Burning Skies (20 page)

She was a balm against his burning skin, an unexpected ease to his soul. If this was her way of seducing him, damn it might just work. He had lived a solitary life for over a millennium. He’d found lots of ways to make it work, one of which was never getting involved with a woman. Another was having lots of casual sex.

But the
breh-hedden
had orchestrated this moment, which in turn had brought memories forward of former times when he’d known this kind of closeness and joy with a woman.

And in this moment, his heart began to hurt.

*   *   *

“Is this all the footage you’ve got?” Crace asked. He sat at his desk in the office he’d commandeered four months ago from one of Greaves’s generals. Rith had just loaded a DVD of the attack at the Superstitions, the one in which Rith had personally detonated the incendiary bomb that was supposed to have offed Warrior Luken. Everything looked in order—so why had the mission failed?

Rith stood next to him and grew very still, the man’s only tell. “Yes,” he responded succinctly. “This is all I have. Warrior Thorne showed up thirty seconds after Warrior Luken hit the earth.”

“Fucking bad luck,” Crace muttered. He grunted his displeasure at the screen. He thought the height of the flames could be taller but he liked the colors, some pinks and greens, almost glittery, real spectacle-grade shit. But why the fuck hadn’t the warrior died? What was the point of beautiful explosions if someone didn’t get killed?

“There is something, however, I think you might have missed,” Rith said. He gestured with both hands toward the keyboard. “May I?”

“By all means.” Crace scooted away in his rolling desk chair, his hands in the air. He had an instinct about this vampire who pretended to be submissive. He should kill him right now and would have except that Greaves favored the bastard.

A few clicks followed. “There,” Rith said. “A hint of red hair. I was too far away at the time and preparing to leave so I didn’t see the arrival of a third person. I snatched the camera and tripod then folded away. I only saw this later.”

Crace peered close. “Fuck. You think this is ascender Morgan?” He could still taste her exquisite blood on his lips. His heart rate increased, double time.

“Yes. I do.”

“What the hell was she doing there at the scene?” Crace asked.

“The real question is—how did Warrior Thorne know to come to Warrior Luken’s aid?”

Crace frowned. “Are you saying he was warned?”

“I’m not sure. But ascender Morgan has a special relationship with Warrior Luken. I believe she knew he was in trouble.”

“A link?”

“Not necessarily, but I do think it’s possible she had a link with Warrior Medichi and that’s why he arrived at the town house so swiftly last night.”

No shit, Sherlock,
he thought. Aloud, he said, “Go on.”

“There is no way Warrior Thorne could have known of the bomb at the Superstitions or that one of his warriors was down. I made certain that the Awatukee Borderland, where he was fighting, had a surplus of death vamps to battle. Even so, Warrior Luken fell hard to earth, and you can see by the footage that he was unable to make a call.”

“But you think ascender Morgan somehow knew that he’d been hurt, then intervened?”

“Yes. I do.”

“If not a telepathic link, then how do you explain it?”

“Do you recall the dispatches of yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“One of the Seers spoke of
emergence
. There have been at least six more reports from Seers Fortresses about ascender Morgan in the past twenty-four hours. One of them spoke of darkening capabilities.”

At that, Crace frowned. He was just a little skeptical about Seers’ prophecies. “Are you suggesting that she located Warrior Luken through the darkening?”

“I think it possible. It would explain a lot, especially her increased appearance in the future streams.”

Crace shook his head. To his knowledge only Endelle had darkening capabilities, which meant it was a Third Earth power even Greaves didn’t have. Yeah. Skeptical.

“And you’re telling me this because—?”

“Because I know you have an interest in her beyond her emerging powers.”

Crace didn’t trust Rith any farther than he could piss on him. He sensed in the man duplicity and schemes, plans of his own, but it didn’t matter. Right now, for whatever reason, it suited Rith to share information with Crace about Havily Morgan, and that was good enough. Maybe it was simply that Rith wanted her out of the picture the way Greaves did. Making Havily dead would be a feather in his cap where the Commander was concerned.

Crace did indeed have an entirely different interest in Havily Morgan. Truth be known, he didn’t give a damn about her emerging powers. What he wanted was her blood. Permanently.

He had never felt better in his long fucking life.

He flexed his right arm and felt the increased bulk of his bicep. Goddamn if the dispatches weren’t right. Her blood had done exactly what dying blood could do: It had increased his physical strength, lit up his libido, improved some of his normal human abilities. Bottom line? He may have just discovered the mother lode.

Rith stepped away from the computer and rounded the table to stand facing Crace. “There’s just one more thing. We have a convergence in the future streams
.”

“Between?”

For the first time since Crace had known Rith, the vampire’s cheeks wore color—very faint, but the flush was there, a pale pink. What the fuck? “Ascender Morgan and the mortal-with-wings, a woman. She finally showed up in the future streams.”

Crace jerked forward in his chair and rose to his feet. “What the fuck?” He moved so fast, however, that his chair skidded backward and slammed into the stone wall. “We’ve heard nothing about the mortal-with-wings in the past four months and suddenly we have a convergence between these two women? Are you fucking sure?”

“Yes.”

Crace knew the bastard was holding something back, something big. “What do you want, Rith? Tell me.”

“I want her, the one purportedly with first-flight capability, the mortal-with-wings.”

“Why?” He knew for certain the next words his enemy spoke would be important.

“Because she is to me what ascender Morgan is to you.”

A blood donor?
No, not that. Then what? Shit. Rith would never tell him, and he’d never been able to read his goddamn mind. Well, wasn’t this a day of surprises?

