what she was talking about, don’t you?”
His eyes were fierce now, flashing with the warrior gleam she was coming to know so well.
“You’re sure she said Serena.”
“Hard to mistake that name. It’s pretty different.” She stared into his eyes. “You know who she is.”
“So do you,” he muttered. Just hearing that name opened up a treasure trove of memories inside him, thick as tar and just as appealing. “You just don’t remember yet.”
“What’re you—” She stopped and took a breath. “I knew her then? In the past?”
“You could say that,” he replied. “You were Serena.”
Chapter 40
“I was…when?”
“Does it matter?” Rune didn’t want to talk about that incarnation. The memory pained him. At the moment, he would have liked nothing better than to kick the ghostly ass of Elena’s spirit for bringing it up.
“Of course it matters. Elena said it mattered and now, looking at your face, I can see that your memories of Serena aren’t exactly cheerful ones, so, yeah. I’d like to know what everyone else knows.”
He released her and stalked across the cave, needing to put some distance between them. “You should let your own memories surface. Remember this on your own.”
“Do we have time for that?” she countered. “I’m working at dredging up the memories, but so far I’m not getting much. If Elena thinks Serena’s spells can help, then wouldn’t knowing the truth help, too?”
Irritated and unsettled by the past suddenly encroaching on his present, Rune spun to look at her. The sight of her mating tattoo circling her breast and beginning to spread to her back eased him, though. The past was dead and now they were approaching a future that had been too long in coming. “You want the truth? Fine. Serena was a treacherous bitch. Happy?”
“Thrilled,” she said tightly. “Now tell me the rest.”
“It was 1530,” he told her. “In London. You worked at a tavern there and were drawn to witchcraft even though you had no power. You think the witch hunters now are fierce?” He gave a short, hard laugh. “Back then, they were on a mission from God and were damn relentless about it.”
“I’ve read about it.”
He gave her a cold smile. “You lived it, too. You just don’t remember it yet.”
“So tell me.”
“You were separated from your magic because of the atonement, but your soul was still drawn to the craft,” he said, bringing it all back in his mind in a churning mass of images. “We were together, until you ran afoul of the tribunal. Someone saw you with a woman of power, trying to learn to do spellwork, and turned you in. To save your own ass, you handed me to them. Set me up to be trapped. You had your witch friend cast a spell to hold me so the ‘good people’ of London could beat me down.”
“Oh, God …”
With time and distance, the immediacy of her betrayal had lost the emotional punch it once had. But the bitterness remained. He looked down into her profoundly familiar eyes and saw Serena as she had been that last night. As she had stood with his captors, decrying him as an unnatural “thing.”
“Rune …”
He shook his head. “Her spell couldn’t hold me for long. I flashed out and later I discovered that once I was gone, the crowd turned on you. I returned the following day to confront you, but—” He hesitated.
“Finish,” she whispered brokenly.
“—you were dead. They burned you and the witch at the stake for consorting with demons.”
She closed her eyes, took another deep breath and blew it out in a heavy sigh. “Well, that explains a lot.”
“Really?” he asked wryly.
“You look at me and see her,” Teresa said, turning her eyes up to him. “I can’t really blame you. But, Rune, I’m not that woman. I made a promise to you. I’m your mate and I’m not going to turn on you like she did.”
“Serena didn’t plan to turn on me, either,” he told her flatly.
She walked to him and laid both hands on his bare chest. Rune felt a rush of heat spill from her body into his. It wiped away the chill of his memories and pushed thoughts of betrayal back into the past.
“I can’t change what I—she—did.” She shook her head and frowned. “Every time I find out one more hideous piece of a past I don’t remember, it makes me want to scream. But I can’t do anything to change it. All I can do is be who I am now.