But only for a moment. The relief was not worth the suddenly hollow sensation it left behind. The sensual fire might have been a stranger to her, but it had been a welcome one nonetheless. The idea that she was somehow broken sexually had haunted her all of her mature life. Of course, a few minutes of getting hot and bothered didn’t mean she was exactly fixed … but she did feel a little less broken.

She felt suddenly overwhelmed and moved out of the dining room and into a room behind the dual fireplaces. Those fireplaces, she realized, opened completely to both sides, warming both rooms with heat and light equally. But this room was empty. Blessedly empty. Empty of unfamiliar people she did not know … and unfamiliar people she inexplicably kept craving to know better.

She stood in front of one of the intense fires, staring hard into the light and not bothering to move away when the heat became fierce against her skin.

Yet it was nothing compared with the wash of fiery, liquid need that flowed beneath her skin, telling her that Ram had just entered the room in search of her.

“Is everything all right?” he asked. The concern was genuine, but it was also somewhat false as he tried to make it the reason for pursuing her into a room where he must have known they would end up alone together.

“I suppose I am perfect,” she mused a bit stiltedly. “Isn’t that so? I’m a perfect little vessel for your perfect precious queen.”

“You are more than a vessel,” he countered, his voice hard and filled with such conviction that it caught her attention. “Each original brings new depth and dimension into our lives, Docia. You are a treasure, a unique and wondrous being Hatshepsut felt she would enjoy getting to know. She chose you. She chose you because of how special you were in her estimation.

“And you are special, Docia. Very, very special.”

There was a wealth of admiration and a deep craving in the compliment. His words held so much heated weight that she drew a quick breath and her eyes shot up to his. She saw in every line of his body how rigidly he was trying to hold himself.

Then, as if he simply could not help himself, he stepped toward her. He hesitated, then continued forward until he was directly in front of her. She turned away, her breath rapid, her face flushing hot. She could feel him, his heat radiating against her back as he loomed over her, far outdoing the heat of the fire in front of her. His breathing was hard, though not quite labored. She felt the rush of his breath against her scalp and realized he had come just shy of nuzzling her hair.

He did not touch her, but he was so close and so vital that she could feel his struggle … his desire to touch her and the enormous willpower he was using not to do so. She felt his craving like a physical touch, felt him lift his hand and run it down the length of her arm, but a fraction of an inch away from touching her.

She turned her head slightly, unable to resist peeking at him. The storm of need on his features made her draw her breath sharply, made her heartbeat kick up to a higher rhythm, made her skin burn from head to toe. Just that one expression of hunger being barely leashed and she went utterly and completely wet.

His breath flowed over her as he moved his head, dropped it down nearer her ear, tickling her with the stirring of her hair. The warmth of it was like hot water soothing her body … only this was far too stimulating.

“I wish I could understand this,” he breathed in a whispering rush. “Why do you make me feel this way? This has never happened before between us.”

“Us?” she queried, shivering at the breathlessness of her own voice. “There’s never been an us before.”

“You know what I mean. But perhaps … perhaps that is the issue. Insofar as you are Hatshepsut, you are also this creature known as Docia. Beautiful, sweet-smelling, unsettling Docia. You are the wild card here. You are the source of my troubles.”

She turned then, forcing him to adjust his stance to avoid touching her. But that did not change his clear desire to do otherwise, and he did not step back away from her.

“If I’m so troublesome to you, why are you standing so close?”

“I wish I could figure that out,” he said, the muscle in his jaw flexing, revealing how he clenched his teeth as he paused in frustration.

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t come close to me until you figure it out,” she said a bit peevishly before she turned and started walking toward the dining room.

“If only it were that simple,” he called to her back.

She ignored the implications of what he left unsaid. Her life was too complicated and too volatile to waste time on the unsaid.

Ugh. What a cliché, she thought as she stood anxiously by a window in the dining room many minutes later. Wanting to do the bodyguard. Still, if Whitney Houston could make it work …

Actually, the end of that movie hadn’t been all that romantic. There hadn’t been a huge happily ever after together.

Crap. Not that she was in any space or position to be thinking about happily-ever-afters … because what it all came down to was she was no longer speaking for just herself.

Well, this is going to suck, she thought dejectedly. She had a hard enough time finding a decent guy who suited her tastes as it was. Now she had to suit the tastes of two women? What about when it came to buying a pair of shoes? Or a shirt? Lord, what about the things she liked to eat? Was all of that going to change once another opinion started chiming in?

We are more similar than we are different, her new companion deemed to share with her.

“You know, you’re awfully quiet in there,” she muttered back at her. “You could speak up a bit more. Warn me about things like this Menes business … and, I dunno … Blend or whatever it is you’re supposed to do!”

I would not worry about Menes. There is time enough for that and for the heart of the Blending, she assured Docia. And my silence does not preclude our Blending.

Docia felt suddenly heartened to realize she could hear, and was gaining a sense of, her new half. It was strange, but for the first time she realized her new other half spoke with a pretty, exotic little accent— one she recognized from their brief conversation in the Ether. Nothing so heavy that she was unintelligible, but it was very much there. It was obvious that English had not been her first language.

Nor my second. Nor my third. I learn something new every time, it seems, and that something is usually language. I confess, I hardly understand half of the things you say or think sometimes.

“Well, that makes sense because neither do I,” Docia admitted with a shrug of a shoulder, her eyes continuing to track the movements of her seemingly agitated bodyguard. He looked as though he couldn’t decide what to do with himself. He couldn’t decide if he should remain close to her on her side of the dining room or put her at a distance by traveling across the way. It was a state of mind she was beginning to understand and even agree with. The closer he got to her … it was as if he were some kind of scrambling device, messing with the natural flow of her brain and her body. At the moment, she could use all the flow she could get.

