Edge of Darkness (A Night Prowler Novel)

by J. T. Geissinger

  He’d reached Ember’s side. Without looking away from Christian, he said, “On your feet, rabbit,” and waved the gun.

  Shaking uncontrollably, Ember stood. Caesar reached out and pulled her against him with a hand fisted in her hair. She cried out but he silenced her by shoving the gun against her cheek and growling into her ear, “Another noise and I’ll blow your head off. But I’ll blow his head off first so you can watch.”

  By now they were perhaps half a mile away from the docks. Barcelona burned bright against the dark hills that rose up from the sea. Wind whipped Ember’s hair into her face and salt spray stung her eyes. The gun was cold and hard against her cheekbone.

  “On your feet,” Caesar directed Christian. With a grim glance at her face, Christian complied.

  And Ember saw what was coming.

  “Wait,” she whispered, turning her head a fraction to look at Caesar. “I have a proposal for you.”

  Caesar snorted. “As if you’d have anything to bargain with. And I’ve already told you, rabbit, no negotiating.” He removed the gun from her face and pointed it at Christian’s chest, and every cell in Ember’s body jumped shrieking to its toes.

  “I can take a lot of pain,” she whispered, staring with laser-like intensity at Caesar’s profile. “You’ve already seen it—you dug a metal plate out of my arm. It takes much more pain for me to pass out than a regular person. The doctor who put those plates in my arms said I had the highest pain tolerance of any patient he’d ever had.”

  He hesitated just long enough to let her know he was listening. Remembering the way he’d grown hard at the sight of her blood and his own, remembering the dark excitement in his voice when he’d hurt Marguerite and the flare of lust in his eyes when he’d broken her nose, Ember breathed, “Because I like it.”

  Caesar slid his gaze to hers, and she slowly nodded, looking deep into his eyes.

  “Just like you need to give pain, I need to receive it. I used to cut myself just so I could feel it, just so I could watch myself bleed. We’re the same, you and I. We’re opposite sides of the same coin.”

  Caesar’s breathing had grown uneven. His pupils had dilated. He moistened his lips.

  This was working. This could actually work!

  Very throaty, she asked, “Have you ever had a woman beg you to hit her harder?”

  “Stop this, Ember!” shouted Christian, but he was ignored by both of them. Caesar’s eyes were locked on hers.

  She leaned into him, brushing her breasts against his chest. “Have you…sire?”

  He stared at her, frozen, color rising to ruddy his cheeks, and she pressed her advantage.

  “If you let him go, I promise you I will never try to run from you. I will never disobey you. I will serve you in any way you like for as long as you like.” She whispered into his ear, “I will bleed for you, and scream for you, and worship you forever.”

  He held still for a moment. Ember felt his heart pounding in his chest. He whispered, “You’re lying.”

  She tilted her head back, exposing her throat. “I know you can smell the difference between a lie and the truth. Go ahead. You decide.”

  Then she closed her eyes and crossed her fingers that all the things broken inside her were broken enough to convince him this wasn’t just a ploy to get Christian to safety…and him alone.

  Behind her back, gripped in her shaking hand, the detonator was a cool, slender weight.

  He bent nearer. She felt the fleet brush of his lips over the pulse in her throat. She heard him inhale against her skin, and then she heard his exhalation, and his next words, spoken in a tense, husky whisper.

  “Well, well…not such a scared little rabbit after all.”

  He pulled away and gazed at her with hooded eyes, jaw twitching. The pulse in his neck throbbed.

  Then he turned back to Christian and fired a round into the air above his head.

  Ember jumped but Christian didn’t move at all. He merely stared at her, motionless, taut as a bowstring as he knelt over the unconscious Nico.

  “Overboard,” directed Caesar, and Ember felt a rush of relief so profound she almost sank to her knees. The hand Caesar still had fisted in her hair helped her to stay on her feet.

  When Christian didn’t move, Caesar said, “Make me say it again and you’ll still go overboard, but it will be with a bullet in your head.”

