Imperial ((Imperial) Web of Hearts and Souls)

  The power that an Escort gives its adored is unmatched by any other race. A regal fever accompanied by a rush would last through several moonrises. It is intense and consuming. And if we had any sense at all, we would never leave this state.

  Though the movement of the vessel was blissful, enticing, it was nothing compared to the energy that a rush creates within the soul. Each soul is raised to an enraptured state.

  Rapture was the state I was in when Vade’s thoughts began to connect with mine. At first I saw this moment. We were reading each other’s desires and honoring them, but as time moved, as I felt the emotions of his touch, I reached deeper into his thoughts. I had to know who had crossed him, who had forced his hand to keep us apart. Who was hurting our kingdom.

  He was careful to guard his deepest trepidation, but I could see flashes in my mind’s eye. I saw the moment he was told of my execution. The raging storm that nearly ended creation below us. I saw him call a council of kings and demand that Xavier accept his challenge to a duel. Like a coward, Xavier denied him.

  Vade assured Xavier that his demise had been forecasted, but before Vade could strike him he saw something in Xavier’s eyes, something that caused him to smile coolly and to step back and listen to the other kings. What Vade saw, I could not fathom.

  The kings openly stated that because I could be destroyed without any fury from our Creator that I was not a sovereign; that in order for me to die my line would have had to have perished first, not be released. They claimed I was a toy sent to appease the mighty king of anger for the time being, that I was a distraction and now that The Realm had claimed me, that Vade should see things clearly, that he should rise and command his line to invoke the emotions we all needed so desperately to survive.

  Wrath and anger poured through me as I saw this in his thoughts. Sensing that emotion, Vade’s lips and hands found a new way to distract me. He wanted me in that moment with him. I wanted to be there, too, but the thing is, Vade would never reveal any worry to me, so this was my only way of figuring out clearly what had happened when I was gone.

  I engaged the passion he was drowning me in, took control for a moment or two, playfully pinning his strong arms so I could feather kisses across his flesh. That always drove him mad with passion, leading him to fight for control once more. I let him have the control he asked for, let him carry me to a new high.

  Once I caught my breath, I dove back into his thoughts, finding the moment I left behind.

  The council of kings was something rarely called into place, but when it was, it was by no small feat. Each sat on a throne, gloriously spaced inside of a golden oval room, with the exception of mine and Vade’s, which were side by side. Because he was the king of anger—the one emotion that resided in every emotion—his chair was higher, slightly above the others.

  Something happened as the other kings stated their case. Vade’s eyes drifted behind them. In his thoughts, I could only see a blinding light with sky blue eyes within its essence. Our Creator.

  If the Creator was not speaking clearly to you, you would not sense Him. That was just how He worked. Plain and simple.

  Though all of His children, with the exception of me, were in that room, Vade was the only one that sensed Him, saw Him. And because his gaze never moved, the other kings had no reason to know that the favored king was receiving a sweet revelation from our Creator. They simply thought that Vade was listening to them, that he was silently agreeing with their arguments.

  Idiots. You do not cross the King of Anger without some form of retaliation, and that revenge would be just like the king that would deliver it: cool, flawlessly designed, and everlasting.

  “Be with me now,” Vade whispered to me, asking me to leave his thoughts be and surrender everything to him.

  He’d caught me lurking in his mind again. I felt like a bad lover, that I was hurting him right now. I could not let that happen.

  I shelved the sovereign I was and let the girl deep inside rise.

  My eyes connected with his, fire to ice. He held my stare as the rhythm of passion carried us away. He wanted my mind, body, and soul at this moment, and I granted him that request.

  Breathlessly, we lay side by side. A beat later, his energy had pulled me against him once more. As I lay on his powerful chest and gazed at the endless candles, I tried to understand what thoughts I had seen of Vade’s. I still did not understand why he’d waited so long to come for me. Had he forgotten how beautiful what we had was, how we both allowed the other not to be a sovereign in each other’s arms? That together we could be real, we could let our true selves rise without judgment?

  My fingertips traced the defined muscles of his stomach as my thoughts raced in various directions. I’d never shown it before, but I often let what the other kings thought of me tangle with my emotions. I was the last to believe that I was one of them. I knew that it was a dangerous claim. I was content to have risen from death, to be at Vade’s side. But Vade was not. He claimed I was a queen long before Mazing called out to me. Long before any of the other kings even considered me to be more than a passing thought.

  I once thought that Vade gave me the reign of wrath just so I could use it against the other kings. But he calmly told me that the most efficient way to retaliate against them was to prove them wrong. To create my own success on the word-laced daggers that were thrown at me.

  “What did He say to you?” I murmured.

  I felt Vade’s powerful arm tighten around me. When he gave me no answer to what the Creator had revealed or spoken to him that day, I moved my head back so I could stare up at him.

  He was gazing into the glow the candles were creating around us. “Vade,” I whispered.

  He sighed deeply as his glowing eyes drifted down to me. “He said that…that it would never be the same. That my fellow kings would be overthrown.”

