Completely Smitten Part 43

"Women don't come into their powers until after menopause. Something about surging hormones, I guess."

He smiled as he said that, but she could tell he wasn't really joking.

"I'm not one, though, am I?" she asked. "That's why you've been brushing me off. Because I'm just a fruit fly compared to you."

"No, Ariel, that's not it." He ran his hands through his hair. "May I change back? I'm using a lot of magic for this right now."

"So?" she asked. "You always look like that."

He shook his head. "This is part of the problem. I have so much to tell you."

Munin whined again. Ariel could feel her heart beating as if she had just finished a long run.

Vari sat still, as if he were waiting for her to say something, which, apparently, he was. He had asked for her permission, after all.

"Okay," she said. "Change back."

The white light flared again. It didn't startle Munin. For a young pup, that dog was amazingly calm. The light didn't startle her as much either. In fact, she had seen a lot of light like that, starting after her fall. In the cabin. When she'd first met Darius.

Darius, who was now sitting across from her. She could see it now. They were the same man. Their facial shape was exactly the same, long and narrow. Vari's features were Darius's, only exaggerated. On Andrew Vari, Darius's Roman nose became a broken beak. His fine thin lips were stretched to nonexistence. His high forehead became a round bald ridge.

Even their build was the same. Darius had broad shoulders, and so did Vari. The only difference was in length. Vari was a truncated version--a man, literally, cut off at the knees.

"I'm so sorry," he said. Darius's voice was musical where Vari's was made of gravel. A beautiful voice distorted through a synthesizer, or ruined by too many cigarettes. Or maybe by a larynx that had been truncated too.

"For what?" she asked.

Darius ran his hands through his hair--long fingers through golden curls this time--and shook his head. "Can you just listen to me for five minutes?"

"All right." She folded her hands on her lap like a student and braced herself against the couch.

"When I was a young man," he said, "which was a very long time ago now, I was a famous athlete. An arrogant, nasty, horrible person who had just come into his magic."

"I thought you said your people didn't come into their magic until they got older."

"I said women didn't. Men get theirs at twenty-one."

"Like men have no hormonal problems at that age," she muttered.

He smiled, but it was a distracted smile. "We have a lot of problems at that age, and I had most of them worse than others. I was an idiot, Ariel. An idiot and an a.s.shole and the worst kind of person. Everything I told you about me-- about Darius--was true."

His voice was trembling. His eyes wouldn't leave hers, and she felt herself being drawn into them in spite of herself. She remembered that conversation in the deli vividly. He had called Darius--himself--all sorts of foul things. Did he actually feel that way about himself? No one should feel that way about himself. No one at all.

"I did something unpardonable. I--ah, h.e.l.l. It's almost impossible to explain."

"Unpardonable," she repeated. "You were a serial killer?"

He smiled. It was a relieved smile. "No."

"So you murdered just one person."

He shook his head. "No, no. Nothing like that."

"Then what's unpardonable?" she asked, feeling even more confused than she had a moment ago.

"I was told that I might have made true love impossible."

"For you."

"For anyone."

She frowned. "What are you talking about? Does your magic put you in charge of us lowly--what did you call us?--mortals?"

He stood and walked around the chair. "I'm going about this all wrong. Look, Ariel, we're not better than you. We're just different. And because of our longer lifespan, we have more of an effect on history. That's all. What I did was, I interfered with something I shouldn't have because I was stupid."

"What did you do?"

He shook his head. "I'm not going to explain it. Not yet. I--ah, h.e.l.l."

Munin leaped off the couch and ran to him, jumping up on his hind legs and pawing at Darius's thigh.

"He thinks I should tell you," Darius said.

"He--Munin?" She felt surprised. She wasn't sure why she felt surprised. The whole afternoon was strange enough that she shouldn't have felt surprised about anything.

"He's my familiar."

"He's your new pet. I just bought him for you. For Andrew Vari, actually, but I guess that's you." She sounded bitter, and she hadn't meant to. But she didn't take it back.

"That's why you thought he should be mine. Because you see magic around the edges of things. Most people don't see white lights when spells get cast. Most people can't track magic to its source, but you did. Blackstone told me about that day in the restaurant."

"So?" Ariel asked, not sure which day in the restaurant he was referring to.

He let the puppy lick his face, then he moved Munin over his shoulder as if Munin were a baby and Darius was about to burp him. "Okay. In a nutsh.e.l.l. I broke a major law among my people, and to punish me, the Fates decided that I had to unite a hundred soul mates."

"The ... Fates?"

"Our governing body. Like a panel of judges with some legislative power. They're the active arm of the Powers That Be."

"The Powers That Be?"

"You know. The ones in charge of everything. Just like it sounds. The Fates carry out a lot of their p.r.o.nouncements. Mount Olympus wasn't that far off."

"Wonderful," she said.

"So I had to unite a hundred soul mates," he said again.

"Unite? As in marry them?"

"As in make sure they were together for the rest of their lives."

"Then what would happen?"

