Thorne.
Oh, God. My head. There’s so much pain.
Thorne, can you hear me?
Yes.
Thorne, I have to break through to your obsidian flame power.
What … the fuck?
You’re obsidian flame, not the triad but some other kind. I need to pierce you and to release your power or you’ll die.
A long pause, then, Do … it.
She pushed against his mind but couldn’t get in. She shouted telepathically, Release your shields.
The shields began to lower and as soon as they did she felt what he was feeling. She recoiled. He was in so much pain.
She pushed on, however, forging her way through and searching for the source, the center of his mind. She found a pulsing ball of light.
Instinctively she knew what had to be done.
She summoned her obsiddy power, opening her mind and letting it release then sharpen, forging a kind of vast blade. Now, she cried.
She let the sword-shaped power release, straight at the enormous round structure. Her power split the membrane, which created a peeling-back effect so that light and power and heat released in a sudden broad stream up and up.
The nature of it catapulted her out of his mind so that she ended up being thrown back on the bed.
She felt disoriented but what went through her mind was: How can he survive this?
She sat up and saw the back of his head, because he was now sitting on the floor. She scooted off the bed and dropped down beside him. His eyes were wide as he stared at the wall opposite. He didn’t seem to be aware of his surroundings.
She pushed at his shoulder. “Thorne, can you hear me?”
For a good long moment, all she could think was that she needed to get Horace here as quickly as possible.
Thorne’s skin felt cool to the touch.
Way too cool.
She rose up, shaking. He wasn’t present in his body. He had somehow left his body, which could only mean that if he didn’t return pronto, he would die. She could feel it, sense it.
She had to get help.
Thorne kept his warrior phone on his nightstand. She looked around and there it was. She folded it into her hand and thumbed, as she’d seen him thumb.
“Central, how can I help?”
“Is this Jeannie?”
“Jeannie works the night shift, this is Carla. And you are—?”
“Marguerite. Thorne’s in trouble. I broke open his obsiddy power but he’s in some kind of death-like trance. I need Horace, maybe Alison. Endelle, shit, I don’t know.”
“I’m getting a fix on you now. Stay on the com. I’m calling all three entities. Thorne’s house is a protected dwelling. I don’t see any death vampire activity. Were you attacked?”
“No. It’s his emerging power.”
“Stay on the line.”
A blankness began, a quiet that scorched every nerve in her body. She still sat beside him so she rubbed his arm, his shoulder, his chest, but he was getting colder by the second. “No, no, no,” she whispered. “Stay with me.”
“Marguerite,” Carla said. “You have incoming. Horace and Alison. Behind you. Turn around please.”
She whipped around and they both arrived at the same time. Alison’s blond hair was in complete disarray and Horace’s eyes were puffy from sleep.
Neither said anything, they just moved past her close to Thorne. Only as she stood there with the phone still pinned to her ear did she realize she and Thorne were both naked. As if she cared. Thorne sure as hell wouldn’t.
But maybe the others would.
Carla came back on the line again. “Endelle’s coming in three, two, one.”
She shimmered to life right next to Marguerite wearing a very simple long purple gown.
Endelle looked her up and down and lifted her brows. “What happened. You fuck him to death, or what?” But for all that sarcasm, her eyes looked tight.
Marguerite wasn’t certain whether she should reveal the truth about Thorne’s new power to all three ascenders or not, but she finally just said it straight out. “Obsidian flame.”
Endelle frowned, but she kept her gaze on Thorne. “You killed him with your obsidian flame power? I don’t understand.”
“No. Thorne has his own version of obsidian flame power.”
“That’s … not … possible. Wait a minute. When he and I were having our little tiff, and he was flying around, his wings had flames, very faint but they were silvery gray.”
“There, you see?”
“Fine. All right, Alison, what have we got here? Horace, I need a report.”
Alison leaned back. She wore jeans and an enormous T-shirt, probably one of Kerrick’s. She shook her head. “He’s not here.”
“What the fuck do you mean?”
“He’s not in this body.”
Horace turned around. “His body is barely alive. It’s as though his spirit departed. Can you tell us what happened?” His gaze flicked over Marguerite’s body and his cheeks colored up.
