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“Fine. Why don’t we start, Endelle, with what you’d like to say to me.”
She put her hands out in front of her, claw-like but facing each other, and as the energy began to spark, she shouted, “How could you have left me alone like this! How? What f**king possessed you to just take off, without a word to me, without thinking of me as a partner in all this shit?” She lifted her arm and as she waved, a red firework left her palm, aimed straight for Marguerite.
Thorne was quick, though. He stepped in front and took the sparks in the chest. He winced and she knew she’d hurt him, which meant he knew exactly just how badly she would have burned Marguerite.
His gaze became dark and hooded as he marched toward her. “Throw another one. Go ahead. Get everything off your chest.”
She couldn’t help herself. She launched repeated fireworks at him, one after the other, but he met each one with hand-blasts of his own, shunting them aside until the vast rotunda in which she stood, facing off her second-in-command, was full of smoke and lightning and showers of red, green, and blue sparks.
James had moved to stand beside Marguerite and set up some kind of shield to protect her.
But Endelle was just warming up. “And how dare you block our mind-link, the one we’ve had in place for centuries. Goddamn you, Thorne, treating me like I was worth a narrow stream of snail piss. Goddamn you.”
The fireworks just kept getting bigger and bigger until even she felt the burn on her arms and shoulders as the sparks came down.
“I’m done, Endelle. I will no longer serve you in this capacity. No more, so I want you to break the f**king mind-link. I will not serve you as I have for the past two thousand years, not when Leto shows up and tells us that Greaves has built an army of two million warriors. How the hell are we supposed to battle that and win? How?”
She hated him now. Hated him for not understanding or valuing all that she had done. She’d never pretended to be a brilliant administrator, but who else could have stepped up and done her job? She said as much then added, “So suck it up, Thorne. I’m not letting you go. I’m not letting you walk away from your responsibilities.”
She kept the blasts streaming and the fireworks bursting against his own hand-blasts.
“I’m not walking away, Endelle. I just refuse to serve you one more day like this. Not one more day, so break the f**king mind-link. Break it.”
“No,” she shouted, using resonance.
She watched him flinch, but he barely moved an inch from his present battling posture. He looked different, too, stronger somehow. He was definitely determined, but she was too angry to see straight.
She thought the thought and her wings flew from their wing-locks, but he must have anticipated this move because there his were, larger than before and lighter, more iridescent than she remembered.
Change had come to Thorne, which meant an increase in power. Maybe that’s what his rebellion was all about.
She still didn’t care what had brought all this on. He’d asked for it and she was dishing it up.
She began to fly in a circle and he matched her. The palace rotundas were enormous. Twenty death vampires could fly through and not touch one another.
“Break the link,” he shouted, also using resonance.
It felt good to be in the air, to be flying, to be doing something other than reading emails and watching her world succumb to all of Greaves’s machinations. How could Thorne possibly know what Leto’s calm announcement about the size of Greaves’s army had done to her? Or that he’d built palace prisons to reach pure f**king vision? How could he possibly know what it felt like to see that no matter what she had done, how little she had slept, how long she had served, how much of her life she had sacrificed, it would all, in the end, mean so little? Or that Greaves had ended up in a superior position, one that would allow him to win the war, and that the one she had come to rely on in everything had somehow decided that she was the real enemy in this whole equation?
So why the hell had she done any of it? Why had she given up her life?
She gathered all that rage, all that intense frustration, and did two things at once: She sent him a blast that would knock him hard into the marble and maybe ruin his wings and at the exact same moment she broke the mind-link.
There, she screamed telepathically, satisfied?
But as she watched Thorne fall, completely unconscious, through the smoke and sparks, she wanted to reach out to him, to break his fall. She couldn’t. Something inside her had broken apart completely. She couldn’t even move.
She popped her wings into parachute-mount and just hung high in the air near the rounded part of the ceiling where the smoke was thickest. She had to work to see anything below her.
At the last moment, it was Marguerite who folded beneath Thorne and sent her own hand-blast to stop his fall. He now hung suspended in midair.
Oh, God, Thorne. Thorne!
Endelle was sickened by what she had done, but still she just stayed there, rocking slightly, back and forth.
As Marguerite diminished her hand-blasts in stages, Thorne’s body descended slowly until he lay inert on top of her, his wings spread wide in the full-mount position. Marguerite’s feet stuck out at an odd angle beneath him. She coughed because of the smoke.
Endelle dropped swiftly to the marble floor and approached the pair. She wanted to know only one thing, so she focused on Thorne’s bare chest: Was the bastard still alive or had she killed the most honorable vampire she’d known in her entire nine thousand years of ascended life.
His rib cage rose and fell.
Okay, so he was alive.
Fine.
Fucking fine.
She closed her eyes and folded to her meditation space.
She sat down on her chaise-longue and folded off her seashells and mini skirt.
She folded on her soft purple linen gown.
She was in her holy of holies and maybe she would just stay here until the earth blew apart into hundreds of trillions of tiny particles.
Sounded like a good plan.
* * *
Marguerite was stuck beneath 260 pounds of muscled vampire warrior and a pair of wings that were both making it hard to breathe and tickling her nose at the same time. For all their strength, wings were also fragile and when broken required a lot of energy to heal.
She’d only been stupid once while mounting her wings. She’d been drunk, of course, at college, or rather at one of the bars near the college, and had released her wings in too small a space.
Because she’d been standing on the bar, and her wings were huge, she’d broken them both at the apex, shattering a few bottles in the process because of her subsequent screaming. The university healers had worked on her for hours.
