Rapture's Edge

by J. T. Geissinger

The police were acting as his very own armed guards. Even more interesting.

  “Speaking of God, are you a religious man, MacGregor?”

  Gregor blinked over at him and watched as Doe withdrew a cigarette from his inner coat pocket, lit it, and drew the tip into flame. His deep, satisfied exhalation sent out a cloud of smoke.

  “I assume there’s a point you’re trying to make, Doe. Make it.”

  Doe chuckled. “Neither am I, as it happens. But there are things we don’t understand in this world, wouldn’t you agree? Things beyond our comprehension? Things…you may have even seen yourself. In the very flesh.”

  Gregor stared at him, giving nothing away.

  “Have you seen the video of your quite spectacular arrival at the hospital? No? Hmm. Well, it’s actually not that interesting”—his one good eye, icy blue, peering at him from behind round spectacles, grew positively arctic—“when you compare it to the video we retrieved from the security cameras at your building. Amazing system you have there. State of the art, I’m told.”

  “Doe—”

  He leaned forward in the chair, suddenly intent, all humor vanished. “Did you know what she was all along? Did you have any idea what you were really dealing with?”

  Gregor leaned back into the pillow, silent, and Doe struggled to his feet. From another pocket he removed a cell phone and held it up between two fingers. “A copy of the feed. It’s been edited. I thought you might enjoy the highlights.”

  He touched a button and then edged nearer to Gregor, holding the phone out. He took it, gazed down at the small square screen, and found he could not look away.

  In all his life, he’d never seen anything move like they did. They’d crawled up the building’s exterior glass walls—literally crawled, like lizards—and entered from the roof. From a dozen different perspectives he saw the assassins running, jumping, bounding, all so quickly their movements were just an on-screen blur. He saw himself and Eliana in the stairwells, the chase in the parking garage, the horrifying impact with the metal door. He saw the Ferrari vanish into the distance out of camera range, but not before he saw, edited from a dozen different angles, five grown men morph into snarling animals and give chase.

  Panthers. They turned into panthers, impossibly huge and black.

  His skin crawled.

  Doe removed the camera from his cold fingers and smiled at the look on Gregor’s face. “Exactly my reaction. I think we’re going to have to build a lot more zoos.”

  He returned to his chair and finished his cigarette in silence while Gregor lay back against the pillow, suddenly exhausted. He stared at the ceiling, his brain on an endless replay loop. Men with guns; panthers. Men with guns; panthers.

  “As I said before,” Doe murmured, stubbing out the cigarette on the plastic arm of the chair, “it’s not you we want. We want her. We want them. Tell us everything you know, and all charges against you will be dropped. And you won’t receive any more visits from the police, I can guarantee it.”

  She’d been right about having many enemies, Gregor thought as he watched a fly march across the ceiling tiles above. Her own kind wanted to see her dead, this crazy German bastard wanted to stick her in a zoo…she was going to need more guns.

  Gregor turned his attention back to Agent Doe. He smiled, humorless. “I think I just realized I have a terrible case of amnesia. Who are you again?”

  Doe shook his head, disappointed. “Why would you protect them? Why would you risk imprisonment? They’re only animals, MacGregor.” He said the word animals with a sneer and a delicate shudder that wiped the smile right off Gregor’s face.

  “So are we,” he said, his voice hard. “So are we, Doe, but some of us are better animals than others. She told me what you did to her. She told me about the tests, about the torture. So what does that make you?”

  Doe stared at him for a long, long, moment, scrutinizing Gregor’s face from his one visible eye. “I am a patriot,” he finally said. “A protector of our way of life and of our race.”

  “Hitler thought the same thing.”

  There was another silence, long and cavernous, broken only by the beeping of Gregor’s heart monitor, now wildly erratic.

