Visions of Magic (10 page)

Yes, they were free of the prison, but not free of the danger. The guards would soon pour out of the camp and begin searching the surrounding woods. They'd have to be long gone by then.

Before he could say anything else, Rune spoke up. “You want to tell me why you rescued her?”

“She knows of another Awakened witch.”

Rune shot the woman a dismissive glance. “Impossible. She's lying. Yours is the first.”

“Shows how much you know,” the witch snapped. She shot a look over her shoulder at the camp as more lights burst into life until the whole compound blazed like a sun in the darkness.

Torin had no patience for arguments between Rune and a witch. There was little time and all of it mattered. He couldn't bear thinking of Shea in a place like this. Surrounded by enemies with no one to turn to. He had to find her.

“You say you know who we are,” he said. “Then you know Eternals can sense the Awakening. We feel the changing pulse in the weave of the universe as one of the chosen comes into her powers.”

“Apparently,” she countered, moonlight glinting in her eyes, “you're not as all-knowing as you would like to think.”

“Then tell me of this witch,” he said, demanding the answers she'd promised him in exchange for her rescue.

“Take this off of me first,” the woman insisted, pointing at the white gold chain draped around her neck.

“You would bargain with me? Again?” He glared at her, but the witch held her ground.

She lifted her chin, met him stare for stare and said, “I would bargain with the devil himself to get as far away from here as possible. I can hardly draw an easy breath with this damn thing around my neck. You know I can't take it off myself. So if you want your answer, free me.”

Rune snorted. “You've a hell of a nerve. We've already saved you. We can just as easily leave you here for the guards to find. With that chain on your neck, you won't go far.”

Torin nodded, watching her to judge her reaction. He knew he wouldn't leave her to the mercies of the prison guards. As an Eternal it was his nature to protect all women—especially women of power. But she didn't have to know that.

“You're not going to leave me here. You can't,” she argued simply. Her gaze shot from Torin to Rune and back again. Her short, spiky hair somehow made her look elfin, vulnerable. “You want the information I hold, so you'll do as I ask and take this weight from my neck.”

When Rune would have continued the argument with the stubborn witch, Torin held up one hand for silence. Behind them, the compound was coming alive. The double doors swung open and a dozen or more armed guards spilled through. The searchlights were a brilliant white against the surrounding darkness and Torin knew they had only moments before they were found. He could grab the witch and flash away with her. But he didn't want to be hampered with the woman in his search for Shea.

The choice was a simple one. Get the information she held or not. Save her or let the guards reclaim her.

The answer was, there was no choice. He would do what he must—as he always had. Without a word, he gathered the fire, focused its strength and touched the tip of one finger to the center links on the white gold chain lying against her skin. The witch held perfectly still, her gaze locked with his.

The flames he called forth were the very essence of magic, so they didn't harm her skin, but a moment after he had channeled his power, the chain's links had melted. Then he simply flicked the offending antimagic device to the ground.

The witch smiled, inhaled deeply and stretched languidly as if she were a cat stepping from a confining cage. She sighed in relief before saying, “Thank you, Eternal.”

Unmoved by her gratitude, Torin dismissed it. “Thank me by keeping your word. Tell me who is this Awakened witch and where is she?”

She slanted her sharp blue eyes on him. A smile curved her mouth as she said, “Her name is Kellyn. And she's standing in front of you, Eternal.”

Then she swept out her arms, tipped her head back and whispered something that struck him as old and powerful. She laughed and was gone an instant later, in a shimmer of movement that seemed to ripple the very air.

“A teleporter,” Rune muttered in disgust.

“As we are,” Torin reminded him. He glanced out to where the prison guards were beginning a concerted sweep of the area. “I don't care that she's gone. But if she was telling the truth, something is very wrong. If Kellyn is Awakened, how is it we didn't sense her coming into her power? And where is her Eternal?”

Eternal and witch were closely bound by the link between them, one created by fates and the old gods. The Eternals, who were created to protect these few special women, instinctively felt when one member of the coven was Awakening. At that time a ripple of awareness moved through the Eternals and the sister witches of the coven. Like a pebble tossed into a lake, the effects of the Awakening echoed within them all.

So how could they have missed the Awakening of another witch?

“What do you mean
where
is he?
Who
is he?” Rune replied.

Over the centuries, the Eternals had drifted apart, each of them watching over the many incarnations of his witch. But being witness to a mate's life and death over and over again during the course of hundreds of years eventually took a toll on all of them. Some elected to disappear, to seek solitude and remain apart from their brothers until the time of the Awakening. Not the wisest course, Torin thought, but understandable.

Still, that left the remaining Eternals with the problem of locating those who had gone missing when they were needed. Now, with the Awakening at last upon them, those absent Eternals should be making themselves known again—if only to guard their own Awakened witches. So if Kellyn had been telling the truth, where, Torin wondered, was her Eternal?

“Should have caught the witch before she teleported out,” Rune told him. “Forced her to talk. Tell us all she knew.”

“We'll find her again,” Torin said, letting the problem go for the moment. Nothing was as important to him as locating Shea. “Just as we'll discover who her Eternal is and why he isn't with her. But for now—”

Rune smiled grimly as the shouts of the prison guards sounded, closer now. “Right. First witch first.”

Torin gave him a brief smile. “Exactly. We find Shea. We go to Long Beach—that's probably where they've taken her. The prison there will be on alert after tonight's business, so we'll have to map out a plan.”

Rune smirked. “They can't keep us out.”

“No, they can't.”

“And if your witch isn't there?”

