The Warlock's Daughter by Jennifer Blake Page A

blooms. How fresh they looked, as if just cut. She didn't remember her aunt bringing them. Who had?
    She gave the man before her an inquiring frown. At that moment, a luna moth of enormous size fluttered from the ranks of tombs. Pale gold, ethereal, it drifted about their heads, then settled on Renfrey's broad, black-clad shoulder like a gentle, moon-dusted ghost.
    And abruptly Carita's every sense was exquisitely alive.
    How delightful the night was; she had hardly noticed before. Moonlight glinting on the dark and shiny leaves of the evergreen magnolia just beyond where they stood gave them the look of black crystal. The marble mausoleums and memorials that surrounded them were smoothly graceful and touched with peace, while the planes and angles of their shadows were velvet-edged and inviting.
    She could smell the delicious scent of the roses on her mother's tomb, and from some nearby garden sweet olive drenched the air with its honeyed seduction. She identified the mustiness of decay on the withering seed pods of the magnolia, caught the dry herbal mustiness of the lantana where it grew against a headstone. The scents of parched grass and old bones hovered near.
    In the mausoleum just over there, a mouse scuffled, making a nest. At the wrought iron fence, a stray cat, gray with night, weaved in and out between the palings; he had not yet detected the mouse.
    The wind on her face had currents of coolness and warmth, of spice and sweetness, as if some portions of it had traveled from the snow-capped Andes while others had last drifted through nutmeg groves or over the heated sugar cane fields of a Caribbean isle. The brush of it against her skin was a languid, inciting caress. The breeze sighed through the row of cedars not far away and clattered in the magnolia leaves. It tinkled a wind chime left hanging in a distant marble tomb's doorway, and the faint, minor sound was like the passing of a soul.
    A wisp of pale hair, turned platinum-and-gilt by moonlight, loosened from her chignon and blew around her face in shining filaments. As Carita caught it back with one hand, holding it, she wondered if her eyes were as night-black as those of the man who watched her.
    “Your mother,” he said softly, “how did she die?”
    “How?” she answered almost at random in her distraction. “She was killed by an excess of loving.”
    “You mean she met death in childbirth?” He tilted his head as he waited for her answer. At the movement, the great luna moth lifted from his cape and meandered into the darkness. Without its soft presence, they were incredibly alone.
    “So many do, don't they ?” she answered. “They are here, lying all around us so quiet and still, many with the tiny babe at their side or enclosed within their bones. But no. My mother was loved too well. Her heart could not sustain it; it just—stopped.”
    “Is there such a thing as too much love?”
    Renfrey's words had the sound of quiet contemplation. Hearing it, Carita's tingling senses expanded still further. It seemed, as she looked into the fathomless depths of his gaze, that she knew him. She had intimate knowledge of his body: the powerful bands of muscle that encased it, the strong skeleton beneath, the heart that beat so fiercely inside. And knowing him, she ached for his touch as she might for food after an eternity of fasting.
    On a quick-drawn breath, she said, “My Aunt Berthe , my mother's older sister, certainly thinks so. She claims my mother was too frail in body and spirit for physical closeness. She says my father knew it would be so, must have guessed in the beginning that his passions were too strong, his needs too demanding. Therefore he killed her.”
    “And you believe it?”
    She faced him squarely. “I have no reason to doubt it.”
    He was silent while the blowing hem of his cape brushed the diamond-glitter of dust from his boots. He set the ferrule of his cane on the toe of one and rested both hands on the silver handle. At