Page 51 of A Bloodline Redeemed

I had been nearly dead fortwo hundred years.And Elijah was looking embarrassed because heaccidentally reunited the sundered parts of my soul?!

The realization was closely followed by a heart-rending shot of panic.“Sunny!”

I had heard his voice just seconds before, but I couldn’t feel him inside me, the way I always had.The darkness of the disembodied wraith was still there when I reached out my magical senses, lingering somewhere between the mortal realm and the in between space inhabited by ghosts and other terrors that mortals only dreamed about.I am here.

But he was fading, being called away.To whatever plane wraiths inhabited when they weren’t feeding on mortal terror and souls.

“Sunshine?”I said again, my voice cracking.

Are you sure, Dyre?You have your life back.What the angel has done has strengthened you.But were I to remain, I could not help but feed from you.There will be a cost.To both of us.

“Your freedom and my lifeforce?”I murmured, fully aware that I sounded like I was taking to myself.No one else could see Sunny.Theymightbe able to sense him, but only as a vague, lingering sense of primal fear.

Something like that,Sunshine replied to my question.You could be free, witch.

“I wouldn’t be whole without you,” I said truthfully.Sunny was a part of me now.And I didn’t just mean in a physical or energetic sense.“But I know you have always felt trapped.”

The darkness caressed my newly restored aura, and I shuddered.I do not feel trapped now.But I do not feel… free.I too am changed, Dyre.I am not what I once was.You are a part of me.I think this might be what mortals mean when they say they feel like they are missing a limb.

I nodded, confirming his assumption.It was a very accurate description of what I was feeling right now, and I knew he could sense the wealth of acknowledgement and acceptance in the gesture.“Come home,” I whispered.“Please?”

Insanity.Madness.The only kind of witch who voluntarily welcomed a possession of this magnitude was one with a death wish.Or someone who stupidly overestimated his own strength and importance, and ended up being devoured by the being inside him.

And yet, I didn’t struggle, didn’t resist as the wraith settled inside me, altering my aura, dimming the world, and chilling my body by a few degrees in the process.I didn’t mourn as my nailbeds turned faintly blue again, and the tinge of ancient darkness merged with my aura.No, I didn’t fight; I simply stepped aside and welcomed him in like a long-lost friend.

As Sunshine settled inside my being, I realized the other thing that had been missing had also been restored without my noticing it.My lifebond with Andy hummed with strength and life.My connection to her and my sense of her were stronger and more invigorating than ever before.And with it… I swore I felt a bunch of multicolored threads that had never been there before.My connection with Elijah wasn’t just a maker’s bond anymore.And I could feel all the others as well, as if we werealllifebonded….But how?

A sudden tug at the invisible cord tying me to Andy nearly knocked me over, and a shockwave of magic rippled out from where she lay prone beside me.The color rapidly returned to her skin and hair, like special effects in a human movie, as the magic of the curse that had held her down shattered like shimmering shards of smoky dark glass.

Andy gasped and sat up suddenly, her gray eyes opening and magic swelling around her again, like an oncoming tidal wave.Somewhere behind me, I heard a matching feminine gasp.But the second sound was one of shock and terror, rather than one of life and relief.

It was the gasp of a certain cultist who had probably just seen her life flash before her eyes.Sunny curled inside me, coiling restlessly like a massive, deadly black serpent ready to strike.

It is time,the wraith murmured in my mind, his words laced with a large dose of wicked anticipation and hunger.Finally, it is time.

People were about to learn what happened when they messed with our family.The reckoning was long past due.

I pushed myself to my feet, feeling stronger than ever before, even after my brush with near-death and my reacquisition of an ancient evil entity inside me.As the others gathered round, Andy reached out and took my offered hand, letting me help her to her feet.

Her magic was overwhelming, the strength and depth of it obvious to everyone connected to her—and probably to anyone with even a hint of magical awareness within miles around as well.Whatever had just happened, it had fully blown open the doors she usually kept closed between herself and that deep, staggering Lovell magic.

So many,manypeople were about to die.And that thought sent a primal wave of yearning through me, that I knew wasn’t entirely from Sunshine.

I tore my gaze away from my lifemate just long enough to glance around at the others, to confirm that they felt what I was feeling.The deep, dark surge of ecstasy.Then my gaze was riveted on Andy again, as her eyes began to glow, and her green hair lifted from her shoulders to float on a breeze that didn’t exist on this plane.I shuddered as I drank her in.The most powerful witch I had ever seen.The world was hers.We only waited for her word.One signal from Oleander Lovell, and we would unleash hell on all who had wronged us.

Chapter 30

Andy

ItookDyre’shandandlet him pull me to my feet as power coursed through me.

Old magic.Incredibly powerful magic.Born into my bloodline, amplified and nurtured by generations of Lovells—and the Blaisdell’s before them—through means both dark and light.I understood it better now.The magic was a living, breathing thing inside me.Not an innate force to be tapped and used, but a creature, an entity both natural and created, full of both goodness and wickedness, brought to life by my ancestors.It was love and sly humor, hope and cynical nihilism, a soft sheath of curious creativity wrapped around the sharp blade of dark cleverness.

The magic flowed through me, warm and strong, but more than a little wild.It wanted to be used.To be released out into the world.

But I had grown into someone who was capable of holding the reins.It was up to me whether this all-encompassing, impatient power was unleased upon the world or not.And the magic and I—we both knew it.

I closed my eyes, drawing in a deep breath, centering myself.Grounding myself in the new (or in Dyre and Sunshine’s case, simplystronger) lifebonds that bolstered my already brimming aura.My anchors.They would keep me from letting the magic run away with me.

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