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Definitely not a good omen. Icy, breathing hard, I lay back and pulled the covers over me, staring into the loft, hearing only the soft hiss of the gas-log flames in the fireplaces and the ticking of the black pig clock in the kitchen, seeing the furniture and the slow-turning fans overhead, and the red light of the answering machine. Feeling only the frigid sheets. I was as cold as if I hadn't been in the bed for hours. As if I'd slept naked instead of wearing long johns.

Trying to get warm, I snuggled deeper and breathed, calming my racing heart.

I'd had the dream before. I understood the warning. I was an omega mage. I could command seraphs in battle and the winged warriors would obey. But if I took a single misstep, they would destroy me. They
wanted
to destroy me. And I had no idea why they hadn't killed me already.

 

I woke hours later, the sun still shining, my loft banded with dull light from the west-facing windows. My face was creased into the folds of the pillows and my eyes felt gritty. I touched them, and found the lashes full of sleep-sand. Sand, I assured myself. Not dried tears. No way. Stretching between the sheets, I pulled on aching joints and rolled out of bed. Stiff, I turned up the gas-log flames before dressing in jeans and a fuzzy sweater over the long johns. Boots completed the attire, and I glamoured my skin to look fresher than I felt, looping my amulet necklace around my neck, outside my clothes. Once I would have hidden it, but no more.

I was eating a bowl of oatmeal with a sprinkle of honey-sugar crystals and fresh milk when I heard footsteps on the stairs. The door opened. I could have stopped him. I could have raced and locked the door. I could have pulled one of the weapons that I'd dumped on the kitchen table for cleaning and oiling and cut his throat as he entered. I hadn't. Still, he shouldn't have presumed and walked in without knocking. I welcomed the spurt of fury that warmed my blood. I set down my spoon. “Next time you want to talk to me, knock,” I said.

“I don't have to knock. I supersede you in terms of authority, age, diplomatic rank, and mage-power.” Cheran closed the door and leaned a shoulder negligently against the jamb. He was wearing jeans and a silk shirt under a corduroy vest and a new down-filled jacket. He would have looked the height of mountain fashion had the silk shirt not been ruffled and edged with lace. “If I want this apartment, I just have to snap my fingers and the elders will deed it to me. They've already said as much.”

I settled back in my chair and the grin that crossed my face showed teeth. Even through the Apache Tear, I felt Cheran flinch. “You've been talking to the Culpeppers, the kirk elder and his fashion-challenged son.”

“The younger man does need the talents of a good designer,” Cheran agreed with a faint shudder. “What did you do to make them hate you so much?”

“I cost them a lot of money.”

“Bad form, that. It could get you killed.”

“Bad form to try and intimidate me.”

“Implying that such attempts could get me killed? You aren't swordswoman enough to best me.”

I actually laughed at that one, my tone caustic, and he was unable to mask his annoyance. It seemed I pushed Cheran Jones' buttons almost as much as he pushed mine. “If you want the place, go ahead and try to take it. I'll tie you up in so much red tape you'll be sticky for years. Meanwhile, you'll still be in a boardinghouse, sharing the bathroom with two or three humans, trying to find ways to stay warm. I give you one full winter here before you give up and head back to the Gulf and warmer temps. One full winter, ten months of snow and ice. Spent in a boardinghouse eating stew and listening to Miz Essie chatter.”

“Ten months?” Cheran actually blanched.

It made me feel really good. I felt the meanness spread through me. “Yeah. And meanwhile you'll be trying to figure out how to explain to the townsfolk that while they were battling Darkness in the streets, you were glamoured and hiding. A coward.” His hands clenched and I let the nasty grin spread over my face. “Because someone, somewhere, will eventually remember that you were nowhere in sight while humans died. You could have called for seraphic intervention on your visa—something I don't know how to do—and you didn't. You could have fought alongside humans and you didn't. You could have waged a war of shields, protecting them, but you didn't. And someone somewhere will call you on it. And name you coward.”

Cheran forced his hands open as if he knew he was giving too much away. “I fought. You saw my knives hit that thing. I killed spawn, dozens of them, with conjures.”

“But no one saw you, did they? And I have no intention of telling them.”

“You fight dirty,” he said, moving toward me across the loft.

“You fight from cover, saving your own skin.”

