Born of Ashes Read online

Page 5

  “Will Medichi and Parisa be here?” Jean-Pierre asked.

  Thorne pursed his lips. Medichi used to serve as a Warrior of the Blood but with his recent completion of the breh-hedden, he had new obligations. “I don’t think so. Endelle has the pair of them on ambassadorial duty to every single Territory still aligned with her. I think they’re in Somalia Two right now. ”

  Jean-Pierre nodded then shifted his gaze over the outdoor chapel. “This place is too open. ”

  “I agree. That’s why I asked all the warriors to come. ”

  “It was the right thing to do. ” He suddenly put a hand to his forehead and squeezed his eyes shut.

  “Hey. What is it?”

  Jean-Pierre opened his eyes and looked at nothing in particular. He seemed to be concentrating hard. After a moment, he said, “Rien. I mean, I am almost certain I felt Fiona reaching out to me with her mind. ”

  “You don’t have a telepathic link, do you?”

  “Non, pas du tout. She would not allow it. ”

  “Well, shit. What the hell does it mean?”

  Jean-Pierre met his gaze. His eyes were blue-gray like the ocean. “She has emerging powers, something I have felt for weeks now. ”

  Oh, God. “You know what that means?”

  “Yes. The enemy will want her. ”

  “Or want her dead. ”

  “Oui. ”

  * * *

  Jean-Pierre saw a large shimmering on the opposite side of the grounds. Once more he drew his sword into his hand, but Thorne told him to take a chill-pill, an expression he still did not quite understand.

  And there she was, with her daughter next to her.

  Fiona now stood on the far side of the outdoor chapel, with Seriffe’s family, and acknowledged him with only a dip of her pretty chin. She was much too far away. He was going mad. Always when he saw her, he wanted to run to her, slide his arm around her waist, drag her against him. He wanted to kiss her and do so many other things to her.

  God have mercy on his soul.

  He shifted his gaze away from her.

  Thorne told him to put his sword away and relax, because the rest of the warriors were on the way. He sent his sword back to his weapons locker in his house in Sedona Two. Another three seconds passed and his brothers-in-arms arrived. They immediately spread out, each man turning in a slow circle to do as Jean-Pierre had done earlier: to scope the territory. He was not surprised when a few expletives left each mouth.

  “What a fucking crap-house,” Zacharius said. He touched a cloth to his swollen lower lip. “I can’t believe that Kerrick and Alison’s baby would be christened in a place like this?”

  Luken snorted. “You would think someone destined to open the pathway to Third Earth would be treated with more respect, even by a self-righteous witch like Sister Quena. ”

  Jean-Pierre knew that Luken spoke of Alison. When she ascended, not only did she battle a former Warrior of the Blood in an arena, but she became in her own right a Guardian of Ascension with the prophecy attached to her that she would do just as Luken had said: She would be the instrument by which the portal to Third Earth, closed after millennia, would at last be reopened.

  There were even Seers’ prophecies indicating that once she accomplished this feat, the war on Second Earth would end for all time.

  The warriors were now ranged to his right in a protective arc, all standing because who would sit on such miserable benches, some of them marked up with graffiti and all of them buried beneath pine needles. The warriors were bruised, just as he was, from the night’s battling. Santiago had a black eye and held his arm with his free hand.

  Zacharius’s left cheek was swollen and his upper lip split and bleeding. He kept pressing a dark cloth to his mouth. His large blue eyes were cloudy with fatigue, much fatigue.

  Luken moved with a limp to stand beside Zach. The pair spoke in low tones.

  It never used to be like this.

  Something had gone so terribly wrong.

  An unseen force had taken to battering the warriors when they were not looking, an invisible force, something that must be from an Upper Dimension and completely illegal, but neither Endelle nor any of the warriors could prove what was going on. Even if they had proof, COPASS would do nothing. The corrupt committee that oversaw the judicial element of all Second Earth was useless.

  But worse for him, his own suffering was eased by dwelling on the impossible situation of the Warriors of the Blood.

  Pathetic.

  The final group arrived: Kerrick, holding baby Helena over his shoulder, Alison beside him, accompanied by Marcus and Havily who stood as godparents. Helena held her head up and eyed the guests, her mouth an O. She had a shock of black hair, the color like her papa’s.

  Jean-Pierre shifted his gaze once more to Fiona. She had her arms draped over the eldest Seriffe boy, who leaned his head back against her stomach and looked up at her. She smiled down at him. She was maternal, this woman. She had birthed two children of her own so many years ago, and she cared for the recovering blood slaves like a mother hen who gathers her chicks beneath her wings.

