Lacybourne Manor (Ghosts and Reincarnation #3)(64)

“What the hell is going on?” he clipped, releasing her, he stepped back and looked about him.

“Colin?” she queried, staring at him in disbelief, her heart in her throat.

A tremor went through her as he looked around with angry bemusement.

Sibyl’s mind was awhirl. This was not right, not real and very, very wrong.

Did she do this to him? Her mother tried to be a witch, believed in magic, but even though Sibyl had grown up around the pagan religion, she’d never truly believed in magic.

Except, of course, to think it would one day bring her a soulmate.

With her strange, lifelike dreams, meeting Colin and all that had happened since Lacybourne (and now this), she was beginning to feel that there was some other power at play here and it could be, maybe had to be, magic.

“What’s going on?” Colin thundered, masculine confusion morphing into anger very quickly.

“You need to sit down,” she told him gently.

“I don’t need to sit down, I need to know what… the f**k… is going on,” he returned slowly and through gritted teeth.

“Do you remember anything?” Sibyl asked and stepped toward him.

His eyes took her in, sweeping the length of her and they stopped on the way up.

“What’s happened to your arms?”

She looked down at her upper arms and saw the dark, angry, red welts that had risen up where Colin/Royce had grabbed her.

“You’ve been crying.” It was not a question or a statement but an accusation.

Sibyl took a deep breath. How to explain?

“You… Colin, you grabbed me and you shook me,” she told him quietly and then took another step toward him when his face blanched.

“I did that to you?”

She laid her hand on his chest and made honest excuses for him, “You weren’t yourself.”

“Christ!”

Sibyl winced because that one word was an explosion. His hand went to his hair and tore through it before he continued speaking.

“I don’t remember anything. I was in the kitchen, wondering where you were and I heard the music. I was going to come out and the next thing I knew I was kissing you.”

She used the hand on his chest to push him back carefully. He didn’t resist and fell into the flowered cushions of a wicker chair she kept in her lab. She hated to see him this way and wished things were different between them. She wished they were such that she could comfort him in the way she wanted, needed to comfort him.

Instead, she said, “I’m going to get you a glass of water. I’ll be right back.”

Then without delay, Sibyl ran from the Summer House, feelings of guilt tearing through her.

She couldn’t help but think she was responsible for this. Maybe her mother was a witch. Maybe that made Sibyl a witch. Maybe these dreams she was having were coming to life. Or, she’d always felt there was something strange and magical about Brightrose Cottage, maybe it was the house.

She flew into the kitchen and grabbed a glass. A phone was ringing and she saw a mobile on the kitchen counter. Without thinking, she grabbed it, flipped it open and put it to her ear.

“Hello?” Sibyl uttered the greeting distractedly and turned on the tap, her eyes moving to look through window in the backdoor to ascertain if she could see Colin but she couldn’t.

There was no response on the phone and when Sibyl was about ready to flip it shut again, a refined woman’s voice said, “I’m sorry, I thought I was ringing Colin Morgan’s phone.”

Sibyl froze.

Was it Mistress Freeze, the long-since-absent Tamara?

Colin had told Sibyl that she could not allow another man to touch her while she was with him, but he made no such promise to her. She’d entirely forgotten the other woman in the extremes of her drama and he’d just spent a week in London.

Dear goddess, he could have been with her.

Sibyl felt waves of sickening jealousy she was not entitled to feel crash through her and said hesitantly, “This is Colin’s phone. He’s…” she peered through the window again and still could not see him, “out back. Um…” She was at a loss of what to say.

“This is his sister, Claire. Who’s this?” Her voice was friendly and engaging but, even so, as her concern fled that she was talking to Tamara, Sibyl’s body jerked at the thought of speaking to Colin’s sister.

She didn’t even know he had a sister.

In fact, Sibyl thought that Colin was akin to a quicksilver god born of the elements, not having parents or siblings or anything mere mortals would possess.

Before Sibyl could reply, Claire asked chattily as if they were going to spend the next hour in pleasant conversation, “You’re American aren’t you?”

Sibyl put the glass under the tap not believing this was happening, especially not now, considering the fact she had unawakened witchy powers and Colin was angrily recovering from an episode of real multiple personalities.

“Yes, I’m American,” she answered.

“Oh, where are you from in America? I love America.” Then before Sibyl could respond Claire went on, her voice sounding amused and very sisterly, almost exactly like her own sister, (except less annoying). “You must be the reason no one has heard from Colin in weeks.”

Sibyl pulled the glass from under the faucet and turned it off.