But the past can’t be rewritten and she was no more than a ghost in this scene—an unwilling observer, trapped in the body she used to occupy. And so she was caught, a fly in a web, forced to relive this moment, this terror.
Her mind fought against it, but the memories had been hidden too long. They came rushing from the darkest corners of her brain with an inevitability she couldn’t turn from.
A full moon slid out from behind the clouds and jagged streaks of lightning still cracked and sizzled overhead. The storm was in the very air, charging each indrawn breath with power pulled from the elements of earth and sky.
The women of the circle lifted their arms and their voices came together to make their demands. The hushed whispers were lost in the wind, but the words had a power of their own and seemed to pulse in the night.
We await the knowledge and the power
We who gather are as one
We embrace the dark and spurn the light
We demand your strength and your might
“Oh, God!” Shea sat bolt upright in the car seat, breath heaving from her lungs as she looked at the Eternal beside her. “What did we do?”
Chapter 19
Landry Harper was pissed.
All that work capturing the witch, only to have the assholes in charge of the prison let her escape.
His hands tightened on the steering wheel as he drove through traffic near his home. He’d been called out, ordered to find the witch. Again. The GPS tracking signal put her somewhere in his territory and if she was there, he’d find her. It was what he did.
He hadn’t always, he remembered. Once he’d been a teacher, like her. Once he’d faced classrooms filled with young faces etched with boredom and had tried to teach them history. Until his own world had shattered and then what had once happened in ancient Rome had become less important than what was happening now. History was being rewritten. The entire human race was under attack. And it was up to people like him to protect the innocent from the damned.
His gaze shifted to the photo attached to the dashboard of his jeep. A smiling woman looked out at him from the faded image and everything in him tightened with determination. Focus. She hadn’t seen her attacker coming. Hadn’t known that the neighbor she trusted would one day “lose control” of a power no one should possess.
The explosion had rocked the neighborhood.
His house had gone up like a torch and the wife and child he’d left sleeping when he went to work were dead in an instant.
The witch next door had escaped the blast, of course. Her power had saved her.
Until Landry had found her, six months later.
Just as he would find this one.
And when he did, she wouldn’t be going back to detention.
Chapter 20
“You’re remembering,” Torin said, glancing at her. “That’s good.”
“Not from my point of view.” She was shivering from a cold seeping through her body that was almost as debilitating as the ice she’d felt from the white gold. But this went deeper. Into her bones. Her soul.
Shaken, she tried to pin down that memory even as it slipped away, back into the mists from which it had come. A part of her was grateful.
“You have to remember, Shea,” he said. “All of it.”
“Do you? I mean, were you there?” She shook her head, closed her eyes briefly and swallowed a rise of nausea. “You were, weren’t you? In the shadows. I couldn’t see you. But I felt you. I knew you were there, trying to reach me.”
“And failing.”
No, she thought wildly, he hadn’t failed. She had. She and the others. He had tried to get to her but hadn’t been able to fight through the wards her sisters and she had set in place to keep him and his brothers out. The memory came back again and this time she wasn’t swept into the action, but could look at it objectively. As if it had happened to someone else.
And hadn’t it?
Shea had always believed in reincarnation in the abstract. After all, it seemed unreasonable to assume that humans were allotted a measly eighty or so years only to wink off into oblivion. The universe was too intricately designed, too vast for her to accept that life was so brief. Besides, even in high school, she had accepted that past lives affected the way you lived this life. Why else could you instantly feel either affinity or enmity for a complete stranger when meeting for the first time?
So, yeah, reincarnation made sense to her. But accepting punishment for something she had done in another lifetime was a little hard to grasp. Could she really be held responsible for something done hundreds of years ago?
Shea fought to steady her heartbeat, ease her breathing, but it wasn’t helping. Nothing was helping. The echoes of that memory still rippled through her system, making her shake with both fear and something all too like excitement.
Her stomach rolled and bile rushed her throat. She swallowed hard and lowered her window as they careened along the freeway, dodging in and out of traffic as if by . . . well, magic. Even the cold didn’t stop her from wanting the slap of fresh air in her face. Her hair flew out into a tangle and she had to push it out of her eyes.
“In the memory,” she managed to say, “I’m me, but . .. not.”
“I know.”
“In prison, I had a different dream. About—”
How to tell him that she’d dreamed of sex with him that was so hot she’d awakened sweating and so needy she’d had to touch herself just to ease the pain? No. Wouldn’t be going there. Not yet. “You were there. And I was living in a cottage and it was hundreds of years ago, but I knew that place. That person that I was then. And I knew you.”
“You always know me,” he told her and she studied his profile in the flash of streetlights as they passed them. His jaw was strong and his straight nose and lips made her want to take a bite out of them. His hands were on the wheel and he was driving as if he was accustomed to doing ninety-plus miles an hour.
