“Mom was the daughter of Comtes d’Arques. Her parents and grandparents before them were very prominent in court. By the time my parents met, the king had given my father the earldom and the lands that had once belonged to my grandfather. The illegitimate son had become the Earl of Worthington.” He frowned. “But it wasn’t enough for my father. He was hard. Ambitious. Cruel. He made those around him miserable.”
I could feel him tensing as he talked about his father. I forked my fingers through his hair, pushed back the locks on his forehead, and tilted his face upwards. I kissed him until he relaxed. I stroked his cheek. Kissed his forehead. “Tell me more about your mother.”
“I can’t focus when you do that,” he mumbled in a voice gone smoky.
I stopped messing with him. “There. I won’t distract you anymore.”
Torin chuckled. “You’re sitting on my lap.”
“I’ll move to the other end of the room.” His arms tightened, firmly holding me in place.
“You distract me by being in the same room, Freckles. Your voice. Your laugh.” He closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, and exhaled. “Your scent. My essence has a way of finding yours, so no matter where you run, I’ll always find you.”
Then why was someone who looked like him searching for me in the future? “I’m not sure if that’s a threat or a promise, but it sounds stalker-ish and not romantic.”
“I can be romantic.”
Yes, he could. “What was your mother’s name?”
“Adelaide,” he said.
I grinned. “Like the city in Australia.”
“Yes. She was the best. Noble by birth but a serf at heart, my father used to tell her. She didn’t care about court life, fashion, or who was wearing what. She learned to speak English and treated the servants with dignity when her fellow aristocrats spoke French and treated the Anglo serfs like crap. If a villager needed her help, she gave it. If they needed food, she supplied it. Soldiers were welcomed to our home, and she helped treat them with herbs and healing ointments she made. Everyone loved her.”
Despite what he’d said, herbs and healing ointments sounded witchy to me. “So you spoke French?”
“Yes and English. After Lavania turned me, it took me three years to learn everything there was to learn about runes, Immortals, and Valkyries. We didn’t have a crash course like some people.” He squeezed my waist, his fingers caressing my skin. I forced myself to focus. “Lavania had a castle in Normandy and about three hundred Immortals under her care. I’d sneak out to see my mother. I’d watch her, walk beside her, and listen as she talked with the servants or friends about us—her, James, and me.” His voice grew gruff. “She took our death hard. We had no children, so we left her nothing. And it was hard being so close to her, yet not tell her that I was still alive and ease her pain.” His voice became hoarse.
Tears filled my eyes and flowed down my cheeks onto his hair.
Torin’s arms were like vices around my waist. “Yet I couldn’t walk away. I tried to so many times, but I always went back. I couldn’t give her what she wanted, yet she was there for me. Even if she didn’t know she was there.” Torin blew out air. “I started to see immortality as a curse. I was alive, yet I was withering from the inside, my connection to those I loved severed.”
No wonder he hadn’t wanted to turn me. He’d said being an Immortal was worse than death and had begged me not to do it. I didn’t know why until now.
My arms tightened around his shoulders.
“Then she died and everything ceased to matter,” he whispered in low voice. “I was like the walking dead. I reaped souls, ate, slept, yet felt nothing. Empty. Darkness became my companion. I hated what I had become, but there was nothing I could do to change it. Perhaps I didn’t want to change it. Most Valkyries reaped in groups. I preferred to be alone. I didn’t want to connect with another person, Mortal or Immortal. By the time I was paired with Andris, I hated being a Valkyrie. His carefree attitude pissed me off. When he turned Maliina and Ingrid without thinking about the consequences, I snapped his neck and threw him out. He stayed away for a while, but he came back. It didn’t matter how often I told him to get lost or stay away; he always came back. Then I met you.”
Silence followed. Like me, I was sure he was reliving our first month together, how he’d been drawn to me against his will, how he’d fought healing me and making me Immortal.
