Blood of the Sorceress

Also by Maggie Shayne

The Portal

DAUGHTER OF THE SPELLCASTER

MARK OF THE WITCH

LEGACY OF THE WITCH

Secrets of Shadow Falls

KISS ME, KILL ME

KILL ME AGAIN

KILLING ME SOFTLY

BLOODLINE

ANGEL’S PAIN

LOVER’S BITE

DEMON’S KISS

Wings in the Night

BLUE TWILIGHT

BEFORE BLUE TWILIGHT

EDGE OF TWILIGHT

RUN FROM TWILIGHT

EMBRACE THE TWILIGHT

TWILIGHT HUNGER

TWILIGHT VOWS

BORN IN TWILIGHT

BEYOND TWILIGHT

TWILIGHT ILLUSIONS

TWILIGHT MEMORIES

TWILIGHT PHANTASIES

DARKER THAN MIDNIGHT

COLDER THAN ICE

THICKER THAN WATER

In Loving Memory of

Jane O’Connor A woman who soared above challenges that would have held most to the ground. Founder of the Central New York Romance Writers, which has since turned out more than a dozen authors and well over a hundred novels that might not otherwise even have been written, much less published. We love you, Jane. You led us to our careers and, more important, to each other. Thank you will never be enough. But thank you all the same.

February 2, Imbolc

Lilia was no angel. Lilia was a witch. Even though she was currently hovering between the worlds, watching over her beloved, waiting for the right time to manifest as a silvery-blond-haired, blue-eyed woman and save his life, she was still a witch. Had been for thirty-five-hundred years. Would be for as long as her soul lived on.

She watched, awestruck, as her beautiful Demetrius flashed into existence fully formed, fully grown, completely naked. The Portal, the opening between dimensions through which he had escaped his Underworld prison, was in the cave behind a waterfall. He arrived in the physical world in a blaze of light, crouching on the stones near that cascade.

Goddess, he was beautiful. She reached out as if to touch him. But she couldn’t. Not yet.

He was the same as she remembered him. His body had been reconstituted just as it had once been, since his soul had been ripped away before he died, an unnatural perversion of the order of things. She wouldn’t get her own body back when she returned to earth to join him. Hers had been dashed against the rocky ground from a great height before her own soul had flown free. She would have to manifest a fresh new form when the time came. She’d glimpsed that new form in a vision, so different from her former body that it had shocked her.

Oh, but look at him.

He rose from his crouched position, looking around, blinking in confusion, and her heart ached. So long … it had been so long!

He looked the same, and her heart twisted in her chest with a mingling of joy that she had come this far, was this close to success, and heartache that he was still out of reach. She hadn’t seen him since that bloody dawn in 1501 BC, in Babylon, when he’d murdered the King in defense of the woman he loved, the King’s harem slave: Lilia herself. When the quarters she shared with her two sisters were searched, the tools of their forbidden magic had been found and the three of them sentenced to be sacrificed to Marduk, chief god of the pantheon. Demetrius had been the King’s right hand, his friend. She never should have fallen in love with him. The cost had been so high.

But she had loved him. She loved him still.

The high priest Sindar had been in love, too—with the King, or so Lilia had always suspected—and so his wrath had been bitter. He’d used his own magic, dark magic, to strip Demetrius of his soul and banish him to a formless, sensory-deprived existence in an Underworld void—just after having Lilia and her sisters thrown from a cliff to the bloody rocks below.