She looked toward the few lights shining in the desert blackness. “Should be safe enough there, right? I mean, the feds are looking for us in Sedona.”
“True. We should have some time before the hunt goes international.”
“I need to get some candles, too, if we can find some,” she said.
He glanced at her. “For what?”
“Candle magic. I need my memories, right?”
His eyes shuttered as he turned his head forward again. “Yes.”
“There’s that look again,” she muttered, then spoke up louder. “Tell me more, Rune. About that night. The night everything went to hell.”
“You should remember on your own.”
“And in a perfect world, sure.” Teresa reached out to grab his arm and he stopped dead. When he was looking at her, she said, “You already prodded me once. I need the memories. You told me yourself. So help me.”
He scowled. “There’s not much more to tell.”
“Then it shouldn’t take long,” she argued.
He spoke then and as his voice wove a spell of words around her, images filled Teresa’s mind and the long-dead past came vibrantly to life.
Teresa felt the swell of power surrounding her and her sisters. The moonlight was bright, shining down from a star-studded black sky. A banefire, built on the bones of slaughtered animals, burned brightly in the center of their circle. The Eternals stood just beyond the ring of power, each of them formidable in his disapproval. Each of them trying to fight past the strength of the magic used to keep him out.
Teresa looked at her own Eternal. The immortal man who came to her bed every night and showed her bliss. His features were twisted as he shouted, trying to make himself heard above the cacophony of sound that seemed to shriek from the very air.
She loved him. A part of her always would. She had promised him that she wouldn’t join the coven tonight. That she would go away with him. But the lure of power was stronger even than her love. Besides, how could she turn away from the women who were like her own blood? She stood with her sisters and called on the gods to hear them. They focused their combined magics on the Artifact before them and in the wildly flickering light demanded the knowledge of the ages. Demanded that doors closed to mankind would open to them.
Doors to other dimensions. Other worlds open to new possibilities.
She saw it all. Lived it all. She tasted the excitement of magic in the air and swallowed the bitter dregs of regret as a door finally opened and the first of the demons rushed through.
Chaos reigned.
The Eternals fought valiantly. The coven strove to undo the harm they had done. But the screams of the dead and dying were all-consuming.
The coven’s wards failed under the onslaught of so much dark energy. Demons and Eternals alike entered the sacred circle and destroyed it. Her sisters were dying all around her. Teresa shuddered under the hideous onslaught of memory. She watched herself as she had once been, struggling to close the gate to hell. But despite her efforts, there were demons who escaped into this world before the gate swung shut. And she saw the fury on the face of the immortal who loved her.
“Oh, my God.” She looked up at him, struggling for air. Her lungs were constricted, as if she was still breathing in that awful fire.
“You saw.”
“I did,” she said, nodding as she looked up into his eyes. “We let demons loose into this world.”
“Most of them were hunted down that night,” he told her. “My brothers and I saw to that. But yes. A few remained.” He swept his gaze across the dark desert, as if expecting for one of the demons to materialize in front of him. “And the doorway you closed wasn’t sealed that night. Not completely. Dark energy still spills through the portal. That is why we have to find the Artifact. We have to undo what you and your sisters did.”
“And my memories will tell me where the Artifact is?”
“Your piece of it, yes,” he said. “After the battle, the coven shattered the Artifact—each of you taking away one piece and hiding it somewhere in the world.”
“That narrows it down.”
He frowned at her and Teresa said, “Sorry. Sorry. What else?”
“A spell of atonement was cast. The coven would give up their powers for eight hundred years. At the end of that time, the Awakening would come. And you would gather to put right what went so wrong.”
“So you’ve been waiting …”
“A very long time,” he said.
“And the Mating ritual will help open my memories?”
“Yes.”
“We weren’t mated then, were we?”
“No,” he said, starting to walk again. “None of the witches wanted to share power. You all kept us at a distance.”
His tone told her that he still hadn’t forgiven her that betrayal.
“Well, no more distance, Rune. We have to start the Mating ritual soon. For everybody’s sake.”
He shot her a look as she hurried to keep up with him and when his gaze landed on her, nerves fluttered in the pit of her stomach.
An inner voice laughed at her. Trying to convince herself that she was ready for sex with Rune only for the greater good wasn’t working. No, the truth was, when she was around him, her entire body hungered. She remembered the feel of his body sliding into hers. She wanted to touch him again. To feel the heat of him surrounding her.
On this crazed race across the countryside, the one stable point in her universe had been his solid, muscular presence. He held her and she felt safe. He touched her and the cold inside her drained away, replaced by a relentless need that only he could ease.
She quivered for a release that seemed to be hovering just out of reach. She looked at him and felt heat pool at her center. She touched him and her nerve endings sizzled. Her magic, her body—there was no distinction here. She wouldn’t care for him. Wouldn’t love him. But if they were fated to mate, would it really be so bad if she enjoyed herself in the process?
She pushed those thoughts aside for the moment, though, and told him, “There’s no point in waiting for the memories to show up. We don’t have time to waste, right? Well, I can try an unblocking spell and maybe hurry them up a little.”
