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“I believed we had no choice, so I did as she asked. I did it for Cassidy, because a child deserves to have a mother who can hold her without fear of what might come of a close embrace.” He had tried to shove the memory to the back of his mind, but it came roaring back in vivid detail. “We conducted the ceremony under the full moon, at the right time of night.” And in the center of the stone circle, though he wasn’t ready to tell her that much.
“It worked, the spell was successful. But as I warned you when you asked me to remove your abilities, there was a cost.” A high cost, one he had never expected. “More than her powers were taken. After that night, Sybil was never the same. She no longer controlled fire. She could no longer hurt her child with a touch. But her personality was entirely different, and her memories were muddled. She knew me, but she didn’t love me anymore. She was often confused about the smallest things, and the baby...”
He took a deep breath so he could continue. “Cassidy was always special. When she was less than a year old, her favorite toys would drift across the room into her arms. Music, lullabies, drifted out of thin air. Sometimes when she cried, it would rain. In the house.” He had been so confused. So...young and lost and alone. To have a daughter who revealed her abilities so young, and so strongly, had turned his life upside down. “Sybil became jealous of the baby. She also missed her own abilities, felt empty without them.” The combination had been a deadly one.
The truth. The dark truth he had tried for so long to shove to the back of his mind. “When Cassidy was two, Sybil attempted to take the child’s powers for herself. The spell she found and attempted to use required the sacrificial death of her own daughter.” He didn’t tell her that he’d found them just in time, that Sybil had stabbed him when he’d interfered and then she’d gone for Cassidy.
He didn’t tell Echo that he’d spun Sybil around and carried her into the next room of their small cottage before driving the knife through her heart, because he didn’t want Cassidy to see her mother die that way. As close as he and Echo were, as easily as her thoughts touched his, perhaps he didn’t have to. He tried so hard not to think about that night, not to remember the pain. Did she see?
“If I had to do it again, I would,” he said so she would know that he had no regrets.
Echo walked toward him, and he knew her well enough, saw into her strongly enough, to see that her anger and shock had faded. She was no longer afraid of him. She understood in a way no one else ever had. For that alone, he could love her.
She walked into his arms, tipped her face up and kissed him. Gently, tenderly. With love. Her fingers found the scar on his chest and she caressed it through the shirt he wore.
“You still don’t trust me,” she whispered.
“I don’t trust anyone but my daughter,” he said honestly.
His statement didn’t anger her, didn’t hurt her feelings. “I won’t tell my cousins or anyone else about Cassidy, I promise you. And I won’t tell them about the stones, either.”
He grimaced. This was the price he paid for letting her into his heart, into his mind. “You saw them through me?”
“I did.” She pressed a warm palm to his chest, directly over the scar. “There are many stone circles in the world. Yours is just one of them. It’s a very powerful place. I suppose it’s the reason so many gifted people live in Cloughban.”
Why lie? She would know. “Yes.”
“Do the stones feed your abilities?”
“Yes,” he said, waiting for the next question. “They also help me with my own control. I know that sounds odd, that they can make my abilities stronger and at the same time allow me to find that control, but that’s the way it’s always been.”
She leaned in, sharing her body heat, showing him in every way that her short-lived fear was gone. He liked having her there more than he should. No matter how close they were, no matter how connected...she could not stay.
“What exactly are your abilities?” she asked. “You’re more than a teacher and a mayor. More than a barkeep and a concerned father. What can you do?”
He sighed before looking deep into her amazing green eyes. “Everything.”
* * *
Everything? Impossible. That kind of power would drive anyone insane. But it did explain why he was called wizard, why people traveled from far and wide for his instructions.
Ryder shook his head slowly. “Except out-of-body travel. That’s one thing Cassidy can do that I can’t.”
Out-of-body travel! That explained so much about the two times she’d seen Cassidy. The girl had been there in spirit only. Fascinating...
“The stone and the wristband you wear.” Echo waved a finger at her own throat. “They help?”
“They dampen.”
Dante and Gideon had worn such talismans; they had fashioned the same for her on more than one occasion. But she knew no one who wore dampening cures constantly. It simply wasn’t natural. The power of the objects always—well, almost always—faded with time.
“In my vision, I saw you rip away the stone and toss it aside.”
“No,” Ryder said sharply. He tensed along the length of his body. “That was wrong. It had to be wrong.”
She would admit that since the scene had taken her so far in the future, nothing was certain. Still...
Her mind was spinning; this was almost too much information to take
