Rapture's Edge

by J. T. Geissinger

  It’s a terrible feeling, trying not to cry, pretending everything is okay and getting your face and body to cooperate. She almost had it together, too. Her hands were steady when she reached for the glass and her face was composed, but there was too much damn water in her eyes and a single tear spilled over and tracked down her cheek. She swallowed the wine she’d poured into her mouth anyway and set the glass back down, pretending like that bastard tear hadn’t escaped, but of course he saw it. Of course he did. He was right there.

  His voice so, so gentle, D said, “It’s only food.”

  “No, it’s not,” she whispered. She didn’t dare look at him. “You cooked for me.” She said it again, emphasizing each word. “You. Cooked. For me.”

  “Well,” he murmured, laughter in his voice, “had I known this would be your reaction, I would have done it years ago.” He reached out and brushed his thumb over her cheek, wiping away the tear she’d tried so hard not to let fall.

  She looked up at him then, and let everything go. It all showed on her face, everything she felt for him, all the anguish and confusion and pain and longing, and she knew he saw every nuance, every spark and hope and the bottomless depth of her despair because his breath caught and his smile vanished and when he looked back at her it was with sudden fierce intensity burning in his eyes.

  “I…I…” She couldn’t get it out, but it didn’t matter.

  “I know,” he whispered, vehemently. “I already know.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Her voice was barely audible, and his face was so close and she thought he might kiss her. And she wanted it, she could die with how much she wanted it, but he exhaled, a heavy, doleful expulsion of air, and she knew he wouldn’t.

  He withdrew. He stood up. He walked to the doorway and paused, then said quietly, “Eat.”

  He watched her until she took the first few bites. Then, satisfied, he turned and moved away, and it was all she could do not to throw the plate of food against the wall in frustration.

  But she didn’t, because as it turned out, she was really hungry.

  And damn, but the man could cook.

  Money—a lot of it—is bulky.

  Only so many stacks of bills can fit into suitcases, and only so many suitcases can fit in the back of a truck. Right about now, Caesar was wishing they’d rented a bigger truck.

  Or opened a bank account.

  Obviously they couldn’t have, however, because large cash deposits tend to invite the curiosity of certain legal entities, whose curiosities they could not afford to pique, so they’d been forced to stash it all in the catacombs, like rats plumping a nest. Eliana had been almost too efficient in her moneymaking endeavors, because moving all this cash quickly was proving to be an unforeseen problem.

  Stupid bitch.

  He sighed, watching Aldo and one of the others who’d stayed behind—men, all of them, because only a moron…or a neutered male in Fabi’s case, which didn’t count…would follow a woman—try to shove one final black leather case into the back of the rental van. They succeeded against all odds, and Aldo drew down the rolling metal door and latched it.

  “Good,” said Caesar with a nod. “Now all we have to worry about is moving the weapons.”

  “They’re in shipping containers,” said Silas from his right.

  Surprised, he turned and looked at Silas, who stood rigidly to the side of the gravel drive with his arm in a makeshift sling and pain etched on his face. Caesar was frankly shocked he was standing at all. He’d passed out cold when they cauterized his amputation with the heated dagger, and the pungent stench of charred meat still lingered in his nose, gamy and sweet. But he’d awoken within minutes, sucked down half a bottle of whiskey, and that was that. Not a single murmur of pain, not one complaint; only the sweat on his brow and his expression gave him away, and Caesar could tell he was trying his damnedest to quell even that.

  He had to hand it to him, Silas was one tough bastard. No wonder his father trusted him so much. Perhaps he’d underestimated him. Caesar would have appreciated a few more of those lovely screams of his, but you can’t have everything.

  Besides, when he got his hands on Eliana, she’d make up for it in spades.

  “I moved all the weapons to the docks at Le Havre so she wouldn’t have access to it without my—your—knowledge, my lord, and the inspectors were paid handsomely to overlook the lack of proper paperwork and ensure the freight is forwarded without incident. We can have the containers ready to be shipped to wherever you like within eight hours.”

