The Magic Circle (48 page)

Wolfgang looked at me with what seemed concern—and another expression I couldn’t quite decipher. It was true I was dizzy from the wallops of cognac mixed with the megadose of natural endorphins that had been released by nearly half an hour of slow, grinding pain. I leaned back against the cushions and tried to pull myself together. Wolfgang reached over and twirled a strand of my hair in his fingertips meditatively. After a moment he spoke, as if he’d arrived at some private conclusion.

“Ariel, I know this is probably the wrong time, but I don’t know when the right time will be. If not now, perhaps never.…” He stopped and shut his eyes for a moment. “My god, I don’t know how to do this at all. Give me a sip of that cognac.”

He leaned across me, plucked my half-f glass from the table, and tossed down a swallow. Then he set the glass down, turned back to me with those fathomless turquoise eyes, and said,

“The first time I saw you in the Technical Science Annex at the nuclear site—did you hear the word I said as I passed?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t quite,” I told him, though I vividly recalled what I’d
hoped
he’d said—“enchanting” or “exquisite”—a far cry from what I looked or felt like right now. But I was hardly expecting what came next.

“What I said was ‘ecstasy.’ At that moment, I really thought of abandoning the entire mission. And I assure you, there are those who’d prefer me to do so, even now. My reaction to you has been so—I’m not really sure how to say it—so immediate. I suppose you can see now where this awkward confession is proceeding.”

He stopped, for I’d abruptly stood up, completely flustered. Here I was—a girl who balked at dipping her skis into deep powder—being invited once more to leap willy-nilly from yet another dangerous height. I could feel the panic surging, even as I struggled against it. Fuzzy I might be, but it didn’t take Albert Einstein to figure out what I wanted Wolfgang to do right now—and what he certainly seemed to want as well.

I tried to be rational about it. What other man would bring me halfway around the world, and invite me home for the night to his very own castle? What other man would look at me, as Wolfgang was looking at me right now—in my dishevelled state, grubby and battered from my travels and travails—and even
want
me? What other man exuded that heady aroma of pine and citron and leather that made me want to drink him in and drown? What in God’s name was my problem, anyway?

But deep within, of course, I knew exactly what it was.

Wolfgang stood to face me without touching me. He looked at me with those X-ray eyes that affected me with the same results kryptonite had on Superman: weak knees and an empty mind. Our lips were inches apart.

Without another word, he folded me into his arms and buried his hands in my hair. My lips touched his; then his mouth was on mine as if he were drinking my soul, washing everything from my mind but the warmth of his lips moving down my throat. The robe slipped from my shoulders and fell in a pool around my bare feet. His teeth grazed my shoulder, his hands moved over my body where he’d slid my underthings away. I couldn’t breathe.

I pulled back. “I’m frightened,” I whispered.

Taking me by the wrist, Wolfgang kissed my palm. “And you think I’m not?” he asked, regarding me seriously. “But there’s only one thing we need to remember, Ariel:
Don’t look back.
”

Don’t look back—the single rule the gods gave Orpheus before he plunged into the underworld to rescue his great love, Eurydice, I thought with a chill.

“I’m not looking back at anything,” I lied. Then I lowered my eyes—too late.

“Oh, yes, you are, my love,” said Wolfgang, tilting my face up to his. “You’re looking at a shadow that has stood between us ever since the moment we met—the shadow of your late cousin, Sam. But after tonight is over, I hope you will never—not even once—look back again.”

Okay, call me crazy. Indeed, that night I myself thought I might’ve gone more than a little mad. Wolfgang had opened a different kind of wound from the one patched together by those stitches in my arm, a wound that ran deep and bled silently within, so I couldn’t be sure exactly how much damage had been done. This unhealed trauma, which I’d managed thus far to hide even from myself, was the fact that I might be more than a little in love with my cousin Sam. So what did the situation make me? A pretty confused girl nuke.

But those conflicting emotions playing war games in my chest were at least partially obliterated that night—along with everything else—by something Wolfgang unlocked that I’d never known or even imagined existed within me. When our two bodies met and melted together, in the heat of passion, there arose in me a mixture of pain and yearning and desire that worked in my veins like a drug, with each new taste only making my craving for him increase. We fed each other’s fires with a hungry obsession until every muscle in my body quivered in exhaustion.

