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The dream took a turn, as dreams do, and he rose from his swaddled, safe bed and was dressed in a long black linen gown, very soft, very expensive. In the distance, he saw a woman, very clearly, and he knew the woman. She was glowing with light and iridescence, supremely majestic.
He didn’t want to move toward her because he hated her and blamed her. She had been the cause, the root of all the evil that had happened for years after she abandoned him.
But she held out her hand and she smiled.
Mother, he sent.
Come to me, my son. Let me love you again, as I did when you were very young.
He didn’t want to move forward, but he felt compelled by a deep call in his soul, by what he remembered of her. His feet shuffled in her direction because he could not stop them.
When he drew near, he saw that tears ran down her cheeks and from her mind to his mind, he felt how deeply she begged for his forgiveness for giving him up to the fosterage system of Mortal Earth.
But as much as he wanted to forgive her, he realized forgiveness wasn’t necessary. Only obliterating what had happened to him could change the course of the future now—and that was impossible, one of the few things in the ascended dimensions that truly could not be done.
Everyone had to live with their past.
How unfortunate.
You must cease this madness, Darian. Indeed, you must, or you will be lost forever.
Forever is a very long time, Mother.
I have a place you can come to. The Council of Fourth has given me permission to bring you here, if you will agree to come to me now.
You mean the place that Casimir calls the Lake of Fire? You wish to baptize all the evil out of your son?
I wish you to be healed and to become whole.
His being shook with sudden fury and he spoke aloud and with all the resonance he could summon, “I am whole.”
The woman who was his mother, the poetess, the healer, the memoirist of Fourth Earth, fell to her knees, her hands to ears. He could see the blood flow, which meant this was not truly a dream.
Darian Greaves, Commander of the Ascenders Liberation Army, leader of death vampires, architect of a new world, lifted both his arms and drew into his body all the power he could summon. He let that power flow and aimed his hands at her, releasing a rumbling of hand-blast energy that echoed through the dream and shattered the illusion.
He stood in his Geneva penthouse, naked, pain slicing up both arms from the repercussion of having delivered so much directed power in one blast. His only surprise was that he had not taken out the entire side of the building.
But then again, his aim had been very specific. He had hit the mark. The stench of burned flesh now filled his bedroom.
He crossed to the window and mentally opened it. The air was cold and felt wonderful on his skin.
He had made his choice long ago.
How dare the woman invade his dreams and try to persuade him to be baptized. He’d rather become a death vampire a thousand times over than submit to her form of therapy.
He looked across the land and saw the future he was building, the vision he held in his mind of some of the greatest architecture ever imagined in the course of humankind.
And he saw that it was good.
* * *
Beatrice lay trembling, a charred remnant of the woman she had been. Her stomach churned but she couldn’t vomit because she was curled up, her flesh having been seared into that position.
“Madame Beatrice,” her assistant cried. “Dear Creator. Dear Creator.”
She wanted to tell the woman to please stop moving around her and to summon the healers, but her jaw was burned in place as well.
The pain was beyond bearing and yet her ascended mind was far too powerful to allow her to faint. Waves of agony flowed and blinded her. Or maybe her eyes had been destroyed in the atomic force that had come out of her son’s hands and decimated her.
But her ears worked.
There was a consistent shrieking. In the distance she could hear running feet, faster and faster. Why was anyone running when they could just fold to her and begin to help her?
Not running feet, then.
The pounding of drums, the signal of danger, of something gone awry.
She could hear voices around her now and she caught phrases as the conversations looped in and out of her hearing.
“… no attack, not on the property…”
“… looks like hand-blast damage…”
“… I saw no one folding in or out…”
“… is this the work of the son, perchance…”
Yes, the work of the son, the least she deserved.
Oh, God, the pain, not of her flesh, but of her heart. She had held the babe who had been Darian Greaves in her arms. She had suckled him at her breast. She had read books to him, and played with him, and prayed that his biological father’s death vampire nature would not have any place in his DNA.
As the healers placed their hands above her skin, and healing flowed, only then did her mind release, like the snap of a taut rubber band, and she flowed into the bliss of unconsciousness.
As she drifted away, she heard her second assistant say, “She failed and now we are lost. All six dimensions are lost.”
“No, there is still hope, the one who is to transform.”
Blackness engulfed her.
* * *
Marguerite sat on the cool tile floor in the powder room of Thorne’s Sedona house, not far from the toilet. She’d known the truth for a while; she just hadn’t been willing to accept it, or even to approach it, until she had tangible physical evidence.
Fiona had taken her to Walgreens Two and bought her three different tests.
Each one had been positive.
So there it was, staring back at her: yes.
The test actually used the word yes.
She so could not be pregnant. This could not be happening. She wasn’t meant to be a mother. Given how she’d been raised, how was she supposed to raise a child of her own? And now she had a job to do, a big job. She was the Supreme High Seer of Second Earth.
Her stomach boiled all over again and once more her cheeks cramped up. Surely there couldn’t be any tuna salad left after the episode at HQ?
Apparently, there was.
She twisted around to face the toilet and hurled so hard that she bounced forward and missed the toilet bowl completely. Oh, God.
She retched and retched and retched.
When she was done, she sank to the floor opposite the toilet then used her folding power to clean up. Thank God for Second Earth powers because she kept her eyes closed the whole time except for the occasional single eye squint to see what she’d missed.
She doubted she’d ever eat tuna again.
