Seduction Read online

  He looked annoyed. “All right. Me. I’m getting a big break, bigger than I can even explain to you right now. You just have to trust me.”

  “You already said that,” I said.

  But I did. I would trust Peter with my life. I have trusted him with my life, more than once. Peter wasn’t the problem.

  Jeremiah Shaw was.

  • • •

  Everything changed after that. A tailor came up from Boston to make clothes for Peter, and just about every day some fabulous electronic gizmo would show up in the mail. One of Jeremiah’s assistants took Peter into New York every two weeks just to get his hair cut. He had a standing meeting with Aldritch, the Shaw butler, who gave him etiquette lessons. For a while, he even moved into the Shaw mansion.

  It was all pretty disgusting, and didn’t accomplish much except to estrange Peter from the townies. The Muffies, of course, loved it. They judged everyone on things like clothes and hair and which generation smartphone they owned.

  But then, they’d liked Peter even before his two-hundred-dollar haircuts and True Religion jeans. And who wouldn’t? He was six feet tall, with honey-blond hair and gray eyes, and long legs and a thin but muscular body, and soft lips and skin that blushed easily, and big hands and a kind of sexy-without-meaning-to-be walk, and a soft voice, and thick dark eyelashes. Did I mention that he always smelled good? Really, really good.

  And, hard as it was for me to believe, he loved me.

  To give him credit, Peter had used the technology available to him through the Shaw laboratories to do a lot of good in our community. There were quite a few people in Whitfield who owed Peter their lives after he’d quelled the kind of crisis that could only happen in a town like Whitfield—but more about that later.

  • • •

  Back at Peter’s megabuck non-graduation party, the grounds were lit by thousands of twinkling lights. At around ten, the band changed and the music turned into old people’s dance tunes. That was when most of my friends left—I guess they were afraid the musicians were going to swing into a rendition of the Hokey Pokey—and the waiters brought out the hard liquor. I wandered over to where Peter had spent most of the evening, to see if he would dance with me. The French girls, I noticed, were clustered around him.

  “Where is everyone?” he asked as we walked toward the dance floor.

  “I think they went for pizza,” I said.

  “Chicken hearts,” Peter said as he twirled me decisively. Jeremiah had made him take dancing lessons in preparation for the party, along with the tutoring in etiquette.

  I guessed Peter could be a wiener after all.

  “We’d have had a lot more fun at Hattie’s Kitchen,” I said. He only smiled. I tried to make the best of things. “At least we didn’t have to work tonight.” As after-school employees, Peter and I had to serve and clean up at every party at Hattie’s. At least this one was labor-free.

  “My uncle wanted to introduce me to the people he works with,” he said.

  “Who work for him, you mean.”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  “So you’re like the son Jeremiah never had?”

  He shrugged.

  I couldn’t hold it in any longer. “But why?” I demanded, as if it were the first time I’d asked him that question. “Why you? Why now?”

  Peter looked uncomfortable. “Maybe he just likes me.”

  I stared at him. He didn’t meet my eyes. “Right,” I said coldly. If he thought I was that dumb, I wasn’t even going to argue about it. “That must be it.”

  “Try not to be cynical, Katy,” he said quietly. Then he smiled. “You look beautiful.”

  I looked away.

  “Like always,” he said.

  God. No wonder I love him.

  “I think I’ll be able to get away before too long,” he whispered in my ear. “Maybe we could go—”

  “Excuse me,” someone said as an ancient hand separated us. It was Jeremiah Shaw. Of course.

  “Pardon me for interrupting, Peter.” He stared at me. “Ummm . . .”

  “Katy,” I reminded him.

  “Yes,” Jeremiah said, his momentary notice of me already a distant memory. “Peter, I want you to meet someone . . .” He led Peter away, leaving me behind without a backward glance.

