“But why trust us?” asked Michael. “Why befriend us at all? You’re a busy man, some sort of billionaire, obviously.”
“Ah, well, we have that in common then, too, don’t we?” said Ash, earnestly. Rowan smiled.
It was a fascinating study in contrasts, the deep-voiced man with the flashing blue eyes and the dark, almost bushy eyebrows; and the tall one, so beguilingly slender, with graceful movements of the wrist that made you almost dizzy. Two exquisite brands of masculinity, both bound up with perfect proportions and fierce personality, and both men—as big men often do—seemed to luxuriate in a great self-confidence and inner calm.
She looked at the ceiling. In her exhaustion, things were distorted. Her eyes were dry and she would have to sleep soon, simply have to, but she couldn’t now. Not now.
Ash spoke again.
“You have a tale to tell which no one can hear but me,” said Ash. “And I want to hear it. And I have a tale to tell that I will tell only to you. Is it that you don’t want my confidence? That you don’t want my friendship or ever, possibly, my love?”
Michael considered this. “I think I want all that, since you ask,” said Michael, with a little shrug and laugh. “Since you ask.”
“Gotcha,” said Ash softly.
Michael laughed again, just a low little rumble. “But you know, don’t you, that I killed Lasher? Yuri told you this. You hold this against me, that I killed one of you?”
“He was not one of me,” said Ash, smiling kindly. The light glinted on the white streak coming from his left temple. A man of thirty, perhaps, with elegant gray streaks, a sort of boy genius of the corporate world, he must have seemed, prematurely rich, prematurely gray. Centuries old, infinitely patient.
It gave her a small warm burst of pride, suddenly, that she had killed Gordon. Not him.
She had done it. It was the first time in all her sad life that she had enjoyed using the power, condemning a man to death with her will, destroying the tissues inside him, and she had confirmed what she had always suspected, that if she really wanted to do it, if she really cooperated with it, rather than fighting this power, it could work awfully fast.
“I want to tell you things,” Ash said. “I want you to know them, the story of what happened and how we came to the glen. Not now, we’re all too tired, surely. But I want to tell you.”
“Yeah,” said Michael, “and I want to know.” He was reaching into his pocket, pulling the pack halfway up and then shaking loose the cigarette. “I want to know all about you, of course. I want to study the book, if you still mean to let us do that, see the book.”
“All that is possible,” said Ash, with an easy gesture, one hand resting on his knee. “You are a veritable tribe of witches. We are close, you and I. Oh, it isn’t terribly complicated, really. I have learned to live with a profound loneliness. I forget about it for years and years. Then it surfaces, the desire to be placed in context by somebody else. The desire to be known, understood, evaluated morally by a sophisticated mind. That was always the lure of the Talamasca, from the beginning, that I could go there and confide in my scholars, that we would talk late into the night. It’s lured many another secretive nonhuman. I’m not the only one.”
“Well, that’s what all of us need, isn’t it?” asked Michael, glancing at Rowan. There passed another one of those silent, secret moments, rather like an invisible kiss.
She nodded.
“Yes,” Ash agreed. “Human beings very seldom survive without that kind of exchange, communication. Love. And our breed was such a loving breed. It took so long for us to come to understand aggression. We always seem like children when humans first meet us, but we’re not children. It’s a different kind of mildness. There’s a stubbornness in it, a desire to be gratified at once, and for things to remain simple.”
He fell silent. Then he asked, very sincerely, “What really troubles you? Why did you both hesitate when I asked you to come with me to New York? What went through your minds?”
“Killing Lasher,” said Michael. “It was a matter of survival with me, no more, no less. There was one witness, one man present who could understand and forgive, if a forgiving witness is required. And that man’s