“I'm not a battle mage.”

“No. You're something creepier, I just don't know what, yet. What do you want, Cheran? Other than to waste my time with empty threats. I was trying to eat.”

“I want to know what you did when you looked at me in the shop,” he said. He reached the table, pulled out a chair, and sat, uninvited. “When you were doing a mind-skim and then it changed.”

“You never saw that before?” When he shook his head, I asked, “What did it look like? In mage-sight?”

“Hot. Gold. The way liquid gold looks when you've melted down twenty-four-carat casting grains. It seemed to pour all over you, like you had bathed in it and it was alive.” His face was lit with excitement and beneath the animation was something that looked colder and darker, avarice and greed.

Suddenly I knew it wouldn't be smart to tell him. Not smart at all. I had been hungry when I sat down. Now I felt slightly sick. I pushed the bowl of oatmeal away. “You know that I was judged by Cheriour, the Angel of Punishment?” Cheran nodded. “He did something to me. I don't know what.” It wasn't a lie. It just wasn't the answer to his question.

Cheran's face fell. “You can't teach me?”

“Nope.” Well, I could, but I wouldn't. I had learned some things about him in the short time I had known him. He was a coward, he was secretive, and he was more than the simple metal mage he claimed. His offer to put new edges on our blades had identified him as a steel mage. The gold comment had also given him away. Most metal mages have an affinity for one particular type of metal, yet Cheran Jones seemed to be both a steel mage and a gold mage. I'd have to research how unusual the affinity for both steel and gold was. “Since we're trading information, your turn again,” I said. “Why didn't you call for seraphic assistance on your visa?”

“I was told to teach you what you needed to function as a fully licensed mage and to watch you fight, if the opportunity presented itself.”

I felt cold settle in my bones and my fingers dropped to touch the placemat. The texture was coarse and tough and I stroked it once as if it might purr and comfort me. “You let people get wounded, you let them die, so you could watch me fight?”

Cheran made a little hand-flap motion to show its unimportance. “They're only humans. It was imperative that I learn what you are and report back to Enclave.”

They're only humans.
I kept my breathing steady, schooling my face to emptiness, not letting him see how I reacted to his statement. How much I wanted to kill him in that moment. Cheran didn't seem to notice. “And now that you've seen me fight?” I asked softly.

“You have a lovely grasp of the basics, and if you had received proper training you would likely be a first-rate battle mage by now. But you forget to draw on your amulets and stored conjures during fighting and rely too much on your blades. If you ever came face-to-face with a well-trained mage in combat, you'd lose, because you would depend on steel.”

I didn't like it that he was so perceptive—and that I was so poorly trained. Audric had taken over my instruction in the martial arts, but I had a decade of training to catch up on and not enough time to devote to it. Unlike mages in Enclaves, who lived off the trade of mage artifacts and services, I had to work for a living in the human world. And Audric, who had no ability to twist and use creation energies, couldn't help me with that part of fighting. I was indeed depending on blades because that was what Audric depended on. Drat. Cheran was right.

“But your biggest flaw in combat is that you care too much what happens to humans and don't seem willing to use them as they're intended to be used in battle.”

“Like pawns,” I said, still soft, remembering Enclave lessons learned so long ago. Lessons where mages were the generals and humans the troops. And humans died.

“Correct. Humans are disposable. You've lived among them so long you've forgotten. And, in addition to all that, you haven't reported back to Enclave about the child. Big mistake.”

Ciana. He meant Ciana. “What about her?”

“She has a seraph artifact. The brooch has to be turned over to the proper authorities once we're able to leave this misbegotten town. And she summoned Minor Flames. To keep her from falling into the hands of Darkness, she has to be taken into protective custody and studied.”

Fear lifted the small hairs across my flesh. My breathing sped up as the terror morphed into fury.
Over my dead body. Over my dead, bled-out, chopped-up, desiccated, rotting body. And yours.
I didn't say it, though my hands were tightening for swords that weren't there. I'd have known this was coming if I had pulverized the Apache Tear. And I could have offered him some tea with rat poison in it.

Some small part of me shuddered at the images in my mind, violent and final, Cheran in a bloody heap or dying in a toxin-induced seizure. On some level I was appalled at myself. On another, it wasn't nearly enough. I'd kill Cheran in cold blood before I let him touch my stepchild.

