marcus.

  Time just—stopped. There was no then, no soon, only a bone-satisfying, endless now.

  Every nerve in her body was tingling, seconds or minutes or hours later, when Marcus had finished reacquainting himself with her body and Phoebe had explored his with the enhanced touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight that she now possessed. She had never imagined she could feel so deeply, or be so completely joined with another human being.

  When Phoebe was moments away from climax, Marcus rolled them over so that Phoebe was balanced atop him. He was still inside her. Gently, Marcus cupped her face in his hands. He searched her face as though he was looking for something. When he found what he sought, Marcus drew her mouth toward his breast.

  Phoebe picked up a scent—elusive, mysterious. It was unlike anything she had ever smelled before.

  Marcus moved, slowly. Phoebe moaned as that maddening, alluring scent grew stronger. He put his hands on her hips, holding her tight to him, increasing the friction between them.

  Phoebe felt her body begin to spiral toward completion. Her cheek was resting on Marcus’s chest, and she heard his heart beat. Once.

  Phoebe bit into Marcus’s flesh, and her mouth was flooded with the scent-taste of heaven—of the man she loved and would always love. His blood sang within her, the notes echoed in his heart’s slow cadence.

  Evermore.

  Marcus’s thoughts and feelings coursed through her veins like quicksilver, a flash of light and fire that brought a kaleidoscope of images along with it. There were too many for Phoebe to acknowledge never mind absorb. It would take her centuries to understand the tales that Marcus’s blood told.

  Evermore, Marcus’s heart sang.

  But there was one constant in the endless changing barrage of information: Phoebe herself. Her voice, as Marcus heard it. Her eyes, as Marcus saw them. Her touch, as Marcus felt it.

  Phoebe heard her own heart answer his, the harmony perfect.

  Evermore.

  Phoebe lifted her head and looked into Marcus’s eyes, knowing that he would see himself reflected in hers.

  Evermore.

  37

  A Fence Against the World

  13 AUGUST

  “My God, that’s a griffin!” Chris Roberts stood in the doorway to the kitchen in New Haven, holding a birthday cake and staring at Apollo.

  “Yes, he is,” I said, taking a tray of roasted vegetables from the oven. “He’s called Apollo.”

  “Does he bite?” Chris asked.

  “He does, but I have some of Sarah’s Peace Water in case he gets anxious.” The bottle in my pocket was filled with layers of different-colored blue liquids. I took it out and gave it a shake. “Come, Apollo.”

  Apollo obediently bounded over.

  “Good boy.” I pulled the stopper on the bottle and dabbed a bit of liquid on the griffin’s forehead and its breastbone.

  Ardwinna stalked by with her bone. She gave Chris a sniff, then settled down to gnaw on it.

  “And what the hell is that?” Chris demanded.

  “A dog. She’s my birthday present from Matthew—a Scottish deerhound. Her name is Ardwinna.”

  “Ard—whatta? Willa?” Chris shook his head and studied the gangly puppy, who was all legs and eyes at the moment with tufts of gray hair sticking out all over her. “What’s wrong with her? She looks like she’s starving.”

  “Hello, Chris. I see you’ve met Ardwinna and Apollo.” Matthew had Philip by the hand. The moment Philip saw Chris, he began to dance around him, babbling a mile a minute. Every third word was intelligible. Based on those I understood, he was telling Chris about his summer.

  “Blocks. Granny. Boat. Marcus,” Philip said, reeling off the high points while he hopped in place. “Jack. Griff’n. Gammer. Aggie.”

  “Deerhounds are supposed to look that way,” I said, trying to answer Chris’s question. “And don’t you dare give her a nickname. Ardwinna is perfect, just as she is.”

  Ardwinna looked up from her bone when her name was mentioned, and thumped her tail before returning her attention to her treat.

  “Chris!” Becca bellowed, barreling through the house like a Tasmanian devil. She flung herself at Chris’s knees.

  “Whoa. Easy there. Hello, Becca. Did you miss me?”

  “Yes.” Becca was squeezing Chris so tightly I was afraid she might cut off his circulation.

  “Me, too.” Philip bounced up and down like an energetic tennis ball. Chris high-fived him, which pleased my son to no end.

  Matthew divested Chris of the cake, which made him an easy target for more of Becca’s attention.

  “Up!” Becca demanded, holding her arms in the air so Chris could do her bidding.

  “Please,” Matthew said automatically, reaching for the bottle of wine on the table.

  “Pleeeeaaaassseee,” Becca said in a wheedling tone.

  I was going to go stark raving mad if she didn’t stop doing that. Before I could say anything, though, Matthew kissed me.

  “Let’s settle for exaggerated courtesy tonight,” Matthew said when he was through. “Beer, Chris?”

  “Sounds good.” Chris looked around at our new house. “Nice place. A bit gloomy, though. You could paint the woodwork, brighten it up a bit.”

  “We’d have to ask our landlord first. It belongs to Marcus,” I said. “He thought it would be a good place for the twins, now that they’re bigger.”

