With witchcraft alive in the world, the people were frightened. Frightened enough to vote for her when she had promised to protect them-and she would keep that promise. She had vowed to resolve the witch situation and to bring a halt to the fear that seemed to be the underlying thread of society these days.
If witchcraft existed, she insisted on the campaign trail, then it was time that the world accept the new reality and find a way to work with it. She solemnly swore that she would not allow this country or any other to revert to the hysteria of the Salem witch trials.
And that was just what she intended to do, Cora told herself firmly. Reaching out one hand, she lifted the phone. “Mr. Salinger?”
“Yes, Madam President.” He paused and audibly swallowed. “I’m afraid I have bad news.”
Her grip tightened on the receiver. Taking a slow, deep breath, she shifted her gaze to the south lawn of the White House. Outside were gardens, soft in the moonlight, being guarded by a full company of armed Marines. Beyond the lawn, the fence had been fortified, sprayed with white gold, and tourists were no longer allowed up close to the “people’s house.” No more photo ops in front of the nation’s capital. Not when you had to worry about a witch getting too close to the president.
The witchcraft scare had driven every decision made in D.C. for the last several years. And fear was a harsh taskmaster. The security was such that Cora even had a Secret Service escort with her at all times inside the White House. About the only place she could count on being alone was in the privacy of her own bedroom.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Salinger,” she said in the soothing, calm tone people had so come to count on. “What’s happened?”
“It’s Shea Jameson.”
“Yes, I assumed as much.” Cora sighed. Only yesterday she’d spoken to this man to tell him in no uncertain terms just how important Ms. Jameson was to Cora’s future plans. The young woman had become the face of a movement.
Her aunt the first witch to be executed, Shea herself hunted for years and now, finally, thanks to her power erupting, caught and jailed. She was young, pretty, a schoolteacher, for heaven’s sake. And her records all indicated Shea was a thoughtful, ordinary woman-at least until her innate witchcraft had erupted. Hers was the face Cora needed to project as she tried to make the very changes she’d promised the voters.
“What’s happened?”
“She’s escaped. Well-” Salinger corrected himself quickly. “She was broken out. There were some deaths. My men-”
“How many of your prisoners died in this escape?”
He paused and Cora heard the rustle of papers as he did some quick checking. “Five women dead, four injured, one of those not expected to make it.”
Rubbing her forehead against the burgeoning ache, Cora turned away from the French doors leading to the south lawn and stared instead at her desk. The Resolute, it had served Reagan, Clinton, the Bushes and Obama and now it was hers. Along with the responsibility that anyone sitting behind it must accept.
She ran her fingertips across the intricately carved English oak surface and reminded herself that she’d earned this position. She’d served first as governor in Texas and from there moved to the Senate. Two terms had solidified her reputation as a straight-talking, nononsense candidate. When her husband died fifteen years ago, Cora had taken her only child, Deidre, out on the campaign trail with her and the two of them had been an unbeatable team.
And she’d walked into this office, ready to take on the problems of not only her country but the world. Now was not the time to get fainthearted.
“And Ms. Jameson?” she asked, cutting into Salinger’s excuses and apologies.
“Gone,” he admitted. “I gave the orders you insisted on, Madam President. She wasn’t bothered… much. The guards mostly kept their distance, and simply watched. If they’d been closer to her when the men appeared…”
She straightened, disregarding the man’s insinuation that somehow all of this was her fault, and focused on the last word he’d said. “Appeared?”
“According to the surviving witnesses, yes,” the man said, nearly babbling now with nerves. “Two men ‘appeared out of nowhere,’ killed the tower guards and showed up in the prison yard.” He cleared his throat and added, “Witnesses swear the two men were covered in flames.”
“Flames?”
He heaved a sigh. “Yes, ma’am, that’s one thing everyone agrees on. The two men looked like pillars of fire.”
“I see.” She inhaled sharply, but kept her voice cool, despite the shock of this news. She remembered the reports from the first attempt to apprehend Shea Jameson. Supposedly a man made of fire had swept her away. Who was he? Where did he come from? And how in heaven could a man of fire be tracked?
Was there more than witches to be concerned about? she wondered. What other kinds of magic might there be, still waiting to be revealed?
