Read Online Bastian by Elizabeth Amber - Free Book Online Page B

managed to shake off his spells. “I have felt the effects of your avuncular love once before.” Silvia brushed her fingertips along the scar, reminding him of its cause.
    â€œI won’t hurt you,” he lied.
    â€œYet you ask me to break my vows?” she went on. “To go the way of so many before me?” She fluttered a careless hand toward the wall of cages behind him, hoping he couldn’t see how it shook with fear and revulsion. “You’ll forgive me, Uncle, if I forgo the pleasure of taking your cock as pacifier. Thank you all the same.”
    He ground his jaw, angered and obviously in pain, then sat back on his throne and gestured at his prick. “Do something,” he muttered to Occia, and heaved a sigh of relief when she put her tired mouth back to work.
    â€œGo!” he told Silvia, but she didn’t move.
    â€œI brought you a tithe,” she reminded him. She nodded toward the shard he still held. “Let me be Replenished.”
    â€œDo it, then, and get out! When next I see you and that other one, there had better be a Vestal firestone in both of your fists.”
    At his command, a ring of guards stepped away from a high marble pedestal to her left. Upon it rested a shallow golden bowl several feet in diameter. The sacred hearth of Vesta, brought here in 394 A.D. from the Roman Forum. Her eternal flame had once burned brightly within it day and night. It pained Silvia now to see the hearth so cold and empty.
    She took the three steps up to it and laid her hands upon its outer rim as if holding it. There were twelve shallow depressions running around it, just inside the rim. Six contained stones.
    The guards leaned in to watch her every move, lest she attempt to make off with any of them. All the other Vestals had revealed the locations of their stones to him, but only six had been located. The other six still remained at large, and those were the ones she sought in EarthWorld. Her own and Michaela’s were among them. If she brought them to him, Vesta’s fire would leap high again. But he would possess the goddess’s fire and use it for some evil purpose. Silvia would not let that happen.
    She closed her eyes, shutting out the despicable horror of her surroundings. Quietly, she murmured a benediction to her goddess. The preternatural heat of her hands intensified with each word she uttered, until the air near the surface of the bowl began to shimmer. A flame suddenly burst from the center of the bowl, scattering the guards.
    Lifting her chin, she inhaled deeply of the wisps of magic that flumed upward, and gloried in the replenishing of her eternal spirit. Ephemerals were kept alive only by virtue of Vesta’s fire, which she and the eleven others carried in their hands. But their fire—their very lives—must be renewed periodically by contact with the remnants of this single fire brought here from ancient Rome after the destruction of the temple.
    Replete at last, Silvia opened her eyes and stepped back. The fire in the golden bowl dwindled, then quickly died.
    Somewhere behind her, Pontifex spoke. “Gods, you are never more beautiful than when you do that.” His voice was thick with emotion and lust. “It makes me want to come inside you. To drill myself in your heat and never leave.”
    Violently repulsed, she refused to glance his way as she slowly shook her head. Putting her palms together, she brought forth her own renewed inner flame, created a firegate, and promptly vanished from his domain.

    The instant she rematerialized in EarthWorld, Silvia felt the near-dead summoning her. In a city as large as Rome, there were always some who found themselves hovering on the brink of their demise at any given time, just as surely as others were being newly born. It was the former that now called to her.
    . . . please, let me live a while longer . . . there is so much left to do . . . my children, what will they do without me . .