“Thought I already did.”

She thumped his shoulder. “In bed, idiot.”

He squeezed her ass. “Did you actually think I was going anywhere else?”

She laughed. “No, I guess not.”

He shuddered.

“What?” she asked.

“We get to sleep together … all night.”

“Thorne, please … please don’t get too used to this.”

He gave her a soft smile. “No worries, not right now. Let’s just get some rest. We’ll figure things out tomorrow. And since there are Seers in this colony, maybe they’ll have some insight about your visions.”

“Okay.”

He thumbed her cheek and stared into her eyes.

His gaze was full of something she didn’t quite recognize except that it warmed up her chest all over again and made her put her lips against his. He kissed her fiercely, pushing his tongue inside her mouth, a kind of claiming.

She wrapped her arms more tightly around his neck.

He kissed her for a long time. Because he’d firmed up inside her again, she wondered if he was headed toward a second round. She wouldn’t have said no, but suddenly she was really tired.

“Okay, bedtime.” But he sighed heavily as he withdrew from her, as if he didn’t like being apart either.

He flipped the lever and the cold water came on. “Sorry, there’s no hot water left.”

She didn’t mind the cold so much. She’d been used to it for decades in the Convent.

He stepped out of the shower as she finished up. When she finally emerged, he had a towel waiting for her, holding it wide. She stepped into it and he wrapped her up from behind.

Why the hell did he have to be such a nice guy? Didn’t he know this was killing her?

* * *

After a night of working the darkening, in which she lost sleep keeping death vampires from being shipped to the Metro Phoenix Two area, Endelle wasn’t in the mood to be polite. She had never been so fucking agitated in her entire life. She felt like a thousand little ants were gnawing on her nerve endings. Where the hell was Thorne and why hadn’t he come back, preferably with Marguerite strapped across his back?

Fucking morons.

She paced the weird tree room in Jean-Pierre’s house, having decided she needed a break from her office in her administrative HQ. Fiona sat on the huge branch that bent sideways from the main trunk, swinging her legs and smiling up at her warrior from time to time. He stood behind her and had his arms draped over her shoulders.

These latest lovebirds gave her the scratch.

“I had to get out of the office.”

“You are always welcome in our home,” Jean-Pierre said, his French accent as easy as a wet dream.

She waved an arm. “What the hell kind of room is this anyway and what’s with the walls? They have to be ten feet and then there’s this huge-ass tree growing straight through the floor.”

“I built the floor around the tree when it was young and trained this branch. I often sit here to think. It is an Arizona sycamore. The fragrance is very sharp from the leaves, especially after a rain.”

“Whatever.” She slapped her leather skirt and watched both pairs of eyes drift to the floor and back. She looked down. “Shit. These garden-variety snail shells just aren’t holding up like I thought they would.” She had glued them in a nice curve right over her crotch, but most of them were busted up and there were bits and pieces on the thick glass that made up the floor of the strange round room.

Fiona started biting her lip and examining her nails.

“What? Are you laughing at my skirt?” She was so not in the mood to be laughed at.

Fiona pinched her lips together and shook her head. Then she started coughing.

“You are such a ninny.”

But that apparently set Fiona off, and she started laughing really hard. “I … I haven’t heard that expression in decades. Ninny? Really?” She laughed some more.

For some reason, the moment broke Endelle, but not in a good way, and she collapsed to sit on the floor. Her heart ached and she didn’t know what to do.

Thorne had been gone for three weeks now and she had this horrible feeling he was never coming back. She couldn’t even contact him because he’d somehow managed to block their shared mind-link.

As she spread her knees to sit cross-legged, the bending of the skirt sent a bunch more shells breaking apart. Much she cared. She ran her fingers lightly over the starfish that covered her right boob. She’d started experimenting with sea crap to enhance her fashion design. The nubby texture kind of soothed her.

Since Jean-Pierre had turned around and was now staring up into the budding branches of the tree, she realized she was probably fully exposed—her skirt was short, and her modesty had disappeared sometime during the Roman conquests on Mortal Earth. Today’s thongs, while awesome, really didn’t cover a whole helluva lot.

So the fuck what.

Fiona hopped off the branch and folded a somewhat lumpy, multicolored throw in her arms. She crossed the space and spread it out over Endelle’s lap. Endelle didn’t even complain. She just sighed heavily.

