Visions of Magic

by Regan Hastings

  “If only we hadn’t—” She broke off, looking up at the walls with the ivy creeping along the stones. Taking a breath, she sighed and admitted, “I can’t help wondering how things might have been different if we hadn’t turned our backs on who we were. On the Eternals.”

  “Shea . . .”

  “No,” she said, cutting him off by laying the tips of her fingers across his mouth. Shaking her head, she fought back a sheen of tears that clouded her vision. “I have to think of these things, Torin. I have to realize what I lost. What we all lost while chasing momentary glory, for God’s sake. We turned away from everything important to us, thinking that we knew best. That we could control the uncontrollable. We should have mated long ago, Torin. We should have joined. And I’m sorry I held myself back from you.”

  He caught her hand in his and kissed her fingertips, stroking her skin with his tongue. “The past is gone, Shea. All we have now is the present. And our future if we can claim it.”

  Staring into those pale gray eyes, she felt his belief in her and clung to it. “We will.”

  They crossed the wooden bridge and stepped through a short tunnel, stopping just before entering the inner yard. On the left was a “modern” caretaker’s cottage that looked to have been built more than a century ago. It was empty, thank heaven, Shea thought, reaching out with her power to scan for intruders. But there weren’t any tourists around, for which she was grateful. Because she felt those who waited for them. Felt their tension. Their eagerness to kill.

  Staying to the shadows, she whispered, “We have to pass through the inner yard. Haven is through the great hall and into the chapel.”

  “The chapel?”

  She grinned. “Through the chapel.”

  Torin nodded and said, “Wait here. I’m going to flash into the yard to draw our enemies’ fire so I can pinpoint their locations.”

  Shea took a breath and blew it out. Grabbing hold of his shirt, she said soberly, “Be careful. If you get shot, I’m going to be seriously pissed.”

  It was his turn to grin. “I’ll remember.”

  He was gone in a brilliant explosion of flames. An instant later, as if from a distance, she heard a shout, then a gunshot that shattered the air and wiped away all traces of the past.

  “Stop! ” Kellyn shouted at the idiot who had disregarded her orders and fired his weapon early. In a raging fury, she reached out to him, fisted her hand and watched as his eyes bulged and his throat closed. Without air, he dropped, lifeless, and his weapon clattered to the stones below. She scowled briefly at the dead fool, then glared at the chaos in the castle yard. Bullets were flying from every direction now that the one man had shattered the silence.

  The men sent to do her bidding were scattered all along the ivy-covered stone walls, each of them with a clean line of sight into the yard below. Before setting up this ambush, they had cleared out the caretakers and chased off the damn tourists.

  It should have been simple.

  If she had been doing this her way, it would have been over and done.

  The men her partner had sent had left their black SUVs behind the castle on Kellyn’s orders, rather than blocking the old portcullis with them. For God’s sake, they’d done everything but blow bugles to announce their presence. If she hadn’t been here to rearrange things, Shea and Torin would never have even approached Haven.

  As it was, they’d been alerted to the danger now. There was no hope to salvage the situation. Kellyn looked below and saw that Torin was already moving to fight their attackers. Shea was standing half hidden in the shadow of a stone staircase, lifting her arms, calling on the elements to protect them.

  Disgusted at the failure of yet another plan, Kellyn did the only thing that was left to her. Speaking into the radio in her hand, she ordered, “Concentrate your fire on the man. No one hurts the witch.”

  Bullets chewed up the lavishly tended lawn and spat chunks of stone from the surrounding walls. Rain dropped from the heavens and Kellyn cursed, knowing the storm had been called by Shea.

  This was all going to hell too fast.

  Shea watched her Eternal flash with dizzying speed from one corner of the yard to another, drawing their fire, never slowing. They couldn’t hit him; bullets smacked into stone walls and chewed up the tidy lawn. Finally, he came back to her side with a smile. “We’ve made our point. They know now we won’t be so easy to surprise again.”

  Reaching for Torin’s hand, Shea said, “Bring the fire.”

