the magic of sex to restore their body’s energies. But he couldn’t afford to waste time worrying about whether he would be strong enough to free Shea once he found her. Instead, he would push himself to the very limits of his abilities. And if an enemy caught him at a weak moment? He would still find a way.
For Shea, there was nothing he wouldn’t do.
Wouldn’t risk.
“We go now,” he ordered.
Rune nodded.
And in an instant the flames winked out and all that was left on the road were the ever-spreading shadows.
Chapter 8
“That wasn’t so hard,” one of the men said from the back of the van.
Shea lay at his feet, stretched out on a smelly gray carpet. There were no interior lights in what had to be a cargo van. A row of seats ran along each side of the vehicle while she lay like an offering on an altar in front of the men celebrating her capture. There were three of them back here with her, and one driving.
They’d sent four men to capture one witch.
She didn’t know whether to be amused, flattered or even more scared. Clearly, the worldwide fear of magic was growing. They were taking no chances anymore.
The shadows were thick inside the van, but as they whizzed along the freeway, the outside lights flashed across the faces of her captors like a rhythmical, painfully bright strobe.
She wasn’t comforted by what she saw.
These men looked hard and cold. Their features were taut and their eyes were bright with both fear and excitement. That didn’t bode well for her. The older ones were watching her warily, while the one young recruit in the bunch had more than curiosity shining in his eyes. There was a raw hunger there, too. Shea inched a little farther away from him.
The men noticed her slight movement and a booted foot came down on her middle. “You just lay there, witch. Don’t try a damn thing. You hear me?”
She shivered, nodded and avoided meeting their gazes again, not wanting to give them any reason to get rougher with her than they had already. Magic Police. Legal bullies, she thought, trying to keep her features from betraying her thoughts.
The MPs were one of the first agencies that had sprung up after magic had been outed to the world. Headlines around the globe trumpeted the news that all of those sleazy tabloid papers had been right all along. Magic did exist. The public outcry for protection from so-called deviants had resulted in every nation pushing through legislation to somehow identify and then secure supposed witches. It had sounded reasonable even to Shea at the time, despite the fact that her own aunt Mairi had been the first witch to be captured in the United States.
Locating and securing women of power had seemed a logical response. Of course it would be safer for these women to be studied and kept from hurting anyone else. Her aunt hadn’t meant to kill, any more than Shea herself had.
While the general population ranted about public safety, Congress and other bodies like it had kept cool heads, talking only about security.
But even laws written with the best of intentions sometimes became another entity entirely over time. Mairi’s execution had heralded the first change. And during the last ten years, the agencies formed to keep witches secure had instead become jailers and executioners. All under the legal government stamp of approval.
People didn’t care what happened to a witch—as long as she wasn’t living in their neighborhood.
As with anything else, though, there were underground movements within movements. Just as BOW and the MPs had gained in authority and popularity, there were other groups equally dedicated in their own way to finding the witches. Religious zealots saw a witch’s power as an affront to God. The Seekers hunted witches in the hopes of somehow stealing their powers for themselves. The RFW, Rights for Witches, struggled and fought through the court system, claiming that a witch was entitled to basic human rights.
Everyone wanted something from the magic community, which was now so deeply in hiding that most of the women captured by hunters were ordinary humans, with no powers at all. Just as with the Salem witch trials so long ago, all it took was innuendo, rumor or an enemy with a grudge, and any woman could find herself locked away with little hope of eventual release.
Shea still couldn’t understand how any of this was happening—not in general, but to her in particular.