It was more than the magic drawing them together. More than the power he felt shifting from her body to his and back again. It went deeper. It went to the heart of her. Who she had been. Who she was now. Who they were—and would be—together.
He still couldn’t bring himself to trust her, but damned if he didn’t admire her.
She was strong. Even in her vulnerability and pain, strength was what ruled her. She hadn’t panicked in that damn village. Instead, she had stood her ground and reached for the nebulous powers just blossoming inside her. She had believed in her magic and used what power she had to take a stand beside Rune. To help him in their fight. To claim all that she was and demand more from the very gods who had first breathed life into their kind.
And she had thrown herself into the Mating with a wild, sexy abandon that shredded Rune’s self-control into rags.
She moved on him, swiveling her hips, drawing his cock higher and deeper into her slick heat. She pulled at more than just his seed. She reached something inside him he hadn’t even been aware of.
A last remaining thin trickle of hope.
Hope that they might actually pull this off. Fix the past and face the future together.
He groaned and slid his hands from her waist to her hips. Holding on to her tightly, he moved her, quickening the lazy rhythm she had set. He wanted faster, harder. And one look at her told him she wanted the same. Fire burned in her eyes, as he knew it did in his. The flames of passion. The fire of a deep craving.
The hot water bubbled and frothed all around them, sending steam into the air and clouding their breath. It blurred his vision. But Rune saw her anyway. As she was now, as she had been then. Those snapping brown eyes of hers had remained the same through all the centuries. After haunting his dreams for hundreds of years, they were still powerful enough to pull him in even when he withheld his trust.
“Stop thinking,” she ordered sternly. “Be with me. Be
here
with me.”
So small, he thought, and yet she was so powerful. He felt her delicate body beneath his hands and shook his head, sending his long, wet hair back behind his shoulders. “I want you too badly. It’s taking everything I have to keep myself in check.”
“Then don’t,” she snapped, reaching for his hands and lifting them up to cover her breasts.
He groaned as her pebbled nipples rubbed against his palms. “If I lose control, I could hurt you.”
“I
want
you out of control,” she said, bracing her hands on his chest now, thumbing his flat nipples until new fire erupted inside him.
“You don’t,” he warned, fighting his own instincts.
“I do.” She reached up again and squeezed his hands on her own breasts, showing him that she was ready for whatever he could give her. That she wanted all he could give her.
Snarling, he kneaded her breasts, his fingers and thumbs tweaking and pulling at the sensitive, rigid, dark tips until her eyes rolled back in her head and she was moaning his name. She writhed atop him, twisting her hips against his, searching for an end to the torment and not finding it.
Rune’s instincts warred with caution and won.
He would have flashed her from the tub, but water mitigated the fires that made him. So he pulled free of her body, disregarding her protests, then holding on to her, leaped out of the tub and instantly called on his fire to flash them both to the wide, sumptuous bed in the other room.
There, he laid her on the silken coverlets like an ancient sacrifice. Breath heaved in and out of her lungs. Her eyes were wide as her gaze dropped to his thick erection. Then she smiled in invitation. Her legs splayed, she rocked her hips to him in welcome. He needed no further tempting.
Lifting her thighs, he draped her legs over his shoulders and took her. He shoved his body into hers with one long stroke. She gasped, arched her hips even higher and tipped her head back, baring the curve of her long, elegant neck. As he pistoned his hips against hers, taking her over and over again, he took her scent into his lungs.
The scent of his witch was earth, air and something that was purely Teresa. Solely hers. She filled him, taking him as he took her. As he felt the mating fire burn in his chest again, he pulled back to watch another splash of red branding claim her luscious coffee-and-cream-colored skin.
Mine
.
He watched her shatter. Felt her body contract around his even as she screamed his name. Her fingers clutched at him as he sheathed himself so deeply inside her he wasn’t sure where his body ended and hers began. Teresa screamed again as another torrent of pleasure rocked her and in the next moment Rune surrendered to the inevitable and emptied himself into her.
