Wings of Fire (Guardians of Ascension #3)(2)
Author: Caris Roane

Medichi flew after him. When the pretty-boy would have slid into the heavy currents that swirled at the base of the rock, the warrior grabbed him by his long, dark hair and hauled him out of the water. He threw him facedown on the rock. How many mortals had this motherfucker drunk to death? How many ascenders? Death vamps didn’t differentiate when it came to dying blood. Any human, ascended or not, would do.

Medichi wafted his wings slowly to keep his balance against the air currents that streamed through the canyon.

God, the bastard’s wings were a mess. The vamp shook hard, maybe from the icy water but probably from shock and a mountain of pain.

“Where’s Rith?” he asked. Time to keep the questions simple.

The death vampire shifted slightly to cast one dark, beautiful eye up at Medichi. Calling death vampires “pretty-boys” was more than accurate. He was exquisite, chiseled features shaped by the effects of dying blood, porcelain skin with a faint bluish cast, enhanced no doubt by the freezing water. Medichi felt the pull of attraction, an allure that created a swelling of ease within his chest. Fuck. Even shaking with pain and approaching death, the bastard was trying to enthrall him.

Medichi punched back with a shot of mental power that acted like a blow, pushing the death vamp’s face into the rock. “Even at this hour,” he shouted, “when you face death, you’d try to enthrall me?”

A smile curved the side of the pretty-boy’s mouth. Blood dribbled from his lips onto the wet black rock beneath his face. “Fuck you,” he whispered.

“Where’s Rith?”

The death vampire just smiled. Yeah, questions would be futile, but he always gave them a chance because what he intended to do next would hurt like hell.

He retracted his wings then dropped to his knees beside the death vamp. A bone jutted from the bastard’s thigh, shiny and white. Blood ran in a rivulet down his ruptured skin, but the water, still shedding from the nearest feathers of his broken wings, kept washing it away.

“You sure you don’t want to just tell me?” Medichi asked. One last chance.

The same reply returned, this time a much stronger “Fuck you.”

“Fine,” Medichi said. “We’ll do it the hard way.” He put his hand on the vamp’s forehead.

The struggle began as the pretty-boy’s mind bucked against Medichi’s touch as though trying to cast him out of his head. He put up a good fight, too, but more than just Medichi’s body had grown tougher over the forced separation from Parisa. He’d been working his mental powers as well, trying to find his woman telepathically. In doing so, he’d gotten stronger.

He shoved hard, and the vampire’s mind gave way. The death vamp screamed but Medichi ignored him and began the real hunt.

He cast aside memories like batting at flies until Rith’s strange face emerged, the Asian cast to his features, the broad forehead and wide nose. He focused on those memories and gained a portrait of the man as a powerful servant of Commander Greaves—but then what else would he be? Greaves was the acknowledged enemy of all that Medichi held dear on Second Earth, in this beautiful dimensional world. Darian Greaves had ambitions to rule both Second Earth and Mortal Earth and was creating a powerful army of death vamps to back up his efforts. Rith was a favored servant.

Within the death vampire’s mind, he saw Rith’s lairs, sometimes in great caverns, sometimes in tents, sometimes in suburban homes, but all in separate geographic locales. He kept picking through them, trying to feel the presence of his woman. All the while the death vamp screamed at the invasion.

Medichi came across the memory of one of Rith’s properties that was shrouded in a mental shield. What the f**k was that? This death vampire didn’t have enough power to create a deep mental shield like this, which meant that Rith had done it himself.

He tried punching through the shroud but couldn’t and then the preternatural sensation stole over him, of simply knowing. He knew. He could feel that this was where Rith held Parisa captive, cloaked even from Central’s advanced high-tech grid system, which could locate anything on two earths.

Parisa.

Parisa.

Sweet Jesus. He felt light-headed. He struggled to breathe.

At last. He’d found a connection to her at last. He focused on breathing for a moment. He had to get command of himself if he had any hope of extracting the information he needed.

When he was calmer and while he was still inside the pretty-boy’s mind, he moved around the shrouded entity as though walking a mental circle. The death vampire sobbed now, but Medichi didn’t give a rat’s ass. He’d witnessed too many of the bastard’s memories, those that involved securing dying blood, and the women he’d killed to get to it—always women because they were easily subdued physically.

So, yeah, let the bastard feel some pain. Let him feel a lot of pain because it wouldn’t be even a fraction of the devastation he’d created in the women he’d killed and the families left behind to deal with all those losses.

He focused once more on the shrouded dwelling and from deep within the death vampire’s mind a location at last came forth: Burma, Second Earth.

Medichi couldn’t quite grasp the sensation that plowed through him, but it popped a firework in his mind until glitter rained in his head. Relief flowed, pure exhilarating relief. After three long horrible months of hunting, he had just limited his search to a single country, located on only one of two dimensional earths.

Finally.

His entire body sagged and his throat tightened. He had a chance now of finding her, his woman.

Parisa on Second Earth and in Burma.

Even so, given Rith’s level of preternatural power it would take a few days to find the lair that held her captive. With Rith’s ability to create shields, no doubt the dwelling in which Parisa was kept was under some crazy-ass mist. The grid would have to search for an anomaly, something nonspecific and unidentifiable—in other words, something vague that didn’t belong.

But what were a few more days after searching for three long months and finding nothing? Yeah, he could wait for the grid to uncover an anomaly.

He closed his eyes. He took a long, long moment to offer thanks to the Creator, lifting his face to the heavens, his heart almost floating in a chest that had been constricted from the moment when the hologram of Parisa had disintegrated in front of his eyes.

He felt the pretty-boy’s life fading. He withdrew from his mind. The death vamp vomited blood, a lot of it.

Medichi sat down beside the creature that had once been a proper vampire youth. He put his hand on his shoulder, and kept it there. His touch calmed the shaking.