Obsidian Flame

However, of late, especially since Marguerite had been taken from the Convent, Grace’s longings had increased in both fervency and frequency.

She had been writing a lot of verse over the past three weeks.

Today in particular had been full of new strange sensations. The earth seemed to be moving beneath her feet and her mind had a strange, loose quality, as though all the doors were open and a breeze blew through constantly.

And also, for inexplicable reasons, she was missing Marguerite this morning more than ever. She had truly loved her cellmate even though they were water and oil.

They were even different physically, since Grace was tall and Marguerite relatively short at five-five. In complexion, Marguerite was dark and Grace was fair, her skin almost white. Marguerite’s eyes were a dark brown and her hair long and of a color to match her eyes, while Grace’s hair hung in thin blond ringlets to her waist.

As for temperament, their dissimilarity continued.

Marguerite was wild, without sexual restraints. She had a worldly outlook and often spoke of men as something to be worshiped with her body. She had been Thorne’s lover, the one who eased Thorne from his duties as a warrior, from almost the beginning of her residence in the Convent.

Grace was chaste. During her life prior to the Convent, she’d only had one lover, her husband, since divorced. She blamed herself for the divorce since she knew she was a rather strange ascender. She had been chaste before him and chaste since. She worshiped in chapel, her head bowed, her eyes closed, her heart completely open to all the mysteries of the universe.

Yet with all this disparity of inclination and temperament, she had loved and valued Marguerite as a sister. She had prayed for Marguerite every day, not with a hope that Marguerite would accept Sister Quena’s harsh and oftentimes brutal discipline; rather, she prayed for Marguerite’s freedom because that was what her Convent sister had wished for more than anything else in the world.

So the day had come when Marguerite had been granted her freedom, and Grace had rejoiced for her even though Thorne in turn was devastated. And therein lay one of the great mysteries of life: how one person’s deepest desire could hurt another person to the core.

But Grace had compassion for Marguerite. Her life had been exceptionally difficult from the time she was a child. She was also quite young in ascended terms, just over a hundred and twenty. And most of those years had been lived in a state of duress behind the stone walls of the Convent.

Then quite suddenly, everything had changed for Marguerite. Endelle, acting in her capacity as the Supreme High Administrator of Second Earth, had finally approved a transfer for Marguerite to the Superstition Seers Fortress. However, the transfer had been granted by Madame Endelle on the sole condition that Her Supremeness be allowed access to the Fortress.

When the High Administrator of the Fortress, Owen Stannett, denied access to Madame Endelle, she in turn authorized Thorne and Warrior Jean-Pierre to break down the front doors of the fortress and to remove Marguerite by force if necessary. In doing so, the warriors found a nightmare awaiting them since it was revealed that High Administrator Stannett had been siring children by the Seers under his care in an effort to create a super-race of Seers.

So Marguerite had been given her freedom, and though Madame Endelle had believed that Marguerite would join forces with her and serve her administration in support of the war against Commander Greaves, Marguerite instead had made her escape to Mortal Earth.

Grace had always been amazed by Marguerite, by her spirit. Again, water and oil. Grace had never been powerful like Thorne or like her twin sister, Patience. Grace had been the one to sit back and smile at their antics, to glory in who they were in all their strength and brilliance.

Her thoughts had always been inward and upward.

She had been on the sidelines, cheering them on, in everything they did. Patience had been wildly powerful, almost a warrior like Thorne. Her disappearance—for Grace still could not believe or even feel that her sister was truly gone—had been a shock.

As for Thorne, Grace had always thought that his symbiotic relationship with Endelle had held him back, had prevented greater powers from emerging. She had tried to tell him many times of her beliefs, but he had replied that he was doing his duty—and for a Warrior of the Blood, there was no greater honor.

Shortly after she had joined the Convent, Marguerite had arrived. To some extent, though she could never explain it, Grace had always felt that her fate was linked to Marguerite’s, a very strange intuition, to be sure, given that they were, yes, water and oil.

But she loved Marguerite, and though she had been gone just a little over three weeks, she missed her.

She turned the pen in her fingers. Her joints ached. In late March the stone cell was icy cold and the inmates weren’t allowed to wear more than their handwoven gowns, day or night, rain or shine, winter or summer.

As she dipped her pen in the inkwell, sudden, inexplicable longings surged yet again within her, a swell of her heart and lungs that caused her for a moment to lose her ability to breathe.

This was new.

What on earth?

Then the experience took a turn, a sudden hard turn. She dropped the pen on the floor and rose from her stool. She moved to the center of the small chamber. She held her hands palms-up and tilted her head back just a little, her eyes closed.

Spiritual fervor, surely.

She was almost in pain.

She could feel a vibration now, but it came from below, beneath the stones on which she stood.

The vibration intensified and fear suddenly shot through her. She didn’t understand what was happening.

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 fuck did it mean that both he and Casimir could scent the same woman?