  And when had he been planning on telling him about that? “Why, Silas,” Caesar drawled, his eyes narrowed, “you wily old dog, you. You’re proving to be even more resourceful than I thought.”

  Silas inclined his head, the picture of deference, but suddenly Caesar found himself not only convinced he’d underestimated him, but wondering by exactly how much.

  “If you like, we can load the money onto the containers as well, ship it all together.”

  His voice was mild, entirely without guile, but Caesar realized that a man who could be stoic when a limb was chopped off could certainly manage to conceal a great many other things, without much effort.

  He smiled cheerfully. “No, Silas, thank you, but I’ll make arrangements for the money to be sent to our final destination.”

  A flicker of annoyance crossed his face, there then gone, and then Silas said, “As you wish, my lord. Shall we begin the taping?”

  “Ah!” At once, Caesar forgot his suspicions. He clapped, and Aldo jumped down from the lift gate of the truck and snapped to attention in front of him. “Is it ready?”

  “Yes, sire, the camera and lights have all been set up!” Aldo sounded nearly as excited as he felt; this little endeavor was, against all odds, proving to be fun.

  “Well, then, hup to!”

  Aldo and the five others scattered like ants, heading toward the shack at the end of the driveway. It was a ramshackle mess of a place that he guessed used to be a gamekeeper’s shed or kennel, with a caved-in ceiling and one wall missing. They’d draped a sheet across one of the standing walls and had set a wooden chair in front of it.

  Opposite the chair was a video camera on a tripod, and to another tripod in the corner was affixed a light.

  “My lord.” Aldo gestured to the chair and positioned himself behind the camera. He flipped a switch, and a little red light at the front of the camera blinked on. “We’re recording.”

  Caesar seated himself in the chair, smoothed a hand over his hair, and smiled. Into the unblinking eye of the video camera he said, “Merry Christmas, humans, and allow me to introduce myself.” His smile grew wider. “I’m your new God.”

  The taping had, of course, been Silas’s idea.

  He watched Caesar smile and preen and posture, reciting the words he’d written himself, and in spite of the pain searing white pathways down every nerve ending in his body, he felt deep, deep satisfaction.

  Caesar would be the one the humans blamed. It would be Caesar’s name they cursed, his likeness they remembered. Silas would be free to operate behind the scenes as he always had, planning and scheming without the burdens notoriety inevitably brought.

  No matter what happened now, his days of servitude were over.

  Because when Caesar’s part had been played, he would have to die.

  Remembering the look on Caesar’s face when he’d pressed the heated steel against the raw, bleeding stump of his wrist, Silas smiled. Yes, Caesar would have to die. By his hands. Hand, he mentally corrected himself. By his hand.

  He was really looking forward to that.

  Three hundred and fifty miles away across the English Channel, the Queen of the Ikati was once again sitting up in bed in the pale pink rays of early dawn. She sat peering around the opulence of her bedchamber for a moment, listening hard into the silence, her heart thundering inside her chest.

  It wasn’t a phone call that had awoken her this time, but a dream. She dreamt of a comet str
eaking across the night sky, trailing fire in a long, flared tail of orange. The comet had illuminated a dark landscape below, an ancient, hilly city with miles of twisting streets and red-roofed houses and a river winding through all of it, slow and serpentine.

  There was a familiar dome in the center of the city, an enormous white dome that glittered atop an even more enormous cathedral, which was built atop the bones of the most famous saint in all the world. In all of history.

  Beneath the fiery glow of the comet, St. Peter’s Basilica and Vatican City looked bathed in red.

  They looked bathed in blood.

  With a glance at the slumbering form of her husband beside her, Jenna slid from beneath the warmth of the goose down duvet and crossed the room on silent feet to stand at the lead-paned window. She pushed aside one heavy velvet drape and gazed up at the heavens, a sense of dread gnawing at her like swarming insects.

