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Grace sat on her stool beside her bed and pressed a cool, damp cloth against Leto’s forehead. Hours had passed since she’d brought the warrior from Moscow Two but instead of improving, his pallor now matched the cloth, a sort of grayish white. Sweat poured from him and he shook from head to toe. She didn’t know what to do. His addiction to dying blood was tearing his body apart and it shouldn’t be.
She’d gone to the Convent’s library and researched this part of a death vampire’s suffering—how long he could survive without dying blood and what sort of symptoms would accompany the deprivation. Essentially, Leto’s withdrawal wasn’t running the usual course.
Unfortunately, she suspected that the aberrations he presented had something to do with the terrible call of the breh-hedden on his body.
Grace could no longer pretend she wasn’t Warrior Leto’s breh, or that he wasn’t hers, as strange as that seemed. But with his scent thick in her nostrils, her sinuses, her brain, all the poetry she’d written throughout the years, the erotic, forbidden verses, kept rushing back at her until she ached so fiercely she wanted to scream.
At the same time, she was so worried for this warrior that her heart kept pounding in her ears. She just didn’t know what to do. But her instinct, above all, was to protect him while he was in such a vulnerable state.
“Are you listening to me?” Sister Quena shouted. “I want him removed. I shall contact Madame Endelle myself to let her know that her faithless one has somehow tried to seek asylum in my convent.”
“I’ll leave,” Leto said, but the words came out little more than a whisper. He tried to rise but he’d grown as weak as a kitten and simply fell back against the hard mattress.
After another breath, he tried again.
Grace put a hand on his shoulder holding him down. “Rest, Leto. I will see to this.”
“James,” he whispered.
“What?” She leaned closer.
“Find James.”
“Who is James?”
But his eyes closed and his breathing grew to a light pant. She understood then that he was near death.
“Devotiate, I will call the regulators if you do not step out of this cell. I will call Madame Endelle and she will take him.”
But the thought that Sister Quena, High Administrator of the Convent, would jeopardize her warrior, forced Grace to leave his side, to rise from her stool, and to turn to face the one Marguerite had always called “sister-bitch.”
Grace felt the earth below her rumble, that same power she had felt before. It drove upward, flowing into her feet, up and up, until she tingled with power.
She opened her arms wide and let some of that energy flow toward Sister Quena. She would not think of hurting her, or even disrupting the authority she had over Grace, but she could not allow Leto to leave her cell.
When she spoke, her voice, much to her surprise, split-resonance. “You will leave us and you will forget that you’ve seen Warrior Leto here this day. You will forbid anyone to approach this cell.”
Sister Quena blinked three times and finally bowed. “As you wish, devotiate.” The tall woman, aged in appearance despite her immortal vampire nature, turned and left to walk very slowly down the hall.
Grace took a breath and willed the energy to leave her, which it did, draining down her body and through her feet, perhaps back to the earth. She glanced down at the floor. What was this new power that had come to her, which seemed so separate from her yet was hers apparently to call at will?
The same power had allowed her to save Leto.
Small gasps behind her caused her to whirl and once more assume her post. When she sat down, she once more dabbed the cloth over Leto’s forehead. He reached for her arm and his eyes opened. “Thank … you,” he murmured.
But it was the connection of his hand on her wrist that sent her mind whirling with understanding. She had what he needed. She rose up and leaned over him, shifting sideways to sling her arm around his head and over his left shoulder.
She positioned her wrist over his mouth. “Drink,” she said. “Take what you need.”
He tried to open his mouth but couldn’t.
Grace didn’t understand where all her boldness was coming from, but using her other hand, she slipped her finger and thumb into his mouth and stroked his gums until his fangs emerged. Of course such intimate contact caused her to press her legs together. Even touching him brought all that desire rushing to the fore.
Leto groaned and his scent suddenly flooded the room, that beautiful forest smell. With a sudden jolt of unexpected energy, he jerked forward and struck.
Grace cried out, her neck and back arching in surprise and then in the utter sexual pleasure that swept over her. Desire flooded her in deep, exhilarating waves. Leto held her wrist to his mouth with both hands as he suckled. He looked up into her eyes.
She put her free hand on his hair and let her fingers glide through the thick black mass.
His color began to return, deepening to a beautiful rich olive tone, so beautiful against the crystal-clear blue of his eyes. She wanted him to live, he had to live. She felt this deep in her soul, that he was necessary to the future of Second Earth, and to her, and to the children she would one day bear for him.
She felt and saw all this as she looked into his eyes. But was any of it real or just her imaginative sensibilities? What she did know was that she craved him, in the way she knew that other women, associated with the Warriors of the Blood, grew to crave their men.
* * *
Leto stared into pale green-gold eyes and so much innocence that he felt blinded by Grace, her beauty and her purity. How could someone as lost as he was, as damned by his actions, be here in the presence of such goodness?
He knew only one thing. He had been near death, though he couldn’t understand the why of it. The addiction to dying blood, when left unsatisfied, could only result in death after months of agonizing starvation.
But as the hours had passed in Grace’s company, with his body on fire with his need for her, not only had the cramps reached an intolerable level, but his heart and lungs had begun to fail him. He’d been on the verge of heart failure for the last hour.
How had she known that her blood would relieve at least part of these symptoms, even abate the abdominal seizures to the extent that he could take deep breaths and remain stretched out instead of curled up in agony.
Oh, God, Grace.
If he stayed here, he put her in jeopardy.
He sat up. He had to get out of here. He had to make contact with James, maybe even Endelle. Yes, Endelle. He had to let her know the truth about Greaves’s army.
