“Oh, God . . .”
He held on to her shoulders as she swayed in reaction to his words, to the memory. More images appeared in her mind and she once again watched as Torin described the events of that long-ago night.
“Demons poured from the doorway until at last Lucifer himself stepped through into this world.” He paused, took a breath and regretfully admitted, “The Eternals couldn’t breach the circle of power to reach their witches. We were forced to remain on the outside, battling those demons that escaped. We couldn’t help. Couldn’t get to you.”
His fingers tightened on her shoulders and Shea reached up to cover his hands with her own, linking them as they should have been linked on that awful night.
She saw it all in a blinding instant. The blood, the terror. Pain and light and noise erupted in her mind in a rush. Shea shrieked in response, held her head and crumpled to the floor at Torin’s feet.
He reached for her and something crashed through the window, shattering glass into the room until it fell like clear, sharp rain.
A metal cylinder clattered to the floor not more than a foot from them.
“Damn.” Torin wrapped his arms around her and flashed them out.
An instant later, the motel exploded in a fireball that lit up the night sky.
Chapter 31
Sanctuary stood alone, deep in the Uinta mountains of Utah, a safe zone for women—witch and human. Here they weren’t hunted. Here they could simply live. Of course the threat of discovery hung over them all the time, but hidden as they were, that threat was far less than it could have been.
Rune was the only male in the camp and as he stalked across the compound, he noted that several little girls were trailing after him, giggling and pointing. As if he belonged in a zoo, he told himself. Wasn’t it enough that he was stuck here until his mission was complete? Irritation spiked. Then he stopped, spun around and flashed into flames.
Rather than being scared off, the girls screamed in delight. One of them waved a hand in the air, making rain spill from a solitary cloud directly over his head.
That should teach him to tease a witch, he thought as his magical flames spat and sizzled in the wet. A witch of any age. He swiped rainwater from his face as the tiny cloud dissipated.
“Girls! Go to your classes, please.” Karen Mackey clapped her hands together and the children scattered.
“I’m sorry about that,” she said, giving him a tense smile. “They haven’t seen a man in—well, a long time.”
“It’s all right. I’ll be gone soon enough. Once I know Terri and her family are going to be all right . . .”
“They’re being assigned housing now,” she said. “Thank you, for bringing them to us.”
Karen was about forty, with short, dark hair that curled around her heart-shaped face. She focused wise blue eyes on him. “It couldn’t have been easy.”
“Wasn’t.” He didn’t even want to think about the last eight hours, trapped in a car with three human females. His powers and strength were just now regenerating. But it was worth it, he knew. They’d managed to save more innocents from the world at large and that was worth any price.
Throughout the years, witches had lived in peace and practiced their magic in secret. Belief in magic died out. The supernatural was dismissed as legend. Until that day ten years before when power had exploded into the public consciousness. Since then, no woman was safe. Witch or human.
The Sanctuary network had been born and until the world came to its senses again—if ever—these women would have to remain hidden.
“They’ll be safe here,” he said and looked out at the still-snowy peaks in the distance. Spirit Lake spread out in front of them, shining dark blue in the starlight. The lake provided plenty of fresh water for the witches and the rough terrain discouraged most people from the area. Here at ten thousand feet, the camp was secluded and hidden by both heavy stands of trees and magical protection wards. Should any hikers stray too close to camp, a feeling of dark dread would overcome them, convincing them to run from the area.
So far, the only other beings the witches had had to worry about were the mountain goats that inhabited the region. It was as close to a perfect hiding place as they could get.
The moon slipped out from behind a stream of clouds and painted silver across the surface of the lake. Shadows crouched and a wind whispered through the trees.
“They’ll be fine,” Karen told him. “We have many human women and children here. You don’t have to be a witch these days to need a safe place. Sanctuary’s protected from both magical incursion and human.”
“Magic?” he asked, sliding a glance at her.
Frowning, she nodded. “We’ve had to upgrade, so to speak, our protection wards lately. We heard about a few witches, broken during torture, who’ve switched sides. Dr. Fender is still at work somewhere,” she added, with a shiver of unease.
Rune understood the sentiment. Dr. Henry Fender began experimenting on witches some years ago. He was the one who had told the world about the uses of white gold in blanketing a witch’s power. The word was that any witch who found herself on his table died screaming.
“Apparently, the good doctor is now convincing some of his ‘patients’ to work for him.”
Rune scowled. The doctor had become legendary in a very short space of time. He had spearheaded the early efforts to contain the witches, but soon his sadism had forced even the government to cut him loose. There were limits, apparently, to what BOW was willing to do. “But the feds stopped using Fender a few years back.”
“Yes, but he’s taken over a large action group,” Karen told him, barely restrained fury coloring every word. “The Seekers find witches and hold them so that Fender can perform more experiments.”
This was not good. No witch would be safe as long as Fender was allowed to continue his madness.
“To what end?” he demanded.
“He’s looking for a way to drain our powers and use them for himself.”
