Visions of Chains

by Regan Hastings

Finn looked down at her and felt every protective instinct he possessed roar into life again. As long as he lived, he would never forget that moment when he had felt Deidre’s fear hit him with the force of a sledgehammer. It had slammed into him.

  He’d left Joe in Virginia and had flashed to her, following the supernatural homing beacon of her tattoo. He wasn’t even surprised to find she had gone to see her mother. Deidre wasn’t a woman to be cowed by anyone’s threats or warnings. Of course he was angry that she’d put herself in danger. But what he’d sensed in that room changed the whole damn ball game. She had no idea what she was dealing with now and he had to make her understand.

  Wiping one hand across his mouth, he took a breath and said, “Her body may be human, but I sensed an ‘other’ presence in her.”

  “Other?” Deidre’s eyes narrowed. “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted and that worried him. The feeling had come and gone so quickly, it was as if someone had hit a light switch, shutting down his ability to sense magical beings. Which made him wonder about the other two in that room.

  Especially since he knew that one of them, Kellyn, was already suspect. He hadn’t picked up any sense of wrongness from her though, which told him she had to be working a protective spell of some kind.

  “You’re wrong,” Deidre said firmly with a shake of her head. “I grant you there’s something off here. Maybe she’s being blackmailed. Or she’s bespelled or . . .”

  She couldn’t come up with an explanation and he knew it. Nothing her mind provided would explain why the mother she knew had been all too willing to attack her to acquire the Artifact. The fact that the president knew about the Artifact—and Deidre’s connection to it—told him she was much more than she pretended to be. Finn only had to wait until Deidre could admit that truth to herself.

  “I need to contact the other Eternals. Tell them where Kellyn is.” He glanced up at the tunnel exit above their heads. “But not from here. We’re too close to the White House. They’ll have every cop in the city out looking for us.”

  “My mother won’t—” She stopped talking, bit her lip and stared at him defiantly.

  “Come on,” he said, wrapping her close and calling up the flames. “We’ll get back to our chamber and go up from there.”

  She held him as he flashed them out, but Finn felt a new distance between them and it bothered him more than he cared to admit.

  * * *

  “She’s a demon,” Rune said.

  Finn had the phone on speaker so Deidre could hear as well. After all, her mother was somehow in this up to her neck and unless he convinced Dee that she was now the enemy, this wasn’t going to go well.

  “Kellyn’s a demon?” he repeated, gaze locked on Deidre’s wide eyes.

  The cold November wind sighed down the alley they stood in, rustling discarded papers and rattling a paper cup along the damp asphalt.

  “Possessed by one, anyway.” Rune sounded pissed off and tired.

  “How the hell is that possible?” Finn argued hotly. “If there’s a demon around, I should be able to spot trace energies.”

  “Yeah, well. Seems the blanketing spell she was wrapped in was like nothing known before.”

  “Then how’d you find out it was there?”

  “Teresa and the others did an enhanced spell.” He paused. “They channeled some of their power through the Artifact shards here in Haven and—”

  “They what?” Finn’s shout startled Deidre enough that she jumped, then scowled at him. Lowering his voice he demanded, “Are you guys nuts? This whole thing started with spells focused through the Artifact.”

  “Yeah, we know. It was a risk.” Rune paused a moment and said to someone in the room, “I’ll be there in a minute.” Then to Finn, he said, “Look, we’ve got plenty of problems here to deal with, the main one being Egan. He’s like a starving pit bull trying to break his chain. He gets loose and the damage count’s going to be unbelievably high.”

  “That’s no reason to mess with that fucking Artifact again.”

  “Don’t you think we know that? Torin, Damyn and I argued against it and lost.”

  “Just like old times,” Finn mused, remembering how the Eternals had tried to stop their witches eight hundred years ago. His gaze locked on Deidre. Her scowl deepened.

