Chapters (17)
(with Mary Blayney, Patricia Gaffney, Ruth Ryan Langan, and Mary Kay McComas)
Also available…
The Official Nora Roberts Companion
(edited by Denise Little and Laura Hayden)
Title Page
Dedication
To all of my cousins, who, thanks to
our parents’ belief in family, are too numerous to mention
Prologue
He understood his power early. What coursed through his blood and made him what he was did not have to be explained to him. Nor did he have to be told that this gift was one not possessed by everyone.
He could see.
The visions were not always pleasant, but they were always fascinating. When they came—even when they came to a small child whose legs were still unsteady—he accepted them as easily as he accepted the sun’s rising each morning.
Often his mother would crouch on the floor with him, her face close to his, her eyes searching his eyes. Mixed with her great love was a hope that he would always accept the gift, and that he would never be hurt by it.
Though she knew better, on both counts.
Who are you? He could hear her thoughts as clearly as if she had spoken aloud. Who will you be?
They were questions he couldn’t answer. Even then he understood that it was more difficult to see into yourself than to see into others.
As time passed, the gift did not prevent him from racing and running and teasing his young cousins. Though often, quite often, he strained against its limitations and tried for more, it did not keep him from enjoying an ice-cream cone on a summer afternoon, or from laughing at cartoons on a Saturday morning.
He was a normal, active, mischievous boy with a sharp, sometimes devious mind, a strikingly handsome face set off by hypnotic gray-blue eyes, and a full mouth that was quick to smile.
He went through all the stages that lead a boy toward manhood. The scraped knees and the broken bones, the rebellions large and small, the first jumpy heartbeat at the smile of a pretty girl. Like all children, he grew into an adult, moved away from his parents’ domain, and chose his own.
And the power grew, as he did.
He considered his life a well-adjusted and comfortable one.
And he accepted, as he always had, the simple fact that he was a witch.