“Very well,” she said abruptly. “Do everything you can, use whatever resource you need, but I want Shea Jameson found, do you understand?”
“Yes, but-”
“And make no mistake, I want her unharmed.” Cora wasn’t interested in hearing more of his apologies or his whining. “I’ll be notifying BOW. They’ll be in contact with you. Give them everything they require, Mr. Salinger.”
“Of course, Madam President, but I don’t think they’ll be able to find her. Not as long as this… man is with her.”
“You’d be surprised what properly motivated people can do, Mr. Salinger. Keep me informed if anything changes.”
“Yes, ma’am, I will-”
She hung up and let her fingers trail across the surface of the telephone. She shifted a look around the Oval Office she’d worked so hard to reach. She wouldn’t allow Shea Jameson to disappear into the underground. She needed her. If they were going to make the necessary changes to society and the world at large, the two of them had to work together.
Whether they wanted to or not.
Chapter 18
Traveling by fire was disconcerting, to say the least.
Torin could travel only so many miles in brilliant bursts of flaming energy. So at the end of every jump, Shea looked around quickly to see where they were. Beach, jump. Freeway, jump. Parking lot, jump. Middle of an intersection-shriek and jump.
By the time they “landed,” Shea was shaken and just a little bit nauseous. She let go of Torin, took a breath and bent at the waist, letting her head hang down as she fought to settle her stomach. Not easy since she thought sure she’d left her stomach behind two jumps ago.
“You all right?”
“I will be,” she said, more steadily than she felt at the moment. “The important thing is I’m out of that prison.”
“No,” Torin corrected. “The important thing is to keep you out. We’re not safe yet. We have to keep going.”
Shea straightened up and whipped her hair back out of her eyes.
She really was inside a completely different world now, Shea thought. Traveling by fire. Sending a friend to a sanctuary. As she quickly considered her new reality, she also acknowledged that she had been relieved to hear about the sanctuaries. Witches were organizing to save themselves and others. They, like she, had decided not to lie down and die with a whimper-and knowing she wasn’t alone in her fight made her feel stronger somehow.
Turning to look up at him, she said, “Just give me a second to get my stomach back where it belongs before you do that fire thing again, okay?”
He gave her a slow smile. “Didn’t like it?”
“It was… amazing,” she admitted, though her insides were still a little shaky. “But not looking forward to doing it again real soon.”
He shook his head as he stood there like some fallen avenging angel, his gray eyes sweeping their surroundings, constantly vigilant. Finally, he looked at her. “No. From here, we’ll drive.”
“Thank God.” At least a car she understood.
“We have to keep moving,” he sai
d. “BOW and the MPs will be looking for you. We have to get lost. Quickly.”
Then he took her arm and dragged her behind him across a well-lit parking garage. He stopped in front of a sleek black sports car that looked so fast, so powerful, she half expected it to growl at her in greeting.
“Get in.”
“Are we stealing somebody’s car?” she asked, even as she headed for the passenger side. “Don’t we have enough people chasing us?”
He shook his head. “It’s my car. I have several I keep in different locations-just to ensure that I have one when I need one. So get in.”
“Right.” She got in, strapped the seat belt into place and instantly slumped against the black leather seat. She hadn’t even been aware of just how much tension was trapped inside her body. Until it all released at once, leaving her feeling as wobbly and insubstantial as a wet noodle.
He fired up the engine and Shea smiled. The car did growl. As he peeled out of the parking space, she asked, “Where are we going?”
“Safe house for tonight.” The muscle-bound car streaked through the parking garage like a hungry cat chasing down prey. Its tires squealed against the concrete floor and its engine seemed to echo with a rumble throughout the structure.
She leaned her head against the seat back and barely noticed as parking lights flashed past like lightning bolts in a dark sky. As Shea’s mind drifted, Torin drove on, steering the car onto the freeway and into the night. And as he drove, visions filled her mind and in those visions, lightning did crack against the heavens.
Voices rose out of the past, whispering, chanting. As the words formed in her mind, Shea shifted uneasily and the power within her howled. Moon, our Goddess, we call to thee
Your daughters call on your power
Bless us now with your bounty
Before us let our enemies cower.
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. 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 syst
em, 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.
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