Rapture's Edge

by J. T. Geissinger

  “Demetrius!”

  “She slept with him, my lord. I overheard her talking with Melliane—”

  “Slept with him!” Caesar screeched, eyes bulging. The world ground to a halt.

  “He’s somehow convinced her I’ve been lying to her, to all of you—”

  “SLEPT WITH HIM!”

  Caesar felt as if a bomb had detonated inside his body. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t move. He was frozen with horror and a fury so gargantuan it felt nuclear. She’d slept with the vermin who’d murdered their father. Slept with him. Slept with him. It kept slapping against the inside of his skull like a trapped bird.

  “Kill her,” he choked out. Silas and Aldo stared at him. The fire crackled merrily, sending up feathers of glowing ash and whorls of smoke. “We have to kill her! She’s a traitor! She’s—she’s a whore!”

  Slowly, Silas smiled. It was more of a grimace the way his lips peeled back over his teeth, but the blood was pounding through Caesar’s veins and there was a booming in his head and he couldn’t see much of anything anymore because the room had started to spin.

  Slept with him. Slept with him.

  He imagined it in stunning, Technicolor detail, their naked bodies pressed together, the warrior’s big hands all over her bare flesh, her wanton moans and their sweat and the squeaking of a mattress beneath them—

  Aldo caught him as he staggered sideways. Caesar shoved him away and began pacing to and fro with his hands clenched in his hair to manage his sudden dizziness, the acid burning his lungs. Hatred glittered through him, consuming, and Caesar had never wanted to kill something—hurt something—so much in his entire life.

  He swung around and spied the dagger in Silas’s hand. “What are you doing with that dagger, Silas?” he hissed, prowling forward.

  Silas’s face hardened. Sweat dripped from his chin. “I have to stop the bleeding, my lord.”

  Caesar looked at the dagger, at the fire, and understood in a flash that was like a thunderbolt. He yanked the dagger from Silas’s hand, held it over the fire until the tip glowed white hot and his own fingers were blistering, and then spat at Aldo, “Hold him.” He looked back at Silas, and his smile was like an animal’s, rabid and wild. “This is going to hurt.”

  A man walking his dog down a quiet residential street six blocks away heard the screams. He stopped and crossed himself, peering up. A mother walking her two children to school heard it, too, and so did the fruit vendor and his wife setting up their stall on the Rue de Marquet. Many more heard it as well, the long, eerie shriek that seemed to descend from the sky itself, echoing off walls and trees and buildings before being cut off abruptly, leaving all to wonder just what had caused such a terrible noise.

  Or who.

  Eliana had no idea how much time had passed. It might have been minutes, it might have been hours. It might have even been centuries for all her dead heart could tell.

  She was slumped against the wall in the long corridor on the level of the bedrooms, her arms resting on her bent knees, staring down at the fibers of the black carpet, seeing nothing. Demetrius had been inside the room with Mel since they arrived. She’d brought him hot water in pans and all the towels she could find, then left him alone as he’d asked. Her last sight of Mel had been of her still, pale body lying on the bed, Demetrius leaning over her with a scalpel in one hand.

  She would die. Eliana was sure of it. She’d lost too much blood. She would die.

  Her fault. Her fault. So much blood and chaos and the unending, nearly unendurable agony of living with half-truths and twisted lies that passed for their sad reality. And what was the point of it all, really? More and more and more years of living on the run and hiding from still more people she once thought were her friends and family. More dragging days and endless nights, hoping for a future that would probably never come, more betrayal, more assassins, a future of living in the open with another species that seemed to prefer her dead, or—worse—caged?

  The answer was: there was no point. It had all been a pipe dream, a castle built in the sand. Emptied of the dreams that had sustained her for so long, she felt gutted. She felt hollowed out.

  The door cracked open. Eliana’s head snapped around. She staggered to her feet.

  “Well?”

