Four of her warriors had bonded with their brehs. Maybe Jean-Pierre hadn’t completed the process but he was well down the pike. Jesus. Four. Four. Would she now lose Jean-Pierre as a warrior?

When Warrior Medichi had completed the breh-hedden with Parisa Lovejoy, he’d embarked on a new form of service, traveling the world as her ambassador and performing the ritual of royle wings alongside his breh. The couple shared the same wings, royle wings, which was all well and good and yes, they were helping to improve her image around the globe as a powerful ruler, but in the meantime she’d lost Medichi’s sword-arm at the Borderlands.

Her men were in deep shit. They protected the five Borderlands, keeping hundreds of death vampires from escaping to Mortal Earth every night.

Colonel Seriffe and Jean-Pierre had been working with the Militia Warriors, to improve their death vampire fighting skills. The problem—and it was a motherfucker of a big one—was that it took four Militia Warriors to bring down one death vampire. For whatever genetic lottery had equipped the Warriors of the Blood, they were so far superior in preternatural speed and skill that they could easily take on as many as eight death vampires at once. That was a helluva lot of power.

But she wasn’t going down that road. That road led to the Grand Canyon of five months ago when Greaves had called her out in battle and she’d lost over a thousand Militia Warriors.

So, no. Her thoughts stopped right there.

She had to live in the here and now or she’d lose her fucking mind.

She shoved both hands into her thick black hair and pulled at the braids dangling past her shoulders. She whirled away from the balcony and paced into the rotunda. She took a deep breath, levitated, and mounted her wings all with one thought. Jesus, mounting wings was a rush, about as close to sex as any other function got.

She rose into the air, plowing in smooth sweeps of her wings so that she rolled beneath the rounded ceiling. She ended up on her back with the tips of her wings flapping ever so slowly, like swimming in a pool and staying afloat with just a sweep of the hands.

What was she going to do? Creator help her, what was she going to do? Marguerite was a gifted Seer and for the first time in a hundred years she had a card to play against Owen Stannett. She could trade Marguerite to Stannett and gain access, at long last, to the information from the Superstition Fortress that could turn the tide of war … at long fucking last.

But the price—!

The inestimable value of two souls, one of which she had loved for two thousand years.

Talk about a crucifixion.

* * *

Fiona lay in bed beside Jean-Pierre. His back was to her, the dark blue comforter under his arm so that his hair was spread out for her to see. He slept heavily, his breathing almost labored, the sound of someone whose sleep had been uneasy for a long time.

His hand rested on his hip and she kept her fingers on top of his. Without the connection, he would wake up.

The man was in hell.

Whatever the breh-hedden might be for her, Jean-Pierre suffered more, as though his male protective instincts had come online with all the subtlety of a summer monsoon.

She owed him this, just to stick close for a while so that he could sleep. Her arm hurt, though, from the unsupported position.

In order to change that, she needed to get closer, something she did not want to do. His coffee scent, even while sleeping, still made her almost anxious to repeat everything they’d just done together. While showering, however, she’d concluded that she ought to be a lot wiser about their relationship. They’d taken a big step, a huge step, a massive leap, but how smart could any of this really be?

For one thing, she knew Jean-Pierre had issues, something she thought had to do with his wife of many decades ago. Then there was her own little struggle: She never wanted to be close to a man again, to get tangled up in the hopelessness of trying to be a couple, or a family, in any dimension.

She shifted her hip in his direction because her arm was close to spasming. She had to get closer, but she so didn’t want to.

She rotated her shoulder, which turned her arm over but still kept her connected. A little better.

She put her palm beneath her cheek and watched his thick hair move up and down with his breathing. She huffed a sigh. So she was obsidian flame, a vampire with “a duty, a sense of purpose, built on a foundation of power.” Jean-Pierre had posed the question to Endelle, but Fiona had answered it, then Endelle had jumped and levitated around her office … again.

Endelle seemed to think that her gold variety of obsidian flame might end up having something to do with her telepathy, since it was her strongest power.

She sighed once more. Her eyelids grew heavy but just as she might have fallen asleep, her bicep, tweaked as it was, started to spasm. Aw, hell, there was nothing for it.

She moved in behind Jean-Pierre, tucking her hips low so she could bend her knees and spoon him.

He didn’t exactly wake up. He just pushed backward to get closer still, took hold of her hand, and drew her arm to his chest. She was now so close to him that she had to push all that glorious hair away from his back because her face was also smashed up against him.