  Since Apollo arrived, it had become clear that our growing family would not fit into my old place on Court Street. We needed a backyard—not to mention better laundry facilities. Marcus had insisted we use his sprawling mansion near campus while we looked for a place that was a little farther away from the hustle and bustle of New Haven, somewhere the children and animals could run. It was not precisely our style. Marcus had bought it in the nineteenth century when formality had been in fashion. There was carved wood everywhere you looked, and more downstairs reception rooms than I knew what to do with, but it was fine for now.

  “Miriam hates this house, you know.” Chris’s lips curved up at the mention of Phoebe’s maker. The precise nature of their relationship was something that Matthew and I speculated about endlessly.

  “She doesn’t have to live here, then,” I said tartly, feeling a bit defensive on behalf of our new home.

  “True. If she does come back to the lab, Miriam can bunk with me. I’ve got plenty of room.” Chris took a sip of beer.

  I looked at my husband in triumph. Matthew owed me ten dollars and a foot massage. I planned on collecting it as soon as Chris left.

  “Has anyone seen the box with the cutlery in it? I’m sure I labeled it.” I rummaged around in the piles by the sink.

  Chris reached into the box nearest to him and produced a spoon. “Ta-da!”

  “Yay you! Magic!” Philip bounced up and down.

  “No, sport, just an old Boy Scout trick: open boxes, look in boxes, find stuff. Simple.” Chris handed Philip his spoon and looked at Matthew and me. “Isn�
�t he a bit young to know that word?”

  “We no longer think so,” I said, stirring some bits of raw meat into Philip’s beet puree.

  “Short of spellbinding, there is no way to keep the twins away from magic, or magic away from the twins,” Matthew explained. “Philip and Becca don’t fully understand what magic is—yet—or the responsibilities that come with it, but they will. In time.”

  “Those children will be spellbound over my dead body,” Chris said roughly. “And I’m one of their godparents, so you can take that as a serious threat.”

  “Only Baldwin thought it was a good idea,” I assured him.

  “That guy has got to learn to relax,” Chris said. “Now that I’m a knight, and have to talk to him occasionally, I’ve learned he has no life outside of what he thinks is his duty to his father’s memory.”

  “We talked a lot about fathers and sons this summer,” I said. “And mothers and daughters, too. In the end, even Baldwin came around on the twins’ spellbinding. As for the magic, well, story time is really fun at our house.” I wiggled my fingers in the air in an imitation of how humans thought witches worked their magic.

  “You mean—you’re doing magic in front of them?” Chris looked shocked. Then he smiled. “Cool. So is the griffin yours? Did you conjure him up for the children to play with?”

  “No, he belongs to Philip.” I looked at my son with pride. “He seems to be an early bloomer, magic-wise. And a promising witch, too.”

  “And how did you get Apollo here?” Chris said, concerned only with the practicalities, not the bigger question of how a mythological creature came to be living in New Haven. “Does he have his own passport?”

  “It turns out you can’t send a griffin on commercial aircraft,” I said, indignant. “I checked both cat and bird on the form, and they just returned it to me and told me to correct my mistakes.”

  “Sore subject,” Matthew murmured to Chris, who nodded in sympathy.

  “We could get Ardwinna onto a plane, and she’s twice his size. I don’t see why we couldn’t just smuggle him on board in a dog carrier,” I grumbled.

  “Because he’s a griffin?” Chris said. I glared at him. “Just a suggestion.”

  “I would have used a disguising spell, obviously.” I lifted Philip into his booster seat and delivered the beets and beef to him. He tucked into his dinner with enthusiasm. Becca wanted only blood and water, so I let her have it in a sippy cup on the floor. She sat next to Ardwinna to drink it, watching the dog chew her bone.

  “Obviously.” Chris grinned.

  “I’ll have you know Apollo makes a convincing Labrador retriever,” I said. “He’s been a good boy in the dog park, when we’ve taken him with Ardwinna.”

  Chris choked on his beer, then quickly recovered.

  “I imagine he’s got good hang time, what with his wingspan. He might like a game of Frisbee.” As usual, Chris took the idiosyncracies of our family in stride. “I’d be happy to play with him, if you’re too busy.”

  Matthew took a platter of steaks out of the fridge. He kissed me as he passed by, this time on the nape of my neck. “I’m headed outside to grill these. How do you like your steak, Chris?”

  “Just walk it through a warm room, my friend,” Chris replied.

  “Good man,” Matthew said. “My sentiments exactly.”

  “Walk a bit more slowly through that warm room with mine,” I reminded him.

  “Savage.” Matthew grinned.

  “So Phoebe and Marcus made it to the big day,” Chris said.

  “Their official reunion was three days ago,” I said. “Though of course they had already seen each other.”

  “Sounds like things got a bit complicated for a while, what with her father’s illness,” Chris commented.

  “We were all sure it would work out,” I replied.

  “You two seem good,” Chris said, gesturing with his beer in Matthew’s direction.

  “On balance, it was a lovely summer,” I said, thinking back over all that had happened. “No work got done, of course.”

  “No, it never does,” Chris said with a laugh.

  “But otherwise, it was perfect.” To my surprise, I meant it.

  “And you’re happy,” Chris observed. “Which makes me happy.”

