Goddess of Legend Read Online Free PDF Page B

cameras? You’ve done a great job of hiding them, because I can spot and smell one from a mile away.”
    “I assure you, I am indeed Coventina. And none of those camera things exist, not in my knowledge.”
    “I’d love that beignet now. And may I have them drizzled with—”
    “—dark chocolate. Of course.” That snap thing again, and then Isabel was staring at a feast. The beignets, yes, just the way she wanted them, but also fried ham, over-easy fried eggs and potatoes with onions, peppers and bits of bacon, just how she cooked them herself. This was too good. Too perfect. Too crazy.
    Then again, she was too hungry to actually be rude enough to decline.
    “Do you mind if I’m freaked out?” Isabel said after licking her fingers? She started to get to her feet. That’s when she noticed that, with a wave of the woman’s hand, her slippers became glued to the earth beneath her. She tried to free herself from them, but they were definitely superglued to her skin as well.
    “Please hear me out,” said the woman who, if the tales were true, didn’t really need to ask.
    Isabel sat back down. “You’ll excuse me if I’m just a little . . . dumbfounded?”
    “I understand.”
    “You saved me from Grand Lake.”
    “Yes.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I have need of you. And I have hopes that this will all turn out so that one of your—how did you put it?—shouldas will also come true for you.”
    “I’m alive. I’m not just in another world?”
    “Oh, I am afraid you are definitely in another world. But it’s of this world, Isabel. Just not of your time.”
    “Where am I?”
    “If you’ve been taught about me, you’ve been taught about Camelot?”
    Isabel again just stared at her. “Surely you jest.”
    Coventina laughed, a sound that was so lyrical that even the lake seemed to respond to it. The lake bubbled here and there as if something beneath couldn’t help but enjoy the joke with her. “I enjoy a good jest, as do many of the men and women of the castle. But I assure you, beyond this forest is the castle of Camelot.”
    “You mean like King Arthur and Lancelot and Guinevere and Mer—Oh. He really is your Merlin.”
    “Or was,” Coventina said, and her eyes immediately turned from a stunning blue to a stormy gray. “But he has forsaken this world, too devastated by the destiny he fears is in Arthur’s future.” The Lady grasped Isabel’s hand. “I must bring him back. I must. I fear that eternity will be an eternal misery without him.”
    “Why me?” Isabel asked, even as she tried not to show watery eyes. She was so not a crybaby, unless it was over the tragedy of a sweet and heroic man in Afghanistan or the birth of a kitten.
    Coventina squeezed Isabel’s hand even more, although strangely it didn’t hurt, but felt like energy being exchanged between them. “Because you were the woman I was looking for. I asked the gods for one who was beautiful, smart and, I’m sorry to say, about to die. And what was a must for me was a woman who had an, as you put it, ‘shoulda.’ One who mourned in her last moments that she’d never found true love.”
    “What makes you think I’ll find it here, Cov—”
    “Call me Viviane. Merlin is the only one who ever has, but I’d like if you would as well. Because I believe you will be the one who brings him back to me.”
    “Okay. What makes you think I’ll find it here, Viviane? And how do I bring Merlin back?”
    “I cannot be certain. But if I do not try, I have not done enough to win back the man I love. And this isn’t acceptable to my heart, or my waters. I fear what will happen if my unhappiness roils the waters that sustain me.”
    Isabel glanced over at the lake to see it suddenly making waves when moments ago it had been calm, clear and as blue as Viviane’s eyes. Now it was uneasy, gray, unhappy. And it churned in her the memory of Grand Lake, which had seemed angry at her just at the moment that she and her car had taken a