I threw my cloak aside and helped Audric settle Rupert on the leather sofa in his loft apartment across from mine. Blood had soaked through the bandages along his spine, through his clothes, and down his legs into his boots. Audric cut through his saturated shirt without ceremony. The half-breed was a competent battlefield medic when needed.

He pulled Rupert's pants and boots off, tossing them to the floor in a bloody heap. The bandage, a mound along the right side of Rupert's spine, was soggy with blood, half-clotted and gummy. He had lost a lot of blood.

As Audric worked, I turned up the gas fireplaces to heat the room. In the linen chest, I found old sheets and raced back to find Audric on his knees beside Rupert. My friend's breathing was fast and shallow, his skin tinged a pale ash. That couldn't be good. How had I stood at his back and talked for so long and not smelled it? I touched the visa hanging on my necklace and wondered at the way it steered my mind into channels of its own choosing. It seemed to have a lot of authority over me and I didn't like that at all. It gave me the willies.

"Do you have any healing amulets left?" Audric asked.

"No. I'll go fill some. Fast as I can." I raced for the door, but stopped at his next words.

"No time. Wake Ciana."

My mage attributes flared up and mage-sight snapped on, battle-ready at his tone, grim and spare as death. Ciana, Rupert's niece, had worked through the night putting injured humans under seraphic healing domes, using the pin gifted by her Raziel. She had fallen asleep at dawn, so exhausted she hadn't waked when I carried her up the stairs, undressed her, and put her to bed in the nook where she slept when she visited her uncle.

I turned on my heel and raced across the room, pulled back the purple-flowered drape that provided the girl with privacy. I stopped fast, rocking on my toes, barking my knee on the bed frame, taking in the scene in a single heartbeat of time.

Cissy lay spooned against Ciana, both girls curled under a down comforter and lavender flannel sheets. They were bathed in sparkles of soft pink light, sparkles that shifted and moved as if with currents of their own, centering in two places: Cissy's throat, where purple bruises and a single healing laceration were all that remained of the succubus' damage, and Ciana's chest, on the pin shaped like seraph wings.

There were additional sparkles on the Pre-Ap ring Ciana wore on her thumb. Marla had found the Stanhope ring in her jewelry box - imagine that - and Rupert had sized it down to fit his niece. The chunky bloodstone in its plain setting didn't look like an amulet, but it appeared to be involved in whatever the seraph pin was doing to heal Cissy. No. Not just the pin. Ciana was drawing on seraph power herself, directing the pin's energies into the wounded child in her arms. Not even a mage had that ability. And certainly not while asleep.

I remembered Lucas' words in the heat of battle. What are we? He had known in that moment what I fully understood now, looking at the little girl, frozen in shock for two more heartbeats. Whatever the Stanhopes were, they weren't fully human. I touched the edge of the sparkly glow and it glimmered against my fingertips, a painless twinkle.

"Thorn?" Audric said, his tension grating like a buzz saw.

But I couldn't hurry. Rupert might need this...whatever Ciana was doing in her sleep. In her sleep! I closed off the sight and extended my mind in a skim, breathing in, smelling-sensing-reading her. In a mind-skim, seraphs smell like living things and really good food and sex. Darkness smells of dying plants, mold, brimstone, and sulfur. Humans smell like their perfumes, the dyes in their clothes, with the underlying musky odor of males and the ripe scent or fresh-yeast bread fragrance of females. Half-breeds have their own odor and mages smell like, well, like mages. Ciana smelled like sunshine on spring grass - nothing like a human child. I pressed my hand through the sparkles and I stroked her hair. "Ciana? Baby? Wake up, darlin'." She blinked once, focusing up at me.

She smiled as if she knew what I was sensing. I wanted to go deeper, perform a concentrated search on her, but Rupert groaned and I kneeled at the bedside instead, stuffing my worry into a convenient niche in my mind. "Ciana, Rupert was injured in the fight. I know you're tired, but is there - "

"He's bleeding, isn't he?" she said, sitting up. "I smell it. Kinda salty and rank, like the venison steaks Daddy cooked last week. He soaked them in milk." She made a face and her blue eyes met mine, innocent and curious.