She rolled her eyes and folded her leathers on. He released a deep breath. She explained, “Well, we weren’t having sex, if that’s what you’re thinking. We’d done that earlier, of course, then we both fell asleep. The next thing I knew, my skin felt like I’d been torched and I jumped out of bed. Thorne was beginning this whole weird thing. He moved to sit at the edge of the bed and his head started to hurt really bad.
“I received a future stream warning that something big was going down, and this is what was going down. He was coming into his obsidian flame power, which neither of us knew about, and I had to do that thing that he’d already done to me and that Endelle had done to Fiona. I had to break open his power, it’s part of the process. Maybe … maybe I punched too hard.”
“Ya think?” Endelle sniped.
But Marguerite wasn’t offended. She would own up to the truth, even if it meant she’d killed her boyfriend, but she hadn’t. “No, Endelle, I knew what I was doing. And I would do it again. If you want, you can do a mind-dive and see the whole thing for yourself.”
The Supreme High Administrator of Second Earth sighed heavily. “No, you have the smell of truth about you. Alison, you’re up. What do we do? How do we get him back?”
Alison met Endelle’s gaze. “He has to want to come back.”
“What?” Marguerite all but shouted. “Are you saying right in this moment he doesn’t want to come back? Oh, no, this is so not happening.”
“You go, girl,” Endelle murmured.
Alison sat back on her heels. She met Marguerite’s gaze. “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. He doesn’t want to come back.”
Marguerite moved to stand in front of Thorne. He was dead. Sitting there, her vampire boyfriend was dead. And Alison was suggesting that it was because he didn’t want to come back.
She knelt between his legs and put her hands on his shoulders. “Thorne, don’t even think about staying wherever the hell it is you are! I need you here. We all need you.” The sense that he wasn’t present flat-out scared her, and she knew she had to do more than just beg.
She turned to Alison. “You’d better get out of the way.”
Alison fell backward as though she had a premonition what Marguerite meant to do. This was going to hurt. She drew her right arm back and at the same time dove within his absent mind. She found the seat of his obsiddy power. It was still streaming, but in a thin stream, as though it had traveled a really long distance away from this body. In a coordinated move, she struck him hard on the face and shot her obsiddy power straight into the core of his bright shining ball of light.
“Get back here!”
Then she hit him again.
From Song of the Gods
Life is such a sweet agony,
How do the mortals bear it.
In the moment of perfect comprehension,
Death arrives to wash it all away.
—Collected Poems, Beatrice of Fourth
Chapter 18
Thorne floated. He was a long distance away, a galaxy away from his body, from Second Earth, from the woman he loved.
When Marguerite had ruptured the membrane surrounding his newly discovered obsidian flame power, his mind had gotten caught in a stream of energy so intense that he’d been catapulted a billion miles away. Or at least that’s how he felt.
He floated, he felt one with the universe, he knew everything there was to know, the Creator was with him.
A man appeared beside him, a short man with gray hair and gentle blue eyes. Oh, James. He’d met James earlier.
The man swept an arm wide. “It’s beautiful out here, isn’t it? I confess I don’t come here often enough. But then Upper Dimension work is rather time consuming, humanity being what it is, ascended or otherwise.”
Thorne turned to look at him. He had an ethereal form, ghost-like. Out of curiosity, Thorne lifted his own arm; he, too, was opaque and unreal. He looked back at the stranger. “You’re James, aren’t you?”
He nodded and smiled. He was short, maybe five-eight. Endelle called him “Shorty.” Thorne released a deep sigh, which was not quite a sigh because he had no lungs, but for the first time in twenty centuries he felt at peace. “I could stay here forever.”
“One day, you just might, but you need to return to your body, the sooner the better.”
“I don’t want to go back.”
“Of course not, but Second Earth needs you. The opening of your obsidian flame power has changed everything. In the coming months, your role in this world, and in the war, will alter significantly. You’ll be able to do things you couldn’t do before. And in the same way you’ve led the Warriors of the Blood, you’ll become the anchor to obsidian flame. Once Grace joins with Fiona and Marguerite, once they experience the full expression of their triad of power, you will understand what it is to be their anchor, to bind them and to direct them. But even above all this, Marguerite needs you.”
At almost the same moment that James spoke her name, a sharp stab of pain traveled through his entire not-exactly-corporeal being. “What the fuck?” Thorne winced.