Wings of Fire (6 page)

He brought the glass to his lips and took a sip. His tongue jerked with pleasure. While the tart lemon put sparks in his mouth, the drink began that long oh-so-necessary slide into sleep that only one-hundred-proof could bring.

It was the waiting that was killing him.

Waiting.

Fuck.

Though he’d finally gotten a serious lead, he still had to wait.

After his third glass, the numbing began … but so did the memories. He saw a woman, pregnant with his child, running through their olive grove in ancient Italy. She was laughing, holding her belly. She was five months’ pregnant, showing nicely. He would walk through the Tuscan village, head high, his arm behind her back pulling her gown tight at the waist so that everyone could see what he had put in her, what he cherished. She would rail at him, shoving her fingers in his face and complaining about what a brute he was, how vulgar, how uncivilized. Then she would strut, thrusting her stomach forward as well. Ah, they were both proud. Married five months and five months with child.

Maria.

He smiled. Then another memory surfaced, the one that brought a searing pain to his heart, as though it were new and not thirteen centuries old.

He had died the night that tribesmen from the north had entered his farmhouse, bound him, and whipped his back into a thousand stripes while they raped his beloved wife, killed her, and stole the life of his son.
His son. His only son.

That he knew his child was a boy was one of the first inklings he’d had that he possessed preternatural power. The strong sense of
knowing
had been on him from the moment of conception. Maria telling him a few weeks later that she was pregnant had been both a confirmation and a warning that his life was about to change.

The enemy had left Medichi to die, having thrust a sword deep into his stomach. He’d been bleeding out on the floor. But the sight of his wife calling softly to him, reaching out to him with the scarlet of her blood spreading over the white linen of her nightgown, had given birth to his ascended powers.

The human part of him died that night and the vampire was born. At first he didn’t know what was happening to him. He ascended to Second Earth, appearing first at the Borderland outside of Rome and answering his call to ascension with a hand-blast. Thorne had come to him, majestically floating out of the air in a leather kilt and heavy battle sandals.

Thorne had been Medichi’s Guardian of Ascension. He’d shared his suffering, eased his pain, shown him what he could do, made him a warrior that very night as together they battled death vampires. Greaves, even back then, had tried hard to make him dead. The bastard had failed.

After his ascension ceremony, Medichi asked permission of no one, but hunted down every one of his wife and son’s murderers. He knew every face and watched with pleasure as each suffered, bled, and died. Vengeance had been born in him that night, war-like justice he’d meted out every night since, battling a new kind of enemy … death vampires.

The clatter of heels on the hardwood of his villa floors brought him back to the present.

Havily. Shit. He should have already disappeared into his bedroom and taken his limoncello with him. He tensed. He didn’t want her to see him like this. He had a sudden impulse to hide the glass and the gallon jar. Then he relaxed. Who was he kidding? Both Havily and Marcus knew what he was doing. You can’t hide that many lemons, that many bottles of vodka. He shifted on the table and dragged one of the chairs with his foot to bring it closer.

Marcus’s
breh
appeared in the doorway and his heart thudded. At one time he’d had a little crush on Havily. Maybe all the warriors had—certainly Luken.

She looked lovely in her usual Ralph Lauren skirt and silk blouse. Her layered red hair floated around her shoulders. She wore leopard-print heels. His heart swelled with affection. “Morning, Hav. You’re running a little late.”

He watched a blush rise on her porcelain cheeks. She was very fair; a little embarrassment went a long way. “Well, you know, Marcus was with you boys last night and since he doesn’t report to the office until the afternoon, he likes me to sleep in with him.” Her blush deepened.

Medichi looked down. Black hairs darted at weird angles on his feet, especially on his big toes. He nodded but didn’t meet her gaze. “You’ve been good for him.”

“He’s been good for me.” Her voice was soft, low, compassionate.

Shit. He threw back the rest of the limoncello, almost choking. He huffed a sigh, shoved both chairs back with his feet, and slid off the table to stand in front of her. Suddenly he remembered he had some news. He told her about the death vamp’s revelations, about Parisa and Burma.

“Can it be true? Will she be coming home soon?” Tears rushed to her eyes.

“I hope so,” he said. Damn, his throat was tight.