“So when you say that your feelings make you weak, I wonder what mine make me, because you are my existence. The reason I breathe. Smile. Laugh. Live. You’ve taught me to feel again, to love and to trust. You give me a reason to wake up in the morning.” He chuckled, though he didn’t sound amused. “But if you ever decide this relationship is not right for you, I will let you go, because above all, above my pain and needs, your happiness is the most important thing to me.”
I stopped breathing when he reached up and touched the side of my face with the tips of his fingers, leaving behind heated flesh. For one brief moment, I closed my eyes and savored his touch, tears burning my eyes. But I opened them just as quickly because I needed to take him in with all my senses.
“Every night when I leave you and crawl in my cold bed, it hurts. I’m not talking about sexual frustration. I need to hold you in my arms. Feel you. Breathe you. Every moment you look into my eyes and whisper you love me, I give you a piece of myself. Yet loving you feeds my soul. Kissing you reaffirms what I believe deep down in my core—that you and I are meant to be together.” He wiped a tear from my cheek. “Do you know that when I wake up every morning and don’t see you by your window I break out in a cold sweat? The thought of losing you to the Norns or stupid Mortals who use magic frivolously is my worst nightmare. I’d do anything, fight anyone to keep you safe, so don’t ever think I don’t listen to anything you say. Everything you do and say is important to me. If it takes a lifetime to convince you of that—”
I cut him off with my lips, poured every drop of love in my heart into the kiss, showing what I couldn’t say. When we pulled apart, he chuckled, the sexy sound rolling over my sensitized senses.
“I should tell you how I feel more often,” he teased.
I hugged him tight. “You do with every look and smile, with every touch and kiss.”
“Okay. Can I breathe now?” he mumbled, and I realized I had pressed his face to my chest. I eased up, leaned back, and studied his beautifully sculptured face—the chiseled cheekbones and those kissable lips. He studied me lazily, his brilliant blue eyes glittering under those incredibly long lashes.
“I know I can be difficult sometimes.”
He grinned. “Understatement there.”
“Okay, I can be a real pain.”
“True.” I could tell he was fighting laughter.
“And I’m not good at telling you how I feel.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Yeah, you kind of yell it. A lot. But you’re really good at showing.”
He was teasing me now. I was going to get better at telling him. “And I can be really mean to you sometimes.”
“Nah, I love your feistiness. If you haven’t noticed, we burn a lot hotter after we fight. Wouldn’t trade that for anything. You turn into a doormat and I promise you right here and now that I’ll make your life miserable. I’m very insufferable when I get my way all the time.” He kissed my nose. “You get me.”
His eyes glowed with the intensity of his feelings, and I felt silly, stupid even, for my earlier reaction. This man adored me. I didn’t know what I’d done in my seventeen-and-a-half years to deserve him, but I was so damn lucky.
We just sat there, my arms around his shoulders, his around my waist. I still had questions. So many of them I didn’t know where to start. I hated bringing up his father, but I had to know.
“Where were we before you distracted me?” I asked.
“We were done.” He lifted me up and threw me onto the bed. I smothered a scream, my legs and arms flailing. “Now I have places to go, witch. Things to do.”
<
br /> I gawked at him as he reached for his socks. “Did your father die before your mother?”
“No.” He shoved a foot in a sock and reached for the second one.
“Where was he when she was grieving?”
“With his mistresses in Aquitaine, or was it London? My mother was alone at the manor with the serfs most of the time.”
“The bastard.”
Torin chuckled. “I think she preferred being alone.”
“Did she know about you? I mean did you, you know, reap her?”
He stopped in the process of putting on his boot, and I thought he wouldn’t answer. “I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I wanted to tell her about me and the time we spent together even though she didn’t know I was there. She was very ill towards the end.”
Oh no. That meant his mother’s soul was in Hel’s Hall. I scooted to the edge of the bed. “Have you ever seen her soul?”
