She screamed and the lightning kept striking, leaping, flying.

Jean-Pierre shouted into the room as he came, as he spent himself inside her, his cock jerking. As he came, another orgasm sped through her, flying up and up and bringing another scream out of her throat.

He kissed the back of her neck, his body swaying into her, his body still connected, her mind still richly enshrined within his.

The oneness once more brought tears flowing down her cheeks.

“Jean-Pierre,” she said, her voice hoarse.

“Ma chérie,” he whispered over her neck, against her ear, into her hair. “Ma chérie. Ma chérie.”

The feathers of his wings swept over her arms.

The tears continued.

She felt very strange, not quite in her own body. She felt wonderful. She wanted to cry out, to spin in circles, to laugh, to fly.

But as his body stilled, she grew quiet as well.

“Do you feel that?” he asked.

She nodded. “Yes. I think so.”

She could feel something at a great distance, hovering, waiting. Finally, it came like a great wind, blowing hard and forceful.

Jean-Pierre, still connected to her, leaned over her, his arms around her.

The wind swept over them both.

She felt the click in the center of her chest. “Do you feel that? A click?”

“Yes, near my heart.”

“Yes.”

“Fiona, your wing-locks.”

She felt it now, the swelling of her back, the weeping of her wing-locks, nothing new and yet everything was new. She had crossed some great barrier. She felt it now as though for so long she had been an island separated from a thriving mainland. Now there was a bridge and she could cross it at will.

Her back no longer itched.

Instead she felt the power within, a new sureness of foot, and an understanding of who she was, who she was meant to be, within herself and in her life.

“I think I can mount my wings,” she said.

“Then do it, right now. Nothing would be more beautiful to me.”

He started to withdraw from her but she reached back and held his hips. “No. I want to do it for the first time like this, with you inside me. Can you do that?”

She felt him shudder and she realized he was still very much erect. Jean-Pierre, I can feel you … very firm.

It is your blood.

Her turn to shiver as he very slowly pushed inside, withdrew, then pushed, a new steady rhythm.

Now release your wings.

With his blood like fire in her veins, with her mind still sunk within his, with his body still connected low and stroking her, she closed her eyes and thought the beautiful thought. Wings.

He gave a cry. “Your wings are coming. I can feel it from inside you.”

And just like that, her wings began to move from within her body, through the wing-locks, flying at tremendous speed so that before she had opened her eyes, the wings were just there, held in place by the attending mesh superstructure.

“Fiona, they are so beautiful! You are so beautiful. But I cannot help myself.”

She knew what he meant and because the emergence of her wings had been, just as he had said, close to a sexual experience, she cried out, “Do it!”

As he held her hips, he pumped her from behind, harder and faster. Before a handful of seconds had passed, she arched her neck and screamed as the orgasm took her again, better than before, better than anything. “Oh, God,” came out of her throat in a long keening sound.

Jean-Pierre grunted heavily as once more he released into her, his hips moving at lightning speed, the wind from his wings another layer of erotic sensation.

One last groan and his hips finally stilled against hers.

* * *

Jean-Pierre had only one regret: that he had waited so very long to give himself completely to Fiona.

This night had been like nothing he had experienced before. He felt honored to be so close to her at the moment she released her wings for the first time. But this is what he had seen within the brief vision, that she would release her wings tonight. He just hadn’t expected to be connected to her so intimately when it happened.

He stroked the length of her back along her spine. He smoothed a hand over the soft black wings with the gold flame markings. This was the meaning of obsidian flame, the beautiful wings that reflected her calling and her gift.

“Can you see your wings, chérie? Try to look at them. They are … magnificent.”

He saw her flex the muscles of her back, and with that flexing her left wing drifted closer to Fiona’s body, in the direction her head was turned. “The feathers are black and gold. Oh, I really get it now. Obsidian flame. Wow. Are they as beautiful as I think they are?”

“Incroyable. Nothing less. I wish you could see them as I see them.”

He leaned down and kissed her between her wings and felt her shiver beneath him. His eyes were wet. He could not help that. His life had just shifted, a turning of the earth to reveal a new arrangement of the stars.

Very carefully, he leaned over her back, pressing his chest against her skin and against the base of her wings. He mingled the tips of his feathers with hers. “I am so proud of you.”