  “You could say that,” Rune agreed. “This time it was different. They needed the power boost to get through whatever shield was protecting Kellyn from them. They did it. The real Kellyn is shut up somewhere inside her own body and a demon’s at the steering wheel.”

  “Fan-fucking-tastic.”

  “That about sums it up,” Rune muttered. “So if Kellyn’s hanging with Cora Sterling, you gotta wonder if there’s a surprise inside the president, too.”

  “Oh my God,” Deidre murmured as the possibilities clicked in.

  Finn was as rocked by this news as Deidre. “So how do you want us to handle Kellyn?”

  “You take care of the Mating and find that damned Artifact. We’ll take care of Kellyn.” Rune blew out an impatient breath. “Believe me when I say it’s number one on our agenda.”

  “Right. Good luck.”

  “Back atcha,” Rune said. “We’re all gonna need it.”

  The next few days were tense. Everyone in the WLF was feeling the pressure. Cops, BOW agents and the MPs, Magic Police, were all over the city. Random checks on IDs were the order of the day and the rumors were that martial law was on the horizon.

  Since Joe was off visiting his father for a couple of days, Finn and Deidre were topside, doing recon on a small holding center in Oak Hill Cemetery. He could have done it alone; he just didn’t like the idea of leaving Deidre by herself. Too many things were unsettled. He’d spent most of his time the last few days just trying to get through to her. The woman’s head was as hard as that Black Silver they needed to find so badly.

  Just inside the Thirtieth Street entrance stood a redbrick Italianate building once used as the living quarters for the cemetery’s superintendent. Built in 1850, it was stately, beautiful and right now being used to house four accused witches before they could be transferred to BOW headquarters.

  With the snow falling and light shining through leaded glass panes, it made a picture more suitable for a Christmas card than a holding tank for witches. Redbrick gateposts stood a few feet apart, with black, wrought iron fencing in between. The two evergreens flanking the arched front door were dazzled with Christmas lights.

  “When will we hit it?” Deidre asked, huddling deeper into her coat.

  “We’ll wait for Joe to get back. A couple of days.”

  She nodded and Finn ground his back teeth together. This was how it had been between them now for three days. A polite coolness. Distance even when they were wrapped around each other, pushing the Mating into completion.

  The hell of it was, he missed her, damn it.

  Missed the connection he’d found with her and he wasn’t about to let it go. “Deidre—”

  “If you’re about to tell me that my mother is a demon, don’t bother.”

  It had been this way for days now. Her denying what she had seen and heard with her own eyes and ears and him pushing for her to deal and move on. Anger sparked inside him. He’d been patient, for Belen’s sake, and look where it had gotten him. Exactly nowhere. It was past time for a damn confrontation about this and he was done waiting.

  “Well,” he demanded, “have you got a better explanation for what’s going on?”

  “No.” She stuffed her hands into her pockets and turned her back on the gatehouse. Staring out over the cemetery, her gaze swept over ancient tombstones, spires of granite and marble and simple flat markers, all placed there to remember the dead. “But how can I accept what you’re saying? If I do, then I have to ask mysel
f for how long? Has she been a demon my whole life?”

  She turned her head to look up at him and he saw pain in her eyes and he ached for her. But at the same time, she had to work through this.

  “Was nothing I knew real? Was it all an act, played out by a creature who was just waiting for me to get this damned tattoo?”

  He grabbed her and held on. She was stiff and unyielding against him for a long moment, but he kept holding her and eventually, she leaned into him. “Finn, if my mother has always been a demon, then what does that make me?”

  “It makes you Deidre Sterling,” he said firmly, tipping her chin up until her gaze met his. “A witch of awesome power. Lover of an Eternal. Holder of a secret that can save the world. It makes you just exactly who you have always been. Never doubt it.”

  She took a deep breath and blew it out, watching it cloud into cold vapor in front of her. “None of this makes sense,” she muttered. “I’ve been trying to work through it for days and none of it makes sense.”

