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She gave a little cry then sent, Jean-Pierre, can you hear me? Oh, God, please hear me. Hear me. I don’t know what to do. I don’t have the power to battle these men.
I am here, he returned. But I cannot move.
He put you and the entire audience in stasis.
My breathing, what is happening?
She looked at his throat and chest and she saw the brilliance of the trap. The bindings are tightening with each breath you take.
Are you all right?
Yes. But for how long? I don’t know what to do.
What of your channeling power?
Yes. Of course. She moved her mind next to his and felt all the miraculous vibrations.
“Hold her tighter,” Casimir called out.
Fiona, your aura is glowing again.
Casimir said as much. Can you feel me next to you?
Yes.
I want to try a hand-blast.
Do it.
She could feel a faint vibration travel down his arm, very weak, nothing like before when they used the hand-blast together.
She opened her palm and let the sensation fly, but barely anything happened.
Casimir laughed. “I saw a little burst of gold from your hand. Surely you can do better than that.” He crossed his arms over his chest. He looked arrogant again, his lips almost a sneer.
Fiona knew she couldn’t channel Jean-Pierre, not in this situation, because of the stasis.
She reached out for the one woman who could help her: Endelle. She sent her telepathic thread flying in the direction of Phoenix Two, but before she’d gotten a few feet, she stumbled mentally, such a strange preternatural sensation that her head actually jerked forward.
“Not gonna happen, Fiona,” Casimir called out to her. “I’ve shielded the building. Nobody in. Nobody out. No preternatural phone calls.”
Oh, dear God.
Freedom has many faces.
—Collected Proverbs, Beatrice of Fourth
Chapter 19
Fiona. Jean-Pierre’s voice was a mere whisper through her mind. I cannot breathe.
She looked down at Jean-Pierre. His face was red and the bands had again tightened around his throat.
She looked at Casimir. “You’re killing him.”
But he lifted up both hands and shook his head. “I’m not allowed to kill anyone on Second Earth or Mortal Earth. To do so would be a death warrant.”
“But you are the instrument of his death. How is that any different?”
Casimir shrugged. “It’s a loophole and it’s worked quite well for centuries.”
Fiona looked down at the man she loved. She felt her power pulsing around her and through her. She knew her aura glowed, that her preternatural channeling power was at full bore, but what good could it do her when she couldn’t channel anyone?
She felt completely helpless, even useless. She might as well be strapped down on Rith’s bloodletting table for all the power she could wield in this situation. She slid off the table and sank to her knees. She held Jean-Pierre’s limp hand in hers and brought his fingers to her lips.
She loved this man, this dying man. She loved him with all her heart, yet there was nothing she could do.
Tears fell, dampening his fingers as she rubbed them back and forth over her cheeks. I love you, she sent.
Je t’aime, returned faint, so very faint.
* * *
Jean-Pierre drew the smallest breath, but the band tightened even more. His mind skated about uneasily. He could not see a way out of this situation.
He knew only one thing: He would miss Fiona. He did not know what the afterlife would hold for him and perhaps this was his time, but already, even in this moment, he knew he would miss her, all the years he did not have with her, perhaps even the children they would not birth and raise together. Yes, he would miss it all.
He did not understand the power that the breh-hedden had wielded over his life since he first caught Fiona’s lovely patisserie scent. He had at times been a crazed man, a vampire searching to be satisfied with only what she had to give. Taking her blood had been one of the finest experiences of his life, giving power to his body, and to his spirit. That was the true mystery between them: that somehow she empowered him and forced him to think in larger terms.
Even his desire to see the Militia Warrior force improved had expanded during his pursuit of Fiona, by all their conversations together over the past five months. Oui, so many conversations about life and about the war, about what each of them could do, desired to do, to make a difference in their society.
To lose all that now seemed tragic.
And yet who was to blame? He had only himself, always holding back, always restraining himself because of things that had happened so long ago, things that had forged a wall of bitterness around his heart, things that had prevented him from really loving Fiona the way this woman deserved to be loved, with nothing held back, with his heart on fire in true passion, in true commitment, in true love.
How much he wished even for just a moment to reclaim his life, that he might give himself fully to her as he had once given himself to his wife. Whatever Isabelle’s reasons had been for her betrayal, he should never have closed his heart and his life to love because of it. That had been his real foolishness.
As his ability to breathe diminished, his mind seemed to grow and expand. He allowed himself to love Fiona. He gave his heart, so that it was as if a cool breeze swept through him and he could see things he had not seen before: that he had diminished his own life by not giving himself to love, that his own powers had been hindered because he had been restrained, even bitter.
How strange at the point of death to be so overcome by truth. He understood something about his real power. Fiona had even alluded to it several times—how much he was like Alison in empathic abilities. He felt them now and they were strong, very strong.
Understanding.
Of others, of their strengths and weaknesses, of what they needed in the moment of greatest stress.
As he released the past, as he embraced love truly for the first time in so very long, his mind flowed back to the last time he had trained Fiona. Though he had been right that she needed to allow possession during channeling to truly gain access to the power of obsidian flame, he had been wrong to pressure her. The last thing that she had needed or could have absorbed was that pressure.
As her teacher he had erred, he could see that now. He even saw that if he had covered her in his love, in his full acceptance of who she was, she might even now have complete access to her powers.
If he could go back, he would undo the mistake.
If he had been open and loving with Fiona, instead of proud in his defiance against love, would they be here, right now, trapped?