Had so few days of battle, of pitched combat, changed me so much? This was the second time in as many weeks that I had been ready to kill, to murder. Was I truly willing to commit a capital crime to save someone I loved? Yeah. Hell, yeah. But I shoved those thoughts down deep inside where I didn't have to look at them. “It's my right to tell Enclave. Not yours,” I stated, my voice sounding remarkably calm despite the fact that my blood was boiling. Before he could pin me down I said, “I'll handle it in the next twenty-four hours.” He had to give me that. And he did, with a regal nod of his head. The fiend.

C
heran left just like he came in, without a word, though he did drop a sheaf of lesson plans on the table. I'd sooner read books on demonology than anything he offered to teach me. Though the incantation to kill spawn at a distance would be handy. So would the one that put out fire. Temptation was a real pain in the butt.

I was no longer hungry but I forced myself to eat the cold oatmeal. My jeans were hanging on my hips and I needed protein to restore my depleted reserves and fluids to reduce the dehydration. After the oatmeal, I drank a quart of water and grilled a veggie patty, eating standing at the sink, staring at the wall, wishing I had a window there, overlooking a mountain view. Forcing myself, knowing protein would help me think better, I opened a jar of peanut butter, carrying the half-full jar and a spoon around the loft. I ate, I tidied, but mostly I thought, running through possible scenarios on how to save Ciana.

In a little running debate, I kept coming back to killing Cheran. I didn't like it that part of me chose violence before alternative possibilities were exhausted. And it wasn't like his dying was a clean and neat solution. There was that pesky GPS locator device he wore, and the visa. The seraphs would know the moment he died and would send someone to investigate, someone with wings and a sword and a bad temper, so if I gave in to this particular temptation, I would be blasted with holy fire when the seraphs caught me. Dead in a heartbeat.

The violent part of me noted that I was smart and fast. I could plan something and be long gone when he kicked the bucket. Wryly, I wondered how accurate seraph forensics were, or if God the Victorious would just tell his winged warriors who had killed Cheran and where the guilty culprit was hiding. The violent part shut up at that one. No wonder murder had all but vanished from the list of human sins. Having talked myself out of committing murder, I felt better about myself. I wasn't a raving battle mage with a terminal case of bloodlust and an uncontrollable desire to kill. I wasn't. And I was pretty sure I wasn't becoming one either.

Mental conversation ended, I was back to—nothing. But I had twenty-four hours to figure something out, which made me feel better about it all. The entire world could change in a day. It had happened at the end of the world and the start of the plagues. Maybe Cheran would keel over twitching and bleeding and just die. That was a vision that made me grin happily.

“Who are you planning to kill and do you need any help?”

Peanut butter jar in one hand, spoon in the other, I whirled to face the door. Eli was leaning a shoulder against the doorjamb, booted feet crossed at the ankles, arms crossed over his chest, and his hat shading his brow. He looked as if he'd been there a while. “I knocked. Three times. Interesting choice of weapons.”

I looked from the jar to the spoon and back to him. He looked good standing there. Maybe too good. That new, violent part of me had additional novel visions, of a less bloody, but no less physical nature. I reined them in too. The last time I gave in to physical needs, I ended up in bed with my ex-husband and that had been a disaster. I had changed the locks since, but clearly I hadn't secured them before my nap.

“You going to smother someone in peanut butter or scoop them to death? If you go for the smothering I'll volunteer to be a test subject. Soft foods have all sorts of interesting possibilities”—his lips turned up at the corners—“especially if you add whipped cream and melted chocolate. And that saddle I've been wanting to try.”

“The mental picture is interesting but messy. And I just know the girl would have to clean up afterward. Why do you think I want to kill someone?”

Eli chuckled, all basso notes deep in his chest. It made things low in my belly do a little flutter and shimmy. “Better than interesting.” He pushed back the brim of his hat so I could see his remarkable eyes, warm amber and gold. “You can leave all the work to me, even the cleanup. All you have to do is wear red the color of your hair and moan. Real loud. Maybe scream a time or two.” His voice went up an octave. “Oh, Eli, enough, enough. Don't. Stop. Don't stop!”

Grinning, I dropped the spoon into the jar where it clattered in the empty bottom. I walked to the kitchen and put them in the sink.