  “Yeah,” I said, looking around me at the chaos of unpacked boxes and pureed beets, children and animals, stacks of unopened mail that had been collecting all summer, books and laptops, toys that squeaked and toys that didn’t. “I really am.”

  That evening, after Chris left and the children were put to bed, Matthew and I sat out on the wide porch that wrapped around the corner of the house and overlooked the fenced garden. The sky was filled with stars, and the night air held a welcome note of coolness to balance out the heat of the day.

  “It feels so protected here,” I said, glancing over the yard. “Our own private paradise, hidden away from the world, where nothing bad can happen.”

  The slanting moonlight glanced off Matthew’s features, silvering his hair and adding lines and shadows to his face. For a moment—just one moment—I imagined him an old man, and me an old woman, holding hands on a late summer evening and remembering when our children slept safely inside and love filled every corner of our lives.

  “I know it can’t stay this way,” I said, thinking back over the events of the past summer. “We can’t stay in the garden forever.”

  “No. And the only true fence against the world and all its dangers is a thorough knowledge of it,” Matthew said as we rocked in silence, together.

  38

  One Hundred

  20 AUGUST

  Marcus drove through the center of Hadley, along the village green that preserved the town’s colonial layout. Stately houses with carved doorways clustered around the leafy space with an attitude of determined persistence.

  He swung the car onto a road that led west. Marcus slowed slightly as they passed a graveyard, then pulled up in front of a small, wooden house. It was far more modest than those in the center of town, with no extensions or additions to alter the original footprint: two rooms downstairs and two rooms upstairs arranged around a central chimney made of brick. The house’s façade sparkled with casement windows on the ground and first floor, and Phoebe adjusted her glasses to lessen their glare. There was a single stone step leading up to the door. Outside, a small garden in the front was filled with sunflowers that stood out against the white painted clapboards like polka dots. Like the house, the white picket fence had been freshly painted, and the wood was in surprisingly good condition. An old-fashioned, sprawling rosebush filled the space under the windows on one side of the door, and a tall shrub with dark green, heart-shaped leaves was on the other. Fields surrounded the house in every direction, and two ramshackle barns added a romantic note.

  “It’s beautiful.” Phoebe turned to Marcus. “Is it how you remember?”

  “The fence wasn’t that sturdy when we lived here, that’s for sure.” Marcus put the car in park and turned off the ignition. He looked uncertain and vulnerable. “Matthew’s been busy.”

  Phoebe reached over and took her mate’s hand.

  “Do you want to get out?” Phoebe asked quietly. “If not, we can always keep driving, and stay somewhere else.”

  It wouldn’t be surprising if Marcus wanted to wait a bit longer. Returning to the home of his childhood was a major step.

  “It’s time.” Marcus opened his door and came around to open hers. Phoebe fished around in her purse and found her mobile. She took a picture of the house and sent it to Diana, as she had promised.

  Phoebe held tight to Marcus’s hand as they walked through the garden gate. Marcus closed it securely behind them. Phoebe frowned.

  “Habit,” Marcus explained with a smile. “To keep the Kelloggs’ hog out of Ma’s garden.”

 
Phoebe caught him in her arms when he returned. She kissed him. They stood, arms locked around each other, noses touching. Marcus took a deep breath.

  “Show me our house,” Phoebe said, kissing him again.

  Marcus led her down the short, gravel path to the stone threshold. It was rough-hewn and uneven, a massive piece of rock that was weatherworn and had a dip in the center from the tread of hundreds of feet. The door had a split in the top panel, and its dark red paint was peeling. Phoebe scratched at it, and the paint underneath was the same color, as was the paint beneath that.

  “It’s as though time stood still, and everything is just as I left it,” Marcus commented. “Except the lock, of course. Mr. Security strikes again.”

  When they turned the modern brass key in the substantial mechanism and pushed the door open, the air that met them smelled old and stale. There was a touch of damp, too, and a slight scent of mold.

  Phoebe searched for a light switch. To her surprise, she couldn’t find one.

  “I don’t think there’s any electric,” Marcus said. “Matthew refused to wire Pickering Place until about twenty years ago.”

  Phoebe’s eyes adjusted to the dim light coming through the ancient casement windows. Slowly, the house’s interior came into focus.

  There was dust everywhere—on the wide pine floorboards, on the chamfered summer beam that spanned the width of the house, on the shallow sills that held the diamond panes on the casement windows, on the round newel post that punctuated the end of the banister.

  “Christ.” Marcus sounded shaky. “I half expect my mother came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron, to see if I was hungry.”

  They walked together through the four rooms of Marcus’s childhood. First the kitchen, with thickly boarded walls that ran horizontally around the room. They were painted with a mustardy yellow paint that had turned black around the fireplace where Catherine Chauncey had cooked meals for her family. A long hook was all that remained of the iron equipment that once would have filled the brick enclosure—the trivets and griddles and deep pots. The beams that held up the rooms above were exposed, and cobwebs clung to the corners. There were a few pegs driven into the walls, and a rickety chair sat in the corner. A brighter yellow patch on the wall indicated where there had once stood a cupboard.