Contrary to mystery books and television, most humans can't smell blood unless it's decaying. There's no coppery scent, no salty scent, there's zilch to the typical human nose. I struggled to keep my reaction off my face and my voice calm. "Yes. He's hurt. I used a healing amulet on him and it was able to repair most of the nerve and muscle damage, but I ran out before we could close the wound. Zeddy stitched it up, but it reopened and he didn't tell us. He's in bad shape."

Ciana sighed and said, "Men." Her tone was so world-weary I actually laughed. She sounded like she was eight going on thirty-three. She sounded like her mother, Marla.

"Yeah. Men," I echoed. My stepdaughter was growing up.

She touched the seraph-wing pin and the healing glow seemed to withdraw, coalescing into a pinpoint of bright light beneath her fingers. She eased out from the covers, tucking them around Cissy to keep the other girl warm.

On sock-covered feet, the flounce of her nightgown dragging the floor, she crossed the intervening space and crawled up on the leather couch beside her uncle. His shirt was off, the wound exposed, and I got a quick look at it before Audric covered it with a clean pad and applied pressure, sopping up blood.

It was a foot-long gaping wound with muscles, blood vessels, and ribs visible in the ragged, broken flesh. The ruptured stitches looked like black spider legs splaying to either side. His skin was a dangerous gray, the edges of the wound white with blood loss. I would have shielded any other child from the sight, but Ciana was inured to such injuries. She had helped me following two previous raids on the town, assisting to heal the wounded, calling on domes of healing stored in the pin, seraphic incantations I had no idea how to use. When I asked her how she knew what to do, she had shrugged and claimed not to know. It was a heck of a burden for an eight-year-old and I felt more than a moment of discomfort at asking her. But I kept asking.

Ciana touched her pin with one hand and Rupert's back with the other. Her uncle spasmed as if struck with an electrical jolt. When he sucked in a breath, it sounded wet and somehow sticky. She pushed the bandage away and bent over the wound, tilting her head first to one side, then the other. From the hand holding the pin, pink and blue sparkles flowed, pinpoints of glittery light that I could see with human vision. Mage-sight clicked on with an almost audible snap, and the sparkles became strings of light flowing into Rupert. But they came from Ciana's fingers, not from the pin, which was really weird. And scary.

"Does that hurt?" I asked her. "I mean, does it hurt you?"

"A little." She shrugged. "I get tired after. The domes are easier, but it's all out of those."

Healing domes were seraph energy constructs shaped like upside-down bowls, a type of curative conjure that had been permanently stored in the pin. She had figured out how to use them all on her own. Or maybe like my visa, the pin had suggested the domes, a kind of interactive relationship. I wasn't sure I liked Ciana being tied to an artifact of seraphic origins, but that hadn't stopped me from encouraging her to use it to help the town's injured. And I wasn't sure where the energy that powered the pin's conjures came from, but I was guessing it came from the cosmos itself. A lot of guessing on my part. And guessing could mean throwing Ciana to the wolves. I was turning into a wicked stepmother, something from a fairytale.

"Bad stepmama," Ciana said with a stifled giggle.

I felt myself go cold. She had heard my thoughts.

Ciana looked up at me, the gap where she had recently lost a baby tooth a thin black hole in her smile. "It's okay, Thorn. It won't hurt me. And I can only hear you sometimes. I tried to hear you in the fight, and you were just a buzz in my ears. No words."

"What does she mean?" Audric asked. "This one looks deep." He pointed to a place on Rupert's back where the muscle was twisted, wrapped around a blood vessel.

Ciana put her fingers directly on the spot and pressed. The glittery pink and blue strands of light merged into a tight, shining braid and poured into the ruptured flesh. Rupert sighed as his pain began to ease. She said, "When I'm using the pin, I can hear Thorn's thoughts. And I'm out of domes because the pin has to regen - regena - What's the word? Make more?"

"Regenerate," I said. "It has to regenerate itself, and draw more power."

"Yep. From the Most High. He gives Raziel the power to make it work." She looked up at me under tousled dark brown hair. "He likes you."

"Who?" I asked. Raziel?

"The Most High."

Before I could guard my thoughts Ciana giggled. "That's a bad word. Shame on you, Thorn." Her grin faded. "It's okay. Really. I wasn't human in the first place. None of us are."

Mage-sight was already open, so I gripped the couch and opened a mind-skim, drawing in air and sensation through my nose and into my mind, blending the senses into one scan. Under it, Ciana was...changed. She no longer coursed with human energies; instead, her body coruscated with blue light that raced just under her skin. Her aura was pink, like the domes she could open, but whispering with the blue and pink sparkles that came from her fingers. Her eyes were bright blue flames.

