Obsidian Flame

She turned to face him. “And don’t even get me started on you.”

That weird thing inside him moved again, gliding around like something that had been hungry for a long time and was ready to start devouring.

But it was Marguerite who changed things around. She actually rose in a smooth leap to stand on the coffee table, straddling the trays. She was now at just above eye level with Endelle.

Endelle was so surprised by this sudden move that she took a step back, hit her calf on the back of her chair, and fell back into her seat.

Marguerite glanced from one to the other. “Aren’t you both forgetting something here? Like why we’re all here?” In a theatrical manner, she swept her arm in Leto’s direction and flipped her wrist. “Hello.”

Thorne couldn’t help it. He laughed, and his temper once more stalled out. As he sat down again, keeping his mug level, his gaze shifted to Endelle and he was a little startled by what he saw. She was looking at him as though she’d been kicked in the gut about a hundred times.

She schooled the emotion soon enough and started glaring. But she’d opened a window, and he wouldn’t soon forget that look.

Jesus, it hadn’t occurred to him that she would actually be hurt by what he’d done.

Shit. Now his guilt roared.

She dipped her chin and shifted her gaze to Leto then back to Diallo, finally to Marguerite. “Point taken, blondie. You can sit back down.”

“You sure about that?” Marguerite narrowed her eyes at her, cocked her head. She even tapped her foot. “If you don’t behave I might just have to pop you one.” She held up her fists, boxer-style. She was so not Endelle’s equal that everyone grinned.

Endelle offered her a quirk of her lips, then a laugh. “Fine. I’ll be good.”

Marguerite stepped off the table. “I wasn’t asking you to be good. What the hell kind of fun is that?”

This time Endelle did let loose with a stomach-roll of laughter. It sounded good.

Diallo addressed her. “I wasn’t trying to be annoying. I’m not at liberty to share the details of our colonial structure and for the present, I hope you’ll respect that. I don’t run the show. We have a very fine council of elders who make those kinds of decisions.”

“Fine, much good it will do when Greaves takes over this sorry dimension.”

“The very point I’ve been arguing with the council for the past eighteen hours.”

Endelle shifted her gaze to Leto. “Well, I guess this is all about you, then. What do you need to tell us? Greaves hasn’t exactly hidden his forthcoming military review. His propaganda plays on just about every channel night and day.”

Leto met her gaze. “Shall I be frank?”

“No,” Endelle said sarcastically. “Be coy because that’s what we need here. Or better yet, let me spend the next hour just guessing.”

Thorne hated her tone of voice and he almost rose to his feet again, but Marguerite sent, Ease up, Thorne.

He drew a deep breath and turned to Leto.

The warrior released a sigh. His gaze fell to the floor in front of him. “Greaves has a vast army, ten times larger than the one he’ll be parading through Moscow Two.”

Thorne frowned. “Ten times what?”

“He’ll march two hundred thousand down the avenue. Yeah, it’s going to be one long fucking spectacle.”

Thorne jerked forward. “He has a working army of two million?”

Leto nodded. “And I trained it. That’s been my primary job for the past fifteen years. I’ve basically laid the groundwork for his takeover of two dimensions.”

Grace murmured a soft, “Two million. Oh, no.”

The number astonished Thorne. And Leto had trained the army. He shifted his gaze to Endelle and stared at her. She didn’t meet his eyes. She stared at the untouched plate of pastries. Who the hell could eat now?

Thorne leaned forward and put his mug on the coffee table. He put his hand on his forehead, elbow on his knee. Shit. Of all the things he’d expected Leto to say, that wasn’t one of them: two million expertly trained men and women.

Sweet Jesus.

He leaned back once more. “Leto, what the fuck does this mean? You’re saying that the Council of Sixth Earth approached you in order to have you spy for them, and the result is that you built an army for Greaves?”

Leto sighed heavily. “The purpose of my mission, the part that I was able to fulfill, was that I fed them Greaves’s files continuously.”

“How? How did you do that?”

“Through James. He has a lot of power. He could create specific shields when he uploaded the material, shields that Greaves wasn’t even aware of. Sixth Earth knows what’s going on, probably even more than I do because I didn’t look at all those files, not even a fifth of them.”

Thorne knew the rest of what Leto wasn’t saying, that even with all of James’s formidable Sixth Earth power, James wouldn’t intervene directly in Second Earth affairs. He wouldn’t lift a finger to stop Greaves.

