When Arik Beltrán checks into a hotel on business, he expects the tedium of unfamiliar beds and boring meetings. He expects to meet a financial client and be home before the solitude of being a stranger in a mundane land becomes too much to bear. Instead Arik finds Blaze: a mysterious man with an inner fire that lives up to the name. Nothing in Arik's life, not his deranged father nor even his faint brushes with the magic only Arik can see in the woven web of life could have prepared Arik for the man in the hotel lobby who casually invites Arik to room 1109 for late night ... Well, anything at all. Blaze Zaituc, on the other hand, knows exactly who Arik is and what Arik needs: Blaze. He has crossed land and sea to find the man who has appeared in Blaze's Visions as the next target in the Quest that comprises Blaze's life. Arik is someone for whom the Universe has plans, and Blaze must make sure Arik complies. Or else. Unaware of the lives and risks hanging in the balance, Arik untangles himself from the sheets in the silent hours of the morning. He wonders if he will find the door to 1109 open and waiting. He's not a risk taker, but this one time, just this once, maybe he'll take a chance ... And seal both his and Blaze's destinies forever.

Vision Quest

Tension shouldn’t have been tightening the otherwise broad expanse between Arik’s shoulders. There was no reason whatsoever that his stomach should twist. More than anything, however, there was no justification for the warning that hinted Arik should be very, very careful. Of course, that particular nuance could have had more to do with history than any instinct serving self-preservation.


Arik tried again. “Not so much different. More like, well…I needed—”


“To be here.” Blaze nodded, blue eyes trained on Arik’s. His expression was intense, direct, and though it spoke of decades, centuries—millennia even—of hard-learned secrets, it was honest. “You needed to be here.”


There wasn’t anything Arik could think of to say. Instead, he parroted it back. “Yes. I needed to be here.”


Arik shook his head. He answered with what he thought was the obvious expectation. “To meet you?”


Blaze leaned back, took a sip of his coffee, and shrugged. “Do you think so?”


Chapter 7