Page 2 of Gates of Rapture (The Guardians of Ascension #6)

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.

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.