He nodded. “Good idea. We should be able to find what we need here.”
As they drew nearer to the village, Teresa wondered if he was right. The place was hardly more than a spot in the road, really. A dozen or so buildings clustered together in the middle of nowhere.
“Then what?” she asked. “Where do we go from here?”
“There are caves near here,” he said, swatting at her bird as the small creature made a dive at his head. “I’ve stayed there before.”
“Caves. Great.” Mother Nature’s version of a shack. Teresa whistled for Chico and he flew to her shoulder, where he bobbed up and down in time with her steps. She lifted one hand to gently stroke his sleek feathers and immediately felt comforted. Her home, her life, her friend were all gone. Chico and this stranger who would be her mate were all she had left.
Except for the grandmother who probably, thanks to her gift of visions, already knew they were headed her way. Teresa suddenly needed to see her abuela. She felt a desperate urge to hear the older woman’s steady, nononsense advice. And she needed to feel that connection to the past that she knew before she walked into a future that was looking more and more terrifying.
He stopped suddenly and asked, “Will you trust me, Teresa?”
“What?”
“Trust. Can you trust me?”
“I have so far, haven’t I?” She wanted to trust him, but there was still so much she didn’t know. Prepared or not, she had gaping holes in her knowledge and handing her fate over to an immortal wasn’t something easily done.
He grabbed her arms and pulled her in close to him. The color of his gray eyes shifted from pewter to steel to the soft gray of storm clouds, all while he looked into her eyes, as if searching for something that he couldn’t fin
d.
“Fine,” she admitted. “It’s hard. I don’t know you, Rune. You say you’ve always been with me, but I’ve never seen you, so why should I—”
“You were ten,” he said, his gaze boring into hers. “At your abuela’s. You wandered into the desert and stirred a rattlesnake nest to life.”
She remembered. That frozen sense of terror came back to her and it was as if all the years between then and now had fallen away. “There were dozens of them.” She shook her head and swallowed. “The rattling, the hissing, it was so loud and—”
“And a coyote saved you,” he said. “It jumped into the nest so you could run.”
“Yeah,” she said, smiling now. “I don’t know where it came from—”
“The coyote was me, Teresa,” he said. “I used magic, drawing on yours and my own to create the illusion of a coyote.”
“You were there?” She looked into his eyes and saw the truth staring back at her. “You saved me.”
“I will always be there when you need me. You are my mate.”
The simple honesty of his words tore down a bit of the wall she had built around her heart and soul. And that worried her. She didn’t want to be vulnerable to him. But how could she hold back from a being who had already saved her life more than once?
“Trust goes both ways, Teresa,” he reminded her.
She tipped her head to one side and stared up at him. Saw shadows crouched in his eyes. She felt his power rippling out around her, drawing her in even as he held a part of himself back.
Something told her that the memories she hoped to draw out of the locked closet in her mind wouldn’t all be puppies and rainbows. There was more between them than he was saying. She knew it.
He might pretend to be keeping the past where it belonged, but at his heart, at his soul, he was holding on to feelings that threatened to destroy the very link they were supposed to forge. He expected her to blindly trust him when it was clear he couldn’t do the same with her.
“Look,” she said, covering a sudden burst of nerves with a stiff, calm voice, “we’re stuck with each other, right? We have the Mating ritual to complete. This quest to finish. So it doesn’t really matter if we like each other, does it?”
“I suppose not,” he agreed.
Oddly, she was almost disappointed to hear him say that. Despite knowing that it was better all the way around this way. After all, she was prepared to go through with the Mating. What she wasn’t willing to do was allow herself to love him. Love wasn’t part of this package and she had no interest in changing that. Love gave people too much power over you.
Gave them the weapons to hurt you.
So, no thanks. She wasn’t interested in eternal love. She was prepared to do her duty. To complete the task her grandmother had prepared her for most of her life. But nowhere was it written that she must love the mate the fates had chosen for her.
When Rune held one hand out to her in a gesture of solidarity, of alliance, Teresa took it, sliding her hand into his. The instant their skin met, a sizzle of something ancient and hot and delicious skittered through her system. Her whole body shook with desire, with quickening passion. She looked into those incredible eyes and saw that he had felt it too and she knew, like it or not, this Eternal was hers.
The question was, what was she supposed to do with him once the quest was over?
Chapter 21
He released her and reached beneath his black coat to the small of his back. He pulled out a wickedlooking knife with a blade that was at least six inches long, sharp on one edge and jagged on the other. The shining silver glinted with menace in the starlight.
She looked from him to the knife and then to the village. Cheerfully bright mariachi music from a radio drifted to them on the night wind. Other than the loud, cheerful tune, the small town might as well have been deserted. Teresa knew all too well how easily sound traveled in the desert. But there were no voices. No laughter. Just … silence, and suddenly the village looked more ominous than welcoming. She couldn’t stop the shiver as a thread of cold slithered along her spine. “Do you think you’re going to need that knife?”