Crace relaxed his shoulders. “So basically, if I should happen to find the women together, as the future streams have suggested, then you want me to deliver the mortal-with-wings to you personally.”

Rith met his gaze with a blank stare, his mental shields practically glowing. “I would be obliged to you for the favor.”

Crace could lie with the best of them. “Then I’ll just have to see what I can do.” There was more than one way to destroy an enemy.

When Rith left, Crace headed to the war room. He scouted the notables present and ignored five of the generals to glare at the sixth, General Leto, former Warrior of the Blood. He disliked Leto immensely and distrusted him even more.

He moved to the surveillance grid and changed the coordinates to reflect the Metro Phoenix area, Mortal Earth. A mortal-with-wings by nature would have a power-signature strong enough to show up on the grid. Once he had her location, he’d go after her.

He glanced at Leto. How he despised the bastard who had fought Alison Wells in the Tolleson Two arena and failed to destroy her. He was tall, taller than Crace by at least an inch, and well muscled. He had intense blue eyes and long black warrior hair, which he kept drawn back in the traditional
cadroen,
a reminder to his peers that he’d once been a Warrior of the Blood. So fucking what!

Crace was happy to make use of him, though. Greaves had given Crace power over all the generals for any assignment that came down the pike.

He called Leto over and instructed him to keep an eye on the grid, told him what he was looking for, and asked the man to summon him the moment he found a strong enough signature to indicate a mortal-with-wings. He’d be in his forge until notified.

Leto, to his credit, merely flared his nostrils slightly, then responded, “Yes, Mr. High Administrator.”

Master
would have been a preferred choice of address, but Crace thought it more likely he would ice-skate in hell first.

As he folded to the underbelly of the entire complex, deep in the earth—his beautiful forge—a shiver of anticipation went through him. If there was to be a convergence between ascender Morgan and the mortal-with-wings, then Crace thought it likely he’d be in the presence of his preferred blood donor very soon.

How much he loved synchronicity.

*   *   *

As the hour neared seven in the evening, Parisa Lovejoy stood in front of the mirror in her master bath. She wore black lace French-cut underwear but nothing else. Her breathing was shallow, her eyes burned, and her back was on fire.

She had waited ten days. She could never go beyond ten days or the release occurred spontaneously. So far, in the past year since
the event
had overtaken her body, she had been able to mount her wings in complete privacy and secrecy. But she feared more than anything else in the world that her unique condition would become public knowledge.

She closed her eyes. She drew a deep breath and released it slowly. At the same time, she relaxed all the hard fiery lumps that ranged in a V down her back. The weirdest vibration, accompanied by an almost unbearable itch, followed. Nausea overtook her and she shuddered.

She should have done this sooner, but even though she knew quite a bit about the ascended world of Second Earth, she was still worried that as a regular human being, a
mortal,
she was able to mount a pair of wings. It just wasn’t
normal,
at least not in her dimension.

She arched back then folded forward.

That was when the indecent pleasure began, almost like sex, as ripples of sensation flowed over her breasts and down deep within her. Okay a lot like sex. Then the wings came forth, gliding as though well oiled, from her body, just as they did for the other ascenders who mounted their wings. She was grateful she knew about the world of ascension; otherwise when her first wing-mount had occurred, she might have gone crazy.

When they were fully released, she straightened up. Her gaze fell to her breasts, which always looked like this, full and peaked as though she had just climaxed.

The nausea still worked over her stomach and she felt weak, like she could fall over if she wasn’t careful. But her gaze was drawn to the feathers her body had somehow produced, at the sheer height and beauty of the cream-colored wings, of the tall span that reached all the way to the nine-foot ceiling. She leaned forward and stared into the mirror. She might dislike the fact that she was a complete anomaly on earth, but her wings were magnificent.

As she stared, a slight gasp left her lips. Today there was a difference, a very beautiful difference. Near the tips of the outermost feathers there had always been two bands, one black and one a soft burnished gold. But now there was a new color, the same color as her eyes, a light purple, not quite lavender, placed between the bands. When she held each wing to its fullest height and breadth, and drew them together to touch above her head, the bands made a perfect arch, black forming the outermost arch, then amethyst, then gold.

“So beautiful,” she whispered, her gaze tracking the arch from left to right. Her heart ached at the sight and familiar longings trapped her breath in her chest. She felt a profound call on her life and she knew exactly what it was: She was being called to ascension.

She knew about the dimensional world because of another preternatural ability she possessed: She had
visions
of Second Earth. Or at least that’s what she called them. When she made herself still and focused, she could see into the ascended world, like opening a window.

Of course, the strangest part of all was that these visions centered on one particular man, a very tall, muscular warrior, who proved to be a vampire and a warrior. But not just any vampire warrior. He served in a place called Second Earth with six other warriors, all of whom she knew by name. As a group, they were known as the Warriors of the Blood, probably because they were vampires.

Vampires.

She could say the word now, quite easily, though that hadn’t been the case early on. She had felt ill. She had always believed that vampires were a dark mythology that arose from the collective unconscious of the masses. So when the world of ascension presented itself in the form of her unique visions and immediately presented as also the world of the vampire, well, that had taken some getting used to. But then so had her wings.

She manipulated her back muscles and the wings responded instantly, as though an extension of her muscles. She could make them unfurl almost to a full span and would have if the bathroom had been larger. She could pull the wings in tight to her body as well, even arching them forward to create a cocoon around herself.