And beneath her fingers, Rupert was changing too. Still human, in that his body was rich with life and with what I had come to associate with normal human energy patterns, normal human chi, but through his blood vessels coursed that same blue light. Seraphic light. The energy of the holy ones.

The world tilted, and nausea rose in the back of my throat as the vertigo that came with blending scans gripped me. I stepped back and went down, sitting hard on the wood floor and catching myself with both hands. I had looked at Lucas' aura, not long after he ate food provided by the cherub Amethyst, manna or something close to it, while they were both imprisoned by Forcas in the Trine. Lucas, Ciana, and now Rupert had all been exposed to seraphic influences. And all three were changing, which humans simply did not do. Ciana said they weren't entirely human, never had been. So what the heck were they? Not mage. Not half-breeds. Not seraphs, though Ciana could manipulate seraphic energies. And talk to someone she thought was the Most High God. Psychosis? Or spiritual reality?

Audric looked at me over the back of the couch, his mouth in a grim line and questions in his glance that he wouldn't ask aloud in front of Ciana. "I don't know," I said to the unasked questions. I don't know what the Stanhopes are.

In response, the big man bent nearly double and gripped my wrist. With an effortless tug, he pulled me to my feet and deposited me in a chair. His look warned me to guard my thoughts, and I quickly blanked my mind, envisioning a candle flame, unwavering in the night, the first meditation technique taught to all mage children. I let the first thing that came into my mind fill me, latched on to the first litany taught mage children. Stone and fire, water and air, blood and kin prevail. Wings and shield, dagger and sword, blood and kin prevail.

Rupert's eyes opened and he looked at me. "Cool," he croaked. "I like that."

Somehow, I was able to keep my reaction to myself, focusing hard on the verse with laserlike precision. Rupert stretched his neck and found Audric. "Where's Death of Dragonets? I need it."

His face impassive, Audric went to a low chest and brought back the tooled leather sheath and sword, the gift he'd had made especially for Rupert to celebrate the day when he reached master status in savage-blade. My best boy-pal had been the recipient of a battlefield promotion, and now he had named his sword. Men and their toys. I shook my head, amused.

"Yeah. We're pretty weird that way," Rupert said, reading my body language, taking hold of the sword hilt. Shaken, I stood and left the apartment, closing the door on the healing, the sight of Rupert holding a master's sword, of Ciana bent over his spine, manipulating the energies of the High Host, energies no mage could use, and the image of Audric watching them both, his face closed but his body tense with some strange and awful kind of mourning. Returning to my loft, I closed the door and leaned against it, feeling tears burn their way down my cheeks. In the distance, the lynx howled, lost and lonely and full of despair.

I knew I was dreaming, the vision slipping through my mind like the mist slips across the ground in fall, just before the first snow. I was fighting, drenched in sweat, shattered by fear, struggling into wakefulness. Afraid. Mortally afraid I was going to die. Without a soul, I would simply cease to exist. Death would be forever.

With a final thrust of will, I sat up, ripping myself from the nightmare with a massive effort of will. I was sitting in my bed, dull light pouring in through the windows, shadowing everything in shades of gray, making the familiar seem foreign and malevolent. I gasped, filling my air-starved lungs, sucking breath after breath. My limbs quivered with the shock of battle interrupted. It was a dream. Only a dream.

I was left with one image. A ring of seraphs hovering, wings spread, beating the air, creating a terrible wind. Swords drawn, their eyes blazed yellow-orange-red, not the clear blue light of the High Host, servants of Light. Raziel - my seraph - and Cheriour, an Angel of Punishment, Zadkiel and his mate Amethyst. Three more with black wings. They were attacking me. Bell-toned words of the seraphic Host ran through my mind, fading even as I remembered them. A mage, one of the foretold ones...She is near.

Definitely not a good omen. Icy, breathing hard, I lay back and pulled the covers over me, staring into the loft, hearing only the soft hiss of the gas-log flames in the fireplaces and the ticking of the black pig clock in the kitchen, seeing the furniture and the slow-turning fans overhead, and the red light of the answering machine. Feeling only the frigid sheets. I was as cold as if I hadn't been in the bed for hours. As if I'd slept naked instead of wearing long johns.

