Born of Ashes

He tossed his head back and forth. He panted. “The potion, mon Dieu.” He rattled off a string of French words that she couldn’t understand. He twitched within her.

She didn’t have much time. She leaned over him and pressed his head to the side with her arm. She held him in place. She dipped low and licked his neck until what she needed rose. She didn’t overthink the moment; she just shifted her head sideways and struck to a depth that felt right. Then she began to draw into her mouth an elixir like nothing she had ever known before.

Oh. God.

His blood tasted like he tasted and like he smelled, a kind of rich, heady wine, but with a bitter coffee edge, all blended and erotic as hell.

But it was more than just the flavor of him. It was also his power. She drank down his power and as his blood hit her stomach, she felt wonderful explosions begin to erupt within her veins, one after the other, which only made her draw deeper. The well of her was wet, so wet, and began to grip him, tugging on him. Oh, how she needed him, all of him, moving within her.

She felt his hands on her waist. And before she could prepare, he began to pump into her, hard thrusts because he was ramrod-stiff and so ready. He was grunting and growling, more beast than man, and she loved it.

She sucked harder at his neck, holding him in place with her arm. Her body started moving in powerful waves, meeting his thrusts in answering jerks of her hips. He went faster. She followed suit.

His blood hit her bloodstream and she pulled out of his neck, planting her hands on either side of his head and working her hips over his cock, pulling and tugging until rapture burst like an enormous firework through her brain, through her body, and deep, so deep that pleasure streaked through her, up and up, over and over.

She heard screaming but it was his voice then hers and back and forth, as he came and she came, riding him hard, his hips pumping and meeting her downward-pounding gallops.

“Fiona, hold on. I am coming again.”

Again. Oh, God.

Once more he shouted to the heavens and once more pleasure gripped her and streaked through her body until she was shouting with him, sending his name flying into the stars, flying and flying, until at last she was spent, and he was spent and she collapsed on top of him.

How do you carry the past into the future?

The question was first asked when Adam and Eve left the garden of Eden.

There still isn’t a sufficient answer.

—Memoirs, Beatrice of Fourth

Chapter 11

“Don’t you have anything to say about this?” Endelle stood in her office, in front of her desk. She planted her hands on her hips and rubbed her fingers over the stiff boar’s hide of her awesome skirt. It was closing in on one in the morning, she had darkening work to get to, and she felt her scowl drawing all her loveliness into a weird-ass knot.

Thorne shrugged but didn’t exactly meet her gaze. Ten kinds of ruined. He always looked like ten kinds of ruined. Maybe eleven right now. Aw, hell, maybe a hundred.

Thorne was a handsome man, hair light brown and permanently sun-streaked. His eyes had every shade possible, wedges of brown and gray, blue and green, a perfect hazel, but that seemed like an inadequate description.

She might have gone for him at one time, like a couple of millennia ago, but from the first he just felt more like a brother than someone she could ride. He was built, oh, dammit-to-hell,the man was built. He had perfect proportions, from his awesome shoulder width to his narrow hips. His thighs were a dream. And he was stallion-big when it came to what men were all about.

But for the last hundred years he’d been proclaiming his celibacy and all the while he’d been shagging that little devil-child in the Creator’s Convent.

Which brought her right back to her original question. “Dammit, Thorne, you have to say something. You can’t just defer to me, not on this.”

He looked up at her. The man was a beautiful six-five, the same height as her, but she always wore her black stilettos, for obvious purposes. If you planned to order around seven or eight of the toughest hombres on the planet, then you’d better give yourself a few artificial advantages.

“You want me to say something? You want me to fucking say something? What? What should I say?” There, a little sarcasm. That was better.

“I don’t know, asshole, you tell me?”

“All right. Here’s what I have to say. I hate this fucking war and you’re the last person on earth who should have ever been allowed to fucking rule.” His face was ruddy now—a good match for his red-rimmed eyes.

Her turn to shrug. “That’s why I brought Marcus on board as HA of Desert Southwest Two. So tell me something I don’t know or don’t agree with. I didn’t want this gig, but I’ve got it. And I know you never wanted to be my second-in-command, so the fuck what?”

His shoulders slumped. “What the hell am I supposed to say. I love her? Well, I do. I also know her really well and I know a move to the Seers Fortress is akin to setting her on fire.”

“Just tell me you understand why I have to do this. Tell me. I need to hear it from you.”

