Goddess of the Rose (Goddess Summoning #4)(16)

"Queen of Night, hear your errant priestess's prayer.

Forgive me that I have forgotten your ways."

Mikki faltered. The small, Band-Aid-covered cut on her palm throbbed painfully. There was a great rushing sound in her ears that reminded her of the ocean. She felt the night wind, which had only moments before been gentle and cool, whip in a sudden heat around her, lifting her hair as if it, too, along with her body, had been electrified. Caressed by the wind, the unusual scent of the perfume she'd dabbed on her pulse points lifted with the breeze to fill her senses. She breathed deeply, inhaling rose and spice and heat. Overwhelmed by the exquisite beauty of the rich oil, the glowing words on the script blurred until Mikki could no longer see them. But it didn't matter. Unbelievably, she heard the lines within her mind, and with a sob, she opened her mouth and cried the words that were echoing through her head.

"I call upon you now Hecate, by the blood that runs thick in my veins and ask that you help me to return to your service and your realm so that I might once again remember the use of the blood magick and the ancient beauty that is the Realm of the Rose."

A great roar split the night, ringing in Mikki's ears with an intensity that washed her in dizziness. She blinked tears from her eyes, looking around her as if she had just awakened from a dream.

Ah, hell! I'm having one of those damn episodes! Mikki frantically tried to make sense of the bright lights and the women who were staring open-mouthed at her. The play! Crap! Crap! Mikki looked down at the script she still clutched in her sweating hands. The words printed there in ordinary black and white made no sense. They weren't the lines she had just said. What the hell had happened to her?

Three single claps came from the rear of the stage.

"Lovely job of ad-libbing. Truly moving." The voice was filled with sarcasm.

Mikki managed to get awkwardly to her feet as an attractive petite woman wearing a gold toga and a long, dark wig stepped up to her.

"But the star has returned. So I'll take my mike and my stage position, and you can run along."

Mikki felt frozen with humiliation as the actress reached up to yank the neatly hidden microphone from her hair.

"Ouch! Fuck!" the diva shrieked, pulling back her hand and sucking on her bleeding finger. "The damn thing stabbed me."

Woodenly, Mikki raised her hand to touch the rose that still sat behind her ear.

"Sorry," she muttered, quickly pulling the mike from her hair. "Mikado Roses don't usually have prominent thorns."

"Catie, darling, it's all right. She was just helping us out with the sound check." Cio rushed onstage.

Catie snatched the mike from Mikki and turned her back dismissively as the sound manager hastily began working the tiny microphone into the hairline of the star's wig.

"Someone get me a Band-Aid before I bleed to death! And my God! What is that smell? Who has on too f**king much perfume? It's like I'm standing in the middle of a bordello, not a stage. For Christ's sake! I leave for half a second and everything goes to shit!"

Two more people hurried onstage, and Mikki sidled off, ignoring the director when he called insincere thanks and reminded her that she could pick up her tickets opening night at the Garden Center.

Chapter Seven

IT took several minutes for Mikki's cheeks to cool down. She could easily imagine the blazing red of her blush. Jeesh, what a humiliating experience! She left the sidewalk and retreated up the side of the gently sloping hill that would lead her to the uppermost entrance to the rose gardens. Shuffling her feet through the dry leaves that browned the soft grass of the park, Mikki tried to make sense of what had just happened. Everything had seemed fine - even fun - when she'd gone up onstage. Then she'd started reading her lines and . . . she looked down at the script that she had forgotten to leave behind. The light was too dim, and she couldn't make out the words, but she didn't have to read them to know that what had come out of her mouth had definitely not been what had been written on the script. She remembered all too well seeing the lines glow and then hearing them ring in her mind. She ran a shaky hand through her hair.

What was happening to her? She should go home. Maybe she should call Nelly. If having a totally embarrassing hallucination in front of multiple people didn't constitute an emergency of enormous girlfriend proportions, she didn't know what did.

Just then Mikki topped the little rise and came to a halt. The Tulsa Municipal Rose Gardens stretched before her like a familiar dream, comforting her frayed nerves. Just what exactly was so terrible about what she'd just done? What had really happened had probably more to do with three glasses of wine and being freaked out by suddenly being thrust onstage than with psychosis. She shoved the script into her purse. When she got home she'd reread Medea's words. What she had said was probably close to the original text. She needed to quit being so hard on herself. It was ridiculous to focus on every little mistake she made and every little daydream she allowed herself. She grinned suddenly. She'd even pick up the free tickets and consider heckling diva Catie on opening night.

Mikki felt the pull of her beloved gardens dissipate the last of her nervous stress as she gazed out across the expanse of roses. The gardens had been built in the shape of a gigantic tiered rectangle that always reminded Mikki of a huge, Italian wedding cake. There were five sections of terraced gardens, which climbed almost 900 feet from street level. Each tier was filled with row after row of meticulously tended roses. The gardens were styled after the gardens made popular during the Italian Renaissance, and amidst the more than 9,000 roses and imported statuary were Italian junipers, sheared by hand into formal, conical shapes, southern Magnolias, as well as deciduous holly and mugo pines.