Mating. Only that it would seal Eternal and witch together for eternity. That’s a long time.”
His hands dropped from her arms and he took a step away from her. His already familiar eyes narrowed and in the dancing torchlight, he looked every inch the deadly warrior that he was.
“I’ve already waited an eternity for you,” he said. “This time I thought it would be different. This time, I had hopes that you would have learned from the past. Grown. But now is no different than before. Other lives, other times,” he whispered with a shake of his head. “But always the same.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You, Teresa,” he ground out. “I’m talking about what you’re doing right now. Do you not see it?”
What Teresa saw was the frustration glinting in his eyes and she fired the same look right back at him.
“What?” she demanded. “I want to take a minute, think about this, and that makes me the enemy?”
He laughed, but there was no humor in the sound. “Centuries it’s been, Teresa. Countless lives and opportunities wasted, because still you refuse to make that leap of faith.”
Stunned, she simply stared up at him. Her body was still buzzing, but her brain was taking over and it was getting pissed. Didn’t seem to matter that he had said pretty much what she had been thinking just before he pulled away. She hadn’t been trying to start a fight, for heaven’s sake. She had just needed one damn minute.
“What happened to all of the ‘your past lives have nothing to do with now’ stuff you fed me a couple of days ago?” she countered.
“I tried, but you are proving to be the same woman. You have no faith.”
“What am I supposed to have faith in?”
“Me,” he told her. “Us. And if not that, then at least in yourself. You say you know about the Mating, but still you stall, you stand back, clinging to your old life, unwilling to accept the new.”
“I think I’ve done a hell of a lot of accepting,” she shouted, stabbing his broad chest with the tip of her forefinger. “Do you even realize what’s happened to me lately?”
“Yes,” he said tightly, glancing down to see sparks of energy snapping from her finger to his chest and back again. “You lost it all. I know. But now, when you could gain so much, you turn your face from it. You turn from me. Just as you always have,” he finished with a mutter.
“I’m not—”
He was on her in a heartbeat. His hands gripped her upper arms and he lifted her right off the floor as if she were no bigger than a child. When they were at eye level, he said, “I opened some of your memories to you. Can you deny what I’m saying? You’ve always done this, Teresa. Chosen yourself over your duty. Over me. Am I to stand by and watch you throw away our last chance to make right what you and your sisters fucked up so long ago?”
“I didn’t ask you to step back,” she argued. “I just wanted a minute to catch my breath. Is that so terrible?”
“You wanted the chance to back away.”
“You don’t know me,” she told him, bracing her hands on his shoulders, digging her fingers in for purchase. “All of this talk about who I was, the lives I don’t even remember—that has nothing to do with me. With who I am now.”
“Who you are now comes from what was before. How can the past not matter?”
Furious, mainly because a part of her wondered if he wasn’t right about all of this, she shoved him, putting all of her strength into her hands as she pushed at his massive chest. Sparks of light swept from her fingertips, like droplets from sparklers on the Fourth of July, singeing his shirt. Instantly, she was horrified and patted at him to make sure she hadn’t set him on fire.
“Damn it, what good is this magic if I can’t control it?”
“You will gain control through the Mating,” he told her, ignoring the flash of light sparking at the tips of her fingers. “We are meant to join. To balance each other. To focus our magic into one honed force.”
It sounded right, she told herself, but that small, doubting voice in the back of her mind still shrieked out warnings. It had always been this way. Through the years of training, of studying, she had prepared for her duty and dreaded its arrival.
She