The Valhalla Covenant
Chapter Thirty-One — Illicit Passions

Back in his apartment after midnight, Reimas was shielded from the buzz of hundreds of busy and excited people, and after putting in a radio call to Sasha, who was still in France, he dimmed the lights and lay down with his eyes already closed.

For a while he slept deeply but it didn’t feel like long before he woke again. Or was he awake? There was the familiar soft, warm comfort of sleep and no visible surroundings yet he felt conscious. It seemed like a dream but had a different quality. It was as if he was sheltered from the outside world in a cocoon yet was entirely conscious.

As he lay there, he rapidly became aware of an unprecedented wave of mental power. Ascending quickly on that wave of pure, unadulterated thought, he moved on, undisturbed by stray irrelevancies, uninterrupted by external stimuli, and knew that he was free from even the slightest hint of inaccurate presumption.

As his thoughts flowed, a complex theoretical view of the worldwide situation began to crystallize, and eventually he emerged from the process with new inspiration.

Not long afterwards as sleep returned, Reimas heard the gentle click of the door and saw the soft lines of a woman dressed only in a delicate nightdress … Sasha. She hesitated a moment in the dimmed light of the passage before closing the door.

With her first touch, he felt himself ever so gently drawn from the laziness of sleep. Then he felt the soft touch of her sweet breath on his face and held her supple form in his arms. Her careful projection of presence into his semi-consciousness awareness took him completely off his guard and when he made love to her, certain differences he vaguely perceived served only to heighten his impression of her capacity for spontaneity.

The night passed in pleasure but in the morning, when Reimas woke, she was gone.

With a shock, moments after he woke, he recalled that Sasha had been summoned back to France the day before to deputize in the French leader’s absence, and he’d not heard that she was back. Standing orders specified that he be informed of any change in the whereabouts of all senior members.

A small matter, perhaps, on the face of it, but as leader now of a rebellion that had taken the world by storm, and with the fate of the world at his fingertips, such doubts as then reared in his mind might have considerable consequence.