Many tales profess to explain the essence of magic. They would perhaps have you believe that it is a simple process of spells, incantations and a person strong enough to exert will upon some unknown ethereal entity who does the bidding of some shaman or witch or warlock or priest.

Magic is more like a room where spirits who know you well come to meet. If you have the awareness to enter, you will have the ability to seek the help to affect whatever it is you seek to influence. That is not to say that the spirit will help you, for spirits can be quite cantankerous in their own way. They may also not agree with what you are attempting to attain. Reaching that room, opening the door: that can be a challenge all in itself. The door isn't always open. Sometimes, what you seek help with is so large a burden that it takes extra effort to get to the room. On those occasions, one is wise to only attempt the magic when your abilities are strongest and when the room is closest to you. These are different moments perhaps for each person. For me, it is the night of the full moon when I can be one with the wind.

Magic is powerful. The ability to control certain aspects is to be attained. Those who come before must help each following generation of witches.

Magic is personal. Every witch who employs it must have a focused reason, a driving force behind her or his desire to employ it. It is not so much the casting of a spell as it the communion with a sense that escapes notice of the majority of people on this planet.

Magic is small. It is not employed to affect the world or history. It is never so much as the one tiny spark that will affect a specific life.

In my family, we employ magic with success only when we understand how a specific reason to help a specific person will be something we believe is the right thing. It is, above all, critical to us to protect the Four Sacred Things: earth, fire, water and wind. We could not exist without them.

Cort's tan face seemed almost silver in the moon's glow. We were in the hayloft; the door through which bales were dropped was open so that I could see the sky and the earth.

He had come seeking my magic.

I had already decided I would help him. Perhaps I had decided when he'd told me he was existing in El Mundo Malo. Perhaps this is why the water spirit had seduced me into a trance only to call Cort to where I was in that brook. It was not a coincidence he'd come there at that time, not when water was his guiding Sacred Thing, just as wind is mine. But what power it would take to give this man what he wanted me to do for him. I'd known that as he'd let me see the life he'd passed through already.

He had been swept out of that life, had come through some void I feared to cross; he had come into my time. Two years he had wandered, tormented by his desire to return to his own time.

Everyone, no matter who, has a time and place that belongs to them. If what happened to Cort had happened to me, if I'd been pulled from this time and place into another one, I would have believed that it was meant that I would always be there, that that would have been my real time and place.

Cort, though, was bound by only one belief: he belonged where his life had begun.

Who is to say which of us would be right?

I would help him return.

What he asked of me, though, he knew not of its cost to me. The only possible chance I would have to be powerful enough to carry his burden as I sought to enact the magic that would allow him to travel back across that terrible void, would be to do it under the next night's full moon.

I had woken from a dream with the realization that I wished a connection with him before he left that would bind him to me. I had grown to love this man based solely on the magnificence of his spirit that would allow him to open and show himself to me, both the good and the very bad of him.

What swam through my dream was the purity of his soul's belief that redemption was possible.

The wind swept gently through the door's opening; it hesitated for only a moment before touching me where I stood in the hayloft.

"Come to me now and lay your hands over mine." This is what I told Cort.

He said, "You're shaking."

"I want to know you."

"Do I scare you, Rachel?"

"Oh, yes."

"Why?"

"Because I will never forget you. Nothing will ever be the same for me."

"Why?"

I shrugged my shoulders. I put my hand on his chest. I felt his heart beating, strong and valiant. "Because you are you. Because I want and I haven't wanted any man for so long. Because now I know your spirit but..."

"But?" he whispered. His mouth moved against my ear. His breath was warm; it licked boldly across the tempo of my longing to know him.

"I want you to taste El Mundo Bueno, Cort. I want you to see that even as we stand on the brink of sending you back to that other time, that you have already left the Bad Reality. You must walk now with me in the Good Reality, where I can do the magic you wish."

His big hands pulled me closer to him. He felt me press myself into his hardness. "You're still trembling," he said, this time in a voice that knew that I was trembling because of how he touched me, how he made me anticipate what he would be like.

