Rapture's Edge

by J. T. Geissinger

  “—because I fainted in the ladies’ room and didn’t wake up until the lights were out and everyone was gone, and in my state of panic at being alone in the dark I wandered around the museum trying to find a way out—”

  “Naked,” he repeated, even harder.

  She lifted a shoulder. “Some people cry when they get scared. I get—”

  “Naked,” he finished, and now he sounded like he really wanted to break something.

  She smiled at him, a cheerless curve of her lips. “Exactly. It’s a tic. As I was saying, maybe I was trying to find a way out of the big, dark, scary museum—it’s over seventy thousand square meters, you know, which is a lot, especially in the dark—and I wound up in front of the Degas and was distracted for a minute from my extreme fear and disorientation and just stood there admiring it.”

  “With your hands on the frame,” interrupted Chubby in a high, disbelieving voice. “Trying to lift it from the wall!”

  Eliana looked at him. “I never touched that painting.”

  He made a sound like he was choking on something and jerked his hand to indicate everyone else. “We saw you! You had your hands right on it—”

  “It was very shadowy in there. Maybe your eyes tricked you. Have you dusted it for prints?”

  No one said anything. One of the standing officers shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

  “No? Well, don’t bother. Because unfortunately you’re not going to find any.”

  They wouldn’t because they couldn’t. Intangibility in shadow allowed her to sneak around undetected, leaving no fingerprints…she was as invisible as air.

  In the shadows, that is. When pinned in the highly focused beams of flashlights—like the one Chubby and company had wielded—she could be seen plain as day.

  She’d heard of this only once before. Her great-grandmother on her mother’s side was also a Shadow Walker and had also been an accomplished thief. That was where their similarities ended, however; to hear the story told, her great-grandmother stuck to jewels and absolutely loved thieving. It was said she wore so much of her pilfered booty she jangled when she walked.

  Green Eyes addressed her directly. “You like to play games, don’t you.”

  It was a statement, not a question. Beneath the soft tone of his voice, she felt the challenge and also sensed a dark, growing undercurrent of excitement.

  Holding his gaze, she leaned back in the chair and crossed her legs. The shirt rode up even higher on her bare thighs, and that searing gaze flickered down to her legs. When his gaze traveled back to her face, it was bright and burning hot.

  It did something to her, that look. An old memory flickered in her mind, beautiful dark eyes that looked at her with that same, fevered hunger. She quashed it as quickly as it surfaced.

  The memory of those eyes and who they belonged to was even more dangerous than capture by humans.

  “I like to do all kinds of things,” she answered, staring unsmiling at him. “What did you have in mind?”

  He stiffened. His nostrils flared. Judging by the sour tang that suddenly permeated the air, she’d really pissed him off. In one swift motion, he shoved away from the wall. “Everyone out,” he snapped. He crossed his arms over his chest and stood staring at her, his face now hard as a slab of granite.

  “Édoard,” Chubby protested, turning to him with knitted brows, but Green Eyes cut him a glare so vicious he snapped his mouth shut and rose stiffly from the chair.

  “Vous l’avez entendu,” Chubby snapped to the other four standing officers, and one by one they filed out the door. Chubby slammed it shut behind him, leaving her alone with the unpredictable, agitated Édoard.

  They stared at each other for what felt like an hour. The only sound was the whisper of air through a ceiling vent. A muscle in her bicep began to cramp and twitch, and she longed to stretch her arms overhead and massage it. But of course, the handcuffs prevented it.

  Then into the tense silence he abruptly said, “What are you?”

  Not who, but what. Startled, she blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me,” he said, unmoving. He looked at her—really looked at her—as if trying to slip inside her body using only his eyes. It was unnerving. She knew it wasn’t the chill in the room that made her skin prickle.

  “What I am is hungry, hurt, and not in the mood for word games,” she said flatly, trying to keep the sharp pang of worry she suddenly felt out of her voice. What are you?

  He just stared at her.

  Her gaze skipped away from his and fell on the small camera above the door. There were no shadows in this harshly lit room; they’d have her on video now for sure.

