Born of Ashes

She loved it, that hard tongue of his driving into her mouth. She whimpered and threw her arms around his neck. She kissed him back, biting his lip and making him bleed.

He laughed. “Wildcat,” he said, but he kissed her again.

“Does this mean I’m free?” she asked against lips that kept pushing at her mouth.

“Please stay,” he said. “Not here. I mean on Second. Please come back with me to Endelle’s office. She wants to talk to you, then please stay.”

“Of course I’m staying.” Not.

He kissed her again. “I want you to stay. Please. I need you, Marguerite. I don’t know what I’ll do if you go.”

“I’m not going anywhere.” She didn’t know exactly why she was lying to him. Maybe the piercing desperation in his voice, or the trembling of his arms as he about squeezed the life out of her.

“Thorne, I am so sorry to intrude, but we must find Fiona.”

At that, Marguerite jerked out of his arms and pushed past him to stare at Jean-Pierre. Well, wasn’t he one hunk of a man? She loved the color of his eyes, similar to Thorne’s but bluer—or would that be greener? Yes, the man had great eyes. And those lips. Fuck, but she could kiss those lips for about a century.

She heard a low growling sound beside her and turned to see that Thorne was watching her watching the warrior in the doorway. Uh-oh. She wasn’t the most discreet woman on the planet but there was no point rattling the lion’s cage.

“So … what were you saying about Fiona? Is she in some kind of trouble?”

“Duhuro warrior,” a man’s voice called from behind Jean-Pierre.

“Horace,” Thorne called out. Jean-Pierre stepped aside and the healer named Horace came into view. Marguerite had known of him for decades. He was the one who kept the warriors mobile every night, going from one Borderland to the next and healing their skin burns—as they called the deep sword cuts that happened now and again.

She looked the healer up and down. Horace had a look to him that Marguerite really liked. He had longish wavy brown hair, not as long as these warrior brutes, but wavy and quite beautiful. He had a long neck. Her gaze fell to his vein and she suddenly wanted some of what he had to give.

But as she looked at him, ignoring the conversation among the men, Thorne was suddenly in front of her. “What are you looking at, Marguerite?”

She blinked up at him. His fangs had emerged. And all that sudden interest in Horace shifted until all she could see was Thorne’s fangs wet from his mouth. Shit. All that need she felt coalesced, and she couldn’t exactly help that she threw herself on him and wrapped her legs around his waist.

“Thorne,” Jean-Pierre called out.

He drew back from her, his hazel eyes wild. “We can do this later. Shit. Sweetheart, we need you to find Fiona in the future streams. Rith took her.”

“Rith has Fiona? Why the fuck didn’t you say so?” She didn’t exactly release Thorne since now she was a woman with two critical missions. She locked her ankles around his waist then sank into the future streams.

She found Fiona’s golden ribbon and dove in. The images came at her faster than she wanted them to, but she got the gist. She collected them and released the golden pathway. She opened her eyes. “Don’t let me go,” she told Thorne.

“I’ve got you.”

She nodded. “But I have to touch Jean-Pierre.” He had hold of her ass and pressed her against him so that she could feel all the promise of his body.

“Jean-Pierre,” she said, still holding Thorne’s rough gaze. “Come here, and let me show you what you need to see. I’m not letting go of Thorne. Don’t look at me, just put your face against my hand, do you understand?” Multi-tasking was just plain fun.

“Oui.” She felt his face. Thorne’s arms tightened around her. She felt Jean-Pierre’s mind though she heard Thorne growling against her neck now. With her eyes closed, she let the vision flow toward him.

The process took less than five seconds, images being a kind of movie that sped up the communication in light-speed increments.

“Fuck,” Jean-Pierre cried. “He has got her back in Burma, that sonofabitch. When does the vision take place?”

She savored how Thorne ran the sides of his fangs up and down her neck. “I’d say you’ve got about three minutes, maybe a little more.” But her gaze was fixed on Thorne’s sandy-colored hair as she picked at the cadroen that held it together. “Shut the door on your way out, Jean-Pierre. Thorne and I have something to discuss.”

She heard the door slam.

Thorne backed her up against the wall. Good. Good. She was already panting hard and her thighs were wet, so ready. He jerked her nightgown up and lost his kilt and the briefs he wore to do battle in so that he was right there, his cock hard as a rock as it had been for the past century with her.

She tilted her hips. Give it to me. Give it to me. Give it to me. He drove in hard. Oh, God.

