Page 3 of Gates of Rapture (The Guardians of Ascension #6)

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.”