“I want to know only one thing,” she said.

“What is that, ma chérie?”

“How soon can I fly?”

* * *

Casimir sat with the swans and the geese. They were all settled down after a difficult night that included a second fold back to Las Vegas Two, a mode of transportation for which they were poorly suited.

The smell was a bit strong in the massive barn, but … whatever. He found their presence soothing, even comforting.

He was not happy.

He sat in the dark with his arms clasped around his knees. He had a shield around him, triple-thick to keep certain powerful Second ascenders from invading his space.

He wasn’t used to facing his own death.

He wasn’t used to failure.

And he wasn’t used to betrayal, not like this anyway, not unexpected.

After the debacle at Dark Spectacle, he’d actually folded back to Paris, to the perimeter of his shielded hotel room, just to see whether or not his children were still alive.

They were.

Once he saw that the hotel room was safe, he fetched Julianna from the outskirts of the palace crowd in Phoenix Two and put her to bed. She’d gotten caught up in the mass fold—otherwise she, too, would have been dead. Her spirits had been depressed by the experience, by the knowledge that Greaves had orchestrated the arena explosion at a time when he would have known she was still in the building.

She hadn’t argued too much when he told her he needed some time alone.

But as he sat among the birds, he confessed he didn’t know what to do.

“Thought I might find you here, my friend.”

And how the fuck did Greaves break through his shield? Just how much power did this Second ascender have anyway?

“Enough,” Greaves responded.

So Darian had read his mind? He turned to look at him, his preternatural vision putting Greaves in a halo of light. He stood twenty feet away near a couple of empty swan crates. “Did you come here to finish the job yourself, then?”

“I have no idea what you mean.”

“Cut the crap, Darian. I know that you intended for me to die in the explosion.”

He heard Greaves sigh. “I confess that was one of the possibilities sent to me from the Mumbai Two Seers Fortress.” He started walking in Casimir’s direction. “But if I had truly wanted you dead, I would have finished the job myself. COPASS has no rules forbidding me to take the lives of Upper ascenders.”

“Then you didn’t plan for me to die?”

“I will be honest with you, I had hoped for it, but I wasn’t sanguine. These are difficult times as you have now learned, very difficult, almost impossible to navigate with any degree of precision. I mean, seriously, Casimir, could you have predicted that a young ascender would be capable of combining her power with the most uncouth woman on the face of Second Earth and actually succeeding in folding twenty thousand people out of a theater?”

When he put it like that … “I suppose not.”

“Then you have just defined all my current dilemmas as well as the reason I struck the bargain with you in the first place. When I heard of the vision about your death, I dismissed it.”

“But you would not have minded seeing me vaporized.”

“No more than you would shed tears at my funeral.”

The little peach had a point.

“But I did not come here to discuss the past but rather the future, the somewhat immediate future. All three of my primary Seers Fortresses have provided a very interesting bit of information about our second obsidian flame. I believe you already know who she is.”

He nodded. “Marguerite.”

“She’s missing.”

At that he stared at Greaves. He understood the implications at once. “Go on.”

“Apparently she’s gone rogue and is now wandering around on Mortal Earth, completely unprotected.”

Now, that was interesting.

“I want the obsidian triad broken before it has a chance to gain its real power. You are the only one who can do this, Casimir, but I need to know if somehow the night’s failure has destroyed your confidence, plucked your oversized balls out of your snug trousers? Hm?”

Casimir’s chest tightened as he stared at Greaves. “No,” he said.

Greaves returned his stare, no doubt taking his measure. “This one thing I have always known about you, my friend, your hedonism is not your greatest flaw. Vanity holds you in thrall. In this moment, you cannot believe that you actually failed tonight. You had thought your plan infallible and now you can hardly bear the thought that a young female vampire, not even two centuries old, has bested you. Am I right?”

Casimir refused to answer him.

“Do not look so glum. It spoils your beauty. After all, we are not so very different. Imagine what I felt having to ask for your help in the first place.”

It disturbed Caz that the bastard was making so much sense. He had all but decided to make Greaves’s demise his object rather than continue in his efforts to take down Endelle’s administration. Now Greaves was giving him reason to keep up the fight.