Wings of Fire

“I think we should find her and kill her, of course. She is too dangerous for the Coming Order.”

Darian smiled then chuckled. “I adore how you speak of killing her the same way you would speak about creating a floral arrangement. We should put the roses in first, then the lilies.” He chuckled again. Rith eased him. He always had. In some ways, Rith was an extension of his own careful, ordered, sociopathic mind.

“She is dangerous, master. Very dangerous. Only an hour ago, another report came, from Johannesburg this time, as they used to when Alison was in her ascension process, that Parisa will change the course of the war.”

“Alison was supposed to have that kind of effect, but she has accomplished nothing of significance. If anything, Havily Morgan has wrought more damage since she brought Warrior Marcus back from Mortal Earth to serve as High Administrator of Desert Southwest Two.” A faint shudder went through him. Marcus had indeed stalled Greaves’s efforts to turn High Administrators. “I give you permission to do what I see in your heart you wish to do anyway.” He watched Rith carefully. “Good God, Rith, are you actually smiling?”

“Yes, master.” Rith placed the blood in a special pack then settled it in a cradle within an Igloo container. He had a runner outside ready to transport the blood to a lab that created the cocktail for the various blood donor facilities. It pleased Greaves to think that a drop or two of his blood ensured that his donors remained alive and healthy so that they could keep producing.

In that way, he was a true sustainer of life.

Which made him chuckle again.

With all his equipment packed up, Rith turned and headed to the door. Greaves rolled his shirtsleeve down and rose to his feet. “It is a lovely thing to see you so happy, Rith.”

“Yes, master.”

Rith actually bowed. Greaves was in favor of the gesture, but it was an antiquated European cultural tradition that was considered passé.

With a dismissive wave of his hand, he bid his servant good-bye.

***

Parisa dreamed of peaches rolling around in her mind.

They moved around, crashing into one another and pummeling the inside of her head. All that movement hurt. Finally she jerked awake and put her hand to her forehead.

Oh, thank God she had only dreamed the pain.

She glanced at the clock. She had been checking her voyeur window every half hour. She must be on Fiona time since she’d only drifted off for about fifteen minutes.

Once more, she opened her voyeur’s window. Still daylight. She shut it down fast. Good, still no headache.

Antony was right next to her, his warm body pressed close to her side, his back to her. She shifted to look at all the silvery scars and his long warrior hair. She wanted to touch him but didn’t want to wake him. He’d been through so much in the past three months.

She stared up at the ceiling, at the coffer beams and the words in Italian burned into the wood. Antony had said it was a poem his wife had written. She hoped one day he would share the translation with her.

Her thoughts turned back to her dream. So what had she been dreaming?

Oh, yeah. Peaches. How weird to think of a sweet round fuzzy fruit banging around in her head and causing such pain.

She flung an arm over her head and took a few deep breaths, grateful the dream hadn’t been real.

How comfortable this was, feeling the movement of Antony’s regular deep breaths rising and falling against her side.

She was naked.

He was as well.

He’d made love to her—she smiled—in the turret room so that he could create just the right angle. He’d enabled her to see that beautiful part of him thrusting between her legs and disappearing. Tears welled up in her eyes just thinking about it. She hadn’t taken a lover since her fiancé; she didn’t believe in promiscuity. She never had. Yet here she was, bedding a man she hardly knew.

She released a sigh. What was she doing, anyway? What was she thinking to have become so instantly involved with Antony?

At the very least, she should give herself time and space to make sense of this new world, to discover where she fit within Endelle’s administration. She should get her own apartment—only how was she supposed to be safe when it was clear Rith was still after her?

Endelle had continued to sustain the dome of mist over the villa, a constant protection for her. And when crews came to work in the vineyard or the olive grove or anywhere else on the property, the plan was that she would either stay at Endelle’s administrative headquarters or have Carla or Jeannie fold her directly to the palace. Whatever.

Her thoughts shifted to Fiona, as they often did. Because she’d seen the woman several times now, both in person and through her voyeur window, she felt a connection to her and certainly a powerful drive to release her from the terrible slavery that held her prisoner. She recalled touching her for the first time, holding her arms and feeling the peculiar vibration flow between them.

Though her own captivity had been relatively gentle, she knew what it was not to be free, to be held to a strict schedule, to never be allowed to leave a narrow, tightly governed space.

Peaches.

Peaches.

