He didn’t even lift his arm. He just vanished.
Jean-Pierre glanced at Endelle. She stared into the empty space where Thorne had been. For just a moment, her face began to collapse, the muscles of her cheeks sagging, her lips drooping. Then she gave herself a shake and turned back to Fiona. “I want you working with Jean-Pierre this afternoon. Of all the warriors, he seems to have an ability to assess the powers of others and to draw them out. I’ve often wished he had the Third Earth facilitation power, but I’ve never known a Second ascender who possessed that shit. Whatever.
“As for Alison, she’s been whining about not spending enough time with Helena so I only get her services for about four hours in the afternoon.”
Fiona’s lips quirked. “Hey. I thought you said there’s no whining in ascension. Forgive me, Your Supremeness, but that sounded damn close to a whine.”
Jean-Pierre felt certain he needed to give Fiona a hint about not poking at rattlesnakes or scorpions, but for some reason Endelle laughed. “All right, smart-ass, get the hell out of here and take your boyfriend with you.”
Jean-Pierre did not need to be invited a second time. He crossed the room quickly to Fiona and slid his left arm around her waist. “Ready, chérie?”
She smiled and nodded. He lifted his arm and felt the smooth, swishing glide through nether-space, his heart warm as he held Fiona next to him. For this moment, she was here, she was with him, and she was safe.
* * *
Fiona strove to settle her temper down. Her boyfriend had been working her channeling powers for the past two hours, but now he wanted to attempt something new, something he was certain she could do. But she wasn’t having it, not one little bit.
“Even if I could let a possession occur,” she cried. “The hell I will.”
Jean-Pierre wanted her to see if together they could take her obsidian flame abilities to the next level, one that involved possession, in which he would slide the metaphysical part of his being over hers, possess her, and make use of her powers in concert with his.
No way in hell and all this session had done was taken her temper down to a cold hard place. Her boyfriend, it seemed, took any kind of training seriously, and right now he was really pissing her off. “I won’t do it. I won’t.”
“Having ascended in 1793, I am still young by ascended terms,” he said, his chin low, his eyes glittering in the dim light of the room. “But this I can tell you: Each power you have must be pushed to its limits, its farthest boundaries. This is one of the lessons of our world. To hold back in this way can allow the enemy an advantage, a terrible advantage.”
She pinched her lips together. “I don’t see how.”
“Because the more powerful you are, the more the enemy will want you dead. If your powers are not fully expressed, then do you not see how you are left exposed like a weak flank in an offensive? That is where the enemy will attack, hurting you where you are at your most vulnerable.”
Fiona turned away from him and paced in front of the closed blinds. Seriffe had given them the same room as before, but the door was closed and she was alone with Jean-Pierre. At first, she thought it might be difficult given the I-can’t-keep-my-hands-off-you nature of the breh-hedden, but almost from the beginning Jean-Pierre had browbeaten her with her need to engage more fully with obsidian flame.
What he said sort of made sense. “This is just all so new to me. The day I left the hospital, I was floating because I thought now I could have a life, you know, maybe work as a waitress, something simple, basic, straightforward. Start over.” She chuckled, “You know, fly under the radar.” So much irony since she couldn’t even mount her wings. Whatever. “Now I’m something that I can’t really begin to comprehend, obsidian flame, and you’re here telling me I have to allow a kind of possession in order to truly express my powers.
“Jean-Pierre, the first time we made love you had to enthrall me because I couldn’t bear the weight of you on me. And these last two times, well, first I rode you, then this last time you took me from behind. I know, I know, that if we tried to do it the regular way”—she looked up at him and gestured first to his chest, then to hers—“I’d freak out again.”
Of course bringing up sex was a mistake, because a heavy roll of his delicious coffee scent poured over her. “Would you stop that?”
“Désolé, chérie. Though I understand the reason behind the reference, the images caught me by surprise.”
“But you know what I mean, right?”
“Yes, of course.”
She moved to sit down in the chair she’d used the afternoon before when she had worked with Alison. She bent over and shaded her eyes with her hands. This was too much. All too much, but it had been from the first anyway, from having been taken from the streets of Boston in 1886, used as a blood slave, rescued by one of the hunkiest men she had ever seen, until right now with her vampire breh standing in the center of the room, waiting for her to calm down so that they could continue the training. All too much.
Absently, she fingered the gold locket that she wore around her neck, trying to find an anchor. Her husband had warned her repeatedly not to go shopping by herself, that a woman on the streets alone would always invite danger. And so it had, but not in a way that Terence could have ever predicted. Was there a lesson here for her, then? And just how right was Jean-Pierre?
The trouble was, she wasn’t sure she could do it period. Not just because she resisted the idea; she also thought it possible she would really struggle to learn the skill in the first place.
She looked up at him. He waited so patiently, a slight furrow on his brow, solemn. He was a good teacher; he had skills, because here she was ready to do what she had pretty much vowed never to do. “All right, Obi-Wan, let’s do this thing.”
Then he smiled, all those big beautiful teeth.
“You know, you could have been a model or something.”
He chuckled. “I think I would rather make war.”
At that she laughed but his expression grew serious. “You are so beautiful, Fiona. Sometimes looking at you makes my heart ache.”
She rose to her feet and her breathing seemed to stall in her chest. He always gave her the most wonderful compliments because he tied them to his heart. Did he know he did that?
He closed his eyes and his nostrils flared. “I wish you could smell what it is that I smell. There is nothing like a bakery first thing in the morning when the aroma of all that goodness fills the dawn air. That is what I smell when you are near me like this. All that goodness.” He opened his eyes. “And that is who you are, Fiona. When I see you with your daughter, Carolyn, and her children, I think, Oui, all that goodness.”