Rapture's Edge

by J. T. Geissinger

  Always a chilly fifty-five degrees, the air in the catacombs took on a decidedly electric vibe.

  She prowled to the middle of the grotto and paused. She shrugged off her coat, handed it to an anonymous person who darted forward from the crowd to take it, and let her gaze drift over the sea of bodies. She knew what the cataphiles saw when they looked back at her: choppy blue hair and tight black leather, motorcycle boots and a cinched bustier that left her arms and shoulders bare, the butterfly between her shoulder blades exposed and strangely animated as the shadows played over her skin. For the first time in a long time she’d worn makeup, smoky eye shadow and eyeliner drawn out past the corners of her eyes to accentuate their catlike tilt. Her lips were a curving slash of vermilion.

  “Who wants to go first?” she shouted above the noise.

  A group of four men, money held aloft in fists, pushed to the front of the crowd. One of them—the biggest one, blocky and grinning, with ham-hock hands and the cauliflower ears of a professional boxer—peeled off his shirt, dropped it to the ground, lifted his hand, and pointed a stubby finger at his chest.

  Eliana smiled and thought, The bigger they are, the harder they—

  “I’ll go first,” boomed a deep, masculine voice from the shadows along the back wall, a voice every cell in her body recognized, and every head in the crowd craned around to see.

  They didn’t have to try very hard. He stood head and shoulders above everyone else. He stepped forward from the shadows, and one by one, mouths hanging open, every person shrank back as he passed.

  Demetrius.

  Here.

  Here!

  The music died. Hushed whispers ran through the gathering. A palpable crackle of excitement leapt from person to person, viral, infectious.

  He prowled toward her, exuding a raw current of danger, feral and heated, his eyes locked on hers. When he reached the edge of the crowd he paused. Deliberately, holding her gaze, he slowly unzipped the black hoodie he was wearing, shrugged it off, and let it fall to his feet.

  That was when the air actually turned to fire.

  Audible gasps went up through the crowd. The ham-hock hands of the man who’d just been ready to fight her trembled. Someone whispered an astonished, Merde!

  And beyond her thundering heart and frozen muscles and horror, Eliana could appreciate why.

  Huge, bare-chested, and leonine, D stood exposed, chin lifted, eyes hooded, shoulders thrown back. His body was carved and corded with muscle, a sculptor’s imagination gone wild. From the V-shaped muscles that rose from the waistline of his low-slung leathers to the articulated corrugation of his rock-hard abs to the bulging biceps of his arms and the flare of heavy lats on his back that tapered down to his narrow waist in an inverted triangle, he was magnificent. Breathtaking. Hercules, Adonis, Samson, and Tarzan, all rolled into one.

  He had multiple, elaborate tattoos: the stylized Eye of Horus on his left shoulder, thick black tribal symbols tracked down the length of his right arm, an enormous cobra that snaked its way down from his neck, around his back, and up to his chest, where it coiled, sinuous. In the center of one loop of scales right over his heart there was inked a name in cursive letters with thorny vines and flowers patterned around.

  The letters spelled out Eliana.

  Astonished, she glanced back up at his face, noting the scratches she’d given him had already healed. He was smiling at her, a slow, seductive curve of his lips. “How ’bout a rematch?” he said in a low, amused rumble. “Five hundred says I win this time, too.”

  Son of a bitch.

  The crowd exploded into a frenzy. Bets were placed, money changed hands, and shouting and shoving and chaos ensued. From one corner of her eye she noticed Alexi standing with arms crossed, glaring back and forth between the two of them. The flabbergasted blonde beside him couldn’t tear her wide-eyed gaze from Demetrius’s naked chest.

  He took a step forward. She took a step back. They began to circle each other slowly, warily, their gazes locked together. All the noise and movement faded to the background as her focus honed on his face. His movements. His breath.

  Her own breath was ragged, her pulse a thunderstorm inside her skull.

  “If you think I’m going to lead to you to the others, you’re wrong,” she said, low enough she knew only his ears would be able to hear. Over four hundred miles of hiding spaces in the catacombs; he’d have to search for days to find them, and by then they’d be long gone.