  “I suppose He was wrong about that,” I said as I furrowed my brow and silently questioned how intense his stare was.

  “He is eternal. Nothing is instant with Him.”

  “But you believe their demise will come?”

  “I believed the reason the Creator gave me for them to be overthrown,” Vade said under his breath.

  “Power? They would charge The Fall and fail?” I assumed aloud.

  Vade’s intense stare told me The Fall was not even in his thoughts at that moment. “Do you remember our last bloom?” he whispered gently as his fingertips caressed the long strands of my hair, which was resting on my shoulders.

  Blooms were not the same for us as other Escorts—we are sovereigns. It did not take two to create one or extend the line; it took one. Our energy would rush from our souls and define two separate lines.

  Much like what just occurred between us.

  Before this night, our last bloom had been moments before our last fight, mere hours before my death. “I released the line before that energy could have found hosts,” I assured him, looking away from his stare as I held myself up on one arm.

  I doubted he knew everything that occurred when I’d approached Xavier’s throne, that Xavier had asked me to be his adored for a millennium—I doubt Vade would have bothered with a call to the kings if he did.

  “You released the line whilst my energy was still entangled within yours.” His hypnotic voice displayed a painful anger that caused my eyes to meet his once again.

  “You lost a part of your line that day?” I whispered.

  His stare told me that he had. Beyond losing me, losing his mist, future Escorts of his line, would have been a tragedy. Vade’s energy was too powerful to be left unguarded. That was why Vade rarely had mists lurking in the real world. He assigned petals to watch over them, even as children. He guarded his essence closely, dearly. So much so that more than once Escorts from other lines had asked to be claimed by him.

  The ache in his stare screamed a yes to me.

  “How many?” I stated as my skin turned crimson with rage.

  Xavier’s punishment
did not fit the crime my First had committed.

  Vade raised his other hand and let his long fingertips massage his eyes, which were now closed, a tell that told me that right now words were too hard for him to grasp.

  I felt horrid. I caused that. If I had just swallowed my pride and told him my First was at risk of death, that war had been declared—this could have all been avoided, at least delayed long enough for his mist to be unraveled from my energy. It was bad enough that we’d been apart this long, that my entire line was sacrificed. This, this was salt in a wound that would never close for either of us.

  “Tell me,” I pleaded sorrowfully. I had to know.

  “A few,” he murmured as his hand fell from his eyes and he adjusted how he was lying on the satin pillows below him.

  A few could be in the thousands, so that didn’t give me an answer. I was reading his rigid body movement. The anger that was settled beneath his pristine skin. It wasn’t aimed at me. Real anger, anger without passion, had never been cast at me from his essence. I knew that he was grieving deeply for the souls he’d lost.

  I didn’t even realize that his energy was released with mine that fateful day. We had just passed an eternity cycle, a point marked in corporeal time as four million, three hundred two years. It is the point that the stars return to their beginning.

  It is also the only point in time that Vade extends his line. Sounds like a massive amount of time, a span of time that would barely allow any of us to have more than a few souls in our line. But time is not measured the same in our realm of life. We rarely perceive it at all. But if I were forced to explain the length of time to a mortal soul, I would say the cycle comes around for us as often as a new moon comes to the heavens.

  Every chance I had, cycle or not, I sent my energy out.

  The only reason for Vade to send out his energy outside of a cycle would be to create Fated Escorts, souls that had the power to rise quickly. Something he had talked about often but had never dared to try.

  Though I had never witnessed the creation of a Fated Escort, I believed they were indeed possible.

  Fated Escorts, by all accounts, are regal. Old souls that knew that anger was a gift and used it for change. They understood the balance of the emotion. How it could equally create and destroy. These beings would have an instant pull to them. Masses would find an undeniable attraction in their magnetic stare, in the essence of their energy. They would serve as ambassadors for our kind. One of them, in a carefully chosen dimension, could sway the entire mood of the world, and in turn the universe.

  Their cravings to relieve or express emotion would haunt them, but they would not feel the need to feed for lifetimes, that is, unless they accidently tasted the power of raw energy. They wouldn’t, though. Vade was too fierce a leader to let anything happen to those he led.

  “Could you sense if they were Fated? Did I take that from you?” I asked in a meek whisper.

  He let out a sigh as he rolled to his side to face me. I let my arm fall and pulled my pillow closer to my neck so I would be level with that diamond stare of his.

  There was something in his stare that told me they were more than that. I had a horrible feeling that I had taken more than Fated souls from him.

  I cringed as I recalled another dream of Vade’s. One that he had only shared with me. To create an Escort with both light and dark energy. To create metallic energy.

  Vade wished this for a very simple reason: he wanted peace. He wanted mortal souls to be powerful enough to rise above the emotions that chain them. He never came out and said it, but I think he intended for his Fated to rise with unheard of metallic energy. In Vade’s mind, if that were to occur then the other kings could invoke dark emotions all they wanted, but the souls would rise. In effect, we would return to our given charge without war, without the loss of life.