  CHAPTER

  •

  TWO

  I tried not to feel resentful that I hadn’t been introduced (or even acknowledged, aside from Jeremiah’s distracted ummm). But there I stood, alone in the middle of the dance floor, wishing I could disappear in a puff of smoke. Everyone had seen Peter walk away from me. The Muffies were giggling. The French girls were talking behind their hands. I swallowed, held up my head in a meaningless show of bravado, and headed for the parking lot. I’d had enough of this funfest.

  A dainty hand touched my elbow. “ ’Allo, Katy,” Fabienne said, smiling behind a cloud of pink tulle. She pronounced my name as if it consisted of two letters, K and T, with the accent on the T. “Are you having the good time?”

  Before I could lie, she smiled and said, “No, I think perhaps not so good.” She looked over at Peter and his corporate cohorts. “The men are boring, no?”

  I shrugged, not trusting my voice. Not trusting anything. If Fabienne had come to hit me with a Mean Girl zinger, she’d picked the right time. I looked over at the French girls.

  “Oh, they are boring too,” she said, laughing. “Come with me.” She hooked her arm through mine. “We go to the powder room, hokay? We look for something more interesting.”

  I didn’t know what to say, but at least it was a less humiliating way to leave the dance floor than Plan A.

  We had to go into the house for the restrooms. The nearest one was off the billiards room. When I came out, Fabienne had racked up a set of balls.

  “You will play?” she asked, chalking a stick.

  “Why not,” I muttered. I wasn’t a very good pool player, but sometimes my friends and I—and Peter, before he became the darling of Shaw Enterprises—would hang out at Buzzy’s Billiards for pizza and a few racks.

  She broke surprisingly well. “Impressive,” I said.

  “Pool is very popular in Los Angeles now.”

  “When were you in L.A.?”

  “I go to school there before,” she answered offhandedly. “Six months, two year ago. Before that I am in Rome. Tokyo, too.” She pocketed three striped balls. “Now here. But I finish now. No more school.”

  “What? You’re dropping out of high school?”

  She missed the fourth pocket by a hair. “The education, it is not important,” she said breezily, adjusting her tulle.

  “What planet are you from?” I blurted. But then I regretted it because she blushed and ducked her head slightly, and I knew that she was feeling ashamed.

  “In my family, the women do not study beyond fifteen years,” she said quietly, her eyes not meeting mine. “Too much reading ruins the eyes.”

  I blinked. “But . . . what will you do, then? With the rest of your life?”

  She made a Gallic gesture. “Oh, I visit, I travel. Perhaps I will fall in love, when I am of age. Who knows?” Her lips formed a glistening pout. “And you? You will continue to study, yes?”

  If there was anything in my life that had never been open to discussion, it was whether I would go to college. My father, who is a professor of medieval literature at Columbia University, began planning my academic career at approximately the moment of my conception. I was to go to Harvard, of course, where I would begin a broad overview of English and other languages during my freshman year, with a focus on post–World War I poetry, and proceed from there through my first doctorate. So that was pretty much a done deal. One of the reasons I’d been sent to Ainsworth in the first place was that 95 percent of its graduates went on to college. I presume the remaining 5 percent died or lapsed into comas, since no mention is ever made of them. I couldn’t imagine what the school officials would have to say about Fabienne’s ambitions, or
lack of them.

  “Uh . . . yeah,” I said. “At least eight years after high school.” That was, if one Ph.D. would be enough to please Dad.

  “Eight years! To study cooking?”

  “Cooking?”

  “But you are a cook, non?”

  “Well, I’ve been working at a restaurant after school for a couple of years—”

  “Oui, at Hattie’s Kitchen. But you are merveilleuse! Everyone talks about how you are the great chef already.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” I said, although her words made me feel like bursting with pride. I loved cooking. It was artistic and harrowing and endlessly complex. It was about beauty and intellect and wild physical activity and huge stress, but also love. For me, it was mostly about love.

  “You should study at Le Clef d’Or in Paris,” Fabienne said. “This is the best cooking school in the world. Very close to my mother’s house.”

  “Paris,” I mused. “I’d love that.”

  “Then go. Maybe I am there myself when you arrive. Then I show you le vrai Paris.”

