Imperial (Insight #8)(21)

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.