And that included that pompous prick with the fire hands.
Big deal. So he could do magic. That made him no better than the very witch they were chasing. He was a mutant. Like Teresa. Like the rest of the women with power. And they all thought they were better than humans. Better than
him.
“Well, fuck that,” he said aloud, letting his temper burn unrestrained inside him. He would show them all just how good he was.
They wanted Teresa, fine. He’d show them how it was done. He was finished taking orders. He knew where she was going to show up, so he’d be there. Waiting for her.
“Bastard fire man wants to call the shots, but he’s too stupid to listen to
me.
” Miguel had told them all that Chiapas was the secret to catching Teresa. No one wanted to just follow his advice and finish this. So, he was on his own. Fuck the rest of them.
He would do this himself and then they’d realize that he was a man to be taken seriously.
The village tavern was already miles behind him and still Miguel was fuming. He’d slipped out just before dawn when the bastard with gray eyes had left on business. Suited Miguel just fine. He had business of his own and when he was done, they’d all have to admit to his face that he was the one who knew what to do. That
he
, Miguel Hernandez, had come through for them when no one else had.
“When this is over,” he promised himself, “I’m not going to take shit from anybody again. I’ll have the reward money and I’ll get out of this fucking desert and never look back. Then we’ll see who’s the important guy around here. Fucking Parnell with his fire thinks he’s so bad? We’ll see how impressive he is with a bullet in the head.”
He smiled at the thought. Indulging his fantasies made the miles go by faster. Soon he was deep in the desert, heading for Chiapas. And his destiny.
Chapter 39
“T
rust the Eternal and fear the immortal?” Rune repeated, lying back on the bed and crooking one arm behind his head. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know,” Teresa said.
“Focus your power. Aim the lightning at me.”
“And if I hit you?”
“You can’t kill me.”
She threw a white-hot bolt at him. But he had already flashed away. The lightning hit the cave wall instead, making the crystals buried there light up like neon.
“I’m an Eternal
and
an immortal,” Rune reminded her unnecessarily when he popped back in just a foot from her.
“That’s what I told her.” Teresa spun, dropped and threw one hand out, spitting sparks from her fingertips.
Rune grinned and disappeared.
“She wouldn’t—or couldn’t, maybe; I don’t know which—explain any further,” Teresa said when Rune flashed back to her side. “She just said that there was danger and that the immortal wanted
me
, specifically. And not just for the witchcraft.”
“She was right about that, anyway,” Rune whispered, reaching out to grab her.
Teresa jumped away, swung one hand in the air and reached for her magic. “You’re not worried?” she asked.
He flashed to stand behind her, wrapped his arms around her middle and held on. “Worried, no. Interested, yes. Now don’t depend solely on your magic. Conjure a knife. Like I showed you. You never know what you’ll have to fight with.”
Teresa held out one hand, focused her gaze on her palm and in a moment a long-bladed knife, gleaming silver in the torchlight, lay in her hand. She smiled, curled her fingers around the hilt, then swung it experimentally through the air.
Admiration for her swelled inside Rune. She’d been practicing. This time together had been good for her. Time to mate. Time to focus on her growing power. Time to connect to each other in a way that they hadn’t over the centuries. Her magical skills were impressive. She hadn’t needed teaching—only to remember her own past and what she had once done as easily as breathing.
“Good. That’s good,” Rune said, and crooked one finger at her in challenge. “Now come at me.”
She did. She charged across the room, holding the knife blade low and deadly. He swiped her arm out of the way and she spun quickly, dropping into a crouch while swinging her knife in a wide arc. Rune flashed out. If he hadn’t, she would have had him.
“That’s cheating,” she called out to the room.
“If you expect your opponent to fight fair, you’ll die,” he told her as he appeared again just a few feet from her.
“Then I should just use magic,” she countered, walking in a slow, wide circle around him.
“Use whatever you have,” Rune told her, dodging her next attack, then smiling when she whirled in time to take another swipe at him. “Stay alive. No matter what you have to do.”
