The Warlock's Daughter Read online

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Originally published by Avon Books

  Copyright © 1994 by Patricia Maxwell

  Second edition by Steel Magnolia Press, 2011

  ~ CHAPTER 1 ~

  Carita Grey was not afraid of ghosts or goblins or any other creature of darkness, real or imagined. That was why she was always given the evening errands, such as taking the vicious boxer dog belonging to the widowed aunt with whom she lived for his walk before bedtime or going for the doctor when there was illness in the house. It was why she was out tonight, collecting the flower vase left behind after the decoration of the cemetery for All Saints' Day. It was also the reason she failed to retreat when she saw the stranger sitting on the raised family tomb.

  The gentleman was not particularly threatening. He was, in fact, immensely polite, rising to his feet with lithe grace, sweeping off his high silk hat, executing his bow with all the polish of a courtier before a queen. Nor was there anything to distress her in the way he looked: his handsome features and tall, broad form were too pleasing, if anything. Still, there was something about him as he stood there in the light of the rising moon with the white marble sepulchers of New Orleans' City of the Dead gleaming around him that set alarm bells clanging in her mind. That was even before he spoke.

  “What kept you, chère?” he said. “I've been waiting for hours.”

  Carita felt the rich tone of his voice, with its shading of familiarity and wry humor, vibrate deep inside her. It set off a rush of fierce longing that expanded, crowding out thought, heating her heart, weighting her lower body while her mind swam with the euphoric intoxication. The sensation was like nothing she had ever known, a consuming flame of purest concupiscence. Startled, unbelieving, she was defenseless against it.

  The man's rigorously sculpted features softened. He transferred his hat to the same hand which held his cane, then reached out to her. As he moved forward, his long cape billowed to expose the red silk lining inside the dark folds. It made him look, for an instant, like a hawk swooping down on its prey.

  “No!” she said on a quick gasp. Shuddering at the effort, she stepped backward beyond any possibility of physical contact.

  He stopped and let his hand drop to his side. A waiting stillness settled over him while he regarded her with distracted care, as if listening to her panicked breathing, absorbing her reluctance. Beyond the brick and wrought iron cemetery fence, a carriage rattled past at a slow pace and faded into the night.

  As quiet closed in on them once more, he said simply, “Why?”

  “You—you must be mistaken in who I am, sir.” She clasped her hands tightly together at her waist under the slits of her short velvet cloak.

  His mouth, sensual in its chiseled curves, exquisitely tender in the tucked corners, curved in amusement. He said, “Oh, I don't believe so.”

  “Well, I certainly don't know you! And if you will permit me to pass, I have to retrieve—”

  “Renfrey.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “My name. You did not know it.”

  The tenderness of his voice was like a caress. Carita did her best to ignore it. With great firmness, she said, “Yes, well, but your saying so can hardly be called an acceptable introduction, can it? As I was saying, there is a vase behind you left by my Aunt Berthe that I must—”

  “It’s worthless. I wouldn't trouble myself over it.” The words were judicious and dismissive. He paused, then said in intent demand, “How are you called?”

  “Carita. It's odd, I know, but was an endearment my father used, so had special meaning to my mother before—” She halted, amazed at herself for saying so much when she had meant to say nothing at all.

  “Before she died?” he finished gently. “I was reading the engraving on her tomb, I think, just now.”

  Carita looked beyond him to where a bouquet of wilting chrysanthemums and wild ageratum tied with black ribbon streamers lay on the couch-like foundation of the family resting place. There were roses there, also—a huge mass of late fall 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 demandin
g. 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 last he said, “She must have been a woman of uncommon beauty.”

  “They say so; I never knew her.” She heard the regret in her own voice, something else she had never noted before.

  “I expect you are her image.”

  The flush that rose at the compliment was painful in its intensity. Her vanity, however, was untouched. “My aunt says not, though the resemblance is there. I am more like my father, which is unforgivable. I have his strength.”

  “You would, of course,” he said, and smiled to himself.

