“I’m so sorry.” It was all crazy and getting worse every day. Ten years after the existence of magic had been revealed, and people were still reacting out of fear.
Terri nodded and sighed. “Thanks. I’m just so worried about Amanda. And my mom. What if they’re arrested next?”
Shea had no easy reassurances for her. She knew as well as Terri did that her family was now in even more danger. BOW and the MPs would be watching every move they made for who knew how long.
As for Terri… women caught up in the mob mentality of the witch hunt were pretty much out of luck. Unless the RFW took up Terri’s case, she had no chance of getting out of this camp.
And unless Torin found her, Shea was in the same boat.
“Why are you here?” Terri finally asked, then stopped and winced. “I’m sorry-shouldn’t have said that. I mean, I know about your aunt and-”
“It’s okay,” Shea said, not wanting to get drawn into a conversation about it. Especially not here. In places like this the walls really did have ears. There was no telling how many people were listening in on conversations. They weren’t even safe outside. A parabolic microphone or two could cover most of the yard.
As if Terri had remembered the same thing, she lowered her voice. “Are you… like your aunt?”
A few days ago Shea would have said no. Now, she was living a new reality. Now, she was dealing with the knowledge that she’d killed a man and was, very possibly, in jail for the rest of her life-at least until her execution. But she looked into the other woman’s eyes and saw compassion. Amazing just how good it felt to be offered understanding. Slowly, Shea nodded.
Terri smiled. “A month ago, that might have terrified me,” she admitted quietly. “Now, though…” She looked around the yard again. At the dozens of women, in a range of ages anywhere from eighty to teens, and she sighed. “There are other things more scary. There’s being snatched from your home in the middle of the night and locked away without a chance of even speaking to your own child. There’s fearing that you’ll never get out.”
“We really shouldn’t be talking about this,” Shea whispered, glancing up at the closest guard tower. The man wasn’t looking in their direction, but that didn’t mean a thing.
“They’ve already locked me up,” Terri said firmly. “They’re not going to shut me up, too. You know, before this happened, I was like anyone else, reading about magic and the witches and how BOW and the MPs were doing their duty to protect the people…”
Shea took Terri’s elbow and started walking. She wasn’t sure why, but somehow she had the feeling that it would be more difficult for their jailers to overhear them if they kept moving in and out of crowds. And she tried to subtly warn her student’s mother that being outspoken in prison wasn’t necessarily a good thing. “Terri…”
She walked and shook her head before giving Shea a half smile. “I know. I know they listen. I know they watch.” Her gaze slid to the side, where two female guards stood together, watching over the prisoners. “But I’m still a citizen. I still have rights.”
“Not really,” Shea told her.
“There’s a sad statement.”
“You have to be careful,” Shea said. “No one here is concerned about your ‘rights.’ To them, we’re less than human. They’d like nothing better than a chance to take us all down. So if you want to see Amanda again-do what you can to stay unnoticed. Don’t stand out in this crowd, Terri. Blend in. Don’t make waves. You might drown in them.”
She huffed out a breath. “Seeing Amanda. What’re the chances of that, I wonder.”
“Probably not good,” Shea admitted, then added, “but you’ll make it worse for yourself in here by not being careful.”
“I know that, but underneath all of the fear, I am furious,” she said softly and her voice toughened up as if to prove it. “I’ve met a few… interesting women here and the thing is, they’re no different from me. Not at the bottom of it, you know? I mean, we’re all just people. Some good, some bad.”
Oh, Shea wished she had met Terri under other circumstances. They could have been friends. Instead, they were prison mates with definite dates of expiration. “Yeah, the problem is, that doesn’t seem to matter.”
“All I’m trying to say is if people would just talk to witches, they wouldn’t be so afraid.”
“You’re right. But at the moment,” Shea told her, keeping her voice low, “fear’s in charge and logic didn’t even get a seat at the table.”
They walked through the yard, the breeze off the harbor carrying the smell of the sea and the illusion of freedom. Off in one corner, a lone woman sat with her knees drawn up, back against the wall, quietly crying to herself. Just seeing the emotionally beaten woman stiffened Shea’s spine.
She wasn’t going to be afraid. Not anymore. She was through being the helpless victim, racing through the dark, trying to avoid her enemies by disappearing into an uncaring crowd. Talking to Terri had helped, too. Terri had allowed her own sense of injustice to trump her fears and Shea could do no less.
Dropping one arm around the other woman’s shoulder, Shea said, “We’ll find a way out.”
And she realized she believed it. She wasn’t going to be locked away here forever. She’d find a way out even if Torin didn’t come for her. Damned if she’d let these bastards win. She and Terri would get out. Somehow. She wouldn’t be a statistic and simply disappear.
She wouldn’t lie down and die without a whimper.
Chapter 15
Torin felt her presence the moment he and Rune flashed into the internment camp.
Standing in one of the guard towers, he let the body of the guard he had killed drop at his feet. Quick snaps of the neck and both men in the eastern tower were dead. He didn’t spare a glance to where they lay sprawled across the floor. They didn’t matter. They were predators. Kidnappers and worse.
