Persecuted. Lisa Childs
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knowledge of his affair. She’d “seen” him with another woman. At first she’d passed those images off as she had her others, figments of her overactive imagination or products of stress or paranoia. Finally she’d forced herself to face the truth about her sham of a marriage…and herself.
She didn’t love Kirk; maybe she never had, because she’d never trusted him enough to tell him anything about her past or herself. During college their relationship had been mostly superficial and fun, things that Elena’s life had never been. But their relationship had never really deepened, despite marriage, despite the beautiful four-year-old daughter they shared, and it had stopped being fun a long time ago. Sick of all the lies, his and hers, she’d finally filed for divorce.
For so long Elena hadn’t been able to discern truth from fiction. Although she hadn’t seen her mother in twenty years, she could hear her lilting voice echoing in her head with the words of a gypsy proverb, There are such things as false truths and honest lies.
When she’d been taken away from her mother two decades ago, she had also been separated from her younger half sisters. She’d only recently reconnected with Ariel. Elena had been twelve, Ariel nine and their youngest sister, Irina, just four when social services had taken them away from their mother. They’d never seen Mother again. Alive.
Ariel had seen her dead, though. Her sister could see people after they passed away. She hadn’t wanted to see Elena and Irina for the first time in two decades the way she had their mother, so she’d searched for her sisters to warn them that someone had started a witch hunt. She hadn’t found Irina yet, and had only stumbled across Elena by accident.
But Elena had already known about the witch hunt because of her dreams. She’d fought so hard to suppress her visions, to convince herself that they weren’t real. When her sister had found her, Elena had had to admit to the truth, if only to herself.
The visions were why Elena was cursed, not the three-hundred-and-fifty-year-old vendetta that had started the first witch hunt. One of Elena’s Durikken ancestors had been accused of killing the female members of the McGregor family and was burned at the stake. But like Elena, she’d seen her future and urged her daughter to run. That child, for whom Elena was named, had found safety, and she’d continued the Durikken legacy, passing on to her children the special abilities that people mistook for witchcraft.
Now someone else had resurrected the vendetta that Eli McGregor had begun three and a half centuries ago, of ritualistically killing all witches. Elena had dreamed, sleeping and awake, of his murders. While she saw his victims, she hadn’t seen the killer; she couldn’t identify him. Helplessness and frustration churned in her stomach, gnawing at the lining like ulcers.
“I don’t want this!” she insisted to the empty room, as she had for so many years.
Leaning over, she wrapped her fingers around the handle of the nightstand drawer and pulled with such force that the drawer dropped onto the floor. Papers flew out, scattering across the thick beige carpet. Her copy of the divorce papers. Her husband refused to sign his. She couldn’t continue their farce of a marriage, which had been over long ago and was past time to officially end. If only she was a witch, like the legend claimed, then she could cast a spell on Kirk and make him go away forever. Somehow she suspected that a big check would do the job.
Elena rolled out of bed and dropped to her knees on the floor. Instead of picking up the papers, she pushed them aside. In the dim light, she couldn’t see what she sought. Blindly she ran her fingertips through the carpet, raking it, until her nails grazed warm metal. She dug the pewter charm from the thick fibers, then dropped the little star, the tips dulled with age, into her palm. Twenty years ago her mother had pressed the star upon her, telling Elena that as well as keeping her safe, the charm would ensure that she never forgot who or what she was.
Images flashed in her mind like snapshots. A woman hanging. Another woman crushed beneath rocks. Another woman burning. Pain knotted her stomach and pounded at her temples. Her hands fisted, the points of the star digging into her palm.
She didn’t want to remember those horrifying images.
She didn’t want to be a witch.
She lurched to her feet and staggered to the bathroom. She lifted the lid to the toilet and dropped the little pewter charm into the water. Drops splashed up from inside the bowl, spattering the rim, as the star bobbed. Hand trembling, she reached for the handle. Maybe flushing the charm would stop the visions and make Elena normal. Her fingers closed around the metal handle, which was cool unlike the charm. The little star radiated warmth, always.
Her sister believed the charms held some special power to protect them, that if all three sisters united with the charms, they could stop the witch hunt. Elena’s fingers slipped away from the handle. Then she reached into the bowl and pulled the star from the water. She’d held on to the charm too long to get rid of it now. Even though Elena didn’t share Ariel’s beliefs, she didn’t want to shatter her sister’s hope.
Her breath coming in shallow pants, she moved to the sink, turning on the gold-plated faucets to wash off the charm and her hands. Because of the soap, she kept a firm hold on the piece of metal, careful not to lose the star down the drain. She glanced at her image in the mirror, the disheveled blond hair, the wild light blue eyes, the silk chemise nightgown baring her shoulders.
“Liar,” she called herself. She hadn’t just lied to her sister when she’d claimed that the charms held no power; she had lied to herself, about so many things.
The marble floor cold beneath her bare feet, Elena walked from the bathroom. With one hand, she fitted the drawer back into the nightstand, then laid the star inside. The charm’s warmth had already dried it, so it glistened in the soft glow of the Tiffany lamp.
Over the years Elena had many times considered tossing out the charm, but she always refrained. No matter how hard she’d tried to forget her past, a part of her had been unwilling to let go. With the witch hunt resurrected, that part would either prove her salvation…or her demise.
* * *
Elena had no idea how long she’d been asleep when moist lips touched her shoulder, gliding over the bare skin. Her pulse quickening, she murmured and shifted against the bed, struggling to awaken. She dragged in a deep breath, the scent of citrus soap and musk.
This was not her husband joining her in bed. He wasn’t even down the hall tonight; he was out of town. But when he’d been around, he hadn’t touched her, not for a long time. From the way he’d started looking at her, with uneasiness and a trace of fear, he might have figured out that his wife wasn’t normal. Perhaps he’d picked up clues from her nightmares, or from the things she knew before he told her.
The lips moved, nibbling along her shoulder to her neck. The brush of moist, hot breath raised goose bumps along her skin. The blanket lowered, pushed aside by impatient hands. Then those strong, clever hands ran over her body, skimming down her arms, then around her waist and over her hips. Sometime during the night, even though the air blowing through her windows was cool in mid-May in western Michigan, she had removed her nightgown. Nothing separated her skin from his as his body brushed against hers.
“Elena,” a deep voice whispered in her ear, his hot breath stirring her hair and her senses. “You’re ready for me.”
Excitement pulsed in her veins, and she opened her eyes, staring up into his face as he leaned over her. Desire had darkened his eyes so that only a thin circle of green rimmed his enlarged pupils. A muscle jumped in his cheek, shadowed with the beard clinging to his square jaw.
“Elena, I want you.” His biceps bulged as he braced his arms on the mattress on either side of her, trapping her beneath the long, hard length of his body. His voice deepened to a throaty growl as he told her, “I want to bury myself so deep inside you that you’ll feel me