He hadn’t always, he remembered. Once he’d been a teacher, like her. Once he’d faced classrooms filled with young faces etched with boredom and had tried to teach them history. Until his own world had shattered and then what had once happened in ancient Rome had become less important than what was happening now. History was being rewritten. The entire human race was under attack. And it was up to people like him to protect the innocent from the damned.
His gaze shifted to the photo attached to the dashboard of his jeep. A smiling woman looked out at him from the faded image and everything in him tightened with determination. Focus. She hadn’t seen her attacker coming. Hadn’t known that the neighbor she trusted would one day “lose control” of a power no one should possess.
The explosion had rocked the neighborhood.
His house had gone up like a torch and the wife and child he’d left sleeping when he went to work were dead in an instant.
The witch next door had escaped the blast, of course. Her power had saved her.
Until Landry had found her, six months later.
Just as he would find this one.
And when he did, she wouldn’t be going back to detention.
Chapter 20
“You’re remembering,” Torin said, glancing at her. “That’s good.”
“Not from my point of view.” She was shivering from a cold seeping through her body that was almost as debilitating as the ice she’d felt from the white gold. But this went deeper. Into her bones. Her soul.
Shaken, she tried to pin down that memory even as it slipped away, back into the mists from which it had come. A part of her was grateful.
“You have to remember, Shea,” he said. “All of it.”
“Do you? I mean, were you there?” She shook her head, closed her eyes briefly and swallowed a rise of nausea. “You were, weren’t you? In the shadows. I couldn’t see you. But I felt you. I knew you were there, trying to reach me.”
“And failing.”
No, she thought wildly, he hadn’t failed. She had. She and the others. He had tried to get to her but hadn’t been able to fight through the wards her sisters and she had set in place to keep him and his brothers out. The memory came back again and this time she wasn’t swept into the action, but could look at it objectively. As if it had happened to someone else.
And hadn’t it?
Shea had always believed in reincarnation in the abstract. After all, it seemed unreasonable to assume that humans were allotted a measly eighty or so years only to wink off into oblivion. The universe was too intricately designed, too vast for her to accept that life was so brief. Besides, even in high school, she had accepted that past lives affected the way you lived this life. Why else could you instantly feel either affinity or enmity for a complete stranger when meeting for the first time?
So, yeah, reincarnation made sense to her. But accepting punishment for something she had done in another lifetime was a little hard to grasp. Could she really be held responsible for something done hundreds of years ago?
Shea fought to steady her heartbeat, ease her breathing, but it wasn’t helping. Nothing was helping. The echoes of that memory still rippled through her system, making her shake with both fear and something all too like excitement.
Her stomach rolled and bile rushed her throat. She swallowed hard and lowered her window as they careened along the freeway, dodging in and out of traffic as if by . . . well, magic. Even the cold didn’t stop her from wanting the slap of fresh air in her face. Her hair flew out into a tangle and she had to push it out of her eyes.
“In the memory,” she managed to say, “I’m me, but . .. not.”
“I know.”
“In prison, I had a different dream. About—”
How to tell him that she’d dreamed of sex with him that was so hot she’d awakened sweating and so needy she’d had to touch herself just to ease the pain? No. Wouldn’t be going there. Not yet. “You were there. And I was living in a cottage and it was hundreds of years ago, but I knew that place. That person that I was then. And I knew you.”
“You always know me,” he told her and she studied his profile in the flash of streetlights as they passed them. His