mythean arcana 06 - master of fate (8 page)

If she had, she’d clearly gotten over it.

“There’s a fireplace in your room,” he said.

“It wasn’t warm enough. I hate the cold.” The vehemence in her voice surprised him. 

“It’s a small sauna.”

“Big enough for two.” She sat on the lower bench, leaned back, and turned her head to gaze up at him. 

He relaxed infinitesimally. He could handle her naked. As long as she didn’t touch him, he’d be fine. And gods, he wanted to look at her. He’d wait a few minutes so it didn’t seem as though he was running away, then he’d go.

Except for the fact that the dim light now fell directly on her and she’d placed herself on the bench right in front of him. Gods, this was going to be harder than he’d thought. 

CHAPTER SIX

Aurora tried to think of something to say as she gazed up at Felix. He was freaking enormous. Easily more than a foot taller than she, but she’d bet he weighed at least twice as much. His legs were as muscular as the rest of him. The way he was sitting, with one big leg propped up, shielded his cock from view. But that didn’t mean she didn’t have plenty to look at, what with the way the shadows played across his muscles. If she was honest with herself, that was half the reason she’d come down here.

Up close, she could see that the tattoos wound up his arms in a scrolling pattern, over his shoulders, and partially down his chest. The head of a ferocious wolf was inked on the left side of his chest. It was fierce, but beautiful. She wanted to get closer to them to see the details.

His face was still too intense, the way it’d been before he stormed off to the barn. Only now, he looked hungry and distant, all at once. Torn. His gaze roved heatedly over her skin, which she should have expected, given that she was naked. He looked at her as though he hadn’t seen a woman naked in ages. She liked it.

Perhaps his weirdness about this whole thing was like hers. They had a fraught history. He’d been her first relationship. She might even have loved him. She’d been young, but it had been real. 

Now, she’d pushed that feeling so far down that it couldn’t possibly claw its way to the surface. She wasn’t willing to give it room to revive and perhaps he didn’t want to either. Perhaps he’d be up for something a little more casual. It was probably a bad idea to pursue anything, but she wanted him so badly she couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t admit to him how she really felt, but she didn’t have to take things that far.

First, she’d ease into it with work. “I suppose you want to hear about the portal?”

His gaze snapped to hers, distinctly uncomfortable. “We’re going to... we’re going to discuss that here?” 

How could such a big man, who looked at her like he wanted to jump on her, also look so uncomfortable?

“Sure, why not? We’ll head out at first light, and since shit has clearly gone really wrong up there since you saw it last, I figured you’d want to know more about it.” Not that the story put her in the most flattering light, but she wasn’t about to be embarrassed. You did what you had to in order to survive.

“I do. What kind of portal is it? Who put it there?”

“I did.”

Felix’s head jerked. “You were here?” He hadn’t felt her.

“Not on the glacier. I was in the city for a short time. I entered it through the portal I made.”

“Why go to the trouble of making a portal? It’s no’ blocked from normal entry.”

“I never wanted to enter the city in the first place. Have you wondered where I’ve been all these years?”

“More than you know,” he muttered. For a hundred years, he’d searched the world and every afterworld he could get to, trying to find her.

“What?”

“Aye, I’ve wondered.” Dared he tell her how much? That in 1661, after he’d returned from his trip away to find her missing, he’d felt like his soul had been torn out? “What happened to you?”

“You remember when my mother was killed.”

It was more statement than question and he nodded. Avera had been captured by mortals during the Great Scottish Witch Hunt of 1661. It had lasted more than two years, but Avera was one of the first to be burned at the stake. Aurora, only nineteen, had disappeared the next day. They’d been together six months by that point. When Avera had been killed, he’d been away, trying to find his brother. He’d left for only a fortnight, but when he returned, she was gone.

“In my grief, I lost my mind,” she said. “I went on what I suppose you would call a... rampage.”

His brows shot up. He’d searched for her for so long, and though he’d come close to finding her, he hadn’t wanted to believe the rumors. “Rampage?”

She shrugged. “Only word for it. I stole souls. Hundreds of souls. From Mytheans all over Europe. Even from some mortals. Like Warren, who is now the love of my sister’s life. His was the first. I did it because I was out of my mind with grief. I wanted to hurt him in the worst way I knew how. I didn’t intend to steal more. But it tripped a lever in my mind. Made me insatiable for power.”

Holy shite. He’d had no idea. In 1661, it’d been hard to find information about anything. “What happened then?”

“Having access to the constant stream of soul power made me immensely strong. And immensely mad. All those souls fighting to escape.” She shuddered. “I was a real nut job by the end. But my magic couldn’t have been stronger. I could do anything, and I was everything that Mytheans are afraid of. The sort of soulceress who gives the rest a bad name.”

Understanding hit him in the gut. That’s why the Seer had been so insistent on finding her—her power. When the Seer had captured him, he’d finally had a real lead on Aurora’s location. But he’d never revealed it, no matter how many sick games the Seer had played with his flesh.

“You weren’t always in Europe,” he said. 

“No. Eventually, in 1705, I was captured by the witches at the university and tossed into the aether prison.”

“Fuck.” His gut pitched. 

“Fuck is right.” She shuddered. Even in the dim light, he could see the shadows enter her eyes. “I was in Europe. It took them a long time to figure out what I was doing and even longer to catch me. But they were successful. The aether was terrible. The worst place in all the afterworlds. It felt like drowning in the cold dark, all the time. Over and over.”