  Demetrius looked as if he’d gone down to hell to do battle with demons, and lost. His face was strained, his shoulders were hunched forward in an attitude of defeat, and there were dark smudges of blue under his eyes which, to her great horror, reflected the defeat in his posture. The utter lack of hope.

  “You should sit with her,” was his cryptic response, and then he brushed past her and walked slowly up the twisting stairs to the level above.

  No. Her heart began to pound it out like a drumbeat in her chest. No. No. No. No.

  She went into the room and had to bite her lip to keep from sobbing.

  There was a pile of bloody towels in one corner, gruesomely vivid, pans full of now cold water that had all turned red pushed against the baseboards along one wall. A tray of bloodied instruments lay on a dresser near the door, and Mel’s ruined shirt hung from the back of a chair, tossed there in an obvious rush. And Mel was on the bed, still, silent as a corpse.

  D had cleaned her and washed the blood from her face and arms, and he’d covered her up to her neck with a sheet and folded her hands over her chest. She was peaceful and ghostly pale, and if she wasn’t already dead, she looked as if she soon would be.

  On the white sheet just at the center of her chest was a tiny spot of red.

  She sank down beside the bed and took Mel’s icy hand in her own. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

  Mel didn’t answer. She didn’t move. The long dark plait of her hair had come undone and lay bedraggled on the pillow, wisps like eiderdown from the softest underbelly of a black swan. With shaking hands, Eliana unwound the braid and ran her fingers through the strands, tidying them, brushing them smooth over the pillow until they lay in a glossy fan all around her head. She was barely holding herself together, and only because she thought Mel would be horrified if she could see her face, all screwed up and red with the effort not to cry. She knew she’d tell her to snap out of it and grow a pair, and then she’d laugh her wonderful, witchy laugh at what a sissy she’d turned out to be after all.

  Eliana thought maybe she should pray, but all that came out of her mouth was a plea instead. “Please. Please, Mel. Don’t leave me. Don’t die. Please don’t die.”

  But Mel’s pale lips formed no encouraging words, and her bluish lids stayed closed, and finally the dam broke and Eliana dissolved into tears. Her body was wracked with sobs, and she gave herself over to it, kneeling at the bedside with her face pressed to the mattress, Mel’s hand beneath her forehead, her cold, cold fingers getting wet with tears.

  Time passed. Her tears slowed, then stopped. Her legs went numb. She slid from her knees and sagged against the bed, still clinging to Mel’s hand, unwilling to let go. Her lids grew heavy and she let herself drift, and finally she fell asleep in the same spot, still holding Mel’s hand.

  And that’s exactly how D found the two of them when he returned hours later.

  He stood in the doorway a long, silent moment, watching with a heavy heart. He thought it might only be moments now; in fact, he was surprised Mel hadn’t already passed into the arms of Anubis, god of the afterlife. He’d seen much stronger men than she bleed out and die from lesser wounds.

  She was a fighter, but she wasn’t immortal. There was only so much trauma a body could take. He’d done what he could—stopped the bleeding, repaired the ruptured artery and the torn flesh around the wound—but she’d lost too much blood, and he didn’t have the tools to do a transfusion. What was left of his hope was quickly fading.

  His gaze rested on Eliana. In sleep she looked younger and vulnerable as she never did when awake. Her face had lost all its hard edges, and her generous mouth was slack. She looked almost a
s peaceful as Mel did, except for the little line between the dark crescents of her brows. Slumped on the floor against the bed, her head bowed and her knees drawn up to her chest, she also looked cramped and uncomfortable, and he couldn’t bear to see her like that. D drew a breath and moved forward.

  He picked her up as gently as he could without waking her and disentangled her hand from Mel’s. She made a little protesting noise but didn’t open her eyes, and when he lifted her she rested her head against his chest and sighed like a child. When she wound her arms around his neck, he had to swallow around the tightness in his throat.