“And,” he said, “I saw Cheran Jones leaving. From the look on his face and now yours, it looks like slaughter brewing.”

I turned from the sink and braced myself, both hands on the counter at my back. His eyes strayed from my face to my chest, but only for a moment. I gave him points for effort. “Who are you?” I asked. “EIH or AAS?”

He didn't answer, and I felt, more than saw, him evaluating. “May I come in?”

Earth Invasion Heretics were, in their own way, as dangerous to nonhumans as the AAS. As likely to be enemies. But there was something about Eli Walker that I liked. I gestured to the kitchen table and poured water into a teakettle, setting it on the stove to heat. Once, I would have used a match, but today I drew on a fire amulet and the flame ignited with a little puff of sound and the smell of gas.

“Nice trick. You pull rabbits out of a hat too? Because if you do, we need a rabbit big enough to kill and eat a Dragon.”

Shaking my head, fighting a smile that was at all odds with my mood, I set out teacups and offered him a choice of teas. “Whatever you're having,” he said. “I'm more of a beer man.” From the fridge I pulled a bottle of Black Bear Brew, twisted off the top, and held it out. The Bear Brewery near Asheville had a short list of offerings but they were all good, and I kept a varied supply handy. Unlike hard liquor, beer wasn't proscribed by seraphs or kirk.

Eli took the beer, one hand wrapping around my wrist, the other around my hand on the bottle. With a gentle tug, he pulled me and the bottle to him. Human muscle mass beat mage any day, but his grip was loose enough to give me a choice. I let myself be dragged to him. Gaze locked with mine, he drank, his encircling fingers warm, the cold bottle condensing and wet in my grip. When the bottle was half drained, he eased it away, but kept one hand curled on mine. The other he slid around my hips and pulled me close. It was a graceful dancer's move, all controlled power, fluid and lissome. His arms went around me.

I was left holding the bottle as his mouth came down on mine, our eyes still fastened together. The little things doing somersaults in my belly began to do backflips and handsprings when his mouth touched, lips wet and chilled from the beer, searching and yeasty and delicious. He melded my body to his, and my free hand went to his shoulder. His tongue touched mine and I heard myself sigh. He chuckled again, that purely masculine sound that could make a woman's nether regions stand up and beg, and deepened the kiss.

I was evil, foolish, heartless, and uncaring. My stepdaughter had been threatened, yet I was standing only a few feet from her, kissing a man who might be an enemy.

Eli was only a little taller than I, maybe five and half feet, and we fit together perfectly, his yin to my yang. Or maybe it was the other way around. But his hardness fit into my softness in just the right places.

Guiding me, he drifted us into motion, and I let him lead, dance steps that brought our hips together, apart, together, my belly just brushing his. Tension gathered in my flesh, my knees weakened, and I sighed into his mouth, not thinking at all.

When we came up for air minutes later, the beer was on the counter and we were stretched out on the couch, his body beneath mine. “I like a woman who wants to be on top,” he said with a laugh that vibrated through me. I really liked that laugh. Then he spoiled it totally. “Let's get naked and party,” he said.

I dropped my forehead to his chest. “You really need to work on your pitch. And I don't think so. I don't know anything about you. Except you have amber eyes and really soft hair.”

He nudged my head back up and nuzzled my nose with his smiling lips. “What? You want roses and declarations of love? All that romantic stuff? I have really soft hair all over. You know that too, if I remember that incident in the street in the middle of the fight last night.”

I blushed hotly and he laughed again, the rumble vaguely catlike, like a lion's purr. It seemed to rub against all the warm things deep inside me that were aching to be touched. Okay. I really
really
liked his laugh. With me pressing against him, it was a rumble deep in his chest, a growl of desire and humor, and I had no doubt that he wanted me in the worst way. Or maybe the best way. To combat the need growing within me, I asked, “So. EIH or AAS?”

The laugh eased away but his smile didn't. At some point, he had loosened my hair, and it covered us in a tumbled snarl. He took a single strand and stroked it, curling it around his finger, the vibrant scarlet contrasting on his winter-white skin. “You want to talk about work when things are going so well? Wouldn't you rather—” I rolled away from him and he finished with, “Guess not.”