“But an army of this magnitude. Jesus H. Christ. How could the contents of those files possibly counteract an army of two million? This is a fucking nightmare.”

Leto drew in a deep shuddering breath. The circles under his eyes looked deeper than ever and he was almost ghost-white. “I don’t know what it all means, I just reached this point that I couldn’t take it anymore, not the dying blood, not the antidote, not the training of Greaves’s army. And now the Military Review. It’s spectacle-grade, Thorne, and it will change things. The sight of even a tenth of Greaves’s army will force a lot of High Administrators around the globe to shift their allegiance to the Commander unless something unexpected happens, some miracle.

“As for the army, oh, God. I did what I could to diminish my efforts, but you know what Greaves is. He was very thorough about the training. I wanted to sabotage parts of it, but I couldn’t, not without jeopardizing my mission. Every time I pushed James on this, he pushed back even harder. He was adamant about the necessity of the files. He kept trying to tell me everything would work out, but how? Sixth Earth won’t intervene once the battling starts. They never have in all of Second Earth history and to do so would be to violate their most basic non-interference rule.”

Thorne shook his head. “So, somehow, we’re expected to believe that everything else you’ve done will justify the creation of an army. Not in a millennium is this going to make sense to me.”

Leto met his gaze. “James has been insistent from the first to trust in him, to have faith in the council’s wisdom. But I’m with you: How could building this army be right?” He shaded his face with his hand. “But there’s something else I have to tell you. It doesn’t have anything to do with military power, but I have a sick feeling that it could be worse.”

At that, Thorne could no longer remained seated. What could be worse than a standing army of this magnitude?

Leto, still sitting against the arm of the chair met his gaze then glanced at Marguerite. Thorne got a bad feeling.

Leto looked up at him again. “Greaves built five palaces on Second Earth, one each in Africa, the Andes, Chicago, Siberia, and Hong Kong. He’s already started moving Seers from his favorite Fortresses into these palaces. Of course palace in this case is a euphemism for ‘prison.’ They’re designed to harness, and I do mean harness, Seers together in order to achieve pure vision. No more guesswork with accuracy rates and incomplete visions. Which means, of course, that he’ll know the future.”

* * *

Marguerite rose from her seat only vaguely aware that her feet had left the ground. Something in her mind had gone dark and twisted. She stared down at Leto. “What did you say?” she asked. “He’s harnessing Seers together?”

Thorne stared up at her then for some reason blurred in her direction though she had no idea why except that suddenly she was looking down at him, way down.

She blinked and looked at the floor.

Whatever thought had stunned the levitation power into existence in the first place now fled her, and she plummeted. She would have hit hard but Thorne caught her.

“What the hell was that?” she asked. “What did I just do?”

“You levitated. I take it you’ve never done that before?”

She shook her head then pushed away from him. She headed toward Leto, who still sat on the arm of the couch as calm as you please, hollow-eyed but having stated so many horrible things that her body had started trembling. How could he have spewed so much horror and still be just sitting there? She wanted to hurt Leto, which wasn’t in any way fair to him. But the thought of Seers treated so badly split something within her wide open.

She turned away from him and began to pace. Her heart ached something fierce. She rubbed between her breasts and made herself take deep breaths. God, it was almost as though she could feel those Seers crying out, wailing, or worse, living in such bleak despair that there were no more tears, no anguish, just a terrible wish for death. And death could not come to the near-immortal.

She walked in a big circle trying to calm down. Somehow this feeling was associated with her obsidian flame power. She stopped pacing and bent over. The ache began to grow until it became almost unbearable. She panted and rocked back and forth. She couldn’t breathe.

Thorne. She needed Thorne.

Help me, she called to him.

He came.

He rubbed her back. “What can I do?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“Endelle, can you help here?”

Marguerite lifted her head but Endelle shrugged. “This isn’t my gift. You need someone like Alison or Mr. Feel-Good over here.” She gestured to Diallo.

Diallo was already on his feet and crossed swiftly to Marguerite. He put his long black fingers beneath Marguerite’s chin and slowly began to lift. “Take a deep breath.”

She tried. She shook her head.

He kept lifting until she was standing upright once more, but her chest ached and she wanted to fall on her face and sob, something she never did. She just didn’t understand the cause of so much terrible grief.