  Ah, so much love in this woman.

  His vision narrowed to a fine point that always stopped where she began. He had become as the men who had gone before him—Warriors Kerrick, Marcus, and Medichi—all those men, each a powerful Warrior of the Blood, who had become bonded to their women. As they had been in the early stages of courtship, so he was now: easily distracted by Fiona’s presence so that soon he saw only her and cared only that he would draw his sword for her and battle the gates of hell to protect her.

  But she stood apart from him as she always did, pretending her immunity, her indifference, as though she did not suffer the way he did. But he knew better. He knew because her scent came to him in soft waves of desire even now. She could not shield that from him in the same way he could not keep from her the intensity of his passion for her, his lust, his cravings, oui, his desire.

  She stood as far away from him as possible, a shoulder just barely turned in his direction. He measured the angle of that presentation like a careful architect. Had she stood in just that manner so that part of her would connect to him, if just the shoulder? He thought yes, oui, because he knew her. After five months of absurd dating, yes, he knew her very well.

  He saw the clean line of her jaw, the angle of her beautiful long throat, her chestnut hair in waves down her back, her chin lifted, so proud, so determined. He knew her thoughts. Ah, oui, after five months he knew her obsessive thoughts and they were not fixed on him as they ought to be. Non, they reeked of her constant need to find Rith, to see him imprisoned and tried for his crimes, to see him dead.

  What was left for him? Little bones she cast at his feet every two weeks. He hungered for them and jumped at them when they came. He tore them to bits, sucked on the marrow, chewed them with sharp hard teeth until he had devoured each small piece. But until the bones came, he waited as one suspended in time, caught as if between dimensions, waiting for her smiles and her frowns, the soft clearing of her throat, the words spoken from tender lips.

  How he despised the breh-hedden that had brought him to this terrible place, into the power of another woman. He had fought for over two centuries to keep his heart and mind free of the shackles of any sort of love. Love had betrayed him once, love that had felt eternal, love that he had given his heart to without restraints of any kind.

  He had believed himself loved but in the last month before his ascension, his wife had grown distant, even cruel at times, weeping uncontrollably, enraged, perhaps even insane—he would never know. But in her unstable state, she had betrayed him to the revolution, spoken of his crimes, of secret but false alliances with the court of Marie Antoinette.

  He had been for the revolution. He had been on committees to create a new government based on liberté, égalité, fraternité. He had renounced his lands, his position
in society. How could anyone have doubted his sincerity, his patriotism, his dedication to a new France?

  But Robespierre was another kind of monster and so he had found himself confronting Madame La Guillotine and all because his wife had betrayed him. He could not imagine what the crowds thought when he simply disappeared off the guillotine just as the angled blade made its terrible descent.

  No, his wife’s betrayal and the revolution’s betrayal had slain his heart, had changed him. Gone was his innocence, his belief in l’amour, in the equities of life. He had departed from a country caught in civil war, as well as an encroaching war with all of Europe, to ascend to a new dimension also at war. This time, he became a warrior and no longer a fool hoping for political change.

  So Fiona could never truly be important to him. His heart was too broken. But as he watched her, mon Dieu, sometimes, he thought his heart beat in unison with hers, trying to call to her from the depths of his soul, summon her, beg her to hear him, to turn toward him, that he might see in her eyes the same need he felt.

  He was so fucked, another perfect American expression.

  Of course, her scent rolled toward him in heavy waves, which meant that she knew exactly where he was and that she was thinking about him, just as he thought of her.

  The trouble was that the more her scent rolled, the more it afflicted his lower body as though fingers played over him.

  Merde, would this agony never end?

  * * *

  Fiona felt his presence like a strong wind against her back, pushing and shoving. She resisted. Of course she resisted. He was the real danger in her life, not ten death vampires, not a hundred, not a thousand. They could only steal her life from her, but Jean-Pierre, oh, Jean-Pierre, he could steal her heart, her mind, her soul … her freedom, her precious freedom.

  Ethan had returned to the circle of his father’s arm. She crossed her arms over her chest and grasped the edge of the soft cashmere as though holding on to a lifeline.

  She would not look at him.

  She would not look at him.

  The ceremony would begin soon and she would be free, at least for a few minutes, of Jean-Pierre and the coffee scent that flowed over her in a constant teasing breeze of sensory torment. She wanted a taste, maybe her tongue licking down the center of his chest, over his hardened nipples, biting into his pecs …