Ascension
Her body felt rubbery, disoriented as though some of her muscles pulled two ways at once. Of course. Since she now possessed his muscle memory alongside her own.
She set her feet apart and slung her left arm behind her back.
He looked her up and down, nodded his approval. “A warrior’s stance.”
Some of the images flickered up to her conscious mind. There he was standing before a woman with black hair and a dress made up of some kind of spotted animal skin, a beautiful woman who looked Arabic and exotic.
She knew the woman was Endelle, the leader of Second, even though her name wasn’t spoken. She knew because he knew. Endelle appeared angry, her enormous wings all the way to the ceiling but drawn back aggressively. The words came from her mouth, “Don’t you dare take that fucking tone with me, Warrior, or I’ll have your wings—literally—feather by feather.”
“Okaaay,” she murmured, shutting the memory down. She was so out of her depth.
“You’ll need your weapon now.” He held the box bearing what would become her personal sword, her identified sword.
She took the box from him and looked down at a really beautiful weapon resting on a bed of dark green velvet. The steel glimmered beneath the recessed lights high in the vaulted twigged ceiling overhead.
“Carbon steel, extremely sharp. You’ll need some instruction on the care of it.”
She looked up at him. “How exactly does this work? You said the sword accepts an identity and then that’s it, the sword is mine, only mine.”
He nodded. “Once properly identified, no one on Second or Mortal Earth can touch any part of the sword without dying.”
She nodded. “So how do I do this?”
“Take the handle in a tight grip and the identification process will complete itself. Just maintain contact steadily for a few seconds. You’ll know.”
She shifted the weight of the box to one hand, holding it firmly beneath. She reached for the handle but hesitated. She was taking another step on her path to a new life, a new world, literally a new dimension.
Oh, God.
* * *
“I’m still pissed at you,” Medichi said.
Marcus sat on the curb near the downtown Borderland, his kilt slung between his legs, sweat dripping with blood from different parts of his body. He looked up at his fellow warrior. “Who the fuck cares?”
Medichi stood on the sidewalk as cars on Mortal Earth whizzed by. He looked like a god from the Roman pantheon, all six-seven of him, lit by the overhead streetlight. His hair was long, black, and straight, and he wore it pulled back slick and bound up tight in his cadroen. He had pronounced cheekbones and a strong jaw. He was powerful, lean, a warrior with dark secrets. No one messed with Medichi.
He wiped down his bloodied sword with a clean, soft white cloth. He didn’t seem to notice the traffic and of course no one could see either of them. Marcus had misted the area, a gossamer cloud that none of the mortals would be able to see. The presence of the mist would simply create a confusion of mind.
“So, Medichi, you still keeping your wings a secret?”
“Fuck off.” Nobody knew the why of Medichi’s refusal to mount his wings. No one. In fact, no one, to Marcus’s knowledge, had ever even seen his wings.
Medichi asked, “You still planning on running back to Mortal Earth with your tail between your legs?”
Marcus took the jibe in stride. You did that when the other vampire had saved your ass about a dozen times over the last two nights.
He wiped a hand across his forehead, which caused a cut above his left eyebrow to sting like hell. Their most recent engagement, which involved snapping an enemy’s wing, had sent quills scraping him raw. Central had just done a cleanup on eleven death vamps. “You know why I had to leave. It wasn’t exactly a secret.”
Medichi peered at his sword and rubbed back and forth in a quick motion. Blood trickled from a slice on the back of his thigh and ran down the back of his knee, into the calf straps of his shin guards. He didn’t seem to notice. His scowl sat heavy on his brow. “I never believed you’d actually hurt Kerrick.”
“Everyone thinks they were just words,” he said quietly. “But I would have killed him and my sentiments on the subject haven’t changed. Endelle’s been smart to keep us separated like this.”
“Your beef with him is two centuries old. You need to get over yourself.” He didn’t add the usual asshole tag. A few hours of fighting a common enemy would also do that to a couple of warriors. They weren’t exactly buddies, though some of the I-want-to-cut-your-liver-out had left Medichi’s dark brown gaze.
Marcus scanned the area, from the burned-out smears of old gum on the sidewalk, to the litter in the gutter, the car across the street with a smashed-in fender. “Helena was the last of my family and I begged Kerrick not to marry her. I begged him for months. I begged her as well, much good it did.”
“She loved him,” Medichi said, his tone deep, resonant, dark. “What else mattered?”