  “Lay down with dogs and you get up with fleas, MacGregor,” Doe said softly, one hand wrapped in a death grip around his cane. He stood slowly, in obvious pain, favoring one leg and leaning heavily on the cane. “This is not over. This is only the beginning. Do you think these creatures will be content to live forever in the shadows? Our information indicates there are hundreds of them, possibly thousands. Maybe more; there’s no way to be sure. But consider what will happen if they one day decide humans have been at the top of the food chain too long. You’ve seen what they can do.” He patted the pocket of his suit jacket where he’d stashed the phone. “And that is only the tip of the iceberg, as they say. They’re killers, MacGregor. They’re monsters. Their potential to cause harm to the human race is unlimited. Consider that carefully when you think of the reasons you are protecting your lady friend.”

  He moved slowly to the door. One of the gendarmes saw his approach through the glass and swung the door open for him, holding it as he drew near. He paused in the doorway and looked back at Gregor over his shoulder. His gaze was ghostly pale and eerie as it rested on him.

  “You will have plenty of time to ponder all that in prison, I’m sure.”

  The hospital door was the kind that had a magnet on it, so when pushed against a wall with another magnet, it stuck and held. Agent Doe passed through the door, but because the gendarme had pushed it all the way open it stayed that way, and Gregor was able to overhear a few words as he made a phone call from his cell phone, walking slowly away from his room and down the hall.

  “Thirteen here. Section Thirty. Put me through to the chairman. Yes, I’ll hold.”

  He rounded a corner and limped out of sight.

  Crouched in the same spot she’d been hunkered down in for the past six hours, Eliana’s legs were numb.

  The tall, turreted red brick structure long ago used as a furnace and chimney to burn waste during construction of the Eiffel Tower was dwarfed by the tower itself, but on its little grassy hill directly beside it, provided a perfect, unobstructed view of the surrounding area. She’d be able to see D’s approach from any direction.

  She’d be able to see if he brought anyone else with him.

  Twilight conspired to paint Paris in a romantic glow perfectly unsuited to her mood. It was cold but lovely; light snowfall tinted the sky all silver and haze and muffled the roar of the cars and buses on the Avenue Gustave Eiffel to the south. The lights from the port on the river Seine snaking by to her north sparkled in long, winking waves off the dark water. The tower itself was awash in gold light from the thousands of lamps that illumed it, a spear of brilliance that rose straight up to the heavens from the heart of the greatest city in the world. Everything was beautiful.

  Everything was awful.

  She hadn’t been able to string together a single coherent thought all day. After the catacomb police—a separate division of the force tasked with clearing out the cataphiles on a regular basis—had finally left and the dark corridors were once again silent, Eliana had gone aboveground and wandered the streets for nearly a full day, blank-eyed and hollow. She didn’t see the pedestrians Christmas shopping who thronged the quaint, cobblestone lanes and chic boulevards; she didn’t care when she bumped into them and they skittered away, frightened by whatever look must have been on her face.

  She could guess it wasn’t friendly. Or particularly sane.

  Curiously, she couldn’t feel it. She wasn’t feeling much of anything at all, except a tightness in her chest that wouldn’t go away and a growing tension in her muscles that felt like a winch, constricting. There was a black cloud over her head, descending, engulfing her in darkness.

  A tingle of recognition snapped her head around and pulled her out of the morass she’d been lingering in with an abrupt jolt, as i
f she’d been plucked from quicksand. Her heart began to pound. Her hands began to shake.

  Because there he was. Walking slowly toward the ticket booth at the south foot of the tower marked pilier sud, queuing up like a regular person with all the other tourists, there he was, dressed identically to her in boots and black leather, a long coat with the collar turned up against the wind.

  He stood out like a lion in a flock of dozing lambs.

  A lion that carried, in one large hand, a small parcel wrapped in butcher paper.

  Instead of the elevators with most of the tourists who preferred to avoid exposure to the cold, Demetrius took the narrow stairs in the south leg of the tower to the second floor. She watched him as he ascended through the open latticed network of iron until he reached the wide platform. Moving with slow deliberation, shouldering through the thinning crowd who darted aside to let him pass like a school of minnows fleeing from a shark, he went to the railing and looked out. He closed his eyes and stayed that way for several moments, unmoving, his coat flapping and billowing around his spread legs, while Eliana watched from her hidden perch, feeling as if her heart would claw itself out of her chest.

