Gates of Rapture (The Guardians of Ascension) Read online

  Greaves needed to be destroyed, and Grace had finally decided that she wanted more than anything to be part of that process.

  She glanced down. Low clouds had begun to dissipate from around the dwelling so that she could finally see all of the city below. Many of the wealthier denizens of Fourth had homes built in the air, tethered to the earth by the sheer preternatural power of the owner.

  In the same way that some Second ascenders could create and sustain microclimates in their gardens through the use of personal power, so Beatrice could keep her home floating in the air. The white marble palace literally floated in a fixed position above the earth, as did the attached land for the gardens and her rehabilitation pools. Even drastic changes in weather couldn’t budge the airborne estate.

  To the north, another mansion was preparing to launch in a few weeks. Grace had hoped to see the event, but the time had come to put into effect a plan she had been forming for the past several months.

  “Come sit with me for a few minutes,” Beatrice called out. “I would like to finish these last two skeins of yarn, if you are willing.” Beatrice enjoyed knitting and other needlework.

  Grace turned to her, wondering how much Beatrice already knew about Grace’s intention to leave Fourth today. The woman had tremendous power, so perhaps she had known it from the first day of her arrival with Casimir.

  She left her post by the balcony and strolled back into the well-appointed marble receiving room. “Of course I’m willing to help. And what will you make this time?”

  “Probably another meditation shawl.”

  Beatrice was a woman of endless good works, atoning for a terrible decision she had made to allow her young son to be fostered two thousand years ago. The tradition on Second Earth at the time was for all children, once they reached the age of five, to be sent to other tribal homes for care and raising. The result had been disastrous: The foster father had sexually abused and physically tortured the boy for years, ultimately releasing on Second Earth the psychopath known as Commander Darian Greaves.

  To the sound of Bach and the delicate tinkling of a gentle nearby water fountain, therefore, Grace took her seat on an old-fashioned needlepoint footstool across from Beatrice. The large familiar round shape of the woman’s eyes still startled her, even after five months of living in Denver Four. They were the same eyes that belonged to Greaves.

  As Grace slipped a loop of soft lavender mohair yarn over her arms, Beatrice picked up the growing ball, and the fluttering of fine mohair began.

  “You’ve been very quiet all morning.” The woman’s voice was a lovely contralto, resonant, gentle, kind. Come to think of it, Greaves spoke like that as well, as though speech patterns and word choices, despite his despotic nature, had been transferred on a genetic level, from mother to son. Two ascenders could not have been more disparate, though, in terms of motive, intent, and general kindness.

  Beatrice was a healer and philosopher, a collector of ancient proverbs and poems, a woman of great spiritual insight, a woman of love. She was one of the finest women Grace had ever known.

  Her son was a sociopath tyrant.

  Grace’s gaze fell and settled on one of the fine folds of light green silk of Beatrice’s gown. Beatrice always dressed formally and wore her thick red curls in elegant waves separated by strips of gold. Her appearance was very Mortal Earth Grecian. Even her house had a Mediterranean feel, made as it was from all that marble. She was quite wealthy and served on the Council of Fourth. She was one of the most distinguished citizens of her world, honored in particular for the development of her redemption program that had the power, once completed by the participant, to absolve and transform even the most hardened criminal.

  Though Beatrice had never stated her original purpose in designing the program, Grace believed she hoped above all things that her son might return to her and begin the series of excruciating baptisms in her five graded pools. Each pool forced the participant to face his or her crimes, to experience an almost intolerable sensation of remorse, to plan extensive future acts of atonement, and ultimately to be completely changed and made new.

  Grace sighed.

  “And now a sigh.” The contralto blended seamlessly with the water, the music, and the light, but for a sudden moment Grace wanted to scream at all this perfection. What good was such a place on Fourth Earth when Greaves still lived, still continued to breed death vampires who in turn killed countless ascenders and mortals alike?

  “So when are you leaving?”

  Grace lifted her gaze to Beatrice. “Then you know?”

  “I have felt it coming for days, and now you seem very much at peace yet removed at the same time.”

  “I intend to leave after Casimir completes his immersions today.”

  “You are changed, Grace, more determined than I have ever known you. I have also felt that you intend to go after my son. Is this true?”

  Grace nodded. “And I will bring him to you if I can.”

  “What made you come to this decision?”

  As the yarn kept disappearing from around her hands, Grace said, “Many things, I suppose. Primarily that I can no longer ignore my obsidian flame power. It calls to me every day, like a burning flame in my soul. But I have watched so many suffer because of Greaves’s ambitions and manipulations. I thought that if I join Fiona and Marguerite, who each bear the obsidian flame power, then maybe the triad can bring him down at long last.”

  Beatrice’s fingers moved swiftly over the ball of yarn. “So you will finally embrace your obsidian flame power. Good. It is the right thing to do on many levels.”

  Grace nodded. “But it’s not my heart’s desire. I would prefer to stay here.”

  “But not necessarily with Casimir?”

  “No. That part of our relationship is at an end.”

  “Have you even talked to him about leaving?”

