Obsidian Flame (37 page)

She stepped back until she stood beside James. “Thorne, I don’t think you’ve met our oh-so-useless Sixth Ascender Guardian. James of Sixth Earth, Gatekeeper of Third, may I present Warrior Thorne and Seer Marguerite.”

“How do you do?” James offered.

She watched Thorne and Marguerite exchange a glance, brows raised, and why wouldn’t they be? She hadn’t known James was coming, either.

She turned back to him. “Why don’t you tell us all just why you’re here right now?”

“Just to monitor and report.”

She glanced at Thorne then back to Shorty. “Wait a minute. Are you here to watch me take my second-in-command apart, because that’s what I’m about to do unless of course you’d like to get involved.”

“As you know, we have strict rules about interference.”

“Well, how very
Star Trek
of you.”

But James only smiled. He addressed the newcomers. “If you can, please continue as though I’m not here.”

At that, Endelle met Thorne’s gaze dead-on. “Yes, Warrior Thorne, why don’t we continue as though James, and even your woman here, don’t exist.”

“Fine. Why don’t we start, Endelle, with what you’d like to say to me.”

She put her hands out in front of her, claw-like but facing each other, and as the energy began to spark, she shouted, “How could you have left me alone like this! How? What fucking possessed you to just take off, without a word to me, without thinking of me as a partner in all this shit?” She lifted her arm and as she waved, a red firework left her palm, aimed straight for Marguerite.

Thorne was quick, though. He stepped in front and took the sparks in the chest. He winced and she knew she’d hurt him, which meant he knew exactly just how badly she would have burned Marguerite.

His gaze became dark and hooded as he marched toward her. “Throw another one. Go ahead. Get everything off your chest.”

She couldn’t help herself. She launched repeated fireworks at him, one after the other, but he met each one with hand-blasts of his own, shunting them aside until the vast rotunda in which she stood, facing off her second-in-command, was full of smoke and lightning and showers of red, green, and blue sparks.

James had moved to stand beside Marguerite and set up some kind of shield to protect her.

But Endelle was just warming up. “And how dare you block our mind-link, the one we’ve had in place for centuries. Goddamn you, Thorne, treating me like I was worth a narrow stream of snail piss. Goddamn you.”

The fireworks just kept getting bigger and bigger until even she felt the burn on her arms and shoulders as the sparks came down.

“I’m done, Endelle. I will no longer serve you in this capacity. No more, so I want you to break the fucking mind-link. I will not serve you as I have for the past two thousand years, not when Leto shows up and tells us that Greaves has built an army of two million warriors. How the hell are we supposed to battle that and win? How?”

She hated him now. Hated him for not understanding or valuing all that she had done. She’d never pretended to be a brilliant administrator, but who else could have stepped up and done her job? She said as much then added, “So suck it up, Thorne. I’m not letting you go. I’m not letting you walk away from your responsibilities.”

She kept the blasts streaming and the fireworks bursting against his own hand-blasts.

“I’m not walking away, Endelle. I just refuse to serve you one more day like this. Not one more day, so break the fucking mind-link. Break it.”

“No,”
she shouted, using resonance.

She watched him flinch, but he barely moved an inch from his present battling posture. He looked different, too, stronger somehow. He was definitely determined, but she was too angry to see straight.

She thought the thought and her wings flew from their wing-locks, but he must have anticipated this move because there his were, larger than before and lighter, more iridescent than she remembered.

Change had come to Thorne, which meant an increase in power. Maybe that’s what his rebellion was all about.

She still didn’t care what had brought all this on. He’d asked for it and she was dishing it up.

She began to fly in a circle and he matched her. The palace rotundas were enormous. Twenty death vampires could fly through and not touch one another.

“Break the link,”
he shouted, also using resonance.

It felt good to be in the air, to be flying, to be doing something other than reading emails and watching her world succumb to all of Greaves’s machinations. How could Thorne possibly know what Leto’s calm announcement about the size of Greaves’s army had done to her? Or that he’d built palace prisons to reach pure fucking vision? How could he possibly know what it felt like to see that no matter what she had done, how little she had slept, how long she had served, how much of her life she had sacrificed, it would all, in the end, mean so little? Or that Greaves had ended up in a superior position, one that would allow him to win the war, and that the one she had come to rely on in everything had somehow decided that she was the real enemy in this whole equation?

So why the hell had she done any of it? Why had she given up her life?

She gathered all that rage, all that intense frustration, and did two things at once: She sent him a blast that would knock him hard into the marble and maybe ruin his wings and at the exact same moment she broke the mind-link.

There,
she screamed telepathically,
satisfied?

But as she watched Thorne fall, completely unconscious, through the smoke and sparks, she wanted to reach out to him, to break his fall. She couldn’t. Something inside her had broken apart completely. She couldn’t even move.

She popped her wings into parachute-mount and just hung high in the air near the rounded part of the ceiling where the smoke was thickest. She had to work to see anything below her.

At the last moment, it was Marguerite who folded beneath Thorne and sent her own hand-blast to stop his fall. He now hung suspended in midair.

Oh, God, Thorne. Thorne!

Endelle was sickened by what she had done, but still she just stayed there, rocking slightly, back and forth.

As Marguerite diminished her hand-blasts in stages, Thorne’s body descended slowly until he lay inert on top of her, his wings spread wide in the full-mount position. Marguerite’s feet stuck out at an odd angle beneath him. She coughed because of the smoke.

