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in on Greaves’s ass, but at that moment Thorne cut in. He was her second-in-command and shared a telepathic link with her, the only vampire on Second Earth to do so.
    Come home now, his gravel voice rippled through her head.
    She cursed the disruption. Once begun, she didn’t like to be distracted from her darkening duties. However, Thorne never intruded unless there was some kind of fucking crisis at home. So, yeah … shit.
    She pulled away from India and began the long slide through the darkening all the way back to her meditation chamber. Once she arrived, she relaxed her mind, letting it pull down deep until all she saw was a well of darkness. Step by step she moved out of nether-space and back into her primary self. She took deep breaths.
    After a minute, she opened her eyes. Despite the desperate nature of Thorne’s call, she smiled. For just this moment, during this small speck of time she had to herself, she looked up at the ceiling of her private retreat deep within her palace on the side of the McDowell Mountains. She was safe here. Even when Greaves and his death vampires had attacked four months ago, they had been unable to penetrate the layers of shields that kept her in complete safety in her womb-like meditation space.
    Two dozen four-inch candles, all in white, sat at precise intervals on matching shelves all around the room. The shelves were set four feet above the floor and lit the small rotunda in a warm glow. Burgundy velvet drapes hung at intervals between the shelves, ceiling-to-floor, for no other purpose than to soften and color her space.
    The meditations that kept her moving at light speed through nether-space always left her logy for a minute or two afterward, her mind too loose to function at top level. But Thorne needed her and she needed to get her ass moving.
    She slid her legs over the side of the chaise longue. She leaned forward and took deep breaths. Dammit, she was too dizzy to move. She’d have to wait a few minutes. She had a lot of power, but even she had limits.
    *   *   *
     
    Thorne stood in Luken’s treatment room at the emergency clinic shaking his head back and forth. Havily was next to him but neither of them spoke, which was a good thing. As the leader of the Warriors of the Blood, the man in charge, the man who was supposed to have all the answers, he was shocked and having trouble concentrating. He’d been Endelle’s second-in-command for too many centuries to count. To say he was feeling it was to say red was red. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept two hours straight and right now he wanted his Ketel One neat and to-the-fucking-rim.
    Jesus H. Christ.
    What a big fucking nightmare. Incendiary bombs? At the Superstition Borderland? On Mortal Earth?
    How was he supposed to deal with that? And he really didn’t want to think about what would have happened if Havily hadn’t called Central to warn him about Luken, which begged another big fucking mysterious question.
    “I just don’t understand, Hav,” he said. “How did you know he’d been hurt?”
    Luken was suspended in the air, facedown, in a contraption that looked like it had come from a circus. There was rhyme to the reason, however. The healers surrounded his back and were working on his wing-locks. Christ, what a mess.
    Havily pressed her fingers to her lips, and her lovely light green eyes flooded with tears. She stared at the hospital bed across the room. “I guess I had some kind of vision.” Her voice trembled, new leaves shaking in a breeze. “I somehow found myself sitting in the desert looking up at him. I saw flames in the dark night sky and his wings on fire.” She rasped a breath. “Oh, God.”
    Thorne put his arm around her and pulled her hard against him. She looked so vulnerable in her yellow T-shirt and rumpled red hair. Her jeans were dirty from having sat on the ground beside Luken. She was young by Second Earth standards, only a hundred years old. She certainly