depths, making him look exactly what he was—dangerous.
“You were already hunted as a witch. Now maybe those tracking you will think twice before approaching.”
“Do you really believe that?”
He shrugged and gave her a tired smile. “No, but it doesn’t matter anyway. We are the magic, Teresa. We won’t hide from it any longer. Instead, we will embrace it and do what we’re expected to do.”
His words, the forceful way he said them, all seemed as though he was asking her to make a pledge of faithfulness to their shared duty. He wasn’t just talking. He was looking for confirmation from her that she was with him. And she was. Whatever else was going on around them, she knew that she belonged at this Eternal’s side. At least until they had completed their mission.
“What is it you want from me?”
“I want to believe in you. Your loyalty,” he ground out. “To me. To this task. I want to know that you’ll see it through this time.”
She bristled a bit at being reminded again that in her past lives she had been less than trustworthy. And now that she had remembered just enough to make her feel shame for choices long since made, she liked it even less. She hated knowing that in another lifetime she had been … dangerous. Paying for your sins was right, she supposed. But paying for sins you committed as another woman entirely just didn’t seem fair at all. Still, there was no choice but to move ahead, so she swallowed the emotions nearly choking her and solemnly nodded. “I will.”
He studied her for a long minute or two, then finally inclined his head in a nearly regal sign of acceptance. That bristled, too, but it had already been a long enough day and she didn’t really have the energy for an argument, so she let it go.
Taking her arm, he steered her deeper into the darkness. She turned back for one last look at the mouth of the cave and the glimpse of the starry sky and the open desert beyond. “But what about Chico?”
“I’m not going back for him. Not now, anyway,” Rune said.
“No.” As much as it pained her to think of her pet alone in the wild, she could admit that returning to the village immediately was a bad idea. So that was one more thing she had lost on this perilous journey. Her last link with home. With normalcy. With the life she had lived before this huge man had crashed into it.
As she walked beside Rune, she felt fatigue begin to claw at her. With the adrenaline rush draining away, her legs felt like lead weights and just putting one foot in front of the other became a herculean task. “How far back does this cave go, anyway?”
“Just a bit farther.”
His voice echoed off the rocks in a low rumble of sound, but despite what he said, it seemed as if they walked miles more. Finally, though, Rune stopped, called on the fire and she watched as blue and yellow flames danced into life around his hand. Then he touched a cold torch stuck into a stanchion on the wall and light surged quickly into life around the enclosure.
“Oh, my,” Teresa whispered, walking farther into the spacious cavern.
When she had entered this cave, she had expected to spend the evening huddled around a miserly campfire in a dank, cold space. This had never entered her mind.
The room they stepped into was carved out of the rock and it was massive. There were stalactites of purest crystal jutting from the ceiling in a wide array of colors and Teresa could feel the magical energy humming from them. Rune threw fire to other torches ringing the room, tails of flame that danced to his whims and settled over the dry torches with a rush of sound and a quick flare of light. The walls came alive in the flickering radiance and Teresa saw that there were more crystals sparkling in them. As each torch caught fire, smoke drifted toward cleverly hidden holes in the ceiling.
“Won’t people see the smoke?” she asked, staring at the rough-hewn rock overhead. “And then find us?”
“No,” Rune said, continuing to throw fire at the remaining torches until the last of the shadows were pushed back into the corners and the crystals on the walls burst into glittering life and color. “The holes lead to ventilation shafts that draw the smoke to still more holes and through other tunnels,