But oh … there was something to be said for the way … the feel of being scrambled.

“Docia.”

Startled, she turned to find Cleo close to her, nearly standing in her shoes. Initially she was puzzled by the crowding and then by the sudden clawing grip of Cleo’s fingers as they grasped her arm and dug in. Docia’s attention flew up to Cleo’s face, and what she saw there made her gasp. The blue of the other woman’s eyes had bled out of her irises, staining the sclera to match so it was a perfect blue landscape, with pinpoint dots of black for irises.

“Run toward Ram,” she said, her breath seeming to come harder and harder. Sweat stained her forehead, a bead of it trickling down the side of Cleo’s neck. Docia was so stunned that she couldn’t respond until Cleo spat out at her, “Go now!”

There was such urgency in her, such terrifying presence, that Docia stumbled back, staggering in the direction she had last recalled seeing Ram. Somehow she found him in spite of the blind shock surrounding her. She barely was able to reach out and touch his solid arm, barely had time to register the way her touch made his muscles flex into hardness, before a horrific explosion rocked the room.

The room, the entire house, was made of heavily poured and sculpted stone and concrete. A fortress, actually, when she thought about it. So when it blew apart from the outside wall and ceiling, it was a rain of glass and heavy stone, everywhere at once, not to mention the percussive force of the explosion itself. She had been standing near the fireplace set closest to the windows because, let’s face it, that was just the kind of luck she was having these days; but Cleo’s warning had brought her out of reach of the worst of it, and Ram, quick to react, had hooked an arm around her and turned her behind the wall of his body, pulling her to his chest in a death-defying hug as he bent over her protectively, exposing his back to the lash of glass and rock projectiles. She felt something hit him, the thump of it echoing in sound as well as sickly sensation beneath the ear she had pressed to his chest. Docia thought she ought to be screaming bloody murder, she ought to be a bundle of wet fear and terror. Hell, she ought to be the walking poster child for PTSD by now.

Yet somehow she felt safe.

For a second. Wrapped in Ram’s strength, protected by the force that he was, in that second she felt utterly protected.

And then the second was gone, ripped from her as a new force of energy exploded through the room, seemingly determined to tear her away from Ram.

But Ram was no slouch at this table, not just a pretty little face and a pumped-up body that didn’t know a single useful thing about protecting his charge. He let the force hit him, but somewhere along the way he had locked a hand around her arm, and the power trying to rip them apart simply could not break that hold. Her shoulder wrenched and now she screamed, but it was all about pain and nothing to do with fear. Fear would have been separating from Ram. She knew that on a visceral level she probably wouldn’t be able to explain in calmer moments any more than she could explain it right then.

Ram holding on to her changed the impetus of her direction, and she flew across the room with him. He was flung into the wall, but when he should have hit it like a wet rag, his feet hit it first and he ran up the surface of the tapestry as though he were running over the floor. He ran until he was nearly head down, then flipped completely over, his feet hitting the floor with a solid smack. He had let go of her briefly, knowing he would snap her shoulder apart with the move if he didn’t, but as soon as he touched down he grabbed hold of her again. Now he shoved her behind him as he turned to face the threat at hand. The threat that had come after the building stopped raining down around them.

Docia couldn’t help peeping around him. Sure, instinct said to hide, duck and cover, never come out, but she apparently had a stronger instinct than self-preservation, and that one was outright curiosity. Although she liked to think it was just a matter of seeing her impending death and meeting it face-on.

Yeah. That was her story, and she was sticking to it.

What she saw was that half of the building looked as if it had been ripped away, reduced to rubble both inside and outside on the snow-dusted grounds. When had it started snowing? she found herself wondering ridiculously. “Nice, Docia,” she muttered, “how about some priorities, girlfriend?”

Like, how about worrying about the über-ugly winged beasties, each with skin cast like dark gray stone, each with talons that sprouted from both gnarled fingers and toes, talons long enough that they could be seen even in a tempest of wind, falling debris, and the ironically delicate drift of early snow. There were triple joints on those long wings, and at the crest of each joint was yet another talon, not to be outdone by the longest one that speared out from the very end of each wingtip. Two of the creatures lay among the rubble, as if the attack had knocked them into the room. The largest of the fiends stood up with a stagger, then swung around to look Docia dead in the eyes. Even its eyes were gray, she realized as a reactive little giggle erupted from her lips. Its warped, bumpy face was terrifying, most especially its mouth because of the fangs, one set spearing down and one set spearing up, along the outside of its mouth.

“Ram,” it hissed, suddenly leaping toward them. It landed awkwardly, a tear in its wing throwing it off balance. “Take her away! My lieutenants will see you to safety!”

“What are the forces, Stohn?”

“What else?” the creature said, the c**k of its head hard and grim.

“You mean it’s on your side?” Docia squeaked, pointing incredulously at Stohn as two more of the winged beasts landed in front of them and she suddenly became aware of an explosive fight taking place outside the dining hall wall. Bursts of red light and energy were streaking through the night sky, blinding her as they struck down other winged monsters. One bolt, thrown from a dark-haired man who looked as though he could step onto a pirate ship and swash and buckle with the best of them, was so powerful that the creature it targeted exploded in a crush of gray skin, bones, and blood the color of violet night. Docia couldn’t tear her eyes away as it spiraled helplessly to the ground and struck with a sickening smack, sending a castoff of violet across Felicity’s orange evening dress.