  Seeing the direction of her stare, Édoard turned, walked over to the door, reached up, and flipped a switch on the side of the lens. A tiny red light beneath the camera faded to black.

  Her brows shot up.

  He turned back to her with that intense green gaze and leaned over the back of the chair his chubby companion had just vacated, his knuckles white as they gripped the curved metal. Beneath the glare of the fluorescent lights, his brown hair shone a beautiful shade of burnished bronze.

  “You’re different,” he accused, startling her again. “Everything about you is different,” he went on, his terse voice softened by the lilting French accent. His gaze scoured her. “Your face, your voice, the way you move. Even the way you’re sitting in that chair looking at me is different than anyone else who’s ever sat in that chair looking at me before. I’ve been around a very long time, belle fille, and I’ve never seen anything like you.”

  Belle fille. Beautiful girl. It gave her a pang in the gaping hole in her chest where her heart used to be. It had been a long, long time since someone had called her beautiful.

  “Is this an interrogation, or are you trying to ask me out on a date?” she said coldly.

  His face hardened. He straightened and crossed his arms over his broad chest. “Interview,” he said, looking down his nose at her. “It’s called an interview. If this was an interrogation, there would be pain involved.”

  “There is pain involved.” She leaned sideways and stuck her bandaged leg out, then bent her arms to give him a good view of the handcuffs behind her back, her wrists red and chafed inside them. Just to provoke him, she added, “And my bare behind is frozen to this chair.”

  Again, he didn’t take the bait. His mouth just puckered as if he’d been sucking on a lemon. “You’re lucky Jean-Luc gave you his shirt. I’d have hauled you in as naked as we found you, and your bare behind would have been on public display for all those reporters. Your bare behind would have made the cover of Le Monde.”

  Eliana flushed. “Charming,” she muttered. She sat upright and adjusted herself in the chair so her tailbone wasn’t flush against the cold seat. Her entire rear end was numb. And her leg throbbed. When she saw Caesar again, she was going to kill him.

  “You’re the one who likes being naked so much. And I may be rude, but I’m not stupid,” he rejoined. Something odd had crept into his voice, and she glanced up to find him still staring.

  “I know who you are, belle fille,” he said, eyes glittering. “I know how you think. I’ve been studying La Chatte for years. I’ll admit you became something of an obsession for me. A thief who evaded all security systems, who never triggered a single alarm, who drifted in and out of locked buildings and rooms and vaults like…a ghost? Impossible. You made us look like a bunch of incompetent fools. You made me look like a fool. All those rich, important people screaming for your head, and not a trace of you to be found. So I studied your pattern, the things you took, the specific times and dates and places of the crimes. And I discovered something.”

  Eliana waited, a growing sense of dread gnawing at her stomach.

  “Even ghosts get bored.”

  He smiled, and the predatory curve of his lips sent fear lashing along every nerve ending.

  “Every theft was a little more daring than the last, a little
harder,” he continued. “Either you were getting desperate, which didn’t seem likely as you weren’t under any heat from us, or you needed a challenge. It was me who predicted La Chatte would get tired of poaching from fat old goats and go for a bigger prize. I knew one day you’d hit the Louvre. And because, as you’ve guessed, we’ve never managed to capture you with normal surveillance video, I ordered a few special, very high-tech cameras designed by some old friends in the American military. Cost a pretty penny, too, and all very hush-hush top secret, but it was authorized by the prime minister himself. Because you, belle fille, are at the very top of his shit list.”

  Cameras? Special cameras? She couldn’t be seen on cameras—

  “He’s still holding a grudge over two Picassos you stole from his house while he was sleeping,” Édoard continued in a conspiratorial tone, as if they were two girlfriends talking over cocktails. “In fact, he’s given us carte blanche to do whatever is necessary to get them back, along with the rest of the things you stole, some of which were from his personal friends. Whatever is necessary, including resorting to the interrogation you so casually mentioned before. Which, by the way, I’m particularly well qualified to do having served as an interrogator the entirety of my ten years with the counterterrorism unit of the bérets verts.”

