“I was on a hill. In the distance I could see the river, but I wasn’t near London. The air was too clean. And I could see a village below me,” she told him.
“Do you know the location?”
“Not exactly. I don’t even remember my original name, but I do know that I was surrounded by a coven of angry witches.”
His excitement faded at the edge of pain in her voice. “Were you attacked?”
She shuddered. The bitter fury of the women condemning her to death might have happened two hundred years ago, but it felt agonizingly fresh. Probably because the memory had just been exposed. Her ability to process and heal from what had happened to her would take time.
“I was trapped and burned at the stake.”
Heat blasted through the limo as Azh’s eyes swirled with thunderclouds. “Who?”
“I don’t know any names, but I’m sure it was a coven of witches. I think they were pissed that my magic had flared and I was becoming a mage.” Her lips twisted into a bitter smile. “Although it turned out to be worthless. I might as well have stayed human.”
With a low growl, Azh reached to frame her face in his hands, gazing down at her with a fierce expression.
“Never say that you’re worthless,” he rasped. “You have more power than any mage I’ve ever encountered.”
Wynn tilted back her head, easily becoming distracted by the lightning that danced at the back of the smoky gray eyes. So much raw power. So much raw passion. So much raw...dragon. Glorious, sexy, and possessive.
With an effort, she forced herself to finish revealing her memories. “Anyway, I had a vision of being surrounded by the flames and then falling into a deep pit. I think I was dying but then I was surrounded by a silver light that healed my burns.”
“A silver light?” He considered the various possibilities. “That must have been Gabriela,” he at last concluded.
She shrugged. “Maybe.”
“What do you remember about the pit?”
“Nothing much. A lot of barren rock. And of course, the silver light was there.” She took a minute to consider what else she’d seen. Her vision had been limited by the blinding glow. And worse, the memories were beginning to fade. As if they were being slowly erased again. “After I was healed I noticed the silver light was threaded with streaks of green. I assume it had to be the corruption attacking it.”
“Was there a statue?” he pressed.
“I didn’t see one, but I wasn’t really looking,” she admitted. “Oh, and there was also another magic. I could see the shimmer of it coming through a crack in the wall.”
“Dragon magic?”
“I wasn’t paying enough attention to do more than get a glimpse of it,” she admitted. “I was too busy trying to get out of the pit while the weird powers were distracted fighting each other.” She paused again. “I think I heard the pit collapsing behind me, but I don’t know why. My next memory is stumbling toward the river.”
Azh studied her with a fierce intensity, visibly trying to imagine what had happened to her all those years ago, and why.
“Maybe you didn’t get your magic from an artifact,” he at last suggested, as if the thought was just forming in his mind. “Maybe Gabriela shared a portion of her powers to heal you and your particular ability allowed you to absorb the magic.”
Wynn jerked her face out of his grasp, still not comfortable with the thought the dragon magic was inside her. Especially not when it might be the sole reason Azh was so interested in her.
“I’ve never been able to absorb the magic directly from the user,” she stubbornly protested.
Easily sensing she didn’t want to discuss the bright light or Gabriela, Azh leaned back to regard her with a searching gaze.
“Okay, tell me why you want to find Axton.”
Wynn readily latched onto the change in conversation. She didn’t want to dwell on the creepy unease that there was more than an echo of distant magic inside her.
“Because of something Malis said about my medallion,” she said, reaching into her pocket where she’d unconsciously shoved the necklace after she’d released the curse that destroyed the demon.
Azh arched a brow as he watched her pull it out. “He recognized it?”
“He claimed he used it to track me to the pawnshop. He wasn’t happy when the medallion was there and I wasn’t. I assume that’s why he destroyed the place.”