He opened his arms wide. Havily walked into them then slid her arms around his back and squeezed hard. He felt her chest jump a few times. “Hey,” he said, petting her back and trying not to mess up her hair. Havily was so damn stylish. “You’re going to ruin your makeup if you keep crying.”

Her chest jerked again, but he was sure it was a laugh this time. She didn’t, however, release him.

His throat twisted into a knot. “Have I thanked you and Marcus for staying on at the villa?”

“Only every other day.”

His turn to laugh.

After a few more seconds, she finally drew back and dabbed carefully beneath her eyes with the backs of her fingers. She glanced at the empty glass. “Still can’t sleep?”

“Not without help.”

She nodded. No judgment, thank God. She frowned, looked at the floor, wrapped her arms around her stomach.

His heart sank again. He felt the question in the air between them. He settled a hand on her shoulder, and she looked up at him. “Yes, I felt her again and I heard her call my name. So yes, she’s still alive.”

She released another heavy sigh. “Thank God. If only she could say more to you than just your name.”

“That’s all she ever could, you know, even three months ago. Her telepathic abilities just haven’t emerged yet.”

“I know, I know.”

He nodded. “And now, I’m actually feeling sleepy.”

With the heavy jug in one hand, his glass in the other, he returned to the fridge. He heard the familiar click of her heels as she followed behind. “How’s the house coming?” he called from over his shoulder.

“Marcus had another big fight with the contractor. Imagine that.” Marcus ran a tight ship and his contractor didn’t. Medichi felt an I’m-firing-his-ass coming soon.

Marcus and Havily were building a home at the foot of South Mountain. They wanted to be near Endelle’s administrative offices, not far from Sky Harbor Airport on Mortal Earth. They were also building in the Pacific Northwest, but that was a getaway property and had nothing to do with their stay at his villa.

He put the limoncello away then washed out his glass. Yeah, time to get some sleep.

Havily stood on the other side of the dark soapstone island. “If you need anything, Antony—”

“I know. Just ask.”

She smiled and her light green eyes sparkled. “You know where I’ll be.” Besides working with Endelle in the darkening, she also worked at administrative headquarters on special projects. It turned out that for all Havily’s warmth of spirit, she had a temper to rival Endelle’s; some of their fights had gotten so loud and so profane, they’d become legendary. But Havily really wasn’t complaining. She’d never looked happier and somehow in all those blistering fights with the Supreme High Administrator of Second Earth, Havily had made peace with her new job and her new life.

She nodded, lifted her arm, and vanished.

Now that she was gone, Medichi planted his hands on the front of the sink and let his shoulders and head slump. Havily meant well. Christ, they all meant well, but the constant support and concern were fire on his nerves and he was getting sick of having to front.

Moving to the center cupboard, he grabbed a new glass, sixteen ounces this time. He drew the jug of limoncello from the fridge and poured it to the rim. How many was that? Three, four, five? It had to be bad if he’d started losing track.

Whatever.

He replaced the jug, drank off the top inch, then headed back to his bedroom.

For the past three months he’d slept maybe three, four hours at a stretch. He kept waking up to nightmares—seeing Parisa but not being able to reach her; seeing her stretched out at his feet, dying, and being unable to save her.

As he lay in bed now reviewing how he might rescue her, he realized he’d reached the end of one of his ropes—he could no longer remain earthbound when he fought. He’d been going solo and battling death vampires in the air for months on his morning searches, but he still hadn’t let any of the warriors see him mount his wings, or see the scars on his back. Only Marcus.

So, yeah, shit. After thirteen centuries he was going to have to reveal the truth to his brother warriors. And it would be tonight.

***

At midnight, Geneva time, Darian Greaves was in his penthouse, sitting up in bed, his HP on his lap as he read emails from Rith. With ambitions to take over two worlds, he kept his plans simple: He built armies of death vampires, and he turned High Administrators by appealing to their greed. When his army was big enough and when he “owned” a majority of Territories around the globe, he’d simply push Madame Endelle out of her office and get on with things.

Endelle, though quite powerful in her own right, had very little ambition and hardly sufficient executive prowess to stand against his persistence and dedication. Her values were too simple and her organizational skills too limited to be a real threat.