I wriggled my bottom between his thigh and the couch back, my legs across his, feeling the hard shape of a gun strapped on his thigh, like a wild west gunslinger's. There was something about hard steel jabbing me that was strangely exciting, but I kept my reaction off my face. Getting turned on by close contact with guns was downright disturbing. “I don't sleep with men I don't know.” I could have added that I had only slept with one man, and had married him, and that I didn't intend to sleep with another human, not ever, but that sounded a bit like a challenge and I had a feeling that Eli didn't turn away from a challenge. “EIH or AAS?” I repeated.

Eli had lost the hat and his coat somewhere and, wearing only two layered shirts, stretched up an arm, tucking his hand behind his neck. The position stretched out his chest, giving him a long, lean line. He grinned lazily when he saw the direction of my gaze, but I shook my head. “No way. Answer the question.”

His amusement evaporated and he considered me, sitting beside him, my legs draping him, our thighs in intimate contact. “What do you know about the heretics' organization and the asseys? Do you know the difference?”

“Between the EIH and the AAS?” It sounded like a school question, a compare and contrast assignment. I crossed my arms over my chest. “I'll bite. One is an antigovernment, antiseraph organization at odds with every religious group on the planet, composed of poor, disenfranchised members of society, who advocate anarchy. The other is government to the core, working hand-in-hand with the Realms of Light, doing whatever the seraphs want, including tracking down and killing any unlicensed witchy-women, turning over EIH operatives to the local kirks, fighting demons and Darkness wherever they can, providing covert intelligence about the movements of Darkness to the military, and coordinating military action during conflict. And the biggest difference—asseys' salaries are paid by tax money.”

“Well, there is that,” he said.

I rolled my eyes. Only a little, but it got the point across.

“That's been the standard line for decades,” he conceded. “But what if the EIH had evidence, real evidence, that the seraphs and demons, Light and Darkness, were really aliens from another planet, who, when their own solar system or galaxy or whatever was decimated by war, brought that conflict here.”

“Solar system or galaxy. Far, far away,” I quoted a Pre-Ap
Star Wars
movie line. It reminded me suddenly of the reference Eli had made about my tanto, the blade stretched with blue light. The minisword had reminded him of Luke Skywalker. How weird was that.

“Make fun if you want. Maybe they come from another dimension. But it isn't heaven or hell. Have you ever heard of the river of
time?
” I don't know what he saw in my expression, but his face went hard. “Talk to me,” he said. “You've heard of it.”

Actually, I had seen it. Had been there, sort of. In a series of out-of-body encounters that were more surreal than reality, experiences that kept slipping from my conscious memory like dreams. I had gone there during a kind of warfare that seemed to be fought in two places at once, on the earth as I knew it, and in another place that was all spiritual energy centered around this stream of lava-energy that the seraphs called the river of
time
. They talked about it a lot but they weren't exactly forthcoming on what it really was, or where it was, or what it did. All I knew for sure was that when I stood on its bank and joined with a seraph spiritually, in a mind-altering mystical mating, it changed the course of a battle. Because of it, Forcas had been drained and the Dragon was stopped in its tracks. I nearly died there too. I still wasn't sure why I hadn't.

I had a theory on what the river of
time
was. I guessed it was a fourth dimension, with time being the fourth. Meaning that the river of
time
could give seraphic beings access to all of time throughout the history of the universe. It was here, not here. It was Earth, not Earth. It was heaven and not heaven. It was a reality all its own.

Eli watched me. Could I trust him with what I had seen? “Assey or EIH?” I asked again. And subsequently, in one of those intuitive leaps that defied logic, my breath stopped in my chest. I asked, “Or both?”

One hand reached for my arm, the other went for the weapon along his thigh. Faster than humans can follow, mage-fast, I ripped my arm from his fingers in a corkscrew break, leaped from the couch, and tumbled across the floor, thumbing on a shield. In mage-sight, it was thousands of interlocking, overlapping purple feathers of energy. Unlike most mage-shields, this one moved with me, the feathers rippling as I dove for my blades on the end of the kitchen table.

His hand reached the holster and snapped it open. I whipped up the tanto and the kogatana, racing back to the couch, and flowed into the walking horse. Eli was still drawing the gun when his slow human eyes found me and he stopped cold. My blade was poised to cut through his liver. All it would take was a single thrust as I snapped off the shield.