We tried to fight them, but we couldn’t. You fought to get to us, but couldn’t enter our sacred circle.”
“Yes,” Rune said, reliving that night all over again as her whispered words drew up the images in his mind. A part of him regretted the necessity of Teresa remembering the ugliness of that last, awful night.
“Barastat,” she said, clearly horrified by what her own mind was showing her. “A demon warlord. He came through the portal we opened and claimed this world for Lucifer.”
Everything in Rune fisted and he felt again that long-ago fury and frustration at being magically kept from his witch. Being unable to reach her.
“Oh, God. Several of our sisters died,” she said and a single tear rolled down her cheek, shining like a liquid diamond in the torchlight. “Somehow, we dropped the circle and the Eternals—you—rushed in to battle the demons. To force them back through the portal.”
“We did,” he said gently and with the tips of his fingers he lifted her chin until she was looking into his eyes. “And the coven fought at our side. As you remember the nightmare, remember also that when it mattered most, you and the coven made the right choice. You sent the bastards back to their hell.”
She laughed shortly, a harsh sound that ripped free a small piece of his soul. “When it was too late to stop what we’d done, yes. God, the arrogance we had.”
“Do you remember the rest?”
Blowing out a breath, Teresa nodded. “We shattered the Artifact magically, breaking it into pieces. Then each of us took one shard and hid it somewhere in the world, covering it with binding magic to protect it. Then we sentenced ourselves to eight hundred years of atonement, cast the spell and …”
“Died,” Rune said, recalling exactly how he had mourned her, how he had been consumed with rage and grief at her passing. At what she and her sisters had wrought on all of them in a quest for more power. “You died. All of you. Leaving us to wait for your souls to reincarnate. Again and again, we watched over you. Sometimes at your sides, sometimes no more than a shadow on the periphery of your existence.
“And always, we waited, sentenced by your spell as surely as you yourselves were, to a centuries-long agony of a half life.” He slid his hands down to her upper arms and held on to her. Staring into her eyes, he felt himself drowning in those dark brown depths. “As immortals, we were forced to continue on through hundreds of dark, empty years. Without you. Without the other halves of our souls.”
“Rune,” she said, her mouth working as she tried to keep from crying, tried to keep her voice steady, “if we could have gone back and undone it, we would have.”
“But you couldn’t and so we all paid. As we continue to do.”
She sighed heavily, blinked back the tears glistening in her eyes and said, “Centuries of incarnations, waiting for the spell to end with the Awakening so we could get the Artifact back and destroy it. Now we have thirty short days to try to set it all right.”
His mouth flattened.
“What do you want from me? What’s done is done. It can’t be changed. It can’t be forgotten. All we can do now is fight this fight. To bring the pieces of the Artifact together again so we can destroy it, once and for all.”
Rune’s gaze moved over her features, from the teardampened eyes to the stubborn tilt of her chin. He wanted to believe in her again. But it was hard to move past centuries of mistrust. He’d spent so many years wandering the earth, his soul an open wound because of the magic she had chosen over him. How was he now to turn his back on hundreds of years’ worth of rage and give her his faith? His gaze dropped to the beginnings of the brand burned into her skin at her nipple and something inside him eased just a bit.
This was not the same, he told himself. Before, the witches had held themselves separate from the Eternals. Though they had been welcomed as partners in sex, they’d been denied the Mating ritual. The coven hadn’t wanted to share magic—not even with a mate.
He touched her tattoo, rubbing his thumb over the physical reminder of her vow to him and his to her. This was more than the two of them had ever shared before. This