Rage filled Rune, cold and dark, forcing him to battle his own instincts in order to remain calm. It wasn’t enough that witches were being hunted, jailed and executed. Now there were human monsters looking to exploit them for their own greed? They talked about shutting down the power when in reality, what they wanted was to steal magic any way they could.
And people thought witches were evil, he told himself wryly.
Torin and the other Eternals had to know about this. They would have to find Fender somehow and send him from this world before he could do more damage. Finding one human male on this overcrowded planet would be quite the task, though. Yet, even as he thought about it, Rune wondered if an Awakened witch couldn’t cast a locator spell. Why not use the very magic the man hungered for against him?
He reached for the satellite phone in the pocket of his black jeans. Torin needed to hear this. Not only about Fender, but about the second tracker the witches had found on Terri. If Shea was still bugged, their escape was going to be short-lived.
“No reception here, remember?” Karen asked, smiling at his phone. “We enchant a TV so we can keep up with the news, but as for everything else . . .”
“Right.” Ordinarily, his satellite phone would get reception pretty much anywhere on the planet. But in Sanctuary, their magical wards shut down any electronic device they didn’t specifically protect. So as long as he was on this mountain he was out of contact. He eyed the witch beside him. “Don’t suppose you’d consider cutting a hole through the ward so I could make a call?”
She shook her head. “Don’t suppose I would.”
He muttered something, but she cut him off quickly.
“We can’t risk it, Eternal. Not even for you. All it would take is one stray signal picked up by the wrong person and Sanctuary would be in danger.” She scrubbed her hands up and down her arms. “As it was, the tracker Terri was carrying came all too close to the entrance. We’ll have to be on high alert for the next few weeks, just in case.�
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He hadn’t considered that. Realizing that he may have brought trouble to this spot bothered him more than he cared to admit. “Do you need me to stay? I can leave the mountain, make a call and come back to help guard the place for a few weeks.”
Her head tipped to one side as she studied him. “You would do that?”
He inclined his head. “We in the magical world have to help each other.”
“True,” she said, taking a deep breath. “But in this case, it’s unnecessary. The Guardians will be able to handle whatever comes our way. And if need be, we will all fight. Human and witch.”
He looked into her eyes and read the fierce determination written there. And still he had to ask, “What about the Wiccan Rede . . . An it harm none, do what ye will?”
The leader of the witches gave him a rueful smile. “Times change, Eternal. You know we risk great damage to ourselves in using our power against our enemies.”
“Yes,” he said solemnly, knowing that whatever harm a witch did would return on her threefold.
“And yet, what choice do we have?” She shook her head and looked out over the starlit lake. “We use human weapons when we can and resort to magics only when there is no other option. We, each of us, are prepared to accept the karma of what we do—to ensure that we are not wiped from the earth.”
“You believe you can hold this camp against all intruders?”
She smiled. “It wasn’t easy for you to get in, was it?”
“Hell, no.” He grinned suddenly, remembering the warrior women who had dropped from trees to challenge him. “Still not easy to know who to trust, though.”
“True enough.” She looked back at the camp, tidy log cabins with lamplight falling through the windows to lie on the ground like gold dust. “But the turned witches—traitors—are still few and far between. We’ll survive, as will the other Sanctuaries around the world.”
“It’s bad times,” Rune said softly.
“True again,” Karen agreed, then looked out over the mountainous view. “But we’ve lived through bad times before. We will this time, too. Now that the Awakening is here, everything will change.”
He slid a glance to her. “How much do you know?”
She smiled. “More than you think, less than I’d like.” Shrugging, she continued, “The story of the last great coven has been handed down from mother to daughter throughout the centuries. We all know about the chosen few. And the tasks they must complete to ensure the safety of this world. We don’t know who they are, but we know the time is now.”
Rune snorted a laugh. He and the other Eternals hadn’t considered that the witches had kept a chain of information going throughout the centuries. But they should have. Witches were clever women. And it didn’t pay to underestimate a clever woman.
“The Sanctuaries hold libraries of spell books. Shadow books,” she was saying. “We’ve saved the ancient tomes and added to them over the years. If the chosen ones need help they’ve only to seek out a Sanctuary.”
Intrigued, he stared at the short woman beside him. “You’ve been preparing for the Awakening all along?”
“Of course,” she said. “We all need the Awakened ones to succeed. If they fail . . . everyone loses.”
“Good point,” Rune said. But they wouldn’t fail, he told himself grimly. He and his fellow Eternals would do everything in their considerable power to ensure that their witches prevailed.
Karen laid one hand on his forearm. “Tell them, Eternal. Tell the chosen ones that the Sanctuary libraries can be accessed by a dimensional spell.”
“Dimensional? Hell, that’s what got us into trouble in the first place! Opening portals into other worlds is a bad idea.”
“It is,” she agreed, with a shake of her head. “But that’s not what I mean. Sanctuaries have all been equipped with a dimensional hotspot, so to speak. A way for us to share information.”
“You manipulate dimensions?” Rune asked, astonished at the level of power in the tiny witch before him.