She loved it the best when he was like this. He’d been jealous and it soothed her feminine soul because an animal couldn’t have been more powerful right now as he pumped her hard. He was big, thick, hard, exactly what she liked, what she needed. She clung to him. “What are you waiting for, asshole? Take my blood … now.”

And he did.

Her back arched against the wall. Thorne slammed into her and drank her down. He made huge grunting noises and the slap of his skin against hers was the only music she really liked, or vowed she ever would.

He brought her, a rush of sensation as she ground her muscles against him, pulling him deeper into her well. She dug her nails into his back, barely avoiding his wing-locks. She felt the skin break and when it did, he came, drawing his fangs out of her and pounding into her, giving her what only he could give.

She cried out at the ceiling as pleasure spilled over her, a wave of sensation through her chest that washed her overboard and let her swim and swim and swim. Her mind filled with euphoria so that she knew happiness and peace.

She sighed over his back, savoring the feel of him deep within. She felt his cock twitch. He drew a quick breath then released a quicker sigh. “I love you” came from his absurdly gravelly voice.

“I love you, too.” The lies came so easily.

“Please stay.”

“I said I would and I will.”

“I mean it.”

“Of course you do and I mean that I’m staying.”

“Like hell you are.”

“I’m staying, Thorne.” Maybe if she said it enough, she’d start to believe it as well.

* * *

Jean-Pierre stood outside an impenetrable wall of mist. It was raining in Burma, hard. He was already soaked. He had tried several times to reach Fiona telepathically, but he could not break through the barrier of mist that once more covered Rith’s house. He had even mounted his wings searching for an entry point over the outer dome, but Rith had changed the structure of the shield and unlike most walls of mist, he could not pass through.

So now he waited, playing the vision over and over in his mind, of two knives and Fiona. Mon Dieu, he prayed to the Creator that Marguerite was right and that he was exactly where he needed to be.

* * *

Fiona looked around the living room of Rith’s house. She stood just inside the door and gazed. She had only been in this part of the British Colonial replica once, when she had battled with Rith physically all those months ago. She had overpowered him by shattering a vase over his head, then ran into the garden, the place where she had first met Parisa, the woman who had engineered her eventual rescue.

She looked around at the polished mahogany floors, at the quiet serenity of the Burmese house, of the orange cat half hidden behind a chair, his tail flipping.

The house felt like a home, yet downstairs, in the damp stone basement, was the place she had resided for over a hundred years in blood slavery. She had of course many times seen the front room or lounge from the gardens, where she took an hour of exercise each day. She had seen the small dark Burmese women cleaning, polishing, performing a different kind of slavery for Rith, day in and day out.

And here she was again.

But like a river you could never step into twice, this was not the same room she had been in before. She was not the same woman.

“I have a request,” she stated. She moved into the living space and sat down in a chair overlooking the garden. “I’d like a cup of tea.” She looked up at him. “Would you be so good—”

“You want a cup of tea?”

He now stood to her left. His brows were lifted, almost in surprise, maybe disdain. He didn’t like women very much. Certainly he had no respect for them and no particular use except as submissive slaves. He was a man of boxes.

So she would play this box.

She watched him turn on his heel, a slight shrug to his shoulders. He even chuckled, an unusual sound for him.

Fiona stared at the wall opposite now and drew inward. She felt her obsidian power, the mass of golden light that was becoming so familiar to her. She had barely begun to scratch the surface of its meaning and uses.

She sent her telepathic thread outward several times, reaching in turn for Marguerite, for Endelle, for Jean-Pierre, but the signal simply returned in a brisk boomerang of sensation that left her with a slight headache just above her right eye.

She hadn’t expected to connect. Rith wouldn’t have been that stupid.

But she turned inward once more, settled herself very deeply against her obsidian power, the power of truth. She pondered the two recent “possessions,” by Jean-Pierre and by Endelle. The resulting power had been extraordinary.

She went deeper still and explored the memory of having been possessed by Jean-Pierre, when she had wielded the sword in her hand, when she had essentially killed two men, both infinitely bigger than she.

She felt the vibrations of the experience within her body, her bones, her muscles, all the connective tissues.

Without thinking, she held the vibrations very close within her body. She rose from the chair. She could hear the sudden scream of the teakettle. She remembered Rith’s chuckle. She felt something else, as well: the way Jean-Pierre could read people. And so she read Rith now, the web of his emotions. She understood just how much he believed women to be inferior, silly, easily overpowered.