in her chest as she realized that she was becoming what she once was and couldn’t stop it. Couldn’t end it. Couldn’t seem to pry her fingers off the Artifact.
“History’s repeating itself, Shea,” Torin said, his voice sharp as a blade, his pale eyes locked on her face.
Shea looked into his gaze and saw her own reflection staring back at her. But this was the face of a long-dead witch. One who’d gambled and lost. One who had so endangered her soul, she’d set herself on an eight-hundred-year journey of atonement. And for what? So that she could make the same mistakes over and over again?
A battle rose up within her. A battle for supremacy.
The witch against the power of the Artifact.
Against her own hunger.
Chapter 47
Shea’s terrified gaze fixed on his. “Torin, it’s much stronger than it was in the old days. It’s as if it’s been gathering power through the centuries and the longer it was here, unused, untapped, the stronger it became.”
“You must fight it, Shea,” he told her, coming toward her, one slow step at a time, as if sneaking up on the magical metal she held so closely. “If our mating bond is shattered before completion, if you pull away from me now, both of our souls will die.”
She hadn’t known that, but she instinctively recognized it as truth. A truth she couldn’t allow to happen. She shuddered, a great, wrenching, full-body shudder that snapped her teeth together and locked her bones in a painful grip.
Lightning slashed the sky in jagged bolts. Thunder shook the ruin. Even the ground beneath their feet seemed to roll and quake with the gathering power.
“Take it,” she ground out. “Take it from me, Torin.”
He looked into her eyes and shook his head. “You have to give it to me freely, Shea. You have to willingly give away that power.”
She knew he was right. Her mind was shrieking at her to do it. To uncurl her tight fingers from the black silver. Hand it to Torin and reclaim her own soul from the darkness. But it was so hard to fight her body’s demands. Hard to fight against that rush of magic spilling into her.
Shea locked her gaze on Torin’s. She gathered herself and concentrated solely on the Eternal in front of her. In his pale gray eyes, she saw love. Acceptance. Loyalty. She clung to the strength of those emotions. She thought of her own journey. All she’d been through in the last month. Her soul felt divided, one half leaning toward the light, the other toward the dark. She was torn, literally, between two desires, each of them as strong as the other.
And there was Torin. Still standing in front of her. Steadfastly watching her with love, with trust. She nodded, reached for her own strength deep within herself and slowly she forced herself to stretch out her cupped hands to him. To painfully open her cramped fingers from around the black silver, which had shifted shape in her grasp, becoming once more a slice of an ancient Celtic knot.
She looked down at the metal lying in the center of her palms, felt herself yearn, then deliberately released it.
Torin caught the Artifact, then reached out to grab her as she dropped in a dead faint.
Shea woke up, drew a deep breath and was relieved to feel that she was her true self again. She picked up a long hank of her hair, glanced at it and sighed to see the familiar dark red. “Torin?”
She sat up, looked around the ruined chapel and finally spotted her Eternal in the shadows. “Torin? Are you okay?”
“It is . . . difficult.” His voice sounded hollow, different.
Scrambling to her feet, Shea rushed to him, drawing him from the darkness, only to see that the changes that had overtaken her were now affecting him. His familiar gray eyes were black as pitch. His hair was even darker than before and his clothing too was night black. “Oh, God.”
Had he saved her only to lose himself?
He kept one hand fisted around the Artifact and she knew the burn of power he was experiencing. She reached for him and wasn’t dissuaded when he lurched backward, away from her touch. Insistently, she laid one hand on his broad chest and let the connection between the two of them strengthen him.
“You have to drop that thing, Torin,” she told him, her gaze searching the black pits of his eyes, looking for a flicker of recognition there. “Let it