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But even as the fear came, a wave of love followed that eradicated the fear so that she spread her arms wide and smiled. She let the love flow. She had a sense of weight, of strength, of vitality, of life force, and of the earth.
Yes, of the earth, a power that seemed to be flowing through her. She had the sense that something enormous had come to her.
The object of her forbidden poetry came into her mind: Leto.
She saw him as clearly as if he were standing next to her. He shivered in the cold. He wore a dark fur hat that just covered his ears and looked very Russian. The sky overhead was both the dark of night and yet the muted gray of clouds overhead. Snowflakes fell. He stared ahead, the sharpness of his blue eyes as vivid as she remembered, beautiful.
The power and the love she felt flowing through her, from the source she didn’t understand, coupled with the affection she had always felt for this brother-warrior of Thorne’s, poured through her in an increased rush. Just like that she stood next to him … sort of. In some mystical way, she knew herself to be in two places at once.
He stared at her, wide-eyed, stunned. “Grace?” he murmured. His lips were tinged blue from the cold but she could see that his skin was clammy, as if he was ill, something highly unusual for vampires.
“I’m here,” she said. Her focus was all for him. She could feel that she was not with him in a corporeal sense, and yet she was able to stand next to him. She didn’t question the situation.
“What … what are you doing here?”
She shook her head and looked around. Extraordinary white tigers, one in each cage, paced, restless and … starving. This she could tell because of the power within her.
She looked to the left of the cages. She stood with Leto at the head of dozens of stairs that flowed down to a broad empty street, a long avenue lined with bare trees. She looked back at him. “I was thinking about you and now here I am. Where is this place?”
“Moscow Two. I … I have not seen you since you went into the Convent.”
Grace smiled. “Over a hundred years ago.” As she stood next to him, she could suddenly smell him. The scent was erotic, very much a man but laced with forest, like the ponderosa pines of northern Arizona.
The power once more flowed over her in a great wave of understanding. She didn’t so much have a vision as she simply knew what was happening and what was needed. “You are in mortal danger and you are to come with me. I am to tend your wounds.”
* * *
Leto knew he shouldn’t go. He was all that was abhorrent to such a sweet spirit as Grace. Besides, his presence in her life would put her in danger. He was sure of that.
A double shimmering appeared in front of the tiger cages. Casimir and Greaves arrived together, forming a purposeful front. He didn’t harbor even the smallest doubt as to the meaning of their sudden appearance.
He felt something inside him relax and give way, as though he hadn’t really breathed for the last hundred years.
It was over, finally over, the ten thousand games he played, all the ways he hid his subversion, all the ways he’d tried to sabotage the tasks Greaves assigned him, all the dying blood he had consumed.
So now he had a choice to make: to go with Grace or to die here, on this platform. He felt in his gut it would be much better for him to leave the earth now, permanently, than to involve Grace in one more moment of the chaos that would ensue should he go with her.
He was ready to die. That would be his decision today. He would simply refuse to take her hand.
He turned to Grace but she had a funny look on her face as she shifted to stare not at Greaves but at Casimir.
Leto, too, glanced back at Casimir and saw that the Fourth ascender’s attention had suddenly become fixed on Grace, his dark eyes wide, almost surprised. His lips moved. Leto thought he might have said, “Beautiful.” Then he whispered, “I’m smelling a meadow, soft grasses, fragrant wildflowers all combined.”
Greaves turned slightly and scowled at him. “What did you say?”
But Casimir ignored him. He took a step forward. Then another.
So Casimir could see Grace but Greaves couldn’t. What the hell did this mean?
Leto turned back to Grace. Then he smelled it as well, the gentlest fragrance of a meadow, all that verdant growth, the earth, a combined scent of indistinguishable flowers.
Breh-hedden shot through his mind. A flash of fear followed swiftly at the singular truth that the Fourth ascender also smelled Grace. If all that he knew of the breh-hedden was true, he was both experiencing and watching the inception of what had always been a myth on Second Earth. Only what the f**k did it mean that both he and Casimir could scent the same woman?
Oh, God, no.
“Grace,” he said, calling to her. She turned to look at him and in that same moment, from his peripheral vision, he watched Casimir lift his hand in what would no doubt be a monstrous hand-blast, aimed not at Grace but at him.
“You must come now,” she said.
When she stretched out her hand to him, a semi-transparent limb with an iridescent sheen, he looked at the cupped fingers, the small white hand, and he placed his palm over hers and held on tight.
He saw Casimir’s energy release toward him but at the same time, a strange kind of vibration flowed through him. Suddenly he whipped through nether-space, dematerializing and blanking out for a split second, only to touch down in a dark stone cell right next to … Grace.
He let go of her hand and spun in a circle, folding his sword into his hand and preparing for the Fourth intruder, but nothing more happened.
A wave of abdominal cramps caught him and he lurched forward and gasped. He released the sword back to his weapons locker deep in the bowels of Estrella Mountain where Greaves had one of his primary military compounds. The sword was identified to him and therefore dangerous to Grace. He dropped to his knees.
“You’re in pain.”
He nodded, gritting his teeth, unable to breathe. After half a minute, the spasm eased though much of the pain remained. Struggling, he regained his feet. “Intruders,” he whispered, wanting to call his sword back but afraid he would completely lose control.
“Don’t worry, the trace is blocked.”
“You have that kind of power?”
She shook her head. “No, but the power that possessed me does.”
“What power?” He looked around, expecting another ascender to step forward, James perhaps, but there was no one else in the room.
She shrugged. “I can’t explain it, since I’m not sure exactly what just happened to me. But I felt a power from there.” She swept a hand in the direction of the floor. “Then the power flowed through me. Suddenly I was thinking of you, and then there I was next to you.”