Torin scowled off into the night, taking in the brilliantly lit prison with the women trapped behind its walls. Carefully tempered rage bubbled within him at the thought of his woman at the hands of prison guards. If they hurt her in any way, he would not leave a stone of their prison standing. “Then we keep looking. Nothing will keep me from her.”

They surrendered themselves to the magic in unison. Flames burst into life and they were gone an instant later. The guards saw nothing and the night held its secrets.

S
hea wandered the open area, grateful to be out of her cell even though there were walls topped with barbed wire surrounding her. She felt the heavy presence of white gold and knew there was plenty of that material placed around the edges of the prison as well. It seemed the chains around their necks were not nearly enough to assuage any fears the guards might have about their prisoners.

But at least, Shea thought, she could see the sky. She tipped her head back, watched seagulls wheeling and dipping in the wind above her and wished with all her heart she could join them.

The “exercise” yard was small, enclosed on all sides by yet more walls, with armed guards standing in turrets at each of the four corners. There were two guards at each post—one watching the prisoners and one scanning the open harbor. She shivered a little at the implication. They were all too prepared for any rescue attempts—not that people were lining up to help a bunch of accused witches.

She shifted her gaze away quickly, not wanting to be caught studying the guards. In the short time she'd been there, she had already learned to keep her head down. To stay under the radar. The nights were long and terrifying in this place. The guards wandered the darkened aisles, crashing their nightsticks against the bars just to watch the women in the cages jump.

Only that morning Officer Jacobs had shoved Shea's face into a wall for daring to look directly at her. Then she'd used her nightstick to deliver a couple of quick blows to Shea's side. The bruises had been horrific, but were already fading, thanks presumably to her newfound magic. The pain was spectacular, but more than anything it was the despair that continued to choke Shea. She couldn't see a way out. Couldn't think of a thing to help herself. And she had heard the stories of torture somewhere in the bowels of this place.

Sooner or later, she knew it would be her turn.

But it wasn't only the guards she had to worry about. There were feds everywhere. Since her arrival, Shea had learned more than she wanted to know about Terminal Island.

The island itself was crowded with federal agencies. There used to be cottages here, before World War II, to house Japanese fishermen and their families, who lived on the island. But then war with Japan had broken out and the Japanese had been forced to give up their land and property and move to detention centers inland. The village was razed. Ironic that now there was a new generation of so-called un-Americans who had been sent to Terminal Island. The prison itself took up a small portion of this island once used for off-loading cargo.

New cottages and apartment buildings had been hastily built for the use of the jailers and their superiors. The entire place was a fortified, secured center. To keep the women in and others out.

She watched her fellow prisoners. Women rambled around the enclosure in pairs and alone. Some sat and talked quietly while others walked aimlessly, around and around in circles. One or two simply sat on benches and cried. Nowhere to go, nowhere to run, but being able to move outside the tiny cell they spent most of their time in felt like a vacation.

In the two days she'd been there, Shea had already noticed that the two distinct groups of prisoners—the ordinary human women swept up in a tide of fear, and the women of power, women with witchcraft humming through their veins—acted as one outside the cells. Though they were all different, they were also all in the same boat. Amazing, really, that women who would have, in the outside world, been the first to spit on a witch . . . in here, were compatriots with them. Linked together against a common enemy.

Their captors.

For years, Shea had been running and hiding. Odd to finally find a fatalistic peace in the very prison she'd been trying to avoid.

“Ms. Jameson?”

Shea jolted at the sound of her name and whirled around, expecting a guard, and then laughed silently at her own stupidity. No guard here would be calling her “Ms.”

A short blond woman with anxious blue eyes hurried up to her.

“It
is
you.” The woman grabbed Shea's hand and held on, as if clinging to a life rope in a roiling sea. She took a shuddering breath, blew it out again and said, “I thought I recognized you, but I never expected to see you here. Although I never thought to find myself here, either.”

Shea's mind scrambled to find the woman's identity. In the last day or so she'd been through so much, seen so much, she could hardly string two coherent thoughts together beyond the one all-consuming one:
Get Me. Out. Of. Here!
But as the woman continued to talk, it finally dawned on Shea where she knew her from.

School. This was the mother of Amanda Hall. The very girl Shea had been talking to when all of this madness had started.

“It's Terri, isn't it? Terri Hall?” Shea said when the woman wound down.

“Yes,” She whipped her hair out of her eyes and looked around quickly, making sure no one was close by. “I met you at parent-teacher conference night last month. God, that seems like years ago now. Amazing how fast things can change. How long have you been here, Ms. Jameson?”

“Call me Shea. Just a day or two.”

“Then you must have seen my Amanda since my arrest. Is she all right?”

All right but terrified,
Shea thought but couldn't bring herself to say it. No more than she'd tell this poor woman that talking to her daughter had started the slippery slope and landed Shea in prison. Terri Hall was locked away from her daughter and Shea couldn't even imagine the terror the woman must be feeling. Especially since, unlike Shea, Terri hadn't done a damn thing to deserve this. Instinctively, she reached out to soothe and comfort.

“Amanda's fine,” she said, squeezing Terri's hand. “I saw her at school and told her to stay with her grandmother and not to go back to school.”

“Good, that's good,” Terri muttered. “I still can't believe any of this is happening. I'm not a witch, for heaven's sake. One of my neighbors told the MPs that she saw me lighting candles and saying a spell.” She laughed shortly and wrapped her arms around her middle as she lifted her gaze to the soaring sky above them. “I was saying a prayer for my husband. He died last year.”

“I'm so sorry.” It was all crazy and getting worse every day. Ten years after the existence of magic had been revealed, and people were still reacting out of fear.

Terri nodded and sighed. “Thanks. I'm just so worried about Amanda. And my mom. What if they're arrested next?”