wouldn’t be leaving whatever camp she’d been taken to? Now… less than twenty-four hours later, Shea herself was in the same situation. Ironic? Or just punishment?
She had killed, after all. There was no denying it.
Outside the van, freeway lights flashed by and the roar of traffic sounded like a caged beast trying to get inside the van.
“Did she really kill a man today?” the young voice again. “She looks so… helpless.”
“Helpless? Not likely,” someone growled with a snort. “Bitch flipped that poor son of a bitch the bird and he went up like a tiki torch at a barbecue.”
A couple of the men laughed and Shea closed her eyes on a wave of sorrow. She’d have to live with what she’d done-if she was allowed to live at all.
“Shut up, Dave.” The strongest voice spoke up again. Then he leaned out over Shea so she could look up into his face.
He had dark eyes, short dark hair and a jaw that looked as though it could have been carved of granite. The name stitched into his uniform read L. HARPER. In another life she might have found him attractive, until she looked into his eyes long enough. His dark eyes were filled with hatred. There was nothing soft or merciful about him and as his gaze met hers she tried to cringe back from his hard stare.
“Don’t you get fooled by how a witch looks, kid,” he said, speaking to the other man as he stared into Shea’s eyes. “They’re all evil. Right down to the core. Kill you as soon as look at you and do whatever they have to, to escape.”
Shea shook her head wildly, trying to silently argue with him, but he wasn’t buying it.
“Don’t try the big sad eyes on me, witch,” he murmured, leaning in so that he could speak in a whisper. “I’ve seen what your kind can do. And I’m not going to rest until you’re all locked up or burned at the stake. With any luck, you’re going to end up just like your aunt did.”
Tears fell from the corners of her eyes and streaked into her hair, but Shea couldn’t stop them. Fear clawed at her chest, scraped at her throat. She looked up into those eyes and saw her own death written there.
And though it was far too late, she silently screamed for the one person she believed could have saved her.
Torin!
Chapter 9
Torin faced an ugly truth. He had no idea where Shea had been taken. She could be at any one of several internment camps-or she might have been killed outright.
But even as that thought registered, he rejected it. Though he couldn’t sense her, he had no doubt that if she were dead, his body would feel her absence. It had been so in the past and he had no reason to suspect that it had changed. She lived. But where was she?
“Which do we try first?” Rune’s voice, sounding as irritated as Torin felt, shattered his thoughts.
Scowling into the night, Torin considered their options. They had already followed the scent of Shea’s captors as far as they could. But the trail had ended on the 405 freeway, close enough to a transition that the car carrying Shea away from him could have gone in either of two directions.
A decision must be made. Any action was preferable to a stalemate.
The challenge lay in forcing himself to think like a human. Their minds were convoluted; logic rarely reared its head. The mortals he’d known over the centuries were driven by fear-which led to mystifying choices that often left Torin wondering how they had managed to survive as a species. But now, to find his woman, he must find a way to guess what these particular humans would do next.
There were two internment camps within driving distance of Malibu. The first lay deep in the Angeles National Forest, surrounded by hundreds of acres of emptiness. Secluded, far from any city, it would be the more difficult of the two to infiltrate, since there was nothing but open space around the camp itself-leaving any who approached visible to the guards standing watch.
The other was on Terminal Island in Long Beach. Closer, but far easier to find a way in. With the city surrounding it and the busy traffic of a harbor, he and Rune would hardly be noticed. Once a prison, it had been turned into a detention camp when the first witches were discovered. The camps were all heavily guarded, he knew. And their fences were laced with white gold that would tax the Eternals’ powers. His choice was which location to try first.
He was tempted to take the closer route, investigate the camp in Long Beach. But if Shea were not there, the authorities would be on alert from his visit and all of the camps would be strengthened, making the Angeles Forest camp that much harder to penetrate. The same would hold true once he and Rune invaded the old FEMA camp in the woods, but even on high alert Long Beach would be easier to breach.
“We go to Angeles Forest,” he said finally. Decision made. But before he left he threw another long look at the freeway stretching out toward Long Beach.
He would find her. Wherever she was.
No one could keep her from him.
Chapter 10
The Terminal Island internment camp used to be a federal prison. It squatted on an artificial island between Los Angeles Harbor and Long Beach Harbor. Back when California was still a Spanish territory, the island was little more than a mudflat known to locals as Rattlesnake Island. But in the early twentieth century, the feds built a prison there and called it Terminal Island. The name had always had a sort of funereal feel to it, in Shea’s mind. But she’d never really noticed it much unless she was driving over the Vincent Thomas Bridge to San Pedro.
Now, though, everything had changed. The island had been emptied of everyday criminals when witchcraft was exposed and now it housed hundreds of suspected witches. Turned out people were more afraid of magic- casting women than they were of common murderers.
“What that says about people, I don’t know,” Shea whispered to herself, carrying a set of sheets along with a flat pillow and a threadbare blanket in her arms. She marched behind a heavily armed female guard and two other prisoners. She wasn’t the only witch to have been captured tonight.
Fluorescent lights cast an ugly glow over the sickly green walls and the faces of women peering through their barred cell doors. Shea felt dozens of stares fixed on her and she could only suppose that watching the arrival of new prisoners was the sole entertainment the women in here got.
She tipped her head back to look around and saw that above her there was another whole floor of cells. She wondered just how many women had been tucked away in this prison and forgotten. Her stomach churned and the heaviness on her soul felt worse than ever. The white gold chain around her neck continued to send icy threads of misery throughout her body as if reminding her that there was nothing she could do to free herself.
She took a deep breath and cast sidelong glances to the cells she passed on her walk. Women of all different ages and races stared back at her, hopelessness glistening in their eyes as they watched the latest arrivals.
Soon, Shea thought, she’d be one of them. Just another rat in a cage, locked away until someone, somewhere, decided what was to be done with her. And though the thought of being shut up behind bars terrified her, the noise in the prison was the worst part.
The incessant clang of steel bars slamming shut. The desperate sobbing, and under it all the softly pitched crackle of women’s voices rising and falling to the rhythm of the sea just beyond the prison walls. A guard shouted, a woman cried out and somewhere close by another prisoner moaned as if she were dying.
Despair clung to the walls and tainted every breath Shea drew. Panic was clawing at her, closing her throat so she could barely breathe, filling her eyes with tears she refused to shed. She wouldn’t give her jailers the satisfaction of seeing how scared she really was.
The female guard pushed the first woman in their line into a cell and slammed the door shut. The clang jolted