  “Not yet, but he suspects.”

  For the first two months upon arriving on Fourth Earth, she had joined Casimir in his bed and become his lover. She had savored his practiced lovemaking, his beautiful mulled wine scent, and his soul that she could see so clearly, a soul so different from the self-absorbed life he had led.

  Oddly, neither she nor Casimir had felt compelled to complete the breh-hedden ritual in which the sharing of blood, body, and deep-mind engagement occurred at the same time. He had felt unworthy of her, and she had a second breh in Leto who still had a role to play out in her life.

  Then he had entered Beatrice’s program of redemption and her purpose in his life became clear to her. Casimir had needed to be redeemed, again for reasons she sensed would soon be revealed to her, but not here on Fourth Earth.

  Beatrice had applauded her courage for leaving Second Earth with so notorious a figure as Casimir when everyone else would have condemned him as worthless.

  Through one of Grace’s strongest gifts, she had seen his soul. She had seen the wonderful man he would have become had earlier parts of his life not been riddled with sexual slavery. He had shared so many things with her, horrifying things, about how he was used during the first millennium of his life. What else could he have become except a careless hedonist?

  When she had left Leto to be with Casimir, she had experienced a profound prescience that Casimir was destined to die and that if she didn’t leave with him, Leto would die as well: To not love them both would be to lose them both.

  She had no proof, just her ascender’s powerful intuition.

  Casimir had understood this to be his truth as well: that his future was tied to Leto’s and in that intertwined fate, Casimir would surely die.

  For that reason, she and Casimir had approached Beatrice about finding a way to prevent Casimir’s impending demise. Beatrice had taken their request seriously, and after praying and meditating for several days, she had returned with the firm conviction that the only way Casimir could prevent his death was by entering the redemption program. “But you must see it through,” she had said, “to the
end, otherwise I can guarantee nothing for you. Do you understand?”

  So Casimir had begun the program, hoping to alter his future.

  But a surprise had followed, for from that first immersion into the initial graded baptismal pool, Grace had lost the ability to scent him and he could no longer smell what he called her meadow scent. At that point, she felt she understood something of the purpose of the breh-hedden between Casimir and herself: that she was the vehicle by which he could come to Fourth Earth and enter the redemption pools.

  Grace had taken great comfort in this turn of events because leaving Leto behind had weighed down her heart. Her time with Casimir, despite how necessary it seemed to be, had been a betrayal of Leto. She could look at it no other way.

  Yet in order to save them both, she’d had to align with Casimir first. Would Leto ever understand? Ever forgive her?

  The process of being redeemed, however, had become a personal nightmare for Casimir. It involved a continual life review, and an exploration of every sin. Atonement was called for at each stage, and dear Creator, Casimir had so very much to atone for.

  He had shaved off his beautiful dark curls as well, a sign of his determination. He was now bald and had tattooed his skull with Grace’s name, as well as the names of his children, Kendrew and Sloane, in an elegant dark blue script.

  Almost as quickly, therefore, as the affair had begun, it had ended, and all Casimir’s energy had turned to the process of redeeming his life. Yet even though her desire for him had ended, still she loved him. She understood his worth and hoped that in time, he would at last be the man he was meant to be.

  “In all of this,” Beatrice asked, intruding on Grace’s reveries, “what is your greatest concern?” Her fingers grew very still as she met Grace’s gaze.

  Grace removed one hand from the loop of yarn and pressed it against her chest. “That even though I have set for myself such strong goals, like returning and participating in obsidian flame and going after Greaves, I still don’t feel real in my life, fully present.”

  “You’re restrained,” Beatrice said. “It’s a very old habit of yours but not necessarily a bad one.”

  “I suppose at times restraint has advantages, but sometimes I feel like a ghost in my own life.” She slipped her arm through the skein once more.

  “What a strange thing to say. And yet I believe you are right. But are you sure you’re ready to return to Leto?”

  Grace felt her desire for him flow through her, a tender wave of sensation that ended with her heart beating a little harder. “Yes. I have missed him so much.”

  Beatrice smiled. “I believe you have loved him for a very long time. Centuries perhaps.”

  Grace thought it possible. Leto had been the true desire of her heart, even when she’d been in the Convent. During those decades when she’d been a novitiate, she had written hundreds of erotic poems with him in mind, as though her soul had been calling to him all those years.

  She had been in the Convent when her obsidian power had first emerged and led her to Moscow Two. She had experienced the strangest sensation and had actually split into an apparition-form that had carried her straight to him. That he had been able to see her had been a miracle all in its own, for even Greaves, who was there, hadn’t been able to see her.

  She had saved him from certain death that night. Greaves had intended to kill him then and there. But Grace, in her apparition-form, had brought him safely back to the Convent. Later, she had taken him to the Seattle hidden colony. She then spent the next several days just keeping him alive by offering him her blood. Because Leto had been taking dying blood, at Greaves’s insistence, he was in a profound state of withdrawal that threatened his life.

  Only when given Havily’s blood, which mimicked dying blood, did Leto finally begin to recover. Though the process remained a complete mystery, Havily’s blood had cured his addiction to dying blood.