“Better to have it and not need it than the other way around.” He stabbed the blade through a belt loop on his jeans and pulled the edge of his coat over it. “Let’s go.” He paused and glared at Chico. “And keep that bird quiet.”
She frowned after him, but a moment later she fell in step behind him. They came out of the desert shadows into the light and for a moment or two Teresa was nearly blinded. Not that the lights on the porches and spilling from small homes were bright—but in comparison to the blackness of the night it was like being dropped from outer space into the middle of the Vegas Strip.
“This way,” he said and Teresa walked beside him. She felt the gazes of the villagers following them. That unsettled feeling she’d had only that morning was back and she had to force herself to relax a little. If they walked down the street looking like fugitives, that wouldn’t exactly help them blend in. Of course, how much blending in could a six-foot-five bundle of pure danger do, anyway?
Teresa kept pace with Rune and smiled at a couple of old women sitting on worn plastic chairs outside a house that looked as if it had occupied that spot since the beginning of time. Neither of the women smiled back, their wrinkled faces blank except for the curiosity in their eyes.
Teresa couldn’t shake the sensation of being watched. This wasn’t the time to ask Rune about it, though. She simply followed him into the store when they found it. Chico flew off to take up a perch on an overhead beam, but she didn’t try to coax him down. She’d get him when they were ready to leave. The important thing now was to take care of business and get gone again. The front door shrieked, wood on wood, as they opened it and the sound was like that of a tormented soul.
She stepped inside and the radio crackled and hissed, reception interrupted by her innate, electrically fueled magic. She moved past the counter quickly and the radio played on.
Another shiver wracked Teresa’s body as she caught the eye of a fiftyish man seated on a rickety chair behind a wood plank counter. She gave him a smile, but he only stared at her, much as the old women had. She wondered if all strangers were treated this way or if word had already gotten out about an escaped witch and her bodyguard.
Now that was a scary thought, so she pushed it away and helped Rune gather what they needed. Fast.
There were shelves filled with dry goods, canned food and bags of chips and pretzels. A refrigerator held bottles of water, beer and soda. The bright, shiny music they’d heard in the desert piped from the radio behind the counter.
The man behind the counter was smoking a cigar and watching a small television set on mute. The program looked like a telenovela, a Spanish soap opera. Teresa recognized it because her grandmother watched the same program religiously. The picture rolled and danced when she got too close, so she kept her distance.
“Señor,” she said as Rune walked past her to gather up water, canned beans and whatever else he came across. It distracted her for a second and she wondered just how much he could carry while using his powers to transport them. But she shook her head and focused on the older man looking at her. “Señor, tiene usted candelero?”
“Sí.” He looked her up and down, then pointed to the far aisle. “Candles are in the back.”
Teresa grinned at the unexpected use of English. As much time as she had spent in Mexico with her grandmother, her Spanish was still lacking. Her training had focused mainly on spells, the history of witchcraft and preparing for her destiny. Not a lot of time for language lessons.
“Gracias.”
Shooting a quick look at Rune, she hurried down the aisle and smiled at a boy trying to choose a candy bar. His brow was furrowed with indecision as he studied row after row of goodies and she envied him the simplicity of his life. But she didn’t have time to curse the fates or to wish that things were different for her. Life was what it was and now it was u
p to her to do what had to be done.
The old man called out to the boy and he ran to the counter for a whispered conversation. Teresa frowned as she watched, trying to pick out a word or two, but the old man finished in a hurry and a moment later the child was racing from the store, letting the door screech and slam shut in his wake.
She looked over the shelves, dismissing the tall glass votives covered with pictures of the saints or Our Lady of Guadalupe. These were meant for devotions, she knew, for asking indulgences from heaven. Seemed wrong to her somehow to use those for spellwork. For a moment, Teresa went still and thought about buying one of the tall candles for Elena. But if ever there was a person whose soul needed no help in getting into heaven, it was Elena Vargas.
Blinking back a sudden sheen of tears that blurred her vision, she grabbed a box of plain white votive candles. They were probably for emergency use, for when the power went out. Well, she hadn’t really expected to find colored tapers here and she would make do with what she had. On the plus side, she thought wryly, she wouldn’t need matches. Even without Rune around, she was still funneling magic drawn from lightning, and fire was becoming a way of life for her, too.
She met up with Rune at the counter and nearly laughed when she saw him pull a wallet and money from his back pocket. Funny, but she hadn’t even considered that a magical being would have cash on hand. The old man rang up their purchases without once looking at their faces.
Teresa was starting to get another bad feeling and judging by the tension she sensed coming off Rune in waves, he was experiencing the same thing. She was anxious to get out of the store, leave the village behind and disappear into the desert.
Finally they were finished. Rune took the bag of groceries, held on to Teresa’s elbow with his free hand and steered her out of the store. Chico flew right at them, whistling sharply as he dove and swooped wildly.
Rune dropped the bag of supplies at their feet. In the next instant, he dropped into a half crouch in front of her and whipped the knife free in the same movement.
Visions of Skyfire Page 9
