The Hex Witch of Seldom (23 page)

Bobbi turned fiercely on her, speaking out of the hunger within. “Look at me,” she demanded. “I'm your daughter. I'm Bobbi! Look at me! See me the way I really am!”

Her mother answered this outburst with a blank stare. “Well, fiddle-dee-dee!” Chantilly declared. “Don't be in a pet, Melly. I was just asking.”

Shane had come to a standstill, swinging his head to look at her. But instead of meeting his gaze Bobbi strode up to her mother's knee. “Bend down,” she ordered.

Chantilly tossed her head and did not obey. For the moment, clenching her teeth, Bobbi played her assigned part.

“Bend down here, silly. Your hat ribbon's coming undone.”

“Oh!” Pleased, as Scarlett O'Hara was always pleased by attention of any sort, Chantilly leaned over to be ministered to. Bobbi grabbed her mother's head between her hands, glared into the dark eyes so much like her own, pressed her forehead hard against her mother's forehead, so petal-soft of skin, so white. Her mother's startled hands came up and gripped her wrists as if to tear her hands away. Bobbi spoke quickly.

“You are Chantilly Lou Buige Yandro,” she commanded. “I am Bobbi Lee Yandro. I am your daughter. See me!” And with all her strength she willed it.

And beating down her strength, battering it and cutting through it, she felt—a will far stronger than her own. A madwoman's single-minded, steely resolve to make the world what she wanted it to be. Bobbi felt—felt—

She pulled away, broke free of Chantilly's grip on her wrists, ran a few steps in her heavy, soaking boots before she slowed down and trudged on again. Shane walked at her side. She felt his glance but would not look at him.

“She's twice as strong as me,” she said, very low. “She almost—she almost turned me into Melanie.”

Shane's head swung toward her. She looked away, as if looking around her for danger, though she could see nothing. Tears blurred her eyes, stupid, stinging tears. And in her heart burned the angry, hurting, hungry feeling, the same as—what she couldn't get past, what was keeping her away from her grandpap—

“Yankees!” Chantilly exclaimed as they approached the crest of a hill.

“Ask me if I care,” Bobbi muttered. Nevertheless, her head came up to see the police cruiser.

Then it was hide again, duck behind the rise of land, head toward the corncrib standing at the field's corner. All afternoon it was duck, dodge, hide. The “Yankee” sightings grew fewer and farther away; Bobbi began to hope that she and Chantilly and Shane had left the focus of the search behind. But still, the day was nothing but stalk, skulk, hide. The land had softened from corn stubble into pasture growing rank with spring grass; her mother, without preamble, had slipped down off Shane's back to patter along at Bobbi's side. Bobbi felt hunger knotting her insides so that she could scarcely lift her heavy feet. The sun was sinking low. No rest, had to press on, but soon darkness would help them hide—

Shane cantered up the next hill and stood at the very top of it, head flung high, looking all around him defiantly, like a stallion surveying his domain. Bobbi gawked. Craziness in the air, she thought. Shane had lost his mind.

Chantilly scampered up the slope and perched on a single boulder there, a rock as big as a mill wheel and nearly as circular. She arranged her full skirt, soaked in streams, draggled with cow dung, to half cover it with mud-splattered green folds. Scarlett O'Hara had settled on the ottoman at Twelve Oaks. Green was Scarlett O'Hara's favorite color. It brought out the green of her sly, jealous eyes. “Well,” said Chantilly brightly, “here we are.”

Bobbi came trudging up at the best speed she could manage. “Is that true?” she demanded of Shane. “Is this really it?” A sweep of pasture, a rounded hill with a rock on top—

Shane turned his intense gaze on her, but a smoky-thin voice from the vicinity of her right hand answered, startling her. Kabilde.

“This is the Hub,” the walking stick said in its dispassionate way. “No one else has eyes to notice, but we of the Circle know. The mound was shaped by ancient people, the yellow-skinned people who came even before the red men. They raised the earthwork over their honored dead; the dust of their bones lies underneath. Millennia have passed, and the mound has weathered away to the shape of a breast, but we of the circle remember. The rock is even older than the bones, older than the shape of this continent. The people who made the mound have carved their runes on it. No muck-minded farmer would ever know, but we know. Under moonlight, they still show.”

Come here who will, Shane's stance atop the hill seemed to say. This is the Hub, the ancient, sacred place, and I will defend it.