  Her father had once told her the ancients believed comets were a sign of ill repute, an omen of terrible things to come. Famine and earthquakes and floods, destruction and death and crops lost to frost.

  Plague. Pestilence.

  War.

  The last time she ever saw her father, when she was ten years old, a comet had blazed a brilliant trail across the night sky. A comet with a tail of fiery orange, just like the one in her dream.

  She shivered, suddenly ice cold, cold straight down to her bones, as if a ghostly wind sliced right through her.

  “What is it?”

  The voice was smooth and masculine, carrying that wary weight she’d come to know so well. Jenna turned from the window to see Leander sitting up on his side of the massive, four-poster bed, staring at her through the silvered half-light. He was alert and on edge; she felt the tension in him even from all the way across the room. As he must have felt her thundering heart. Her pulse like a kettledrum beating a dire warning through her veins.

  “Wake the others,” she said into the hush. “Wake everyone. Something is going to happen. Something very bad.”

  “He’s not answering the damn phone.” Celian’s voice was tight, darker and more tense than either Lix or Constantine had ever heard it, and that was saying something.

  “Can’t you leave a message?” asked Lix.

  “The fool doesn’t have voice mail set up.”

  Lix snorted, his usual response to something he found ridiculous. “Leave it to D. That would require speaking.”

  “It’s not funny,” Celian snapped, pulling up short from the pacing he’d been doing for the last several minutes, long, agitated strides that took him back and forth over the blood-red woven rug in the candlelit opulence of what had once been the king’s personal library, but now was open to anyone in the colony who desired it. “We haven’t heard from him in days, and his time is up and so is Eliana’s, and our good friend Leander has his panties in a twist over this entire situation, not the least of which is because I managed to talk his wife into allowing something he never would have allowed in the first place, which didn’t pan out and made me look like I can’t be trusted, in addition to making me look like a total ass.”

  He dragged a hand through his dark hair, cursed, and started pacing again.

  Lix and Constantine shared a look; Celian rarely lost his temper. He was the rational one, the controlled one, the one with an iron will and a stare that could make men shrivel like testicles exposed to cold. In opposition to Lix’s lighthearted good humor and Constantine’s sensitivity—which he took great pains to hide—Celian had no soft spots or sentimentality. He was pragmatic and nearly always stone-cold calm, which made him a strong leader and an even stronger warrior, and his agitation was a good indicator of just how bad this situation was.

  “That Queen of theirs…I had a chance, at least, with her. She’s the only one in that entire colony who seems reasonable.” His voice dropped. “But now all bets are off. D’s been formally declared a deserter and a traitor, and our colony has been declared persona non grata. Unless we hand D over to them, of course. Otherwise, we’re essentially at war.” He paused and his face grew grim. “Which means they could invade at any time.”

  In stereo, Lix and Constantine gasped.

  “Yeah. Welcome to the party.”

  Constantine leapt to his feet and Lix followed, the two of them flexing and snarling like the animals they were. They’d been lounging on a velvet sofa watching as Celian spoke on the phone with Leander before trying, in vain, to reach D, but their quiet repose had been replaced instantaneously with fierce readiness, and the willingness to rip out the throat of an enemy and lay down their own lives in order to protect their colony.

  Celian turned and stared at them. “Get the Legiones ready. Call the elders to order and make sure everyone knows what’s at stake. Get the women and children to the Domitilla; the sunken church is the farthest outpost, and they can escape easily from there if worse comes to worst. And then join me in the armory. We’re going to lay some traps for these rats.”

  He smiled, mirthless, his lips curving cold red.

  “There’s a thousand secret passageways in these catacombs, a million black, dead-end corridors to get lost in. If they do invade, that British peacock and his friends won’t be getting out of here alive.”

  “We can’t stay here long.”

  D was turned away from her with his hands on his hips. His voice was low and solemn.

  She’d found him this way, staring out the curved bay window in the living room into the pale, shifting light of dawn. She’d eaten, checked on Mel—no change—and then wandered around the safe house aimlessly, not realizing until she found herself at the top of the stairs of the main level that she’d been looking for him.

