Gates of Rapture(5)

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.