Bobbi said to her mother, “Would you get up, please? I want to look.”

With a flounce and a swirl of polyester, Chantilly flitted away, and Bobbi looked at the stone. She could see no runes, no carving of any sort, but through her planted feet she began to sense a feeling, an understanding, wordless and bone deep. This was an old place. The Hidden Circle haunted the old places. The stone topped the mound like the nipple on a pap, breast of earth; and earth was the oldest thing of all.

Shane stood deeply breathing through widened nostrils. Bobbi stood beside him and looked around at farmland, distant wooded mountains, sky. White clouds were beginning to glow saffron, lavender, rose. Bobbi stood by the black horse and watched the sunset. There would be time enough to eat, afterward.… The sun blazed in chariot spokes through shifting clouds, then sank lower, spun free, the solo dancer in a kaleidoscope sky, turning into a circle of scarlet.

Chantilly Lou Yandro walked lightly up the hill, out of the dance in the west.

The madwoman had been playing around the base of the mound, sometimes sitting like a lark in the tall grass, sometimes busy with her hands, sometimes jumping up to swirl off to another place. Because she wanted something from her mother that she was not getting and never would, Bobbi had not paid much attention until Chantilly came up the hill wearing the sun like a broad-brimmed hat. Chantilly had made herself a garland of violets to wear against the whiteness of her neck. In the wild curls of her dark hair she had placed the white blossoms of phlox, and she carried sprays and clusters of it in her arms, white and purple and wine red, and for the first time Bobbi noticed how weirdly beautiful she was in her long dress, her waist small, her breasts half-bared above the flowers. Chantilly's face, rapt in madness, was as soft and unlined as that of a child. She had washed it in the dew on the lush pasture grass, and it rose white and innocent above the flowers, her lips lustrous red, her eyes dark and shining. She swayed as she walked, and Bobbi saw hoops swaying, silk flounces edged in velvet, green morocco slippers.

Scarlett O'Hara came, red lips pouting and slightly parted as if waiting for a kiss, long eyelashes wisping down and then up again so that glowing, liquid eyes could gaze. Straight at the black horse she gazed. Straight into eyes of wild-larkspur blue.

Scarlett said, “Rhett.”

Like black silk Shane's hide lustered. Sweat of fear made it shine.

Bobbi saw the fear-sweat slick his neck and chest and shoulders all in a moment, saw him stiffen and start to tremble as she had seen him tremble once before, when he was trapped in a dark stall, terrified of castration—terrified. Shane was as deeply afraid of this woman as he had been of the scalpel. The dark rider, panicked by a slender girl-woman … “No,” Bobbi whispered, seeing the form behind the form, seeing too late what she had done. This was the one who had so often betrayed him. This was the woman who had tamed and befooled and betrayed him, all his lives. It was she who had sent him away to the wastelands, a wild horse. It was she who could coax and cajole a wild horse to her and lay her hands on its forelock.

One hand outstretched, Kabilde in the other, Bobbi started toward Shane to lend him her strength. She would place her hand on his neck to comfort him. She would drive her mother away with the staff—

Kabilde writhed and twisted in her grip. The snake's head darted up at her face, its small eyes hard and glittering. Bobbi jumped back, nearly dropping the pow-wow staff. The snake faced her steadily, its small tongue flickering, wordlessly warning her away from Shane. What was to be, was to be. The cards had told it on Witchie's table. Witchie had battled Bissel so that it could happen.

“Rhett,” Scarlett O'Hara breathed, “you have come back to me.”

Shane stood quivering, his eyes wild with terror. Why did he not run, if he was so terribly afraid? But he was the dark rider. Honor held him where he stood. He would not run.

Aglow in the scarlet sunset light, with white flowers caught like souls in the tangle of her hair, Bobbi's mother faced Shane on the hilltop. Blossoms drifted down from her breast, her arms. She lifted her hands to either side of Shane's black head, pressed them there, gazed into his staring eyes and kissed him.

There was a harsh, clanging sound, like the clash of some brutal gong. The sky darkened, for all in a moment the sun had sunk. And the dark rider changed under the madwoman's hands. No horse stood there. Shane stood there, Shane the man, or the man Bobbi called Shane, shaken and trembling. In black silk shirt and black breeches he stood there—the clothes were as much a part of him, of what he was, as a black stallion's black hide was of it. But four moon-crescents of iron had fallen clanging to the ground. On his neck, at the open collar of the shirt, showed odd white markings, a brand or scar. His face—the look on his face tugged at Bobbi's heart. A man doomed to love … He stepped back from the full-skirted woman standing before him, but swept off his broad-brimmed black hat in the presence of a lady.

