Page 75 of Gates of Rapture
Shit.
Exactly.
But you brought her out?
Grace nodded.
Endelle narrowed her eyes.How?
The explanation involved Grace’s obsidian power, the same power she’d employed to locate the attack at Nazca.
“Love that you can split into an apparition.Reminds me of my darkening work, although it sounds more powerful and more versatile, like you can go just about anywhere.”
Thorne was tapping away at the computer, and the next moment the screen split into four segments, each a live feed from the in-flight video crews that were flying over the colony.
To her infinite pleasure, the Thunder God Warriors were making mincemeat of a bunch of blue-skinned, black-winged sociopaths.
“Hot damn,” Thorne shouted.The room, which had a dozen techs on different monitors, burst into shouts and applause.
Endelle could see Militia Warriors engaging four-to-one against each death vamp.Militia Warriors were limited in that way—it was the rare warrior who could take on a death vamp by himself.Her Warriors of the Blood were the truly gifted and could battle as many as eight at a time.Luken, the biggest of her warriors, often battled nine or more on a regular basis.He was one fit brute.
But the squads of four Militia Warriors were brilliantly trained and took down the enemy like dominoes falling one after the other.
As new squads peeled off the colony’s landing platform, at least three Section Leaders were directing the action, speaking into their coms and aiming traffic as needed.Many of the squads headed south into the valley’s grain fields, but more and more of them were sent into the forest.Their activity would be difficult to track, but guerrilla work was part of the training.
“Are you streaming any of this to Marcus?”Endelle asked.“He’ll want to send this out to our allied High Administrators all around the globe.”
“He was my third phone call after you and Seriffe.”
“Good.”Something inside Endelle began to ease.She had hated her break with Thorne when Marguerite entered the picture, but right now she saw the results.Thorne in this position, essentially commanding all aspects of the war against Greaves, was exactly what she had needed.
As for Marcus, who headed up her PR, he would be eating up the videos.Ever since he’d returned from a two-hundred-year vacay on Mortal Earth, he’d been piling the electronics.She now saw one of the results: He could mobilize his PR crews within seconds of any situation.She approved.On the other hand, one of the other results bugged the shit out of her since she now had a website called MadameEndelle.com, and all the other crap that Marcus called “a critical social media platform.”Thanks to a thing called “tweets” that Marcus and hisbreh,Havily, formulated on her behalf, Endelle was enjoying a surge in popularity.
How fucking precious.
“So what do we think all this means?”Endelle asked.
Thorne turned to meet her gaze.“Besides the obvious?”
“That’s right, besides the fact that Greaves has attacked two of the colonies on Mortal Earth two nights in a row and risked our world becoming known to the human population.Besides all that, what the fuck is the bastard up to?”
But it was Grace who answered.“He’s testing everything without showing his hand on Second Earth: the strength of Diallo’s mist, response time of the Militia Warrior army, what, if anything, obsidian flame would do if he attacks, perhaps even my own power.”
“She’s right,” Thorne said.“This isn’t an overt battle.If Greaves had wanted to do that, he would have launched at Apache Junction Two at any of your allied Territories around the world.But he knows if he does that, he opens the war.He’s not ready yet to go full-out, but I don’t think he’s going to wait very long.”
Endelle turned to Grace.“Where’s your man right now?Alison said you completed thebreh-hedden.Can you find him?”
Grace nodded, then blinked a couple of times as if she was concentrating.Finally, she said, “He’s just sent a squad of sixteen deep into the forest after three death vamps.He also said to alert Jeannie that he’d want to start moving corpses and clearing debris in small bursts.I told him I’d relay the message.”
Thorne held the mouthpiece of his headset, clicked a couple more buttons, and Jeannie’s voice filled the space.“Jeannie here.”
Thorne gave her Leto’s instructions.“Shall I let Gideon know?”he asked.
“I’ve got it,” she said.“Later.”
Endelle heard the softest click.She was fucking impressed.This was a massive team that Thorne had built.“What do we think Greaves’s next move will be?”
Thorne turned around to face her.“This worries me the most because we just don’t know, and according to Marguerite, that bastard Stannett is working his ass off blocking Greaves’s movements in the future streams.She has four teams of Seers working with high rates of accuracy, but none of them is able to find out much about Greaves or his generals or his army.I can tell you what my biggest concerns are.”