  He cocked an eyebrow. The silver rings in it glinted in the light. “Not here for them, baby girl. I’m here for you.”

  If he meant to anger her with his endearment, it worked. “Nice tattoo, by the way,” she snapped, glancing at his chest. “I’ll be carving that off your dead body later.”

  He tutted. “You’ll have to kill me first. Good luck with that.”

  Then he lunged forward in a blur of bronzed skin and leather and grabbed her.

  She twisted out of his grasp, using all her strength to tear free. But he had her again in an instant and pinned her arms behind her back. Heady and warm and masculine, the scent of his skin flamed hot in her nose as he leaned down and whispered into her ear, “You’re not trying very hard. You need to give the crowd their money’s worth. Butterfly.” She felt the fleet brush of his lips across the flesh of her shoulder, and then he released her and sprang away.

  She whirled around with a savage snarl. He was on the other side of the space cleared by the circle of bodies, hands on his hips, staring at her with a heated expression somewhere between amusement and anticipation. He stretched a hand out and crooked two fingers at her, a silent command.

  Come.

  Oh no. Oh no he didn’t.

  Fury blinded her, and she went on pure instinct, striking out, hitting, kicking. The next few moments were a blur. There was the sensation flying, of falling, of gravity spinning away. Her hands were around his throat, his hands came around her waist, and suddenly she was flat on her back in the center of the fighting ring with Demetrius straddling her body, his hands pinning her wrists to the ground above her head.

  The roar of the crowd was deafening.

  He grinned down at her, victorious, and then, before she could scream the curse that was on the tip of her tongue, his mouth was on hers.

  Ache and salt and softness, the ground cold and hard against her back, Demetrius warm and hard against her chest, pulling greedily at her lips, drinking deep…the sharp edges of her fury began, awfully, to melt.

  He pulled away first, panting, flipped her over, and in one horrifying, fluid movement, flung her over his bent knee so she was staring in shock at the dusty, scuffed ground.

  And then—horror of all horrors—he spanked her.

  In front of everyone.

  Three times.

  Hard.

  The crowd went absolutely insane.

  “That’s for every year you were gone,” D growled, bending near her ear. She kicked and screamed, fighting him, but he held her fast, immovable and ironfisted, trapping both her hands in one of his, leaning his weight onto her back with his forearm.

  Then he spanked her another three times. Her scream of outrage was drowned by the delighted, uproarious cheers of the spectators.

  “That’s for calling me a liar, a murderer, and a traitor.”

  Her cheeks burned molten hot. She couldn’t get away, she was at his complete mercy—

  He spanked her again, three more hard, humiliating times, then lifted her up, took her in his arms, and said, “And that’s for the next three things you’re going to do that will annoy the hell out of me.”

  Then he pulled her against him and kissed her again, in full view of everyone, his hands in her hair and his mouth hot on hers and a low purr of pleasure rumbling deep in his chest.

  “Not cool,” Alexi said from somewhere nearby. “So not cool.”

  She came to her senses and shoved him away just as the crowd broke suddenly apart and began a wild, careening stampede toward the
numerous shadowed tunnels that led out of New Harmony.

  “Cataflics!” someone shouted, pushing by.

  Police.

  Eliana leapt to her feet and bounded away, flashing through the crowd, using the chaos to her advantage to duck into a low access tunnel that was rarely used because of the treacherous, unmarked pits that would suddenly appear in the uneven floor, plunging down into darkness.

  She knew without looking that Demetrius followed not far behind.

  The prostitute was a blonde, as Silas promised, but not his favorite blonde, the one who screamed with such beautiful abandon, the one whose milky pale skin welted to the perfect berry pink, bruised to the most gorgeous mottled purple.

  She wasn’t his favorite, no. She wasn’t young, or pretty, or thin.

  She wasn’t moving at the moment, either.

  Standing at the end of the bed fully dressed, Caesar regarded her in the bleak fluorescent light of the bedside lamp. She lay facedown on the stained and rumpled coverlet, spread-eagle, naked.

  He cocked his head, inspecting her with the cold, clinical calculation of a collector, of a connoisseur. There was good naked and bad naked and everything in between, but the worst was ugly naked, the kind where even a hospital nurse, used to seeing people steeped in shit and blood and vomit, would recoil.

