to his story. He omitted place names and other identifiers, but there were a few clues, like his ties to the railroad industry, that gave her enough fuel for some conjecture.
If her guess was right about his language of origin, then he had lived in the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. She rifled through her history education. The war that broke out… could it have been World War I?
Her coffee had gone cold, but she sipped it anyway as she watched him. The spring sun threw shadows over his expression. There was a rough elegance to the strong bones of his face and frame, a sense of tough endurance that had enormous appeal. The more contact she had with him, the stronger that appeal grew.
She still wasn’t sure she liked him. But she was beginning to understand how difficult events had shaped his nature, and when push came to shove, he had been there for her multiple times. Astonishingly so.
“If only we could talk to our younger selves,” she muttered wryly. “Think of the pitfalls we could have avoided.”
“I wouldn’t skip one of them.” His voice turned hard. “Each one taught me something. I survived, and I’ll never be trapped by those mistakes again.”
Respect stirred. She tilted her coffee mug at him. “Good attitude.”
He gave her a cynical smile. “Having said that, the next several years of my life were a nightmare. The man I went to see was a court favorite and had powerful influence over the royal family. He was a very old witch—and there’s something you should know about very old witches. If you choose, as some of us do, to extend your life, eventually our Power runs down and our human bodies rebel as the longevity spell fades. Then what you would have fallen prey to during your normal lifespan will still occur, and often it hits harder. Cancers, heart attacks, strokes, dementia, renal failure. The longevity spell only delays the inevitable. In my opinion, it’s well worth it to live potentially hundreds of years, but eventually every witch faces a choice. Either they exit their lives with integrity, or they steal what is forbidden—someone else’s Power.”
“Oh no,” she murmured. The ache in her fingers made her realize she was gripping her mug too hard. She made a deliberate choice to relax.
“Oh, yes. I had a lot of Power, and I didn’t know what to do with it. As worldly as I had become about everything else, I was helpless as a baby about this one thing. And that old witch had made his choice long before me to feed off the Power in others. At his behest, the royal family threw me in prison on trumped-up charges, where I was held indefinitely. He had access to see me whenever he wanted. Every time my Power started to return, he sucked me dry until I’d forgotten what it was like to live without a raw, empty wound at my core. That went on for years.”
She swallowed. “I can’t imagine. It’s been bad enough to lose mine for a few hours. How did you keep from going crazy?”
He raised one eyebrow. “You’re assuming I haven’t.”
“You’re hard and single-minded, and you can be thoughtless, but you’re not crazy,” she said with certainty. “How did you get free?”
“He disappeared for a while. I found out later someone had tried to assassinate him. Everyone thought he was dead. I believe he took the opportunity to reinvent himself. It’s an old tactic many of us have used. Historically, long-lived witches have not been welcome in many communities. Sometimes they’ve been hunted and burned—and the royal court hadn’t realized he was a witch.”
“Nobody noticed anything odd about him?”
He gave a cynical shrug. “He’d been known as a holy man who performed miracles of healing on their prince, but they didn’t call that magic. They called it religion.” After a pause, he continued. “Then there was a revolution—well, two, actually—and the royal family was slaughtered. The world went to hell. I escaped in the chaos and eventually relocated here. I soaked up every scrap of magical knowledge I could find and studied law. I trained to become the best fighter I could and a crack shot, and when I got enough experience, I started a careful, patient search for him.”
“You’re sure he’s still alive?”
“I’m positive.” His expression turned thoughtful. “I wasn’t his first victim, and I was far from his last. I’ve been able to build up a