Wings of Fire (3 page)

She truly didn’t know what to do—but just in case inspiration struck at the last moment, she had begged for one last flight before bed.

She hadn’t expected Rith to allow it. He kept a very strict schedule for her throughout any given day. To her surprise, however, he’d agreed to her request. Given his attitude toward her, she’d found his acquiescence suspect.

As she stared up into the inner domes, swirling with a pattern of blue-green mist, her heart hammered in her chest. Should she take her chances and fly through both domes, right here, right now?

Even as the thought entered her mind, she felt tendrils reaching toward her, whispering for her to do it, to go, to leave, to break through.

She looked around. Was she hearing Antony at long last? Had he found her? Was he encouraging her to leave? Did he wait for her beyond the mist?

She trembled. She wanted to leave. Oh, how she wanted to leave. More than anything in the world, she longed to see Warrior Medichi.

Again, the whispers drifted over her:
Go, leave, run away, now
.

Antony,
she sent from her mind. Nothing returned to her.

Was it possible he had found a way to reach her telepathically?

She wore a long halter gown of beautiful amethyst silk, the same color as her eyes. From the beginning, Rith had kept her in beautiful clothes. But in this case, the halter meant that her back was bare and she could mount her wings. She knew that if she took to the skies she might get her legs tangled up in the skirting, but she believed Rith had wanted her hampered. Rith always had a reason for every action. He was the most careful man, or rather vampire, she had ever known.

She stepped farther away from the enormous tamarind tree, away from Rith, away from his three Burmese slaves who had come to watch the show. The women loved to watch her fly. As far as she knew, none of them had wings—yet they’d been ascended for centuries. She found the absence of wings very strange for second dimension vampires, unless of course Rith had found a way to prevent them from gaining normal flight capability.

Whatever.

Rith was a monster, a quiet, dedicated, harmless-looking monster. He had ways of hurting her, and probably his slaves, that left no marks: His torture skills involved the piercing of the mind with his superior mental power. If she escaped his home tonight and he caught her, at the very least he would fill her mind with the equivalent of whirling knives. At the most, he would find an excuse to take her life.

So what was she to do? Take her chances and attempt to escape the mist or remain and risk staying one more night in the power of a man who now radiated a desire to kill her?

Her arms trembled as she prepared to mount her wings. She closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath, forcing herself to relax, an exercise that required a full minute of firm concentration.

She took a final deep cleansing breath, leaned forward slightly with her hands on her waist, then released her wings. She couldn’t hold back the moan of pleasure. Her nipples drew into hard beads. For whatever reason, mounting her wings had always been for her an experience akin to sexual release.

The feathers flew in perfect balance through the small weeping apertures in her back and at the exact same moment joined with the mesh superstructure that also emerged and held the incomprehensible mass together. She would never understand how her body produced the glory that was her wings, but then how could she open the windows of her preternatural voyeurism and see what others were doing? How could the ascended vampire dematerialize? How did Rith create the extraordinary mist that appeared in visible domes over his home? Power then more power.

These were the mysteries of her world, her new world, the world of ascension.

She moved in a slow circle, wafting her wings up and down, practicing the combined movements of her back, her arms, and her wings. She was new to flight, having flown for the first time three months ago, though she’d had her wings over a year before that. Her friend Havily Morgan, an ascended vampire, had been teaching her to fly before the abduction. In one early session, Parisa had almost gotten herself killed by launching into the air without enough training, but Havily had pulled on her feet and brought her out of a deadly forward roll.

Because she was alone here in her garden prison, all her practice had been done with great care. She feared falling and breaking her wings more than anything. She didn’t heal at lightning speed like normal vampires did, which was part of the reason she feared attempting an unsupported escape. One huge gust of wind would probably throw her into an uncontrolled spin or roll; she could easily fall to the ground. In her mortal state, she didn’t want to think what that would feel like. She could end up paralyzed or even dead.

Yeah, this really wasn’t a simple decision.

