witch of great power. And one with a spine stiff enough to take risks she had no business considering. While he could stand to one side and respect her formidable will, he resented the fact that she had risked her life rather than trusting him to protect her.
When he found her, he would make sure he convinced her never to defy him again. She would trust him because it was by damn his due. Hadn’t he been at her side when death had claimed her, lifetime after lifetime? Hadn’t he been waiting for her soul to be reborn so that he could once again pick up the mantle of protector?
Would this not prove to the woman that he had earned his place at her side?
Once on the street, he followed her trail, running through the darkness, at home in the shadows as he was nowhere else. The roar of the ocean thundered in the background as waves crashed against the cliffs. Lights blazed in the houses he passed, but he paid them no mind. What did he care for civilians when his mind was focused solely on his witch?
Torin stopped dead when her scent abruptly disappeared. He caught no sign of her on the wind and even reaching with the deeper senses of an Eternal gained him nothing. Shea had disappeared as completely as if she’d stepped into a hole in the earth. Muttering darkly under his breath, he dropped to one knee to closely examine the ground.
There’d been a fight here. A struggle. She’d been forced to the ground by three-four men. And a woman. Torin frowned to himself as he recognized the scent of one of his neighbors. A nosy older woman forever spying on the world outside her own home. She must have seen Shea at the house and reported her. Which meant those who had taken Shea were no doubt official agents.
That was something, he told himself, even as a wild, frantic urge to find her swamped him. Officials, though cruel, rarely killed the women they captured outright. They would take her to a camp. Somewhere they could interrogate her. Lock her away. From him.
The rage already blistering Torin’s insides flashed into a consuming inferno as he felt the lingering traces of Shea’s fear and panic. He looked up, long hair lifting in the wind as his eyes narrowed on the dark road stretching out before him. Human males had grabbed his woman and if they had hurt her, he told himself, then they had best hope their God was looking out for them.
Rune ran up to join him as Torin stood. Cold, vicious fury burned within him, strangling every breath, flooding him with an iciness that was as black as the night surrounding them.
“Gone,” he said, the one word ground from his throat like jagged glass. His body tensed, his huge hands curling into fists at his sides. He couldn’t feel her. Couldn’t sense her presence anywhere. And that meant only one thing.
Whoever had taken her had locked her powers down.
“Where?”
Torin turned his head to glance briefly at his friend. “No telling. I can’t sense her.”
Rune cursed under his breath and then quieted, gathering his own strength for whatever came next.
Torin felt the warmth of solidarity begin to ease away the ice within him.
“We follow the scents of her captors as far as we can.” He knew even the stench of humanity would dissipate with the wind and distance. But it was somewhere to start.
He lifted his arms and allowed the fire that was the essence of him to come. Flames danced and licked across his skin until every inch of his body hummed with the magical energy rushing through him. He felt his strength swell and build until finally it erupted, filling each of his cells with the power he had commanded for centuries.
He didn’t care if the old woman or any of his other neighbors glanced out their windows and saw him. Torin wouldn’t bother disguising himself or his true nature. The humans could do nothing to him and he had no time to camouflage himself simply to prevent them from having to admit the existence of even more magic.
Now he focused his mind on one thing.
Finding the men who had taken Shea from him.
Their scents were still clear to him, staining the very air with trace signatures. He easily picked up on the lingering sense of the men’s fear and arousal. These men enjoyed their work, he realized grimly-capturing and tormenting women, whether witch or not. Soon, Torin thought, he would show them the error of their ways. But first he would use them as they used the women they captured to feed their own base instincts.
He would allow these men to guide him to the only woman in the world who mattered.
He looked again at Rune and saw that he, too, was enveloped in living flames, the immortal soul of each Eternal. With the strength of the fire coursing through them, they could travel short distances in the span of a breath. Their magic was less complicated than the witches to whom they were bound. But their physical strength and their prowess at battle more than made up the difference.
Magic flowed through the Eternals, yet as powerful as they were, they faced limits that could leave them vulnerable to an enemy. Flashing themselves across distances took a toll and would eventually drain the very powers they depended on.
When they took someone else along for the ride, their powers were taxed that much more quickly.
Even Eternals required rest or the magic of sex to restore their body’s energies. But he couldn’t afford to waste time worrying about whether he would be strong enough to free Shea once he found her. Instead, he would push himself to the very limits of his abilities. And if an enemy caught him at a weak moment? He would still find a way.
For Shea, there was nothing he wouldn’t do.
Wouldn’t risk.
“We go now,” he ordered.
Rune nodded.
And in an instant the flames winked out and all that was left on the road were the ever-spreading shadows.
Chapter 8
“That wasn’t so hard,” one of the men said from the back of the van.
Shea lay at his feet, stretched out on a smelly gray carpet. There were no interior lights in what had to be a cargo van. A row of seats ran along each side of the vehicle while she lay like an offering on an altar in front of the men celebrating her capture. There were three of them back here with her, and one driving.
They’d sent four men to capture one witch.
She didn’t know whether to be amused, flattered or even more scared. Clearly, the worldwide fear of magic was growing. They were taking no chances anymore.
The shadows were thick inside the van, but as they whizzed along the freeway, the outside lights flashed across the faces of her captors like a rhythmical, painfully bright strobe.
She wasn’t comforted by what she saw.
These men looked hard and cold. Their features were taut and their eyes were bright with both fear and excitement. That didn’t bode well for her. The older ones were watching her warily, while the one young recruit in the bunch had more than curiosity shining in his eyes. There was a raw hunger there, too. Shea inched a little farther away from him.
The men noticed her slight movement and a booted foot came down on her middle. “You just lay there, witch. Don’t try a damn thing. You hear me?”
She shivered, nodded and avoided meeting their gazes again, not wanting to give them any reason to get rougher with her than they had already. Magic Police. Legal bullies, she thought, trying to keep her features from betraying her thoughts.
The MPs were one of the first agencies that had sprung up after magic had been outed to the world. Headlines around the globe trumpeted the news that all of those sleazy tabloid papers had been right all along. Magic did exist. The public outcry for protection from so-called deviants had resulted in every nation pushing through legislation to somehow identify and then secure supposed witches. It had sounded reasonable even to Shea at the time, despite the fact that her own aunt Mairi had been the first witch to be captured in the United
