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My eyes widened. I couldn’t help it. Fear thudded in my throat. “How did you . . . know that?”

“I touched his power when I helped cast him out of you. I heard his voice, felt his presence. He was willing you to die, Anita, draining you of life.”

I swallowed, my pulse still too fast. “I’d like a nurse now, please.”

“You’re afraid of me?” She smiled when she said it.

I started to say no, but then . . . “Yeah, but it’s not personal. Let’s just say after my brush with death, I’m not sure who to trust, magically speaking.”

“Are you saying I saved you because this master allowed me to save you?”

“I don’t know.”

She frowned for the first time. “Trust me on this, Anita. It was not easy to save you. I had to encircle you with protection, and some of that protection was my own power, my own essence. If I had not been strong enough, if the names I called on for aid had not been strong enough, I would have died with you.”

I looked up at her and wanted to believe her, but . . . “Thank you.”

She sighed, settling the skirt of her dress with fingers aglitter with rings. “Very well, I will fetch you a familiar face, but then we must talk. Your friend Ted told me of the marks that bind you to the werewolf and the vampire.”

Something must have shown on my face because she said, “I needed to know in order to help you. I’d saved your life by the time he arrived here, but I was trying to fix your aura, and I couldn’t.” She passed a hand just above my body and I felt that trail of warmth that was her power caressing over mine. She hesitated over my chest, over my heart. “There is a hole here as if there is a piece of yourself missing.” Her hands slid farther down my body and hesitated low on my stomach, or high on my abdomen depending on how you looked at it. “Here is another hole. They are both chakra points, important energy points for your body. Bad places to have no ability to shield from magical attack.”

My heart was back to beating faster than it should have. “They are closed. I’ve worked for the last six months to close them up.”

Leonora shook her head, taking her hands gently back from me. “If I understand what your friend told me of this triumvirate of power you are a part of, then these spaces are like electrical sockets in the wall of your aura, your body. The two creatures have the plugs that fit their respective sockets.”

“They aren’t creatures,” I said.

“Ted painted a very unflattering picture of them.”

I frowned. It sounded like something Edward would do. “Ted doesn’t like the fact that I’m . . . intimate with monsters.”

“You are lovers with both then?”

“No. I mean . . .” I tried to think of a quick version. “I was sleeping with them at separate times. I mean for a little while I was . . . dating them both at the same time, but it didn’t work out.”

“Why did it not work?”

“We were invading each other’s dreams. Thinking each other’s thoughts. Every time we had sex, it was worse, as if the sex was tying the knots tighter and tighter.” I stopped talking, not because I was finished, but because the words weren’t enough. I started over. “One night the three of us were alone, just talking, trying to work things out. A thought popped into my head, and it wasn’t mine, or I didn’t think it was mine, but I didn’t know whose thought it was.” I looked up at her, trying to will her to understand the moment of sheer terror that had been for me.

She nodded, as if she did, but her next words said she’d missed the point. “That frightened you.”

“Yeah,” I said, making the word two syllables so she’d catch the sarcasm.

“The lack of control,” she said.

“Yes.”

“The lack of individual privacy.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Why did you take on these marks?”

“They would have died if I hadn’t done it. We might all have died.”

“So you did it to save your own life.” She sat there, hands crossed in her lap, perfectly at ease while she probed my psychic wounds. I hate people who are at peace with themselves.

“No, I couldn’t lose them both. I might have survived losing one,