She looked up into the swirling dome and drew her wings back. She launched into the air, brought her wings forward, caught air, and began to fly. A collective gasp came from the three women on the porch. She flapped her wings and smiled. She understood their delight. She had seen Havily fly. It was a sight to behold.

She had seen all the Warriors of the Blood in flight at one time or another, all except Antony, of course. She knew the reason why he didn’t mount his wings. She had voyeured him for over a year, so she had seen the secret he kept hidden from those closest to him. What she didn’t know was the
why
of it.

Antony.

Now she was here, struggling to find a way to escape. The truth was, even if she did escape she still didn’t know which path she would choose: to stay on Mortal Earth or ascend.

She tilted her wings slightly to the left and began a turn. She had to keep her movements small or she would start a rolling maneuver from which she would have a hard time recovering. Maybe impossible.

Her heart pounded as she approached the upper reaches. She flew in an arc and raised her arm straight over her head, carefully controlling the shape of her right wing as she dragged her fingers through the blue-green mist. A wonderful ripple of power flowed up her arm. The women below applauded since the dome reacted to these movements by swirling in enormous patterns to reconfigure over and over again, an oversized kaleidoscope.

Parisa dove toward the ground. Yes, her skills had improved. The women gasped again but at the last moment, she fluffed her wings into parachute position, brought her feet up, and floated to earth. She touched her toes to the grass, bent her knees, drew her wings close to her body, then once more launched upward.

The whispering grew louder from deep within her mind.
Yes, leave now. Make your escape.

Antony?
she sent, hoping. Was her guardian warrior communicating with her? The whispers were so faint, she couldn’t tell.

Antony?

But nothing returned.

She drew close to the top of the tamarind tree and once more assumed the parachute position. This time she stared down at Rith. He had moved to the edge of the porch, his fists clenched at his sides, his eyes dark and glittering as he stared up at her. She wafted her wings slowly to maintain altitude.

She met his gaze.

Fly through the mist. Hurry. Escape now!

Then she knew and her heart plummeted. She wasn’t hearing Antony’s whispers at all. Rith was in her mind. These were his words, his commands, and he had but one purpose—he wanted her to make a run for it. If she did, she knew she would die.

She understood now that though Rith wanted her dead, he couldn’t kill her outright. He must be under orders to keep her alive, which meant he’d have to make her death look like an accident. His master, Commander Greaves, was the one truly in charge of her. Rith was just her keeper.

What better way to create
an accident
than to hurt her high in the air, beyond the mist, and send her into a deadly spin?

Yet what exactly had changed for Rith that he now wished for her death?

Her heart sank farther, a rock dropping into a pond. She turned slowly and wafted her wings, gliding down to the lawn below. She didn’t look at him or the women. Once she felt the grass beneath her feet, she closed her eyes and retracted her wings.

She ignored Rith as she made her way onto the porch then into the house. The female servants followed her.

Time for bed.

She showered and slid on a soft white cotton nightgown trimmed with lavender lace. Yes, everything of the finest quality had been provided for her since the first day of her captivity.

The women put her to bed because that was one of their duties, even though she was perfectly capable of pulling back the patchwork silk coverlet and sliding between the sheets all by herself. Ridiculous. But Rith insisted that they tuck her in, like a child, every night, which was of course more about control than kindness. Shortly after her arrival, she’d become aware that the women were as much captives as she was. To her knowledge, they never left the house, and they were forced to sleep on mats in the hall outside Parisa’s bedroom. It sickened her.

Once she was alone in her bed and she could hear the women rustling on their mats, she glanced at the clock on her bedside table. The hour was too early for her to voyeur Warrior Medichi. He would not come to her for at least half an hour, perhaps more.

Over the course of three months, he had developed a routine of hunting down rogue death vampires on Mortal Earth—but not until after dawn. He did this searching for information about Rith and following leads to places she might be held captive. But he couldn’t engage in these solo hunts until after a night of battling death vampires at one of the Mortal Earth Borderlands.

