Burning Skies Read Online Free PDF Page B

Business was a perfect distraction from a situation he needed to ignore anyway.
    He worked hard keeping his empire in line. Lately he’d been dealing with a couple of strikes on different continents and some serious competition from a Chinese firm looking to move in on his Mortal Earth European operations.
    Tomorrow he had two board meetings. One corporation exported PCs to Second Earth; the other was a highly specialized company designed to serve the horticulture industry. So yeah, he needed his rest.
    He yawned, closed his eyes.
    Okay. There was just way too much here he couldn’t control.
    Whatever.
    *   *   *
     
    Endelle, Supreme High Administrator of Second Earth, reclined on her chaise longue. She wore a soft purple linen gown for comfort since she would be on duty all through the night, just as her Warriors of the Blood were on duty, however different their assigned tasks.
    Instead of battling with a sword, Endelle hunted her prey in the midst of the darkening, that piece of nether-space she inhabited during her meditations. While in a state of meditation, she was able to split-self, to become two separate corporeal forms—one that reclined on the chaise, the other that slipped into the nether-space of the darkening , free to move around and act within that space in a second physical body.
    What her second split-self couldn’t do was leave the darkening , except to return to, and rejoin, her first corporeal self—all very third-dimensional preternatural shit that no one else on Second Earth, not even Greaves himself, could do.
    So here she was, her primary self reclining in meditation and her second self, her split-self, chasing that bastard, Darian Greaves, from one end of the planet to the other, at least while in the darkening.
    She had one job to perform during her nightly vigils—to keep Greaves from increasing the size of his army of death vampires here in Phoenix.
    In the past decade he’d taken to shipping death vamps from all over the world to the metropolitan area in an ongoing effort to destroy the Warriors of the Blood, to wear them down so that they made mistakes and got themselves killed. It was a clever, subtle strategy that did not in any way alert the authorities to his machinations.
    COPASS was the committee that governed the process of ascension to Second Earth and which had also established several critical rules for how each faction could conduct its war efforts. Basically, she and Greaves weren’t allowed to engage in open warfare for the simple reason that they were each too powerful. Engagement had atomic implications, and both she and the Commander had agreed not to do battle personally.
    But Greaves could ship death vampires to Phoenix Two and Endelle could chase his sorry ass through the darkening and stop him.
    At least, thank God, Greaves wasn’t omnipotent. Yes, she could thank the Creator for small favors.
    As she moved in her split-self, she drew close, so close to her prey. Silver tendrils appeared, small beacons of light that belonged exclusively to Greaves. His light trails never ceased to surprise her because evil ought to be represented by red flames and black smoke, not silver streams of light, for Christ’s sake.
    His voice came to her next, full of persuasive resonance, as he addressed his minions. “A place, my brother ascenders, has been prepared for you, of great honor for your service to my cause. In return, being stationed in Metro Phoenix will provide all the opportunity you need to sate your appetites, since the Sonoran Desert has five access points to Mortal Earth.”
    An interpreter spoke rapidly in a language she didn’t know, but something that sounded like East Indian. This last statement mentioning five access points, once flushed through the interpreter, was met with a round of lifted fists and war cries. Funny how Greaves failed to note that the access points were guarded by Warriors of the Blood.
    A moment more and she skidded into Greaves’s