“Never.” Samuel’s voice sounded rougher than usual. His power had that effect.

He turned, ready to fold someplace else, away from the battle site in order to resume his natural state, but back-up had finally arrived.

Luken, the leader of the Warriors of the Blood, stood beside Jean-Pierre and both men glared at him.

“I’m not doing this,” Samuel said, meeting Luken’s gaze dead on. “You can’t have this ability for your Warrior of the Blood shit.” Samuel had been a Militia Warrior, a Thunder God Warrior, almost from the day of his ascension to Second Earth in 1908. He didn’t want to leave behind the men who had held his loyalty all these decades. Besides, he couldn’t always control his dark power and more than anything he feared hurting or killing someone, other than the enemy, by using it as a weapon on a regular basis.

“You may not get a say in this,” Luken said. Built like a tank, he led the What-Bees, as the Warriors of the Blood were known among the Militia Warriors.

He had blue eyes and long blond hair, extra-long like all the What-Bees, and caught back in the required clasp called the cadroen. Women followed him around the Blood and Bite, taking care of his needs with little more than a snap of his fingers.

Samuel opened his mouth to explain, but Jean-Pierre, usually good-natured, stepped toward him and got right in his face. “You goddamned motherfucker!” The words sounded so strange spoken in his French accent. “All these months that I have worked with the Militia Warriors, seeking to build up those with exceptional power, but you never said a word to me or anyone else. I suppose not even to Duncan, who is your friend and who helped you escape.”

“Don’t blame Duncan. He knew, but he understood my reasons.”

“Fuck those reasons. Merde, how many times did I speak to your section and ask if any warrior had an emerging power that he wanted brought forward, developed? And this is what you have had all the time? Were you laughing at me, warrior?”

“No. Fuck, no.” Samuel took a step back, horrified that Jean-Pierre would accuse him of such a thing.

“I am pissed past speaking the words!” Jean-Pierre’s nostrils flared.

“How could you have held back this tremendous power that I have just witnessed, so dark and so beautiful, like a flow of smoke and mist around you? Or do you not understand that even though Greaves is gone, we still have a terrible war threatening our entire world?” He grunted his exasperation and without waiting for a response, he lifted his right arm and vanished.

Samuel turned to meet Luken’s gaze, wanting to explain, but the usually affable warrior shook his head, and muttered, “You’ll be hearing from us.” He also lifted his arm, the signal for a fold, and vanished.

Samuel stood very still, distressed that he hadn’t been given a chance to explain. The warriors viewed him as having let down the war effort, but he knew what he risked each time he released the dark power .

And how the hell could Jean-Pierre have described it as beautiful?

As his dark power began to recede, and the attending smoky mist that came out of his body, evaporated, Samuel pivoted to glare at Santiago. He waited for the warrior to say something, and so he did.

“Incoming.” The air turned arctic and Samuel shifted his gaze to the night sky as another eight more death vampires descended out of the inter-dimensional trough, that nether-space between dimensions, sent by a Second Earth general of vast power.

“Hermano, ” Santiago said. “You probably should summon that bad-shit of yours again because I have one slight problemo.” He pivoted to show Samuel the deep skin burn he had along the back of his left calf. The warriors, Militia or otherwise, called any cut a skin burn, unless it incapacitated movement. Blood still seeped from Santiago’s wound, trickling down his calf and into his leather battle sandal.

Samuel reached down deep and once more let the darkness come. As the bastards landed in the dirt, all fresh and ready to go, he added, “Bring it, assholes.” Santiago offered him a smile, full of white teeth. He looked back at the first beautiful death vampire and jerked a thumb in Samuel’s direction. “What mi hermano said.”

Vela Stillwell sat straight up in bed and planted a palm between sweat- slickened breasts.

A nightmare that wasn’t a nightmare.

She set a stream of curses rippling the air and leaving behind tiny little fireworks—one of her more exalted powers that she kept hidden. Normally, the sparkling lights made her smile, but right now she was pissed as hell.

She didn’t want this, more power than she’d ever asked to have and a connection to another Militia Warrior.

She didn’t know the man in her dreams, but he had a darkness about him that both frightened her and left her feeling weak in a womanish way, like she wanted to be with him, wanted to be under him.

The vision, or whatever it was, had taken place in the desert and the warrior had been battling out at the Superstitions.