  An interrogator with the green berets. High-tech cameras. Several things clicked into place, and the fear simmering in her bloodstream rose to a dark, violent boil. Her stomach lurched.

  As an afterthought he added, “Did you know the word torture comes from the French word meaning ‘to twist’?”

  His lips curved into a dark, triumphant smile, and she went ice cold.

  “You’re bluffing,” she said, pulse racing. “You can’t lay a finger on me. There are laws against that, and the entire world saw you take me in—”

  “I won’t go into the particulars of how photon cameras work, but the images are quite interesting, to say the least,” he interrupted as if she hadn’t spoken at all. He uncrossed his arms and pulled out the chair opposite hers, then sat with unhurried grace, crossed one leg over the other, and folded his hands into his lap. “Weren’t you curious how, in a seventy-thousand-square-meter museum as you so helpfully pointed out, I knew exactly where to find an invisible woman?”

  She didn’t answer. A cold trickle of sweat rolled down the back of her neck.

  “So I’ll ask you again.” Still smiling, he regarded her with those green, glittering eyes. “And I’ll ask you nicely, one more time, before I hand you over to un médecin. And it won’t be for your injured leg, my dear. The good doctor and I are going to conduct a few…experiments.”

  He emphasized carefully each next word he spoke. “What. Are. You?”

  Horror tightened its sharp, freezing claws around her throat. She sat there like a statue, frozen, unable to answer, unable even to blink.

  The doctor. Interrogation. Experiments.

  Oh God.

  D made the thirteen-hour drive from Rome to Paris in under ten.

  He’d have been even faster on the Ducati, but his plan involved heavy explosives and those took up a lot of room, especially with what he had in mind. So the motorcycle was out, left behind in its usual spot in a parking garage not too far from the sunken church and the entrance to the catacombs where he and the other members of the Roman colony lived.

  Where Eliana also used to live, until everything got so turned around his eyes would cross just thinking about it.

  The Range Rover he drove—pitch black and growly, like his mood—belonged to a disbanded group of Ikati assassins from the colony in Brazil that used to go by the name The Syndicate. The paranoid leaders of the four colonies who comprised the Council of Alphas never left anything to chance, so as soon as The Syndicate went off-line three years ago, The Hunt went live.

  Because you had to have paid killers to round up and dispose of the inevitable deserters who couldn’t live by the most inviolable rule of Ikati Law: secrecy. Second only to allegiance, secrecy was paramount to the survival of them all. Now more than ever.

  And his Eliana—in addition to being the daughter of the dead leader of the Expurgari, the Ikati’s ancient enemy, and the assumed new boss of the organization—had violated that ironclad rule of secrecy in a truly spectacular way, making her the Council’s public enemy number one.

  And making him desperate with a capital D.

  If The Hunt reached her before he did…

  He gripped the steering wheel tighter and stomped the gas pedal to the floor. The SUV lurched forward, roaring over the empty, predawn Paris streets.

  At the same moment, six men dressed exactly alike in tailored dark suits and mirrored aviators stepped off the high-speed Eurostar train at the Gare du Nord station in central Paris and without speaking to one another walked swiftly across the crowded platform and through the automatic glass doors to the pair of sleek black Audis awaiting them at the curb.

  The six split into two groups of three. Two sat in the backseat of each car, one rode shotgun. The driver of each sedan said the identical thing to the new arrivals:

  “Seventeen minutes. Lock and load.” And jerked his head to the stainless steel case in the middle of the backseat.

  Both cars had government plates and so were allowed to idle in a no-stopping zone. If any of the railway police who prowled the station had run the plates, they would have found the cars registered to one Pierre Nettoyeur, senior medical practitioner with the French Defense Health Service and personal physician to the minister of defense.

  Monsieur Nettoyeur was, of course, a fiction. Like others engineered by the Council of Alphas, he existed in digital form purely for the purpose of convenience. The leadership of the Ikati sometimes needed to travel and was occasionally forced to do it quickly and in close proximity to the humans who remained ignorant of their existence.