  “Yeah, I know. And I promise you, we’ll find out what happened to your mother. But right now—”

  She rubbed her forehead and whispered, “The Artifact’s more important.”

  “None of this will mean a damn thing if we don’t find that gods-damned piece of Black Silver, Dee.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” She pushed one hand through her hair, long and loose around her shoulders. “It’s like the memories just stopped coming. I haven’t had one since—”

  “—you were nearly captured by your mother.”

  “Yeah.” Her mouth worked as if she were chewing on something bitter until finally she said, “I haven’t gotten anything clear since—”

  “London. I remember.” He snorted. “Funny, I could never get you into the city back then. Guess that’s why the night of the spell I went there.” He stroked one hand up and down her back, soothing both of them with the touch that sparked their magic and the connection simmering between them. While he talked, Finn looked at his own memories of long ago. “I was in a pub by the docks. The ships were preparing to sail and all I could hear was the creak of the wood, the sailors cursing each other and the slap of the water against those huge hulls.”

  “Finn!” She swayed and grabbed him. Her hand clutched his arm and through the fabric of his leather coat, he felt magic and heat push into him in a wild rush. “Oh, God.”

  “What is it?”

  “When you described that scene, I got an image in my mind.” Her eyes were wide and she stared straight ahead, though he knew she was looking at a scene long dead and buried. “A ship. It had two masts.”

  “Tell me.”

  She shook her head and concentrated. “I went up the gangway and slipped on board. God, the smell. Dead fish, old whiskey and unwashed men. I was sick. Sick at heart and my stomach kept churning with what we had done. The piece of the Artifact I was holding was dead. Flat. As if the spell had used up its magic and left it empty. But I knew it wouldn’t last.”

  Her hand slid down his arm to his hand and she threaded her fingers through his, holding on as more of the past unfurled inside her mind.

  “You put the Artifact on a ship?” His voice was low, urgent.

  Finn watched as she frowned, working through memories that had been clouded for centuries. He couldn’t imagine what it was like trying to sift through so many images looking for only one specific picture of the right time and place.

  “I could only think to get it out of England. Away from us. Somewhere safe,” she said, words tumbling from her mouth in a rush. “I used magic to mold the Black Silver into a plaque, with the name of the ship . . . Marguerite scrolled across it. Then I spelled the captain.” She smiled slightly. “He didn’t want me on his boat. Women were bad luck on a ship . . .”

  Finn snorted. Men were always calling women bad luck, when the truth was much simpler. Men who couldn’t get a woman made up superstitions to explain why they didn’t want one.

  Her palm to his, Finn felt the heat of the Mating tattoo spreading across his skin, climbing up his back and knew she was feeling it too. As her memories came, fast and rich, unspooling through her mind, the Mating brand became more complete. Magic pulsed and breathed all around them. Snow fell, the wind blew and somewhere in the distance, a siren wailed.

  Her voice was soft, almost lost in the sigh of the wind. “I used magic to convince the captain the Black Silver plaque was his. That it was a gift from a patron. Precious. To be protected.”

  Finn’s heart lurched. If the captain had taken that plaque with him on his travels, who the hell knew where it had finally ended up? It could be anywhere now. Hell, if the ship had sunk, as plenty of them had, back in the day, the damn thing was at the bottom of a very deep ocean.

  “Deidre—the sea captain took it with him?”

  She lifted her eyes to him, horror for what she’d done clouding her blue gaze. “Yeah, he did. I watched the ship set sail the following morning. God, I gave that magical time bomb to him. Who knows what the Artifact did to the man when its power woke up again?”

  Frustration crouched inside him, but he heard the misery in her voice and responded. “No, Deidre. You did the only thing you could to—”

  “Dump my problem off on someone else?” she interrupted. Turning away, she stomped off a few paces, then whirled back to face him. “I was supposed to get it somewhere safe. I could have buried it or hidden it in a cave or something, I don’t know! Instead, I handed it off to some poor guy who didn’t have the slightest idea what he was holding.” She slapped both hands to the side of her head and asked, “What the hell kind of person was I, anyway?” Her gaze snapped to his. “Why the hell did you give two shits for me?”