  Then he turned his head, and across the distance his eyes found hers, as if he knew where she’d been hiding all along. As if he’d felt her watching.

  She stood. She stared back at him. Even with the distance, everything was between them, palpable as rain, bright as summer sunlight. His gaze was heat across her face, his dark eyes burned, just staring at her, not a muscle moving, searing intensity and the crackle of invisible flame. She felt pinned by that look, the stark longing in it, the hunger, raw and real. She felt powerless against it, and suddenly a wave of anguish rose up in her, a longing to match his own, and she had to look away.

  She turned to the stairs of the old chimney and began the winding descent down.

  When she finally stood beside him on the second-floor observation deck and looked out over the vast, sparkling majesty of Paris on a winter evening, she had herself a little bit more under control.

  D didn’t turn to look at her. He acknowledged her presence with a slight bow of his head, but that was all. They stood silently for a while, shoulder width apart, listening to people chatter in a dozen different languages, feeling the wind on their faces. Up here it was colder, the flakes of snow more biting than below.

  “I have this memory of you,” he said in a low, solemn voice, still looking out over the city. She kept her own eyes on the view as well as he continued to speak. “You were sixteen, maybe seventeen. It was the winter solstice, and everyone had gathered in the great room after the ceremony in the temple for the feast of Horus.”

  Eliana closed her eyes, remembering the cavernous great room they used on festival days, the smell of hot beeswax and incense, the glow of a thousand candles in iron braziers and chandeliers, the shouting and laughter, the heat of so many bodies pressed close together at long wooden tables as they feasted on suckling pig and roasted beef and delicacies from all over the world, brought in to celebrate the birthday of their patron god.

  “You were sitting with your father and brother at the main table. I was standing behind you, against the wall, on duty as always. The Bellatorum had drawn straws to see who would stand guard during the feast, and I was the one who drew the short straw. It didn’t matter anyway; the rest of them had women they wanted to go to, but I had no one, so I didn’t mind.

  “But you kept glancing back at me, with this worried look on your face. I didn’t dare look at you, but I couldn’t figure out why the king’s daughter, the precious spem futuri, would be paying the slightest attention to me.”

  Hope for the future: that’s what the elders had called her, though she never knew exactly why. He went on and his voice grew softer, tinged with something close to awe.

  “Then when your father was distracted by someone who’d come to speak with him, you called one of the servants to you and passed her something. You whispered something to her, and I could tell she was trying to talk you out of whatever you’d said. She looked very angry, but you insisted, and eventually she made some pretense to walk by me and hand me what you had given her.”

  D glanced down at her. “An apple. You gave her an apple to give to me.”

  “You looked hungry,” Eliana whispered. “You looked miserable, standing there alone. I thought you might like something to eat.”

  “You kept sending her back, every chance you could, too, didn’t you? Pieces of fruit and cheese, bread, candy.”

  “You wouldn’t eat any of it. I had to keep trying until I found something you liked.”

  He turned to her, staring down at her with all the intensity from before still burning in his eyes. “I liked all of it. I couldn’t eat it because I was on duty, but I liked all of it. You were the only person in that room of thousands who gave a damn about me, the one person with the least reason to. You were kind to me. You noticed me. You looked at me, when everyone else went to great lengths to avoid doing that. Everyone else was terrified of me, and yet you never were. You smiled at me whenever we passed. You said hello.” His voice dropped. “You said my name. Said it like you liked it…like you liked me. That was the beginning for me. Just like that apple, you were this perfect, delicious thing I hungered for with every cell in my body, but was forbidden to eat.”

  “Stop,” she whispered, frozen in place. “Please. Stop.”

  They stood like that, not moving, a foot apart, his gaze searing, hers trained on some spot in the distance because she couldn’t bear to look at him.