  I dreamed on for another second or two, but then reality set in. “That’s never going to happen,” I said, shaking my head as if it had suddenly been filled with Styrofoam peanuts. “My dad would literally have a heart attack if I didn’t go to college.”

  She shrugged. “But of course you can go. Cooking is not a long study, one year, perhaps. You can even go for the summer only.”

  I laughed. Partly it was because she kept saying “kooking,” but also, I was nervous and just sort of tittering stupidly because I didn’t know what else to do. I’d never before allowed myself to think about cooking seriously.

  Fabienne gave me one of those French gestures with her chin to let me know it was my turn to shoot.

  I chalked up my stick, but the idea she had stuck in my head wasn’t easy to ignore. “It’s not just the time involved,” I said. “The Clef d’Or would cost a lot of money. Maybe all my savings.”

  “Money?” She looked amazed, as if the word “money” were an alien sound communicated through tap-dancing frogs. “You are worried about money? You?”

  I blinked. “Yes, me,” I answered. “The kitchen wench, remember?”

  “But Peter . . .” Her voice died away.

  “What about him?” I prodded.

  “Peter is your amant, no?”

  Although my grasp of French was limited, I knew that amant meant lover. “Er . . . well, not exactly,” I waffled. First base, maybe, but definitely no home run. “Just my boyfriend.”

  “Eh bien,” Fabienne said. “Still, he will give you the money, surely.”

  “What?” Then I got it. She must have thought that a) Peter was rich, and b) I would accept money from him if he were. “That’s not going to fly,” I said tersely, leaning over the pool table.

  “But he gives it to me.”

  My stick skimmed wildly off the top of the ball. I closed my eyes, counted to ten, and straightened up. “He gives you money?” I seethed.

  “You do not know this?” She opened her sparkly evening bag and dumped a bunch of coins onto the green baize of the pool table.

  I stared at the pile for a moment. They were coins, all right, but none of them were engraved in any way. They were just plain disks of gleaming, bright gold.

  “What are these?” I asked, picking one up and dropping it again.

  “Gold, bien sur. From Peter and Monsieur Shaw. But surely you know what they do.”

  I looked over at her, my eyes narrowed. “Besides give you money?”

  “Not just me. All of us.”

  “Meaning exactly . . . ?”

  “My friends. Les Françaises.”

  “Er . . . why?”

  She shrugged. “Ask Peter,” she said.

  • • •

  “Well, uh . . . uh. . . .” Peter squirmed in our booth at Pizza World the next day.

  “Look, this isn’t Jeopardy. I just want to know why—and how—you’re giving Fabienne money.”

  “Fabienne?” He looked puzzled.

  I sighed. “The French girl?” I prodded. “The one you took to Winter Frolic?”

  “Oh, yeah. She was a freshman,” he added unnecessarily.

  “A very rich one, apparently. So are her friends, who also have you to thank for their newfound wealth.”

  “Uh,” he said, running his hand through his hair. “That is, I’m not exactly sure. I mean, I don’t know the rest of them personally.”

  “I see. You’re just kind of tossing gold coins their way.”

  “No, it’s not like that. It’s . . .” The waitress came to take our order. We got our pizza date after all, the day after the party. Only it wasn’t turning out to be as much fun as I’d thought it would be. “I wish you wouldn’t do this, Katy.”

  I wished I wouldn’t either. I didn’t like giving Peter the third degree. It was demeaning, to Peter and to me both. “Oh, forget it,” I said. “Keep your stupid secrets.”

  “Katy, please. Wait.” He took my arm. “I hate keeping things from you.” He pulled me close to him over the table in our booth, and he spoke in a whisper. “It’s Jeremiah. He’s taught me . . . some things.”

  “Yeah,” I said with as much sarcasm as I could muster. “Like turning lead into gold, I suppose.”

  He gazed at me levelly.

  I felt my throat close. “Oh, my God,” I finally managed. My blood felt cold in my veins. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

  He swallowed.

