Eternity: Immortal Witches Book 1 (The Immortal Witches) Read Online Free

trying.
    “‘Tis wrong! Dinna do this thing, Nathanial!” he shouted over and over, but his words fell on deaf ears.
    “Take heart,” my mother whispered. “You will see him again. And know this, my darling. I love you.”
    I turned to meet her loving eyes. And then the floor fell away from beneath my feet, and I plunged through it. I heard Duncan’s anguished cry. Then the rope reached its end, and there was a sudden painful snap in my neck that made my head explode and my vision turn red. And then no more. Only darkness.

Chapter 2

    Duncan didn’t even know her name.
    He didn’t even know her name.
    And yet he felt as if he’d lost a treasured friend–more than that, even. ‘Twas as if a part of his own soul had just been brutally murdered in the town square.
    Her surname, St. James, he’d heard that much muttered in the streets. More than that he did not know. Might never know.
    “I tried,’’ he whispered. “God knows I tried.’’
    He’d been moved beyond all reason, all logic, when he’d heard her strong, deep voice and the courage it held as it rang out over the spectators, shaming them as they should well be shamed. And he’d known then that he had to try. Though he had no idea now what he could have done, even had they let him pass. Even had he reached her again. Perhaps he’d been a bit mad.
    Perhaps she truly was a witch and had cast some spell, some enchantment, o’er his heart there on the gallows. He didn’t know. He only knew that something had possessed him—some sudden, violent, desperate need to save her.
    And that he’d failed.
    She swung slowly from the end of a rope beside her mother, her life snuffed out far too soon. And he realized, by the cold dampness seeping through his robes and chilling his legs, that he knelt now, before the gallows. He seemed to have fallen right where he’d been standing when the trapdoor had jerked away from beneath the beautiful girl. And he remained there still, kneeling in the snow.
    He got to his feet, but his legs felt weak and his chest hollow. Staggering forward, he snatched a blade from a local man’s belt as he passed the fellow. Ignoring the man’s outcry, he moved beneath the gallows, to gather the young woman’s body into his arms. He held her tight to him as he sawed at the rope until it gave way. Her weight fell upon him, head resting on his shoulder like a lover’s. Satin soft hair, snow damp and fragrant, brushed against his cheek. He closed his arms round her body and turned his face full into that hair to inhale it and to feel it and to commit it to memory—as well as to hide the inexplicable tears that welled up in his eyes. So warm, her face on his skin. So much as if she were only sleeping.
    “What might you have been to me?” he asked her, his voice a strangled whisper. “What might we have been to each other?”
    But he spoke to death, and death did not answer.
    Though it makes no sense, lass, my heart is broken. I didna know you at all, an’ yet it feels so very much as if I did. As if I always have.” He rocked her in his arms, and a sob choked him. “Can you hear me? Are you out there, somewhere, listenin’, lass? I’ll give you a proper burial, I vow it. An’ your dear mother, too.”
    He held her close, enveloped in a sadness he could not explain and a new certainty about the path he would walk in this life. And he owed her thanks for that, if nothing else, he realized.
    A heavy hand fell upon his shoulder. “What sort of spectacle do you wish to make of yourself, boy?”
    Duncan turned to see the murderer himself, Nathanial Dearborne, his own trusted mentor. “Do you ken what you've done this day?” he asked the man.
    Nathanial’s eyes narrowed, and he signaled to someone with a flick of his wrist. Immediately three men rushed forward to tear the beauty from Duncan’s arms, as he cried out in protest. They bore her away, dumping her body on the back of a rickety wagon where her mother already lay. The