  Finally, around the lump in her throat, she said, “You brought it?”

  From the corner of her eye she saw him nod. She held out her hand. He placed the paper-wrapped bundle in it, and she closed her fingers around it, hard. “I’m leaving now.”

  “If—afterward—I’ll be at the same place I brought you after the police station. The safe house. You remember where it is?”

  She glanced at him, her eyes as freezing as the wind. “I won’t come. Don’t wait.”

  He said nothing, just looked at her. She slowly backed away, clutching the parcel to her chest. “I won’t come,” she said again, but he didn’t even nod.

  Eliana turned and fled.

  D did wait, though. His heart gave him no other choice.

  He managed to convince Celian and Lix and Constantine that it was best if they left the safe house and returned to Rome. She’d mistake their presence if she did show up, and leaving the Roman colony unprotected for longer than absolutely necessary at a time like this was unthinkable. Celian had brought the journal and gotten him the few days’ reprieve from the confederate colonies that he’d petitioned for, and all he had left to do was see if she would come to him. In only a few hours, his reprieve would expire.

  If Eliana didn’t come, he would turn himself in to the Council and let Fate have its way with him. If she didn’t come, nothing mattered anyway. Let them do their worst.

  In the meantime, he’d have to find some other way to convince them she was innocent of her father’s treachery. Because he knew she was. He knew it to the marrow of his bones.

  He was pondering that, lying on the couch in the dark subterranean living room of the safe house with his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling, when he heard a noise.

  The sound of knocking, angry and loud.

  Two stories above, in the furnished and unused house that hid three levels of secrets below, someone was pounding on the front door.

  With his heart in his throat, he leapt to his feet, took the stairs four at a time, and ran, literally flat-out ran to the door. He didn’t even bother looking through the peephole to see who was there—he didn’t need to. Now he smelled her, he felt her, and his blood scorched through his veins like liquid fire.

  He threw the door open, and a shock of cold night air, sucked in from outside, hit him in the face.

  Then a fist hit him in the face.

  “You knew!” Eliana shr
ieked, loud as a banshee. “You knew and you never told me! How could you not tell me?”

  She’d caught him square in the jaw with the punch. It snapped his head around but didn’t budge him, but now she gave him a shove with both hands on his chest that actually set him back on his heels. He stepped back to regain his balance, and she was on him before he could, another fist in his face, wild swinging punches that were all fury and no control, snarling like a lion sprung from a cage.

  He spun away and managed to kick the front door shut before she was on him again, pummeling him, cursing him. He thought she might actually cause more damage to herself than to him, so he grabbed both her wrists and pinned them behind her back.

  “Settle!” he growled, having to use a surprising amount of his strength to keep her contained as she twisted and fought him. He pulled her up hard against his body and said it again, into her ear. After a second, she did settle, though her breathing remained wild, her heartbeat loud enough for him to hear in the silence of the room. She leaned her head against his shoulder.

  “You knew,” she panted, halfway between a whisper and a sob. “You knew all along what he was really like, and I…I…God, I was so blind. I was so stupid!”

  He let go of her wrists and crushed her to him. Her body shook against his. “You weren’t stupid. He didn’t let you see. He controlled all of us. There was no way you could have known—”

  “But you did!” Her voice rose to a near-hysterical pitch. “And you didn’t tell me! I went around in ignorance for my entire life, and you knew he was a monster, and I’ll never forgive you for that, never, never, never!”

  She broke away from him and began stalking around the room, wild-eyed and enraged. She tore a picture from the wall and threw it with a scream across the living room. A lamp met her wrath next, destroyed in an explosion of flying ceramic and splintered wood as it was slammed against a desk.

  “Everything was lies! My entire life—lies!”

  She was beyond herself, beyond rational thought, beautiful and violent like an avenging angel, a whirlwind of destruction. D watched her tear through the room with a calm that didn’t match the circumstances, because he knew on some basic level that this was exactly what she needed at this moment. She needed to get it out. All that rage and betrayal and pain needed to come out.