  Even though I believed metallic energy to be impossible, the thought that I had hindered him from, at the very least, disproving himself was overwhelming.

  “They are Fated,” he said as he reached to caress my lips.

  “Are,” I repeated with wide eyes.

  He leaned in and let his humming lips caress mine. “Are,” he breathed against my skin.

  I smiled, thinking that maybe that was why I was freed today: his ambassadors were restoring our race, and any threat to me had vanished. “Congratulations, your majesty.”

  I felt him tense and questioned him with my eyes. When he offered no answer, I pressed him for one. “What?”

  “They were stolen,” he said as his pristine eyes became drowned with anger.

  “By whom?” I asked as I rose fiercely from the bed. With little effort, he pulled me back to his embrace.

  “By several,” he responded as his fingertips traced across my brow in an attempt to wipe away my anger.

  “Why are you calm? Why are you not out destroying every single line that has crossed you!”

  The hum within his skin intensified as he eased his hand down my shoulders and along my waist before pulling me against him.

  “Glory, it is a very complex problem.”

  “No, it’s not. They stole what belonged to you, and they will return them.”

  “My adored, they have taken so much more from you…they have declared war, they have signed their death warrant.”

  Chapter Seven

  I had never heard words so fiercely spoken in that classic seductive tone of his. They were so powerful that I felt myself quiver. Not understanding the response of my vessel, Vade pulled me closer to his humming skin.

  “You will be avenged. I swear to you.”

  “I don’t understand what they could have taken from me. You are in my arms, Mazing is within this mansion, and I released my line.”

  His brow furrowed for an instant, then he gained control over the emotions he was clearly fighting.

  “You cannot release a line completely, not in the way you assumed. They were freed from you, they were blinded from your existence, but their cravings and desires remained. They ached to be claimed by anyone that would explain their purpose to them.”

  My breath stopped. The very pulse of my soul stopped. “Are you telling me that my line exists still? That another sovereign is ruling them now?” Before I could rise with well-deserved fury, his powerful arms flexed around me.

  “Yes. And that sovereign will release them to you the moment we decide that we no longer want to be in this room which, for me, is not this one or the one after.”

  “Who?” I breathed, feeling agony. I’d always imagined my line living out lives of peace. I admit in the back of my mind I searched for them in the procession of death, for I knew their souls would not understand why death had come for them, that they would seek a stay from the Reaper. I never saw a single one of them. Never even came close to sensing the essence that I would know as well as my own breath.

  Knowing that they were harmed while I was imprisoned was more than I could handle. It also meant that I had every right to go after Xavier–two wrongs do not create a right. He’d breached our agreement, or rather allowed me to make an agreement that had no merit.

  A smile reflected in that diamond stare of Vade’s. “I found them all, claimed each by name. Rasp called them home the moment you stepped foot within these walls.” A slow, sweet smile infused with an amber blush enveloped his visage. “Do you feel them, Glory?” he whispered.

  Every lean muscle in my body relaxed as I breathed in. I felt them. I’d felt them long before this moment, but I assumed it was their ghostly memories. “You did that for me.” That young girl deep inside was speaking now. It was as if he had arrived at my doorstep with endless roses.

  “Would you have expected any less from your rush?” he questioned as he gently tensed his brow, so much so that his luscious eyelashes nearly masked his eyes.

  Those words made me smile, like the girl I was deep down in my soul.

  All exaltation is short-lived, as this exaltation I was feeling surely was. “
So are you avenging the kings for taking my line from me?” I asked in a disbelieving tone. That wasn’t Vade’s style. If the matter were resolved, then he would cause no further turmoil.

  “No,” he said in a near whisper. “I’m avenging your mist…as well as mine.”

  “What else are you avenging, Vade?” I asked nervously, not recognizing the cold look in his eyes.

  “In time, I will tell you,” he murmured.

  “Tell me now,” I demanded.

  “I cannot and I will not right now. You have a line to claim…we have a web of misted souls to untangle.”

  “A web? I did not call my mist. They were not accepted into this life—how could anyone claim my mist or yours? Tell me what I do not understand.”

  His jaw tightened as a rage-filled emotion rippled across his image. “They planned your downfall for eons. Every move was precisely calculated and meticulously orchestrated and carried out.”

  Wrath was swarming through my being. “How was my First’s betrayal planned?”

  Slowly, his eyes appraised my image. “Tell me this: if Colton were a true First, would Xavier have executed him?”

  “He did what!” I couldn’t have heard him right.

  Vade cocked one eyebrow to push his point. “Xavier ripped Colton’s energy into shreds moments before you appeared at his throne.”

  “Who would do that to their First?” That was foolish. Anyone with any sense would have claimed that energy, at least part of it, as their own to grow their line. And the king who did it would be so weak that he would not be able to stop it from occurring.

  “No one.”

  “So why did he?”

  “I doubt Colton was Xavier’s First. I think Colton was a ploy.”

  “Were you not there when his First was claimed?”