Obsidian Flame (15 page)

As she dipped her pen in the inkwell, sudden, inexplicable longings surged yet again within her, a swell of her heart and lungs that caused her for a moment to lose her ability to breathe.

This was new.

What on earth?

Then the experience took a turn, a sudden hard turn. She dropped the pen on the floor and rose from her stool. She moved to the center of the small chamber. She held her hands palms-up and tilted her head back just a little, her eyes closed.

Spiritual fervor, surely.

She was almost in pain.

She could feel a vibration now, but it came from below, beneath the stones on which she stood.

The vibration intensified and fear suddenly shot through her. She didn’t understand what was happening.

But even as the fear came, a wave of love followed that eradicated the fear so that she spread her arms wide and smiled. She let the love flow. She had a sense of weight, of strength, of vitality, of life force, and of the earth.

Yes, of the earth, a power that seemed to be flowing through her. She had the sense that something enormous had come to her.

The object of her forbidden poetry came into her mind:
Leto.

She saw him as clearly as if he were standing next to her. He shivered in the cold. He wore a dark fur hat that just covered his ears and looked very Russian. The sky overhead was both the dark of night and yet the muted gray of clouds overhead. Snowflakes fell. He stared ahead, the sharpness of his blue eyes as vivid as she remembered, beautiful.

The power and the love she felt flowing through her, from the source she didn’t understand, coupled with the affection she had always felt for this brother-warrior of Thorne’s, poured through her in an increased rush. Just like that she stood next to him … sort of. In some mystical way, she knew herself to be in two places at once.

He stared at her, wide-eyed, stunned. “Grace?” he murmured. His lips were tinged blue from the cold but she could see that his skin was clammy, as if he was ill, something highly unusual for vampires.

“I’m here,” she said. Her focus was all for him. She could feel that she was not with him in a corporeal sense, and yet she was able to stand next to him. She didn’t question the situation.

“What … what are you doing here?”

She shook her head and looked around. Extraordinary white tigers, one in each cage, paced, restless and … starving. This she could tell because of the power within her.

She looked to the left of the cages. She stood with Leto at the head of dozens of stairs that flowed down to a broad empty street, a long avenue lined with bare trees. She looked back at him. “I was thinking about you and now here I am. Where is this place?”

“Moscow Two. I … I have not seen you since you went into the Convent.”

Grace smiled. “Over a hundred years ago.” As she stood next to him, she could suddenly smell him. The scent was erotic, very much a man but laced with forest, like the ponderosa pines of northern Arizona.

The power once more flowed over her in a great wave of understanding. She didn’t so much have a vision as she simply
knew
what was happening and what was needed. “You are in mortal danger and you are to come with me. I am to tend your wounds.”

*   *   *

Leto knew he shouldn’t go. He was all that was abhorrent to such a sweet spirit as Grace. Besides, his presence in her life would put her in danger. He was sure of that.

A double shimmering appeared in front of the tiger cages. Casimir and Greaves arrived together, forming a purposeful front. He didn’t harbor even the smallest doubt as to the meaning of their sudden appearance.

He felt something inside him relax and give way, as though he hadn’t really breathed for the last hundred years.

It was over, finally over, the ten thousand games he played, all the ways he hid his subversion, all the ways he’d tried to sabotage the tasks Greaves assigned him, all the dying blood he had consumed.

So now he had a choice to make: to go with Grace or to die here, on this platform. He felt in his gut it would be much better for him to leave the earth now, permanently, than to involve Grace in one more moment of the chaos that would ensue should he go with her.

He was ready to die. That would be his decision today. He would simply refuse to take her hand.

He turned to Grace but she had a funny look on her face as she shifted to stare not at Greaves but at Casimir.

Leto, too, glanced back at Casimir and saw that the Fourth ascender’s attention had suddenly become fixed on Grace, his dark eyes wide, almost surprised. His lips moved. Leto thought he might have said, “Beautiful.” Then he whispered, “I’m smelling a meadow, soft grasses, fragrant wildflowers all combined.”

Greaves turned slightly and scowled at him. “What did you say?”

But Casimir ignored him. He took a step forward. Then another.

So Casimir could see Grace but Greaves couldn’t. What the hell did this mean?

Leto turned back to Grace. Then he smelled it as well, the gentlest fragrance of a meadow, all that verdant growth, the earth, a combined scent of indistinguishable flowers.

Breh-hedden
shot through his mind. A flash of fear followed swiftly at the singular truth that the Fourth ascender also smelled Grace. If all that he knew of the
breh-hedden
was true, he was both experiencing and watching the inception of what had always been a myth on Second Earth. Only what the fuck did it mean that both he and Casimir could scent the same woman?

Oh, God, no.

“Grace,” he said, calling to her. She turned to look at him and in that same moment, from his peripheral vision, he watched Casimir lift his hand in what would no doubt be a monstrous hand-blast, aimed not at Grace but at him.

“You must come now,” she said.

When she stretched out her hand to him, a semi-transparent limb with an iridescent sheen, he looked at the cupped fingers, the small white hand, and he placed his palm over hers and held on tight.

He saw Casimir’s energy release toward him but at the same time, a strange kind of vibration flowed through him. Suddenly he whipped through nether-space, dematerializing and blanking out for a split second, only to touch down in a dark stone cell right next to … Grace.

He let go of her hand and spun in a circle, folding his sword into his hand and preparing for the Fourth intruder, but nothing more happened.