  “How . . . how long?”

  Peter understood exactly what I was asking. “Since Jeremiah showed me,” he said quietly.

  “He showed you how to make gold?”

  “Shh.” He looked over his shoulder to make sure no one was listening to us. “Not exactly. That is, not everyone can do it. But he recognized the . . . the gift I had, and he’s been teaching me how to develop it. That’s what’s been taking up so much of my time.”

  I sat back, stunned.

  “So?” he asked. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m speechless,” I said.

  He grinned. “Well, I guess there’s a first time for everything.”

  CHAPTER

  •

  THREE

  Now, the fact that Peter could do magic was not, in itself, really extraordinary. Not for Whitfield, Massachusetts.

  I’ve mentioned that it’s a strange place. Most of the families in town have lived here since before the American Revolution. It’s a nice town, after all is said and done, where there isn’t much crime except for the occasional demonic possession. Well, there was the incident a couple of years ago when someone was nearly burned at the stake as a witch.

  That was me.

  The only thing that was really weird about that was that not only am I a witch, but so is almost everyone else who lives in Whitfield. Everybody has some kind of talent—that is, we can all do things that most (read normal) people would consider impossible. Like reading minds, or healing by touch, or being able to disappear at will. I myself am a telekinetic, which means I can move objects with my mind. It’s not a great talent or a rare one, but it comes in handy from time to time.

  We’re all different, but we all fit together in Whitfield. It’s a perfect town for someone like me. Well, usually. We’re more troubled than most about something we call the Darkness, but we try not to think about that. At least I do. I’ve had a couple of run-ins with It—call It the Devil, or the Dark Passenger, or just plain evil—and I hope never to encounter It again.

  The burning-at-the-stake incident had been an accident, not the work of the Darkness. Still, as you might guess, even minor misunderstandings among witches can have disastrous consequences, the most serious of which is publicity.

  Publicity is something witches don’t like. Not even a little bit. There are no famous witches who are really witches. That is because if cowen—that is, ordinary people—knew about us, it would only be a matter of time before the burnings would be
held in earnest.

  It’s understandable. People don’t generally like what’s different. We’ve got people in Whitfield who can travel without their bodies. Who can shape-shift. One of us, known as a djinn, can actually command a whole group of people to do her bidding. Can you imagine what cowen would do if they got hold of her?

  Or someone who can create gold? It made me shiver just to think about it.

  The funny thing is, until this revelation, nobody thought Peter had much magical talent at all. Don’t get me wrong, he was a valuable member of the community. It was his genius with computers that had saved the lives of a whole village whose water supply had been poisoned (again by accident, and alas, again by me). But as far as magic went, Peter had never been considered much of a force to be reckoned with.

  The fact that he had any magic at all was surprising, given that he was a Shaw.

  You see, the Shaws were notoriously cowen—or at least they seemed to be, before Peter dropped the bombshell about Jeremiah on me. The Shaw family had been the bane of the Whitfield witches ever since the first American Shaw (Henry, 1646–?) turned his own wife over to the righteously murderous Puritans on suspicion of witchcraft.

  Why he had done that if he had been a witch himself was a mystery that hadn’t yet been solved, but there were a lot of mysteries in Whitfield, so I wasn’t about to lose any sleep over Henry Shaw.

  But Peter . . . holy cats, I just couldn’t believe it.

  “Katy?” Peter asked anxiously. I guess he wasn’t used to my silence. “Are you all right?”

  I cleared my throat. “You never told me,” I said. “About being . . . being . . .”

  “Don’t say it out loud,” he warned. “I wanted to tell you. Really, I did.”

  I could feel my bottom lip quivering. “Didn’t you trust me?”

  “Of course I did. It’s just that . . . well, sometimes you talk . . . a little . . . not much, but . . .” He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief.

  “You thought I would blab?”

  Peter swallowed. “No,” he answered, too quickly. “Besides, I . . . I wasn’t even sure myself, until Jeremiah taught me how to do it.”