Imperial ((Imperial) Web of Hearts and Souls) (9 page)

Hungrily, my hands moved across his shoulders, his chest, letting the scent of fresh cut roses course from my being. As he returned that essence to me all the more powerfully, we were basking in the sweet aroma of a feverous rush.

We were quenching an undying thirst for one another.

My flesh was aching for him. I felt starved for this. The bliss was near painful. There was so much emotion in every movement of our embrace that I felt my soul quake.

Before I could even gasp, we were lying across a bed that had manifested in this room. Surrounded by silence and candlelight, we explored what belonged to each of us.

Every girl remembers her first, the first soul that seized every emotion within her…the one that took her precious innocence and replaced it with an emotion that changed everything she knew about the world around her.

With time, those girls become women, and they embrace their last with a force that has grown with time and experience. Vade and I were each other’s first, last, only, and knowing that—knowing that the rush between us was so sacred that it could never be shared with another—was more than empowering. It was a regal sensation that we had never once taken advantage of. At least we would not take advantage of that in this moment.

Gradually, with care, the clothes that bound our bodies were released. Skin-to-skin, soul-to-soul; that was our destination. But we had waited too long for this moment to be anything but slow and deliberate. Once a new part of our bodies was exposed, we took the time to kiss the warm skin sensually that was hidden before. I could tell it was killing him to hold back, to be tender, that his embrace was just as greedy as mine. It was painful, but I have never felt such a glorious aching in my life.

Passion is called a fever for a reason. The heat comes from within—the craving is unmistakable. It burns. A divine pain that most would kill to feel endlessly. Your very being is on fire, and it craves the one that created that heat. It fights to get closer to that source, yet at the same time it caresses and calls gently to its other. For if the pure fever were released suddenly, it would nearly destroy the souls. It was just that powerful. An addictive, potent lust.

I sighed as his lips moved across my skin, which was no longer translucent, but now glowing against the candlelight. As I felt his powerful hands embrace my flesh, the ache in his every movement dared me to believe that he feared I was a dream, an illusion his mind had created to appease him.

They call it a rush for a reason, too. A rush is felt in moments like this for almost any soul, but once an Escort claims a rush they feel this emotion near constantly, most definitely when they are in the presence of the one who created such an emotion.

Escorts are in tune with emotions, to every movement of the vessel. Naturally, they know exactly what to say, where to touch, where to caress, and where to kiss to bring forth an even more intense fever. The goal is to pull as much passion as the other soul can give—which is near infinite.

The soul’s essence rushes to the skin, to the waiting vessel of our other. Once that energy is connected, every movement and every touch is electrified to a point where breath and thought are near impossible. A rush is defined and produced when souls are connected. True rushes, rushes that are everlasting, are felt long before the first touch; they are felt at first glance.

The power that an Escort gives its adored is unmatched by any other race. A regal fever accompanied by a rush would last through several moonrises. It is intense and consuming. And if we had any sense at all, we would never leave this state.

Though the movement of the vessel was blissful, enticing, it was nothing compared to the energy that a rush creates within the soul. Each soul is raised to an enraptured state.

Rapture was the state I was in when Vade’s thoughts began to connect with mine. At first I saw this moment. We were reading each other’s desires and honoring them, but as time moved, as I felt the emotions of his touch, I reached deeper into his thoughts. I had to know who had crossed him, who had forced his hand to keep us apart. Who was hurting our kingdom.

He was careful to guard his deepest trepidation, but I could see flashes in my mind’s eye. I saw the moment he was told of my execution. The raging storm that nearly ended creation below us. I saw him call a council of kings and demand that Xavier accept his challenge to a duel. Like a coward, Xavier denied him.

Vade assured Xavier that his demise had been forecasted, but before Vade could strike him he saw something in Xavier’s eyes, something that caused him to smile coolly and to step back and listen to the other kings. What Vade saw, I could not fathom.

The kings openly stated that because I could be destroyed without any fury from our Creator that I was not a sovereign; that in order for me to die my line would have had to have perished first, not be released. They claimed I was a toy sent to appease the mighty king of anger for the time being, that I was a distraction and now that The Realm had claimed me, that Vade should see things clearly, that he should rise and command his line to invoke the emotions we all needed so desperately to survive.

Wrath and anger poured through me as I saw this in his thoughts. Sensing that emotion, Vade’s lips and hands found a new way to distract me.  He wanted me in that moment with him. I wanted to be there, too, but the thing is, Vade would never reveal any worry to me, so this was my only way of figuring out clearly what had happened when I was gone.

I engaged the passion he was drowning me in, took control for a moment or two, playfully pinning his strong arms so I could feather kisses across his flesh. That always drove him mad with passion, leading him to fight for control once more. I let him have the control he asked for, let him carry me to a new high.

Once I caught my breath, I dove back into his thoughts, finding the moment I left behind.

The council of kings was something rarely called into place, but when it was, it was by no small feat. Each sat on a throne, gloriously spaced inside of a golden oval room, with the exception of mine and Vade’s, which were side by side. Because he was the king of anger—the one emotion that resided in every emotion—his chair was higher, slightly above the others.

Something happened as the other kings stated their case. Vade’s eyes drifted behind them. In his thoughts, I could only see a blinding light with sky blue eyes within its essence. Our Creator.

If the Creator was not speaking clearly to you, you would not sense Him. That was just how He worked. Plain and simple.