  This bitch was definitely ugly naked.

  Angry red ligature marks marred her wrists and her ankles from where he’d bound her, and a splatter of blood decorated the fleshy, dimpled arch of her hip. Her back was dusted with freckles, soft as a sifting of cinnamon against her pasty skin. Her lank yellow hair—thin, he hated thin hair—lay in limp strands across the pillow and her face, hiding her eyes. Open? Closed? It didn’t matter. He didn’t want to see her eyes, anyway. He always liked to cover their eyes; it was only their screams he wanted.

  This thin-haired whore had given those to him in spades. The plastic ball gag he’d cinched around her mouth and neck had done little to muffle them.

  The hotel room was in the red-light district on the outskirts of Montmartre, seedy and glum, visited by a certain caliber of men who moved furtively through shadows, scurrying like rats. It reeked of sweat and piss and cigarette smoke, of pain and desperation. It was all Caesar could do to block it out. At times like these he cursed his heightened senses, one of the few differences between himself and those ratlike men.

  Perhaps the only difference, if truth be told.

  He lifted his foot and gave the lumpy mattress a sharp kick. The whore didn’t react, didn’t make a sound, just rolled slightly with the bed and then settled back a little too quickly to heavy, unnatural stillness. Her skin was beginning to show the faintest tinge of gray. Outside in the parking lot, unseen beyond the drawn drapes, someone screamed something unintelligible and slammed a car door. Off in the distance, a dog barked three times.

  Yellow hair. Gods, he hated her hair.

  Folded on an old rattan chair against a wall stained and peeling was a blanket, threadbare, patchy, and plain. Caesar spied it and allowed his gaze to linger, arrested, appreciating the only thing of beauty in the room. The color of it. The beautiful, saturated hue.

  Indigo. He’d never really realized how beautiful that particular shade of blue was before.

  His mouth watered. Another erection—much firmer than the one he’d inflicted on the whore—stirred to life in his pants.

  Slowly, enjoying the anticipation, lust and rage simmering in his blood like a rising fever, Caesar crossed from the bed to the chair against the wall. He took up the blanket in his hands. He pressed it to his nose, his lips. He moved to the bed, where he stood over the dead prostitute and looked down at her, repulsed. But once he’d carefully arranged the blanket over her head—blocking out her face, her eyes, her ugly yellow hair, everything personal about her—he felt better.

  He felt right.

  He returned to his place at the foot of the bed and admired his handiwork.

  He imagined the blue blanket wasn’t a blanket at all, but hair. Hair so thick and dark and lovely it could never be rendered plain by an indifferent cut, an inexperienced dye job.

  Hair so midnight blue it mimicked the heavens and should be crowned with stars.

  Hair like…his sister’s.

  Mouth watering, heart pounding in his chest, Caesar began, slowly, to work open the buckle of his belt.

  “Everything is arranged for the meeting?”

  The man in the fedora inclined his head, murmured respectfully, “Ita, domine meus.”

  Yes, my lord. How Silas loved the unchanging ways of the Church. Everyone spoke Latin, no one questioned authority, underlings knew their place. He’d refused to speak Latin since he’d left the Roman catacombs, but he supposed he could bend that rule today, this being a special occasion.

  After all, it wasn’t every day you arranged to meet the pope.

  “Excellens,” he answered, and the man in the fedora smiled.

  Their meeting place was a tiny café with strong espresso, surly waitstaff, and an excellent view of the Place du Tertre, a cobblestoned square ringed by small shops topped with tidy red awnings. Strung through the bare branches of trees all around were tiny blue lights, and sparkling white along curbs and windowsills was a confectioner’s dusting of snow. In spite of the hour and the dropping temperature, the square still buzzed with shoppers and diners and row after row of artists with easels, hawking portraits to all the tourists. This close to Christmas everything stayed open late.

  To the slight, smiling man in the fedora and cloak sitting across from him at the scrolled iron café table, Silas said, “The timing is very important. Just before his Christmas morning speech would be ideal. We won’t keep His Holiness long, of course. He has so many important matters to attend to that day.”

