A Little Magic by Nora Roberts Read Free Book Online

solstice. Tomorrow night.” She picked up her wine again, but only turned the stem around and around in her fingers.
    “Cutting it close, aren’t you?”
    “You didn’t want to hear me—and I waited too long. It was pride. I was wanting you to call to me, just once.” Defeated by her own heart, she closed her eyes. “Like some foolish teenage girl waiting by the phone for her boy to call her. You’d hurt me when you turned away from me.” Her eyes opened again, pinned him with the sharp edge of her un happiness. “Why did you turn from me, Calin? Why did you stop answering, stop hearing?”
    He couldn’t deny it. He was here, and so was she. He’d been pulled to her, and no matter how he struggled to refuse it, he could remember—the soft voice, the plea in it. And those eyes, so incredibly blue, with that same deep hurt glowing in them.
    It was, he realized, accept this or accept insanity. “Because I didn’t want to answer, and I didn’t want to be here.” His voice roughened as he shoved the bowl aside. “I wanted to be normal.”
    “So you rejected me, and the gift you’d been given, for what you see as normality?”
    “Do you know what it’s like to be different, to be odd?” he tossed back furiously. Then he hissed through his teeth. “I suppose you do,” he muttered. “But I hated it, hated seeing how it worried my parents.”
    “It wasn’t meant to be a burden but a joy. It was part of her, part of me that was passed to you, Calin, that small gift of sight. To protect you, not to threaten.”
    “I didn’t want it!” He shoved back from the table. “Where are my rights in all this? Where’s my choice?”
    She wanted to weep for him, for the small boy who hadn’t understood that his uniqueness had been a loving gift. And for the man who would reject it still. “The choice has always been yours.”
    “Fine. I don’t want any of this.”
    “And me, Calin.” She rose as well, slowly, pride in the set of her shoulders, the set of her head. “Do you not want me as well?”
    “No.” It was a lie, and it burned on his tongue. “I don’t want you.”
    He heard the laughter, a nasty buzz on the air. Hecate hissed, arched her back, then growled out a warning. Cal saw fear leap into Bryna’s eyes even as she whirled and flung herself in front of him like a shield.
    “No!” Her voice boomed, power and authority. “You are not welcome here. You have no right here.”
    The shadows in the doorway swirled, coalesced, formed into a man. He wore sorcerer’s black, piped with silver, on a slender frame. A face as handsome as a fairy-tale prince was framed with golden hair and accented with eyes as black as midnight.
    “Bryna, your time is short.” His voice was smooth, laced with dark amusement. “There is no need for this war between us. I offer you such power, such a world. You’ve only to take my hand, accept.”
    “Do you think I would? That a thousand years, or ten thousand, would change my heart? Doomed you are, Alasdair, and the choice was your own.”
    “The wait’s nearly at an end.” Alasdair lifted a hand, and thunder crashed overhead like swords meeting. “Send him away and I will allow it. My word to you, Bryna. Send him away and he goes unharmed by me. If he stays, his end will be as it was before, and I will have you, Bryna, unbound or in chains. That choice is your own.”
    She lifted a hand, and light glinted off her ring of carved silver. “Come into my circle now, Alasdair.” Her lips curved in a sultry dare, though her heart was pounding in terror, for she was not ready to meet him power to power. “Do you risk it?”
    His lips thinned in a sneer, his dark eyes glittering with malicious promise. “On the solstice, Bryna.” His gaze flickered to Cal, amusement shining dark. “You, warrior, remember death.”
    There was pain, bright and sharp and sudden, stabbing into Cal’s belly. It burned through him like acid, cutting off his breath, weakening his