  Carita watched him, and she wondered. But no, it was unlikely that he could know anything of her situation. He was only a chance-met stranger, and perhaps an accomplished trifler with the female sex. He might be—was without doubt—good at reading the desires of a woman's heart. But that was all.

  Or was it? The warmth of his smile seemed for her alone; the look in his eyes caressed her. She was encompassed, held prisoner, by the sheer male force emanating from him. With these things was something more that was like mystic recognition. And possibly the handiwork of fate.

  “What of your mother?” he asked, delicately probing. “Did she regret the loving?”

  It was a personal question, like his personal comments. She should not answer, should not stay to exchange another word. Yet the compulsion was strong. She said, “There is nothing to show that she did. My aunt regrets it enough for both of them.”

  “And has accomplished her revenge against your father by transferring it to you?”

  A frown drew her brows together. “Why should you think so?”

  “She has made the memory of your mother bitter with regret and turned you, with her claims, into the daughter of a murderer. Encouraging you to despise your father, she has taught you to disavow the part of yourself that is like him.”

  “Not—intentionally.”

  “No? But you can't deny she has proved her lack of concern for your well-being. After all, she has sent you here alone, without a chaperone, on All Hallows’ Eve, the one night in the year when anything can happen.”

  Carita had never thought of it like that. Still, she said, “Perhaps I came of my own choice.”

  “I salute your loyalty; it is a lovely virtue. But does your aunt deserve it?”

  Between confusion over the compliment and recognition of her own doubts, her protest was weak. “She must be given some consideration for caring for me since I was born.”

  “But if she can't or won't protect you, now that you are a young woman, it could be time for you to seek the safety of a gold band.”

  “Hardly,” she said, “if you mean the kind that comes with a husband attached.”

  Laughter flashed like lightning across the darkness of his eyes, then vanished. “You sound so certain. Perhaps you've been married?”

  The violent shake of her head threatened to loosen her small hat of feather-trimmed felt. “No, thank goodness. Rather, I've seen the husbands chosen by my aunt for her daughters.”

  “You weren't impressed?”

  The solicitation in his voice was, she thought, completely spurious. “One of them drinks all day and falls asleep at dinner with his face in his soup; the other sleeps during the daylight hours and drinks all night with his male friends.”

  “And on the strength of their example you shun matrimony.”

  “I haven't the temperament for it.” Her face was without expression. He could not know the subject was distressing to her.

  Renfrey was thoughtful. “I will grant that I have little experience with the cool and pallid passions of the church, but you don't have the look of a nun.”

  “The problem,” she said in stringent tones, “is not a lack of heat.”

  “What an intriguing admission—” he began with a wicked smile, then stopped. “No,” he corrected himself. “That was a statement of information, I think, not an invitation to dalliance. The question is, then: What are you afraid of?”

  The night wind shifted the fullness of her wide skirts so they brushed the tombs on either side. The friction crumbled old lichen from the surfaces into black flakes that sprinkled down onto the worn gray silk, catching on the circular bones of the hoop underneath. Above them in the night sky, a trio of bats swooped in silent delirium on brown velvet wings, mouths open to catch the mosquitoes which danced in the air. Voracious, the small flying animals combed the air with their teeth for what they needed in order to live. As did all creatures, each in its own way.

  Releasing the breath she had caught, Carita said in stark denial, “I’m not afraid of you.”

  “Indeed not; why should you be?” he said. “I am no threat.”

  But he was, and she knew it. Before this night, there had been no one who might have answered the need inside her, no image to use for a hook on which to hang her dreams. She would not have believed there was someone who could fill the aching void in her heart, yet this man was pushing his way inside and settling there, bit by bit, like a homing night owl in a hollow tree.

  She said, “Some fears cannot be explained.”

  He was not to be put off with ambiguity. “You aren't afraid of the dark, or even the unknown, else you wouldn't be here. You obviously aren't timid of the opposite sex, and we have settled that you don't have the disposition of a nun. I don't understand. Can it be you are afraid of dying like your mother?”