He shook his head, his eyes sliding from mine. One booted leg done. “I searched for her. When Andris turned Maliina and Ingrid, we both got tour duty in Hel for about a decade. I searched for her there too, but Hel is huge. The souls there are not like the ones in Valhalla who trained for Ragnarok during the day and partied at night. Souls of the sick and the elderly in Hel’s Hall are at peace. They go there to rest. The evil ones are herded to Corpse Strand, the island of the damned, where they meet their fate.”
Tortured for eternity, Cora had told me. I shivered. “I hope the Necromancer who killed her is rotting on that island.”
Torin chuckled. “I knew you were a vengeful witch.”
“He deserved it.” I didn’t think it was possible to love him more. I did now more than ever.
The smile disappeared from his lips. “I wish I’d told him that I knew what he’d done, but the journey to the island is dangerous and it’s easy to be trapped there. In fact, Goddess Hel sends Grimnirs she punishes to Corpse Strand.” Torin stood. “Okay, Freckles. Story time is over. I need to talk to Echo about the amulet.”
“We need to talk to Echo,” I corrected.
He rolled his eyes.
“And we haven’t discussed what you found out today,” I whined. “I need to know what’s going on, Torin. You can’t keep me in the dark and claim you’re protecting me.”
He pondered my statement while studying my face with unnerving intensity. I started to feel uneasy.
“What? Do I have a zit?”
He chuckled. “No. I’m counting your imperfections.”
“What?”
“Your eyes are too close together. Weird I never noticed that before. And your lips…”
“Jerk.” I grabbed a pillow and chucked it at his head. He ducked and came up laughing.
“We’re going to Echo’s, so stop goofing around and put on your shoes,” he ordered.
I thought of ways to make him sorry. I couldn’t find anything insulting about him physically to throw at him. “My eyes are not close together,” I said. “And if you think for one second we are leaving without you telling me about what the three of you were plotting outside the school and why you disappeared this morning, then think again. You guys could be the ones knocking off Seeresses for all I know.” There, I’d said it.
He laughed. “You wouldn’t find me anywhere near a witch if my life depended on it. Come on. We’ll talk later.”
I lifted the blanket and crawled in his bed.
His brows lifted. “What are you doing?”
“Getting comfortable,” I shot back the same words he’d told me earlier. “Start talking. And FYI, I’m a witch.”
A glint appeared in his eyes. When he started around the bed, I scooted to the other side. He paused, eyes promising retribution. “You are being a brat,” he said. “We need to find out why the pendant is making you see visions. That’s more important right now.”
“And I say that your refusal to tell me where you three went today is more important.”
He angled his head and gave me a slow, naughty smile. I hated that smile. It said he was about to do something I wouldn’t like. Like grab me and carry me caveman-style out of his room. If he dared…
He pocketed the pendant, grabbed his jacket, and started for the mirror portal.
“Where are you going?” I yelled.
“To Echo’s.” The runes flickered on his skin and blazed. The portal responded. He disappeared through it while I sputtered. I was sure my face was beet red. He was such a…
“Jerk,” I called out. Blowing out air, I counted slowly from ten, imagining all sorts of medieval tortures raining on his arrogant head. Then I heard him.
“You home, Echo?”
“Get lost, Valkyrie,” Echo said rudely. I grinned.
Cora said something that sounded like “be nice.”
“He’s invading our privacy, the one place we find peace and quiet.”
“Peace and quiet?” Cora laughed.
“Okay, St. James. What do you want?”
Instead of answering Echo, Torin said, “Hi, Cora. Can you make sure he’s dressed? I’ll be back in a few.”
“We’re going for a swim…” The rest of Echo’s words disappeared with a door closing.
I grabbed my phone, turned away from the portal, and faked an interest in my phone. I knew the moment Torin entered the bedroom. The bed shifted when he sat.
“Still sulking?” he asked.
“Nope. Texting, Femi.” I did, asking her when dinner was going to be ready and what we were watching tonight. I knew both answers, but Torin didn’t know that. “Let me know what Echo says.”