  Fingers linked, palms touching, they stood against their enemies, a united front. Shea waved her free hand and murmured a chant.

  From those who attack us in this field

  Moon, my Goddess, fuel my will

  Help me create a protective shield

  To honor you, no blood will we spill

  An invisible, magically created cloak lifted from the earth, reaching toward heaven, encircling Torin and Shea, protecting them both from the bullets flying around the inner ward of the castle.

  As the shield grew in intensity, Torin drew on their combined strength, called up his fire and sent it rushing out in a wall of flame that swept across the yard and into every nook and cranny of the walls. Men shrieked in terror and dove for cover and still the fire roared, flames churning, swimming, seeking the enemy.

  The men forgot about their assault in their haste to save their own lives. Bullets stopped. Guns fell to the ground. Rain pummeled the inner ward of the castle, coming down in such thick sheets that Shea and Torin were hidden from sight.

  They raced to the great hall and from there, Shea drew Torin to the chapel. As they ran down the passageways beneath deeply carved rock ceilings, their footsteps sounded hollow and like the beat of drums. The walls around them hummed with ancient energies and the swell of power seemed to rush at them from all sides.

  At last, though, they came to the far end of the chapel and faced a solid stone wall. Paintings done centuries ago still clung to the walls, faint images of their long-lost glories.

  “This is it.”

  Torin looked at her, then turned for another glance down the long passageway behind them. They were still alone. But for how long, he couldn’t guess. “Do what you must, then.”

  Nodding, Shea held his hand tightly, laid her free hand on the wall before them and whispered, “Haven.”

  An opening appeared before them. Dimly lit darkness was thick in the cavernous space beyond the wall, but there were flaming torches set into silver brackets that sent dancing flame shadows around the room.

  Torin stepped in front of Shea, protecting her from whatever they might find beyond the entrance. Walking through the aperture, they stopped when the wall behind them closed again, sealing them into the secret chamber of the last great coven.

  “Now what?” Shea whispered.

  “Now it begins,” a soft, familiar voice called out. “Welcome to Haven. We’ve been waiting for you.”

  Chapter 44

  Frustrated , Kellyn kicked the body of the man she had killed with a thought, then flipped her phone open. She hit REDIAL and waited. It rang only once before it was answered on the other side of the world.

  “Is it over?”

  “No, it’s not over,” Kellyn snapped. She glared across the inner ward at the stone walls of the castle. The Eternal’s fire had gone out, but the walls were blackened. “Your men screwed it up. Again.”

  “Now just one minute . . .”

  “No!” Kellyn was so furious sparks of power arced off her body in a shower of dark red lights. “No, you listen to me. This is twice now. I went along because you could draw on certain influential channels that I needed. But we both know that I’m the one who holds the cards here.”

  “You need me.”

  “Not as much as you need me—a fact of which you’re completely aware,” Kellyn countered, finished with being amenable. She had tried playing by others’ rules and so far it had gotten her squat. “From here on out, I make the decisions. If and when I n
eed your help, I’ll let you know.”

  “Just one damn minute,” her erstwhile partner argued. “We’re in this together. I have plans for Shea Jameson.”

  “I know that.” Kellyn stepped out from under the massive stone wall into the drenching rain. She looked around at the devastation wrought by this little battle and amused herself wondering how the humans would explain away all of the damage.

  “So our alliance still holds.”

  “It does,” Kellyn said tightly. She wished she could do without this partner, but she knew that in the modern world, not all power was strictly magical. “But if you send me another moron who won’t follow orders, but instead shoots his weapon when he’s nervous . . .”

  The speaker ignored that and asked, “How many casualties?”

  “I don’t know.” She opened herself up to her surroundings, touching on the trace energies of the men who had set up this clusterfuck of an ambush. “Three,” she said a moment later, not bothering to tell her silent partner that one of the dead had been killed by her hand.

  “Out of fifteen.”