At last Wolfgang stretched motionless across me where we lay on the soft Turkish rug before the fire, his face pressed against my stomach. Our skin was drenched in moisture, and the flickering glow of the coals burnished his tautly muscled body as if it had been dipped in bronze. I slid my hand along the curve of his back from his shoulders to his waist, and he shuddered.

“Please, Ariel!” He lifted his shaggy head to grin at me. “You’d better be sure what you’re doing, my dear, if you begin that again. You’re a sorceress who’s put some sort of spell over me.”

“You’re the one with the magic wand,” I said, laughing back.

Wolfgang sat up on his haunches and pulled me to an upright position. The fire had died down to embers. Despite our recent exertions, the room was growing cool.

“Someone has to use some sense for a moment,” Wolfgang told me, drawing the bathrobe around my shoulders again. “You need something to relax you.”

“Whatever you were just doing seemed to be working fine,” I assured him.

Wolfgang shook his head and smiled. He pulled me to my feet, scooped his arms beneath me, and carried me up to my room and through to the bathroom, where he set me down again and drew us a hot bath. He splashed in plenty of mineral salts, then he fetched us fresh clothes and laid them out near the tub. As we sank into the aromatic waters, Wolfgang soaked a thick sea sponge and drizzled warm water over my shoulders and breasts.

“You’re the most desirable thing I’ve ever seen,” he said, kissing my shoulder from behind. “But I think we should be practical. It’s only just after nine, right now. Are you very hungry?”

“Voracious,” I said, suddenly realizing it for the first time.

So after we bathed and toweled off, we threw on the warm clothes and walked down through the vineyards to the little restaurant he’d spoken of, overlooking the river. When we got there, another fire was cheerily burning in the hearth.

We had hot soup and a salad of fresh greens along with a
raclette
—that dish of melted cheese with its rich oaky flavor and steamed potatoes and tartly pickled gherkins. We dipped it from the plate with bits of crusty bread, licked the pickle juice from each other’s fingers, and washed everything down with an excellent dry Riesling.

When we hiked back up though the vineyards it was just after ten o’clock. Mist was rising from the river; snatches of it slipped, wraithlike, between the rows of clipped-back vinestocks that were just getting their new shoots. Though the air was tinged with a chill, the earth smelled fresh and new with that special dank night scent that heralds the coming of spring. Wolfgang pulled off one of my gloves and took my bare hand in his, and I felt the heat move through me again that I felt whenever he touched me. He smiled down at me as we walked, but just at that moment a fog bank scudded across the moon, hurling us into darkness.

I thought for an instant I heard the sound of a branch cracking, a footstep behind us not far down the hill. I felt a sudden cold pang of fear, though I couldn’t think why. I stopped in my tracks, drew my hand from his, and listened. Who could be coming this way so late at night?

Wolfgang’s hand pressed my shoulder: he’d heard it, too. “Wait here, and don’t move,” he said quietly. “I’ll be right back.”

Don’t
move?
I was in panic—but he’d been swallowed into the darkness.

I crouched between two grape stocks and focused my ears on the night sounds as Sam had taught me. For instance, just now I could identify the separate calls of a dozen or more insects against the background of the slowly lapping waters of the river wafting from the valley floor. But beneath these sounds of nature I was able to pick out the whispers of two distinct male voices. I caught only fragments—someone said the word “she” and then I heard “tomorrow.”

Just as my eyes had fully dilated in the dark, the scudding fog blew off and the hillside was drenched in silvery moonlight. About twenty yards below where I crouched, two men stood huddled together between the rows of vine. One was clearly Wolfgang; when I stood and he saw me, he raised his arm and waved, then turned away from the other figure and started back up the hill toward me. I glanced at the other man. His crumpled hat cast a shadow on his face so I couldn’t make it out in the moonlight, but when he turned back downhill to depart, there was something about the way his slightly shorter, wirier body moved away.…

Just then Wolfgang reached me. Tossing his arms around me, he lifted me off my feet and swung me in a circle. Then he set me down and kissed me full on the lips.

“If you could see yourself all in silver light like this,” he told me. “You’re so incredibly beautiful—I can’t believe you’re real, and that you’re mine.”