Her guardian warrior was utterly exhausted. The only contact she had with him occurred when he’d completed his final runs to Mortal Earth in pursuit of whatever leads he’d garnered the previous afternoon. He rarely slept, just a four-or five-hour block that crossed the noon hour. The afternoons prior to his night’s usual work were spent pursuing rumors of rogue vampire lairs on Mortal Earth.

She turned on her side and stared at the slim brass Buddha on the table near the door to her private bathroom. She sighed heavily. She opened her voyeur’s window, then thought of Antony. When she saw that he was in conference with Warrior Thorne, she closed the window quickly. She had set certain rules for herself in order to preserve her sanity. She didn’t voyeur anyone but Antony, and only when she could be with him in the privacy of his bedroom.

So she waited. Every fifteen minutes, she opened her window again, until she saw him at last showered, naked, and sitting on the side of his bed, waiting for her.

Antony had been her Guardian of Ascension, assigned to protect her during her rite of ascension to Second Earth. Not everyone who began a rite of ascension needed a guardian, but she had been a mortal-with-wings, something that had apparently happened only once before on Mortal Earth.

Though she had been voyeuring him the entire year preceding her rite and knew what he looked like, meeting him for the first time had been an extraordinary experience. She had been standing in the kitchen of his villa, chatting with Havily. He had appeared in the doorway, like a god, dripping wet from the shower, his muscled chest on display, and only a black towel around his hips.

The towel had been completely inadequate to disguise that he’d been in a full state of arousal. His scent, a beautiful, musky, sage fragrance, had already been heavy in the house, but at that moment clouds of sage had billowed toward her. As always, the scent had teased every tender place of her body to a ripeness she’d never experienced before. Through her voyeurs, she had been completely attracted to him, but standing in the same room her attraction had turned into an inferno of pure sexual need and desire.

Then he had done the unthinkable: He’d dropped the towel. Her gaze had wasted no time in sliding down his chest, down and down, until her eyes found what she needed. She remembered putting her fingers to her neck and stroking her vein. In her voyeurs she had seen him take women into the booths at the Blood and Bite, the club the Warriors used for R&R. She’d been just voyeur enough to stay and watch as well, which meant she’d seen him take blood.

She had wanted nothing more, standing there in that kitchen, than to take Antony somewhere private and give him what he needed.

Havily, bless her, had rescued the situation. Marcus, too, since he’d arrived and punched Antony in the jaw with a solid right hook. Parisa had wanted to go to him, but Havily had taken her outside until she could calm down and think things through.

She’d done a lot of thinking over the next few days, while death vampires were after her. She’d also seen the war up close, and it had frightened her. The whole experience, however, had led her to believe that despite her insane attraction to Antony, despite the tender feelings he aroused in her, she didn’t want to complete her ascension. She wanted to return to her Mortal Earth world, to her cloistered job as a librarian, to her solitary life, to peace and serenity.

She knew Antony would be sad, even angry that she’d decided against ascension, but her choice was made. She’d just been about to tell him when Rith intervened and changed everything.

She couldn’t help the tears that leaked from her eyes, slid over the bridge of her nose, joined with more tears, and splashed into the hair on the side of her head. At least she would be with him again soon, but she couldn’t even share with him that when it was morning for him it was evening for her. Surely he could have found her by now if he’d had that one scrap of information.

And right now, she wished more than anything that she could tell him of her present danger, ask for his advice, his help, anything.

Oh, God, would she even be alive by morning?

But no matter how hard she tried to create a telepathic link with Antony, she simply couldn’t. Only at the point of release, when she would touch herself and experience an orgasm, could she whisper his name in her mind and know that he heard.

She had tried countless ways to talk to Antony short of standing on her head. She had attempted to scream his name inside her head, scream it aloud and in her head at the same time, whisper his name, cry out his name when she was having an orgasm all by herself. Nothing worked. Only in this one special moment, when they connected through her voyeur’s window, could he hear her, and then only once. Everything else had failed.