Marcus gathered a wad of saliva in his mouth then spit. “Well, aren’t you the fucking romantic.”
“Time to move on.”
Marcus gained his feet. “I did move on. I said to hell with this world and returned to Mortal Earth. I like it there … I mean here.” He swept an arm to encompass the downtown cross street and alley. “I’m only fighting because I promised Endelle one favor. After this gig is up, you won’t see me again … ever.”
Medichi nodded. “I know.” His eyes had gotten old in the past two hundred years even if his body had remained exactly as Marcus remembered.
Medichi’s gaze scanned the area. “You make fucking great mist and you fight like hell.” His jaw tensed, relaxed. “I would have died here tonight if it weren’t for you.” He nodded several more times.
“You gonna get soft on me and offer up a thank-you?”
Medichi turned his head slowly. His lips curved. “I’ll offer a fuck you.”
“Accepted.” Marcus looked away. “How soon before we have company again?”
“Any time now. For the past few months they’ve been coming in waves, not like before when you were here and we sometimes had hours until another squad showed up.” His head wagged. “I remember when we had time to take care of some business at the Blood and Bite. Not anymore. We’ll be busy just like last night … all night.”
Marcus drew in deep breaths. He could feel the air start to ice up. His wing-locks responded with a dedicated thrum. He stepped away from Medichi, not wanting to injure him. During a wing-mount, anyone too close could get knocked flat.
Medichi’s chest swelled. “They’re coming.”
Marcus looked up at the night sky. “Floating down on the Commander’s breath.”
“Three of his generals can perform the trick as well.”
“Shit.”
“You got it.”
The air turned icy cold. Marcus folded his sword into his hand. Medichi dropped the now bloody cloth, letting it fall to the asphalt. He whipped the dagger from the slot in his front harness.
Eleven so far.
Jesus H. Christ.
And now another squad … or more.
Marcus felt his wing-locks twitch all down his back. He took two more deep breaths and mounted his wings. Three times now, in one night. Goddamn, that felt good. His wings, light brown with bands of light green, expanded in a vast sweep over his head. His abs tightened as the death vamps dropped out of the sky.
“We need you, Marcus. Thorne will never say it but I will. We need you to come back.”
“Never gonna happen.” The air had dipped to arctic levels, and he shivered.
“Huh,” Medichi muttered.
“What?”
“That green banding on your wings. Same color as Havily’s eyes.”
Shit. Marcus really didn’t want an excuse to think of Havily … and now every time he popped his wings, dammit, he’d think of her.
Great. Just great.
He focused his attention on the pretty-boys. This group had a Latin look, brown skin, dark eyes, black hair, and so good-looking that for just a moment Marcus forgot why he had a sword in hand. “So goddamn beautiful,” he muttered.
“They all look alike to me,” Medichi said, laughing. “Hey, Marcus … you sure have one helluva pair on you. Wings, I mean.”
Marcus didn’t want to laugh, but he did. “Bastard,” he muttered. He held his sword straight up, both hands on the leather-wrapped handle, his gaze glued to the, yeah, two squads, eight death vamps, all winged up and flying in their direction. “Come on, motherfuckers. Don’t be shy.”
One second more and he launched into the air.
* * *
Alison couldn’t stop smiling. She had been working the sword in large, now familiar arcs and she was still surprised by how it felt. She paused, holding the sword upright in both hands. Even after several minutes small jolts of lightning still swept over her fingers and rippled up her hands and arms. How magical it felt. A rush of pleasure kept swirling through her head.
The sword was hers, 100 percent. She could feel it. She had the weirdest sensation of both ownership and belonging and she loved it. Home. The sword felt like home, which hardly made any sense at all.
She glanced at Kerrick. For the entire duration of her sword love-fest, he’d been pushing furniture to the edges of every room in the house. Right now he was corralling one of the warrior-sized leather chairs in the direction of the far wall near a massive fireplace built of stone.
This is so strange, she sent.
He gave the chair a final shove and it banged against the wall. He turned to look at her. “Third technology. One of the few gifts we’ve received from our next highest earth. More like a bond than ownership, right?”
“Yes, exactly.”
She started swinging her sword again, slashing, moving, twirling. She felt Kerrick’s learned experience in the muscles of her legs and arms, shoulders and back. Even her wrist moved differently and the sword made sense in her hand, an old friend.