face come alive for her again, just this little movement, and the way his eyes scanned the room and then stopped on her.
She herself hardly noticed what she’d taken hastily from her suitcase. Something red, something soft, something loose and short that barely touched her knees. Michael had put the pearls around her neck, a small, neat necklace. It had surprised her. She’d been so dazed then.
Ash’s servants had packed up everything else.
“I didn’t know whether or not you wanted us to get Samuel a bulldog,” the young one, Leslie, had said several times, very distressed that she’d displeased the boss.
“It doesn’t matter,” Ash had said finally, hearing her, perhaps for the first time. “In New York we will get Samuel bulldogs. He can keep his bulldogs in the garden on the roof. Do you know, Leslie, there are dogs who live on the rooftops of New York who have never, never been to the street below?”
What must she think he is? Rowan had wondered. What do they all think he is? Is it to his advantage that he is blindingly rich? Or blindingly handsome?
“But I wanted a bulldog tonight,” the little man had fussed until he’d passed out again, “and I want it now.”
The little man had on first sight terrified Rowan. What was that, witch genes? Witch knowledge? Or was it the physician in her, horrified by the folds of flesh slowly covering his entire face? He was like a great variegated and living piece of stone. What if a surgeon’s scalpel removed those folds, revealing eyes, a full, correctly shaped mouth, the bones under the cheeks, the chin? What would his life become?
“Mayfair witches,” he’d said when he saw them, Rowan and Michael.
“Does everyone in this part of the world know us?” Michael had asked testily. “And does our reputation always go before us? When I get home, I mean to read up on witchcraft, to study it in earnest.”
“Very good idea,” Ash had said. “With your powers, you can do many things.”
Michael had laughed. They liked each other, these two. She could see it. They shared certain attitudes. Yuri had been so frenzied, shattered, so young.
All the way back from the grim confrontation at Stuart Gordon’s tower, Michael had told them the long story related to him by Lasher, of a life lived in the 1500s, and of Lasher’s strange account of earlier memories, of his sense that he had lived even before that. There had been nothing clinical in the telling—rather a ragged outpouring of the tale which he and Aaron alone had known. He had told it once before to Rowan, yes, and she remembered it more as a series of images and catastrophes than words.
To have heard it again in the black limousine, flying over the miles towards London, was to see it again and in greater detail. Lasher the priest, Lasher the saint, Lasher the martyr, and then, a hundred years later, the beginning of Lasher the witch’s familiar, the invisible voice in the dark, a force of wind lashing the fields of wheat, and the leaves from the trees.
“Voice from the glen,” the little man had said in London, jabbing his thumb to point at Michael.
Was it? She wondered. She knew the glen, she would never forget it, forget being Lasher’s prisoner, being dragged up through the ruins of the castle, never forget the moments when Lasher had “recalled” everything, when the new flesh had reclaimed his mind and severed it from whatever true knowledge a ghost can possess.
Michael had never been there. Maybe someday they would, together, visit that place.
Ash had told Samuel to go to sleep as they drove for the airport. The little man had drunk another pint of whiskey, with a lot of grunting and groaning and occasional belching, and had been comatose when carried onto the plane.
Now they were flying over the Arctic.
She closed and opened her eyes. The cabin shimmered.
“I would never hurt this child Mona,” said Ash suddenly, startling her, waking her more fully. He was watching Michael with quiet eyes.
Michael took a final drag off the stubby little cigarette, and crushed it out in the big glass tray so that it became a hideous little worm. His fingers looked large, powerful, dusted with dark hair.
“I know you wouldn’t,” said Michael. “But I don’t understand it all. How can I? Yuri was so frightened.”
“That was my fault. Stupidity. This is why we have to talk to each other, we three. There are other reasons