  Okay, he’d tried understanding. He’d tried patience—which really wasn’t one of his strengths—and he’d tried being kind. Time to pull the gloves off. “You want to be a martyr,” he told her, voice as cold as the snow swirling around them, “go for it. But leave the weeping and wailing till after we’re done.”

  She hissed in a breath. “Bastard.”

  “Always.” He stalked to her side and caught her when she would have darted away. “You thought you were perfect in your past life? Is that it? Because nobody’s perfect, Deidre.”

  “Not everybody’s an evil, selfish bitch, though.”

  “More than you might think,” he countered with a grim smile. “And I’m damned if I’ll watch you tear yourself apart over things a different woman in a different time once did.”

  Shaking her head, she said, “Nice try. But you told me yourself that this soul? It’s the same one I carry through lifetime after lifetime. So she was me. I’m what’s left of her.”

  “Wrong. You’re what’s become of her. There’s a difference.” He paused. “And I wish to hell you’d stop throwing my own words back at me.”

  Furious, she tried to pull her hand free, but he held on. “You’re not her, Dee. Let it go. Her mistakes aren’t yours. Don’t you think you’re paying enough for what she did? Haven’t we both paid enough?”

  A long, simmering moment passed before the tension in her body drained away. She turned her face from his to look out across the cemetery again. Gaze locked on her, he waited for her to find her balance again. To reclaim who she was and let the wrongs of the past slide away.

  Snowflakes lay on her hair, her eyelashes and drifted around her like pieces of a cloud. His heart clenched in his chest. Everything he had said was true. He had cared for her in that long-ago time. Loved her as much as he was able.

  Deidre, he loved beyond all reason.

  “It’s not going to be easy finding out what happened to a thirteenth-century sailing ship,” she said at last.

  He smiled when she turned to face him. “We’ve got a name. The Marguerite. We’ll find it. We’ll use magic. Call the others
and get them to do a combined spell—”

  A phone rang shrilly and Finn scowled. “What the hell?”

  Deidre reached into her coat pocket and pulled out her cell phone. Holding it flat in her palm she stared down at it as the ringing continued, the screen flashing with an incoming call. “I grabbed it from the supply room. I’ve been carrying it whenever we go topside, just in case my mother—”

  Finn took a huge breath and held it until he thought his chest might explode. But he thought he understood now. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe her mother wasn’t human. It was that she couldn’t believe it. The truth simply didn’t compute—and maybe it never would unless she faced the woman down again and learned the facts firsthand.

  “Is that her calling?”

  “No,” she said, as the phone stopped ringing and a small green light began to blink. “It was Dante. My Secret Service protection. He’s left a voice mail.”

  Chapter 38

  This meeting was probably a huge mistake, Deidre told herself an hour later. But what choice did she have, really? She glanced up at Finn, beside her. Tall and strong, he had been at her side through all of her lifetimes. She knew that for herself now, had remembered a lot of their combined past. He was her warrior. The one who stood between her and danger. The one who held her at night and made her laugh and cry and stirred anger so hot inside her she could hardly breathe.

  He was, in short, everything.

  They had found a way beyond their shared past to a future that looked amazing—if they could pull this off. Finn was the other half of her. The piece of her personal puzzle that made everything else feel right.

  She wore his brand on her chest, the links of that ribbon of chain now scrolling completely around her breast, under her arm and halfway up her back. The tattoo seemed to burn with urgency when he was near, as if reacting to the matching brand on his skin. Deidre burned, too.

  Even now, in the quiet darkness of the National Mall, surrounded by the granite and marble reminders of this country’s glories, she wanted him. She would always want him, Deidre knew, with a hunger that would never be satiated. Instinctively, she reached for his hand and his fingers wrapped around hers and squeezed.