Midnight Pleasures by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Anthology
ISBN: 9780312987626
Google: IOJcw-H6t9kC
Amazon: 0312987625
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2003-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

Alex looked at the address he'd copied down, then up at the beach house. The numbers matched. He had the right place.

He was fascinated by the woman, the Witch. Mesmerized, maybe. He couldn't get her off his mind after she left, and though he'd fought the demanding urge for a while—a token fight, really—he'd ended up giving in and driving out here. He didn't feel as if he had much choice in the matter. And it wasn't just due to the insane events of the past few weeks of his life, either. There was something about her that lured him, pulled him, like gravity.

She lived on the beach. It seemed fitting. He thought of legends of sirens luring sailors to their doom and wondered if this was the same sort of pull those sailors felt.

He climbed the shallow landscaped steps to the front door and knocked. Then he waited, but there was no answer. A car was in the driveway, but no one seemed to be in the house.

And then the wind picked up and he heard it: a woman's voice, lifted in an enchanting, mesmerizing, haunting song and coming from the beach around back. He followed the sound, picking up the words as he went around the beach house.

"Come, Mother Ocean; come, Lady Night; come, Warrior Woman; come, bring your might."

He found the steps in the back and stared down at the woman on the beach below. And that thing, that powerful attraction he'd felt before, washed over him again like an ocean wave washing over the shore. For a moment, he couldn't breathe. He could only stand there, looking on, wondering what it was about her that sent his head spinning and tied his stomach in knots.

She stood in the sand, arms raised high above her head, a flowing blue dress dancing around her legs in the ocean breeze. There was a small fire crackling in front of her, its light melding with the orange glow of the sun, as it set over the ocean, to paint her body and hair in brushstrokes of bronze and yellow and red.

"Come, Moonlight Maiden; come, Graveyard Crone; come, Dark Enchantress, Goddess of the Foam."

Her voice seemed to grow hypnotic, more mystical with every verse she sang. As the sun sank over the sea and darkness gathered like a blanket, surrounding the firelight and the woman in its center, he noticed for the first time other tiny lights—candles, planted in the sand. Four of them, one just ahead of her, toward the sea, one to either side of her, and one behind her. And there was something on the sand in between them, leading from one dancing candle to the next in a gentle arc so that a circle was formed. As he was drawn ever closer, he squinted. Seashells. The circle was made of seashells.

"Come to thy priestess; come, fierce and strong; come, live within me; come, we are one!"

The words wound themselves around his mind. The final three kept echoing

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