She took a breath, looked down at the knife in her hand and said, “That’s what this is about? No matter what? Shouldn’t there be rules, Rune? Didn’t we screw up royally when we didn’t believe in rules?”
“Yeah. You did.” He flashed out, then appeared again right beside her. He pulled the knife from her hand and tossed it aside. “And we all paid the price. Now we work together and we’ll do whatever the hell we have to do to succeed.”
“So, then, we learned nothing?”
“We learned what we had to learn,” he told her, noting the worry in her eyes. It was good that she considered all sides now. She hadn’t once and they had spent centuries paying for it. “Now, tell me. Elena said you should search for new spells? In the library?”
“Yeah. Rune, what library? The one in Sedona? She said search for Serena’s spells … and I don’t know any Serena. We can’t go back there even if I knew what to look for and—” She stopped, tipped her head to one side and said, “You know what she was talking about, don’t you?”
His eyes were fierce now, flashing with the warrior gleam she was coming to know so well.
“You’re sure she said
Serena.
”
“Hard to mistake that name. It’s pretty different.” She stared into his eyes. “You know who she is.”
“So do you,” he muttered. Just hearing that name opened up a treasure trove of memories inside him, thick as tar and just as appealing. “You just don’t remember yet.”
“What’re you—” She stopped and took a breath. “I knew her then? In the past?”
“You could say that,” he replied. “You
were
Serena.”
Chapter 40
“I
was…when?”
“Does it matter?” Rune didn’t want to talk about that incarnation. The memory pained him. At the moment, he would have liked nothing better than to kick the ghostly ass of Elena’s spirit for bringing it up.
“Of course it matters. Elena said it mattered and now, looking at your face, I can see that your memories of Serena aren’t exactly cheerful ones, so, yeah. I’d like to know what everyone else knows.”
He released her and stalked across the cave, needing to put some distance between them. “You should let your own memories surface. Remember this on your own.”
“Do we have time for that?” she countered. “I’m working at dredging up the memories, but so far I’m not getting much. If Elena thinks Serena’s spells can help, then wouldn’t knowing the truth help, too?”
Irritated and unsettled by the past suddenly encroaching on his present, Rune spun to look at her. The sight of her mating tattoo circling her breast and beginning to spread to her back eased him, though. The past was dead and now they were approaching a future that had been too long in coming. “You want the truth? Fine. Serena was a treacherous bitch. Happy?”
“Thrilled,” she said tightly. “Now tell me the rest.”
“It was 1530,” he told her. “In London. You worked at a tavern there and were drawn to witchcraft even though you had no power. You think the witch hunters now are fierce?” He gave a short, hard laugh. “Back then, they were on a mission from God and were damn relentless about it.”
“I’ve read about it.”
He gave her a cold smile. “You lived it, too. You just don’t remember it yet.”
“So tell me.”
“You were separated from your magic because of the atonement, but your soul was still drawn to the craft,” he said, bringing it all back in his mind in a churning mass of images. “We were together, until you ran afoul of the tribunal. Someone saw you with a woman of power, trying to learn to do spellwork, and turned you in. To save your own ass, you handed me to them. Set me up to be trapped. You had your witch friend cast a spell to hold me so the ‘good people’ of London could beat me down.”
“Oh, God …”
With time and distance, the immediacy of her betrayal had lost the emotional punch it once had. But the bitterness remained. He looked down into her profoundly familiar eyes and saw Serena as she had been that last night. As she had stood with his captors, decrying him as an unnatural “thing.”
“Rune …”
He shook his head. “Her spell couldn’t hold me for long. I flashed out and later I discovered that once I was gone, the crowd turned on you. I returned the following day to confront you, but—” He hesitated.
“Finish,” she whispered brokenly.
“—you were dead. They burned you and the witch at the stake for consorting with demons.”
She closed her eyes, took another deep breath and blew it out in a heavy sigh. “Well, that explains a lot.”
“Really?” he asked wryly.
