Visions of Skyfire

Chapter 31

An 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 …”

“Died,” Rune said, recalling exactly how he had mourned her, how he had been consumed with rage and grief at her passing. At what she and her sisters had wrought on all of them in a quest for more power. “You died. All of you. Leaving us to wait for your souls to reincarnate. Again and again, we watched over you. Sometimes at your sides, sometimes no more than a shadow on the periphery of your existence.

“And always, we waited, sentenced by your spell as surely as you yourselves were, to a centuries-long agony of a half life.” He slid his hands down to her upper arms and held on to her. Staring into her eyes, he felt himself drowning in those dark brown depths. “As immortals, we were forced to continue on through hundreds of dark, empty years. Without you. Without the other halves of our souls.”

“Rune,” she said, her mouth working as she tried to keep from crying, tried to keep her voice steady, “if we could have gone back and undone it, we would have.”

“But you couldn’t and so we all paid. As we continue to do.”

She sighed heavily, blinked back the tears glistening in her eyes and said, “Centuries of incarnations, waiting for the spell to end with the Awakening so we could get the Artifact back and destroy it. Now we have thirty short days to try to set it all right.”

His mouth flattened.

“What do you want from me? What’s done is done. It can’t be changed. It can’t be forgotten. All we can do now is fight this fight. To bring the pieces of the Artifact together again so we can destroy it, once and for all.”

Rune’s gaze moved over her features, from the teardampened eyes to the stubborn tilt of her chin. He wanted to believe in her again. But it was hard to move past centuries of mistrust. He’d spent so many years wandering the earth, his soul an open wound because of the magic she had chosen over him. How was he now to turn his back on hundreds of years’ worth of rage and give her his faith? His gaze dropped to the beginnings of the brand burned into her skin at her nipple and something inside him eased just a bit.

This was not the same, he told himself. Before, the witches had held themselves separate from the Eternals. Though they had been welcomed as partners in sex, they’d been denied the Mating ritual. The coven hadn’t wanted to share magic—not even with a mate.

He touched her tattoo, rubbing his thumb over the physical reminder of her vow to him and his to her. This was more than the two of them had ever shared before. This lifetime was different. The Awakening had come and she was his as she had always been meant to be.

She drew a breath and his thumb dipped lower to smooth the tip of her pebbled nipple. Teresa’s eyes slid closed on a sigh and Rune’s body thickened to the point of aching.

“Enough talk,” he muttered, dipping his head to claim her mouth in a kiss designed to wipe away centuries of misery. “I must have you.”

Their mouths met in a frenzy, as if neither of them could ever taste or feel enough. And when she finally broke away, gasping for air, Rune was teetering on the edge of madness.

She lifted both hands to cup his face and looked into his eyes as she said, “I made a vow this time, Rune. We’re mates. In this together. This time things will be different.”

Her words inflamed him as much as her touch did. If he’d had a beating heart, it would have been crashing against his rib cage. But his hunger was alive and growing and that was all he needed at the moment. He tumbled her back on the bed and let the future take care of itself.