Zurlo, Michele - Torment [Daughters of Circe 1] (Siren Publishing Classic)

by Michele Zurlo

  The implication of Shade’s words penetrated the layers of protection and charms his demons cast around him. All color drained from Soren’s face. “Shaden…”

  Shade shook his head. “We are through, you and I. You are no longer my brother. I renounce any blood, any bond we share.” His gaze flickered down to Torrey and back. “I should have done this long ago. I should never have forgiven you for what you did to Hope.”

  Soren said nothing. There were a million things he could have said, but they were all excuses. At the core of it all, there was only Soren. The demons didn’t hurt anyone. They had no real power in this world.

  Torrey watched Shade’s face as he carried her to his room. “He is your soul, too, Shade. I don’t expect you to hate him on my behalf.”

  “I know,” he said. “I shouldn’t have listened to that letter you wrote. You might be able to forgive him for what he’s done, but I can’t. I’ve tried, Torrey. For years, I’ve tried to do what you asked, all that peace and love nonsense.”

  It sounded very sixties to Torrey. She remembered telling Shade to turn the other cheek. It amazed her how different her personality and ethics were in this lifetime. While she did think Shade should eventually reconcile with Soren, she didn’t think he should do it until after Soren was free from his demons.

  Riley peeled back the coverlet, and Shade set Torrey down gently. He pressed a kiss to her forehead. “Don’t ask me to try it again. I refuse, even for a deathbed promise.”

  Torrey laughed, a short foray because it hurt so much. “I’m not going to die.”

  “Torrey.” Riley sobbed her sister’s name. “This is my fault. If I hadn’t been so gullible…”

  Guilt and regret flashed over Shade’s features. Torrey knew he never intended to let her get near Lyton, the werewolf village. If it came to it, he would have sacrificed Riley to save Torrey.

  “Don’t do that,” Torrey said. “I’m not dying. I’m getting stronger. I’m going to soak up some energy from the sun. Tonight, I’m going to reconnect with earth and water, and I’m going to greet the sun’s long-lost lover with the proper amount of respect and honor.”

  Shade stared at Torrey, assessing her with new eyes. He understood her oblique references. “It’s not possible.”

  “Sure it is.” Riley’s eyes lit with excitement. “You scratched her. It’s a classical werewolf thing. It has made its way into literature and movies. Now she’ll be like you. Soren won’t be able to sacrifice her because now she’s just like you guys.”

  Shade shook his head slowly. “Myth is myth, and reality is reality. Witches cannot become werewolves. Even if they could, it wouldn’t stop Soren. Half-breeds aren’t welcome in Lyton. If they didn’t kill her, she would live the rest of her life as an outcast.”

  Torrey laughed. It hurt, but she couldn’t help it. “I wouldn’t stay here. There are lots of other places to live. The world is huge.”

  “And witches can obviously become werewolves,” Riley continued, finishing Torrey’s thought as she often did. She smoothed hair away from Torrey’s forehead. “Does it hurt a lot?”

  “It burns,” Torrey said. “And it’s going to get worse before it gets better.” She pushed herself to sitting.

  “Don’t do that,” Shade warned, reacting to her grimace. He slid in beside her and supported her back with his large, strong hand. “You need to conserve energy.”

  “Except for the burning, I feel fine,” she said. “I played it up for Soren. He needs to think I’m on my last legs.”

  He stared at her. “You could have told me that.”

  “No, I couldn’t.” She grinned. “Remember that tiny apartment we had in Philadelphia? When my parents came to visit, all you had to do was pretend you lived next door, but you blew it with the first thing you said to my dad.”

  Shade’s cheeks turned ruddy under his short black beard.

  “You’ve never even been to Philadelphia.” Riley’s head tilted to the side. She studied her sister with that look people had when they were trying to figure out whether or not someone was sane.

  “I’ve been everywhere.” She answered Riley, but her smile was for Shade alone. “You knew. From the beginning, you knew.”

  “You are my soul,” he said as he brushed his lips across hers. “Of course I knew.”

