Antony.

Now she was here, struggling to find a way to escape. The truth was, even if she did escape she still didn’t know which path she would choose: to stay on Mortal Earth or ascend.

She tilted her wings slightly to the left and began a turn. She had to keep her movements small or she would start a rolling maneuver from which she would have a hard time recovering. Maybe impossible.

Her heart pounded as she approached the upper reaches. She flew in an arc and raised her arm straight over her head, carefully controlling the shape of her right wing as she dragged her fingers through the blue-green mist. A wonderful ripple of power flowed up her arm. The women below applauded since the dome reacted to these movements by swirling in enormous patterns to reconfigure over and over again, an oversized kaleidoscope.

Parisa dove toward the ground. Yes, her skills had improved. The women gasped again but at the last moment, she fluffed her wings into parachute position, brought her feet up, and floated to earth. She touched her toes to the grass, bent her knees, drew her wings close to her body, then once more launched upward.

The whispering grew louder from deep within her mind. Yes, leave now. Make your escape.

Antony? she sent, hoping. Was her guardian warrior communicating with her? The whispers were so faint, she couldn’t tell.

Antony?

But nothing returned.

She drew close to the top of the tamarind tree and once more assumed the parachute position. This time she stared down at Rith. He had moved to the edge of the porch, his fists clenched at his sides, his eyes dark and glittering as he stared up at her. She wafted her wings slowly to maintain altitude.

She met his gaze.

Fly through the mist. Hurry. Escape now!

Then she knew and her heart plummeted. She wasn’t hearing Antony’s whispers at all. Rith was in her mind. These were his words, his commands, and he had but one purpose—he wanted her to make a run for it. If she did, she knew she would die.

She understood now that though Rith wanted her dead, he couldn’t kill her outright. He must be under orders to keep her alive, which meant he’d have to make her death look like an accident. His master, Commander Greaves, was the one truly in charge of her. Rith was just her keeper.

What better way to create an accident than to hurt her high in the air, beyond the mist, and send her into a deadly spin?

Yet what exactly had changed for Rith that he now wished for her death?

Her heart sank farther, a rock dropping into a pond. She turned slowly and wafted her wings, gliding down to the lawn below. She didn’t look at him or the women. Once she felt the grass beneath her feet, she closed her eyes and retracted her wings.

She ignored Rith as she made her way onto the porch then into the house. The female servants followed her.

Time for bed.

She showered and slid on a soft white cotton nightgown trimmed with lavender lace. Yes, everything of the finest quality had been provided for her since the first day of her captivity.

The women put her to bed because that was one of their duties, even though she was perfectly capable of pulling back the patchwork silk coverlet and sliding between the sheets all by herself. Ridiculous. But Rith insisted that they tuck her in, like a child, every night, which was of course more about control than kindness. Shortly after her arrival, she’d become aware that the women were as much captives as she was. To her knowledge, they never left the house, and they were forced to sleep on mats in the hall outside Parisa’s bedroom. It sickened her.

Once she was alone in her bed and she could hear the women rustling on their mats, she glanced at the clock on her bedside table. The hour was too early for her to voyeur Warrior Medichi. He would not come to her for at least half an hour, perhaps more.

Over the course of three months, he had developed a routine of hunting down rogue death vampires on Mortal Earth—but not until after dawn. He did this searching for information about Rith and following leads to places she might be held captive. But he couldn’t engage in these solo hunts until after a night of battling death vampires at one of the Mortal Earth Borderlands.

Her guardian warrior was utterly exhausted. The only contact she had with him occurred when he’d completed his final runs to Mortal Earth in pursuit of whatever leads he’d garnered the previous afternoon. He rarely slept, just a four-or five-hour block that crossed the noon hour. The afternoons prior to his night’s usual work were spent pursuing rumors of rogue vampire lairs on Mortal Earth.

She turned on her side and stared at the slim brass Buddha on the table near the door to her private bathroom. She sighed heavily. She opened her voyeur’s window, then thought of Antony. When she saw that he was in conference with Warrior Thorne, she closed the window quickly. She had set certain rules for herself in order to preserve her sanity. She didn’t voyeur anyone but Antony, and only when she could be with him in the privacy of his bedroom.

So she waited. Every fifteen minutes, she opened her window again, until she saw him at last showered, naked, and sitting on the side of his bed, waiting for her.

