A muscle tightened in his jaw. "Anything else… anything more is impossible, Serena."

After a long moment she repeated, "Yes, of course," then added gravely, "I apologize for intruding into your personal life. It won't happen again." Quickly, she slipped from the room, closing the door behind her.

Merlin drew a slow, deep breath, trying to ease the constricted sensation in his chest. It didn't really work, which didn't surprise him; he had been conscious of that odd tightness for a long time now. It had been an ever-present feeling for months at least. Before that it had been an erratic thing, something of which he had been aware only occasionally.

He remembered clearly when he had first felt a hint of the strange sensation. Serena had been with him about three years then, and they had been totally immersed in study most of that time. But he had taken her out to dinner one night, and looking at her across the table, he had been jolted to realize she was wearing lipstick.

Such a small thing, and the sudden squeezing inside his chest had been fleeting, easily forgotten. Until the next time he had glimpsed some sign that the ragged urchin he had taken into his home and his life was becoming a woman. Was, actually, reveling in being a woman.

He hadn't lied to her just now, he told himself. There were precise lines dividing Master and Apprentice, and because of the power involved, those boundaries really did have to be respected. Serena knew that, as her words had proven. But he hadn't told her the whole truth, and he had allowed her to believe he was far more emotionally indifferent to her than he was.

Indifferent? Christ, if she only knew…

Merlin pushed himself away from the desk and went around behind it, where his chair was pulled back. He didn't sit, but put his hands on the smooth oak of the desk and leaned forward, staring down at an old, old book lying open. Like so many of the books in this room, its fragile parchment pages were hand-lettered in a strange language that would have baffled even the most erudite linguist, but Merlin read it easily because it was the language of his kind.

It is forbidden far any Master, or any wizard of any level, to encourage or teach a woman to understand or implement any part or the whole of spells, incantations, or any other tool of the wizard's craft. No wizard of any level may reveal his true nature to a woman at any time without the prior express permission of the Council of Elders. Any wizard encountering a woman of innate power, whether or not she be aware of that power, must instantly report the discovery to the Council. Failure to obey these laws will result in the most severe of penalties, up to and including total banishment and the deprivation of all powers…

Merlin didn't have to look at the other books and scrolls on his desk, because he had pored over them for many hours already. Without exception, each of them pronounced the same laws in an identical tone of dire warning. The words might have differed slightly from source to source, but there was no ambiguity, no loophole through which to pass. What it all boiled down to was quite simple.

He had broken an ancient law in accepting a woman as his Apprentice-teaching her secretly, without the knowledge of the Council-and with every day that passed he was compounding the original crime.

It had seemed such a foolish law then, when a half-starved and half-drowned girl had turned up on his doorstep, her untapped powers practically radiating from her thin little body in an aura of promise. How could he turn his back on that promise merely because she was female? He couldn't.

He hadn't.

Since wizards tended to isolate themselves, and no other lived in Seattle, he'd had no trouble in keeping his activities secret from the Council and others of his kind, even over the span of nine years. Serena had been so consumed with the desire to learn that she had been unquestioningly obedient to his carefully devised rules, and he had been able to shield her developing abilities so as to escape notice. So far.

But what Merlin had not anticipated were his own confused instincts and emotions. The more Serena matured, the more he found himself overwhelmingly aware of her. She held his total attention with startling ease, no matter what she was doing, with her voice and her grace and the laughter in her green eyes, and even the way she had of charmingly and cleverly manipulating people and her surroundings to suit her-whether or not she used her powers to do it.

Their years together had given them knowledge of each other and a certain familiarity, and of course she had become a beautiful woman, so his notice and interest should have seemed perfectly normal and hardly surprising. And though he couldn't be sure of Serena's feelings any more than he could read her thoughts, he would have to have been blind and stupid not to recognize, even before today, that she saw him as something more than a teacher.

So why was he fighting his own feelings? There was, after all, nothing standing between him and Serena except a ponderous ban in some old texts Serena had never even seen. And since he'd already broken the law, anything else had to be an insignificant matter of degree. At least that was what he told himself. But what seemed simple on the surface turned out to be far more complicated underneath.

He had found himself withdrawing from her time and time again, feeling a strange and senseless apprehension whenever something reminded him she was no longer a child, that she was a woman only nominally under his control. The feelings grew stronger and stronger, the tightness in his chest, the wariness, the inexplicable urge to be on guard, as if against a threat.

Serena… a threat. Why? Why?

Her innate power was truly incredible; that was beyond question. She frequently startled him with the strength of some ability he was in the process of teaching her-as well as an occasional seemingly natural or unconscious skill that was unknown to him even after a lifetime's study of his art-but he had no logical reason to feel apprehensive or threatened by Serena nevertheless.

It had occurred to him only recently that what he felt was for too powerful to have originated in the simple breaking of a law, that surely there was little power in dry words of warning written in ancient books and scrolls-certainly not enough to cause this turmoil inside him.

No, this was something else, something embedded in him, inherent to him, to who and what he was, that he could only sense. It was as if all his deepest instincts recognized a prohibition so vitally important, it was more like a taboo, a primitive command demanding instant, wordless obedience. Part of him wanted to obey, struggled to obey, but part of him didn't want to and fought against it. Since he was a logical man, and since that command stirred an increasingly stormy conflict he didn't understand in himself, Merlin had begun searching for the reasons behind the law.

So far he hadn't found them.

Sitting down in his desk chair, Merlin leaned back and gazed across the room at nothing. How could he explain to Serena what he didn't understand himself? About what he felt and what he recoiled away from feeling… And how could he even begin to tell her that the closed, secret society of wizards she aspired to join wanted nothing to do with her?

"Have you seen today's paper?"

Serena peered at the clock on her nightstand-a replacement for the one she'd zapped-and made a muffled sound of indignation when she realized it wasn't yet seven o'clock. In the morning.

"Jane, do you know what time it is?" she asked into the phone, yawning.

"Of course I know what time it is. You weren't awake? Serena, you're always up by six on a weekday."