Chapter 31
A
n hour later, Rune gritted his teeth and called on his immense self-control to withstand the need to touch Teresa again and again. He wanted nothing more than to flip her onto her back and drive himself into her until she was breathless. But there were things they had to talk about. Shaking his head, he said, “Now that the Mating’s begun, you need to concentrate on focusing your magic.”
“I know,” she said, all hints of teasing gone from her expression. “But if we’re hiding out, me drawing down the lightning is going to attract attention. Even way out here in the middle of nowhere.”
“True,” he said, and he didn’t like it. “But we’ll have to risk it. I’ll be with you as you practice, to keep watch. And my presence will help you with your control, too.”
“Okay, then what?” She dusted cookie crumbs from her fingers, balled up the used napkins and the apple core and stuffed them into an empty paper bag. “I mean, yes, I work on controlling the magic and you protect me. All good. But what’s next? We go to Chiapas, find my grandmother and …” Her words trailed off into an unfinished question.
“And we figure out where your shard of the Artifact is,” he said, realizing that saying it was a lot easier than finding it was going to be.
“Right. The Artifact. You could start by telling me just what exactly I’m looking for.” Teresa pulled one edge of a red silk quilt up to cover her lap as she tucked her legs beneath her, Indian style. “I have the memory of that night when we set the demons loose.” She paused to shudder. “But I don’t remember the Artifact or what it looked like. I need to know, Rune. Everything you can tell me. What exactly
is
this Artifact?”
Rune leaned back on the mountain of pillows behind him and looked up at her as she watched him. Her features were open, her dark eyes shining with questions. He hated knowing that her eagerness would soon be tempered by fear. But he could see no way to avoid that.
In a quiet voice, hardly more than a hush, he said, “The Artifact was born of fire, breath and blood a thousand years before the birth of Christ. The element that formed it was black silver, created by a coven of powerful witches.”
She shivered and took a shallow breath.
“What’s wrong?”
“Black silver,” she said, her tone breathless, as if even saying the words was difficult for her. “When you said that, I got a cold chill and a seriously uneasy feeling.”
“Your memories,” he said softly. “They’re opening and you’re remembering.”
“I don’t know that I want to,” she admitted with a slight nod. “But I know that I have to, so tell me. What was this black silver?”
His gaze was locked on hers as he tried to explain. “The element was drawn from silver itself,” he said. “Silver is a conduit for witch magic. It’s of the earth and magnifies your powers as well as stabilizing them. But this new dark element was more powerful than that long-ago coven could imagine. It didn’t just exist, it …
became
.”
“What does that mean?”
He swiped one hand over his face and then pushed his hair back. Memories swam before him, thick as flies in summer, as he said, “It wasn’t static. It grew. Became something … other.” Frustrated, he sat up opposite her. “I’m not telling this well. The black silver was created
from
silver, so already it had a connection to the coven. But it was so much more. When the coven poured their power and energies into it, the element exploded with more potency than anyone had thought possible.”
“What happened?”
“The black silver couldn’t be contained. Not even by magic. Bits of it escaped into the world, beyond the reach of the coven, and it was incorporated into the life of humans.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
Remembering that long-ago time, Rune frowned. “It wasn’t. The element itself was neither good nor bad, just incredibly powerful. But it was drawn to humans of strength—whether evil or decent—and it became whatever they needed it to be. The witches were helpless to gather it all. They were forced to simply witness what they’d wrought on the human world.”
Teresa blew out a breath and jumped off the bed. Her hands scraped up and down her bare arms and firelight slid across her light brown skin like a lover’s kiss. Her features shone in the dim light. Her steps were quick as she paced to the far wall and back again.
He watched her emotions charge across her features, one after the other, each more compelling than the one before. Fear, fury, worry, excitement and finally, he thought, determination. As she had in all of her previous incarnations, she had found her will. And it was fueled by fury.