  He carried her to the bedroom he thought of as theirs, though there was certainly no they, she’d made that perfectly clear. He laid her down, gently removed her boots, and unclipped her sword from her belt, putting it aside on the table beside the bed so she could see it as soon as she opened her eyes and know he hadn’t tried to disarm her. He leaned down to pull the sheet over her, and when he straightened she was awake, watching him.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, eyes shining. “I know you did all you could. So…thank you.”

  He nodded. His heart did a strange, painful flip-flop inside his chest. He turned to go, but she sat up and caught him by the hand, and he looked back at her, arrested.

  “Please. I…”

  She seemed unable to go on. Her throat worked, and her face held the expression of someone entirely lost, or surrendered. Their eyes held, and hers were wet, beseeching. Her voice breaking, she said, “Demetrius.”

  She said his name like it meant something else, like it meant something to her, and he had to gather every ounce of his will not to fall at her feet, had to physically force himself to stand there with his face wiped clean of emotion because that’s the way she wanted it between them, that’s what she’d proven by leaving him in the middle of the night and putting her hand on her sword at the abbey and with the phone call to Alexi, whoever the hell that bastard was. And he knew, he knew on some level exactly who Alexi was, but he wanted to unknow it. He wanted to burn it out of his mind.

  But he couldn’t. He wouldn’t. Lying to himself was never his strong suit.

  “You should get some rest,” he said quietly. “I’ll go in. I’ll wake you in case…I’ll wake you in a little while, and we can sit together with her. There’s nothing else we can do tonight.”

  Her look was pure torture. He couldn’t remember ever seeing such anguish on someone’s face, and the fact that it was her face—her beloved, beautiful face—made it all the more terrible. He looked away, drew his hand away, but she tightened her fingers around his and used his hand to pull herself up so she stood in front of him, just inches away, staring up into his face. She was shaking, shaking and breathing as if she’d just run from across the city and looking into him as if she was trying to find some kind of answer to a question she hadn’t asked.

  What he saw when he looked back at her was someone whose soul was in cinders.

  “I don’t know how to love you,” she whispered. “I don’t even know if I can. I’ve spent years cursing your name, wishing you dead, and years before that infatuated with you and I hardly even knew you and almost just as soon as I began to get to know you, we—you—it was over and I was here and you were there and everything was so wrong—so wrong and I thought it could never be fixed but now I don’t know what to think—I don’t know what to do—I don’t—I don’t know anything…”

  She blurted it out in one long, run-on sentence, breathless and broken and stammering her way through it until she petered out to silence at the end and stared at him, eyes huge and dark and haunted. D stood there in shock, stomping down his heart when it wanted to soar out of his chest, smothering the heat and the passion that rose in him like magic conjured from a sorcerer’s spell, and he felt bathed in drenching golden sunlight, his arms longing to crush her to him, a sharp, sweet thrill running through him as if he were a live wire, conducting electricity through his veins.

  Then he thought of Alexi, of her face when she’d called him, her palpable relief, and the sweet thrill turned sour. She might not know how to love him, but it certainly seemed like she knew how to love someone else.

  Bitterly, hating himself because jealousy was a pettiness he’d once thought beneath him, he said, “It must be easier, having the kind of heart that lets you choose what you want. Unfortunately, I don’t have that problem.”

  And he turned around and walked out of the room without looking back, each step fresh misery, every beat of his heart a shrill, clanging din in his ears.

  That day spun by like a dream, shifting and hazy. Eliana slept, but when she awoke after dark she was still exhausted, staggering when she stood from the bed. Her body felt bruised and broken, and her heart felt like a little cold lump of coal inside her chest.

  She went to Mel first, but she remained unchanged from when she’d last seen her hours before—pale skin and a faint heartbeat and almost imperceptible breathing. It was a miracle she was still hanging on, but life clung to her like a lover clings to a parting beloved, returning again and again for one final kiss before leaving for good.

  She called Alexi; her people were safe. Bettina and Fabi had led seventeen to the Tabernacle; the rest had sided with Silas and stayed.

  Seventeen of twenty-four. Better than she dared hope. Good thing Alexi’s place was big.

