Artifact.
“History’s repeating itself, Shea,” Torin said, his voice sharp as a blade, his pale eyes locked on her face.
Shea looked into his gaze and saw her own reflection staring back at her. But this was the face of a long- dead witch. One who’d gambled and lost. One who had so endangered her soul, she’d set herself on an eight- hundred-year journey of atonement. And for what? So that she could make the same mistakes over and over again?
A battle rose up within her. A battle for supremacy.
The witch against the power of the Artifact.
Against her own hunger.
Chapter 47
Shea’s terrified gaze fixed on his. “Torin, it’s much stronger than it was in the old days. It’s as if it’s been gathering power through the centuries and the longer it was here, unused, untapped, the stronger it became.”
“You must fight it, Shea,” he told her, coming toward her, one slow step at a time, as if sneaking up on the magical metal she held so closely. “If our mating bond is shattered before completion, if you pull away from me now, both of our souls will die.”
She hadn’t known that, but she instinctively recognized it as truth. A truth she couldn’t allow to happen. She shuddered, a great, wrenching, full-body shudder that snapped her teeth together and locked her bones in a painful grip.
Lightning slashed the sky in jagged bolts. Thunder shook the ruin. Even the ground beneath their feet seemed to roll and quake with the gathering power.
“Take it,” she ground out. “Take it from me, Torin.”
He looked into her eyes and shook his head. “You have to give it to me freely, Shea. You have to willingly give away that power.”
She knew he was right. Her mind was shrieking at her to do it. To uncurl her tight fingers from the black silver. Hand it to Torin and reclaim her own soul from the darkness. But it was so hard to fight her body’s demands. Hard to fight against that rush of magic spilling into her.
Shea locked her gaze on Torin’s. She gathered herself and concentrated solely on the Eternal in front of her. In his pale gray eyes, she saw love. Acceptance. Loyalty. She clung to the strength of those emotions. She thought of her own journey. All she’d been through in the last month. Her soul felt divided, one half leaning toward the light, the other toward the dark. She was torn, literally, between two desires, each of them as strong as the other.
And there was Torin. Still standing in front of her. Steadfastly watching her with love, with trust. She nodded, reached for her own strength deep within herself and slowly she forced herself to stretch out her cupped hands to him. To painfully open her cramped fingers from around the black silver, which had shifted shape in her grasp, becoming once more a slice of an ancient Celtic knot.
She looked down at the metal lying in the center of her palms, felt herself yearn, then deliberately released it.
Torin caught the Artifact, then reached out to grab her as she dropped in a dead faint.
Shea woke up, drew a deep breath and was relieved to feel that she was her true self again. She picked up a long hank of her hair, glanced at it and sighed to see the familiar dark red. “Torin?”
She sat up, looked around the ruined chapel and finally spotted her Eternal in the shadows. “Torin? Are you okay?”
“It is… difficult.” His voice sounded hollow, different.
Scrambling to her feet, Shea rushed to him, drawing him from the darkness, only to see that the changes that had overtaken her were now affecting him. His familiar gray eyes were black as pitch. His hair was even darker than before and his clothing too was night black. “Oh, God.”
Had he saved her only to lose himself?
He kept one hand fisted around the Artifact and she knew the burn of power he was experiencing. She reached for him and wasn’t dissuaded when he lurched backward, away from her touch. Insistently, she laid one hand on his broad chest and let the connection between the two of them strengthen him.
“You have to drop that thing, Torin,” she told him, her gaze searching the black pits of his eyes, looking for a flicker of recognition there. “Let it go. Now.”
“One of us must carry it back to Haven,” he insisted, lines of strain etching themselves into his features. “Better me than you. We’ve already seen it affects you far more deeply than it does me. I can survive it.”
He was fooling himself. The changes sweeping through him might be happening more slowly than they had with her, but they were just as damaging. Just as dangerous.
It was as if he were far away from her already and Shea knew she didn’t have much more time to reach him. She needed to get him to listen to her, as he had her. Sliding her hand up to cup his cheek in her palm, she shook her head and whispered, “We’ll find a way, Torin. But we can’t hold it. Neither of us can.”
He closed his eyes and she felt the battle raging within him. He was drawing not only on his own formidable strength but their combined essences to fight his way back from the dark.
“Look at me, Torin,” she said softly, waiting until his eyes opened and fixed on her. The blank, empty stare was unsettling, but she refused to be cowed. He had saved her; she could do nothing less for him. “You have to drop the Artifact. We’ll solve this. But I need you with me.”
He hissed in a breath and held it, caught in his lungs. She watched as emotions flashed across his face so quickly that it was hard to identify one from the other. All she knew was that she needed him. Wanted him. Loved him.
She hadn’t once said that word. Not to him. Not to herself. She’d hidden from it, like a coward. She’d become his mate, become his partner and still had withheld that word. Why? To maintain that one last link to the self- sufficient person she had once been? Was it fear? Was it cowardice? God, she hoped not. Just as she hoped that confessing to him now would be enough to release him from the grip of dark magic.
“I love you, Torin,” she said, her eyes shining with promise. “Do you hear me? I love you. Come back to me now.”
The Artifact hit the stone-littered ground with a hard thump and Torin swayed unsteadily as the black power drained from him as quickly as it had stolen over him.
He gave a harsh, short laugh and scraped one hand over his face. Then his eyes shifted to hers and Shea released a pent-up breath when she saw the swirl of gray that she knew and loved.
“The bloody thing’s a trap,” he said, reaching for her, pulling her into him so tightly she could hardly breathe. “Carrying it back to Haven’s going to be a challenge.”
“Can we shift it, magically? Maybe use a spell to transport it back separately?”
“God, no,” he said, burying his face in the curve of her neck. “I don’t trust the damn thing one bit. Who knows how it might react to a spell? It’s so powerful, Shea. I had no idea.”
“You beat it, though,” she murmured, nestling against him.
“Because of you.” He captured her face between his palms and turned her eyes up to his. “Because of what you gave me.”
His gaze moved over her features like a caress. She felt the tenderness welling up inside him and everything in her responded.
“I felt your love,” he said, “and that was enough to draw me back from the edge. Without you…” He shook his head and shifted to glance at the shard of black silver lying at their feet. The green grass around the Artifact was now brown and dead. As if just the touch of that dark magic was enough to suck the life from the ground. “I understand now, I think. What you and the coven felt so long ago.”
“It’s seductive,” she whispered, her gaze, too, fixed on the knot of black silver. Even knowing what she knew, she had to fight to keep from reaching for it. From fondling it. From feeling the black rush of energy swimming through her veins again.