"For weeks, you have sought to seduce me. What woman would not tremble before a man such as you?"

"What man would not try to seduce a woman like you?"

"A weak man."

"I want to lie with you in this night..." he whispered to me even as his mouth kissed mine.

He kissed me.

Will I ever be asked if the kiss would not have been enough for me? If so, would I admit that it would not? You do not enter into these things not knowing you're going to give up an essential part of your spirit.

"Let me show you..."

I lifted the gown I wore; it was soft cotton, the barest yellow. I pulled it up in bunches of fabric until it was high enough that I could take his hand and place it under the gown, upon my heart. Skin touching skin.

For long moments, his eyes unfocused, staring down at my bare ankles. But when I begun tugging the buttons of his flannel shirt open, he looked off, away from me. I placed my hand over his heart. Skin touching skin.

Completing a circle between us.

His eyes sought mine. I felt my focus reach inside myself. I saw my own veins, beating, flowing. I found the essence of him that he was giving me through his hand over my heart. I closed my eyes. I took his aware essence along with me as I turned to look inside him.

Together, we saw the man he'd mined from the pity of his life. We saw the strength it had taken him to face his own failures and not be destroyed. We saw the courage that allowed him to stand tall, admit what he was and still ... still! ... become a better man.

"Oh!" I moaned. My fingers drifted as his memory suddenly shifted. I was seeing myself, as he had seen me when he first arrived at our ranch.

I would have lost contact with his skin, the connection between us broken, except an instinct inside him led him to place his free hand over mine that was upon his chest. I had never witnessed such strength, such honesty in someone to be able to hold me into this connection when I would have let it go.

And so I saw myself as he saw me, through all the weeks, all the nuances of me that I showed him. The shifts in our relationship and the awareness of how I longed for him. His own longing for me. His fear that I would not help him that melted into belief that I was the one person who would stand and deliver the help he needed. It ended with his vision of me this night, standing upon the porch, my gown shifting as I walked to the top step. I could feel every aspect of what he felt about me as he looked. Hunger. Curiosity. Fear. Desire. Lust. Affection. Trust. Above all: a visceral, physical reaction to knowing that beneath that thin layer of drifting cotton, there was only my nakedness. A fleeting, cherished awareness that I would respond to his masculinity; that in that night, I would not have been standing where I was, across from him, if I'd not burned with passion to be with him as a woman is with a man.

He knew... maybe he always had and maybe he'd always liked it... but he knew for sure that I was his but for the taking of me.

"Would you?" I whispered. "You would take me? Even knowing what I am?"

"You're a woman, Rachel."

"What would a man such as you want with me as only a woman?"

"To have you. To be with you. To make a mark on you."

"I would leave a mark on you as well, Cort."

Did I know? Is it at all possible that this will not be uppermost in terms of what will be desired to be known?

If I am a witch, and I am, I cannot foretell the future, sure. But, I can hear the question that will be asked, surely you had to know what would happen between you would be more than what Cort anticipated?

The question I know won't be asked is this: wasn't it at all possible you knew that what would happen would be more than you could have anticipated yourself?

Somewhere inside me, I knew.

I had wanted him. The girlish crush had long since turned into a woman's desire. Realistic, heart stopping, sweating desire.

His eyes swept over my body as I stood before him.

Silent.

Thirsting.

He looked back through the small door in the loft; a vision of stars and the growing moon filled its expanse.

A stolen night.

He sat before the opened door. The night's lights showed his bare chest as I reached down to stroke it and kiss his mouth when it turned up to find mine. I slipped my gown over my head. I tossed the gown aside as I went to him, kneeling before him, desirous of his hands on me.

"You're not what I ever thought," he said softly. His fingers trailed over my hips, as if touching my skin's surface was almost more than he was capable of doing.

"I wonder what you will taste like," I said to him. My fingers traced his lips.

"I was thinking something similar," he said, giving my fingertips a tiny nip.

He settled me in his lap. Denim, rough and dusty, moved against my naked flesh in that most tender area of a woman. It was a sensation that made me aware of being a woman in the intimate presence of a man so masculine that the glint of his eyes in the night excited me.