A wave of abdominal cramps caught him and he lurched forward and gasped. He released the sword back to his weapons locker deep in the bowels of Estrella Mountain where Greaves had one of his primary military compounds. The sword was identified to him and therefore dangerous to Grace. He dropped to his knees.

“You’re in pain.”

He nodded, gritting his teeth, unable to breathe. After half a minute, the spasm eased though much of the pain remained. Struggling, he regained his feet. “Intruders,” he whispered, wanting to call his sword back but afraid he would completely lose control.

“Don’t worry, the trace is blocked.”

“You have that kind of power?”

She shook her head. “No, but the power that possessed me does.”

“What power?” He looked around, expecting another ascender to step forward, James perhaps, but there was no one else in the room.

She shrugged. “I can’t explain it, since I’m not sure exactly what just happened to me. But I felt a power from there.” She swept a hand in the direction of the floor. “Then the power flowed through me. Suddenly I was thinking of you, and then there I was next to you.”

He pinched his lips together. Nausea swirled in his gut.

He focused on her. She looked like a goddess with her long blond hair streaming in ringlets all the way to her waist. She wore a long gown, somewhat nubby and rough in appearance, perhaps handwoven, very beige. Her eyes were large and a light goldish green. Her eyelashes were light-colored as well, which added to her almost angelic look. Her chin had a faint dimple, just as he remembered.

And her scent was much stronger now that he stood beside her. His body reacted, wholly inappropriately, and as he turned to face her, as her meadow and wildflower scent continued to pummel his senses, he began to grow aroused. The muscles of his thighs, abdomen, and chest flexed and relaxed, then trembled in need. But all that sudden physical sensation, like he needed to take her to bed now, caused a new wave of nausea to flow.

What was he going to do? He’d never seen such a spare room with so little he could use.

“You’re going to be ill.”

He felt the clamping of his cheeks. He nodded.

She held out her hand and a wooden bowl appeared. “I’ll get into trouble for this.”

He took the bowl, turned away from her, and puked his guts out. Great, just great.

I have heard it said that freedom is the ability to do what you want, when you want to do it. But I have come to believe that true freedom is the ability to help other people do what they want, when they want to do it. But then, I am a hopeless idealist.

—
Memoirs,
Beatrice of Fourth

CHAPTER 7

Marguerite was alone in the cabin and had been for a while. Thorne was out hunting down Diallo, that tall gorgeous black man.

Now, there was a fine piece of …

Okay, she needed to keep her thoughts pure, at least while she was sharing a bed with Thorne.

She sat on the brown leather couch, cradling a cup of hot, hot coffee, wondering whether she should just take off. Everything about being here felt like another cell into which she was being shoved one push at a time and without a say.

She’d awakened to Thorne spooning her, which of course had led to an early-morning romp. All those wonderful chemicals were still jumping around in her veins, shouting in alternate fits of air-boxing,
Yippee!
and
Stay with Thorne, you fucking idiot!

And yes, she’d enjoyed it, but she had this really bad feeling that the longer she stayed shacked up with Thorne, the harder it would be to leave and get on with her real life.

She sipped her coffee and stared through the bank of windows out at some beautiful tall fir trees. But that didn’t help. The sight reminded her that she wasn’t where she wanted to be.

She lowered her chin and scowled as she took another sip. The cabin had a small kitchen with a decent coffeemaker and cupboard stocked with Seattle’s Best. Apparently, the colony had generators or something, which supplied the homes with some electricity. So yeah, she’d turned on the coffeemaker and sighed when it lit up.

She didn’t need more than coffee, not first thing, although her stomach seemed a little more rumbly than usual. Probably nerves. She’d always had coffee in the Convent. Sister Quena had at least given her devotiates a big cup to start off the morning. Come to think of it, coffee at breakfast was about the only nice thing the woman had ever done.

Whatever.

The trouble was, she had the willies again, irritating little shivers that kept climbing all over her back and down her sides, bugging the shit out of her wing-locks.

Ever since Thorne had related his belief that Owen Stannett was behind last night’s attack, he’d been on her mind big-time. If he’d hired some death vampire mercenaries to get his job done, would he recruit another couple of teams and try again?

As she rolled the warm mug between her palms, she tried to figure out exactly what she was feeling, why she was so uneasy. Yes, she had reasons—Stannett being on the hoof, was one—but something more was going on, something inexplicable, something
big,
something within her. She rubbed her itchy back against the couch.

Maybe Thorne was right. Maybe she needed to just settle down for a minute and confront the fact that she was obsidian flame, whatever the hell that might mean for her in the coming days, weeks, and months.

Her power was emerging, vibrating deep into her bones, making her wing-locks swell and retract and, yes, itch.

She took a deep breath. It was either take deep breaths or throw the coffee cup against the window. She didn’t want this. She didn’t want any of it. She didn’t want obsidian flame or her Seers power or any of her advanced powers.

She could even go into the darkening like Havily and Endelle, something Thorne didn’t know she could do. She was a smelter of preternatural power. Maybe it was a good thing for the world she lacked ambition as well, because sometimes she had the sense she had as much power as Endelle. Aw, shit.

She had to get out of this cabin, leave this colony. She had to get rid of her association with Thorne. She wanted a new life, a simpler life, a life with one goal:
shagging a bunch of hunky men.

There was just one problem—that stupid Seers gift of hers had started crashing down on her and leaving her wide open to who the hell knew what. And Thorne had been right: If the enemy had been around last night … Stannett, for instance … she’d be locked up right now, a new ankle guard around her leg, trapped in a cell probably forever.