  Beatrice’s hands remained in her lap, her graceful fingers curled over the large lavender ball.

  “You want to say something to me,” Grace said. “I have sensed it all morning.”

  Beatrice’s shoulders dipped. “It is so cliché, and I’m embarrassed at the choice of proverb. I’ve searched my mind a thousand times for better words, but cannot find them. And there is my greatest vanity; I always wish to appear wise.”

  Grace laughed, even though her heart was breaking. Her decision to leave had suddenly become very real, and she would miss both Beatrice and Casimir. She could feel change washing toward her, a break of endless waves that would not stop just because Grace wished it otherwise. “Just say it.”

  Beatrice sighed. “Be true to yourself. There. Now you may mock me for my lack of originality.”

  Grace wanted to laugh. “I want to do just that but I don’t understand who I am?”

  “Understanding comes in its own time.” Beatrice put a hand to her chest and breathed a sigh of relief. “Oh, that is much better. Don’t you agree?”

  “You are quite absurd, my friend.”

  “Yes. And I am vain. That I will admit. I am terribly vain. My greatest flaw. Something I am certain I passed on to my son.”

  Grace laughed again. She might even have asked how she could know herself better, but at that moment she heard the tinkling of a bell, which meant that one of the apprentices was moving at a quick, levitating pace up the long marble hall. Everyone on Fourth moved with advanced levitation. Very few walked about as Grace did. Her own levitation powers were minimal compared with others’ on this world. But as the bell drew closer, Grace could sense that something was wrong. No one ever hurried as they moved about Beatrice’s home.

  Casimir was in trouble. She could feel it now. She released a heavy breath and drew in an even deeper one. He was still at the pools.

  Grace rose just half a second before Beatrice. The ball of yarn slipped from her forearms to drop to the marble and bounced off to Beatrice’s right.

  The apprentice appeared, a petite black woman with diamonds laced through her braids.

  “What is it, Eugenie?” Beatrice called out.

  The woman put her palms together, her hands slanting toward the floor. “Forgive me, mistress, but Casimir says he must speak with Mistress Grace.”

  Grace wanted to run to him. Her lover, her former lover, was in such agony, day in and day out. By Casimir’s account, the process was like having molten lava poured over his soul one minute out of every two.

  “Where is he?” Beatrice asked.

  “On the deck beside the third pool.”

  “The third pool,” Beatrice cried. “Foolish vampire. He should not have done so. He had not even completed the proper sequence of baptisms for the second pool.” She nodded. “We will come to him at once.”

  “Thank you, mistress. He … that is, we had to use the restraints.”

  Grace repressed the tears that rushed to her eyes. She wanted to run to him, to fold to him. She even started to, but Beatrice held up her hand. “You must calm yourself. More is gained in situations like this with a tranquil spirit.”

  Grace drew back then took yet another deep breath. Beatrice was right. She had learned one thing while sitting at Beatrice’s knee: As restrained as Grace was, and as much as some of that restraint had to leave, there were times when it was necessary.

  Grace nodded.

  Beatrice rose a foot above the polished marble floor and began to move in that same form of levitated flight, but very slowly.

  Grace, lacking the power to achieve the same kind of movement, walked beside her in a measured maddening cadence. But not for a second did she lose that terrible urge to run to him.

  * * *

  Leto sat in his executive chair in the Seattle Colony’s Militia Warrior HQ at the far northern end of the narrow valley. The tremors were increasing. He had a little over four minutes.

  Gideon stood in front of his desk wearing blood-spattered flight gear that also had bits of feathers and other debris stuck to it. He spoke
quickly. He knew the drill with Leto. Everyone did. There weren’t many secrets in the relatively small community.

  “The death vamps are getting closer. We ran into a couple of squadrons and took care of business. We offed eight of them. Big motherfuckers. We collected several more transmitters.”

  Leto wanted to know more, but he spasmed deep in his gut and held up his hand. Thank the Creator that Gideon fell silent. This change was coming fast.

  Leto rested his forearms on his chair and breathed through the agony that flowed within his veins, the latest turn in his splintered life. The addiction to dying blood was gone, at least the part that was like knives slicing up his intestines. When he had served as a spy and in order to sustain his mission, he took dying blood at Greaves’s insistence. For decades, Greaves had turned numerous members of the ruling council of Second Earth, known as COPASS, into hypocritical versions of death vampires. Greaves provided the dying blood so that his followers wouldn’t actually have to do the killing of mortals or ascenders themselves. He also provided the antidote, which served to halt the physical changes that dying blood created in the individual, even if the searing addiction remained.

  A few months ago, when he’d been at the point of death, Leto had taken Havily’s blood, which had miraculously cured him of his addiction. Havily was Warrior Marcus’s breh, and the sharing of her unique blood with Leto had been a great kindness for which he would be forever grateful.

  But something terrible remained, an incomprehensible residue that lived in his body. When the morphing occurred, he became like a tiger pacing the jungle floor, restless and starved, ready to attack.