I slid my hands slowly over his shoulders as he whispered to me of how we would give to each other that night. He would give me everything he had; I would give him a night of peace and he would forget for this time that he was in a world he did not want to be in.

"My people believe that when a man and woman kiss, as we're about to, with passion and desire, that a bit our life force is exchanged. This is the mark I place on you, Cort."

"The marks I'll put on you tonight on you will fade eventually, Rachel. But you'll never forget them... or me."

Between my legs, a deep twinge. He seemed to know that this was where I'd feel his words. That must be why he stroked the pad of his thumb there; it was far too light a touch to do anything but make me press forward, seeking harder contact.

I clenched his head between my hands and reached my lips down for a kiss. But he was so strong, so adamant. His mouth instead sought out the side of my neck. He kissed me there. I felt his tongue; his teeth. Wetness; hardness.

He stroked his thumb over my wetness again. I trembled. He pressed his thumb inside me. I moaned. He bit into my neck, kissing a mark into me there, just over the vein that jumped and pulsed with vivid life. A small cry, so very small, escaped from me.

His other hand bound itself into my hair; he used this leverage to pull my face to his. This was the moment of our kiss.

One kiss from him to mark me. One kiss from me to mark him.

Even cut off from everything, I knew this much and I will always remember it: no man has kissed with me such latent sensuality.

I drew my fingers through his long hair. Such beautiful hair for such a hard man. He had the soul of a poet who cannot write. He had the countenance of a hard man desperate to hide the poet within. He had the heart of a strong man searching for a woman who read the poet, admired the hard man and protected the searcher.

Why else would I have wanted him in this night? How could I not have wanted him after seeing not just his past but how he suffered and survived only to have the tenderness to be able to see me that night, upon our porch, and to feel sweet desire for me?

When we came out of the kiss, our mouths hung open in that trance-like state lovers take when they struggle to regain the ability to think and act only to realize that they don't want to think about what will happen. They just want to let go.

I unbuttoned his shirt. I whispered against his ear. "I haven't had a man in two years," I said. "I need your touch. I need your passion before you go from this time. I need you. I need to take you inside me. I need to feel every inch. Every breath. Every desire. Every pleasure I give you."

"You've got no idea the way I want to please you, Rachel..."

He did please me. And I pleased him.

I liked touching a body I'd seen inside a trance. I had known I would. I had touched its wet planes in the brook when I was in the trance. In this night, I stroked its sweaty-wet contours. I tasted at his neck, salty slick. His mouth was sweet. His lips were supple and giving.

His tongue explored. Mine, too.

In the moment before we joined our bodies, before he entered me and filled me, we lay side by side on our clothes, scattered beneath us to shelter us from the prickly hay bales. I caressed his manhood. He stroked my breasts.

I promised I'd remember.

He promised to never forget.

I asked him about his God.

He told me he still believed.

"I'll find it hard to let you go, won't I?" I asked him.

"I should have met you when I first came over," he said.

My thumb grazed over the fluid signaling his ever-impatient desire. "How I wish you had. But at last we did meet. Even if so brief. You met me when the time was right."

His hand dropped between my thighs, spreading me even as he shifted his legs between mine and came over me. "Maybe meeting you was what it was all about."

"I need you inside me," I suddenly groaned as he drew his hot head along my wetness, readying himself to make the entry easier. "Don't be gentle."

He had a flicker of a smile at that heated statement. It was the smile of a man about to take. A man not yet focused on the giving he'd do as well.

It ached. An aching inside me that opened and pulsed... and needed filling. I closed my eyes, held on to him, opened my eyes again to watch him in silvery luminescence. A rim of light around my vision brightened as he hilted, deep inside me.

I ached. It was an ache so old, so universal. I ached for the simple pleasure of another person's need of me as a woman, a mate, a lover.

In his eyes, I saw the answering yearning for an ending to isolation.

We were neither of us more open than we were able to be in just that moment, where we became lovers who saw with passion's eyes that we held possibilities we'd never have the time to explore.

