ThenowMaggie found herself in was not her own, not at all. It washers. It was all hers.
She saw the world through unsteady toddler eyes, the warm light of a parent picking her up in their arms. Maggie must have felt so loved, so safe, when she was this small, too, but knowing it was nothing like feeling it again. Before she could grow too comfortable in the sensation, though, it was gone.
Then everything was tinged with an adolescent rage that Maggie hadn’t felt in years but that she put on like an old, worn coat. It felt good. Righteous. It felt strangely like home.
Then she felt the echoes of a dim bar, of a hand on her thigh, whispered words in her ear, and a fluttering, fleeting sense of possibility before it crashed into heartbreak.
This went on and on and on—through first love and first grief, to the expansive love for children and the sweet love for grandchildren, the sudden loneliness of a dying spouse, and more and more and more. The threads of love and loss and joy and anger andsomuch love tangled in a confusing, comforting knot.
It was overwhelming. It was not hers. And she couldn’t escape it.
She tried to draw herself out of it. She tried to reach for the parts of her that she knew were Maggie. She grasped for the threads, but they were brittle and fraying, and she remembered that thought she’d had in 309.Will I ever see the world again?It was no longer a small voice, instead growing bigger and bigger until she was sure she was lost in this unsettled woman’s memories.
And then there were hands on hers, lacing finger throughfinger, tethering Maggie to someone, to somewhere. There was the vague notion of her name being called through the ether. She was tugged forward intorealand out of the unsettled’s memories, but then she fell back into a childhood memory of red-hot embarrassment.
A whispered voice in her ear. Was it real or not real? Strong arms gripped her back and beneath her legs. She was being lifted, like a child off to bed, her head snug against something soft and hard at once. There was a beat, beat, beat beneath her ear, and it filled her with a feeling so much like home that she nestled into it. This was real, she was certain. She heard a light sound, like a gasp, a quickening of the beat, and then Maggie again knew nothing.
When Maggie woke, she was curled on her fainting couch. The lights were low, only Taliesin’s desk lamp glowed, and she had something thrown over her to keep her warm. Breathing in, she smelled Taliesin’s cologne, and she felt the tattered fabric of his tweed jacket, threadbare and soft. It made her think of the soft beat of his heart, going fast at her touch, at the way she’d nestled in his arms as he cradled her head against him. Not just now, in the pall. But once before, too.
And it was then, finally, that the Beltane spell faded away. Maggie remembered everything.
Chapter Twenty
Maggie gagged, and then her office trash can was in her hands. She gagged again, with no time to feel even an ounce of shame or embarrassment, but nothing came up. It was just an aching nausea that roiled through her. She set the trash can down and leaned her head against the back of her couch, gratefully gulping the water that Taliesin handed her and the ginger candy he must have dug through her desk drawer to find.
She could barely see stars twinkling through a gap in the clouds in the tiny window above Taliesin’s desk. In the distance, there was a hollow, haunting cry of a banshee woken by the night. What time was it? How long had she been out?
Her head ached. Her limbs felt like jelly. And she was besieged by memories. Not of her time in the pall, but of that night—his hand at the small of her back, her head against his chest, their legs intertwined as they danced, his tongue…No. She needed to think of something else.
He stood in that same place she’d been just a couple of weeks ago, leaning against her desk, arms crossed, but instead of anger in his expression, it was so much worry it hurt to look at him straight on. She tried to look at his hands instead of his face, his knuckles nearly white as he gripped his arms, and rememberedthe way they’d grazed her chin, tilting her face toward him so he could kiss her beneath the stars. She groaned.
“The wards?” she managed to ask.
He let out a breath like a huff. “Every ward was repaired. There’s no danger of the pall escaping tonight.” His voice was full of something unsaid, and there was a twitch in his jaw.
Gods below. The stranger on Beltane, the man she’d been dreaming about, was no stranger at all. He was Arthur Taliesin. She looked away from him, studying a loose thread in his tweed jacket.
The spiderwebs the spell had cast over her memory faded as if blown away on a breeze, and she wasn’t sure how she’d never known it. The very jacket she still clutched around her shoulders was the one he’d worn that night; the smell that had been nagging at her for weeks was the one she’d breathed in as they danced. The little brother who had made fun of the mystery stranger was none other than Rory, the one she’d already heard so much about.Arthur.
Every part of her had yearned for him, she just hadn’t known it. The inexplicable draw to him she’d felt since that very first moment in the stairwell was because her body remembered what her mind couldn’t. Every moment of frustration that had slowly melted into desire now made sense.
She looked up at him again, at the scrunch of worry in his forehead, the tension that held his jaw rigid, the bend of his fingers against his forearm, as if he was holding himself back from reaching for her. Did he know? And if he didn’t…could she tell him?
If he did know, he had decided not to tell her. Perhaps because now that he knew, he couldn’t stand the idea that it had been her.Not when he looks at me like that. Perhaps, instead, he had decided it wasn’t worth risking his job over a kiss.
Another wave of nausea hit her, and she couldn’t be sure if it was from the lingering pall sickness or the reality of this discovery, but she held it down. “How long have I been out?” She thought it was a safe question, but Arthur began to chew on his bottom lip.
“A couple hours. Edna and Nurse Whitney have already been here and fussed over you,” he explained, gesturing to an assortment of bottles on her cart. A bottle of antiemetic and a sleep aid, though she wasn’t sure what that was for. “Nurse Whitney promised you will be fine, but you should take the dropper of antiemetic now.”
“What is that one for?” she asked, pointing to the dropper bottle of sleep aid.
Arthur swallowed and his throat bobbed. “The nightmares.”
Maggie always thought the expression about blood running cold was hyperbolic, but now she could safely say that it wasn’t. Something about the tone of Arthur’s voice, the haunted look in his eyes, made her shiver. “Nightmares?” she whispered.
He nodded. “The sleep aid helps. Don’t be stubborn and refuse to take it.”
“Stubborn like you?” she guessed.