He was a modern man, obviously, but there was an old-world warrior feel to him, too. She heard it in his speech at times. A formality of sorts, from another time. As if he hadn’t really left behind that man he’d been in her dream. As if he was the kind of man who didn’t bow to whatever age he was living in. He forced it to bend to him.
“What do you mean I always knew you?”
“You know exactly what I mean,” he said, steering the car across three lanes of freeway to take the connector ramp to another freeway. He hit the accelerator even harder. “We’ve been together through the centuries, Shea.”
“That can’t be,” she whispered, though everything inside her yearned toward him. Every cell in her body already believed. Her heart, her soul, all felt the pull of him and if her mind wanted to argue, the rest of her really didn’t want to hear about it.
Besides, she argued silently, how else could she explain any of this?
“You’re a witch. I’m your Eternal. It’s as it has been between us since the beginning.”
She breathed deep, drawing in the fading scent of the ocean as they raced in the opposite direction, headed God knew where. It was too much. All of it. Her Eternal. Centuries. Magic. How was she supposed to make sense of this? How was she supposed to know what to do? If her memories were true, then she had made the wrong call before. What was to prevent her from doing it again?
A fresh wash of sickness rushed through her.
“Stop the car!”
“No.”
Fury erupted inside her at the way he dismissed her need. She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. She felt as if she were ready to burst. She needed out of that damn car. She needed to stand on her own two feet and try to remember who she was now. That was the woman she was interested in. Shea Jameson in the here and now. She couldn’t change the past, but she could, by God, have a say in her present and her future.
Something rose up inside her as if she had called for it. Rising, burning, it nearly choked her in an effort to escape. She surrendered to that fe
eling, rode the wave of it as it crested within her and moments later, she literally saw sparks flying in the air between her and the huge man in the driver’s seat.
Like flares lifting from a campfire, the sparks shone frantically, then went out, but ever more of them appeared, swirling like a swarm of fireflies. When she shouted “Stop!” a second time, a rush of power filled the word and the high-performance car sputtered and died.
“Damn it, I don’t know whether to be proud or pissed.” He cursed low and deep as he steered the coasting car to the side of the freeway.
They were near Irvine Ranch now and traffic blew past them as if they didn’t exist. Shea hardly waited for the car to stop completely before she opened the door and bailed. She heard Torin swearing viciously again, but paid no attention as she waved one hand in front of her, shattering the fence that bordered wide-open hills and valleys spilling along the freeway.
The wind screamed at her and the roar of traffic sounded as if it were twenty miles instead of twenty feet behind her. She ran, her feet stumbling on the uneven ground, and then she was in the high grass, still running. Above her, the first stars were bursting into the sky. The moon was a sliver, casting no light into the darkness, but she didn’t care about that.
She ran because she had to.
Because the haunting memories overtaking her were too much to handle.
Not just of the last few days, when she’d found out what it was to be locked down and helpless . . . but the memories of the past—of lives she’d lived and died. Memories of dark magic and chanting voices. And Torin.
Always Torin.
He caught up to her in a matter of seconds. His big hand came down on her arm and he spun her around to look at him. “Running away?” he challenged. “This is what you’ve become? A coward?”
“I’m no coward,” she shouted back, mortified to feel the sting of tears.
“Where would you go? Half the country will be looking for you by morning.”
“I don’t care,” she cried, her power rushing through her, as if now that it had been unleashed it was too much to control. Fire tipped the ends of her fingers like the tiny flames on birthday candles. She looked at them, surprised and yet somehow comforted at the evidence of her power, too. It was that other her, she assured herself. The one who had stood in moonlight and called on shadows. The witch who had opened something dark and embraced it with welcoming arms.
That wasn’t her.
“I just need to think,” she shouted, willing the flames on her hands out and then staring at them as if she couldn’t believe what was happening to her. “I need to figure out what it is I’m supposed to do.”
“You’re supposed to mate with me,” he told her flatly, grabbing her other arm and pulling her to him.
Yes, her body shouted, arching toward him, her breasts aching for his touch, his kiss. She could almost feel the warmth of his mouth around her nipple and she groaned with a need that was primal. All-consuming.
She wanted him. Needed him. But she’d had him in the past, she reminded herself, and nothing had changed. Nothing had stopped her from opening herself to the dark.
“According to my vision, we already tried that a few hundred years ago. Nothing happened.” Not true, her mind whispered slyly, reminding her of what she had found in his arms. The glory. The pleasure. The soulshaking orgasms.
Oh, God.
But she had not experienced a huge growth in her magical abilities.
“It’s different now, damn it. Don’t you see?”
She whipped her hair out of her eyes and fought back the hungry whispers in her mind. “How? How is now any different?”
“It’s the Awakening, Shea,” he said, his voice lost in the burst of something wild and fierce she felt at his words. “In all those other lives, we were working our way toward now. Toward this lifetime. The end of the spell cast so long ago. At last it’s begun. The time of atonement is here and you’re the first—we are the first . . .”
“What are you not telling me?” She could hear the unspoken words waiting to be acknowledged.