  “And we’re lucky there were so few.” Kellyn shot her gaze again to the main hall of the castle and the chapel beyond it. Shea and Torin were beyond her reach. For the moment. She knew exactly where they had gone and would have followed if she could have. She knew precisely where Haven was.

  She just couldn’t get in.

  Yet.

  “What will you do now?”

  “Whatever it is, it will be done my way,” Kellyn snapped and closed the phone, severing the connection. Fury riding her, she stood in the driving rain, closed her eyes and vanished.

  “Aunt Mairi?”

  A tall, lovely woman with waist-length flame red hair smiled at her. Firelight from the wall sconces flared across her features in light and shadow that made her look ethereal. A ghost. Which was all she could be, Shea told herself. Anything else was impossible. A trick. Or maybe even a trap.

  Shea shook her head and threaded her fingers through Torin’s. “No,” she whispered. “It’s impossible. You died. I saw you die. I was there. They burned you at the stake and—”

  Mairi Jameson smiled and hurried forward. “Oh, honey, don’t be scared. It’s really me. I didn’t die that day. Damyn—” She turned and held one hand out to the man standing behind her, drawing him to her side. “My Eternal saved me. He flashed me out of the fire and brought me here.”

  “Your . . .” Shea looked up at Torin, who was grinning at the other Eternal. “You know him?”

  “I do,” Torin said, stretching out one hand to the other man. They clasped forearms and smiled at each other. “I haven’t seen him in centuries. Not since—”

  “Better we discuss that another time,” Damyn interrupted, moving to drape one arm around Mairi’s shoulders.

  “It’s really you,” Shea said, still reeling from shock and wonder.

  “It’s me, sweetie. Really.”

  “I don’t believe this. You’re alive.” Shea released Torin’s hand and rushed to her aunt, gathering her up in a tight, hard hug. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she demanded, torn between hysterical laugher and tears.

  “I couldn’t,” Mairi explained, pulling back to really look at Shea. “Damyn explained that we had to wait until your powers Awakened and then wait for you to find your way here.”

  Of course he had, Shea thought. Hadn’t Torin waited until she was actually attacked before rescuing her? So he could make sure her powers had Awakened?

  “I can’t believe you’re alive and . . .” Shea took a good look at her aunt and for the first time noticed just how she was dressed. She wore a one-shouldered white togalike garment. Gathered at the waist, it fell in a straight column to pool on the floor, dusting the tops of her bare feet. But the most startling thing about the dress was that Mairi’s left breast was bare. A mating tattoo of dark red roses encircled her nipple and swirled around behind her back to curl against her spine. Her Eternal’s broad bare chest bore a matching brand.

  The look was both sensual and powerful. Although Shea didn’t know if she could bare her breast like her aunt dared. “You’re mated.”

  “Of course,” Mairi said, “and I wear the traditional dress to show both my pride in my mate and in the joining. To let all know that we are one.” A frown creased Mairi’s features and she reached out to take Shea’s hand in a firm grip. “You have mated as well, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, well, nearly,” Shea replied. “It hasn’t been a full month yet.”

  Smiling her relief and pleasure, Mairi said, “Yes, I know.” Her gaze touched both Shea and Torin. “Time is running out, Shea, and there are forces lining up against you. Working actively to keep you from completing your quest.”

  “We know,” Torin said shortly. “We were ambushed in the inner ward of the castle.”

  Mairi glanced at Damyn. He nodded, called the fire and flashed out.

  “Damyn will check to see that the intruders are gone. Do you have any idea who they were?”

  “They could be anyone. We’ve been tracked ever since leaving California.”

  Mairi’s eyes looked worried. “I’m afraid our enemies are more powerful than we fully know yet.”

  “What do you mean? Do you know who was behind this attack?”

  “No,” she admitted, frowning a bit. “I’ve scryed, looked into the future and the past, but the enemy masks himself—or herself—too well.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Torin said quietly. “They will not be allowed to stop us.”

  Mairi gave him a brilliant smile. “You’re right, of course, Eternal. Thank you for reminding me. Now, you both must be tired. Why don’t you rest and—”

  “I don’t want to rest, Mairi,” Shea told her aunt. “I want some answers. I want to know what’s going on and exactly what I have to do.”