Chaos whirled around me. I arched under him; I writhed in desire to get physical release and to feel his release. I called his name; he murmured mine against my ear and held himself still as I came.

Sweat.

The taste of his mouth.

His body grinding against mine.

Hands spreading my legs, wider, wider.

Breathing.

His tears.

Tenderness.

It hurts.

How it feels so good. It hurts to feel this good. It is far too fleeting.

Throbbing.

His rough voice, rough beard. 

Warm semen filling me.

Clutching on to him.

Holding him as he falls, his mouth seeking my breast.

His forehead against my wild blood coursing in the vein at the base of my throat.

He came here from another world, another time. He found me in desperation. He wanted to go home. I would have helped him anyway, I'm sure. What I did, I did for him.

We talked.

The sun was not yet able to fight off the moon.

He said that back in his real time, he'd sinned more than even a benevolent God could forgive. He told me that in Redemption, he suffered most when he realized he was not strong enough to resist temptation.

"It wasn't temptation," I said to him, remembering seeing him with a gun in his hand. "It was instinct. You were never meant to be a priest. But that doesn't mean you weren't meant to do good things with your life. You knew the difference even as you struggled."

He rose up on his elbow, looked down at me. I wondered if he was capable of being able to forgive himself any longer. He thought because he shot his gun in that contest, that he'd violated his promise before God to not kill again.

"I was weak," he said softly.

"Everyone is weak," I said.

"You think I'm a strong man."

"You have a strong soul. You have a wounded heart. No wonder women feel such instant desire for you," I said. "But you have something else."

"Do I?"

"You have a sharp, questioning spirit. You always thought you were more comfortable being a loner but it's not in your nature. You want to be with people. You want to be with someone you care enough about to protect from evil."

"You know so much about me?"

"Only because you wanted me to see inside you. You sought me out, Cort. There is a danger in that and you knew it. A witch does not necessarily do your bidding."

"Knowing inside me... Rachel?"

"It was why I wanted you tonight. I wanted to make love with you. I had desired you, of course I had and of course you knew it."

"I did."

"I should blush, I know I should. To be so transparent all this time..."

"It made tonight possible. But you go on and blush because I like a woman who can still blush over wanting me."

His words lightened that moment. For long moments, we lingered over this charming sentiment.

"This is your final morning here. The full moon will come tonight. I have a ceremony I like to do to honor the moon's night. If you come with me, we can try to send you back to where you wish to go."

"Why tonight?"

"It's when I think such a thing is most possible."

"Why won't you look me in the eyes when you say that?"

Did I suppose to lie to him, you will ask me? I could have. I could have spoken to him in a voice that he would have believed no matter what I said. Except how do you form the intent to lie to a soul you've come to know as he had let me know his? I preferred to send him back to his time with some acceptance that someone who had come to know him as I did found him worthy of making a sacrifice for him.

I chose to give him some measure of dignity back. He had more than earned it; yet he did not know it yet.

"I don't know if I'm a strong enough witch to push you where your spirit would need to traverse. There is a void... a blackness that you came across. I have never encountered it before. I saw it in the trance, when I touched you. I don't know what it is. It may take more power than I can muster, even on the night of my moon and wind."

"But you'll try?"

You already know the answer to that. I did try.

Broken and needing healing. I held the key. 

Not everything was ever going to be the way he thought it would be. But he had made his choice.

I should have remembered that I cannot make everything the way I think it ought to be. That I cannot always make it right.

For sometimes a witch may call down what a goddess decides may not be the way forward. And sometimes, what a witch calls for comes but not in the exact shape she has anticipated.

Have I thought to clearly state that I am a witch?

No, not the kind who flies around on broomsticks trying to find Dorothy.

And not the kind who stands with other cackling, green-faced hags around a caldron brewing abysmal potions in some damp forest.

And I am no Wiccan.

This is not a religious calling; it is simply a part of who I am and has been a part of my family for so long.