  Silas sent a little nudge along with these words, a hint of agreeability that had the man nodding.

  “Il papa is eager to meet you, domine meus. He had only the highest respect for your predecessor, and he knows the work you do is necessary to our Mother the Church. To keep her safe from the evil that would prevail were we not so vigilant.” His face darkened. “These devils are everywhere these days.”

  Oh, he really had no idea. Silas had to work hard to keep a straight face. “Give the cardinal my warm regards, will you? Please thank him for arranging the meeting and for his service. He will be rewarded handsomely for his loyalty. As will you all.”

  Again the respectful incline of the head. They exchanged a few more words, particulars of timing and travel, until Silas discreetly looked at his watch. Without needing to be told, the man knew the meeting was over and rose from his chair.

  “Ire cum Deus,” he murmured as a farewell. He lifted his hand to tip his hat, and Silas saw the small, black tattoo on his inner wrist, a tattoo all his kind shared: a headless panther run through with a spear. The man turned and made his way across the busy square, and Silas watched him go until he slipped into the shadows between two buildings and was lost from sight.

  Go with God. It had been their motto since time immemorial, three words spoken as a blessing or farewell or any number of things in between. Strange how fanatics always needed some kind of slogan. Silas played along with it, as had Dominus before him, as had all the nonhuman leaders of this decidedly human group of hunters.

  Expurgari, they called themselves. The purifiers. What a laugh. Almost a thousand years since the Inquisition began and their little troupe of Church-sanctioned killers formed, and they still had no idea what kind of monsters really pulled their strings.

  Soon, though. Very soon they’d find out.

  He tossed a few coins to the table and rose, smiling languidly at the girl who rushed over to clear his plate. Plain as vanilla pudding, she blushed and looked down. Tempting, but he had no time to dally this evening. He had more important matters to attend.

  He had a murder to plan, a revolution to lead, an empire to overthrow.

  He was much too busy to get sidetracked n
ow.

  It was the strangest place D had ever seen.

  Vast and dark and cavernous, it was some kind of underground cathedral, a monument erected to exalt the talent of anonymous street artists and remember the long-forgotten dead. Graffiti, vivid as nightmares, was everywhere. Splashed over the rock walls in lurid swaths of purple and black and red, yellow flowers painted on towering columns, a swirl of kaleidoscope color on the rounded cavern ceiling far above his head. There were flying gold dragons and mincing white geisha and snarling pale ghouls with clawed hands reaching out. There were enormous letters in some forgotten alphabet and an eight-foot-tall depiction of a nude woman with one arm draped over her head.

  But the bones were far more bizarre than the artwork.

  Rising all the way to the ceiling along one long, curving wall was displayed an artfully arranged array of human bones. Countless bones, possibly thousands, femurs and ribs and skulls stacked with careful, almost reverent precision. It was an ossuary, ghoulish in its grandeur, made all the more eerie by the hundreds of candles that glowed along its walls.

  And somewhere in this empire of paint and bones, Eliana was hiding.

  He couldn’t see her but he felt her, that frisson that tingled over every inch of his skin like thunderclouds just before they disgorged a bolt of lightning. He took another step forward into the cool, echoing space, his gaze searching every shadowed corner, every crevice, every hiding place.

  She was nowhere to be seen.

  “I’m not here to hurt you, Eliana.” His voice carried through the quiet space, echoing softly and then dying to silence. The naked graffiti woman seemed to mock him with her sly, painted smile. “I only want to talk. I’ll say what I have to say, and then I’ll leave. You have my word.”

  The sound of dripping water. A candle in a niche in the wall behind him sputtered out. Then a disembodied voice from somewhere in front of him said with gentle sarcasm, “Your word? Well, how reassuring.”

  He froze. The voice, he was sure of it, came from the deepest shadow of the room, a hollow created by the intersection of two massive, perpendicular slabs of limestone. He narrowed his eyes, stretched his senses, and allowed every bit of ambient light to enter his swiftly dilating pupils. Beneath the veil of shadows where he was certain the voice originated lurked only painted mushrooms that sprouted wild from the cavern floor, foresting the two walls of rock with slender stalks and spreading caps that loomed cartoonishly large.