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His shoulders slumped. “What the hell am I supposed to say. I love her? Well, I do. I also know her really well and I know a move to the Seers Fortress is akin to setting her on fire.”
“Just tell me you understand why I have to do this. Tell me. I need to hear it from you.”
At that he looked at her, really looked at her. “Shit, Endelle, don’t make this harder than it is. Just do whatever the f**k you have to do. I’ll get over it. I’ll move on. I don’t know how, but what else is new.”
“Can you lay off the Ketel One?”
“No. That I can’t do, won’t do.”
“Shit.”
“And don’t you have some darkening work to do? As for me, I’ve got to get back to Awatukee. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re down two warriors. Any chance you can recall Medichi for a couple of nights? Just until Fiona’s out of the woods?”
“Maybe. Shit, I guess I should. I don’t know how much good that ambassadorial tour is doing anyway, but Marcus puts a lot of stock in it. He keeps trying to build up my image in the Territories aligned to us, but Greaves has this blog going that shows me at my worst.”
Thorne shook his head. “Yeah, but some of those pics have to be doctored, I mean, come on, flashing at Mardi Gras in New Orleans Two?”
Endelle shrugged and opened her eyes wide.
“You’re f**king kidding me.”
“I’d had a couple of mint juleps. Okay, maybe eight. Besides, don’t you think I have the prettiest br**sts?”
“Again, I refer back to the not-exactly-ruler material.”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry about Marguerite.”
“Yeah. Whatever. Well, this has been fun but I have to get back to the war.”
“Get me some blue skin.”
“I always do.” He lifted his arm and vanished.
Endelle stood frozen, completely immobile except for the bizarre tears that rolled down her cheeks. She never cried, but lately, shit, she’d been losing it a lot lately.
Even though no one was in her office to see her, or anywhere else at administrative HQ, by habit she lifted her right arm and dematerialized to her bedroom.
The funny thing was, once there, she couldn’t exactly remember why the f**k she’d come. Why had she folded here?
Oh, yeah, to have some privacy while she wept.
Except now she didn’t feel like it.
The bedroom was round, another smaller rotunda. She had a bed right in the center, no headboard, just a disco ball suspended from the enormous ceiling to hang about ten feet from the bed. Now, there was an era she missed: mirrors, flashing lights, a lot of bodies gyrating on dance floors.
She felt so low, like she’d been battered over the head a few times with a wooden plank.
She had to get changed for her nightly darkening work. As it was, she should have been here for two hours or more, trolling the dark paths of nether-space for Darian Greaves’s light trails, making her way to the end of those trails to prevent the bastard from sending more international death vamps to his Estrella Mountain War Complex.
She hoped when the time came she’d get to send him to perdition herself. She needed that. She needed to know that when he died, he was truly dead.
She turned toward her closet, the one in which she kept a nice sampling of sleepwear and the soft purple gowns she wore when she stretched out on her lounge and engaged the darkening. She had a separate room for her primal fashions: the feathers, the leather, the skins, all the good stuff that kept everyone around her sufficiently off kilter to give her a psychological edge.
She was always looking for an edge.
She waved a hand in front of her current outfit and sent the chicken feathers and hide to her favorite laundry, Murphy’s on Central Two. They specialized in leather and did most of the battle gear for the Warriors of the Blood and as many of the Militia Warriors as wanted to pay their inflated prices.
She let a few expletives flow then turned in a circle, naked as shit. She let a few more fly as she stared into her closet, then came to a decision and shouted it into the air. “The hell if I’m sending Marguerite to the goddam f**king Superstition Mountain Seers Fortress. I’m not gonna do it!”
“Nice landing strip, babe.”
Endelle stiffened. She knew that voice. James had told her he was coming, but f**k! She’d never really believed the tale that he’d actually survived his death, that Luchianne had somehow saved his sorry ass.
It couldn’t be true. It couldn’t f**king be true.
She turned around, like some stupid actress on stage, in a kind of wide arc, half bent over.
But there he was, reclining on her bed, his elbow bent and his hand planted on the side of his head in support. He wore jeans, no shoes, and a wife-beater shirt no doubt to show off his perfectly shaped bowling-ball shoulders, the absolute edible breadth of his biceps, and the sexy drift of black hair down his chest. Her mouth actually watered.
His gaze fell to her crotch and his eyes dropped to half-mast. “Yep, nice landing strip.”
Endelle knew she had a good body and she wasn’t modest, not even a little. Hello. Mardi Gras.
So there was only one reason she wanted to clothe herself: to let this arrogant ass**le know that this shop was closed.
“You’re supposed to be dead, Braulio. I f**king watched you die. Hell, I held you in my arms. I thought I laid you on the funeral pyre myself. So what was it I burned up? Whose ashes did I spread over Lake Tanganyika Two? What was that, some sort of f**king clone?”
He shrugged.
He was reclining on her bed and he had the audacity to just offer a shrug, the raising of one shoulder, so not even a full shrug, but a half shrug.
“Something like that,” he said. “Hey, I thought you’d be glad to see me.”
“Fuck off.”
“Aw, babe, don’t be like that.”
She turned back to her closet and pulled a purple gown from its hanger. She was pissed off. Royally. Aw, babe. Aw, babe. Shit, shit, shit, shit.
She waved a hand and a split second later the sleeveless gown covered her, with the exception that her head stuck out of one of the armholes. Yeah, she was that pissed off.
She let out a cry of frustration and waved her hand again.
This time the gown went where it was supposed to go.
She lifted her arm and folded straight into her holiest of holies, the small sanctuary in which she engaged in her darkening work. No one could fold in there except, of course, f**king Sixth ascenders.
A movement of air told her what she needed to know.
