She reached out and set her thumb and forefinger between the thorns. She flowed her will into the stem. She plucked it.
It was yellow.
Her vision opened out again. The roses around it were yellow. The swallowtails were yellow. Golden sunlight poured down around her, splashing on golden sandstone under her feet.
The cats unfolded themselves and stretched, lazily, as cats do when they want to show they are granting you a favor. The gray-and-white female padded daintily back the way she had come, through space that had been hedge a moment before, and turned left. Maureen followed.
They walked into grass and open sun. A thatched stone cottage sat in the midst of daffodils and azaleas and tulips, walls whitewashed into a travel-brochure for the Emerald Isle, waiting. The orange tom lay on a windowsill, basking in the only sunbeam falling on that wall. The rest was shaded by a tall rowan-tree guarding the side porch.
Maureen opened the door, nervous, expecting further traps. It squeaked heavily on its hinges but showed her nothing except a tiled entry and an arch back into a modern kitchen. The cats scalloped past her ankles and strode inside.
Have a cup of tea, Fiona's leafy face had said. Jimson weed? Or water hemlock? It would take a brave woman to brew tea in a witch's kitchen. Maybe there would be milk for the cats. That bastard brother of Fiona's had been buying milk at the Quick Shop. But he'd left it there, on the counter . . . .
She stepped inside. Brian sat at the kitchen table, reading. He looked up when her shadow crossed his book, a smile breaking across his face. Then the smile died, replaced by blankness.
Maureen understood, with a chill. He'd expected Fiona. She wasn't Fiona. That was the end of it. Nothing else mattered.
He didn't look as if he even recognized her.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Brian paid no more attention to her than to the cats. He didn't speak. He acted as if Fiona had reached inside his brain and frozen part of it.
Maureen shied away from him, her own thoughts scattered and useless. She groped for something to do, something to say, a way to break the wall of ice between them. She glanced out the window, at a thin plume of smoke on a distant hill. Maybe that was where Fiona had gone, squabbling with her fellow witches and wizards over the spoils Dougal left behind.
Instinct had said, "Go to Fiona's place." As far as Maureen was concerned, instinct could damn well continue making suggestions. Besides, if she had come with some kind of plot in mind, had come looking for a fight, the hedge and the cats probably would have kept her out. Sometimes improv was the only way that worked.
Other than Brian and the cats, the house seemed empty. And it was a house, even a farmer's cottage, not a castle or a palace. Maureen had seen no sign of servants, another difference between Fiona and Dougal.
The orange tom rubbed her leg insistently and then padded over to a refrigerator purring in the corner, reminding her of milk. The machine seemed vaguely incongruous in the old cottage kitchen, but it held a stoneware crock of milk with a thick skin of cream floating on the top. She found three saucers, and filled them with cat-bribes, and drifted into irrelevant questions to avoid thinking about Brian. He was still ignoring her. The cats gave the cottage more of a lived-in feeling than he did.
Electric refrigerator and microwave oven--Fiona had to have some solar panels on the roof, like the ones Dougal had. But the wood stove, oil lamps, marble counter-top with slate sink and hand pump, and lines of cabinets with buttercup-yellow paint worn back to bare wood along the edges and knobs made a comfortable mix of old and new. It looked as if centuries of feet had worn the slate floor smooth and darkened it to ebony. Bundles of herbs hung from the blackened beams of the ceiling, perfuming the air with sage and tarragon and rosemary and more exotic scents. It didn't feel like a dangerous place.
A black laptop computer lay in one corner of the counter, somehow less clashing than it should have been. Maureen smiled at a vision of Fiona keeping her spells in a database, maintaining inventory on her eye of newt and toe of frog electronically to make sure she always had fresh stock--a thoroughly modern witch, perhaps with her own Web site.
Brian sat at the table, ignoring her, reading. The damned man could at least say good afternoon, nice to see you, beautiful day we're having. She'd been counting on him.
You're suffering from Snow White Syndrome, her critic snarled. Once Prince Charming is in the picture, he should take over and everything will be Happily Ever After. Ain't a-gonna work that way, this once-upon-a-time.
This time, it was the Handsome Prince who'd eaten the poisoned apple, and the Princess had to wake him. A simple kiss probably wasn't going to work.
Her hand was rubbing her belly again. Maureen jerked it away, bumping against the hilt of the knife. She pulled the heavy blade, sheathed, from her waistband and dropped it in the middle of Brian's book.
"I think this might be yours."
He didn't even look up. He did pick up the knife, running his fingers over some scars in the black leather of the sheath and then showing a couple of inches of steel to read the maker's mark.
"It looks like my spare," he said to a point somewhere beyond her left shoulder. "Where did you get it?"
"Dougal had it. I killed him with it, this morning."
He blinked. "I gave it to David before we came here. Dougal must have taken it from him."
That was all the response she got? Chop the villain into stew-meat and burn down his castle after spending a week or so naked in his dungeon, and all the