  “You might put it that way,” she answered in tight evasion.

  His eyes narrowed at the corners. “No, I don't think I would, after all. Perhaps it's living that is your secret horror? And loving?”

  “No.” The word was stark.

  “No, but something very close to it,” he mused, relentless. “Is your aunt also to blame for that?”

  He was far too acute for comfort. “Really, I don't believe it's—”

  “Any of my affair? Agreed.” He paused. “It's one thing to be ruled by your own terrors, you know, but something else again to yield to the fears of others.”

  “Or the persuasion?” she suggested, with an edge to her voice. Her gaze was direct if a little defensive.

  He laughed, a sound resonant with warm and accepting humor. “Especially the persuasions. Or worse, their overweening passions. Unless you don't know your own mind—or prefer to pretend you don't.”

  “Letting someone else take the blame for whatever may happen then?”

  “Or the credit,” he said with audacity.

  She watched him and wondered again exactly what was in his mind. And she wished she knew what had brought him there and what he intended, but was afraid he might tell her if she asked. It would never do to be certain, for then she would be forced to go. Which was, she discovered, not at all what she wanted. Not yet.

  “Walk with me,” he said abruptly, his gaze intent on her face. “For just a little while?”

  It felt as if he had read her mind; there had been a momentary and incredible sense of invasion followed by warm unison. No, impossible. She must have initiated that small merging herself, must have failed to guard her thoughts because she was too absorbed in guarding her emotions.

  His invitation should be refused; she knew that beyond doubting. All the reasons that made acceptance futile and unwise clamored in her head along with the certain consequences. Louder still, however, was the urging of instinct.

  Her manner withdrawn, she said, “Walk where?”

  “Anywhere. Nowhere. Must there be a destination?”

  “It's usual.” She added, “Also more prudent.”

  “I thought,” he said with astringency, “that we had dispensed with prudence along with fear?”

  Her gaze was calm. “Did you? I was not aware of it. But I must r
eturn to my aunt's house. If you care to walk in the direction, I have no way of stopping you.”

  He inclined his head with a trace of irony. Replacing his silk hat at a jaunty angle, he moved toward her, offering his arm for her support. As she reached out to take it, however, he snapped his fingers and whirled away. Stepping toward the family tomb with fluid grace, he returned with the vase she had been sent to find.

  “You wanted this, I think.”

  How could she have forgotten? The answer was in the form of the man before her. Foolish, so foolish. She murmured her thanks, not quite meeting his gaze as she accepted the piece of white porcelain.

  To stroll at Renfrey's side along the rows of tombs toward where the gate stood open had all the tremulous excitement of the forbidden. Carita salved her conscience with the knowledge that it would be for only a few short minutes. At the same time, she savored, carefully, the close company; it was so very rare.

  Her aunt had done her duty by taking an orphaned babe into her home, but Carita never felt as if she belonged; there was always a sense of being there on sufferance. As she grew older and her cousins, her aunt's daughters, married, she had been left the sole companion of her aunt. The two of them had sadly little in common, however, as Carita had no liking for gossip and hand work such as funeral jewelry made from human hair, and her Aunt Berthe cared nothing for books or ideas.

  Taught from an early age to make herself useful around the house, Carita had only discovered after she came of age that the household subsisted on money left behind by her father for her care. By then, service, like isolation, had become a habit.

  Renfrey matched his pace to hers without apparent effort. He was an able escort as they wove in and out among the tombs, steering her clear of entanglements and around obstacles. She could feel the warmth of his body, sense the taut muscles and sinews under the broadcloth of his sleeve beneath her grasp.

  He had thrown back his cape so that the lining had a blood-like sheen as it dipped and swirled behind his shoulders. In his free hand he swung his cane, batting at the dusty heads of weeds. Well-balanced, it seemed rather heavy, as if it might have a sword concealed in its glinting, silver-tipped length.