Crystal Cove (Friday Harbor #4)(49)

His gaze sharpened. “Why not?”

“It’s in the area of high magick. Anything that messes with life or death is forbidden—those kinds of spells are dangerous even in the hands of the most experienced crafters. And if a longevity spell worked, it would be terrible. People usually think of longevity as a blessing, but in just about every grimoire you look in, it’s classified as a curse. It’s a cruel fate to live beyond the natural order of things … you would outlive everyone you care about, and your body and mind would decay, but no matter how much pain or loneliness or sorrow you felt, you would keep living. You would end up begging for an end to your suffering because death would be a mercy.”

“What if I still wanted you to try? What if I said it’s worth it to be with you?”

She shook her head. “I wouldn’t do that to you. And even if I were willing, and I cast the spell correctly, it still wouldn’t work out for us. We’re too different. I would hate your life; I could never be part of it. And I can’t see you giving up everything you’ve worked for to live on a quiet little island. Eventually you’d be unhappy. You’d blame me.” Justine turned to face him, her face hidden. “It’s no good,” she said in a muffled voice. “We’re better off apart. It’s fate.”

Jason wrapped his arms around her and held her for a long time, oblivious of strangers who passed them on the dock. It seemed as if he had resigned himself to the inevitable.

Except that when he finally spoke, he sounded anything but resigned. “The only kind of fate I believe in, Justine, is what happens when you don’t make a choice. I want you. And I’ll be damned if I let anything get in the way of that.”

* * *

Jason’s return to Artist’s Point was greeted with relief by the Inari group, which consisted of Gil Summers, a college friend who now ran the company’s development shop … Lars Arendt, his lawyer … Mike Tierney, an accounting and acquisitions manager … and Todd Winslow, the architect for the Inari building in San Francisco.

“Didn’t think you could survive without a cell signal,” Gil had said with mock concern.

“I enjoyed the break,” Jason had told them pointedly. “I can handle being unplugged.”

Mike had looked dubious. “You once told me that if heaven and hell existed, they would both be small Midwestern towns except that hell would be the town with no Internet.”

“My guess is,” Todd had said with a sly grin, “Jason didn’t mind the lack of wireless access because he was getting some client-server action from a long-legged brunette.”

Jason had sent him a warning glance, and although Todd had grinned unrepentantly, he hadn’t said anything further. There were lines of privacy that everyone, even Jason’s close friends, knew not to cross.

Priscilla, on the other hand, dared to broach subjects that no one else would. A year earlier Jason had interviewed and hired her from a pool of interns as his own assistant, after one of his managers had narrowed the field down to three candidates. With her country-fried accent and unconventional background, Priscilla had been an offbeat choice. However, her intelligence and competence had already made her a standout among the other interns.

What had clinched the deal, however, had been her comment near the end of the interview, when Jason had asked if there was any information about herself that she might want him to know. “I reckon there is,” she had said. “I couldn’t help noticing that you don’t have a soul.” As he had stared at her, she had added, “Maybe I could help you with that.”

There was no way Priscilla could have known. He had pressed her to explain, and she had said she could sense it. He had hired her with the expectation that more revelations would come later, and they had. Eventually she had admitted to Jason that she was a natural-born witch.

“You could say me and my kin are the rough end of the Fiveash line,” Priscilla had told Jason. “We got witch blood, but no one in this branch of the family ever did anything with it. But one night back in ’52, my granny Fiveash made the moon fall from the sky. Bounced on the horizon and went right back up again. Ten minutes from start to finish. Whenever Granny talked about how she’d drawn down the moon, my mama always told me it was really just a pilot balloon from the Weather Bureau. But I knew Granny was telling the truth.”

According to Priscilla, her mother hadn’t wanted her to know the truth about their family’s magical legacy. It would have caused them to be expelled from their God-fearing Ozark community. So Priscilla had covertly tried to learn what she could from her grandmother and her great-aunt, both of them crafters who had secretly practiced magic.

After coming to work for Jason, Priscilla had researched the histories of a handful of ancient grimoires. The Triodecad had been listed among them. Following the descendants of the Triodecad’s previous owners, Priscilla had finally identified Justine Hoffman as the last one in the lineage. She was almost certainly in possession of the grimoire by now. And if any book on earth contained secrets that might help Jason, it would be the legendary Triodecad. By a stroke of either coincidence or fate, it had turned out that Justine lived on the island where Jason had already considered buying property.

Jason was grateful to Priscilla for leading him to this place. And he had come to like her as much as he could like anyone who could reminisce fondly about pimento cheese and white bread sandwiches, or grape jelly meatballs, or who thought that the pinnacle of Clint Eastwood’s career had been the movie with the orangutan.