Obsidian Flame (Guardians of Ascension #5)(67)
Author: Caris Roane

“You’re tall,” Endelle said. “You seeing anyone?”

At that Diallo smiled. “My wife is in Hawaii, doing some healing work among the colonists there.”

Thorne narrowed his eyes. “You have a colony in Hawaii?” He sipped his coffee.

“Florida, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington.”

“Well, f**k,” Endelle said. “Just how many colonies are there.”

“Enough.”

At that, Endelle rose to her feet and slammed her mug down on the table. “What the hell kind of answer is that? Enough? It isn’t an answer, it’s a f**k-you. So f**k you.”

“Endelle, what are you doing?” Thorne rose to his feet as well.

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 f**king 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 f**k 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 f**king 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.