“The thrill of the hunt,” he murmured as he moved over in front of me. Eyes glinting, he ran a knuckle down the fading mark on my cheek, and I couldn’t help shivering as I remembered his troubling promise. When I find the man responsible for that bruise on your face, I’ll make him very, very sorry.
In that instant with his magnetic gaze upon me, I sensed something dark inside Devlin. A discordant energy that I didn’t yet understand. I put my hand to his chest, outlining the silver medallion through his shirt. Something very strange happened then. My mind emptied and images came flooding in.
The sensation wasn’t a premonition or a hallucination or even my imagination. It was a memory, I realized. Devlin’s memory. Without even meaning to, I’d somehow slipped into his past.
Twenty-Two
He was no longer looking down at me, but at his companion, Mariama. Behind him a dozen or more silhouettes circled a fire, their voices and laughter rising over the music that played in the background. I recognized the song. It was one that had been popular at least fifteen years ago.
Devlin himself looked younger. There were no worry lines around his mouth and eyes. No silver in his hair from his trip to the other side. No dark circles, hollow cheeks or lingering emaciation from being haunted. Instead, he looked predatory and possessive, every bit the young, privileged male.
He moved toward Mariama, eyes hooded from intoxication and gleaming with lust. It occurred to me then that I wasn’t viewing the scene from Devlin’s perspective or even from Mariama’s. I was an onlooker inside his memory, an observer to an event that had happened a long time ago.
“You really get off on this stuff, don’t you?” he teased.
Mariama flung her arms wide as she threw back her head in exhilaration. “You have no idea! It’s the most intoxicating sensation in the world! When the power is fully unleashed, it feels like lava flowing through my veins, lightning in my fingertips.” She drew a long, rapturous breath. “But it’s not just inside me, it’s everywhere. In the trees, the sky, the ground. Even the air. Can’t you smell it?”
Devlin lifted his face. “That’s ozone. A storm’s coming.”
She gave a throaty laugh and passed him a bottle. “That’s magic.”
“If you say so.” He lifted the whiskey and drank deeply.
“I know you feel it, too,” she said. “I can see the throb of your pulse. Your heart is racing.”
“That’s not magic. That’s you.”
She slid her hand up to the medallion around his neck, entwining the silver chain around her fingers. “So much power in this totem. So much history in this emblem. You’ve no idea.”
“Trust me, I know the history of the Order of the Coffin and the Claw,” he said with an acerbic edge. “My grandfather made certain of it.”
“He hasn’t told you everything. He can’t. Not yet.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Like the Devlins and the Goodwines, the roots of the Order go all the way back to the beginning of Charleston. My ancestors came over on slave ships. One of them was a powerful tagati, a witch doctor who bartered his magic to the most prominent men in the city, men like your ancestors, in exchange for his freedom.”
“Are you saying my family was in league with yours?”
“Until the Devlin conscience got the better of them, and then they and the tagati became mortal enemies. Some would say the Order was born from their blood feud.”
“Fascinating.” Devlin was back to being amused. “Does that make us mortal enemies, then?”
Mariama was silent for a moment. “You take these things far too lightly. What we are about to do is serious. Irrevocable. Are you sure you want to go through with it?”
“Sure. Why not?” he said with an easy grin.
“Very well. Clear your mind so that our thoughts become one. A single consciousness.” As Mariama spoke, she withdrew a small dagger from her pocket and, taking Devlin’s hand in hers, carved a crescent in his palm.
He swore.
“The cut has to be deep to bind us.” She sliced her own palm without a flinch. “Now we join hands.” She laced her fingers through his. “We become one mind, one body, one soul. I’m in your blood now, a part of you. Nothing can ever tear us apart. Not time, not history, not even death. From this day forward, I will be with you always. No matter what happens, I will never leave you.”
“Never is a long time,” he said.
“For us it’s but the blink of an eye.”
She smiled over her shoulder then, peering through the shadows until her gaze lit upon me.
That wasn’t possible, of course. If this were really Devlin’s memory, she couldn’t know I was there. I told myself it had to be a daydream or my own fanciful projection. But I could smell the ozone of her magic. I could feel the presence of something dark and powerful behind me.
Slowly I turned to search the woods.
A tall figure stood in the shadows watching me. My heart started to race as Darius Goodwine moved into the light to confront me.
I hadn’t seen him since the night we’d struck a bargain for Devlin’s life. How was it we were facing off now in Devlin’s memory when I hadn’t known either of them in the distant past?