We maintain a relationship with Mother Earth.  The earth, we know, is a living, conscious being. The earth is a connected system, for lack of better terms. It is connected to the life forms dependent upon it. And this is why the elements of earth, water, air and fire are sacred to us. They are the free essentials for life, whether it is ours or animals or plants: it is our duty to Mother Earth to nurture them as much as they nurture us.

Mother Earth; our Goddess.

In my family, we can do spells; we can conjure images for short periods of time that may confuse or convince others of what has not been; we can affect electro-magnetic fields and control products that depend on them to operate. We can change metal and in that way, can influence it to bend or shape as we need it.  We can move in spectral form to view things happening far away from us, although this is something that we each must learn how to do only when we're older and strong enough to hold to the meditative state.

We are careful, above all else, to not be very obvious or to be caught doing, as my father says, parlor tricks. Persecution is a human trait; they have some sort of need to go after those they know are markedly different.

It is one thing for the natives of this rocky, arid circle of singular land to know us for what we are. It is quite another thing to be so obvious that others would find it necessary to remark upon it. This is how persecution can begin. If your differences are enough, even benign differences will cause fear.

But the reason my mother chose this land when we left the old one was that it is a similar vortex of mysticism to the land of our ancestors. Native Americans knew this about this land; they have revered it for what their shamans feel when they trod here.

Perhaps this is why they have always tried to help maintain a curtain around us that most never seek to look behind. 

We can speak with the departed spirits. We can touch another person, see inside to what is damaged and heal many things by altering a person's ch'i. My mother was perhaps the most powerful healer of her time. My father is a guardian who has kept our small unit safe all these years. He is not a witch.

The herbs I grow have two purposes: some help us in healing rituals and others make our natural trances go deeper, more intense.

My father had come out when I was gathering herbs. My hair was still wet from the shower I'd taken after leaving Cort's arms. 

"Wait one more cycle," he said to me.

"If I do, I won't be able to let him go," I said. I would not look at him.

"All the more reason to wait." He hesitated. His voice was very strong; he was always a guardian. "A good man would want you to wait if he knew how you felt."

I rose from my knees. I had to face him. He had to be there for me when this was finished, whichever way it would go. "How could I tell him? What man wants to hear some lonely woman profess emotions she cannot possibly possess after one night with a man?"

His eyes dropped from mine. His shoulders seemed to set. What father is capable of hearing of his daughter's intimacies with a man? He was no different than any other. He might have known I had made love with Cort the night before, but he did not want this confirmation. I watched as he shoved earth around with the toe of his boot. I was not surprised when he found the inner strength to give me something to ponder, something that would give me firmer footing for what was to come.

"I loved your mother from the moment I first saw her." This was a typical statement; he often told me of my mother's glory; he never spoke about the details.

"You're a romantic, Daddy."

"The night we made you, she had a vision."

His eyes rose. I felt my insides contract. "Daddy..."

"I loved you from that moment. I had not seen you. I only knew she had seen you. That's love, Rach. You cannot predict these things. I would never have thought I'd feel that way because I hadn't been that kind of man. You just never know how you'll feel, how it will come for you. But once it's there, it's the best thing in the world."

"I'm coming back to you, Daddy. I'm not leaving." I had seen the emotions now coming off of him in waves. He thought I would follow Cort's spirit into whatever world he'd come from.

"I've seen how he looks at you, Rach. And I've seen how you look at him. At first, he just wanted your magic. But lately... he wants you."

"He wants to leave here. He came here from another time. I don't know how. I don't know the power that made that possible."

"How smart is it to send him back to the past now that he has knowledge of the future?"

"I don't know, Daddy. But if he stays here when he wants to go back so badly that it stalks his every heartbeat, I think he will never survive."

"How did he find you anyway?"

"He was wandering. He had given up. And then he heard a rumor."

"A rumor?"

"Even natives gossip, Daddy."

"He came here, on nothing more than cheap gossip?"

"He came here on faith. And hope."

"I was wandering when I met your mother, Rachel."

In the day that followed our joining, Cort and I spent many hours ranging in the near and far desert.

For a long time, we lingered at the brook where he'd found me in a trance. I asked him detailed questions about his time and place. I needed him to begin searching for his anchor there.

