Free Awakening by Cate Tiernan Page A

then?” I asked.
    He gave me a sudden, lopsided grin, gazing up at me from under a shock of pale hair. “The thought that you might try to lead them. I couldn’t risk that.”
    If that was a joke, I didn’t find it particularly funny. “Hey, I didn’t come here to be insulted.”
    “Oh, stop.” He laughed. “I didn’t mean it as an insult. I only meant that you’re a bit of a loose cannon because you’ve got all this power and no training. It’s not an incurable condition.”
    “Glad to know it’s not terminal,” I muttered.
    He looked at me more seriously now. “Morgan, listen to me. You have so much potential—it’s very exciting, I know. But you’ve got to learn how to rein in and focus your power. For your own good as much as anything else. All that power makes you like a beacon. You’re a walking target.”
    Abruptly I remembered the real reason I’d come here. I sat forward in my chair.
    “There’s something I need to tell you about,” I said. I described the dark force I’d felt after my dream and then again at the garage. “I tried to get it to reveal itself by drawing Peorth, but it just sort of evaporated,” I said. “Do you have any idea what it was?”
    He was frowning. “This is not good. It could have been another witch, cloaking him, or herself. It sounds more like some sort of a taibhs , a dark spirit, though.”
    “The first time, when I sensed it in the middle of the night, I had the impression that whatever it was, it wasn’t aimed at me,” I said. “But after what happened at the garage, I’m not so sure. Do you think it’s been following me?”
    “You would have sensed that, I think.” Hunter got to his feet, went to the window, and peered out into the trees that surrounded the house. “But we’ve got to assume that it wasn’t coincidence, either. It was looking for you. And it found you.”
    “Did Selene send it? Or . . . Cal?” I asked in a low voice, not really wanting to know the answer.
    “More likely Selene,” Hunter said. “To her your power is an irresistible lure, almost as much as Belwicket’s tools are. If she can’t coerce you to join her group, she wants to absorb your power. It would increase her own to the point where she’d be practically invincible.”
    My skin crawled. I thought of David, saying that we had to take Selene’s intentions into account as well as her actions. Maybe he was right, but her intentions sounded pretty awful in themselves. “They’re really evil, aren’t they?” I asked. “Selene and . . . and Cal?”
    He took some branches from the box of kindling, snapped them in half, and added them to the fire. “Cal . . . is his mother’s creation. I don’t know if I’d call him evil.” Glancing up, he gave me that quick grin again. “Besides, that’s not a nice thing to say about one’s own kin, is it?”
    I grinned back. Hunter did have a sense of humor, I realized. It was just an offbeat one.
    “As for Selene,” Hunter went on, getting serious again. “She’s ambitious and ruthless. She studied with Clyda Rockpel.”
    I shook my head, indicating that I didn’t know the name.
    “Clyda Rockpel was a Welsh Woodbane who was legen darily vicious. She’s said to have murdered her own daughter to enhance her power. And it’s certainly true that wherever Selene goes, witches tend to disappear or die. Destruction seems to follow in her wake. Yes, I would agree that she is truly evil.”
    I felt a wave of pity for Cal. With a mother like that, he’d never really had a choice. Or a chance.
    As if he’d read my mind, Hunter said in a quiet voice, “Poor Cal.” His eyes met mine, and I was startled by the depth of compassion in them.
    We stared at each other, and then we were both suspended in a strange, timeless moment. I felt like I was falling into Hunter’s gaze, and again I remembered the night when he’d almost kissed me. Of the profound connection I’d felt with him, the lightness I’d experienced when