Free Eternity: Immortal Witches Book 1 (The Immortal Witches) by Maggie Shayne Page A

some spell?
    I’d heard it myself. Though he’d taken back the words, the sentiment that spawned them likely still lived in his heart. So ‘twas best I not see him again. Not ever.
    I remained in my cabin for the rest of that journey. The captain brought me my meals, spoke with me for a few minutes each day, and seemed concerned for my well being. He told me how Duncan had been quite crazed since his recovery, insisting a woman had come to him and made him well that night, demanding to know my name and where my cabin was. Most of the crewmen and passengers thought his bout of fever had warped his mind. Even his friends, the couple with whom he was traveling, seemed to fear for his sanity.
    It disturbed me to let him go on unsure just what had happened that night in his cabin. To let him go on wondering how much of it had been real and how much a dream. But I had no choice. ‘Twould do me no good to be with Duncan Wallace. Nor him, either. For what could come of it, after all? What could come of my falling in love with him? And I would—I knew I would. But I was immoral. I would have to watch him grow old. I would suffer through losing him. He would be forced to see me remain young and healthy, while he aged and withered. No. There was no point in following my feelings for him, none at all, for they would only lead to heartache for us both.
    But often as I sat alone in my cabin...and more often when I sneaked up onto the decks in the wee hours before daylight, I wished it could be different. And when I thought of Duncan, of his kiss, a great heaviness seemed to settle atop my heart. It added its weight to the sadness already there, that which I’d carried with me from the night I’d lost my mother, and so I became quite melancholy. Silent and pale. I was told my eyes seemed haunted more often than not.
    I had mourned my mother for the whole of my journey, had gone over the events that cost her life again and again, each time wondering if I could have done something to save her. But I knew this terrible grief, this near despair, was not what she would have wanted for me. She would have wanted me to find my own life, to go on, somehow. She would hate knowing that I cried each time I thought of her. Her memory, she would say, should bring me warmth and joy, not sorrow. So eventually I vowed to try to make it so. I could not spend my life grieving. Not for her, and not for what might have been between Duncan and me, had our situations been different.
    Often, in those long days of my solitary journey, I found myself thinking of the way Duncan had tried so valiantly to help us that day at the gallows. If he had succeeded, and died in the attempt, what would have been the result? I wondered if he would have returned to his next lifetime immortal, as I was, for this was what my mother had written in that secret book. Such a thing seemed beyond belief to me. Surely not a priest, nor a man studying to become one! And yet the undeniable proof was in me. I had become immortal in just such a way.
    I was changing daily—almost hourly—and these changes also occupied my thoughts. How far would they go? I wondered. Each day I grew stronger. My senses continued to sharpen themselves by gradual degrees. And I found that if I focused on my new nature, ‘twas easier to escape my crippling grief. So many new and strange things were happening to my body.
    I could hear conversations from a goodly distance, and hear them more clearly than before. I could see as sharply in the darkness now as I could by daylight, and had been able to do so since that night in Duncan’s cabin, even after I’d extinguished the candle.
    By the time we sailed into the harbor at Boston Town, I could hear the fish swimming beneath the waves. I could detect—even distinguish between—the scents of each person aboard. Duncan’s above all others, and why that was, I did not know. I saw the purple hue of the New World’s shores fully an hour before the lookout