Torin gave a long-suffering sigh designed to make me feel guilty, but it wasn’t working. “I’m sorry for being a jerk.”
An apology from the mighty Torin? The realms just became one giant blob of goo. I turned and eyed him suspiciously. “Really, really sorry?”
His eyes smoldered. “I’m going to regret this.”
“I could make you grovel,” I warned.
“Not in this lifetime.” He finger combed my hair, cupped my face, and added, “There’s absolutely nothing I’d change on your face. I love your eyes. Your freckles,” he touched my nose, “and these,” he touched my lips, “are a work of art. Your face is perfection.”
It wasn’t. My brown eyes weren’t poetry-worthy and even though I’ve grown to love my freckles because of him, I still hated when new ones popped up. “You don’t play fair.”
“I never do. Now, I didn’t want to tell you what we found out because you’d feel bad and blame yourself, and I’d feel like a total shithead.”
“Torin—”
“Then you’d want to visit them or attend their funerals and give eulogies while crying.” I scowled, but he pretended not to see. “Which would piss me off because I hate to see you cry. Of course, I’d want to console you in the only way I know how and become even more frustrated because I can’t fully make love—”
I covered his mouth. Seriously? He could drive a saint crazy. “First, Mr. Smarty Pants, I gave a eulogy at Kate’s funeral because no one else volunteered and I’d known her, like, forever. Second…” I groaned. “I can’t believe it you’re doing it again.”
He pulled my hand down and gave me a fake innocent smile. “What?”
“Distracting me instead of answering my question, you faker. What did you find out about the Seeresses?” He hesitated. “I can handle it, Torin. Please. Just tell me.”
He sighed. “The visions you’ve been having are real. They happened at the exact moment you saw them, so these are not premonitions. The Seeresses are reaching out to you. Talking to you.”
Instead of a Norn. Freaking great! Then something occurred to me. If they were happening in real time, the person I’d seen couldn’t have been Torin. He was here with me at the time.
“But the time kept changing,” I protested, but inside I was celebrating.
“It was three in the morning where it happened. There were other attacks before that and more since.”
&nbs
p; “Yikes.”
“There’s more.” The change in his voice should have warned me. “The reason they are after the Seeresses is… you.”
7. DEAD SEERESSES
My breath got caught in my lungs. I listened to the pounding of my heart, which seemed loud and heavy. I should have seen this coming. I swallowed a sob.
She’s watching us, the last Seeress had said. You must protect the others. You must stop them from hurting our kind.
She’d been communicating with me. She’d known I could see them. It always came back to me. I’d bet it had something to do with the Norns too, bitter old hags.
When I could speak without sounding like a banshee, I asked, “Why?”
Torin scowled as though my calmness surprised him. What had he expected? Tears and a why-me pity party? I might not blame myself for what happened at the swimming pool months ago when a lot of my teammates died, but everything that had happened since then had been my fault. Ever since I met the Norns in charge of my destiny, I saw things with amazing clarity.
The love of my life still watched me as though he expected me to, I don’t know, throw a fit, or summon the Norns. I might do that later. Right now I needed answers.
“Torin?”
His eyes narrowed. “We don’t know. We talked to the relatives of the Seeresses. One texted a boyfriend before she left with them. Another sent a vision to her twin. These people wanted the location of the young Völva who could talk directly with the Norns. The Seeresses did what they could to protect you and led them on a wild goose chase. The first one happened at three o’clock in Amsterdam. They are nine hours ahead of us. That’s why your clock stopped at three. The next one was in Australia, then Italy, West Africa, Dominican Republic, New Orleans, and Maine. All of them practice trance magic.”
Seven dead in two days. How many more before? Then what he’d said registered. “Practice? Does that mean they’re not… dead?”
He shook his head. “No. Remember, we haven’t been able to reap. These are good witches. Unfortunately, they are in comas. All of them.”
Seeress: Book Three (Runes Series) Page 10
