Burning Skies (5 page)

“I’m not asking about the warriors. I just need to know if Havily was involved in any of the activities this evening?”

“Yes.” But she volunteered no other information.

Marcus put a hand to his chest. Shit, he was struggling to breathe. “Was she … injured?”

“No, not at all. I can promise you that. She is perfectly well.” A pause, then more stridently, “But I really can’t say anything more.”

“I understand.” He released a sigh. “Thank you, Jeannie. You’ve helped a lot.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I’ll say good night.”

“Marcus?”

“Yeah?”

“You were always my favorite.”

“Back atcha.”

“Coming back anytime soon?”

In the dark and in the comfort of his bedroom on Bainbridge Island, he smiled. “Don’t think so.”

“Too fucking bad, Warrior. Thorne’s calling. Gotta go.”

He thumbed his iPhone and set it back on the table.

Good. Havily was all right but Jeannie’s unspoken words indicated there had been some problem tonight in which Havily had been involved.

He climbed back into bed, stretched out, then laced his hands behind his head. What was he supposed to do with the conundrum that had become Havily Morgan?

Tonight? Nothing.

Tomorrow he’d head back to his office building, the one he owned in downtown Seattle. Business was a perfect distraction from a situation he needed to ignore anyway.

He worked hard keeping his empire in line. Lately he’d been dealing with a couple of strikes on different continents and some serious competition from a Chinese firm looking to move in on his Mortal Earth European operations.

Tomorrow he had two board meetings. One corporation exported PCs to Second Earth; the other was a highly specialized company designed to serve the horticulture industry. So yeah, he needed his rest.

He yawned, closed his eyes.

Okay. There was just way too much here he couldn’t control.

Whatever.

*   *   *

Endelle, Supreme High Administrator of Second Earth, reclined on her chaise longue. She wore a soft purple linen gown for comfort since she would be on duty all through the night, just as her Warriors of the Blood were on duty, however different their assigned tasks.

Instead of battling with a sword, Endelle hunted her prey in the midst of the darkening, that piece of nether-space she inhabited during her meditations. While in a state of meditation, she was able to split-self, to become two separate corporeal forms—one that reclined on the chaise, the other that slipped into the nether-space of the darkening
,
free to move around and act within that space in a second physical body.

What her second split-self couldn’t do was leave the darkening
,
except to return to, and rejoin, her first corporeal self—all very third-dimensional preternatural shit that no one else on Second Earth, not even Greaves himself, could do.

So here she was, her primary self reclining in meditation and her second self, her split-self, chasing that bastard, Darian Greaves, from one end of the planet to the other, at least while in the darkening.

She had one job to perform during her nightly vigils—to keep Greaves from increasing the size of his army of death vampires here in Phoenix.

In the past decade he’d taken to shipping death vamps from all over the world to the metropolitan area in an ongoing effort to destroy the Warriors of the Blood, to wear them down so that they made mistakes and got themselves killed. It was a clever, subtle strategy that did not in any way alert the authorities to his machinations.

COPASS was the committee that governed the process of ascension to Second Earth and which had also established several critical rules for how each faction could conduct its war efforts. Basically, she and Greaves weren’t allowed to engage in open warfare for the simple reason that they were each too powerful. Engagement had atomic implications, and both she and the Commander had agreed not to do battle personally.

But Greaves could ship death vampires to Phoenix Two and Endelle could chase his sorry ass through the darkening and stop him.

At least, thank God, Greaves wasn’t omnipotent. Yes, she could thank the Creator for small favors.

As she moved in her split-self, she drew close, so close to her prey. Silver tendrils appeared, small beacons of light that belonged exclusively to Greaves. His light trails never ceased to surprise her because evil ought to be represented by red flames and black smoke, not silver streams of light, for Christ’s sake.

His voice came to her next, full of persuasive resonance, as he addressed his minions. “A place, my brother ascenders, has been prepared for you, of great honor for your service to my cause. In return, being stationed in Metro Phoenix will provide all the opportunity you need to sate your appetites, since the Sonoran Desert has five access points to Mortal Earth.”

An interpreter spoke rapidly in a language she didn’t know, but something that sounded like East Indian. This last statement mentioning five access points, once flushed through the interpreter, was met with a round of lifted fists and war cries. Funny how Greaves failed to note that the access points were guarded by Warriors of the Blood.

A moment more and she skidded into Greaves’s arena, thinning the line between real-space and nether-space, so that she could see her prey. He was absurdly attractive, with his bald head and muscular warrior build. He had large, round dark eyes and carried himself like a cultured gentleman. He wore what he always wore, a fine-pressed wool suit. He preferred Hugo Boss. He was a fucking hypocrite and she loathed him.

Given his level of power, no doubt he would see her as fully formed. She didn’t know. She’d never bothered nor cared to ask him. The others, in their limited abilities, would only be able to perceive her as an apparition, a ghost.

Greaves stood before three squads of death vampires,
three,
and yeah, they had dark skin, growing lighter because of dying blood, and so beautiful, each one with glittering black eyes. She’d arrived just in time.

She cleared her throat and everyone turned in her direction. Of course they knew who she was. Every government institution in the capital city of each Territory had either a statue of her or an enormous oil painting in her likeness. And yes, she could be found on Second’s version of the Internet.

However, since the time that Greaves had begun his serious campaign fifteen years ago, when he had persuaded the first of her Territorial High Administrators to align with him, these Territories had been provided with new statues of the Commander, new portraits, new posters, new
COMING ORDER
buttons, coffee mugs, and mouse pads, the bastard. She didn’t even have mouse pads. What became of those edifices and paintings made in her image, she really didn’t want to know.

