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what’s inside me. Your world hides from mine, century by century, building its pale layers of reason and denial. You come here, and in days you stand in judgment of what you can’t begin to comprehend?”
    â€œI don’t judge you, Flynn, but your actions.” The wind had come into the room. It blew over her face, through her hair. And it was cold. Though her belly quaked, she lifted her chin. “Power shouldn’t take away human responsibility. It should add to it. I’m surprised you haven’t learned that in all the time you’ve had to think.”
    His eyes blazed. He threw out his arms, and the room exploded with sound and light. She stumbled back, but managed to regain her balance, managed to swallow a cry. When the air cleared again, the room was empty but for the two of them.
    â€œThis is what I might have if I lived by your rules.Nothing. No comfort, no humanity. Only empty rooms, where even the echoes are lifeless. Five hundred years of alone, and I should worry that another whose life comes and goes in a blink might do without a lamp or a painting?”
    â€œYes.”
    Temper snapped off him, little flames of gold. Then he vanished before her eyes.
    What had she done? Panicked, she nearly called out for him, then realized he would hear only what he chose to hear.
    She’d driven him away, she thought, sinking down in misery to sit on the bare floor. Driven him away with her rigid stance on right and wrong, her own unbending rules of conduct, just as she had kept so many others at a distance most of her life.
    She’d preached at him, she admitted with a sigh. This incredible man with such a magnificent gift. She had wagged her finger at him, just the way she wagged it at her mother. Taken on, as she habitually did, the role of adult to the child.
    It seemed that not even magic could burn that irritating trait out of her. Not even love could overcome it.
    Now she was alone in an empty room. Alone, as she had been for so long. Flynn thought he had a lock on loneliness, she thought with a half laugh. She’d made a career out of alone.
    She drew up her knees, rested her forehead on them. The worst of it, she realized, was that even now—sad, angry, aching—she believed she was right.
    It wasn’t a hell of a lot of comfort.

7
    I T TOOK HIM hours to work off his temper. He walked, he paced, he raged, he brooded. When temper had burned off, he sulked, though if anyone had put this term on his condition, he’d have swung hard back into temper again.
    She’d hurt him. When anger cleared away enough for that realization to surface, it came as a shock. The woman had cut him to the bone. She’d rejected his gift, questioned his morality, and criticized his powers. All in one lump.
    In his day such a swipe from a mere woman would have…
    He cursed and paced some more. It wasn’t his day, and if there was one thing he’d learned to adjust to, it was the changes in attitudes and sensibilities. Women stood toe-to-toe with men in this age, and in his readings and viewings over the years, he’d come to believe they had the right of it.
    He was hardly steeped in the old ways. Hadn’t he embraced technology with each new development? Hadn’t he amused himself with the quirks of society and fashion and mores as they shifted and changed and became? And he’d taken from each of those shifts what appealed most, what sat best with him.
    He was a well-read man, had been well read and well traveled even in his own time. And since that time, he’d studied. Science, history, electronics, engineering, art, music, literature, politics. He had hardly stopped using his mind over the last five hundred years.
    The fact was, he rarely had the chance to use anything else.
    So, he used it now and went over the argument in his head.
    She didn’t understand, he decided. Magic wasn’t bound by the rules of her world, but by itself. It was,