The Rules of Magic (Practical Magic #2)(53)

Vincent didn’t go home that night. He didn’t care if he ate or slept or if his sisters worried over what had become of him. William set up a Polaroid camera and took photographs of them together. They appeared as if by magic, lifting off the page. In each image, they embraced each other. It seemed they were one person, and that was when Vincent began to worry. If you were one, what befell you hurt the other as well. In a sudden cold sweat, he remembered the curse.

He cared nothing about the ruination of himself; trouble didn’t have to look for him, he went right toward it. But William’s fate was another matter. Not love, he and Franny always said to each other, for look at what had happened to Jet. Anything but that. And yet Vincent stayed, unable to give up this dream he’d stumbled into, the one he’d always had but had made himself forget.

On their seventh day together Vincent fell silent, exhausted by sex and by his own fears, which now had grabbed hold of him and wouldn’t let go.

“What’s wrong?” William asked.

Vincent couldn’t bring himself to speak of the curse or let the idea of it into the room with them, even though William would have understood in a way another man would not. He was a bloodline whose relative Matthew Grant had been tried for witchcraft and then acquitted in Windsor, Connecticut, before disappearing. There was no official record of William’s ancestor after his trial, but there didn’t need to be. He’d come to New York, where the family had settled on Long Island, and William had spent every summer at his family’s house on the shore. He had an easy manner, but was direct and comfortable with himself. He’d been to Harvard, so he understood Massachusetts as well, and he’d written his thesis on John Hathorne, the witch-finder and judge who had sentenced so many of their kind to death, and several of the classes he taught at the New School centered on outsider societies.

“Do you know your fate?” Vincent asked as they lay together, entwined.

“I know yours.” William laughed. “I told you when I met you.”

“To sing in Washington Square Park?”

William grinned. “To be mine.”



When Vincent went missing Franny was worried sick the first two days, furious over the next two days, and hurt every day that followed.

“He’ll be back,” Jet insisted. “You know Vincent.”

Franny walked the dog, who continually pulled on his leash to the corner of Bleecker Street, then would stop, puzzled, refusing to walk on until Franny dragged him home. She wondered if her birthday wish had gone wrong, and had driven Vincent further away.

“You would know if something was wrong,” Jet assured her sister. “You still have the sight.”

At last Vincent phoned to say he was sorry to have been out of touch.

“Out of touch?” Franny had barely slept a wink since her brother had disappeared. “I was afraid you were murdered.”

“Worse,” Vincent told her. “I’m in love.”

“Very funny,” Franny said.

He’d had so many admirers and he’d never cared about a single one. He laughed, understanding his sister’s response. “This is different, kiddo.”

“You don’t sound like yourself.” Franny was already looking for a canister of salt and some fresh rosemary to dispel whatever afflicted him.

“I am myself,” Vincent told her.

He gave her an address and told her to come see for herself. Franny packed up the ingredients she thought she might need, then leashed the dog and took off. Vincent’s instructions were odd, however, and the streets unfamiliar. Finally she came to Conjure Street. It was dusk when she thought she saw Vincent on the stoop of an old town house, but Harry didn’t bark to greet him and it was another man who waved to her. Franny approached, suspicious. The dog, on the other hand, went right to the stranger, who introduced himself as William Grant. Although he wasn’t especially handsome he had charisma and even Franny was engaged by his manner.

“I’m meeting my brother here.” Franny was studying William more closely. His dark sensitive eyes, his intensity.

“I am as well.”

“Really?”

There had been so many people who’d been mad for Vincent; Franny assumed she’d simply come across one more admirer. She had persisted with her childhood task of watching over her brother. Every week she dropped a protection amulet into his jacket pocket, made of black cloth and bound by red thread, containing clove and blackthorn. Often, however, she found the amulets discarded in the street.

“And I’m here to meet you, too,” the fellow said. “Your brother was too shy to be here when we first spoke.”

“My brother? Shy? We’re not talking about the same person.”

William laughed. “This is all very new to him.”

“But not to you?”

“Well it is if you mean falling in love.” When Franny didn’t answer, it was William’s turn to study her. “You can’t be surprised. He thinks you knew before he did.”

She’d certainly known that Vincent had never been in love with a woman. That neighbor of their aunt’s who had seduced him, the college girls, the waitresses, the fans of his music, all were meaningless. He rarely saw them more than once, and often couldn’t remember their names. But William Grant was different. Franny knew it as soon as her brother came outside to join them. She could tell when he looked at William.