She cast a locked-down shield around the twelve night-feeders. She had control of them now. Greaves, thank you God, could not bust through these shields.

But for just a moment, as her gaze swept over the pretty-boys, she was struck again by their extraordinary beauty. What fucking irony that something so deadly would be so beautiful—but then that was the point, that a mortal would meet a death vampire and not comprehend the danger. The dark eyes, the porcelain, almost bluish skin, the features worthy of worship, all served to enthrall the mortal victim. A pair of fangs would strike, seeking one thing—the empowering effects that came only from dying blood.

“You’re early tonight,” he said. “How delightful.” But he didn’t wait to converse; he merely lifted an arm and vanished, on to his next appointment. Where he intended to go, however, was not something she could trace. It might take her three hours to discover, or three minutes. Hunting Greaves in the darkening was one long exercise in sheer luck combined with hours of mind-numbing effort.

Whatever.

The death vampires blinked. The interpreter wet himself and disappeared. The death vamps lifted arms to dematerialize but she had them pinned. She would keep the shield in place until the local Indian Militia Warriors arrived to finish off this group of bloodsucking bastards.

She called Central. “Hey, Jeannie. I’m transmitting the coordinates of twelve more assholes.”

“You go, girl,” Jeannie said. Endelle’s phone had GPS but even though she could call from nether-space, for whatever reason, she couldn’t get the GPS unit on the phone to transmit. So she sent the coordinates via telepathy, which Jeannie had no trouble receiving. At the same time, she heard tapping on the computer. A moment later Jeannie said, “That would be Mumbai. I’ll alert the local Chief Militia Officer that there are twelve to dispose of.”

“He’ll be celebrating for days on this one.”

“No shit.”

Endelle laughed. She actually liked Jeannie, but then she’d known her a goddamn long time. “Later.”

“Good hunting, Madame Supreme High Administrator.”

Endelle touched the phone then replaced it in the pocket of her meditation gown.

She was ready to continue on, to keep searching the world over for the silver tendrils of light, for the whisper of breathing that meant she was closing in on Greaves’s ass, but at that moment Thorne cut in. He was her second-in-command and shared a telepathic link with her, the only vampire on Second Earth to do so.

Come home now,
his gravel voice rippled through her head.

She cursed the disruption. Once begun, she didn’t like to be distracted from her darkening duties. However, Thorne never intruded unless there was some kind of fucking crisis at home. So, yeah … shit.

She pulled away from India and began the long slide through the darkening all the way back to her meditation chamber. Once she arrived, she relaxed her mind, letting it pull down deep until all she saw was a well of darkness. Step by step she moved out of nether-space and back into her primary self. She took deep breaths.

After a minute, she opened her eyes. Despite the desperate nature of Thorne’s call, she smiled. For just this moment, during this small speck of time she had to herself, she looked up at the ceiling of her private retreat deep within her palace on the side of the McDowell Mountains. She was safe here. Even when Greaves and his death vampires had attacked four months ago, they had been unable to penetrate the layers of shields that kept her in complete safety in her womb-like meditation space.

Two dozen four-inch candles, all in white, sat at precise intervals on matching shelves all around the room. The shelves were set four feet above the floor and lit the small rotunda in a warm glow. Burgundy velvet drapes hung at intervals between the shelves, ceiling-to-floor, for no other purpose than to soften and color her space.

The meditations that kept her moving at light speed through nether-space always left her logy for a minute or two afterward, her mind too loose to function at top level. But Thorne needed her and she needed to get her ass moving.

She slid her legs over the side of the chaise longue. She leaned forward and took deep breaths. Dammit, she was too dizzy to move. She’d have to wait a few minutes. She had a lot of power, but even she had limits.

*   *   *

Thorne stood in Luken’s treatment room at the emergency clinic shaking his head back and forth. Havily was next to him but neither of them spoke, which was a good thing. As the leader of the Warriors of the Blood,
the man in charge,
the man who was supposed to have
all the answers,
he was shocked and having trouble concentrating. He’d been Endelle’s second-in-command for too many centuries to count. To say he was feeling it was to say red was red. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept two hours straight and right now he wanted his Ketel One neat and to-the-fucking-rim.

Jesus H. Christ.

What a big fucking nightmare. Incendiary bombs? At the Superstition Borderland? On Mortal Earth?

How was he supposed to deal with that? And he really didn’t want to think about what would have happened if Havily hadn’t called Central to warn him about Luken, which begged another big fucking mysterious question.

“I just don’t understand, Hav,” he said. “How did you know he’d been hurt?”

Luken was suspended in the air, facedown, in a contraption that looked like it had come from a circus. There was rhyme to the reason, however. The healers surrounded his back and were working on his wing-locks. Christ, what a mess.

Havily pressed her fingers to her lips, and her lovely light green eyes flooded with tears. She stared at the hospital bed across the room. “I guess I had some kind of vision.” Her voice trembled, new leaves shaking in a breeze. “I somehow found myself sitting in the desert looking up at him. I saw flames in the dark night sky and his wings on fire.” She rasped a breath. “Oh, God.”

Thorne put his arm around her and pulled her hard against him. She looked so vulnerable in her yellow T-shirt and rumpled red hair. Her jeans were dirty from having sat on the ground beside Luken. She was young by Second Earth standards, only a hundred years old. She certainly wasn’t used to seeing the violence he and his brother warriors saw every night of their fucking lives. He felt her relax against him and gave her shoulder a squeeze.