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He was adjusting silver-studded, black leather wrist guards when he turned suddenly and looked at her. His nostrils flared. “What the f**k is with all the … rose. Oh … shit. You look hot as hell.” A deep resonant growl left his throat as a wave of cherry tobacco hit her hard.
Her gaze fell to his stiff battle sandals and shin guards. Definitely an ancient Roman influence, but for some reason the whole effect, with his hair drawn back in the cadroen and his cheekbones in strong relief, spoke to something deep in her bones, something primal and very female.
Whatever the breh-hedden was or wasn’t, it was damn mutual. She knew one thing: If they weren’t headed out right now, she’d hop on the bed and crook her finger at him.
As she looked him up and down, one truth hit her square in the chest: This is my man.
Sweet, sweet Christ, she was so screwed.
* * *
Arthur Robillard stood on the porch of his cabin and extended his vision deep into the forest beyond the various houses opposite. He’d been uneasy all day, as though his body knew something his mind could only perceive in little flashes of awareness.
He lived in a secret Mortal Earth rogue colony after having jumped ship a few months ago, leaving Second Earth behind, much to the despair of his parents and the rest of his large extended family. He stood on the porch of his cabin, the one he had built with his own two hands, with a saw, a hammer, nails, with chisels and planers, and with the muscles the Creator had given him. It wasn’t a big cabin, but it was his.
He didn’t feel young, but at nineteen he was, by both Mortal Earth and ascended standards. Yet his shoulders were weighed down, pressed down by the war. Whatever his youth had been, it was gone, blown into a million pieces when his girlfriend, Nicole, died in a firebomb attack at the Ambassadors Reception a few months ago.
They were going to be married. His family railed against making such a decision when neither of them had even started college. But he’d been with Nicole for two years. He needed to be with her, in every way possible, and it seemed to him that marriage was the only answer, because, for whatever reason, he craved Nicole.
Her parents, well connected in ascended society, wanted her to follow the usual course of affluent ascended females: an eastern college with the junior year spent on Mortal Earth in one of the European universities. Nicole had received all the necessary training on how to function on Mortal Earth in order to keep their Second Earth vampire world a secret. The Sorbonne was very popular, and she’d been studying French since she was eight.
That was how he’d first met her in his junior year. She’d been a sophomore. She had asked if his name was French, which it was. He had been caught by the way her eyes almost disappeared when she laughed and her beautiful red hair, which fell in ringlets to her waist. He’d fallen in love, hard, the way he did just about everything. He’d been committed from day one, his arm around her shoulders, despite the fact that he’d been the brunt of jokes of his small circle of friends. Much he cared. He was with his woman.
He’d even taken blood at her wrist.
And she’d taken his.
If either family had known they were doing that, sharing blood, she would have been shipped off to an aunt who had a beachfront home in Panama Two. But he’d discovered the capacity to heal, if just a little, and the bruises left by doing the forbidden had been removed by holding his hands a couple of inches above the fang-marks.
But he’d loved it, savored the sweet burn, the burst of power. Of course it didn’t help the other situation, which meant he’d become a bastard and had started begging for what he shouldn’t have begged for. Nicole had almost caved, as hungry as he was.
That’s when they decided they should just get married and make legal everything that they were about to do anyway.
Then the Ambassadors Reception had come and it was only by a fluke, a twist of fate, that he hadn’t been with Nicole and her family that night. Now they were all gone, burned up, decimated, and his heart had become a rock-like thing that hung suspended and unmoving inside his chest.
Something else had hardened inside him as well, crusting over his innocence like drying cement. The war against the death vampires had raged all around him but had never, never gotten this close. If he hated the war before, he loathed it now, almost as much as all the political BS that Commander Greaves streamed around the world constantly. Maybe Greaves was the sole reason that the world was in trouble, but Arthur had other ideas—for instance, what about Madame Endelle? She was at fault, wasn’t she? As Supreme High Administrator of Second Earth, she’d had the power for two millennia to contain the monster and she’d failed.
So now he was here, in a Mortal Earth rogue colony, a hidden, secret place. He’d sent a message to his father saying he was perfectly fine but that had been that. He had refused to reveal his location. He had things to figure out, his future for one, and he just couldn’t bear the thought of being in a place that stood for everything he’d lost.
He loved this colony, this hidden place on Mortal Earth, where the war remained so distant, so far away, the people safe beneath an unusual layer of mist that combined the traditional lace-like element with some kind of moss-based component. He could see the dome of protection, even though almost everyone else here couldn’t. The mist kept the locals undetectable, especially the hundreds of Seers who had sought asylum in the world Diallo had created for those ascenders who had gone rogue.
He had told Diallo just today that he meant to make his home here. He needed to speak with his father, of course, to break formally with him and with the rest of his family. He was very young in ascended terms. But in experience? He’d lived a century.
He couldn’t keep pretending that he could follow the path laid out for him, to enter his father’s import business, which had extensive dealings with Mortal Earth export firms run by Second Earth expats who still lived on the grid and were monitored by the bureaucracy of COPASS.
What had begun as a simple organization, the Committee to Oversee the Process of Ascension to Second Society, had turned into an administrative monstrosity with fingers in every lucrative pie to be found in the financial sector of Second Earth.
Arthur’s disgust was profound.
He’d learned only a week ago that he was related to one of the infamous Warriors of the Blood, Warrior Jean-Pierre, a circumstance that explained so much from a genetics standpoint. He had always excelled at sword-work and at hand-to-hand combat. He’d received Militia Warrior training from the time he was eight, the youngest age a boy or girl could enter the various youth programs that focused on weapons training and military discipline.