  “You tried to get rid of me.” Her voice was soft, but her accusation was not. In that dive of a bar, he had known her immediately, and he still told her to go home.

  His arm slid around her waist, holding her good side to pull her closer. “I knew Soren would come after you again. Even if it meant I couldn’t be with you, I couldn’t let him kill you again.”

  “He won’t,” she promised. “I need you tonight.” Including Riley in the sweep of her eyes, she added, “I need both of you tonight.”

  Chapter 18

  Riley objected to the plan, but she was overruled.

  “How can you expect me to stay locked up in a room far away in the middle of nowhere while you two are out there risking your lives?”

  Shade leapt up to clap a hand over her mouth so that the sound didn’t carry too far. The house was large and solidly built, but wolf hearing was exceptional. “You have no powers, Riley. You’re human. To many people out there, you’re nothing more than dinner.”

  She turned to him in horror. “You mean werewolves really do eat people?”

  “Some,” he said. “The older ones. It’s a practice that fell out of favor more than two centuries ago. Unfortunately, wolves tend to live for three or four centuries, which means there are wolves out there who remember the taste fondly.”

  Torrey swung her legs to dangle over the side of the bed. She was stiff from her long illness and the outpouring of power required to cure Shade, and she didn’t want that to impede her later. The wound at her side wept. It would not heal until she shifted her shape, something she wouldn’t attempt until she had the power of the moon in the night sky above her.

  “She has power,” she said. “That’s the problem.” Torrey pushed to her feet. Shade rushed to help her, but she waved him away. “That’s why people fall over themselves to do things for you, Riley. You charm them without even realizing what you’re doing. Your power is weak, but Soren recognizes it. If he can’t have me, he will go for you.”

  Angry tears glittered in Riley’s eyes. “How am I helping if I’m not even here?”

  Limping to an old-fashioned, rolltop desk on the other side of the room, Torrey jotted some words on a scrap of paper. “Find my tree. Sit under it with this blanket draped around your shoulders. When the rain begins, chant the words.”

  She folded the paper and shoved it into Riley’s fist, squeezing her sister’s hand meaningfully.

  “We will meet again, in this form and in this lifetime.”

  Riley threw her arms around Torrey, not checking the force of her hug to save her sister some pain. “Come with us. We can escape. We can be far, far away from here before Soren notices we’ve gone.”

  Torrey disengaged herself from Riley’s hug to take her sister’s face between her hands. “I need him to see you leave. I need him to know Shade is keeping his word to me to keep you safe. He won’t trust Shade otherwise. His demons aren’t the smartest, but Soren is. He will figure this out if the two of you linger here all day.”

  Turning to Shade, she gave him the same treatment. “Don’t come back until the moon is high in the sky. Soren needs to be occupied with the ritual or he will have his guard do something to keep you away.”

  He leaned down and closed his lips over hers. It was a kiss filled with promise and reassurance and love. “I love you, Torrey.”

  Torrey smiled. He could have used any of her names. From his lips, the name didn’t matter, only the sentiment. “I love you, too, Shade.”

  “I won’t let you die this time,” he said. “I want a life with you. I want a family.”

  She reached up to rest a hand on his rough cheek. “We’ll have those things, Sha
de. I promise. Nothing will keep us apart anymore. Not in this lifetime and not in the next.”

  She didn’t need to read his thoughts to know he was remembering the last time, when she’d tricked him into leaving her alone. She had gone to Soren, and she had given herself to him. She knew she hadn’t been strong enough to fight him, not then.

  She had been a creature of hope, a creature of light searching for her one true love. She had forgotten the forces that tore them apart in the first place. She had forgotten the power of torment. Though she still didn’t fully remember everything, she knew the demons haunting Soren were the same beings responsible for rending her soul from Shade’s in the first place. He hadn’t been called Shaden then. She couldn’t remember his name, but she knew it wasn’t that.

  She had instructed Caiden to name her this way so that she would remember what she needed to do. It hadn’t been a punishment from a father who was nothing to her. It had been a big, fat sticky note.