Rune was even now dispatching those in the north tower, but Torin couldn’t think beyond Shea. Through the foggy haze of the white gold dampening her powers, her spirit called to his and electrified the beast within him.
For two days he and Rune had worked out the logistics of getting her out of this prison. Now that the time was here, he knew there would be casualties he couldn’t prevent. Deaths he couldn’t stop. Yet he had no choice. This could be their only chance. The Awakening had come and there was nothing more important to him than securing Shea and together accomplishing their task.
He and Rune had mitigated the danger as much as they could, reducing the damage that would be done here today. Now, it was left to the fates. In late afternoon the yard was crowded with prisoners. Shadows pushed out from the walls, inching across the ground even as the first brilliant colors of sunset stained the sky. Torin focused his concentration on the women below, searching for the one witch who called to him.
His head snapped up as a burst of gunfire chattered from the south and west towers. The guards had seen them. But instead of firing at the Eternals in the towers, the guards concentrated their fire on the prisoners. As if to kill them all before any had a chance at escape. Bullets sprayed wildly across the open expanse of the yard below. Women shrieked and ran for cover. Some dropped where they stood, their blood running across the concrete in scarlet rivers. In their quest to stop Rune and Torin, the remaining guards cared nothing for how many women died in the attempt.
Torin cared.
He instantly flashed to the west tower. A guard hastily swung his gun around, but Torin was faster. The man died with a howl of protest as his partner pulled a knife and stabbed Torin in the back. Pain lanced through him but didn’t stop him. He dropped into a crouch, came up fast and knocked the guard off his feet. Once the man was down, Torin pulled the knife from his body and returned it to the guard. Blade to the heart.
Eyes wide, mouth forming the word no, the second guard joined his partner in hell.
Below him, the women’s screams scraped the air, but through the frantic shouts and pleas, he heard
one voice calling him by name.
“Torin!”
He leapt to his feet, scanned the ground below him and spotted his witch on the far side of the yard. Her long red hair lifted like a flag in the wind and she waved both hands high over her head. He smiled to himself, noting that Shea Jameson wasn’t cowering. She was standing tall and proud and his unbeating heart filled with admiration.
They hadn’t broken her. Not yet. Not ever.
Chapter 16
Warning sirens screamed to life.
Torin knew they had little time to spare. The tower guards were dead, but there were more just like them throughout this prison. In seconds, reinforcements would rush into the prison proper.
His gaze swept the yard again, searching out the dangers, pinpointing where he would need to be to get his woman to safety. His knife wound was deep and painful, but nothing he hadn’t experienced before in centuries of battle. He hadn’t the time to spend healing himself. He would need all of his powers focused on the escape.
He flashed to Shea’s side and she threw herself at him. Instantly, the world righted itself again. She was alive and in his arms, and the rest he would deal with.
“Torin!”
She held on tightly to him, her face buried in the curve of his neck. As if she knew she belonged there, accepted what they were and always had been to each other. This, he thought, would make the coming days easier. To have her acceptance, her cooperation in the task ahead would make all the difference.
But cooperation or not, he wouldn’t be letting her out of his sight again.
With her body pressed to his, he felt the chill of the white gold chain around her neck seep into him, sending ice racing after the fire in his veins. She was stronger than she thought, he told himself. Even with the drain of the white gold at her slender throat, he felt her magic bubbling with her.
Despite the chill of the dampening element against him, his body responded immediately to her presence. Heedless of the danger, he was hard as iron and aching to begin the ritual. But his mind overruled his dick. This time.
“We have to go,” he said, glancing over as Rune flashed in to stand beside him. The Eternal’s gaze swept the crowded yard-the screaming women, the wounded prisoners stretched out across dirty asphalt, the remaining guards who were running for cover to wait until their cavalry arrived.
“I know,” Shea said. “I’m ready.” She released him, took a step back, then reached out and grabbed the hand of the blond woman standing beside her. “I mean, we’re ready.”
Of course this wouldn’t go smoothly, Torin told himself with an inward groan of frustration. Never once in centuries had Shea stopped surprising him.
“Damn it!” Rune’s curse was deep and vicious.
Shea shot him a dark look. “I wasn’t talking to you.” Then she shifted her gaze to Torin’s and he felt the strength of that stare hit him hard. “This is my student’s mother. She’s not a witch. And if she doesn’t get out of here, they’ll kill her. They’ll torture her for information she doesn’t have.”
“We don’t have time for this,” Rune told Torin.
“We don’t have time to argue about it, either,” he shot back, before turning his gaze back to his witch. “You insist on this?”
She met his gaze squarely. “I do.”
Nodding, Torin looked at the other woman, who watched him through stunned yet resolute blue eyes. He took her measure and noted that she hadn’t shrunk back from him, though a man appearing from a tower of flames had to have shocked her. “Your name.”
“Terri. Terri Hall,” she said, words tumbling from her mouth as she reacted to the dangerous situation. “And I do need to get out of here. I have to get to my daughter.”