  Mairi’s grass green eyes met hers and slowly she nodded. “Very well. We’ll talk. Then you’ll rest. Come. Let me reacquaint you with Haven.”

  Shea followed her aunt, keeping her fingers entwined with Torin’s. As Mairi talked, Shea felt her own memories thicken like syrup and spill through her mind. She remembered this place. Remembered ancient times, when the walls rang with laughter, when she and her sisters worked spells and gathered knowledge.

  She remembered her chambers here. She remembered leaving Haven to meet Torin for sex—just as she recalled withholding herself from the mating. Being unwilling to share her power, even for the chance at immortality. Even with the promise of her own powers growing with the joining.

  Her long-ago self had wanted to master her powers on her own. She hadn’t wanted to join permanently with her Eternal for fear of losing any part of herself to the joint whole.

  And that obstinacy and arrogance had cost her much.

  “Don’t do that, Shea,” Mairi said, sending Torin a quick look, silently asking for some privacy.

  Torin looked at Shea, bowed his head and flashed out, leaving the two women alone.

  “Do what?” Shea countered, her footsteps echoing on the stone floor. “Remember? Isn’t that what I’m supposed to be doing?”

  “Don’t look back with anger—it does no good and only splinters your energies just when you’ll need them most.”

  “What about the anger I feel at you, Mairi?” Shea asked, stopping suddenly to whirl around and face the aunt she loved. “Can I remember that?”

  “Shea . . .” Mairi’s features were concerned, her green eyes filled with regret and sorrow.

  “Ten years,” Shea said, refusing to be swayed by the intense emotion radiating from her aunt. “Ten years I spent alone. Hunted. Afraid. You were all the family I had left. You’re the one who raised me when I lost my parents. I watched you die and I was all alone. I had no one, Mairi. I mourned you. I cried for you. And all that time”—she threw her hands up high and looked around at the stone walls shot through with veins of silver—“you were here. With your Eternal. Safe. How can I not be angry about
that?”

  “I don’t know,” Mairi said, moving in close to take Shea’s hands in hers. “I know it’s asking a lot of you. I only know you have to find a way to release that anger or it will carve an opening in your soul for the darkness to creep in.”

  Shea shivered.

  “I can’t blame you for being furious with me,” Mairi said. “But I didn’t have a choice, Shea. Just as you now don’t have a choice. We are what we were meant to be. We are the chosen. We are the remnants of the last coven. We owe a debt. To nature. To the world. And we must pay it.”

  Scrubbing her hands up and down her arms, Shea looked around the cavernous main hall. Images dotted the walls—carved from rock and embedded with silver, the magical charms hummed with power.

  There were pentagrams, of course, and simple circles as well. Signifying the sacred ring, the circle was the ancient and universal symbol of unity and female power. Then there were circles with a single dot inside at the center, the Bindu, symbolizing the circle as woman and the dot as man, joined as one. There were circles quartered in equal lines of silver, the Medicine Wheel, symbolizing nature and the four elements. There was a carving of a snake, devouring its own tail, meaning life, rebirth.

  And there was the spiral. It dotted each wall, over and over again. The silver spiral, Shea knew, was a symbol known all over the world since time began. It represented the female and the birth, growth, death and rebirth of the soul.

  All magical. All powerful. The symbols were powerful enough on their own, but defined by the silver of the ancients, they generated a field of such magnitude even drawing a simple breath in their presence seemed to fill the body with strength and courage.

  All of which Shea desperately needed.

  In the torchlight, the silver winked and glistened as if alive. As if the heartbeats of long-dead witches had been caught in these walls and now they were silent witness to their descendants’ actions.

  She felt another shiver course along her spine, twisting her with cold, with an icy fear that lingered in the pit of her stomach. All of this power triggered not only her memories of unity and strength but other, darker memories as well. Her mind and soul remembered how she had once been drawn from the light to embrace the dark.