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Ethan shifted to Vojalie. “Back me up on this, would you?”
Vojalie held his gaze steadily. “I refuse to support either of you. There’s an awful lot of belligerence on both sides. No, you’ll have to resolve this one yourselves.”
Ethan’s scowl deepened as he turned the force of his gaze back on Samantha. “Look. I have a lot of responsibilities and going to Merhaine makes things simpler.”
“For you, yes, but I have a stake in what happens here as well and I insist on staying in Bergisson. In fact, I’ll go back to Shreveport before I get packed off to another realm.”
“Shreveport,” he all but shouted. “The hell you will.”
“Don’t you see that this isn’t a simple situation?”
“I see clearly enough to know that Merhaine is the right course and I won’t be moved on this point.”
Samantha glanced at Vojalie who merely shrugged as if to say ‘good luck’. But Samantha actually agreed with her, that she and Ethan needed to work this one out.
As if on cue, Bernice belched.
Davido laughed and murmured against the baby’s cheek. “I was thinking the same thing, my most beautiful darling.” Bernice kicked her legs and cooed.
For a moment, Ethan’s scowl eased and his lips quirked but soon enough he had his ‘mastyr’s’ demeanor under control once more.
Samantha glanced at Davido, who winked at her. He kissed Bernice’s sweet baby-curls but said nothing. There was however a sense of goodness and wisdom, very ancient wisdom in his eyes. Though she had no way of knowing or proving the sudden intuition that came to her, but she felt certain Davido was over two thousand years old.
She felt something else as well, a soft vibration deep in the center of her faeness and the vibration went on and on. Had Davido rung that bell?
She glanced back at Ethan. He had his warrior’s face on and arguing would be pointless. Typical stubborn male.
But she had her own profound level of obstinacy, something that had more than once ended a fairly decent relationship. Maybe she should try a different tack, something more centered on the realm-world than her human experience.
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Focusing on the fae part of her still vibrating softly, perhaps thanks to Davido, she let all that power flow to the surface of her being.
Her neck arched as she grabbed a lung-full of air. The resulting flow of energy surprised her since it was so much stronger than the previous night, as though while she slept, she’d been growing her power.
And she knew what would follow as images began to creep through her mind.
When the vision arrived in full, she opened her eyes, but she no longer saw Ethan’s dining room, or anyone with her.
Instead, a mastyr vampire appeared, with black hair that flowed away from his face in thick waves, yet very different from Ry. His eyes were large and fierce beneath thick black brows. His nose had a strange curve. Maybe it had been broken at one time and not healed properly. His lips were thick and sensual. He was gorgeous and wild-looking, almost maniacal.
He flew over a tall rise of rock, almost a monolith. She felt something from the rock, something that wasn’t rock, but had the properties of minerals, which seemed to call to her. Crystals. Lots of blue crystals.
But the vampire caught her attention since he flew directly at her, wielding a short sword, a weapon larger than a dagger.
She realized she hovered in the air and when she looked down, she saw a gully of some kind, though very deep and equally wide. A gorge, maybe. A dry stream bed ran through the middle and she had two impressions: That something wonderful had happened here and something horrible, a great tragedy, in fact.
The vision pulled her off to the side, to the tree-laden ridges above the gorge where Invictus wraith-pairs and Guardsmen battled fiercely.
Ry was there as well, and something else, something that grew instantly blurred and suddenly the images started to slip away and the vision faded.
She tried to call it back, to learn what happened to the dark warrior, to Ethan, to his Guard, even to Ry, but nothing came to her.
She blinked several times and found everyone staring at her including Bernice who looked surprised. A surprised baby. She stretched, or seemed to stretch, a hand out to Samantha, who took the three-month-old easily in her arms. She was incredibly light and felt like heaven in her arms. She met Vojalie’s gaze. The woman had tears in her eyes.
“Another vision?” Vojalie asked.
“Yes, but what does that have to do with Bernice?” Samantha stared down into the infant’s contented face.
“She’s sensitive to faeness.”
Davido patted Samantha’s shoulder.
“Of course she would be.” And the strangest sense of family moved through her, that in some inexplicable way, Bernice belonged to her. She’d felt something similar with Vojalie at the Guildhall, that what she’d come to in Bergisson had been built into her genetic code, another indication, no doubt, of her faeness.
Her gaze traveled to Ethan who stared at her with something like amazement. I felt what you experienced, even though I couldn’t see anything. I felt your shock, your wonder, and your sudden concern and fear.
She nodded. “Should I tell everyone about the vision? It involves you and a place that looks like a gorge.”
His brows rose. “A gorge?” He released a heavy breath. “Yes, I trust Davido and Vojalie implicitly. What did you see?”
She retold the vision in great detail, adding as much as came to her including the pines on the facing ridges, the shrubs, the dry streambed, the monolith to the east, the way the gorge felt tragic.
She didn’t look at any of them until she finished recounting what she’d seen. So, it came as a shock to her that both Davido and Vojalie were looking at Ethan, who in turn pulled the chair out across from Samantha and sat down.
Because she could sense his frequency, she could also feel what he was feeling. What returned to her though was more a sense of grief than anything else.
He stared at the table, his left forearm settled in front of him.
She’d made some kind of mistake, but she had no idea what it was. “Ethan, what’s wrong?”
He met her gaze, but his eyes had a hollowed out look like he’d been battered by her words. “I have no doubt, not one, that you’ve described Sweet Gorge, where my family died forty years ago. And now you’ve had a vision of a forthcoming battle at the same location.”
“Oh, God, I’m so sorry. If I’d had even the smallest idea, I wouldn’t have just barreled into it like that. I apologize.”
