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She could hear Gideon speaking, but not what he was saying.
“Settle down, people,” Seriffe called out.
Gideon relayed the information that all eleven were alive and healthy.
Fiona slipped her BlackBerry from her pants pocket, touched the screen, and connected with the rehab center. She let reception know that they’d be getting eleven new arrivals.
The woman gave a little cry. “We’ll take it from here, Fiona. Well done.”
Well done. She wanted to rejoice, she really did, but that meant there were still fifteen other facilities, that they knew of, and how many more women to rescue before she could really begin to celebrate.
“Take a moment, Fiona,” Jean-Pierre whispered. “This is a good thing you have done.”
How did he know? Could he read her mind?
She drew away from him and looked up at him. She saw the deep compassion in his stormy eyes and then she understood. He was a Warrior of the Blood. He had fought for over two hundred years, from the first year of his ascension, against the ongoing depredation of death vampires. He knew the victory that the slaying of each death vampire meant, but he also knew the persistent frustration and despair that accrued because right now there seemed to be no end in sight. The enemy, Commander Darian Greaves, encouraged the creation of death vampires, since he used them as a significant weapon in his bid to take over two worlds, Second Earth and Mortal Earth.
She nodded. She glanced at the clock on the wall. The hour was eleven at night. She would have to go home soon with Colonel Seriffe, her son-in-law, at which time Jean-Pierre would join the Warriors of the Blood as they fought at all five dimensional entry points in the Metro Phoenix area.
“Where will you be tonight?” she asked.
“Thorne likes to keep me at the downtown Borderland.”
She nodded. She knew why. The downtown Borderland was the closest location to Colonel Seriffe’s home, where Fiona now lived. Thorne knew that the situation for Jean-Pierre, serving as her guardian, was something of a nightmare. He looked it, too, with faint circles beneath his eyes. Even relatively immortal vampires could show signs of strain if they had to guard a woman twelve hours of the day, battle death vampires another six, then toss and turn through a restless sleep cycle.
Damn the breh-hedden, she thought. The former mythological state of vampire mate-bonding had also reared its ugly head. She was afflicted with what she thought of as an inconvenient and terrible disease, but for whatever reason, the breh-hedden really took a toll on the men, as though it put all that testosterone on high alert constantly.
Hence, even in the perfectly safe environment of Militia Warrior HQ, Jean-Pierre stuck close.
“Now, chérie, we must talk about the christening tomorrow.”
She cocked her head and planted her hands on her hips. “I’m going and I don’t care whether you think it’s a security problem or not. Alison has been a good friend to me and bringing this baby into the world was no picnic. She’s a new mom, and I remember what that was like. She needs my support and if you think that I would bail on her at this late hour, after having been a slave for over a hundred years, because of the threat of death vampires, then you don’t know me at all.”
* * *
Jean-Pierre Robillard, out of France in 1793, saw the familiar stubborn glint in the eye of his woman and his hopes sank that he would have the smallest chance to change her mind. She was so beautiful, her long thick chestnut hair wrapped in a twist at the back of her head, her lovely cheekbones well on display, the silver-blue of her eyes shining in the dim lights of the central grid room.
Her scent rose to drift into his nose and command his senses, a delicate bouquet of pastries and woman combined, a heady combination that tended to strip him of all rational thought.
His breath caught and held. He felt as he had from the first, that he could lose his soul in the eyes of this woman, his woman.
His woman. Mais quel cauchemar. A nightmare that would not end. The breh-hedden had done this to them both, bound them together when neither of them wanted to be bound.
“I’m going to baby Helena’s christening, Jean-Pierre. And that’s that. I will not discuss it further.”
He could not move her. Whatever her slavery had been, her recovery had been swift. From the withdrawn, despairing woman had emerged a vampire with a dedicated mind-set intent on rescuing all the remaining blood slaves and seeing Rith Do’onwa into the grave.
He applauded her determination but the sheer stubbornness that had arisen, the willfulness, was a thorn in his side, night and day. He would not call her reckless, but certainly fearless. His job would have been so much easier if she had been a wallflower that wilted. Instead she forged ahead, ignored his opinions, and was like an Amazon to the problems in front of her.
He served as her Guardian of Ascension and had from almost the day of her rescue. He was both grateful for and hated the assignment. Grateful because he could not have tolerated any other warrior being close to her. Yet if he was to have a chance to not feel so very bound to her, only distance would answer—and distance he could not get.
Worse, she had emerging powers, which meant that the enemy would soon discover her worth, and would want her very dead. For that reason, he had tried to persuade her not to attend the christening, which he had learned just a few hours ago, and much to his horror, was to be conducted in the open air.
Merde.
Seriffe commanded the room again. “We have another situation, people.”
“Oh, no,” Fiona whispered.
Without thinking, he moved in close behind her once more, something she allowed, and he was not surprised when she leaned against him for support. As much as neither wished to be close, a friendship had developed, and he knew that to some degree she relied on him.
Once more, he put his hand most carefully on her hip and worked at his breathing. This close, his arousal was only a thought away. But in the past five months, he had learned some new skills in tolerating the presence of his woman without constantly sporting, as the Americans liked to say, a raging hard-on.
Seriffe had a remote control in his hand. He aimed it at the large central monitor and clicked. “I recorded this a few minutes ago.”
Greaves came on the screen. Jean-Pierre could not restrain a soft growl. More than any other creature on the face of the earth, he wanted this vampire dead, set on fire, burned to ashes, then cast over at least five different bodies of water.
“My fellow ascenders,” Greaves began, “I have learned this very morning of a grave situation. My staff, in their ongoing efforts to better regulate a world that has fallen into massive decay under Madame Endelle’s unfortunate leadership, has uncovered the existence of several blood slave facilities. We are even now in the process of searching these facilities out and ending the reprehensible activity of procuring dying blood from enslaved females.