  Largely ignorant, that is. There had been an incident a few years back involving a disco, a territory dispute, and an eyewitness with a cell phone, but though that particular video made it to the evening news, it was roundly dismissed as fake. And all those witnesses in the club were dismissed as fame-seeking drunks.

  At least publicly. There were those who did not dismiss things like that so easily.

  Nettoyeur was a bit of whimsy—it meant “cleaner” in French, and “cleaner” in certain circles like the ones the eight gentlemen in the Audis moved in referred to an assassin, specifically one hired to manage a bad situation with a very permanent solution—but for this mission the fabricated profession had a much more practical purpose.

  If stopped by the police, the driver would easily be able to explain why he carried such dangerous tranquilizers and weapons, and in such quantity. Monsieur Nettoyeur reported directly to the man who ran France’s entire military and had all the required paperwork to prove it.

  So the paperwork was in order, fake identities had been assumed, travel had been arranged, and all the plans quite carefully made. And now The Hunt had arrived in Paris.

  In less than one hour, Eliana Cardinalis would be captured—or dead.

  There was a rat inside her skull.

  An angry, hungry rat, intent on devouring all the gray matter it could before she clawed her own eyes out to get at it. Eliana needed to kill it and she needed to kill it soon because the agony, oh gods, the agony.

  “One hundred fifty thousand, Édoard,” said a calm male voice, strongly accented with German. The voice drifted to her from somewhere very close but also far, far away. She heard movement, fabric rustling, shoes clicking on tile, smelled the cool tang of rain in the air from a storm that was still hours off. Somewhere in the building a window was cracked and sweet, dew-tinged air leaked in.

  But not in here, wherever here was. In here the air sweltered and smelled of death.

  The rat really hated it. It chewed her brain more viciously than before. Tearing, squealing, clawing, eyes small and blood-red bright.

  “Canine?” said another voice, almost hop
efully.

  The rat lifted its head and hissed. It liked this new speaker as much as she did. Édoard, she remembered past the pain, Édoard was his name. Beautiful hair, beautiful eyes…heart like a shard of obsidian.

  “Bat, actually,” murmured the first voice, surprised. “Top of the auditory range. Extraordinary.”

  “All right, record it and shut it down. We’ll do the UV next and see what we come up with. We’ve got to move her down the hall for that, though. And where the hell is the transfer paperwork? I needed that an hour ago.” Édoard muttered the last bit, irritated.

  “Patience,” his friend answered calmly. “She’s not going anywhere.”

  Then there was a small click, and all at once the rabid rat vanished, the pain in her skull subsided, and the room, spinning and white, swam into focus as she blinked open her eyes.

  “Are you, liebe?” said a tall, white-coated, bespectacled man with ice blue eyes. He was of an indeterminate age somewhere between forty and sixty, smelled of cigarettes, and looked bland as oatmeal. He peered at her over his glasses and smiled, cheerfully benign.

  The banality of evil. Eliana had heard the phrase once to describe the phenomenon whereby the most truly horrific acts were carried out not by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people socialized to accept unspeakable atrocities as “normal.” The holocaust, animal testing, genocide and capital punishment and war.

  Torture.

  It was the man from Gregor’s office, Agent Doe. The one she’d warned him was dangerous that day when she’d come with the Cézanne and he’d been entertaining the police. She knew he was trouble.

  “I hope you burn in hell,” she said to the ice-eyed doctor, her voice oddly hoarse. Then she remembered: she’d been screaming. For a long time, evidently, because her throat felt raw as ground meat.

  The doctor chuckled, unimpressed with her attempt at bravado. Behind her, Édoard gave another of his now-familiar snorts. “Claws, kitty cat. Mind the claws.”

  He walked casually around her wheelchair—she was strapped to a wheelchair, when did that happen?—and stood next to the doctor. The table beside them held a small electronic device with wires and dials and a digital readout blinking numbers in blue against a black screen. The size of a small microwave, it must have been the source of that excruciating pain eating holes in her skull.