Visions of Magic (13 page)

Over and over again, the voices rose and fell like waves on a churning sea. Shadows swirled through her mind and her heart as what she had been fought to exist once more.

Shea moaned and fell deeper into the past, into the images hidden in her own memories. As Torin steered the car through the night, Shea walked through mist, her sisters at her side.

She felt power churning in the air and smiled. Whips of lightning skittered through the clouds, illuminating them from behind. Wind tore at their clothing and hair and shrieked an accompaniment to the chanting of the gathered witches.

A pentacle lay etched into the dirt, candles at each of its five points. Despite the fierce wind, the flames on the wicks of those candles burned tall and straight with hardly a flicker of movement. Shea followed the others and formed a circle around the great star on the ground.

She felt, more than saw, others there as well. They were on the fringes of the circle, lost in darkness, yet somehow she knew they were trying to reach the witches. Stop them.

But nothing could have stopped them.

As one, the witches dropped the white robes they wore and stood skyclad, all of them, their skin glowing in the pearly half-light of moon and the bolts of lightning. Long hair flew about their heads and in their eyes—reflected around the circle—was a hunger and a thirst that Shea recognized, while instinctively, a part of her pulled back from it.

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.

“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
?”

L
andry 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.

“Y
ou'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 feeling, 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 . . .”