Trying to get warm, I snuggled deeper and breathed, calming my racing heart.

I'd had the dream before. I understood the warning. I was an omega mage. I could command seraphs in battle and the winged warriors would obey. But if I took a single misstep, they would destroy me. They wanted to destroy me. And I had no idea why they hadn't killed me already.

I woke hours later, the sun still shining, my loft banded with dull light from the west-facing windows. My face was creased into the folds of the pillows and my eyes felt gritty. I touched them, and found the lashes full of sleep-sand. Sand, I assured myself. Not dried tears. No way. Stretching between the sheets, I pulled on aching joints and rolled out of bed. Stiff, I turned up the gas-log flames before dressing in jeans and a fuzzy sweater over the long johns. Boots completed the attire, and I glamoured my skin to look fresher than I felt, looping my amulet necklace around my neck, outside my clothes. Once I would have hidden it, but no more.

I was eating a bowl of oatmeal with a sprinkle of honey-sugar crystals and fresh milk when I heard footsteps on the stairs. The door opened. I could have stopped him. I could have raced and locked the door. I could have pulled one of the weapons that I'd dumped on the kitchen table for cleaning and oiling and cut his throat as he entered. I hadn't. Still, he shouldn't have presumed and walked in without knocking. I welcomed the spurt of fury that warmed my blood. I set down my spoon. "Next time you want to talk to me, knock," I said.

"I don't have to knock. I supersede you in terms of authority, age, diplomatic rank, and mage-power." Cheran closed the door and leaned a shoulder negligently against the jamb. He was wearing jeans and a silk shirt under a corduroy vest and a new down-filled jacket. He would have looked the height of mountain fashion had the silk shirt not been ruffled and edged with lace. "If I want this apartment, I just have to snap my fingers and the elders will deed it to me. They've already said as much."

I settled back in my chair and the grin that crossed my face showed teeth. Even through the Apache Tear, I felt Cheran flinch. "You've been talking to the Culpeppers, the kirk elder and his fashion-challenged son."

"The younger man does need the talents of a good designer," Cheran agreed with a faint shudder. "What did you do to make them hate you so much?"

"I cost them a lot of money."

"Bad form, that. It could get you killed."

"Bad form to try and intimidate me."

"Implying that such attempts could get me killed? You aren't swordswoman enough to best me."

I actually laughed at that one, my tone caustic, and he was unable to mask his annoyance. It seemed I pushed Cheran Jones' buttons almost as much as he pushed mine. "If you want the place, go ahead and try to take it. I'll tie you up in so much red tape you'll be sticky for years. Meanwhile, you'll still be in a boardinghouse, sharing the bathroom with two or three humans, trying to find ways to stay warm. I give you one full winter here before you give up and head back to the Gulf and warmer temps. One full winter, ten months of snow and ice. Spent in a boardinghouse eating stew and listening to Miz Essie chatter."

"Ten months?" Cheran actually blanched.

It made me feel really good. I felt the meanness spread through me. "Yeah. And meanwhile you'll be trying to figure out how to explain to the townsfolk that while they were battling Darkness in the streets, you were glamoured and hiding. A coward." His hands clenched and I let the nasty grin spread over my face. "Because someone, somewhere, will eventually remember that you were nowhere in sight while humans died. You could have called for seraphic intervention on your visa - something I don't know how to do - and you didn't. You could have fought alongside humans and you didn't. You could have waged a war of shields, protecting them, but you didn't. And someone somewhere will call you on it. And name you coward."

Cheran forced his hands open as if he knew he was giving too much away. "I fought. You saw my knives hit that thing. I killed spawn, dozens of them, with conjures."

"But no one saw you, did they? And I have no intention of telling them."

"You fight dirty," he said, moving toward me across the loft.

"You fight from cover, saving your own skin."

"I'm not a battle mage."

"No. You're something creepier, I just don't know what, yet. What do you want, Cheran? Other than to waste my time with empty threats. I was trying to eat."

"I want to know what you did when you looked at me in the shop," he said. He reached the table, pulled out a chair, and sat, uninvited. "When you were doing a mind-skim and then it changed."

"You never saw that before?" When he shook his head, I asked, "What did it look like? In mage-sight?"

