Page 30 of Wind Called

He couldn’t help smiling. “You needed grounding after our evening together?”

Gray eyes met his, level, unblinking. “What do you think?”

Well, considering he’d felt as if he was on Cloud Nine during the whole drive over to Cottonwood, he supposed he could see why Bellamy had seen the need to come back down to earth.

He helped himself to some iced tea as well. “I don’t want to flatter myself.”

Now she grinned, the tense moment broken. “Maybe you should.”

He chuckled, but since her expression abruptly sobered, he knew she wanted to get back to business.

“Anyway, when I was standing out in the courtyard, I thought I heard something on the wind. It almost sounded like voices.”

That seemed a little odd, but sound could travel in weird ways at night, carried on the desert breeze. “Your neighbors?”

She shook her head. In the bright light from the floor-to-ceiling windows that dominated the space, her loose hair was almost the same ruddy hue as the red rocks surrounding them on all sides.

“That’s what I thought at first, too. But there wasn’t any music, and it sure didn’t sound like people partying. More like whispers, or words spoken so quickly I couldn’t really understand any of them.”

Well, that didn’t sound creepy at all. Even though they were sitting in a restaurant with other people, brightly lit and certainly not sinister in the slightest, he couldn’t quite prevent a chill from running down his spine.

“Has that ever happened before?”

“No,” she said at once. “I’m not a psychic. I’m not supposed to hear words on the wind, or whatever was going on last night.”

She paused there so she could reach for her glass of iced tea and take a sip. Gray eyes met his again, more bleak than ever.

A breath, and then she said, “I’m worried that maybe there was a real reason why all those Wilcox and McAllister witches in the past said we needed to stay away from Sedona.”

10

He hadn’t laughedat her, which had been Bellamy’s greatest fear when she’d decided she needed to confide in Marc, to tell him the troubling ideas that had been floating around in her brain while she was getting ready that morning.

What if there really was something about Sedona that had been playing with her witchy powers?

No, he only looked thoughtful, and glanced past her to the red rocks outside the restaurant’s windows before he returned his attention to her once again.

“But…don’t plenty of McAllister witches come and roam around Sedona all the time?”

“To shop and eat and go to the movies, sure.” Bellamy swirled her straw around in her iced tea, doing her best to collect her scattered thoughts. “But they don’t sleep here, or spend twenty-four/seven around the red rocks and vortexes. Maybe that’s what it takes for Sedona’s energies to start working on their witchy powers.”

For a moment, Marc didn’t say anything. He hadn’t looked away, though, which she believed must be a hopeful sign. If he thought she’d completely gone off the deep end, then she doubted he would have maintained their current eye contact.

“Maybe it is,” he said at length. “Is it something you could talk to Angela and Connor about?”

Bellamy honestly didn’t know. Sure, both theprimaandprimushad gained crazy powers when they inherited their positions — powers that expanded even further when they became consorts — but still, it wasn’t as if they’d also had all sorts of esoteric knowledge beamed directly into their brains. They had to figure things out for themselves, the same as anyone else.

“I suppose we can start there,” she replied, then shook her head. “Or maybe talk to the elders first. I don’t want to be bugging Connor and Angela with every little thing.”

“I’m not sure this is a ‘little thing,’” Marc said, words that reassured her even more. He was taking her concerns seriously, not dismissing them as the result of too much chianti and those amazing kisses they’d shared. “Not when you haven’t experienced anything like this before.”

No, she hadn’t. Sure, when she was a kid and her powers had first awakened, she used to stand on the overlook near McAllister Mercantile and let the wind ruffle her hair, and she’d pretended that those winds had all sorts of secrets they could tell her, if only she could figure out how to make her magical gift do what she wanted.

Now it seemed as if those winds were actually trying to communicate with her at last, and she wasn’t sure she liked the sensation very much.

If, in fact, anything really was happening, and her overactive brain hadn’t made up the whole thing.

She wished it was that easy. But whatever it was that she’d heard the night before, it had been real.

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