Wings of Fire

He nodded. “A long, long time ago, before I ascended.”

She felt the sudden stiffness in his body and wasn’t surprised when he eased out of her and rolled onto his back, his gaze also drifting to the beams. She could feel the pain of those few words as though he’d spoken it aloud. She didn’t want to ask. She didn’t want to know, not the meaning of the words, not why he ascended without his wife, but she had opened the subject, unwittingly.

She turned on her side toward him. She felt his seed and her wetness begin to spill out of her. “Hey, magical one, can you get me a few tissues or a washcloth?”

He smiled then laughed. He folded what she needed into his hand but instead of giving it to her, he rolled toward her and murmured, “Spread your legs.”

Still on her side, she lifted her left leg. He very gently covered the well of her, then cupped her. She lowered her leg, pinning his hand and the tissues in place. Because he faced her, he leaned toward her and kissed her. “Thank you for not asking.”

She kissed him back. “Thank you for making love to me. It was exactly what I needed. Now I feel like I’m home.”

That made him smile.

Some mental health professionals insist that mind-engagement of any kind, including basic telepathy, is a matter more of great trust than of extraordinary preternatural power.

—From Treatise on Ascension, Philippe Reynard

Chapter 11

The next morning, Parisa stood on a semicircle of pavers in front of the villa, the place where Havily had taught her to fly. Now she was trying to learn something new, but what Antony wanted her to do had her stomach tied up in knots.

Jean-Pierre and Havily stood a good distance away, maybe twenty feet or so, giving her space as if they, too, sensed her struggle. Jean-Pierre had agreed to help with the training, and Havily, against Marcus’s wishes, had insisted on being part of the lesson. Havily held a sword in her hand.

“The only way you can do this,” Antony said gently, “is if you lower your mental shields.”

She shook her head. Her gaze seemed permanently fixed to his black tee just below the ribbing around the neck. She couldn’t seem to look at him; nor could she explain why. “I don’t think I can do this,” she whispered. “I know I asked you to help me so that I could learn really fast, but I’m kind of stuck here.”

Only then did she lift her gaze to his. A slight furrow marred his brow. He lifted a hand and touched her cheek lightly. “I’ve never seen you this … frightened.”

“I am frightened, aren’t I?”

“Why? Because you’re afraid Rith will find you again?”

She shook her head. “No, that’s not it. I have no doubt that Rith has sufficient power to track me, but he can’t make me fold to him again. What happened at the palace caught me by surprise. I felt drawn, so I folded. But believe me, Rith won’t be able to do that a second time.”

“Well, if that’s not what’s bothering you, then what is?”

The light went on. “Letting someone, anyone, inside my head. I just have the worst feeling.” And suddenly, the memory returned to her, so fast that she listed sideways. Antony’s hand caught her and kept her from stumbling. “Greaves came to me. I remember now. Oh, God. He sat in that large teak chair across from me. He drank tea from a white teacup. I was sitting on the bench beneath the tamarind tree, the one I told you about. Remember?”

“Of course I remember. What happened?”

“He drank his tea and he watched me as though trying to figure out how to take my mind, how to bypass my shields. Then he came to sit by me, but that’s all I remember. Later, I woke up on the grass.” She put a hand to her forehead and rubbed back and forth slowly. “Antony, I think he might have gotten inside my head. That’s why I’m so uncomfortable right now. At least, I think that’s it.”

“Well, I’m not Greaves,” he said. “Do you trust me?”

She met his gaze again. “Yes. Of course I do. With my life.”

“Can you focus on that?”

She took another deep breath and closed her eyes. He put his palms back on her cheeks, where they’d been for the last several minutes.

She tried. She really tried. But she just couldn’t let her shields down.

“Are you sure you trust me?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Maybe not as much as you think.”

She glanced up at him again, her eyes flying open. “That’s not true.”

“There is a current thought that suggests our mental shields reflect our life in some way. Maybe you need to ask yourself why your shields are like steel.”

Parisa had to admit it made some sense. She met Antony’s gaze again, but this time she smiled. “Do all preternatural powers have some basis in neuroses?”