"They'd live happily ever after."

"No," she said. "To you, once you did this."

He closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and squeezed the dog until Munin made a small squeal of protest. "I would get to look like myself again."

"What?" How could she be getting more confused? Weren't explanations supposed to make a person less confused?

"For two weeks out of the year," he said, setting Munin down, "I got to look like this."

He ran his hands along his body--his lean, trim, too-handsome body.

"I could pick those two weeks. Usually I went somewhere fun, like Cannes, only the last ten years or so I got tired of all that. I went to my place in Idaho."

"To be alone," she said, remembering what he had told her all those months ago. "And reflect."

He nodded. "The rest of the time, I was being punished for thinking myself greater than everyone else because of my physical prowess, because my body worked better than other people's even before I came into my magic. So the Fates decided to teach me what it was like to be someone whose body didn't automatically open doors."

"Andrew Vari," she said.

"Andvari," he said, putting a different emphasis on the name. "Only you don't know Norse mythology."

"You're a Norse G.o.d?"

"No." He came back to his chair and sat down. "I'm the dumb dwarf who tormented a Norse G.o.d.

Loki. That's where my Andrew Vari--Andvari--form first enters written history. That's how Blackstone knew me. Only he met me hundreds of years later, when everyone was calling me..."

He paused and looked at her sideways, as if he didn't want to say any more.

"Calling you what?" she asked, somehow knowing she wasn't going to like this.

"Merlin."

"That's it." She was off the couch before she knew it. "Where's the hidden camera? Where are your friends? You can all come out now and laugh at me to my face."

"I'm serious, Ariel."

She whirled on him. "So Blackstone calls you Sancho because you're the original Sancho Panza?"

"Yes," he said.

She sank back onto the couch. Her knees weren't working again.

"And the original Ghost of Christmas Present, if you have to know, and Shakespeare claimed that I was Falstaff to annoy me, but if you look at Puck, you see where that character came from."

Ariel bowed her head and laced her hands over the back of it, protecting herself. She didn't want to hear any more.

"But that doesn't matter, Ariel." Darius got out of the chair and came toward her. He crouched in front of her and put his finger beneath her chin, raising her head so that she would look at him. "What matters is, I was a failure."

She moved her head away from him, but she couldn't stop looking at those eyes. They seemed even sadder.

"A thousand years, two thousand, almost three went by, and I still hadn't united a hundred couples. Early on, I made terrible messes of things. I'll tell you about it sometime. Anthony and Cleopatra, Troilus and Cressida--I was so inept."

Ariel brought her arms down and rested them on her thighs, but she didn't look away from him. And Darius didn't move. He continued to crouch before her. He rested his own arms on the couch beside her, almost but not quite touching her.

"I didn't tell Blackstone any of this. I can see soul mates, Ariel. I can see in a person's eyes if they have one. Blackstone did, and I knew it. I knew one day I'd have to help him find his ideal lover."

"Nora," Ariel said.

"Nora." Darius gave her a small smile. "It took a thousand years to find her."

Ariel let out a small breath. The confusion was lessening. This incredible story was making sense. "So you help your people find their perfect love."

"Not my people," he said. "All people. You have a soul mate, Ariel. I knew it when you looked up at me that first evening, on my couch. I knew it, and it broke my heart."

He got up and moved away, as if some parts of his own story made him so restless he had to try to shake them off.

"You see, as the Fates explained it to me, my job was to unite two other people in their perfect relationship. Nora and Blackstone were number ninety-eight."

"And you never told him," Ariel said, suddenly remembering Blackstone's comment. "You never told him any of this."

Darius nodded. "He found out today. He's mad. He's real mad. He thinks I've been lying to him all along."

Darius walked to the kitchen counter and braced himself against it, then looked at his hands, as if he hadn't expected them to move that way.

"My friend Emma and her husband Michael were number ninety-nine," Darius said, no longer looking at Ariel. "Then I see you and I know, I just know, deep down, that you're part of the hundredth couple."

Her heart rose a little. She had a soul mate. She would never have thought of that. She wasn't romantic enough to believe in such things--or so she would have thought.

"The problem was," he said, still not facing her, "I fell in love with you the moment I saw you walking on that path."

Ariel raised her head. She was holding her breath, and her heart was still rising--floating, almost.

"You were so confident and so strong," he said, head bowed. "You moved with such grace. And then, when the ground dissolved beneath you, you did everything right. You didn't panic. You used all your resources to save yourself, and when it was clear that wasn't enough, you let yourself go with the moment. I'll never forget that."

Ariel swallowed. "There was no ledge, was there?"

"No." His voice was soft. "I created it. And screwed up, just like I always do."

"What do you mean?"

"You were so broken when I got down there." He turned. She could still see the traces of fear on his face, and she wondered what he had gone through that afternoon. "Internal bleeding, damage everywhere. I fixed it. I stopped the bleeding, got you breathing again, made sure everything was all right. But I missed the ankle."

His lips thinned and he moved away from the counter, walking to the window.