At that he looked at her, really looked at her. “Shit, Endelle, don’t make this harder than it is. Just do whatever the fuck you have to do. I’ll get over it. I’ll move on. I don’t know how, but what else is new.”

“Can you lay off the Ketel One?”

“No. That I can’t do, won’t do.”

“Shit.”

“And don’t you have some darkening work to do? As for me, I’ve got to get back to Awatukee. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re down two warriors. Any chance you can recall Medichi for a couple of nights? Just until Fiona’s out of the woods?”

“Maybe. Shit, I guess I should. I don’t know how much good that ambassadorial tour is doing anyway, but Marcus puts a lot of stock in it. He keeps trying to build up my image in the Territories aligned to us, but Greaves has this blog going that shows me at my worst.”

Thorne shook his head. “Yeah, but some of those pics have to be doctored, I mean, come on, flashing at Mardi Gras in New Orleans Two?”

Endelle shrugged and opened her eyes wide.

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

“I’d had a couple of mint juleps. Okay, maybe eight. Besides, don’t you think I have the prettiest breasts?”

“Again, I refer back to the not-exactly-ruler material.”

She shook her head. “I’m sorry about Marguerite.”

“Yeah. Whatever. Well, this has been fun but I have to get back to the war.”

“Get me some blue skin.”

“I always do.” He lifted his arm and vanished.

Endelle stood frozen, completely immobile except for the bizarre tears that rolled down her cheeks. She never cried, but lately, shit, she’d been losing it a lot lately.

Even though no one was in her office to see her, or anywhere else at administrative HQ, by habit she lifted her right arm and dematerialized to her bedroom.

The funny thing was, once there, she couldn’t exactly remember why the fuck she’d come. Why had she folded here?

Oh, yeah, to have some privacy while she wept.

Except now she didn’t feel like it.

The bedroom was round, another smaller rotunda. She had a bed right in the center, no headboard, just a disco ball suspended from the enormous ceiling to hang about ten feet from the bed. Now, there was an era she missed: mirrors, flashing lights, a lot of bodies gyrating on dance floors.

She felt so low, like she’d been battered over the head a few times with a wooden plank.

She had to get changed for her nightly darkening work. As it was, she should have been here for two hours or more, trolling the dark paths of nether-space for Darian Greaves’s light trails, making her way to the end of those trails to prevent the bastard from sending more international death vamps to his Estrella Mountain War Complex.

She hoped when the time came she’d get to send him to perdition herself. She needed that. She needed to know that when he died, he was truly dead.

She turned toward her closet, the one in which she kept a nice sampling of sleepwear and the soft purple gowns she wore when she stretched out on her lounge and engaged the darkening. She had a separate room for her primal fashions: the feathers, the leather, the skins, all the good stuff that kept everyone around her sufficiently off kilter to give her a psychological edge.

She was always looking for an edge.

She waved a hand in front of her current outfit and sent the chicken feathers and hide to her favorite laundry, Murphy’s on Central Two. They specialized in leather and did most of the battle gear for the Warriors of the Blood and as many of the Militia Warriors as wanted to pay their inflated prices.

She let a few expletives flow then turned in a circle, naked as shit. She let a few more fly as she stared into her closet, then came to a decision and shouted it into the air. “The hell if I’m sending Marguerite to the goddam fucking Superstition Mountain Seers Fortress. I’m not gonna do it!”

“Nice landing strip, babe.”

Endelle stiffened. She knew that voice. James had told her he was coming, but fuck! She’d never really believed the tale that he’d actually survived his death, that Luchianne had somehow saved his sorry ass.

It couldn’t be true. It couldn’t fucking be true.

She turned around, like some stupid actress on stage, in a kind of wide arc, half bent over.

But there he was, reclining on her bed, his elbow bent and his hand planted on the side of his head in support. He wore jeans, no shoes, and a wife-beater shirt no doubt to show off his perfectly shaped bowling-ball shoulders, the absolute edible breadth of his biceps, and the sexy drift of black hair down his chest. Her mouth actually watered.

His gaze fell to her crotch and his eyes dropped to half-mast. “Yep, nice landing strip.”

Endelle knew she had a good body and she wasn’t modest, not even a little. Hello. Mardi Gras.

So there was only one reason she wanted to clothe herself: to let this arrogant asshole know that this shop was closed.