Obsidian Flame (Guardians of Ascension #5)(80)
Author: Caris Roane

“No. Thorne has his own version of obsidian flame power.”

“That’s … not … possible. Wait a minute. When he and I were having our little tiff, and he was flying around, his wings had flames, very faint but they were silvery gray.”

“There, you see?”

“Fine. All right, Alison, what have we got here? Horace, I need a report.”

Alison leaned back. She wore jeans and an enormous T-shirt, probably one of Kerrick’s. She shook her head. “He’s not here.”

“What the f**k do you mean?”

“He’s not in this body.”

Horace turned around. “His body is barely alive. It’s as though his spirit departed. Can you tell us what happened?” His gaze flicked over Marguerite’s body and his cheeks colored up.

She rolled her eyes and folded her leathers on. He released a deep breath. She explained, “Well, we weren’t having sex, if that’s what you’re thinking. We’d done that earlier, of course, then we both fell asleep. The next thing I knew, my skin felt like I’d been torched and I jumped out of bed. Thorne was beginning this whole weird thing. He moved to sit at the edge of the bed and his head started to hurt really bad.

“I received a future stream warning that something big was going down, and this is what was going down. He was coming into his obsidian flame power, which neither of us knew about, and I had to do that thing that he’d already done to me and that Endelle had done to Fiona. I had to break open his power, it’s part of the process. Maybe … maybe I punched too hard.”

“Ya think?” Endelle sniped.

But Marguerite wasn’t offended. She would own up to the truth, even if it meant she’d killed her boyfriend, but she hadn’t. “No, Endelle, I knew what I was doing. And I would do it again. If you want, you can do a mind-dive and see the whole thing for yourself.”

The Supreme High Administrator of Second Earth sighed heavily. “No, you have the smell of truth about you. Alison, you’re up. What do we do? How do we get him back?”

Alison met Endelle’s gaze. “He has to want to come back.”

“What?” Marguerite all but shouted. “Are you saying right in this moment he doesn’t want to come back? Oh, no, this is so not happening.”

“You go, girl,” Endelle murmured.

Alison sat back on her heels. She met Marguerite’s gaze. “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. He doesn’t want to come back.”

Marguerite moved to stand in front of Thorne. He was dead. Sitting there, her vampire boyfriend was dead. And Alison was suggesting that it was because he didn’t want to come back.

She knelt between his legs and put her hands on his shoulders. “Thorne, don’t even think about staying wherever the hell it is you are! I need you here. We all need you.” The sense that he wasn’t present flat-out scared her, and she knew she had to do more than just beg.

She turned to Alison. “You’d better get out of the way.”

Alison fell backward as though she had a premonition what Marguerite meant to do. This was going to hurt. She drew her right arm back and at the same time dove within his absent mind. She found the seat of his obsiddy power. It was still streaming, but in a thin stream, as though it had traveled a really long distance away from this body. In a coordinated move, she struck him hard on the face and shot her obsiddy power straight into the core of his bright shining ball of light.

“Get back here!”

Then she hit him again.

From Song of the Gods

Life is such a sweet agony,

How do the mortals bear it.

In the moment of perfect comprehension,

Death arrives to wash it all away.

—Collected Poems, Beatrice of Fourth

Chapter 18

Thorne floated. He was a long distance away, a galaxy away from his body, from Second Earth, from the woman he loved.

When Marguerite had ruptured the membrane surrounding his newly discovered obsidian flame power, his mind had gotten caught in a stream of energy so intense that he’d been catapulted a billion miles away. Or at least that’s how he felt.

He floated, he felt one with the universe, he knew everything there was to know, the Creator was with him.

A man appeared beside him, a short man with gray hair and gentle blue eyes. Oh, James. He’d met James earlier.

The man swept an arm wide. “It’s beautiful out here, isn’t it? I confess I don’t come here often enough. But then Upper Dimension work is rather time consuming, humanity being what it is, ascended or otherwise.”

Thorne turned to look at him. He had an ethereal form, ghost-like. Out of curiosity, Thorne lifted his own arm; he, too, was opaque and unreal. He looked back at the stranger. “You’re James, aren’t you?”

He nodded and smiled. He was short, maybe five-eight. Endelle called him “Shorty.” Thorne released a deep sigh, which was not quite a sigh because he had no lungs, but for the first time in twenty centuries he felt at peace. “I could stay here forever.”

“One day, you just might, but you need to return to your body, the sooner the better.”

“I don’t want to go back.”

“Of course not, but Second Earth needs you. The opening of your obsidian flame power has changed everything. In the coming months, your role in this world, and in the war, will alter significantly. You’ll be able to do things you couldn’t do before. And in the same way you’ve led the Warriors of the Blood, you’ll become the anchor to obsidian flame. Once Grace joins with Fiona and Marguerite, once they experience the full expression of their triad of power, you will understand what it is to be their anchor, to bind them and to direct them. But even above all this, Marguerite needs you.”

At almost the same moment that James spoke her name, a sharp stab of pain traveled through his entire not-exactly-corporeal being. “What the f**k?” Thorne winced.

“What’s wrong?” James asked, but he was grinning.

“You know exactly what it is.”

He laughed, although it was more like a ringing sound as though someone had struck a bell. “Marguerite has a lot of spirit. And power.”

“And punch.” His wildcat was after him. He could feel it. Suddenly her words reached him: Get your ass back here, now. His corporeal head started to hurt all over again. What the hell was she doing to him? I didn’t come this far to have you take off on some mystical adventure. Get back here.