“You look at me and see
her
,” Teresa said, turning her eyes up to him. “I can’t really blame you. But, Rune, I’m not that woman. I made a promise to you. I’m your mate and I’m not going to turn on you like she did.”
“Serena didn’t
plan
to turn on me, either,” he told her flatly.
She walked to him and laid both hands on his bare chest. Rune felt a rush of heat spill from her body into his. It wiped away the chill of his memories and pushed thoughts of betrayal back into the past.
“I can’t change what I—
she—
did.” She shook her head and frowned. “Every time I find out one more hideous piece of a past I don’t remember, it makes me want to scream. But I can’t do anything to change it. All I can do is be who I am now. And I’m not that woman.”
“I know you’re not.”
“Do you? Really?” She tipped her head to one side and her long hair swung over her shoulder to cover one bare breast. “I think we’re both coming into this with a lot of our own problems strapped to our backs. You don’t trust me and I don’t—”
“Don’t what?” He frowned as her gaze shifted from his. “Teresa.” Cupping her chin in his hand, he turned her face back to him until their eyes met once more. “You don’t what—”
Steeling herself, she said, “I don’t want to love you, okay?”
“Why? Because of that bastard of a boyfriend you had?”
Her eyes went wide in surprise. “You know about Miguel?”
“I know everything about you,” he said. “You think it was easy to watch that bastard with you? I saw how he treated you and I wanted to kill him for it. If he had ever struck you or harmed you in any way, I would have.”
She smiled at the hostile tone of his voice. “Even though you don’t really like me?”
“I do like you,” he said and silently admitted that liking her didn’t even begin to cover what he felt for her. “I just don’t know that I can trust you. And, yes, I would have killed him for daring to harm you. As I would anyone else.”
“I know I shouldn’t like hearing that, but I do,” she said, “so thank you.”
“You don’t have to love me,” Rune said softly.
“But you do have to trust me,” Teresa told him. “If this is going to work, if we’re to have a chance of succeeding, you’re going to have to trust me at some point, Rune.”
He nodded because he knew she was right. But knowing and doing were two different things. Still, he was working on it. “I’m trying.”
“That’s all I can ask for,” she said after a long moment. Then she smiled sadly. “You don’t trust me and I won’t love you. So there are a few strikes against us right off the top.”
“Hasn’t stopped us so far,” he said.
“True,” Teresa admitted. “So … back to Elena and what she said. Do you know which library she was talking about?”
“Yeah, I do. It’s an interdimensional library.”
“What?”
He looked down at her, his gaze moving over her features while he slid one hand up to cover her left breast. As if he needed to touch the mating brand, to link them somehow. To get past the powerful emotions flooding the room. Old pain had no place in his present and he would have to make a stronger effort to let it go.
“Torin and Shea,” he said slowly, “the first Eternal and witch to bond during the Awakening, discovered the library last month.”
His hand cupped her breast and the heat wound through him in a sensual ribbon.
“Tell me,” she said, urging him to continue.
“You know that you’re the reincarnation of one of the chosen witches. A member of the last great coven.”
She nodded, impatient for him to get to the important part. “Yes, that much I know.”
“Well, there are other witches, thousands of them.”
“Yeah, and they’re being hunted and rounded up by the feds, and by civilian hunters. But what does this have to do with—”
He blew out a breath. “For centuries, witches have been handing down knowledge through the generations. From one to the other in a long, unbroken link, they’ve passed down spells and secrets and legends.”
She’d had no idea that women of power had managed to retain all that they were throughout the ages. If the feds knew about this, she told herself grimly, they would increase their already rabid efforts to wipe out the witch population.
A shiver wracked her body and as if he understood, Rune dropped a quick, hard kiss on her mouth. She appreciated the kiss for its own sake, and for the reassurance that the awkwardness caused by their conversation was over.
“The witches crafted a ‘library’ to hold the ancient texts and vital information gleaned through the years. Any witch can access it if she’s close to a Sanctuary.”