Gates of Rapture (Guardians of Ascension #6)(9)
Author: Caris Roane

Damn his wing-locks.

As he came, he roared because his wings released, adding to the intense pleasure. But would there be enough room for his entire wingspan? Or would he be maimed?

The sensation of releasing into Grace took over and pleasure came from every direction at once. He thrust hard, his wings flapped, and the sound of Grace crying out in pleasure spurred him on. He pumped harder, giving her every bit of who he was as a man. Pleasure rippled over his massive body, and some terrible pain inside him finally drifted away. Grace had come back. She had come home to him. He could breathe again.

He began to slow in his movements and to savor how she sighed and cooed, and that he was connected deep.

At last, his consciousness began to fade, and he fell down on her so that she collapsed under him and under the covering of his wings.

* * *

At first, Grace was too lethargic to move—but she wouldn’t have been able to anyway. She was caught in some kind of postcoital bliss that rocked her eyes in her head. She smiled and savored. Her mouth was pressed into the mattress, making it even harder to breathe.

Everything was so very wrong, yet so right, which made no sense at all yet complete sense.

Leto had given her a choice.

She would always remember that as probably the most heroic thing he could ever have done with her. She had understood the depth of his need and she knew he’d been locked into some kind of primordial beast-mode. Yet somehow his rational self had shone through. No, she would never forget that he’d given her a choice.

So here she was buried beneath his wings and his massive, bruising body, and she couldn’t move. She could barely breathe, he was so heavy on her. But she could draw just enough air to survive, which made her smile.

She was with Leto, the warrior she had known for the entire two thousand years of her long vampire life, from the time that Thorne had joined the Warriors of the Blood. Leto and Thorne had been battling death vampires together all these long centuries.

Leto was also the warrior she had written all her erotic poems about during her decades in the Prescott Two Creator’s Convent. It was as though somehow her spiritual mind had known that one day she would be here, fulfilled by Leto’s body.

But as she came down from the bliss of ecstasy, her rational mind began to explore all the implications of such irrational behavior. She wasn’t afraid of pregnancy. For reasons she had never understood, she had been barren for almost her entire life. This was a great sadness to her, of course, but not something she’d been able to change in all these centuries. The one birth she had experienced, when she was young, had not ended well. She had always wondered if that was the cause of her inability to conceive.

She doubted she would ever know.

Her mind drifted very quickly to Fourth Earth and to the vampire she had left behind. How strange to think that just a little while ago, she had been living in a palace in Denver Four, caring for Casimir and his children, enjoying Beatrice’s friendship, and now she was here.

She had left the clouds and had fallen hard to earth.

That her fate seemed inextricably bound to Leto’s was clear. She knew his history, that he’d lost a mother to death vampires when he was very little. His soul had been closed off even longer than her own. But on some deep level, before these truths had been shared between them, she had known him and he had known her.

But what did this portend for her? Or, more accurately, what was she willing to do about it?

She was tired of not breathing deeply, so she pushed at Leto, giving him a hint.

“Hey,” she said softly and pushed again, taking care not to disturb the feathers. A vampire’s wings were strong but they were also in many ways fragile; even pulling on an individual feather too hard would cause pain.

But after a few more nudges, the last two quite firm, she realized he wasn’t just asleep, he was unconscious.

She was about to remedy the situation, but something within her vibrated softly, like a chime deep within her soul, as though something must be understood and known in this very moment, before she took one more step into the future.

She grew very still, her face smashed into the mattress, Leto’s body heavy and warm on top of her.

She searched through her mind and followed the sound of the soft chime, flowing down and down through a veil of dark clouds until her mind pulsed with blue light. She remained in that unearthly glow.

She had never been in this place before, but the color told her she was very close to her obsidian power, her blue flame power. Using her instincts, she wrapped herself in that power. As she focused, Leto’s soul was simply there. She understood then that in some mysterious way, her power was related to her ability to read the souls of others, even to search them, something she had been able to do since she was very young.

This time, however, Leto’s soul seemed sharper and clearer than ever before.

She sank deep into both his character and his past. She saw the battles he had waged, the thousands of conversations he’d had with Commander Greaves, his arguments with Greaves’s generals. Then before his abdication of his Warrior of the Blood status, she saw his close connection to all his warrior brothers, especially to Thorne, and how Leto had once served as Thorne’s mentor. She saw the women Leto had loved over the past century and beyond that, over the full course of his three thousand years. She saw him as a child, back and back until she was able to see what had prompted him to become a warrior. He had always wanted to be the very best warrior in his tribe. From a young age, he had prided himself on being the best. How much it must have hurt him to have been a spy. She moved forward swiftly in time until he was once more serving as a spy on behalf of the Sixth ascender James. She saw how James had explained how critical it was that Sixth Earth get extensive information on Greaves, something only a spy could deliver, and in the ensuing years just how much Leto had suffered as he performed his traitor’s role.

She saw the arena battle in which Leto had been required to fight Alison, each bearing a sword. She felt how much the performance of this duty wounded the depths of his soul, how much he had hated setting his centuries of experience against an untried woman, even how hard he had fought. Then his surprise when her vast powers had emerged and Alison had defeated him using a pocket of time reversal. However, in this moment, Grace saw something more. She realized that Leto had a connection to Alison, a purpose to fulfill with her in the coming days, though Grace couldn’t discern what that purpose was.

She knew that Alison was destined to open the Trough or portal to Third Earth, an unfathomable feat. This much Grace knew from conversations with Thorne over the past year and a half. No one knew the timing, only that when it happened, Second Earth would be changed forever. But what did it mean that Leto had this kind of connection to Alison?