The Lost Enchantress Read Free Page A

woven that afternoon, to light my way.
    I remember that the knot was perfect. It was all perfect, and just like the day I’d discovered the spell, I knew even before I reached the garden’s innermost circle that the rose would be there. Waiting. Glowing as softly as the pale moon that had suddenly appeared and hovered between clouds directly overhead.
    Hanging at my waist was a silver-handled athame, a family heirloom I used to cut the stem with a single stroke, as effortlessly as if I’d done it a thousand times before, and it was in that instant that I felt it for the first time, flowing around me and through me. Power. Pure. Dazzling. Mine. I could hear it, smell it, taste it.
    Time flowed as well, carrying me up the stairs to the candlelit turret room, where with the same ease and grace I cast the sacred circle and did what I had been waiting so long to do, what I’d dreamed of doing, what I’d been born to do.
    Fire, Water, Earth and Wind.
End to beginning, beginning to end.
     
    In this place and in this hour,
I call upon your grace and power.
     
    With winter rose and candle fire,
I seek true sight and heart’s desire
     
    As petals fall, this spell’s begun,
As I say, let it be done.
    And that’s where my memory stops. Fade to black. I know I cast the spell and saw a vision in the flames. I know my parents arrived home earlier than expected, and that Grand and Chloe and I had to scramble to cover our traces and make it into our beds before they walked in. I know all that because I’ve been told; I just don’t remember any of it. Whatever memories there might have been are gone, burned to nothingness by what happened afterwards.
    A matter of self-preservation? Or guilt? Maybe. Probably. I don’t know. I only know that if my life was a book, that long-ago night put an end to the chapter titled “Innocence.”

One
    JANUARY
    H e parked in the shadows between streetlights and got out. He was wearing the usual: black leather gloves, black cashmere overcoat and a black look. The look, guarded and not quite a scowl, had been described as everything from dispassionate to demonic. On another man the effect might not have been quite so regally off-putting, but Gabriel Hazard wasn’t like any other man.
    Physically he was just the tall side of average, his rangy build more bone than flesh, belying a fierce, sinewy strength that, combined with uncanny quickness and an aptitude for ruthlessness, made him a match for men twice his weight and girth. It was an advantage he was seldom called upon to substantiate. Most people were quick to pick up on his stay-the-hell-away-from-me attitude and smart enough to do exactly that. Men let him pass with relief; women were often a bit more reluctant, wondering what it was about him that made their pulse quicken and what it would take to unleash what their hormones told them was caged beneath those iceberg cheekbones, eyes as gray and bleak as winter skies, and chiseled lips that seemed to have forgotten how to smile.
    He’d been told he was handsome, too handsome in fact, and though it had been years since he’d looked in a mirror, he assumed it was as true as ever. And he couldn’t have cared less. As far as Hazard was concerned, his face was simply one more weapon in his arsenal, to be used whenever and however it suited his purpose.
    The door of the Mercedes S600 closed behind him with the solid thud befitting a car engineered to withstand attack by hand grenades and small arms missiles and things that go bump in the night. It was falling prey to those night things that most concerned him, not because he didn’t want to die, but because he didn’t want to live on anyone else’s terms.
    Somewhere in the darkness a dog barked. Hazard instinctively tipped his face to the starless sky, letting the cold night air wash over him as he took the time to carefully absorb his surroundings. He didn’t like surprises. The dog was at least a block away and likely tethered since