  She told him she’d see him soon and then rang off and sat staring at the wall, at a loss what to do next. Eat, she supposed, though she had no appetite. Food seemed like an unnecessary luxury somehow, and eating selfish. How could she eat now? How could she eat ever again?

  Then she was ashamed for feeling sorry for herself. She had people who were relying on her. She had to be strong for them. She would be.

  She dragged herself out of the room and down the hallway. At the top of the stairs she found a room obviously decorated by a man. The size of the television alone would have been enough proof, but everything else was utterly masculine, too. Angular leather furniture, a glass and metal coffee table, no plants or bric-a-brac a woman might have used to soften the starkness of all that charcoal gray and black of the chairs and sofas and walls. At the far end of the long room was an open door to a kitchen, with a dining room beyond.

  And in a chair in the dining room sat Demetrius, perfectly still, staring down at a cell phone that lay on the table in front of him between his spread hands.

  She swallowed, steadying herself, and stood straight. She took a step forward into the room, and at that moment, the cell phone in front of him rang.

  But he’d noticed her movement. A fleeting look crossed his face, pain or something darker, she couldn’t tell because it was quickly extinguished as he abruptly stood, ignoring the shrilly ringing phone and focusing all his attention on her.

  A flash of déjà vu jolted through her. She saw him in a million fleeting memories, doing this exact thing. No matter what he’d been doing, no matter with whom, he always stood whenever she entered a room. Always. The realization made her chest constrict.

  The phone continued to ring. Neither one of them made another move.

  Whoever was calling was persistent, because her nerves were pulled to near-breaking when the ringing finally stopped. The sudden silence was deafening.

  “You look tired,” he finally said. His gaze moved over her face to her hair, which she hadn’t bothered to comb and stuck up in crazy tufts over her head.

  She didn’t have the energy to feel defensive. “I slept.”

  His look narrowed. “When was the last time you ate?”

  She thought about it and then shrugged. “Don’t know.”

  He pointed to the chair across from him. “Sit.”

  “Demetrius—”

  “Eliana,” he said in a tone that indicated he wasn’t tolerating any lip, “sit.”

  She sat.

  “Good. Now stay.”

  Her lips tightened. Stay? Like a dog? But she kept her mouth shut.

  Cabinets ope
ned and closed, the refrigerator opened and closed, the microwave hummed and chimed, liquid was poured into a glass. She didn’t see any of it because she didn’t turn around to look because she was staying—as instructed—put.

  When he gently set the plate in front of her and she looked down, all her irritation vanished and she felt…she felt…gratitude. And wonder. Roasted chicken, garlic mashed potatoes, buttered green beans—she’d been expecting a frozen dinner, a few pieces of meat slapped between slices of bread.

  “What’s this?”

  She looked up at him, but he’d turned away so she couldn’t see his face. “There wasn’t any food here. Had to go out and get some.”

  She looked back at the plate, perplexed. “You…cooked?”

  His low chuckle drew her eyes to him again. He was leaning against the kitchen counter, arms crossed over his chest, one corner of his mouth quirked up in amusement. “You sound surprised.”

  “I am surprised. Since when do you cook?”

  His face darkened. He glanced away. “Since I needed a hobby. To keep me from—to pass the time.”

  There was so much more to that, she felt it all underneath the simple words. But he glanced back at her, and his face had cleared.

  “You should taste my sweet potato pie. It’s killer.”

  Her mouth opened. It closed. It opened again and she said, with feeling, “Wow.”

  He gave her a true smile then, one that lit his face and his eyes and brought out a dimple in his cheek. She had to look away because she thought she’d never seen him look so beautiful. Tattoos and piercings and acres of muscles and a glower able to freeze lava that he wore more often than not and still he was always the most beautiful thing to her, masculine and strong and real.

  She looked at the plate and was appalled to find it swimming in the moisture that had gathered in her eyes. He set silverware down and a glass of white wine and then sat beside her. She knew without looking his eyes were on her, intent.

  “Eat,” he said softly.