Though all of His children, with the exception of me, were in that room, Vade was the only one that sensed Him, saw Him. And because his gaze never moved, the other kings had no reason to know that the favored king was receiving a sweet revelation from our Creator. They simply thought that Vade was listening to them, that he was silently agreeing with their arguments.

Idiots. You do not cross the King of Anger without some form of retaliation, and that revenge would be just like the king that would deliver it: cool, flawlessly designed, and everlasting.

“Be with me now,” Vade whispered to me, asking me to leave his thoughts be and surrender everything to him.

He’d caught me lurking in his mind again. I felt like a bad lover, that I was hurting him right now. I could not let that happen.

I shelved the sovereign I was and let the girl deep inside rise.

My eyes connected with his, fire to ice. He held my stare as the rhythm of passion carried us away. He wanted my mind, body, and soul at this moment, and I granted him that request.

Breathlessly, we lay side by side. A beat later, his energy had pulled me against him once more. As I lay on his powerful chest and gazed at the endless candles, I tried to understand what thoughts I had seen of Vade’s. I still did not understand why he’d waited so long to come for me. Had he forgotten how beautiful what we had was, how we both allowed the other not to be a sovereign in each other’s arms? That together we could be real, we could let our true selves rise without judgment?

My fingertips traced the defined muscles of his stomach as my thoughts raced in various directions. I’d never shown it before, but I often let what the other kings thought of me tangle with my emotions. I was the last to believe that I was one of them. I knew that it was a dangerous claim. I was content to have risen from death, to be at Vade’s side. But Vade was not. He claimed I was a queen long before Mazing called out to me. Long before any of the other kings even considered me to be more than a passing thought.

I once thought that Vade gave me the reign of wrath just so I could use it against the other kings. But he calmly told me that the most efficient way to retaliate against them was to prove them wrong. To create my own success on the word-laced daggers that were thrown at me.

“What did He say to you?” I murmured.

I felt Vade’s powerful arm tighten around me. When he gave me no answer to what the Creator had revealed or spoken to him that day, I moved my head back so I could stare up at him.

He was gazing into the glow the candles were creating around us. “Vade,” I whispered.

He sighed deeply as his glowing eyes drifted down to me. “He said that…that it would never be the same. That my fellow kings would be overthrown.”

“I suppose He was wrong about that,” I said as I furrowed my brow and silently questioned how intense his stare was.

“He is eternal. Nothing is instant with Him.”

“But you believe their demise will come?”

“I believed the reason the Creator gave me for them to be overthrown,” Vade said under his breath.

“Power? They would charge The Fall and fail?” I assumed aloud.

Vade’s intense stare told me The Fall was not even in his thoughts at that moment. “Do you remember our last bloom?” he whispered gently as his fingertips caressed the long strands of my hair, which was resting on my shoulders.

Blooms were not the same for us as other Escorts—we are sovereigns. It did not take two to create one or extend the line; it took one. Our energy would rush from our souls and define two separate lines.

Much like what just occurred between us.

Before this night, our last bloom had been moments before our last fight, mere hours before my death. “I released the line before that energy could have found hosts,” I assured him, looking away from his stare as I held myself up on one arm.

I doubted he knew everything that occurred when I’d approached Xavier’s throne, that Xavier had asked me to be his adored for a millennium—I doubt Vade would have bothered with a call to the kings if he did.

“You released the line whilst my energy was still entangled within yours.” His hypnotic voice displayed a painful anger that caused my eyes to meet his once again.

“You lost a part of your line that day?” I whispered.

His stare told me that he had. Beyond losing me, losing his mist, future Escorts of his line, would have been a tragedy. Vade’s energy was too powerful to be left unguarded. That was why Vade rarely had mists lurking in the real world. He assigned petals to watch over them, even as children. He guarded his essence closely, dearly. So much so that more than once Escorts from other lines had asked to be claimed by him.

The ache in his stare screamed a yes to me.

“How many?”  I stated as my skin turned crimson with rage.

Xavier’s punishment did not fit the crime my First had committed.

Vade raised his other hand and let his long fingertips massage his eyes, which were now closed, a tell that told me that right now words were too hard for him to grasp.

I felt horrid. I caused that. If I had just swallowed my pride and told him my First was at risk of death, that war had been declared—this could have all been avoided, at least delayed long enough for his mist to be unraveled from my energy. It was bad enough that we’d been apart this long, that my entire line was sacrificed. This, this was salt in a wound that would never close for either of us.

“Tell me,” I pleaded sorrowfully. I had to know.

“A few,” he murmured as his hand fell from his eyes and he adjusted how he was lying on the satin pillows below him.

A few could be in the thousands, so that didn’t give me an answer. I was reading his rigid body movement. The anger that was settled beneath his pristine skin. It wasn’t aimed at me. Real anger, anger without passion, had never been cast at me from his essence. I knew that he was grieving deeply for the souls he’d lost.

I didn’t even realize that his energy was released with mine that fateful day. We had just passed an eternity cycle, a point marked in corporeal time as four million, three hundred two years. It is the point that the stars return to their beginning.

It is also the only point in time that Vade extends his line. Sounds like a massive amount of time, a span of time that would barely allow any of us to have more than a few souls in our line. But time is not measured the same in our realm of life. We rarely perceive it at all. But if I were forced to explain the length of time to a mortal soul, I would say the cycle comes around for us as often as a new moon comes to the heavens.

Every chance I had, cycle or not, I sent my energy out.

The only reason for Vade to send out his energy outside of a cycle would be to create Fated Escorts, souls that had the power to rise quickly. Something he had talked about often but had never dared to try.