“These are the witches I come from?” she muttered. “
This
is the last great coven? They nearly destroyed themselves.”
Rune nodded. “Yes.”
Whirling around to face him, she snapped, “They could have destroyed the world.”
“Yes, but they didn’t.”
“Out of sheer luck,” she argued, then shook her head vehemently. “I had no idea. None. I mean, objectively, you think, magic. I’m a witch. But I never once thought it would be this bad. What am I supposed to do with this? How can I fix it? What could make up for what we did?”
“All we have is atonement,” he told her flatly.
“It’s not enough,” Teresa muttered. “All my life, I thought I was preparing for this. But who the hell could prepare to be faced with hundreds of years’ worth of misery and mistakes?” Her insides trembling, she wondered how she ever could have expected to keep her heart out of this. Her heart was
in.
No mistake. She had to care. About Rune. About the past. About the future—if she had any hope at all of succeeding.
“Just … tell me what happened next. What did the coven do with the black silver?”
He sighed, got off the bed and walked to her. Resting his hands on her shoulders, he felt her quiver. “The coven took all the black silver they could gather and crafted the Artifact. A series of Celtic knots, entwined together into a crest of sorts. Most of the coven hailed from Eire, so the design was familiar to them.”
She frowned as if trying to dredge up the memory to match his words.
“The coven shuddered when they realized the power in the Artifact and vowed to hide it from the world. To protect it—even from themselves.” He added, “The Artifact itself was a powerful focus for magic. And they worried what might happen if they lost control of their own will and tapped the Artifact’s energies. They kept it hidden in a place known only to them and it was safe for centuries….”
“Until?” she asked, lifting her gaze to his.
The torchlight around the room seemed to swim in the air. A breeze he couldn’t feel twisted the flames and sent their shadows dancing across the walls.
“Until the year twelve hundred. The last great coven gathered, reincarnations of the coven that had formed the Artifact. These witches,” he said, his voice dropping, “had reached the pinnacle of their knowledge. Arrogant in their power, they lusted for more. They wanted new worlds to explore, new secrets to understand. They wouldn’t listen to
us,
” he added under his breath. “They heard no one but the voices inside their own minds and hearts. They opened the sealed Artifact, poured their essences into it and—”
“Opened the gateway to hell,” she finished for him.
“Yes.”
Teresa swayed on her feet as if she’d been dealt a physical blow. She closed her eyes, drew a long, deep breath and whispered, “And the demons raced through the portal. They tore at us, howling, screaming for blood and misery. We tried to fight them, but we couldn’t. You fought to get to us, but couldn’t enter our sacred circle.”
“Yes,” Rune said, reliving that night all over again as her whispered words drew up the images in his mind. A part of him regretted the necessity of Teresa remembering the ugliness of that last, awful night.
“Barastat,”
she said, clearly horrified by what her own mind was showing her. “A demon warlord. He came through the portal we opened and claimed this world for Lucifer.”
Everything in Rune fisted and he felt again that long-ago fury and frustration at being magically kept from his witch. Being unable to reach her.
“Oh, God. Several of our sisters died,” she said and a single tear rolled down her cheek, shining like a liquid diamond in the torchlight. “Somehow, we dropped the circle and the Eternals—you—rushed in to battle the demons. To force them back through the portal.”
“We did,” he said gently and with the tips of his fingers he lifted her chin until she was looking into his eyes. “And the coven fought at our side. As you remember the nightmare, remember also that when it mattered most, you and the coven made the right choice. You sent the bastards back to their hell.”
She laughed shortly, a harsh sound that ripped free a small piece of his soul. “When it was too late to stop what we’d done, yes. God, the arrogance we had.”
“Do you remember the rest?”
Blowing out a breath, Teresa nodded. “We shattered the Artifact magically, breaking it into pieces. Then each of us took one shard and hid it somewhere in the world, covering it with binding magic to protect it. Then we sentenced ourselves to eight hundred years of atonement, cast the spell and …”