Wings of Fire

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to my agent, Jennifer Schober, for all the wonderful conversations about the Guardians of Ascension.

To Rose Hilliard—lady, you rock!!!

Danielle Fiorella—thank you so much for the best covers in publishing!

Laurie Henderson and Laura Jorstad, again thank you so much for taking care of my beloved Antony and Parisa.

I am once again so very grateful to Anne Marie Tallberg and Eileen Rothschild for continuing to bring my winged vampires to market.

And as always, many thanks to Matthew Shear, Jen Enderlin, and the amazing team at SMP.

My Beloved

In the twilight I think of him He sees me in the wonder of his eye I allow the air to breathe He does not move with swift feet His thoughts turn to me imagined I wait beyond the faint boundary of time He does not rush

My steps are measured I have known his love from the beginning I perceive his beauty angled, firm He is earnest in his movements Love rises on wings of fire —Maria Medichi (AD 707–732), translated by her husband, Antony, 1845

The search is futile

When carried out by the avenging heart.

—
Collected Proverbs,
Beatrice of Fourth

CHAPTER 1

In the last three months, since the abduction of his woman, Antony Medichi, out of Italy in the late Roman era, had become a killing machine. He had steel for bones and molten iron for blood. He rarely slept. He battled death vampires at night, sending to perdition any who crossed his sword. But during the day, when most of the pretty-boys were asleep, Antony bled his wrists on his altar and hunted rogue vampires on Mortal Earth, searching for the woman he’d lost.

Those hunts also ended in death. Not his.

He stood on the rim of the Grand Canyon, Mortal Earth, looking down, tracking a death vampire flying in the shadows. Even though he was far from the touristy areas, he still cloaked his presence with a heavy concentration of mist, a preternatural creation designed to confuse the average human mind. Most mortals simply couldn’t see him, and right now he didn’t want to be seen.

Antony stared into the abyss. The profound silence across the canyon formed a strange juxtaposition to the visual feast. The Grand Canyon was all for the eyes, not for the ears. But he hadn’t come to admire the view or embrace the quiet.

His predatory gaze followed the death vampire flying below, legs straight back, glossy black wings glinting in the early-morning sunshine. He’d been hunting this particular bastard for weeks now. All clues had led here. This pretty-boy had known both Eldon Crace and Rith Do’onwa, two sons of bitches who had harmed women belonging to the Warriors of the Blood. Both vampires deserved death. Crace had already gotten what he deserved, and within the depths of Medichi’s mind Rith Do’onwa, the fiend who had kidnapped his woman, was a death waiting to happen, nothing more.

Three months ago, Medichi had served as Parisa Lovejoy’s Guardian of Ascension. She’d entered his world as an anomaly, a mortal-with-wings, a woman of extraordinary preternatural power in need of protection from the enemy. No one, except the first ascender, had mounted wings on Mortal Earth. But Parisa had. She’d also arrived with the ability to voyeur, a power that allowed her to focus on an individual or a place and
see
what was happening in real time, even in an entirely separate location, or a different dimension.

So much power, and beauty, and a strong analytical mind.

But all these immense gifts and abilities paled in comparison with the call of the
breh-hedden,
the myth of vampire mate-bonding, that had proved as real as the air he breathed. She was his
breh,
his mate, the one destiny had selected for him, the one he
craved
.

He hadn’t asked for a mate. He hadn’t wanted one and he sure as hell didn’t deserve one, but she’d come, he’d served as her guardian, and she’d been abducted on his watch.

So here he was, a wrecked shell of a warrior, struggling to find his way back to her.

When Rith had abducted Parisa, he’d not only blocked his trace—which indicated an enormous amount of power—but also deceived Medichi with a hologram of Parisa that lasted for at least half a minute. Medichi didn’t know anyone, not even any of his warrior brothers, the powerful Warriors of the Blood, who could create a hologram. So, yeah, Rith had power, which made him a clever, dangerous opponent.

But the death vampire working the airstreams of the Grand Canyon had known Rith. He had answers, and Medichi meant to have them. Right now. This morning.

His heart pumped hard in his chest.

The death vampire flew close to the canyon walls as though trying to hide in the shadows. Medichi smiled the hard smile that tended to work his jaw at the same time. Did the death vamp actually think to hide in a place this size?

Medichi bound his hair not in the ritual
cadroen
as he was supposed to, but with a narrow leather strap over his forehead, tied at the back of his head so that his long warrior hair flowed free. He was uncivilized now, a wild beast hunting for what was his by right, for what had been taken from him.

He had his wings at close-mount, tight to his body; any breeze would send him off the canyon’s edge otherwise. But now it was time to take care of business. With the practice of thirteen centuries, he spread his wings to full-mount, adjusting with infinitesimal shifts to balance the air currents, then launched into the empty airspace over the canyon.

A rush of pure adrenaline shot through his heart then sent dizzying endorphins into his head. There was nothing like flight, nothing like falling off a cliff and knowing that spreading his wings to their farthest span would catch, hold, then carry him where he wanted to go.

With a slight adjustment, the barest drawing back of his wings, his body shifted at an angle that meant
down,
and down he started to fly. Down and down, into the varying degrees of cool shadow and warm light as the canyon walls jutted and receded.

He was close now, his quarry an eighth of a mile away, less, less, a hundred yards now.