He’d helped out a Warrior of the Blood, the super-sexy Santiago that had half the women at HQ racing to the workout center whenever it was known he would be running sword drills with the Thunder God Warriors.

Vela avoided the workout center.

The last thing she wanted was to hook up with another warrior. She’d loved and lost a man of the sword and she couldn’t go through it again. So, when the women at lunch got to talking about who looked particularly hot in a battle kilt these days, she’d usually make an excuse and head back to her desk early, on the opposite side of the building, where she worked crunching numbers, paying invoices, and reviewing purchase orders.

She’d been widowed five years now, but it still felt like yesterday since Jeff was killed in the line of duty, while battling death vampires at the Awatukee Borderland.

Waking up, therefore, with weird dreams about a warrior she didn’t know, but who appealed to her in an erotic, primal way, chapped her hide especially since today would be her last day at HQ.

She’d finally decided to leave the Apache Junction Two compound so she wouldn’t have to be around the whole Militia Warrior camp. She wanted a fresh start and next week she’d take up her new job as a counselor at the rehab center where she’d be working with Fiona, Warrior Jean-Pierre’s mated breh, helping to rehabilitate former blood slaves.

She checked her bedroom clock. It was already half past five. She got up and worked out for an hour, something she’d done since Jeff died. The exertion kept her sane.

She dressed in her usual dark slacks, light blue silk blouse, and low heels. She let her unruly, and very thick, long blond hair flow free, ignoring all the errant curls, letting the uncontrolled mass be a sign of the change to come, that after today she’d begin a new, less restricted life.

She folded to the HQ landing platforms, on time as usual, and went to work, sitting in her office and processing purchase orders for all kinds of weaponry, uniforms, and electronic equipment. Over the past several weeks, the latter had become an almost constant stream of acquisitions for Warrior Thorne, the Supreme High Commander of the Allied Ascender Forces. He’d set up a working HQ, a Command Center, at Madame Endelle’s palace during the time preceding the battle at White Lake that saw Greaves’s defeat, and he’d continued building up his operations since.

Now, apparently, he had a new set of problems.

Vela always got a headache thinking about the turn in the war. What had begun as a great victory and celebrated throughout the world as a resounding defeat had already taken on the shape of a nightmare. Three of Greaves’s generals, as a contingency plan to his failure to win his mano-a-mano battle against Madame Endelle, had essentially taken their master’s army, hiding over three-hundred- thousand troops each, which added up to almost a million warriors, and had subsequently begun launching guerilla-like attacks against Thorne’s AAF.

The body count among the Thunder God Warriors had hit numbers that forced her to avoid certain websites and newsfeeds.

She couldn’t get away from all of this chaos soon enough.

She glanced at her computer and saw that it was now ten-after-five. She was officially done and could say adios to HQ forever.

Yes, a new life awaited her and she chomped at the bit to get started.

Of course, she only had three purchase orders left to process, and since she couldn’t stand the thought of leaving the task undone, she kept working. What was twenty more minutes?

But as she prepared to print-out a hard copy of a particularly troublesome document, she heard a familiar group- giggling sound and she smiled.

Her time was up.

“Shut it down, Ascender Vela. You no longer work here.” She looked up and saw her three closest friends, looking young and chic, grouped in her doorway. She loved her world that at least two of her friends were over a hundred but didn’t look a day past thirty. Sweet.

As she did a double-take, she realized each wore a silly grin.

Suspicion set in.

“All right, what’s going on?” she called out. She closed the last file and signed off. Despite that her friends were clearly up to something, a deep sigh of relief left her. Her tour of duty at Militia Warrior HQ was officially over.

She stood up and grabbed her purse.

“Well, we’re definitely taking you out for drinks,” Donna said. “But first, have we got a surprise for you.”

“Really?” She grinned. “I hope it involves a cake with that really bad-for- you, sugary-white frosting, because I’m in.” When she reached the door, Bev and Chris flanked her left side, and Donna, who shared HQ grid-work with Bev, took her right.

“This has nothing to do with that kind o f cake,” Donna said. “But it is cake, if you get my drift.”

“As in beefcake,” Chris drawled.

Vela stalled out and couldn’t make her feet move. “Please don’t tell me we’re going to the workout center.” Anything but that.

“Oh, yes we are,” Bev said. “We’ve heard it on the grapevine that someone special is being brought in, a warrior we’ve been hearing rumors about for the past several months but have never seen.