“Torin,” Rune interrupted, “there’s no time to save another. We had a mission and we’ve been here too long already. More guards will be coming.”
But Torin was looking not at Rune but at Shea. Her green eyes were locked with his and she was measuring him, seeing who and what he was. He sensed that her memories of their shared past hadn’t cleared yet. And so the choice he made now would decide much for her. He knew this moment would brand him in her eyes for all time. Could she trust him and learn from him? Or would he be as uncaring as those who would see her dead?
The choice was a simple one.
“Take the woman,” Torin told Rune flatly.
Shea smiled and Terri blew out a relieved breath. From somewhere in the distance more shouts lifted into the air. He didn’t like leaving these other women to the less than tender mercies of the guards, but there was nothing he could do to help them. Not yet, anyway.
“You have to get her to safety,” Shea insisted, spearing Rune with a commanding stare. “You can’t just get her out of here and then dump her somewhere. She needs to be safe. And not only her. You’ll need to take her daughter and mother, too.”
Terri gasped in surprise.
Rune’s mouth worked as if he longed to tell her no, but to his credit, he remained quiet until he muttered a curse and simply asked, “Anything else?”
Pride in his woman prompted Torin to smile at his friend’s fury.
“Yes,” Shea snapped, unamused. “They’ll need money and I want to know where you’re taking them.”
“Money’s not a problem,” Torin replied. The Eternals’ god, Belen, saw to it that his warriors had all they needed to survive in a human world. “As for safety, there are places. Sanctuaries.”
Shea looked to Torin, demanding, “Where?”
He scanned the area again, knowing time was short and the guards would soon locate them.
“The closest one is in the Uinta Mountains of Utah,” he said. “The camp is well hidden. Both witches and human women are welcome to hide there. It’s far from civilization and the witches there have laid down wards and protective spells so that their camp is overlooked by those who would search for them.”
She nodded and looked at her friend. “Terri? Is all of this okay with you?”
The blonde shot a wary look at Rune. She had little choice but to risk going with him. It was that or die, never seeing her child again. Torin wasn’t surprised when she spoke.
“Sounds good. And thanks for getting my mom and Amanda out, too.” Her gaze shifted around the prison enclosure, briefly taking in the bodies of the fallen women. She shivered and swallowed hard, lifting her chin in a show of defiance. “Always wanted to live in the mountains. Besides, the farther from here, the better.”
“We go, then,” Rune said. First, he reached out one hand toward the chain around her neck. “This must come off.”
“If we don’t get rid of the necklace, the white gold will drain Rune’s powers slowly, making it harder for him to protect you and your family,” Torin said.
“Do it.” Terri tilted her head to one side and barely flinched when Rune’s fingertip blazed into flames that touched her skin and didn’t burn. The necklace dropped unheeded to the ground. She lifted one hand to rub her neck, then stared at Rune as if wondering if she was jumping from the frying pan into a living, breathing fire.
“Trust them,” Shea said and those two words filled Torin with pride.
Rune held out one hand to Terri. “If we are going, woman, we must go now.”
“Right.” Terri linked her fingers with his and as the flames rose up to swallow them, Shea actually heard Terri laugh.
“Now are you ready?” Torin asked, reaching out his hand to free her of the draining white gold links at her throat.
Gunfire erupted in the distance. Shea took a breath and nodded. “God, yes. Let’s go.”
Flames raced from his body to the links against her neck. Seconds passed; then she sighed as the hated necklace dropped free of her body. “That feels much better.”
Guards shouted, women screamed and yet more gunfire blasted the air. Wrapping her arms around Torin’s neck, Shea held on tight and whispered, “Get us out of here.”
With a whoosh of sound and a bright flash
of flames, they vanished.
Chapter 17
“Madam President, the director of the Terminal Island detention center is on line two. He said you’re expecting his call?”
Cora Sterling, first female president of the United States, looked up at her chief of staff. She gave him the warm, motherly smile that had gained her the trust of a nation and allowed her to be at the epicenter of a historic election. “Yes, thank you, Sam. I’ll speak to him in a moment.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The tall, handsome man nodded and left the Oval Office.
Cora sat on one of the twin pale blue upholstered sofas placed opposite each other. A reading lamp burned softly on the nearby table and the latest sheaf of papers sent to her by the Senate was scattered across the cushions beside her. I love this room, she thought, as she stood up and crossed the navy blue rug with the presidential seal embroidered into it.
Being here, in the White House, was something she never took for granted. She’d worked hard to get here. To belong here. Though at times it all still felt surreal. A widow with a grown daughter, Cora had always been an ambitious woman-but this, she thought wryly, went well beyond her ambitions.
The sound of her heels was muffled as she walked with a confident stride to stand at her desk and stare at the phone. The HOLD button flashed as if insisting that she pick up. But she took a moment to ground herself.
She was the president, after all.
She smiled to herself. Six months in office and she still wasn’t used to it. Cora Sterling, middle-class girl from Sugar Land, Texas, first female president. Her election had made history. Her term in office, she told herself, would do the same. She had run on a campaign of reform and domestic safety.
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