Gates of Rapture (Guardians of Ascension 6)

Brynna, he sent.

She turned toward him. I can feel it, Leto. The change, I mean. Basement time?

He nodded.

Aloud, she said, “We’d better get to HQ. Gideon will want to report in before you take off.”

“Absolutely.” Once he went beast, he could be out for hours.

He set the toddler down. The mothers and caregivers trailed at a distance. He turned to them and nodded.

They hurried forward and took over. Everyone knew of his disability and forgave him. The fact that they valued him made it all one big acid-on-skin experience.

A few moments later he and Brynna folded to the hidden colony’s military HQ.

* * *

Grace stood on the balcony of Beatrice’s floating palace, overlooking Denver Four half a mile below.

Everything had changed since her arrival five months ago with Casimir. Today, in just a few minutes, she would be leaving Fourth and returning to Leto. But how to say good-bye to both Casimir and Beatrice?

She held her spine straight, a reflection of her new determination. The hour had come for courage, and she meant to rise to the challenge. For her entire two thousand years of ascended life, she had kept herself apart from the war against Greaves. She had never wanted to engage in something that had hurt so many people she loved, most especially her brother, Thorne.

But today, all that changed. Today, she would begin her own campaign against Darian Greaves by returning to Second Earth and taking her place as the blue variety of obsidian flame. She had no idea whether she would bring something formidable against Greaves or not, but it didn’t matter. He was the monster that had required Leto to take dying blood for a full century in order to prove his loyalty to Greaves’s Coming Order. He had created a continual supply of death vampires to bolster his already massive army. Of course death vampires needed to be fed, so naturally Greaves had perfected the process of enslaving women to serve as blood slaves, an efficient method of creating dying blood through a process of killing the women off once a month then bringing them back to life with defibrillators. Heinous. Monstrous.

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?