We made love in the shade of a boulder. Soft, damp earth beneath him. My knees barely felt the mud's grit. My hands felt his beard's rough scratch. If I must say it, I will say the obvious... I will always remember the way his lips touched mine in lingering caresses that drew me in deeper and still deeper. I will see his eyes in that time, in that light: the way they half shut when he neared his orgasm; the way they flashed open when he was so near that he became greedy for the release.

What else will I admit to remembering? Would I say I find it hard to describe the ball of sadness that bounced against the wall of determination to heal him?

He has large hands. He touched me, all over, as if fixing me within his immediate memories in such a way that he could always reach out in lonely nights and touch me.

He can say the roughest words in the softest voice. He has a man's way with words spoken in lust when there is love stalking in the shadows.

He never abandons a woman when he is her anchor to reality. He may drive her to that special form of ecstasy that only a man can give a woman who desires him as I desired him. But he is always there to protect her and to guide her back to earth.

He makes love with tender abandon. There is no remorse. You must be woman enough to be with him when he is this way. Nothing ever seems the same after.

Nothing.

I gathered remnants of his seed by stroking over his groin with the marigold blossom I'd brought with me from the garden. As he reclined upon the blanket, I held the marigold in my palms and whispered an incantation over it just before tucking it carefully inside a vial of anise oil.

By nightfall, we had ridden up to the cave.

He paced inside the cave while I made a potion outside in the dying remains of the day. Every component had a reason; the only tool I used was a chalice in which to place every component of the potion. I used a chalice because it a tool appropriate to those influenced by water, such as Cort was. I used pieces of his body... hair, his seed... to bind him to the potion's work, to make it personal to Cort.

As I made the potion, I gave thanks to Mother Earth for letting me borrow the herbs and the magic she gave them.

Anise, to protect him from El Mundo Malo. Marigold, to help him find and keep love. Agrimony, to help him face problems and grief that come to any man heading back to the life he'd come from. Juniper berry, as a token of my love because I loved him. Comfrey to bind him to the spell that would allow him to travel across the void.

Over the mixture, I chanted my thanks and my desire that he be kept safe. I felt the moment the potion was touched by Mother Earth's will. One more incantation and the potion was ready to assist me in my search for the right magic to return Cort to his time.

The trance came as peacefully and easily as if it summoned me rather than the other way round.

"Diosa," I whispered as I felt the unmistakable presence of the Goddess.

It was a warm shifting current of air. She murmured to me; I told her she'd have to speak more plainly.

"You always have liked to sass me," she said.

"That's why you like me," I said.

"You've thought I'd forgotten."

"Forgotten?" I asked, wondering what she meant.

"You gave up on a request you made of me two years ago. Do you remember?"

I ranged back in my memory. Two years ago... I had heard someone else say that recently... but before I could latch on to the closer memory, she waved her hand and I saw myself, in this same place, dancing about a fire, skyclad, sage branches flooding the air as they smoked.

The memory flooded over me. I felt what I'd been feeling two years ago. I mouthed the spell along with the person I had been when I was saying it two years ago. I had forgotten all about that spell.

Months had gone by after I cast it before I finally realized I was not going to be granted that spell's desire.

"I did give up on you fulfilling that request," I told her.

"See, Rachel. See."

I watched her hand flicker out and sweep across my line of vision. I saw a road in the distance. Not that far from where I was. A man was there. Dusty hair blowing across his wide eyes. Two guns on his hips.

When the night shifted and the trance evaporated, I went inside the cave.

I made Cort sit before me. I pulled a strand of my hair from my head and wound it around his middle finger. It is my protection of you as you cross the void, I told him. And then I called for the wind.

"What happens now?" he asked me.

"Be still. Center your thoughts on your world, your time."

"I wish I'd met you before I..."

"Cort?"

"What I want to ask some day is why..."

"No answer will ever satisfy you."

"Have I asked for something I had no right to? Should I stay here and..."

"And?"

I wanted to see deep within him. I slid my palms across his. Our fingers intertwined.