Greaves was sometimes called the little peach.

She sat up suddenly, which caused Antony to jerk awake. He leaped from bed and before she knew it, he had his sword in hand, his very nude body hunched in an aggressive position. He turned slowly in a circle examining every corner of the room. “What is it?” he cried.

She glanced at him and covered her mouth. She was trying not to laugh. “I’m sooo sorry, Antony. I had a nightmare.” That was partially the truth.

His sword vanished first, then he slumped forward onto the bed and groaned. “Thank God.” He looked up at her, his eyes bloodshot, weary. “Thank God.” He shifted to stretch himself out on the bed next to her, propping himself up on his forearms. “Are you all right? What kind of bad dream?”

She settled down beside him, her head on her pillow. She dragged the sheet up over her breasts and under her arms. She put her hand on his bicep, one of her favorite places, her thumb stroking back and forth. “I think I know what happened, why I had headaches during the recent voyeurs, even though I’d never had them before.”

He rubbed his eyes. “Why?”

“Greaves.”

He looked back at her and scowled. “What do you mean, Greaves?”

Then the memory came forth, of being on the teak bench that last day, of Greaves coming to her and sitting down next to her, of doing battle against his mind, of his intention to break through her shields. She again shared all this with Antony. But only in this moment, maybe because of the peaches-like-bowling balls dream, did she remember what else he had done. “He kissed me.”

“He did what?” he barked.

“He kissed me. I’m only now just remembering. The moment his lips touched mine, I thought of you and my shields just fell flat. Then I must have passed out because I woke up on the grass, on my face, without being able to remember anything. But, I’m telling you, Greaves got through, he broke through my shields, and he’s been in my mind. Antony, I think he’s been causing the pain when I open my voyeur window. He’s linked to me somehow. That’s how he knew we were coming for the D and R slaves. That’s why Rith met us in Toulouse with all those death vampires and all the slaves but Fiona gone. Greaves warned him.”

Antony stared at her for a long hard moment, his eyes darkening in stages. His chin dipped low. His shoulders hunched.

She didn’t at first understand what was happening to him.

A growl emerged, a sound that told her his ascended vampire nature was in the fore and his rational brain had taken a hike. “I’ll kill him. I’ll fucking kill him.”

She thumped him on the shoulder. “Antony, stop! Don’t go all Neanderthal on me. This is good news because now I know what’s going on. We can use it to our advantage.”

He looked away from her, rolled onto his back, then took several very deep breaths. “It’s the breh-hedden. In all my ascended life I have not experienced anything like this. For a moment, the only thing I wanted was to find Greaves and tear him limb from limb.”

“Yeah, I got that.”

He released a deep sigh then shifted to meet her gaze. He put a hand on her shoulder and said, “So you think Greaves has some kind of link with you. A mind-link to your voyeur window.”

When he said it like that, she suddenly felt cold, sick, clammy. The thought of such a monster having control of her turned her stomach. “Yes,” she said. “I believe he does. Is there any way I can get rid of it?”

“The person establishing the link has to break it. At least, that’s the way it’s usually done.”

“Oh, God, I just remembered. He saw us. When I voyeured, you know, us, in the turret room, he saw us.”

At that Antony drew his hand into a fist. He muttered a string of obscenities, which seemed quite appropriate. “You think he saw the whole damn thing?” He was shouting now.

Parisa thought it through. “Wait. Maybe not. When I first opened the window, the pain began and I pushed it away. Mentally. I remember thinking that I so didn’t want to have pain right then, so I gave it a hard push and then I felt nothing. I felt like I normally did.”

He met her gaze and nodded. “You may have pushed him out. Jesus, what power.”

She leaned into him and bumped her forehead against his shoulder. “Oh, God, I hope so. I think so.” She bumped her head a few more times, which seemed kind of silly but it comforted her. “You know, if my life gets any weirder, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

He slipped his arm around her and pulled her up next to him, holding her close. “Get some rest. Later maybe we can experiment. But if this is true, then it would explain why we had a greeting party in Toulouse.”

She rolled into him and snuggled close. She slung a leg over his legs and an arm over his stomach.

“How did you figure out it was Greaves?”

“I dreamed of peaches rolling around in my head, crashing into one another. Then I remembered that Greaves was sometimes called the little peach. On some level, I must have known, but it was only through my dream that the knowledge was able to break through to my conscious mind.”