She took a deep breath of his exquisite coffee smell. Though desire rolled through her as it always did when she caught his scent, a delicious lethargy took hold of her as well. She closed her eyes with the heat of his body taking her that last final step into the oblivion of sleep.

* * *

Sated. Oh, so sated.

Casimir left his nearly comatose partner stretched out on her back, in his Paris bed, her arms flung wide, his fang marks all over her breasts, her abdomen, her navel, and lower. She had taken her fill of the hopeless young gothic woman he’d seduced out of a club an hour earlier.

He and Julianna had drained her almost to the point of dying blood, but neither of them would ever go that far. They might be hedonists, even sadists, but they weren’t murderers.

The young woman lay naked and unconscious, bloody and bruised on the fine silk of the sofa. Her short hair was bleached white, her lips tattooed black, and she had piercings in a number of places, most of which Julianna had ripped from her, savoring the screams, in the course of the taking.

Naturally, Caz had misted a tough barrier between the back bedrooms and the living rooms. He would never want his babies distressed by the activity in the living room.

He thought the thought and her skimpy black leather bustier, mini skirt, and torn stockings reappeared on her body. On her feet, combat boots. Cliché, in Caz’s opinion, but the ensemble had worked for Julianna.

Extending his preternatural voyeurism, he sent the special window flying back to the club where he’d found the woman and moved to scope out the alley in the back. With no one around, he simply returned her to lean against the wall. With any luck, she’d be well used again before she woke up and their misdeeds were laid at the feet of mortals.

Pulling his voyeur’s window back in and shutting it down, he gathered up all the superfluous silver loops, studs, and bars and sent them clinking onto the cement next to the goth.

He stared down at the couch and clucked his tongue. The fabric was a mess. He shook his head. He had so much power. With barely a thought, he had been able to send the fully clothed goth back to the club. But he couldn’t seem to remove stains from silk.

The three of them had been very active … well, two of them had been active. The goth party girl had lost her smiles about two minutes in, had screamed for about forty minutes, then lost consciousness before the big climax.

Surprise.

Vampires are real.

So was his current dilemma.

The silk used to be gold.

Gold silk.

The color snagged his mind, worked him over, forced him to think.

Gold.

Then suddenly all the pieces concerning the attack at the Convent fell miraculously into place. And sure enough, as he reviewed the battle, as he dwelled in particular on Fiona’s aura, he saw … gold.

Part of him was delighted that his mind had finally figured it out. The other part, the one that understood the implications, was appalled. This kind of power could be vast—as in monumentally vast. It could also be lethal, deadly as hell.

He hadn’t expected this … so, shit.

He felt a slight movement of air behind him and stiffened. Without looking around he said, “Hello, Darian. How’s tricks?”

He turned to face his co-conspirator, who stood just three feet away and bore a slight sheen on his forehead. Caz smiled. Apparently the man with ambitions to rule two worlds had been forced to work pretty hard to get through the shields Caz had placed all around his hotel room.

Very nice.

Greaves held his right hand in his left and gave his onyx pinkie ring an infinitesimal adjustment.

“Tricks, Casimir?” Darian glanced at the offending sofa and offered a soft grunt of disapproval. He turned away and moved to an uninjured pale cream chair near the window. He sat down, smoothing the back of his tailored wool suit as he did, as though feeling the length of old-fashioned tails.

Caz knew the sensation well. He often regretted the passing of the very best of men’s fashion from the early 1800s.

“Didn’t we all look grand in our waistcoats and breeches?” he asked.

Darian nodded. “The neckcloths. Remember the neckcloths?”

“Three feet of the finest linen. I had Brummell himself teach me how to do the little folds. But then no doubt you did not come here to discuss British fashion.”

Darian splayed the fingers of his right hand. “No. I wish to understand how the devil you sent eighty death vampires to that absurd, weedy outdoor chapel then lost all of them without even drawing blood once against our enemy?”

“I have asked myself that question at least a dozen times.” He crossed to the bar and removed ingredients he’d arranged ahead of time for this little interview: Old Tom Gin, juice of a lime, heavy cream, and a very ripe peach, mashed. It had been just a matter of time before the Commander would come, without the courtesy of an announcement, of course.

Using a stick blender he beat the hell out of the ingredients. He poured the result in a tall fizz glass, added Perrier, and crossed the room to present the result to Darian.