Kay Hooper - The Wizard Of Seattle

It is forbidden far any Master, or any wizard of any level, to encourage or teach a woman to understand or implement any part or the whole of spells, incantations, or any other tool of the wizard's craft. No wizard of any level may reveal his true nature to a woman at any time without the prior express permission of the Council of Elders. Any wizard encountering a woman of innate power, whether or not she be aware of that power, must instantly report the discovery to the Council. Failure to obey these laws will result in the most severe of penalties, up to and including total banishment and the deprivation of all powers …

Merlin didn't have to look at the other books and scrolls on his desk, because he had pored over them for many hours already. Without exception, each of them pronounced the same laws in an identical tone of dire warning. The words might have differed slightly from source to source, but there was no ambiguity, no loophole through which to pass. What it all boiled down to was quite simple.

He had broken an ancient law in accepting a woman as his Apprentice-teaching her secretly, without the knowledge of the Council-and with every day that passed he was compounding the original crime.

It had seemed such a foolish law then, when a half-starved and half-drowned girl had turned up on his doorstep, her untapped powers practically radiating from her thin little body in an aura of promise. How could he turn his back on that promise merely because she was female? He couldn't.

He hadn't.

Since wizards tended to isolate themselves, and no other lived in Seattle, he'd had no trouble in keeping his activities secret from the Council and others of his kind, even over the span of nine years. Serena had been so consumed with the desire to learn that she had been unquestioningly obedient to his carefully devised rules, and he had been able to shield her developing abilities so as to escape notice. So far.

But what Merlin had not anticipated were his own confused instincts and emotions. The more Serena matured, the more he found himself overwhelmingly aware of her. She held his total attention with startling ease, no matter what she was doing, with her voice and her grace and the laughter in her green eyes, and even the way she had of charmingly and cleverly manipulating people and her surroundings to suit her-whether or not she used her powers to do it.

Their years together had given them knowledge of each other and a certain familiarity, and of course she had become a beautiful woman, so his notice and interest should have seemed perfectly normal and hardly surprising. And though he couldn't be sure of Serena's feelings any more than he could read her thoughts, he would have to have been blind and stupid not to recognize, even before today, that she saw him as something more than a teacher.

So why was he fighting his own feelings? There was, after all, nothing standing between him and Serena except a ponderous ban in some old texts Serena had never even seen. And since he'd already broken the law, anything else had to be an insignificant matter of degree. At least that was what he told himself. But what seemed simple on the surface turned out to be far more complicated underneath.

He had found himself withdrawing from her time and time again, feeling a strange and senseless apprehension whenever something reminded him she was no longer a child, that she was a woman only nominally under his control. The feelings grew stronger and stronger, the tightness in his chest, the wariness, the inexplicable urge to be on guard, as if against a threat.

Serena… a threat. Why? Why ?

Her innate power was truly incredible; that was beyond question. She frequently startled him with the strength of some ability he was in the process of teaching her-as well as an occasional seemingly natural or unconscious skill that was unknown to him even after a lifetime's study of his art-but he had no logical reason to feel apprehensive or threatened by Serena nevertheless.

It had occurred to him only recently that what he felt was for too powerful to have originated in the simple breaking of a law, that surely there was little power in dry words of warning written in ancient books and scrolls-certainly not enough to cause this turmoil inside him.

No, this was something else, something embedded in him, inherent to him, to who and what he was, that he could only sense. It was as if all his deepest instincts recognized a prohibition so vitally important, it was more like a taboo, a primitive command demanding instant, wordless obedience. Part of him wanted to obey, struggled to obey, but part of him didn't want to and fought against it. Since he was a logical man, and since that command stirred an increasingly stormy conflict he didn't understand in himself, Merlin had begun searching for the reasons behind the law.

So far he hadn't found them.

Sitting down in his desk chair, Merlin leaned back and gazed across the room at nothing. How could he explain to Serena what he didn't understand himself? About what he felt and what he recoiled away from feeling… And how could he even begin to tell her that the closed, secret society of wizards she aspired to join wanted nothing to do with her?

"Have you seen today's paper?"

Serena peered at the clock on her nightstand-a replacement for the one she'd zapped-and made a muffled sound of indignation when she realized it wasn't yet seven o'clock. In the morning.

"Jane, do you know what time it is?" she asked into the phone, yawning.

"Of course I know what time it is. You weren't awake? Serena, you're always up by six on a weekday."

Unwilling to explain that she hadn't slept well in the two nights since the confrontation with Merlin on Tuesday, Serena merely said, "I was up late last night. What's this about the paper?"

In a patient tone Jane said, "Thursday is when Kane's column runs, remember?"

Serena thought about it. "Yeah, I remember. So what? Did he call me the whore of Babylon?" She wasn't very interested; since most of her concentration and emotional energy had been taken up with the urgent need to act as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened between her and Merlin whenever he was present, she had completely forgotten that Kane might have decided to make trouble for her.

"Let me put it this way. If at all possible, you'd better hide the relevant section of the paper before Richard sees it."

Pushing herself up in bed, Serena frowned. "Did Kane attack Richard?" she demanded fiercely.

"Well, he certainly didn't nominate him for citizen of the month, but Richard is not going to like the publicity, and I doubt he'll be terribly pleased at the stuff printed about you-even if none of it's new. Really, Serena, just get to the paper and read it, okay? And call me later."

Serena hung up the phone on her way out of bed. She was in such a hurry that she used her powers to get ready for work in three seconds flat, going from a nightgown to a businesslike skirt and sweater between her bed (which made itself up as soon as she left it) and the door. It always felt a bit unsettling to have shoes appear on her feet while she was walking, especially high heels, but she adjusted and hurried from her bedroom after a quick glance to make sure the shoes matched. At least twice, hurrying like today, she had ended up with a weird combination.

Merlin's bedroom was down the hall, and the closed door didn't tell her whether or not he was up.

They hadn't talked, beyond what was absolutely necessary and then with distant courtesy, since Tuesday. He had spent his evenings in the house closeted in his study, so she had seen him only at meals. As she went quickly down the stairs, she could only hope that a late night of work, or whatever he was doing in his study these days, had kept him in bed past his usual time. Both of them tended to rise early, usually before six a.m., as Jane had noted.