“Nothing.” He let her go, took a step back and shoved one hand through his long, dark hair. “It’s nothing. Another witch. When I was trying to find you. She said she was the first. Her name was Kellyn, but it can’t be so.”
“Does it matter who’s first, for God’s sake?” She laughed and didn’t like the sound of hysteria she heard.
His gaze speared into hers. “No. It only matters that you’re here. With me. And we have a chance to end what was started so long ago.”
She scrambled backward a few steps. “I talked to some of the witches in prison. They told me that a chosen witch and her Eternal share power when they mate.”
“Not a sharing, more of a merging. You will be stronger with the mating.”
Stronger. That could be good. Or terrifying.
“And what do you get out of it?” she asked, though she already knew she would go through with the ritual. She had decided that while she was in the camp. She was never going to be helpless to defend herself again. Not if she could prevent it. She would learn. She would remember. And she would become powerful enough to protect herself and any others who needed her help.
“I get you, Shea.” His gaze locked on hers and she felt the fire inside him burning all around him, like a halo of power and strength, wrapping him in its intensity until it had no choice but to burn outward, enveloping her as well.
“I’ve wanted you for lifetimes. Through all the years, through the centuries.” He took a step closer to her and his gray eyes swirled as if lit from within. She saw shapes and colors and shadows playing out in their depths. Sensed that he was feeling as tightly wound as she was—that his hunger was more than a match for her own. Something inside her woke up and stretched its arms, eager to accept him, to ease this soul-deep need Shea had never known before.
“You’re mine,” he said. “You always have been. As I am yours.”
They were alone on a darkened hillside, standing beneath a small slice of moon. and she could see him as clearly as if there were a spotlight shining down on them. Her body yearned and her heart ached and still her mind argued. She had to understand what was happening and how to control her powers. She had spent years taking care of herself and she needed to be in on what was happening in her life.
“In this merging, your powers grow, too?”
He inclined his head.
“What kind of growth? I mean, do you get super hearing or X-ray vision or something?”
One side of his mouth tilted into a smile. “No. My abilities will be strengthened. I’ll be able to flash-travel for longer distances without resting. I’ll be stronger physically, more able to protect you. And our minds will connect, allowing us to communicate without words.”
“You’ll be able to read my mind?”
He shrugged. “Not so much read as hear you when you reach for me. And you will be able to do the same.”
“Would this happen for you with just any witch?”
“No.” He swore it to her. “Only you, Shea. Only you are for me.”
She felt the truth of that, as if the knowledge had been stamped on her heart and soul at the beginning of time. She’d only needed to hear it to recognize it. He was hers. As he had always been. And still, Shea needed to be an equal in whatever came next. In whatever the two of them faced.
“Torin, I’ve been taking care of myself for a long time.”
“I know,” he said, watching her. “But I have been close, Shea. Always.”
She took a breath and let it out slowly. “Okay, but my point is, I’m not the kind of woman who just turns her own safety over to someone else. If we’re going to be together, then you have to treat me like a partner—not a damsel in distress.”
He gave her a quick, unexpected grin that left her nearly breathless at his sheer physical beauty. “I have never considered you weak, Shea. Or less than an equal. We are a unit and will act as one.”
That was good, she thought. She didn’t want to be in the dark about anything anymore.
“Where are you taking me, Torin?”
“Away.”
“How far?”
“Tonight—to a safe house.”
“Not what I meant,” she said. “I have to be a part of this, Torin. You just said we were a unit. So tell me what you’re planning.” Shea wasn’t about to let herself be kidnapped again, either, not even by her supposed destined lover.
“It depends on you,” he told her, his hair flying about his face in the sharp wind. “Only you know where we have to be. I’m keeping nothing from you, Shea. The answers you seek are buried in your memories. Once you open yourself to them and your powers, you’ll know where we need to go.”
True again. And again, she felt a soul-deep recognition of something that would have seemed like fantasy only weeks ago. The Awakening was about her. Her memories. Her powers. She was going to need all the strength she could find. Just as, she thought, looking up into Torin’s eyes, she was going to need him beside her.
The flutter of energy pulsing through her made Shea smile in spite of everything and gave her a sense of completion. All her life, she’d felt as though there had been something missing. Some piece of her lost. Now at last she was finding it.
“Okay, I think the power thing has started.” God, a few days ago that statement would have terrified her. She had been ready to run not only from the authorities but from what she had sensed in herself. Now she welcomed that surge of something . . . extra.
She was a witch. Like her aunt before her. Like the thousands of women worldwide who were coming into unexpected skills and talents. Like the women already living with power and the fears that accompanied it. She was a member of a proud sisterhood that had survived throughout the centuries despite witch trials and persecution. It was past time for her to take pride in who she was and learn to use the gifts given her.
In fact, Shea’s newfound sense of self believed the more strength and power the better. “How do I get my powers to open up completely?”
Visions of Magic Page 10