Antony had been her Guardian of Ascension, assigned to protect her during her rite of ascension to Second Earth. Not everyone who began a rite of ascension needed a guardian, but she had been a mortal-with-wings, something that had apparently happened only once before on Mortal Earth.

Though she had been voyeuring him the entire year preceding her rite and knew what he looked like, meeting him for the first time had been an extraordinary experience. She had been standing in the kitchen of his villa, chatting with Havily. He had appeared in the doorway, like a god, dripping wet from the shower, his muscled chest on display, and only a black towel around his hips.

The towel had been completely inadequate to disguise that he’d been in a full state of arousal. His scent, a beautiful, musky, sage fragrance, had already been heavy in the house, but at that moment clouds of sage had billowed toward her. As always, the scent had teased every tender place of her body to a ripeness she’d never experienced before. Through her voyeurs, she had been completely attracted to him, but standing in the same room her attraction had turned into an inferno of pure sexual need and desire.

Then he had done the unthinkable: He’d dropped the towel. Her gaze had wasted no time in sliding down his chest, down and down, until her eyes found what she needed. She remembered putting her fingers to her neck and stroking her vein. In her voyeurs she had seen him take women into the booths at the Blood and Bite, the club the Warriors used for R&R. She’d been just voyeur enough to stay and watch as well, which meant she’d seen him take blood.

She had wanted nothing more, standing there in that kitchen, than to take Antony somewhere private and give him what he needed.

Havily, bless her, had rescued the situation. Marcus, too, since he’d arrived and punched Antony in the jaw with a solid right hook. Parisa had wanted to go to him, but Havily had taken her outside until she could calm down and think things through.

She’d done a lot of thinking over the next few days, while death vampires were after her. She’d also seen the war up close, and it had frightened her. The whole experience, however, had led her to believe that despite her insane attraction to Antony, despite the tender feelings he aroused in her, she didn’t want to complete her ascension. She wanted to return to her Mortal Earth world, to her cloistered job as a librarian, to her solitary life, to peace and serenity.

She knew Antony would be sad, even angry that she’d decided against ascension, but her choice was made. She’d just been about to tell him when Rith intervened and changed everything.

She couldn’t help the tears that leaked from her eyes, slid over the bridge of her nose, joined with more tears, and splashed into the hair on the side of her head. At least she would be with him again soon, but she couldn’t even share with him that when it was morning for him it was evening for her. Surely he could have found her by now if he’d had that one scrap of information.

And right now, she wished more than anything that she could tell him of her present danger, ask for his advice, his help, anything.

Oh, God, would she even be alive by morning?

But no matter how hard she tried to create a telepathic link with Antony, she simply couldn’t. Only at the point of release, when she would touch herself and experience an orgasm, could she whisper his name in her mind and know that he heard.

She had tried countless ways to talk to Antony short of standing on her head. She had attempted to scream his name inside her head, scream it aloud and in her head at the same time, whisper his name, cry out his name when she was having an orgasm all by herself. Nothing worked. Only in this one special moment, when they connected through her voyeur’s window, could he hear her, and then only once. Everything else had failed.

She hated that she was so weak in this way. She hated that she was a prisoner. She hated that she still knew so little about ascended life and her powers. The only thing she had accomplished in three months was improving her flight.

Be wise and do not judge what creates love for others, since shoes often travel to unsuspecting feet.

—Collected Proverbs, Beatrice of Fourth

Chapter 2

Rith was not an original thinker. He never had been. For that reason he relied on the future streams to guide him, all those beautiful ribbons of light that prophesied forthcoming events.

He reclined on the dark blue velvet chaise-longue in his small private room adjacent to his office. He clasped his hands loosely over his stomach. He stared at the mahogany ceiling. His facial muscles felt strange and lax, almost burdened, and his throat was tight.

He’d just emerged from the future streams and was devastated all over again. The same prophecy from last night had returned even stronger just moments ago, while the shower had been running and Parisa had been going through her nightly ritual.

Parisa Lovejoy was to share a bond with Commander Greaves.

It couldn’t be true. It just couldn’t.

Parisa’s unspecified yet critical role in the war against the Commander had already been foretold numerous times. Rith had recommended her death to his master over and over, but for whatever incomprehensible reason, Greaves tended to play fast and loose with Seers’ prophecies. He couldn’t be entirely faulted for this, since the prophecies didn’t always come to pass. And Greaves preferred to work every angle of a prophecy before acting, and often succeeded in his rather daring ventures.