“Endelle, is there anything I can do?”

Fiona dropped to sit in front of her, also cross-legged, but she wore jeans. This couple preferred jeans to anything.

Jean-Pierre turned back around. “Oui, Endelle, we would like to help, if we could.” He now leaned over the branch, his forearms balanced on the smooth bark, his hands clasped in front of him.

Endelle looked at his current position as well as the height and flatness of the smooth tree limb. Her brows rose. “That branch is at a really good height, if you know what I mean.”

The fact that Jean-Pierre’s gaze whipped to the back of Fiona’s head and Fiona’s face turned a sudden crimson color spoke volumes. Endelle snorted. “You two are about as hard to read as a turkey on a Thanksgiving table.”

Of course her gaze went right back to the branch. It was wide and would make a perfect platform. It really would.

Her thoughts then turned as they did way too often toward Braulio, that prick of pricks who’d suddenly shown up in her life and started making her want a man bad. They’d been lovers a few millennia ago and then he’d died, or she thought he’d died. Apparently, Luchianne, the first vampire ever, had hauled his ass out of the River Styx, so to speak, and hidden him away on Sixth Earth all this time.

Now Braulio was back, performing some sort of service for the ruling council there with hopes of keeping Greaves from taking over two worlds. She might have gotten excited about the idea of Sixth getting involved in her difficulties—but one thing she knew for sure, when it came to government, forward movement was about as fast as trying to get ketchup out of a glass bottle. She’d need to stick a big fat butter knife up somebody’s ass to get a little progress.

When Fiona had recovered her complexion, she rephrased her question. “What can I do to help? That’s why you wanted to see me, right? Because Marguerite and I share the obsidian flame power?”

“No. I don’t know. Maybe. The hell if I know.”

Endelle got that sick sinking feeling again, the one that had hit her when she found out Thorne had dropped to Mortal Earth and disappeared off the grid. “I’ve never felt this lost before. I mean, the war has been a shitfest for a long time, but I always had Thorne with me”—she tapped her forehead—“here, in my mind. Now he’s shut me out.”

“Did he break the link with you?” Jean-Pierre asked.

She’d had the mind-link with Thorne for centuries so that she could reach him telepathically day or night. She’d set it up, and with mind-links only the person who’d established the link could break it.

She shook her head. Holding the multicolored throw in place, she brushed broken snail-shell bits from the upper creases of her skirt. “He can’t break the link, but he found a way to block me. I think he might have emerging powers. I can’t reach him. I can’t even read his thoughts—and I’ve always been able to read his thoughts. The only good thing about this whole fiasco is that he has to be with Marguerite. He has to know where she is, has to be protecting her, and God knows we need her. My only hope in this whole fucking situation is that he’ll bring her back.”

She met Fiona’s gaze. “So, what about Marguerite? Have you heard anything from her in these last couple of weeks? If I remember, you two could reach each other when no one else could.”

“Nothing. I’m sorry. I honestly thought I would have because we kind of connected when she was in the Convent. But to be honest, the sense I have of her is that she wanted to shake the dust from her sandals. She was done with Second Earth.”

Endelle still couldn’t believe that obsidian flame had finally shown up on Second Earth. She had been so excited when she’d first learned that Fiona had this power: Each individual identified as obsidian flame would have emerging preternatural abilities, and—because the flame phenomenon always worked in the form of a triad—there would be two others.

Marguerite had already been identified as the red variety, and with her advanced Seer capacity, Endelle was really hoping that her contribution would involve her Seer skills. The third woman hadn’t yet emerged—but what good would it do if Marguerite was still traipsing around on Mortal Earth, apparently intent on living however the hell she pleased? Though she had never seen an obsidian flame triad in action, she understood that the potential was enormous.

God knew they needed a weapon of this magnitude in order to fight Greaves. She could feel in her bones that what had always felt centuries distant was about to fall on Second Earth in the form of Armageddon. The fact that Greaves was holding his military review spectacle had simply solidified this truth.

And now Thorne was gone.

The ultimate warrior.

The man she’d always counted on.

She once more rubbed the little lumps on the starfish’s back, but she stared now at nothing in particular, her heart aching. Her emotions were all over the place as well, but they seemed to revolve around two specific poles; one that was pure grief, like now, and the other so filled with fury that she’d nearly lost her mind with rage.