  Shade kissed her again, this time in warning, and then he left with Riley. Torrey watched them leave. Her heart was heavy, and she was afraid. The urge to call out to them, to flee instead of staying to fight, was powerful. She fought it.

  If she didn’t stop this now, it might be centuries before she found Shade again. She couldn’t wait that long.

  Torrey spent the rest of the afternoon alternating between dozing under the shafts of sunlight playing over the bed and stretching her limbs. Soren knocked on the door as the sun was setting.

  “Come in,” she called. “It’s not locked.”

  The handle turned, and the heavy wood structure creaked inward. Soren’s blond head and the tip of one boot peeked into the room. The rest of him stayed behind the door, hidden from view. His demons were in the hall where she couldn’t see them, but she could hear them clearly. They didn’t like what he was about to do.

  “Are you hungry? I don’t know what you like, so I had Alethea make up a whole bunch of stuff.”

  Torrey strove for a sad, serene smile, all the while marveling at how quickly her innocence had disappeared. Living for thousands of years and hundreds of lifetimes jaded a soul. She needed to be with Shade. She needed to know it wasn’t all pointless.

  “My last meal?” She laughed a weak laugh, ending it with an undisguised grimace. The burning in her side had morphed from pain to an anticipatory tingle. Her body was nearly ready. “I’d love a big, juicy steak. Salad with Caesar dressing. A baked potato loaded with sour cream and butter. Oh, and chocolate cake. There’s no point in counting calories anymore.”

  Guilt motivated Soren. He missed the energy she couldn’t quite disguise in her tone. With a brief nod, he disappeared. Minutes later, he reappeared. A tray, laden with more than the foods for which she had asked, was balanced in his hand.

  In a feat of dexterity that dazzled Torrey, he lifted a heavy oak table half-filled with hand-carved, wooden statuettes of wolves and brought it over next to the bed without upsetting a single thing on it. He slid the tray onto the table and sat on the edge of the bed.

  Torrey studied the blond hair curling to his collar, the strong, sexy body that was so similar to Shade’s, and the stunningly handsome face featuring teal-green eyes that would stop the hearts of millions of women. Riley had found him attractive. She had flirted with him before he threatened Torrey and kidnapped Riley.

  The demons wandered the room, each keeping one eye on the waning daylight streaming through the window and the other on the pair on the bed, preparing to share a meal.

  “I remember the first time we met,” Torrey said. Her head rested against the pillows behind her. She didn’t try to move her head or sit up. She couldn’t tip her hand before it was time. “Shade was so nervous about introducing me to you. He didn’t care what the rest of Lyton thought about me. He only cared that you accepted me as his mate.”

  Soren busied himself with cutting the steak into bite-sized pieces. Torment twisted his features. “If I could find a way to stop doing this to you, I would. From the way Shade forgave me last time, I knew you would return. I tried to avoid human settlements. I did so well for so long.”

  Torrey raised a weak hand to rest on his forearm, the closest part of him to her. “I forgive you, Soren.”

  His breathing became labored as he struggled, fighting his emotions. “You forgave me last time, too.” He came around the other side of the bed to rearrange her pillows to hold her in a semi-upright position. “That doesn’t mean I can forgive myself.”

  Sympathy surged inside her. She knew she should be angry. Shade was furious. She supposed she would have embraced that emotion if she actually believed this was the end, again. “You’ll be free of them one day, Soren. I don’t know when, and I don’t know how, but I have to believe that one day you’ll be master of your own destiny.”

  He speared a cube of steak and held it to her lips. “I wish I had your faith. I wish I had your hope.”

  Faith and Hope, two things she had tried before. They hadn’t worked.

  She opened her mouth to offer words of comfort once more, but he stuck the fork through the opening.

  “Eat, Torrey. I can’t do this again. I don’t want you to make me feel better about sacrificing you and killing anything that remains of my brother’s soul.”

  She let him have his torment and his anguish. Self-pity would keep his attention focused on himself and not the fact he was feeding the wolf growing inside her.