"Help me, Rachel," he whispered.

"I will do my best." I bade him to concentrate.

The wind always comes into that cave carrying the scent of a land we left before I was born. How I recognize this scent... how I often feel the sadness of it all.

In that night, it brought a new scent. I blessed Mother Earth for this. It was the scent of time.

"The earth is our mother; we must take care of her," I half sang into the wind.

"What's that?"

"A chant. The moment is near, Cort."

His hands squeezed mine.

I hesitated on the brink of uttering the spell that would send him back. "Before you go, I must whisper to you. I have found out why you were brought here. It was my fault. That means the cycle will be complete if I do all I can to send you back," I said softly.

His eyes held mine steady.

"You came to this world two years ago, right?"

"Yes."

I sighed. "Two years ago, I cast a spell that I never thought came to fruition."

His eyes flickered in the light. I think maybe he knew already what I'd say.

"I was in love with a man. He left me. What I was, a witch, it was not... he saw only the negative. But I loved him, Cort. And I was in such pain."

He squeezed my hands in his; he bent to kiss at my knuckles. How could he be so endearing when he had to know I was the cause of two years of his lost life?

"I cast a spell for my Goddess to bring me the man who'd love me. The man strong enough to be for me. I thought... when the months went by and he never appeared, I thought my spell had not worked. I looked at every guest who came that season and wanted it to be him."

"But it wasn't," he said softly, shaking his head.

"I didn't know it was you, Cort."

"So your spell is the reason I was pulled into this age?"

"Yes."

"When did you know?"

"Tonight. The Goddess just showed me. I'd given up so long ago on ever finding that man that I just forgot all about the spell."

He pursed his lips; his eyes studied me calmly. "Do you have any idea what you've put me through?" His voice was soft. His tone was hard.

"Yes. I do. Now I do." I pulled his hands to my lips and carefully kissed his knuckles as he'd kissed mine. "I ask you to forgive me before I send you back."

"Forgive you?"

"You of all men know the value of forgiveness granted to someone who may not deserve it of you. It falls on both the giver and the receiver."

He frowned. In the light of the fire, every line that formed the confusion of his face was defined. "You're still gonna send me back? Even though you apparently believe I was sent here in answer to your spell?"

"I promised you I would do everything to help you, Cort. This is the least I can do for you."

"When I go back, will I remember you, Rachel? Will I remember this time?"

"No. You won't. You'll go back in the moment you were taken. You won't remember a thing. But I will. I will always remember you. I will always be grateful I met you. I will tell you something, shall I?"

"I think you've told me a lot."

"I am sending you back with a space in your heart that carries me. Even if you will not remember me, it is something that goes with you because it is my lasting gift to you. It will help you because you will carry the certainty with you that I saw into every part of you and I saw quite clearly that you are, at your core, a good man. A strong man. An interesting man. A man I have been proud to know."

A flickering smile shifted across his lips. He dropped one of my hands and touched at my cheek. "Some part of me will always remember you, Rachel. If nothing else, I'll remember that in your eyes, I saw a reflection of me that I wasn't ashamed to claim."

"It's time, Cort. Hold on to my hands. Concentrate on where you are seeking to go. Can you see it? Can you feel it? Sniff the wind, Cort. It is bringing your time here to ours. I am going to throw the potion on the fire. Accept its smoke. Let it take you over. Go deep inside it. Tell it to take you where you belong. Believe and it helps me help you. Concentrate."

After I poured the herbed oil atop the glowing embers of the fire, I held his hands and leaned into the soft hold of the wind circling around us as I cast my spell. I sent my mind deep within Cort's specific memory of the moment between his time and this one. I searched down past the two years he'd spent in this time. The confusion was the first real cloud. How to wind through a maze so uncertain? I knew I'd reached the moment I sought when I felt cold void. Could I go beyond that?

I could. I could because I felt Cort's seeking spirit as it sheltered me in the search for its original place, for where it had somehow come where it should not have ventured. I felt the Goddess come to my side, whisper to me to go further. To protect him, keep him safe until he was past the void.