The bastard looked up. Shit. Maybe Medichi’s shadow had crossed him.

Panic seized the pretty-boy’s eyes and he banked left, then drew his wings into close-mount. He threw his arms forward as though diving, his body now aimed in the direction of the Colorado River.

Medichi didn’t hesitate. He folded his wings close to his body and, instead of flying in long pulls through the air, became a missile and headed with fierce intent after his prey.

The bastard was good and he was old, which meant he had power, speed, and lots of fucking skill.

But then so did Medichi. He had never mounted his wings during battle, but he flew, a lot. He practiced, a lot. And now he smiled, his jaw twitching.

The mile-deep canyon walls sped past him, the striated layers of rock blending into an orange-beige fusion as he jetted toward the blue-and-white ribbon below. Closer.

He could almost touch the bastard’s foot.

Closer.

If he could wrap a hand around his ankle.

Closer.

The waters rose up and up.

Shit.

The death vamp leveled off just three feet above the water but Medichi took a huge risk, kept his missile shape for a split second longer, and just as the death vamp started to plow air Medichi caught his ankle and jerked him down, straight into the frothy rapids of the river below. At the same time, with the steel of his bones, the molten iron of his blood, and a swift mental command, he snagged his levitation ability and threw his wings into parachute mount, cupped at the top, to keep from plunging into the frigid water.

The death vamp wasn’t so lucky. His wings went under, and he surfaced screaming because the water had trashed them. The mesh superstructure that held the feathers in place was fairly fragile, and the smallest injury hurt like a bitch. This tumbling in wild waters would be a form of torture. As the current dragged him in a heap, tossing him over and over, the death vamp screamed each time his head breached the water. He landed back-first against an enormous rock. Medichi heard the crack as well as another shriek.

Medichi flew after him. When the pretty-boy would have slid into the heavy currents that swirled at the base of the rock, the warrior grabbed him by his long, dark hair and hauled him out of the water. He threw him facedown on the rock. How many mortals had this motherfucker drunk to death? How many ascenders? Death vamps didn’t differentiate when it came to dying blood. Any human, ascended or not, would do.

Medichi wafted his wings slowly to keep his balance against the air currents that streamed through the canyon.

God, the bastard’s wings were a mess. The vamp shook hard, maybe from the icy water but probably from shock and a mountain of pain.

“Where’s Rith?” he asked. Time to keep the questions simple.

The death vampire shifted slightly to cast one dark, beautiful eye up at Medichi. Calling death vampires “pretty-boys” was more than accurate. He was exquisite, chiseled features shaped by the effects of dying blood, porcelain skin with a faint bluish cast, enhanced no doubt by the freezing water. Medichi felt the pull of attraction, an allure that created a swelling of ease within his chest. Fuck. Even shaking with pain and approaching death, the bastard was trying to enthrall him.

Medichi punched back with a shot of mental power that acted like a blow, pushing the death vamp’s face into the rock. “Even at this hour,” he shouted, “when you face death, you’d try to enthrall me?”

A smile curved the side of the pretty-boy’s mouth. Blood dribbled from his lips onto the wet black rock beneath his face. “Fuck you,” he whispered.

“Where’s Rith?”

The death vampire just smiled. Yeah, questions would be futile, but he always gave them a chance because what he intended to do next would hurt like hell.

He retracted his wings then dropped to his knees beside the death vamp. A bone jutted from the bastard’s thigh, shiny and white. Blood ran in a rivulet down his ruptured skin, but the water, still shedding from the nearest feathers of his broken wings, kept washing it away.

“You sure you don’t want to just tell me?” Medichi asked. One last chance.

The same reply returned, this time a much stronger “Fuck you.”

“Fine,” Medichi said. “We’ll do it the hard way.” He put his hand on the vamp’s forehead.

The struggle began as the pretty-boy’s mind bucked against Medichi’s touch as though trying to cast him out of his head. He put up a good fight, too, but more than just Medichi’s body had grown tougher over the forced separation from Parisa. He’d been working his mental powers as well, trying to find his woman telepathically. In doing so, he’d gotten stronger.

He shoved hard, and the vampire’s mind gave way. The death vamp screamed but Medichi ignored him and began the real hunt.

He cast aside memories like batting at flies until Rith’s strange face emerged, the Asian cast to his features, the broad forehead and wide nose. He focused on those memories and gained a portrait of the man as a powerful servant of Commander Greaves—but then what else would he be? Greaves was the acknowledged enemy of all that Medichi held dear on Second Earth, in this beautiful dimensional world. Darian Greaves had ambitions to rule both Second Earth and Mortal Earth and was creating a powerful army of death vamps to back up his efforts. Rith was a favored servant.

Within the death vampire’s mind, he saw Rith’s lairs, sometimes in great caverns, sometimes in tents, sometimes in suburban homes, but all in separate geographic locales. He kept picking through them, trying to
feel
the presence of his woman. All the while the death vamp screamed at the invasion.

Medichi came across the memory of one of Rith’s properties that was shrouded in a mental shield. What the fuck was that? This death vampire didn’t have enough power to create a deep mental shield like this, which meant that Rith had done it himself.

He tried punching through the shroud but couldn’t and then the preternatural sensation stole over him, of simply
knowing
. He knew. He could
feel
that this was where Rith held Parisa captive, cloaked even from Central’s advanced high-tech grid system, which could locate anything on two earths.