Obsidian Flame (Guardians of Ascension #5)

“Last night, he was in Awatukee. When Jeannie could not reach him on his warrior phone, she sent Santiago to see if he was all right. Santiago found him tearing a death vampire to pieces with his hands. He was deep in the chest. He ripped out the heart … and other things. Santiago said he was crazed. Leto did not even notice he was there. And when he did seem to come back to himself, he shouted into the night sky for a long time.”

Leto. His mentor for centuries.

“Maybe Leto should go to the Seattle Colony. The Militia Warriors need to be trained, and he could work with Arthur.”

“I think it would be best if he did not battle death vampires just now. He needs time to heal and to adjust. In the meantime, I will speak with my grandson, Arthur’s father, about the situation and see what he wishes to do.” He leaned forward in his chair. “Now there is something I would like to know. When are you going to make peace with Endelle? None of us like this person she has become. She is changed and very unhappy.”

“I know. I haven’t known what to do.”

“Just speak with her, Thorne. You knew her better than anyone else, but to my eye she is just very, very sad at losing such a good friend as you were to her all those centuries, non?”

He didn’t need to tap into his obsiddy power to gain clarity on the subject. He already knew Jean-Pierre had it exactly right.

“I’ll speak with her.”

Jean-Pierre rose to his feet, that same crooked smile on his face. “Now, I think, would be an excellent time.”

“Point taken.”

Jean-Pierre left. Thorne made his way to the landing platform.

After some searching, he found Endelle at one of her favorite gardens in the White Lake Resort Colony. But he didn’t approach her right away because she seemed lost in thought behind a heavy dome of mist.

Endelle leaned on the wrought-iron railing overlooking the replica of the Mortal Earth Butchart Gardens. This was one of a hundred enormous gardens that flanked either side of White Lake. The man-made lake was fifteen miles long and stretched the entire length of the White Tank Mountains, at the foot of the western slopes.

On either side of the lake, famous hotels and public gardens made this location one of the most visited places on Second Earth. She only wished she’d had enough foresight to invest in the colony at its inception a few decades ago, but that’s what happened to overworked Supreme High Administrators. They were just too busy keeping bad guys from taking over the world to see to their own futures.

Whatever.

She rubbed her neck and still felt nauseated. What the hell had Braulio done to her? She had scars at the upper end of her spine now. Horace had looked at them and believed them to be permanent. The depth of his concern had almost been her undoing. She could feel that Braulio had marked her in some way that was permanent, as in Upper Dimension permanent. She just didn’t know why, or what it would mean for her.

What she did know was that at odd times her muscles and bones would ache, as if she had some kind of virus at work in her body, which was impossible given that she was an ascended vampire. Hello, no such thing as a virus for the near-immortal.

She clasped her hands together and shifted her feet. The iron was cool beneath her forearms. Butchart Gardens Two was one of her favorite places. She couldn’t imagine how many tons of dirt had been removed to create the deep, sunken space. A lot.

She often came here to think. She’d pulled a nice cloak of mist around her to keep from being approached or recognized. Or even, she supposed, to avoid giving Greaves a chance to have a pair of his pretty-boys attempt to off her, especially now that he’d found some way to employ the Third Earth bastards. Right now, she just didn’t want the grief.

She had a hole in her chest about three feet wide and twelve feet deep. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt this way, maybe when Braulio had died, or not died, or what-the-fuck-ever had actually happened to him.

She sighed. She sure as hell wished she had someone to turn to in this situation, but who would understand what her life had been like, what it was like as the Supreme High Administrator of a world that had been at war for a couple of fucking millennia? Or even how important Thorne had been to her, that she had shared a mind-link with him, that she had always counted on him. The role he’d played in her life had been … crucial. She’d just never seen it before.

Now that he’d moved on because of his emerging powers, she should rejoice that he would be able to make a serious contribution to the war effort. Instead she felt completely lost, which made no sense but there it was.

The mind-link with him had kept her sane and strangely content, had helped her to feel not quite so alone in her struggles.

Now he was gone, he was a bonded warrior, and he had a new role to play.

Thorne had really dragged her over the coals then back again. She didn’t quibble with his complaints; they were all true. She knew her limitations and she knew she should have been removed from this job eons ago.