Endelle dropped swiftly to the marble floor and approached the pair. She wanted to know only one thing, so she focused on Thorne’s bare chest: Was the bastard still alive or had she killed the most honorable vampire she’d known in her entire nine thousand years of ascended life.

His rib cage rose and fell.

Okay, so he was alive.

Fine.

Fucking fine.

She closed her eyes and folded to her meditation space.

She sat down on her chaise-longue and folded off her seashells and mini skirt.

She folded on her soft purple linen gown.

She was in her holy of holies and maybe she would just stay here until the earth blew apart into hundreds of trillions of tiny particles.

Sounded like a good plan.

*   *   *

Marguerite was stuck beneath 260 pounds of muscled vampire warrior and a pair of wings that were both making it hard to breathe and tickling her nose at the same time. For all their strength, wings were also fragile and when broken required a lot of energy to heal.

She’d only been stupid once while mounting her wings. She’d been drunk, of course, at college, or rather at one of the bars near the college, and had released her wings in too small a space.

Because she’d been standing on the bar, and her wings were huge, she’d broken them both at the apex, shattering a few bottles in the process because of her subsequent screaming. The university healers had worked on her for
hours.

As she struggled to draw a deep breath under Thorne’s weight, she hoped like hell he hadn’t broken anything.

Through the feathers, a foot appeared; not hers, not Thorne’s. Had to belong to James.

“Need some help?” he asked. His voice had a warm soothing quality, but even he coughed because of the smoke.

“No, no,” she said. “We’re fine. If he stays unconscious for about six months he might lose enough of his muscle mass for me to move.” She turned her head and coughed.

James laughed, but suddenly Thorne’s weight was just not there. Marguerite slid out from under the levitating body, then James lowered him back to the marble floor. “His wings are magnificent. Did I detect a flame pattern like yours while he was flying?”

Marguerite stood next to the short man, waving her hand back and forth against the thick cloud in the air. She really liked James’s non-warrior, non-Supreme-High-Administrator height. “With all the smoke, fireworks, and sparks showering down like a monsoon storm, I didn’t exactly notice the pattern of his wings.” She turned to the side and coughed her lungs out. Her eyes stung from the smoke as well.

“I suppose not.”

She glanced at James. “So is he okay?”

He nodded. “He’s fine.”

When she started coughing again, James waved an arm and
poof,
all the smoke was gone.

“Nice trick.”

“Thank you.” But his gaze was on Thorne.

“Why isn’t he burned?” she asked. “There was enough energy in this room to set the whole northern Arizona forest on fire.”

“I’m really not sure except that I believe he has emerging powers. If you’ll remember, Endelle didn’t get burned, either.”

“She just knocked him unconscious during that last round?”

“Yep.”

She turned a little in his direction. “So you’re from Sixth. What’s it like up there?”

Somehow she wasn’t surprised when a look of long-suffering overcame his face. “It can be wonderful, just like here, but I have a very demanding boss.”

“Then you and Thorne have the same problem.”

“Sort of. I report to Luchianne.”

Her mouth dropped open. “You report to the first vampire ever? The one who had first flight, who opened the gateway to Second Earth, who sported a pair of fangs before she could possibly have known what they were for?”

He nodded. “Those are the facts of the case.”

“Sweet Lord in heaven.”

She felt the strangest urge to touch him, to see if he was real. Instead, movement caught her eye. Thorne was coming around. If he moved too much, though, he’d do some damage.

She walked between the apex of his wings very carefully, knelt while avoiding any of the feathers, and bent over him. She put her hands on his face and sent,
Stay still. You’re fine. You’re at the palace with James and me.
She looked over her shoulder, but the Sixth ascender was gone.
Well, you’re with me. Endelle folded somewhere. Try not to move. You’re lying on top of your wings.

His eyes opened and he looked up at her. “Hey.”

“Hey, yourself.”

“She got me pretty good.”

“Yep. Anything broken?”

“Just my head. Maybe my heart a little. Holy shit, did I actually take her on? I’m lucky I wasn’t blown into a thousand pieces.”

“James said he thinks you have emerging powers.”

“I have a fucking emerging headache. But…” He paused, then said, “She broke the mind-link.”

She leaned down to kiss him, first his forehead, then his nose, then his lips.

He groaned but while she plucked at his lips, he sent,
You’d better stop that. I’m starting to move … in other places.

She laughed. “Okay, fine. I’m going to fold away right now, just a few feet, okay?”

“Sure. Why?”

“If I back up, I might step on your wings.”

“Oh. Yeah. Please don’t do that.”

She thought the thought and materialized ten feet from his left wing. The feathers were splayed out in a perfect span, so she looked down at it. She squinted. Maybe she saw a flame pattern. Maybe. So what kind of emerging powers could Thorne have that would put them both in even greater danger?

The next moment Thorne simply levitated from the floor, still stretched out on his back, and some of the tension left his face. It couldn’t have felt good to be pressing against the wings, either.

While just lying in midair, he began moving the wings very slowly, wafting like he was doing the backstroke. He stared up into the vast dome of the rotunda and kept moving, easing first this way then that, apparently trying everything out. The beauty of his wings seemed odd against his nubby green sweater, blue jeans, and a brown pair of leather loafers, but the whole thing really worked for her. Even on his back, midair, in casual clothes and full-mount, he was one gorgeous vampire.

His small warrior phone appeared in his hand. “Hey, Carla. Thorne here. I’m at the palace and I need Horace. Can you get him here? A couple of my wings near the wing-locks have small fractures.” He listened and nodded. “Apologize for me. I know he needs his rest.” He then smiled. “Right back atcha. And thanks.”