The aether was vital to the universe. It connected earth and all the afterworlds, an ephemeral substance saturated with the magic of the immortal world. It could be used to travel, fuel certain magical beings, or house the unconscious souls of those waiting to be reincarnated. In all those incarnations, it was harmless. Useful, even.

But if one were trapped in a prison built of the aether, conscious and fully awake, it would be hell. Cold, dark, and silent—utter misery. Rage filled him that the university council had never told him what they’d done. 

And that he’d failed her. 

He’d worked at the university for years before he’d been captured by the Seer. He’d taken the job as a way to increase his chances of locating Aurora. In exchange for his occasional services as a timewalker, the university had agreed to inform him if anyone in their great network of Mytheans had seen her. Instead, from what she was saying, when they’d found her, they’d tossed her into the aether because she’d been so dangerous. He’d been trapped in the Seer’s dungeon for almost twenty years by 1705, when the university captured her. They hadn’t been able to find him when it had come time to imprison her. And perhaps they thought she was so far gone that they couldn’t risk his trying to save her. 

But if he’d been free—maybe, maybe he could have helped her.

The thought of the missed opportunity made him ill. 

“Why did they no’ just kill you?” he asked. Her crimes had been great enough to merit death. He hadn’t realized the extent of them until now—of course the university would keep the existence of such a rogue as quiet as they could—and the idea that she might have faced execution turned his stomach.

“I was too powerful. No one could get to me. When the witches gathered enough strength, with the help of another soulceress, they performed a remote spell that sucked me into the aether prison they had built. And for three hundred years, that was it for me.”

Holy shite.
And he thought his life had been hard? He rubbed the raised scars on his arms, grateful he’d never broken. “How the hell did you get out?”

“The aether weakens occasionally. Not more than once every couple hundred years. And I still had all that power from my souls. I broke out. I built myself a home on an island in the Mediterranean. Sought out my sister.”

Esha. She’d come to Iceland a year ago, needing to get up on the glacier. He’d loaned her snowmobiles and supplies, but hadn’t asked why she’d needed them. He hadn’t cared. Now he realized what she’d been doing. “Esha was the baby your mother carried. And she saved you.”

“Bingo. After I did some really nasty things to her boyfriend, too. But Esha saved me anyway.” There was awe in her voice. “She freed the souls I’d stolen by stabbing me with a soulceress dagger. It ignites magic that frees the souls. Once they were gone, I had my sanity back.” There was an odd tone to her voice.

“Why did you want a portal to the old soulceress city? Was there something there you wanted?” Had she known he was nearby?

“No. I was mad at the time, from all the souls I’d stolen. And paranoid. The last time I remember actually being sane was when my mother was killed. Not only were Mytheans chasing us, so were the damned mortals. I wanted a way for Esha to get to me that no one else could access. A way that only a soulceress could find. A portal in the soulceress city could only be found by another soulceress. The city’s protective magic ensures it. So I created a portal to my own island in the Med and made her find it.”

“Why did you want to see her?” Had the madness prevented her from remembering him? 

She whipped around to pin him with a shocked gaze. “She’s my sister. I might have been mad, and a little bit evil, but I still wanted to see my sister. I didn’t even know I
had
a sister until shortly before I escaped the aether. As soon as I escaped, I wanted to meet her. But I sure as hell didn’t want to hang out on that glacier for any length of time. Too cold and dark. That’s not what I was looking for after the aether.” There was a shivery quality to her voice that made an old part of his mind ache to reach out and touch her. Funny how being around her revived parts of himself that he’d thought long dead.

He couldn’t touch her, so he asked more questions. He wanted to know more about her. Everything. “You’ve only been free for a year? How do you have such a modern accent? There’s no trace of the old days in your voice. Your accent is now vaguely American.”

“A spell. That accent revealed a weakness and also my identity as the Scottish soulceress who went mad.” She looked straight ahead, her gaze far away, her voice hard. “I don’t do weakness. A soulceress can’t, if she wants to survive. So I adopted my sister’s way of speaking to blend in. She was raised in America.”

His chest ached for her. The woman he’d known had been wary, but nothing like this. That woman was long dead. The phoenix who’d risen in her place had been forged in fire. He wished he could have saved her from that fire. He opened his mouth to speak. Faltered. Coughed to cover it up. Eventually, he got out, “I’m sorry for everything that happened. I tried to find you, after I returned.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Her tone was flippant. She didn’t want to talk about it. Maybe brushing it off was the way she dealt with it, but it couldn’t be healthy. 

But who was he to give advice about the healthy way to deal with trauma? “I dinna want it to go that way,” he said. He’d wanted far more for her. For them. 

“Seriously. It’s done. And your life hasn’t been a rose garden.”

His gaze jerked toward hers. Did she know what had happened to him? He barely resisted running his hand over the scar on his arm.

“Years change you,” he conceded, unwilling to say more.

“Those tattoos are a change.” She nodded at his arms and chest.

He glanced down at them and nodded. Suddenly, she was kneeling on the bench directly beneath his, her head close to his left arm. He wanted to jerk away, but forced himself to hold still. His muscles vibrated. She was so close that he swore he could feel her breath on his forearm. Even in the dim light, her hair gleamed. His hands itched to touch it. He clenched them hard.