Gates of Rapture (Guardians of Ascension 6)

She liked men, and more recently she’d discovered she liked making war. She was now a Militia Warrior.

She’d suggested more than once that they take their friendship to a much more productive level, but he’d refused. Sex with Brynna would have been wrong. She was his friend. No, she was more than that. She was his best friend. As much as he wanted to take a woman into his bed, he valued all that she was in his life way too much to dilute it with sex.

But there was another reason he’d refused.

His breh had shown up in the form of Warrior Thorne’s sister: Grace Albion. Her surname was an ancient designation the family had all but dropped. Grace and Thorne’s family originally came from the British Isles. Everyone knew her simply as Grace. But oh, God, even thinking about her brought a flush rising to his skin.

He took a few deep breaths. Thoughts of Grace tended to bring on his beast more quickly. Sure enough, the vibration strengthened, so shit.

But Grace was gone. She’d been gone all these months, having left with the Fourth ascender, Casimir, to who the hell knew where. Because no one could find her in the future streams, not even Marguerite, Thorne’s powerful Seer breh, it was presumed Grace was off-dimension. He wouldn’t be surprised if Casimir had taken her to his home world, Fourth Earth. Casimir wasn’t a warrior, just some very powerful but worthless hedonist who had also caught Grace’s breh-scent and somehow enticed her to go with him.

But all of it was a nightmare starting with the bizarre fact that Grace had caught the scent of not one but two brehs: himself and Casimir. The breh-hedden alone was such a new concept on Second Earth that no one could explain why Grace had actually ended up with two.

But Grace had taken it in stride, one of her many fine qualities, even if the situation had ruined something in Leto’s heart. She seemed to have a strong intuition that her bizarre connection to Casimir was necessary, to Leto’s survival as well as her own. So instead of completing the bonding ritual of the breh-hedden with Leto, she’d taken off with Casimir, convinced she had to for all their sakes.

He was still pissed off as hell about Grace leaving, but he couldn’t exactly complain since she was better off with anyone other than his own sweet self. He had issues, maybe a hundred of them. But having served as a spy would do that to a man, split his soul deep, make him question everything. He was still recovering from that mission. Though well out of it, a century of living apart from his warrior brothers and of joining forces with a hated enemy had done a number on his mind.

That he was still alive seemed like some kind of cosmic joke. He deserved to die. He knew it, and there were way too many nights when, yeah, that was exactly what he wanted. He’d betrayed his warrior brothers and he’d betrayed Endelle, the leader of Second Earth, by building an army of two million on behalf of that bastard Darian Greaves.

Of course, he’d had no other choice. To have refused would have cost him his mission and his life. He’d agreed to become a spy on behalf of the Council of Sixth Earth because they needed a constant stream of data about Greaves in order to know when and how legally they could act in the affairs of Second Earth.

Leto’s handler, James, had assured him that despite the army Leto had built for Greaves, all the information he’d gathered would more than compensate for his work as a spy. Leto wasn’t convinced, but he had to trust that James, and all his Sixth Earth wisdom, would be able to shape the future in a way that prevented an annihilation of the innocent.

Maybe one day he’d know whether or not the horrendous things he’d done would be justified by lives saved in the future. He sure as hell hoped so, because right now his conscience was killing him.

He glanced at Brynna once more. She helped keep his head on straight. He owed her a lot. And when he went beast, which seemed to be happening more and more often, she made sure he got to the basement of his cabin so he couldn’t accidentally hurt anyone.

One of the kids walking beside him said, “I’ll be the champion of the warrior games one day.”

Leto looked down at the boy, who was maybe seven years old. He held his shoulders back as though trying to measure up to warrior status. His eyes had a certain glow, a familiar light. Leto had been that age when he knew that what he wanted from life was to be the best warrior of his tribe. From the first, he longed to join the warriors on their hunts for food and in revenge assaults against their enemies.

The boy looked up at him and met his gaze. “I’m going to be a warrior.”

Leto smiled and nodded. “And so you will be.”

The boy smiled in return, then set his lips in a grim line and his face forward, into the future. Yes, he’d be a warrior.

He felt another vibration, stronger this time, like a nerve going haywire down his left leg from his hip to the sole of his foot. He took a deep breath. Tried not to panic.

A second tremor followed down his right leg.

So it had begun, and now he had a little over six minutes to get some shit done before heading to his goddam basement. Worse, he’d gone beast, as he liked to call it, only two days ago, which meant the frequency of the episodes had increased. But why was the question he couldn’t answer.

Nor did he understand why he went beast in the first place.

He’d been helping to train the colony’s Militia Warriors when his first real beast episode had occurred. He’d been working out in his basement, thank the Creator, when the whole thing had begun: the tingling down his leg followed a few minutes later by a transformation that bulked up his muscles an impossible forty pounds and increased his height another two inches. He’d been crazed during that time, unable to fold out of the basement, unable to leave because there were no doors. He’d built the damn thing as a private space, something he could only fold in and out of, but it had become a prison. In the end, he’d passed out. And when he woke up, he was back to normal.

After that, he’d suffered about every two weeks with the same episode. He had no clear idea what brought it on, but he was convinced that the beast he now endured was connected to his use of dying blood for the past century.

There had been an earlier hint that something was wrong during the time he’d tried to reintegrate back into the Warriors of the Blood five months ago. He’d been at the Awatukee Borderland, battling death vampires, when he’d lost his mind and torn a death vampire to pieces with his bare hands, even breaking apart the rib cage to get to the heart.

Luken, now the leader of the Warriors of the Blood, had sent him here to the Seattle hidden colony to begin the long process of recovering from so many decades under Greaves’s control and from the results of his long addiction to dying blood. For the most part, the assignment had worked. He was more himself than he’d been in a long time, despite his beast issue.