The light from a wall-mounted swing-arm lamp positioned above his lap cast a lovely half-moon glow on the shoulder of his most recent ladylove. When the bed was well occupied, he liked doing a little work between sessions.

He rubbed the soft shoulder. The marks he’d given her had already started to heal. The claw of his left hand was useful for so many things. He’d genetically altered his hand to create terror, but the applications during sex were just delightful. He loved how an idea made manifest could surprise him in terms of usefulness and innovation.

The woman whimpered when he dug a nail into the deepest wound. But he smelled her answering arousal. She enjoyed a little pain. He enjoyed delivering it. They were an excellent match.

He’d known for a long time that he wanted this particular woman in his bed and by his side. He just hadn’t known exactly how she would come to him without creating problems in his Coming Order—she had belonged to one of his most loyal High Administrators. But this much he knew: All things come to him who waits. And so she had come to him because her husband had died … by the hand of a Warrior of the Blood … one of the few times he actually felt beholden to that group of hateful do-gooders.

He also believed that when life delivers lemons, you must make lemonade. In his experience of well over two thousand years, he’d made that particular philosophy his own. Yes, he was a positive thinker. Very evolved. He smiled to himself.

He’d been thinking positive thoughts about this woman for several decades. But how did he know that the day he’d turned High Administrator Eldon Crace into a death vampire by giving him dying blood, the idiot would fail to make use of his special symptom-diminishing antidote? The result had been somewhat unexpected: Crace had become a full-fledged monster with more power than was good for him, and Warrior Luken had killed him in his forge. That had been a black day.

Talk about lemons.

Greaves had sealed the forge permanently after disposing of Crace’s body. That any of the Warriors of the Blood had found the means to fold directly into any part of his compound had enraged Greaves. If Crace hadn’t already been dead, he would have killed him himself. Greaves had seen the security tapes of the event. He’d witnessed ascender Havily Morgan manacled to the wall and drained of blood, and he’d watched Warrior Marcus fold into the forge and attack Crace. He hadn’t been surprised that Crace had dominated Warrior Marcus—the latter had just recovered from third-degree burns over most of his body. But how stupid could Crace have been not to have foreseen the arrival of another warrior?

Still, the violation of his compound by Warriors of the Blood had a silver lining that was truly magnificent: From the moment of Crace’s death, there had been no impediment to his taking the man’s widow into his bed. The exquisite Julianna now lay facedown beside him, the tips of her extremely long nails stroking the tender portion of his naked anatomy between his hip and the top of his thigh. As much as he was able, God help him, he loved her. She was avaricious, power-hungry, thought nothing of torturing anyone opposed to her schemes, and enjoyed both a dominant and submissive role in bed. In other words, she was his soul mate.

Right now, they had an equal number of wounds.

She stroked the lump on his groin just over the vein she’d tapped earlier.

He scrolled through the numerous Seers Fortress reports attached as documents to various emails. He found the usual: The Warriors of the Blood were gaining power through the ritual bonding of the
breh-hedden;
Warrior Marcus and his
breh,
Havily, were preventing High Administrators from defecting to Greaves’s camp; Alison Wells, who was also Warrior Kerrick’s
breh
and Endelle’s personal assistant, was still slated to do some as-yet-unspecified glorious deed for Second Earth. How annoying.

The emails were sorted in order of importance by Rith Do’onwa, his most trusted and most submissive minion. As much as he could, he trusted Rith. The vampire had abducted Parisa—a feat of no small power—and had been keeping her concealed from Madame Endelle’s forces all this time. The only fly in the ointment at present was that although Parisa had disappeared from the future streams for most of three months, she’d recently resurfaced as a threat to his Coming Order. She was a terrible conundrum.

His instinct was to kill her. Still, if he disposed of her outright, even through one of his minions whom he could later blame, her relationship to Warrior Medichi would invite Armageddon. The death of any of the women connected so closely to the Warriors of the Blood would ignite a frenzy of hunting and slaughtering. Greaves did not want to be caught in that sort of maelstrom if he could help it. The warriors would draw and quarter him at the very least for taking her life. As a man intent on ruling the world, he had learned to tread the waters of subvert-and-conquer very lightly.