At that he laughed. “You’d have to ask Alison. She’s the psychologist, but it’s an interesting theory. A more accurate word, I think, might be personality. You have something of an analytical mind. Your tendency to shield like a citizen of the third dimension and not Second Earth might have something to do with that.”

She sighed and focused not on her fear or her disinclination to lower her shields or whatever the hell this was, but instead on the woman who had come running out of Rith’s house begging for her help. She couldn’t be of use to Fiona if she didn’t learn some battle skills. She had to be ready to defend herself, even in a limited way. As soon as Central got a fix on Fiona’s location, the warriors would need her voyeur skills on-site, and she would be there.

Maybe it was remembering Fiona’s desperation or her terrible death and resurrection, but she took Antony’s hands and placed them on her cheeks. “Let’s just do this,” she said, her jaw tight. And without debating the damn subject one more second, she let her shields fall, like gravity tugging apples straight down.

Antony’s battle memories didn’t rush at her. Instead, they came in a long slow glide. When the first image hit, of standing beneath a starlit sky at the Superstition Mountains, of Jean-Pierre beside him, of three death vampires in the air and four on the ground, she breathed in each passing frame like a sweet breeze.

She lived the battle with him and felt the strength of his emotional web, the pure adrenaline of a Warrior of the Blood, of his simple intention of making all the horrible monsters in front of him very dead. She felt all his expertise of having wielded a sword and a dagger for thirteen centuries. She experienced exactly how his body reacted while facing the enemy, the flexing of all the powerful muscles of his arms, back, shoulders, thighs, and calves; how he performed impossible feats of speed, of dematerialization, of whirling, of levitation, of strength. How he worked in tandem with Jean-Pierre, always marking the brother warrior’s location to keep both of them safe and battling at peak performance. She saw the ground in front of him run red. She saw bodies and severed parts and feathers and wings scattered across the desert, a painting on a macabre canvas worthy of the worst of horror films.

She drew in deep breaths as though she were running a race, inhaling along with him in the memory, sucking in air.

Within the memory, she felt Antony fold a cloth from the villa, a stack that he kept next to his weapons locker, and with it he wiped down his sword as well as his dagger. She felt him call Jeannie and heard the woman’s matter-of-fact voice repeating his commands to remove the battle debris. She closed her eyes with him, saw the flash behind her closed eyelids, opened her eyes, his eyes, and marveled at the clean earth.

The memory ended, almost too abruptly. Antony began to withdraw from her mind, which felt like a long pull of taffy until the stretch thinned, then broke. She stepped back and bobbed her head. “That was so strange.”

When he didn’t say anything, she looked up at him. His lips were parted, swollen. “I liked being in there,” he murmured, his voice like tumbling into a deep well.

She drew in a soft breath as sage surrounded her, pelted her, touched her in deep private places.

“I’d like to be there again.” He moved closer, less than an inch away.

She shivered and felt her body respond to this very sensual invitation, but she had other concerns on her mind. “Hold that thought, Warrior.”

“Right, right.”

She understood. He couldn’t exactly control all that was happening to him because of the breh-hedden.

She took a small step back and met his gaze. She even put her hand on his chest as though holding him back.

“Are you all right?” he asked. Just like that the sage receded.

“I’m not sure. It was amazing. I experienced what you felt while battling, and I’m not even upset about what I saw.”

“But you’re distressed. I can feel it.”

She blinked a few times. How could she tell him that what bothered her had to do not with the battle images but with how close he was standing to her, that he had already expressed how much he’d like to be inside her head again.

It occurred to her in a swift flash that her life had never been about again, but more like never-again. For whatever reason, a collage of her own memories shot in front of her eyes, of being a child and later a teenager, the number of times she’d been taken out of school, right in the middle of class, and moved across country. In her entire life, she’d never been in a situation where she could develop long-term friendships, except at work. Even then she kept her personal life separate.

Later, when she’d fallen in love, she was convinced her college sweetheart, Jason, was the one; whatever her life had been before, love had found her and she would build a new life with him. Then he’d walked out that last night. He’d called her inaccessible, which had made no sense to her. She had opened her heart to him and he’d left. So, yeah, never again.

But why was she thinking of this now?

“Parisa, what is it?” He frowned now, heavily.

She shook her head. She didn’t know what to say to him. “I’m not sure.”