Grail of the Summer Stars (Aetherial Tales) by Freda Warrington Page A

landscape, already bleak, looked as if it had been kicked around by a bored god.
    In a daze, he started walking.
    His mind was numb, so the inevitable thoughts of Mistangamesh trickled into the void. Rufus let them flow. Where was I?
    At one point, Rufus was sure he’d found him in the form of a young man, shell-shocked and damaged by the Great War: the very image of his brother. Same flawless yet haunted face, thick dark hair shading his moody eyes. A tormented war poet; that was how he appeared. So Rufus had kidnapped him and spent ninety years trying to convince him that he was not Adam Montague, the scion of a wealthy British dynasty, but actually an immortal Aelyr, son of the ruling house Ephenaestus of the Felynx.
    Rufus had failed.
    Adam refused to “wake up.” All the sultry beauty of the Otherworld, the sensual temptations of Rufus’s followers, a good spell of sensory deprivation, even renaming him Leith to help sever his human ties—none of it had brought Mist back.
    In the end, Adam had stupidly died, as he’d stupidly lived—a dumb human.
    Rufus had lost his mind for a few days. Then he’d pulled his tattered self together, stolen the flashiest sports car he’d ever seen and roared towards the future. Free of Mist, free of false hope.
    He’d headed for London and almost made it, crashing the Lamborghini with the police in full pursuit after he’d refueled and driven off without paying. The memory made him smile. Scrambling though fields and woods, a police helicopter hovering overhead unable to locate him because he moved through the Dusklands—the first layer of the Aetheric realms—thus foxing their infrared cameras.
    It was a shame about the car, though.
    Arriving in London, Rufus tried to lose himself in pleasure. He hung out in trendy nightclubs, befriended ugly politicians and overpaid footballers, sleek socialites, models and actors and all their hangers-on. He wasn’t fussy. At their expense, he got drunk, imbibed an array of drugs, charmed every half-decent-looking human he met. In the morning he would be gone with their money, credit cards and jewelry before they woke up.
    It was so easy, because he had an angel’s beauty and knew how to work it.
    The lifestyle was fun for a while, but … he’d done it all before, and for centuries. He was bored.
    The truth was that nothing filled the void in his soul where his brother Mistangamesh should have been. Nothing ever would. He’d never doubted that Adam’s eyes, clouded by animal fear, would light up with recognition and love. Probably with hate and rage, too, but he could have handled that.
    It had never happened.
    Finally Rufus was forced to admit that Adam was, after all, only a vessel of flesh. The physical resemblance to Mist, so poignant, had duped him. Now he resigned himself to being alone.
    After all, he was used to it. For long centuries he’d been regarded as a pariah among Aetherials, a traitor on an epic scale. A long list of kidnappings, troublemaking and even murder, both on Earth and in the Otherworld, was the least of it. First and greatest was his alleged destruction of the legendary Aetherial city Azantios.
    The Spiral Court—the pompous idiots—had tried to place him on trial, only to produce not one scrap of evidence against him. Rufus had been scared out of his wits for a while, but now the memory amused him. The ordeal had almost been worth it, to see the white face of his prosecutor, the puritanical Lord Albin of Sibeyla, set in frustrated rage.
    One day Rufus realized why a life of hedonism and petty theft was so unsatisfying.
    Don’t be evil was the slogan of a huge Internet company. And Rufus had responded to himself, Why the hell not?
    If his enemies wanted crime, he’d give them crime. He would plunge into the nastiest, shadiest, most dangerous career on the planet, so wicked it was a caricature, a veritable parody of evil.
    One contact led to another and he found himself at glamorous charity balls,