Why had that spell of two years ago not happened with the certainty of this one? What if the Goddess had sent him right to me, so that I could have been there for him when he first burst into this world? How would our lives have been different at this point? How could she grant the first wish by making his route to me circuitous yet grant this one by taking him from me straight away?

I wondered.

It was so dark. So forbidden. I needed a light. I needed a current of air to orient.

The Goddess began slipping away. I needed her to stay. I felt my own power; I was not strong enough to do this for Cort without her help. I called out to her as the darkness made me lose my way. "Where am I? Goddess? Don't leave us now."

My mother's voice answered me instead. "Open your eyes, Rachel."

"Why do you never come to me anymore? I've missed you."

"I'm here now."

"You were a lot more helpful when you were alive, Mom."

"You were always a handful."

"What is this void?"

"I don't know. I have never felt it before."

"Who is this man?"

"Shouldn't you have answered that little detail before sending him back?"

"Mom?"

An answering kiss of air upon my brow.

"Mom, this scares me. It feels wrong."

"Let him go."

"Oh."

"Let him go."

"No! It's not safe for him yet."

"Rachel, let him go. You won't survive if you don't..."

The last remnant of thought from Cort: "Come with me."

My last remnant of thought to him: "Stay here with me."

My mother said: "You were sent to her for a reason. Could it really have been just to send you back to an empty life?"

"What's happening to her?"

"She's sacrificing herself for you."

Some day.

I never want to feel that void again.

I think it was death.

At the last moment, I was sure of that.

I didn't have the strength to influence El Mundo Malo inside Cort's time, where I feared it might re-claim him. But I realized in one split moment of decision that I could choose to not give Cort back to it. It wasn't about saving him. It was about offering him a choice.

He had come to this time without a choice. He'd nearly lost himself before he heard whispering about my family's magic.

In the months with us, he had come out of a shell of that had encased him tightly. It was how far his heart had shriveled. We had circled each other until friendship had formed. But beneath whatever friendship there was, there was always desire.

In one night, he came to find me. In one night, he was offered a choice. Was it desire that influenced him? Or was the Goddess up to her usual tricks where he was concerned?

Nevertheless, it was Cort who made the final decision on the options he had: return to his time or stay in mine.

"My father said he fell in love with my mother the moment he saw her," I told him as we lay on the floor of the cave the next morning.

"I'm not that quick of a study."

"You had to make a choice this time," I said softly, rolling over to look in his face. "It wouldn't have been fair otherwise."

"You wanted me even knowing everything bad I've ever done in my life. Even knowing I am a weak man. I can search forever and not find another woman I'd trust like I trust you."

"We are all weak, Cort. But we're also stronger than we know. When I look at you, when I see your life and your choices, I see a man who is fallible."

His hand cupped my cheek. "Can you read my mind?"

I smiled. "Only when you let me. I promise I will never abuse my gifts when it comes to you."

"Then how will you ever know how I feel about you?"

"In the normal way, silly. You'll have to show me." I put my mouth against his. "I will never force you to stay. If you change your mind, I can send you back in the next full moon."

"You would never survive the attempt."

"It's my sacrifice to make."

A month came. A new moon. The wind swept over me that night. I stood alone in the cave. When I danced with smudging, smoldering bunches of sage, I danced alone.

He had long since chosen to stay with me.

He chose a life with a purpose. He chose a life with love that had escaped him in his time.

A year came. More moons. Winds that swam to greet me. Still I stood alone in the cave each moon.

My father died four months after Cort chose to stay with me. 

Into each generation, a guardian comes to my family to watch over us and to protect in the times that inevitably come when we are chased and hunted.

Those who know the tales of our kind will wonder, some day, if Cort had not stayed, what would have become of my family with no guardian. I have no answer for this. I suspect only the Goddess will ever know that but then I am not a seer, am I?

No matter what is ever said about Cort, this much I can say with total candor: I set out to heal him and it was he who healed my future.

My guardian.

The one man able to walk next to me in this life. My family's future generations swim inside his body even now.

It does not take a seer to see that.