But the problem was, who could have taken her place? Anyone of lesser power would have simply been eliminated by Greaves, and he’d have owned both Second and Mortal Earth a long time ago.

Of all the changes that had been rolling through her administration, the last she had expected was Thorne emerging as some kind of Olympian god.

Suddenly she realized she wasn’t alone and hadn’t been for a few minutes. Thorne. Shit, how had he arrived without her knowing. He’d even penetrated her mist, a turn of phrase that ordinarily would have pleased her bawdy soul, but not today.

“Thought we should talk,” Thorne said, that deep gravelly voice digging more chunks out of the hole in her heart.

“What for? Seems like everything’s settled.” She didn’t look at him. She couldn’t. She didn’t want him to know what she was feeling, and dammit, she was hurt, something she never allowed herself to be.

“Marguerite has been after my ass to come to you.”

“I protected you both, you know. I knew about Marguerite from the beginning.”

He remained silent but moved to mirror her position, settling his forearms on the wrought-iron railing a couple of feet away from her. “She thinks I’m being ungrateful and stubborn.”

“Sounds like she knows you.”

He didn’t answer right away, but finally said, “Thought you needed some time, is all. Also, I didn’t know what to say to you.”

At that, she rose up, taking air into her lungs like she hadn’t been breathing. “Why are you here? You said you’d be setting up shop at Militia Warrior Headquarters. Don’t you have work to do?”

She towered over him in her stilettos. She’d worn them all these centuries, or some version of them, to give her an advantage over her warriors. Now it didn’t seem to matter. Though Thorne was still six-five, he had changed. Something in his entire being now towered over her, and she could hardly bear it. She could hardly bear so many sudden changes: all this breh-hedden shit, the discovery of blood slaves, obsidian flame, and now an entire network of secret rogue colonies on Mortal Earth that protected Seers. It was all just too much.

“You can’t stay mad at me forever.”

“Can’t I? Why the hell not?” She sounded like she was about five years old, and still she pressed on. “We’re immortal, right? Unless a bomb takes us apart. And according to you we have a lot of bombs in our future. I don’t see why I can’t be pissed at you until at least then. Bound to be one of them with my name on it … or yours.”

He narrowed his eyes. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re acting like a goddamn woman.”

“I am a woman.”

He snorted.

Her anger ruffled over her shoulders. She jerked a few times as her temper rose. “I didn’t want any of this. But I made do. I did my job as best I could. I thought … I thought you valued the mind-link we shared. I never thought you hated it, abhorred it … despised me.”

“Take off your shoes.”

“What? No.”

“Take them off. There’s something I need to say to you and I’ll be damned if I’m going to say it with you towering over me and raging at me like a Greek fury. Take ’em off. Meet me, just this once, eye-to-eye.”

Her throat ached. “Fine.” What did she care?

She folded them off and dropped barefoot to the cool cement walk, but she felt like a warrior who’d just removed his suit of armor. So … shit.

He took a deep breath and leveled his gaze at her, straight-on because now they were exactly the same height. Even his eyes looked different, and not just because they were no longer red-rimmed. He looked … powerful in every respect.

“Do you know why I never complained, until yesterday?” he asked.

“Too chickenshit?”

He lifted his hands like he wanted to put them around her neck and squeeze hard. “God, give me patience with wild women. No, not because I was too chickenshit, as you damn well know. I never said anything because I knew you were doing what you knew how to do and I respected the hell out of you. Do you remember in, I don’t know, I think it was sixteen or seventeen hundred? We’d just come back from getting our asses kicked by about twenty death vamps that Greaves had set up as an ambush. Santiago had been sliced through the stomach and he was dying, bleeding out because the cut had hit an artery. Remember that? Out at the Superstitions?”

She sought back through her memories and frowned. Nothing about that particular event struck her as exceptional. “Yeah, I think so. I held him on my lap, as I recall.” It was a rare time when one of her warriors even got close to being on the sucky end of a mortal wound. She could count them on both hands. “What about it?”

He smiled. “You don’t remember what you did. I want you to think back and tell me what you did.”

She shook her head. “I remember sitting in the dirt out there and holding him. I put my hand over his stomach. Some of his right lung was exposed and bubbling. I remember that my healing gifts weren’t strong enough to do much good but I did what I could until Horace got there.”