Totally Spellbound by Kristine Grayson Page A

straightforward to
me,” Robin said. “Sometimes when people learn about magic, they
learn about it slowly. It takes a while for their new reality to
filter in. But you don’t have time for a slow dawning. You’re
driving the Fates around as if you’re their personal chauffeur. You
have to know how dangerous that is.”
    “You’ve used the word dangerous twice
now about them,” Megan said. “What do you mean?”
    He shook his head and sighed. “Where
to begin?”
    She was familiar with
this. It almost felt like a therapy session, only she didn’t want
to analyze this man. Still, she took those callused fingers in her
own.
    “Begin wherever you like,” she
said.
     

 
     
Fourteen
     
    Suddenly he was back there, the place
he never really wanted to be ever again.
    The day that Marian died.
    Only he wasn’t really there. He was
standing outside it, like an observer of his own life, and this
other woman was beside him, holding his hand.
    They stood in the kitchen,
but they could see through the doorway into the bedroom. He had
forgotten how small and mean the rooms were. The cottage was made
of thatch, and smelled like old hay mixed with sickness and
spoiling meat. Two wooden bowls sat on the table, both filled with
an oily stew that no one had touched.
    He remembered making it, just like he
remembered trying to choke it down, even when Marian hadn’t been
able to eat any at all. She had wrinkled her nose and turned
away.
    She looked so tiny on their bed, her
white hair strewn across the blanket he had folded up to form a
kind of pillow. The mattress was stuffed with hay as well and had
been very uncomfortable. To this day, he remembered how it felt to
roll over at night, only to have a sharp straw poke him in the
side.
    Her breath was weak and rattly, her
eyes rheumy, her hand clinging to his. He stared at himself,
looking only a few years younger than he did now, and so
devastated. Had he really looked that broken? She wasn’t even dead
yet, but he knew she was going to die.
    The Fates had already
ruled that he could do nothing about it. They had reversed the
spell he had cast, the spell that had brought her back to her
younger, healthier self. And they had erased her memory of those
few days. As far as she had known, she had been in that bed for
weeks, dying by inches, her young-looking husband still at her
side.
    She had liked his magic. She had found
his forever youth intriguing. Unlike the woman who currently clung
to his hand, Marian had always believed the world had a touch of
magic. She had been happy to learn that Robin held a piece of it,
even at the end, when it couldn’t save her.
    “Your mother?” Megan asked
him.
    Rob glanced at her. Her eyes were
lined with tears. She understood the scene before her without him
even explaining it—all except one piece.
    “My wife,” he said. “My mortal
wife.”
    How he hated that word “mortal.”
Technically, he was mortal too, but not in the same fragile way
that Marian had been.
    Megan said nothing else. She just
observed as his younger self bathed Marian’s face.
    Marian had reached up and touched his
younger self’s face. He still remembered how her hand felt—like the
finest crystal, about to break with a single touch—and cold, oh so
very cold.
    “You did what you could,” she
whispered. “Take comfort in that.”
    Instead of watching, Rob turned away.
He didn’t need to see this again. It was burned in his
brain.
    His younger self had
shaken his head, and she had smiled at him. Her smile had never
changed. It was always fond and warm and so full of
love.
    “I’ll love you forever,” she
whispered.
    And then she died.
    He made a small sound, tried to step
away from the old memory, and nearly tripped over a newspaper.
Somehow he had spelled himself and Megan back to her
condo.
    His magic hadn’t been this
out of control since he had first discovered he had it, in the
middle of that damn Crusade, in a land that it seemed like