“You are mistaken, ma'am,” he said. His deep voice shook only slightly.

Scarlett O'Hara did not step toward him, for in her way she was as proud as a Yandro. White blossoms stirred around her head as she lifted it. “Why, Rhett Butler,” she declared, “don't be a fool. I know you.”

Seeing him standing there, bareheaded, with his blue eyes shadowed, his face pale and his dark hair lifting like a mustang's mane in the evening breeze, with his proud chest heaving beneath the black silk and the new moon rising over his left shoulder, Bobbi felt a sudden hot, dark surge. She wanted him. He was so wild, so beautiful; she wanted to possess him, to own him, to keep him always. He was hers; she had known him first! The weird wooden snake swaying in front of her face could no longer stop her. She cast Kabilde aside, hearing the sharp hiss as the staff struck the ground, ignoring the sound—let the staff do what it wanted. She doubted it would hurt her. In three quick strides she was at the dark rider's side.

“His name is Shane!” she challenged her mother, challenged Chantilly who was prettier than Bobbi would ever be, who looked younger than her own daughter, Chantilly standing there so willowy with white blossoms in her hair while Bobbi clumped about in mud-caked boots and jeans. Chantilly who would never give her daughter what a mother should, what Bobbi needed and craved.

“Shane!” Bobbi repeated. Her mother had flowers in her hair, but she could not have him.

“Melly,” Chantilly snapped, “you keep out of it!”

A white form flitted near her in the dusk, frantic, shouting her name. Her father wanted to speak with her. She ignored him. She heard nothing he said. He might have been hammering at the doors of her mind and she would not have heard, for a low, intense voice, the voice which had always thrilled her, was speaking to her.

Shane said, “Bobbi, she's right. You'd best stay clear of it.”

Bobbi turned and looked at the dark rider in the dusk, and for all his toughness she knew. Something in her knew his soul. And though his gaze on her did not waver, she saw the shadow that moved near his mouth, and she knew he was wishing himself dead. The woman who had brought him back from mustang form was worse, more fearsome, more devastating than the castrating scalpel to him. The knife would have taken his manhood, but she would take his soul, and his life, and his mind.

“I'm not going to let it happen,” Bobbi said to him, knowing that he knew what she meant. With all his lifetimes he knew.

“There's no help for it.”

Bobbi's mother stood by silently, smiling to herself, dimpling like a courting girl with a secret.

But there was help; it was so simple! Bobbi said, “But I can offer you loyalty. I would keep faith with you until I die. I would never toy with you and tame you and betray you. I would love you.”

She felt an odd stillness for a moment, as if the entire world had stopped in its circling. And she saw the sudden flickering of something heartbroken in his eyes, and saw that maybe she had not done good after all. The hope hurt him worse than the despair.

He said, “You deserve better.”

Would love him? What had she meant, saying she would love him? She loved him then, there, at that moment. Her heart turned to water, just looking at him. And whatever he had said about deserving made no sense. She drew a breath to tell him—

He took one quick step and touched her mouth to stop her. It was the first time she had ever felt his touch, Shane, the man. Fingers on her lips like a kiss, then gone.

“Bobbi. No. Please. If I let myself love you—” His voice trembled so badly that he stopped and sucked breath, trying to steady himself. His chest sobbed as if he were weeping.

Standing by, watching, listening, the madwoman softly laughed.

Bobbi felt the sound chill her, then shut it out of her mind, left it on the air somewhere along with the voice of her father's importuning ghost. She did not look at her mother. Nor did Shane. But his voice, when he spoke again, was calm. Worse than calm. Dull, dead, like the voice of a doomed man.

“If I let myself love you, it would destroy—what you are. It would make you—just like the others.”

How could that be? He was the one who would give her what her mother could not, what no one else would, what she had always wanted, what would still her yearnings and make her always happy: love forever, love immortal and eternal. And what she could give him in return … She looked at him, seeing his shadowed face strong-lined and pale in the light of a horseshoe moon. Knowing with all her heart that she was the one who could put the blue fire back in his eyes.