Burning Skies (Guardians of Ascension #2)(51)
Author: Caris Roane

In her visions of Warrior Medichi, Parisa had once seen him take a woman’s blood. He’d been in some kind of club with red velvet booths and loud music and he’d taken a woman into one of the booths. He’d sucked blood from her neck while he’d made love to her and the whole time Parisa had wished she had been beneath his big warrior body. She was embarrassed by the memory, not because of what he’d done but because instead of retreating, she’d kept her special vision open and had watched the whole thing from start to finish.

She was such a voyeur.

Now she was here, in his home.

She hadn’t told Havily, but she recognized this house. She had seen Warrior Medichi here many times before.

Many times.

She pushed away from the wall because she could still hear the suckling sounds. She moved into the room full of heavy antique sofas and chairs covered in cream silk. Large woven rugs anchored the furniture and olive-green silk panels flanked the windows at both the east and west sides of the room.

She needed separation from the oh-so-intimate contact going on in the next room. She sighed. How could she explain what it was she felt right now? From the moment she had entered Warrior Medichi’s villa she had been overcome, not by fear, but by lust, pure, heavy, saturated lust that kept her sex in an uproar. She caught the scent of sweet sage everywhere and had to conclude that since this was Medichi’s home, the sage smell must belong to him. Perhaps he used the spice a lot when he cooked. Whatever it was, her body loved it.

“Better?” she heard Havily say.

“Much,” Marcus responded.

The sounds of their voices, so tender, forced Parisa to move on, deeper into the house, one step in front of the other. She knew exactly where she was going.

She crossed the room and found herself in a second but much smaller foyer. A rectangular oak table sat in the center of the space.

Branching off from this smaller connecting room was a wing that faced west; a window down the hall gave a view of a rolling lawn and mountains beyond. She had never seen Warrior Medichi go into these rooms during one of her visions. She supposed these might be guest rooms.

The villa hallway stretched to the south, and she knew that the warrior’s private suite of rooms formed the entire southern wing of the house. Yes, she had been inside this suite of rooms in her visions as well. She felt a profound desire to explore them but squeezed her eyes shut and forced herself to set aside such invasive thoughts. She had no right to enter his rooms.

So she headed to the one room that made sense. To the east, opposite the supposed suite of guest rooms, was one very large room—the library. She had seen Medichi in this room numerous times as well. She was, after all, a librarian by trade.

She crossed to the arched doorway, and the smell of leather and sage drew her in. She couldn’t imagine a more erotic combination than what greeted her. A love of books was in her blood, deep, passionate, ages old, so that she would have loved this room no matter whom it belonged to. But smelling that rich sage scent embedded in all this leather nearly sent her crumpling to the floor all over again.

She let the overwhelming sensation move through her. She breathed … a lot … then swept her gaze over what was a magnificent chamber. Leather-bound books rose all the way to the ceiling along wall after wall after wall. She moved in a circle and blinked. The room was lit in a soft glow, the lamps throughout the house already on—or perhaps had come on once they arrived, she couldn’t remember.

But she wanted to see better so she searched for and found the light switch. She turned the dimmer mechanism. The room gradually flooded with light, directed downward from the ceiling, and a choir of angels began to sing … at least in her head.

She searched the shelves on the left and found an edition of Pride and Prejudice, no doubt an early edition. If the potential of immortality was part of life on Second Earth, just how old was Warrior Medichi? Was it possible he had purchased all of these books when each had first been published?

She took the treasured volume and moved slowly to a group of massive leather chairs, the size suited for big warrior bodies. The rich sage smell of the house rose up from one chair in particular. She drank in the scent. In her visions, she had seen Warrior Medichi sit here more than once.

She settled into the deep cushion of the chair and was immediately engulfed with what she now believed to be the warrior’s scent. Her heart beat a furious cadence, one coupled with profound desire of a sexual nature, yes, but something more. No, this desire crossed the boundaries of the body into the deep places of the soul. She found herself, as she had so many times before during the past year, in a state of profound longing that caused tears to pour down her face as she pressed a hand to her breast.

She had come home.

Those were the thoughts that moved through her, beat at her, caused the tears to flow so fast she had to set the book aside. The purple sequins could not in any way absorb the tears so she used her fingers, her palm, the back of her hand until a single thought brought her up short and the tears ceased.

She was a woman who had learned to live her solitary life, and she’d gotten so good at it that she never needed anyone. Long before she had released her wings for the first time, she had become comfortable with her isolated world.

When she was a child, she had moved a lot. Her parents used to joke about their itchy feet; changing cities, homes, and schools was the order of the day. Because of it, Parisa had learned early on that making friends with other children meant leaving them all too soon because of yet another move to another city.

The losses had soon taught her to keep to herself, a state she had never really minded. She had simply accepted the reality of her life. Books had become her refuge.

Later, when her wings had emerged, when she had begun having her special visions of Warrior Medichi, she had understood the value of all those early solitary lessons. She had even been grateful for them, since she could never have explained wings to another mortal.

What she hadn’t planned, however, was that one day she would actually step into this new world. Now what was she supposed to do?

She took a deep breath and with a will she had developed from childhood, she pushed all the longings away. She moved from her heart into her head and started analyzing her current situation.

She had come to a new world, the world of the vampire, and yes she felt, she knew, she belonged here. She had even had the most erotic fantasies of letting Warrior Medichi take her at her neck.

However, this was also a world at war, and clearly Warrior Medichi played a constant part in that war. His death, therefore, was no doubt an eventuality. Ascenders died in this extraordinary world even though they were in most respects immortal, although that was an oxymoron if she’d ever heard one. How could anyone be immortal in most respects.