  Given how much food he had brought, she didn’t eat much. When he left, he didn’t look back.

  Chapter 19

  The moon rose early. Soren returned to catch Torrey napping. The lamps in the room were on, disguising the moonlight in which she basked.

  He lifted her carefully. The movement jarred her side. She whimpered, but didn’t tense her body or open her eyes. The tea he had given her with dinner had been drugged. If she had been human or just a witch, she would have slept through most of the ceremony, waking just in time to give over her power and die.

  However, she was not just a witch. Was there a name for the new breed Shade had created? A were-witch, perhaps?

  The drug had no effect on her at all.

  Soren whispered an apology in her ear. He added a plea that she stay far, far away from him in her next lifetime.

  Sounds found their way into her ears. Soren descending the steps. The murmur of the villagers as he entered their sacred circle in the center of the village, not far from the manor house where Soren lived.

  Weddings were performed there. Once upon a lifetime, Shade had wanted to marry her there. Instead, his brother had killed her on the altar where they would have spoken their vows.

  He set her on the altar. She was glad he hadn’t unwrapped her body. Riley had offered clothes, but Torrey refused them on practical grounds. First, they would bother her cuts and bruises. Second, they would only be shredded when she shifted her shape.

  Somewhere in the back of the crowd, Shade waited. Torrey knew he was there, not by scent or sound, but through the ancient bond that had only grown stronger as her body transformed.

  Soren stood above her and began the ritual. “Friends, we gather here tonight to right an ancient wrong, to pay a debt long owed.”

  Torrey opened her eyes, keeping them unfocused as if she were still medicated. She lay on a long stone table, polished smooth from years of weather and use. A bower of white pines interspersed with maples surrounded the sacred space. The opening was large enough for the majority of the townspeople to surround the raised platform and watch the ceremony. From the looks of it, many of them were in attendance.

  Soren wore a long black cloak trimmed with red silk, something reserved for the leader of the pack. The table on which Torrey lay came to his waist, the perfect height for slicing and dicing. Behind Soren, a bonfire blazed, lighting the clearing with brilliant orange light.

  He had thrown back the hood to address his audience.

  The demons approached her body, hovering around the offering i
n anxious anticipation.

  “Witches have long hunted werewolves. They have treated us as animals, chaining us and caging us like wild beasts, using us as their chattel. They cast charms over us to keep us docile.” His words, laced with charm and weighted with mania, rang out over the crowd and were met with hostile cheers.

  “Tonight, I exact revenge on one of the most powerful of their kind. Tonight, I will sacrifice a Daughter of Circe, our original enslaver.”

  The crowd cheered. Soren was forced to pause, to let them express their approval.

  “Circe never enslaved us.”

  Torrey cringed. Her head turned, automatically seeking the sight of her lover. Shade wasn’t supposed to reveal himself this soon. Or so completely. Having run through the forest from his cabin as a wolf, he was naked.

  The crowd booed and hissed. Shade tried to approach the altar, but Tiffany and her three lieutenants grabbed at him. He growled. “This is between Soren and me. Stay out of it.” He shook free of Tiffany, who signaled Flynn, Demetrius, and Marius to release him as well.

  Soren’s demons jumped onto the altar, shouting orders to kill Shade.

  “She created us.” Shade’s voice boomed over the noise of the crowd. “She made us and this is how we repay her? We sacrifice her not once, but twice?”

  Soren growled at the demons. “Don’t. You ask too much already.”

  A gentle rain began, falling from the cloudless night sky. Torrey called on the power of the moon. Her bones stretched, pushing her mouth and nose into a new shape. Teeth elongated. Phalanges lengthened, and her fingers curved to form claws.

  The change seemed to take forever. Torrey was hyperaware of each tiny alteration. White hairs sprouted from every follicle on her body, and there were a lot more of those now than there had been before. Shaving her legs was going to be hell.

  Her fur was the color of pure moonlight. There was no pain. Even the fire that raged inside soothed her like a warm hearth in winter. Yet, in linear time, the transformation was instantaneous.