  “Why not?” She thought of his ringing cell phone from before, and her heart fluttered in panic. “You’ve had news?”

  A nod of his head, almost imperceptible. His shoulders were stiff, pulled back in a way that accentuated their breadth and belied his inner tension. He seemed to be scanning the street outside, looking for something. Or someone.

  “They’ll be checking everywhere now. This place isn’t safe anymore.”

  Eliana swallowed. “They?”

  He turned and looked at her. His face was set in a grim mask, and his eyes were dark and fathomless. “Mel has to be moved. This Alexi”—his voice took on a dangerous edge when he said his name—“his place is secure?”

  With that question, Eliana understood with perfect, terrible clarity that there was a choice to be made, a choice between her nemesis, Faith, and her old, comfortable friend, Doubt.

  She would need his help to safely move Mel. And where else could Mel be moved but to Alexi’s, where she could be given care and watched over? But then he would know where Alexi’s was, and all the other members of the colony who’d fled there. She had few options, little time, and no money on hand to secure them other lodgings, and only his word that he would never hurt her to go on. His word and the look in his eyes when he said it, which had almost, almost made her believe.

  If she took him to Alexi’s, there would be no more hiding. There would be no more secrets. There would be nothing but hope and desperate, blind Faith.

  She was going to have to trust him or stay here and risk death for herself and Mel. Either way, she suddenly realized, their lives were already in his hands.

  And he hadn’t let her down yet.

  He watched her face as these thoughts crowded her mind, watched her silently and unmoving, until finally she drew in a slow breath and chose.

  She nodded. “Yes. It’s secure. I’ll give you directions in the car.”

  Let the chips fall where they may, she thought, turning away. I can always kill him later.

  Alexi’s place turned out to be far more than a mere place. It was practically its own postal code.

  Six stories tall, nearly as wide as a city block, the modest, classic stone exterior hid a lavishly opulent interior of cream silk furnishings, polished marble floors and antiques, and a coll
ection of modern art to rival that of the finest museums, which hung in vivid pops of color from walls painted delicate eggshell white. Located on the Avenue du Président Kennedy directly across from the Eiffel Tower, it also sported a rather awe-inspiring view of the Seine.

  “Let me guess. Rich parents? Trust fund?” D said sourly to Eliana as he stood beneath an elaborate chandelier in the grand foyer that threw sparkling prisms of color in rainbow radiance around the room.

  She shook her head. “He’s self-made. Came from nothing. Hard work and talent got him where he is. He’s a genius, really.” Her lips lifted to a faint, fond smile. “I wouldn’t be surprised if someday he rules the world.”

  D began to hate this rich, genius Alexi with an almost biblical wrath. He hadn’t made an appearance yet; they’d been admitted to the foyer by an arch, elderly butler in a tuxedo who took one look at the two of them and pursed his lips, then glided away to inform the master of the house more “guests” had arrived.

  “Does he know what you are?”

  Eliana contemplated that for a moment, staring at a crystal Lalique figurine on a nearby table of a couple entwined in an embrace, and then murmured, “He knows what I’m not.”

  “Which means?”

  She slid him an indecipherable, sideways glance. “He’s doing me an incredible favor, Demetrius, letting us stay here. Please don’t antagonize him.”

  D ground his teeth together, and all the broken things inside him ground together, too. He said between clenched teeth, “He should take care not to antagonize me, Ana. I suddenly feel like ripping someone’s head off.”

  “Which won’t help anything—”

  “No, but it would make me feel a hell of a lot better—”

  “Demetrius, please—”

  “You can’t expect dogs and cats to play nice together—”

  “Alexi is not a dog!”

  D smirked, and Eliana glared back at him. “He’s a dog, all right. I noticed him at the catacombs, Ana. He’s a pedigreed, pampered little yipper who likes to bury his bone all over town.”