“Combining our magic makes us stronger,” she pointed out. “If the chosen ones need our help, they’ve only to be close to a Sanctuary to open the portal.”
Rune stared down at her, admiration shining in his eyes. “You amaze me.”
“We do what we can with what we have,” she said with a nod. “But in the end, we are all prisoners here. In these safe spots around the world. Cut off from families, friends, hope. The question is, how long will we have to hide? How long, Eternal?”
“Wish I knew.”
It all depended, Rune thought, on the Awakening. On the coven coming together again, to end what they’d begun so long ago.
If that happened, then they would have proof to show the world that witchcraft could be an ally. That witches themselves could be trusted to help when the world needed it most.
He shifted his gaze back to the shadow-filled valley. No pressure, he told himself.
Chapter 32
“What was that?”
The moment his magical flames winked out, Torin cursed viciously and pushed Shea to the ground, covering her with his own body. Her breath came fast and frantic from beneath him. He felt her fear and shared it. Not for himself. He’d been battling evil for eons. Spilling blood was nothing new to him. But seeing Shea terrified and knowing that there were humans somewhere near who wanted her dead filled him with a fear he’d never known before. It tainted every breath.
“A grenade,” he muttered, keeping his voice low, though there was clearly no need for stealth. The sound of the fire at the motel below roared into the night like a caged, starving beast.
He looked down at her wide, frightened eyes and wanted to kill whoever had brought her to this. In the span of just a few days, she’d been captured, tortured, chased and shot. And now someone had blown up the room she was in.
“Enough.” He planted a hard, fast kiss on her mouth and then stared into her eyes. “Whoever launched the grenade into our room is probably still down there. I’m going to find them.”
He lifted his head to peer over the rock behind which he had Shea hidden. Looking through the trees, he could see what was left of the motel. His blood turned to ice, then an instant later, began to boil.
The room he and Shea had been occupying was an inferno.
The rest of the place didn’t look much better. There were screams and shouts as people ran for their lives. But Torin was looking for those who would be running toward the flames. Whoever had tried to kill them would no doubt want to check the scene, make sure he hadn’t failed.
Which meant Torin was going hunting.
“Stay here,” he ordered, rolling off Shea to come to his feet in a crouch. He stared down at her and saw shadows from the intense light of the fire race across her features. “Right here, do you understand?”
She pushed up, swept dirt and pebbles from her cheek and stared at him. “Why? I might be able to help.”
“I need you safely here while I find those responsible.”
“And do what? Kill him?”
“Not until we’ve had a talk.” He wanted information. He’d removed the tracker from Shea’s body, so how did the assassin find them? He had to know which agency was funding this hunt. And he needed to know how to stop it.
Shea looked at the conflagration, flames shooting high into the air, sparks lifting, flying in the wind toward the trees, which were already beginning to smolder. She grabbed Torin’s arm and hung on. “Forget about finding him. There’ll be others here soon. Firefighters. Police. Let’s just go. Now. While they fight the fire.”
“Go where? Shea, if we don’t stop this here, whoever is behind it will only follow us.”
“Who cares?” she shouted it, but her voice was lost in the surrounding clamor. “Everybody in the free world is already looking for me, Torin!”
He went down on one knee beside her and grabbed her upper arms hard enough to leave an imprint of his fingertips on her skin. Just touching her grounded him
in a way that nothing else ever had. Knowing she was his now gave him strength that even his god would tremble at. He looked into her green eyes and felt love wash through him. Love like he had never known before.
“You are my heart, Shea,” he said, sliding his hands up to cup her face in his palms. “I will do whatever I must to see you safe.”
She covered his hands with her own. “Do you think you’re any less important to me? Don’t go down there, Torin.”
“I have no choice. No one will harm you. Ever.” He leaned in and kissed her hard. “Do you believe me?”
A second, then two, ticked past as he waited, staring into the eyes of the woman he’d hungered for throughout time.
“Yes,” she whispered, meeting his eyes. “But—”
“No.” He released her and stood up. He had her belief. He knew her trust wasn’t yet his, but that would come. Provided he could keep her alive long enough for her to become immortal. Thirty days until the mating ritual was complete. Thirty days to find what was lost and return it to safekeeping. Then they would have the coming centuries together and no one, he told himself, was going to rob them of that time together.
“Stay. Here.” Then he flashed into flames and was gone.
“How the hell can we get in there to see the bodies?”
“We wait.”
The first man snorted, then shot a look of pride at the roaring fire consuming the back end of the small motel. “Be like waiting for the fires of hell to burn out.”
“They’re dead,” his friend said, assurance ringing in his tone. “No way they got out of that in time.”
“You best be right. The boss won’t like it if the witch escaped.”
“And just who,” Torin asked, flashing in behind the two men, “is the boss?”
One of the men turned instantly, brought up the shotgun he carried and pointed it at Torin’s chest. Before he could fire, the Eternal had grabbed the barrel and shoved it up. It discharged harmlessly into the air. Torin wrested the gun from the man’s grip tossed it aside, then reached out and broke the shooter’s neck with a quick twist of his hand.
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