But as the last of the shield slipped away, he opened the link. Can we talk? he sent.

There was a long, long pause. Finally, Come to the palace. Now.

Thorne knew Endelle could have brought them both through security but because the silence told him she’d ended the discussion, he concentrated on his warrior phone sitting on his nightstand in Sedona. He folded it into his hand and called Carla.

“Central. How may I help?”

“I need a lift, for two, to the palace. She’s expecting us.” Well, she was expecting him.

“You got it … and … welcome home, boss.”

“Thanks, Carla.”

He thumbed the phone and sent it back to Sedona. He kept his arm around Marguerite and held on. Shit, he was nervous. There was so much that needed to be said and yet he hadn’t really thought through any of it—why he was so fucking mad and, more to the point, what he needed from Endelle.

The vibration began.

What is left when the smoke clears?

Truth.

Awful, horrible, painful truth.

Collected Proverbs, Beatrice of Fourth

Chapter 16

James of Sixth Earth worked to hold his present form. It had been Luchianne’s idea for him to interject himself into Second Society by taking on the persona of a short, gray-haired librarian with light blue eyes. But this shape required effort, since he was in many ways the opposite of this man, the one Alison had once said reminded her of an English country gentleman.

But that was because of the sweaters he wore, and maybe the bow ties.

Luchianne had thought that Alison would need a mild presence in order to accept his help and instruction. Perhaps she’d been right. He’d appeared to Fiona as well, when she’d been near death during the darkest part of a blood slave’s death-and-resurrection process. He had been feeding pigeons when he spoke to her. He’d done some good. Now she was alive and living with Jean-Pierre as his breh. Yes, he’d done some good.

But as he waited for the exact moment to return to Second Earth, on strict instructions from Luchianne herself, he almost trembled at what was coming. This particular encounter between Endelle and her second-in-command had shaken even the High Seers of Sixth Earth.

If this ended badly, all could be lost.

So he had a job to do, and as he felt Thorne and Marguerite begin their folding process, he thought the thought and passed through the ether mist of four dimensions until he reached Second. He dropped down lightly to a space five feet behind Endelle.

“Hello, Endelle. Mind your temper.”

* * *

Endelle turned around. “Shorty, what the fuck are you doing here?”

“Came to observe.”

“I have a bone to pick with you, asshole. What the fuck is Greaves doing with a goddamn army of two million and how the fuck could you have let Leto build it?”

“Yes, it’s a bit of a pickle.”

She snorted. “A pickle? What the hell does that mean and just so ya know, I’m holding you, along with your fucking Sixth Earth friendship circle, accountable for having set Leto up like this. He’s almost dead, you know. Being your spy, and having to take dying blood for a century, has just about killed him. I hope you’re satisfied.”

“We had to have the information Leto provided, all of it, in order to plot our course. Luchianne has a plan, but it’s going to take some serious finessing. She said to tell you that Braulio would come by later for a little chat. Maybe he’ll have an answer for you.” He breathed heavily through his nose, then muttered, “Well, he’ll have something for you anyway, if not an answer.”

She was about to grab him by his skinny arms, shake him hard, and demand he tell her what the fuck was going on, but another voice, full of rocks, invaded the space. “Endelle?” She whirled back around and there stood Thorne with Marguerite, his arm around the other shorty in the room.

She stepped back until she stood beside James. “Thorne, I don’t think you’ve met our oh-so-useless Sixth Ascender Guardian. James of Sixth Earth, Gatekeeper of Third, may I present Warrior Thorne and Seer Marguerite.”

“How do you do?” James offered.

She watched Thorne and Marguerite exchange a glance, brows raised, and why wouldn’t they be? She hadn’t known James was coming, either.

She turned back to him. “Why don’t you tell us all just why you’re here right now?”

“Just to monitor and report.”

She glanced at Thorne then back to Shorty. “Wait a minute. Are you here to watch me take my second-in-command apart, because that’s what I’m about to do unless of course you’d like to get involved.”

“As you know, we have strict rules about interference.”

“Well, how very Star Trek of you.”

But James only smiled. He addressed the newcomers. “If you can, please continue as though I’m not here.”

At that, Endelle met Thorne’s gaze dead-on. “Yes, Warrior Thorne, why don’t we continue as though James, and even your woman here, don’t exist.”

“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 fucking 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 fucking 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 fucking 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 fucking 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.