When one of the committee members actually flopped backward because he’d fallen asleep, then awakened with a shout that he wanted his Scotch, she’d had enough.

Though she felt an impulse to flip them all off, she took a deep breath, thanked the committee for their time, and stepped down from the platform. She didn’t look back. The fight wouldn’t be won in a day and her stomach was doing some serious flips.

Once she was out of the stuffy building, she began swallowing hard and her cheeks had that telling cramping quality. Fiona had come along, so she was glad for the support, but she couldn’t even open her mouth to thank her.

She lifted her arm and folded back to administrative HQ.

She barely made it to the bathroom before she threw up a very nice tuna salad.

Fiona, of course, had followed her. “Are you all right?”

Marguerite looked up at her and for one of the first times in her life, she started to cry. “No,” she wailed.

Fiona’s eyes went wide. “No? Oh … no. Really?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t know. Probably. Oh, God. What am I supposed to do now?”

But Fiona didn’t try to answer the question. Instead, she sat down on the floor next to her, put her arm around her shoulders, and held her.

It might have been because of obsidian flame that Fiona knew exactly what to do in this moment, but Marguerite suspected it was just because Fiona was a really wonderful person.

“Aw, shit,” Marguerite said.

“Well, before you get all worked up, let’s hit a drugstore just to be sure.”

* * *

Greaves dreamed that he was wrapped up in something so angelically soft, his whole spirit gave a fine-grained shudder, head-to-toe.

A force moved around him, walking in slow steps, very measured, as though not wanting to wake him. He felt love, an overpowering wave of love, flow over him with each soft step. He breathed as he had never breathed in his life, as though his lungs were just learning to work and the air was fresh, and clean, and good.

What was the measure of a man?

What prompted each man down his chosen path?

What forces shaped that path and all subsequent choices?

How was a man responsible for those choices when they were predestined by the early years of love or the early years of torture?

In the end, how much of a choice did a man ever really have?

Greaves was not blind to his faults, the great chasms in his essential character, so great that each one had spawned his need for power, for control, for transforming the world into something safe and beautiful that he could command. He wanted to do for others what he’d been unable to do for himself when he was young. And so he was building a new world—two new worlds, and eventually six.

He was a visionary.

There would be lives lost but that was completely inconsequential to the end result, to the magnificence that would emerge, where all young children would be protected from evil.

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.

So the Supreme High Seer of Second Earth had been impregnated by the Supreme High Commander of the Allied Ascender Forces.

She banged her head against the bathroom wall a couple of times. A little harder and she would crack the tile. Oh, she really should have thought about birth control sooner.

Goddamn that Thorne.

* * *

Thorne sat on the edge of his leather couch, a towel around his hips and one draped over his head. He’d showered, but he hated blow-drying his long hair—hence the towel and pretty soon just the dry Sedona Two air. Right now he still dripped.

He had been blocking Marguerite’s physical sensations so that he could concentrate on the task in front of him. As much as he’d come to cherish experiencing what she experienced, a break now and then wasn’t a bad thing.