"Hot. Gold. The way liquid gold looks when you've melted down twenty-four-carat casting grains. It seemed to pour all over you, like you had bathed in it and it was alive." His face was lit with excitement and beneath the animation was something that looked colder and darker, avarice and greed.

Suddenly I knew it wouldn't be smart to tell him. Not smart at all. I had been hungry when I sat down. Now I felt slightly sick. I pushed the bowl of oatmeal away. "You know that I was judged by Cheriour, the Angel of Punishment?" Cheran nodded. "He did something to me. I don't know what." It wasn't a lie. It just wasn't the answer to his question.

Cheran's face fell. "You can't teach me?"

"Nope." Well, I could, but I wouldn't. I had learned some things about him in the short time I had known him. He was a coward, he was secretive, and he was more than the simple metal mage he claimed. His offer to put new edges on our blades had identified him as a steel mage. The gold comment had also given him away. Most metal mages have an affinity for one particular type of metal, yet Cheran Jones seemed to be both a steel mage and a gold mage. I'd have to research how unusual the affinity for both steel and gold was. "Since we're trading information, your turn again," I said. "Why didn't you call for seraphic assistance on your visa?"

"I was told to teach you what you needed to function as a fully licensed mage and to watch you fight, if the opportunity presented itself."

I felt cold settle in my bones and my fingers dropped to touch the placemat. The texture was coarse and tough and I stroked it once as if it might purr and comfort me. "You let people get wounded, you let them die, so you could watch me fight?"

Cheran made a little hand-flap motion to show its unimportance. "They're only humans. It was imperative that I learn what you are and report back to Enclave."

They're only humans. I kept my breathing steady, schooling my face to emptiness, not letting him see how I reacted to his statement. How much I wanted to kill him in that moment. Cheran didn't seem to notice. "And now that you've seen me fight?" I asked softly.

"You have a lovely grasp of the basics, and if you had received proper training you would likely be a first-rate battle mage by now. But you forget to draw on your amulets and stored conjures during fighting and rely too much on your blades. If you ever came face-to-face with a well-trained mage in combat, you'd lose, because you would depend on steel."

I didn't like it that he was so perceptive - and that I was so poorly trained. Audric had taken over my instruction in the martial arts, but I had a decade of training to catch up on and not enough time to devote to it. Unlike mages in Enclaves, who lived off the trade of mage artifacts and services, I had to work for a living in the human world. And Audric, who had no ability to twist and use creation energies, couldn't help me with that part of fighting. I was indeed depending on blades because that was what Audric depended on. Drat. Cheran was right.

"But your biggest flaw in combat is that you care too much what happens to humans and don't seem willing to use them as they're intended to be used in battle."

"Like pawns," I said, still soft, remembering Enclave lessons learned so long ago. Lessons where mages were the generals and humans the troops. And humans died.

"Correct. Humans are disposable. You've lived among them so long you've forgotten. And, in addition to all that, you haven't reported back to Enclave about the child. Big mistake."

Ciana. He meant Ciana. "What about her?"

"She has a seraph artifact. The brooch has to be turned over to the proper authorities once we're able to leave this misbegotten town. And she summoned Minor Flames. To keep her from falling into the hands of Darkness, she has to be taken into protective custody and studied."

Fear lifted the small hairs across my flesh. My breathing sped up as the terror morphed into fury. Over my dead body. Over my dead, bled-out, chopped-up, desiccated, rotting body. And yours. I didn't say it, though my hands were tightening for swords that weren't there. I'd have known this was coming if I had pulverized the Apache Tear. And I could have offered him some tea with rat poison in it.

Some small part of me shuddered at the images in my mind, violent and final, Cheran in a bloody heap or dying in a toxin-induced seizure. On some level I was appalled at myself. On another, it wasn't nearly enough. I'd kill Cheran in cold blood before I let him touch my stepchild.

Had so few days of battle, of pitched combat, changed me so much? This was the second time in as many weeks that I had been ready to kill, to murder. Was I truly willing to commit a capital crime to save someone I loved? Yeah. Hell, yeah. But I shoved those thoughts down deep inside where I didn't have to look at them. "It's my right to tell Enclave. Not yours," I stated, my voice sounding remarkably calm despite the fact that my blood was boiling. Before he could pin me down I said, "I'll handle it in the next twenty-four hours." He had to give me that. And he did, with a regal nod of his head. The fiend.

P/S: Copyright -->www_novelfreereadonline_Com

***