“Who was that man who was following us?” I asked. “He looked familiar.”

“Oh, not at all, it was only my groundskeeper, Hans,” he told me. “He works in the next village during the day, and he looks in here each night when he comes back. Often, like tonight, it’s rather late. But just now when he returned, someone told him they’d seen lights on earlier, up here at the castle. He was coming to check everything before he went to bed. I suppose I’d neglected to tell him I would be home, and he certainly isn’t used to finding houseguests here.”

Wolfgang looked down at me and tossed his arm over my shoulder as we started up the hill once more. “And now, my dear little houseguest,” he added, squeezing me inside the circle of his arm, “I believe it’s time for us to go to bed as well—although not necessarily to sleep.”

But sleep, at long last, we did—though not until well after midnight—among piles of fluffy goosedown comforters in Wolfgang’s bed, high at the top of the tower, beneath that vast tinseled canopy of stars. This one-night odyssey of tempestuous passion had certainly cleared my brain out—not to mention my pores. I was finally at peace despite the fact that I had no idea what the morning, much less the rest of my life, might bring.

Wolfgang lay exhausted in the pillows, as well he might, one arm tossed diagonally across my rib cage, his hand caressing a lock of my hair that rested on my shoulder, as he drifted off into a seemingly untroubled sleep. I lay on my back and looked at the midnight sky spangled with stars. I saw the constellation Orion just overhead, Dacian’s “home of the Romani” in the sky, with those three bright stars at the center of the hourglass: Kaspar, Balthasar, and Melchior.

The last thing I recall was gazing up into the sky at the enormous serpent of light that Sam said the ancients believed was created by milk spurting from the breasts of the primal goddess Rhea: the Milky Way. I recalled the first time I’d stayed up all night to see it—the night of Sam’s
tiwa-titmas
, so many years ago. And then, unconsciously, I slipped back once more into the dream.…

It was well past midnight, but not yet dawn. Sam and I had maintained our vigil most of the night, keeping the fire stirred and fed as we waited for the totem spirits. This last hour we had remained very still, sitting crosslegged on the ground side by side, just our fingertips touching, hoping that before the night was over Sam would finally have the vision he’d waited for, over and over, these past five years. The moon was low on the western horizon and the embers of our fire were merely a glow.

And then I heard it. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed like the sound of breathing, and very nearby. I tensed, but Sam pressed my fingertips, warning me to stay still. I held my breath. Now it seemed even closer—just behind my ear—a rough, labored sound, followed by the warm, heady scent of something powerfully feral. An instant later, there was a flicker at the periphery of my eye. I kept my gaze frozen straight ahead, afraid to move even my lashes though my heart was beating wildly. When the blur of movement solidified within my field of vision, I nearly fainted from shock: it was a full-grown cougar—a mountain lion!—only a few feet away from me.

Sam pressed my hand harder to be sure I didn’t move, but I was too rigid with fear to try. Even if I wanted to get to my feet, I wasn’t sure my legs would carry me—or what I should do if they could. The cat moved across the circle in slow motion, gliding soundlessly except for that even, guttural breathing, almost a purr. Then it stopped beside the dying fire and slowly, gracefully turned to look directly at me.

Just then, a dozen things seemed to happen all at once. There was a loud crashing in the brush at the far side of the circle. The cougar looked quickly over its shoulder toward the sound and hesitated. As Sam gripped my fingers, a dark shadow suddenly crashed through the underbrush and stumbled into the circle: it was a baby bear cub!

The cougar, snorting heavily, headed toward it. Suddenly, from the brush below, an enormous female bear catapulted after the small one into the open circle. With one circular swipe of her paw, she batted her cub behind her and reared on her hind legs—an enormous silhouette drowning out the moon. The astonished cougar whisked sideways, dropped over the rim of the hill, and was swallowed into the darkened forest. Sam and I sat frozen as the mother bear slowly came down from her hind legs and moved to the rim of our dying campfire. She sniffed a few times at my small backpack, and with her paws rummaged through it until she found my apple. She took it in her mouth, paced back, and gave it to her baby. Then with her nose she nudged him ahead of her, back down into the thick part of the wood.