  Smoothly and silently, Christian rose from his knees and stepped over Nico’s unconscious form. He looked back and forth between her and Caesar, then said to her, “Just stay alive. I’ll find you.”

  Caesar leveled the gun at Christian’s face. “One more word, friend—just one, and it’s all over.”

  With his chest heaving, nostrils flared, and fury burning in his eyes, Christian slowly backed up against the low wall of the deck. He leaned against it, calculating, looking for any opportunity, his body tensed for flight.

  Ember knew he was stalling. He wasn’t going to jump overboard; this was the final calm before the storm broke and he charged.

  “And if I don’t hear a splash and see you floating behind us, all bets are off,” Caesar hissed.

  Christian raised his hands and the air around him warped and shimmered. His rage was a palpable thing, washing over her in heated waves, and it brought a smile to Caesar’s face.

  “Sucks to be you,” he mocked.

  Then Nico’s eyes blinked open. He looked up at Christian standing over him, let out a bellow, leapt to his feet in a whip-crack move and launched himself at him. He hit Christian in the chest full force—

  —And they both tumbled over the low deck wall and disappeared into space.

  Ember screamed. There was a flat smack and a splash, then nothing. Several seconds later two heads popped up in the frothing white wake behind the boat. There was a quick struggle, then only one head was left bobbing above the dark water.

  Christian. He screamed something but the wind stole it, and Ember watched as he grew smaller and smaller as the yacht sailed forward into the night.

  I will love you, until the end of time.

  Tears pooled in her eyes, then slid down her cheeks as the sight of Christian’s face disappeared altogether, swallowed by the dark.

  “Now,” said Caesar, spinning her around with both hands on her upper arms and pulling her hard against his chest. He leered triumphantly down at her. “Let’s see exactly how much pain you can take.”

  Ember whispered, “Exactly this much.”

  Then she closed her eyes and depressed her thumb on the detonator’s trigger.

  In the infinitesimal moment before the explosion knocked her off her feet and the world went black, her last thought was, Come what may.

  There were many who saw the huge explosion in the dark waters off Port Vell that night, many who saw the other huge explosion in the hills above the city, many who saw them both. But there was only one person who was close enough to both to see the bodies fly.

  Christian.

  He was floating in the frigid water when the yacht was torn to pieces in a thunderous eruption that sent a shockwave of heat roaring over him and an orange ball of fire and smoke billowing high into the sky, still screaming what he’d been screaming since he’d gone in the water, the words the wind had stolen from his lips. The words Ember would never hear.

  The two most miraculous words in the world, which would now eat at his soul like a cancer until the day he died.

  You’re pregnant.

  Salt water choked him. He was blinded by tears. He didn’t even bother to wait until the huge fireball contracted or the debris stopped raining down into the waves.

  He just began to swim. Frantically, as fast as he could, he swam.

  Death wasn’t nearly as peaceful and quiet as Ember had hoped it would be.

  For one thing, there was too much talking. Granted, the voices weren’t loud, but the way they murmured constantly, the cadences rising and falling while the words remained indistinct, was really irritating. She wan
ted to shout at them to shut up because she was trying to concentrate on being deceased, but her throat wasn’t working properly. Her tongue, furry and swollen, felt like a dead animal inside her mouth.

  Then there was the incessant beeping. She imagined it might be some kind of mechanical contraption designed to process souls through the underworld, a conveyor belt maybe, crowded with the disembodied spirits of the recently departed on their way to be sorted. Or perhaps it was a waiting room like in the movie Beetlejuice, filled with the patient undead, and the sound was the clock of eternity, forever announcing the same, unchanging hour.

  Also, there was a hell of a lot of pain involved. She thought this death business was supposed to be the absence of pain, especially since she no longer had a body, but somehow agony crackled through her, angry as a nest of spitting snakes. How was that possible, if she no longer had nerves?

  The worst thing, though, was the crying.

  It was soft and muffled and anguished, its tone of utter misery worse than everything else combined. She caught a few whispered words that reminded her of something, but she couldn’t quite remember what.

  “Don’t leave me, little firecracker. Please, please don’t leave me.”

  This was followed by a low, choked sob, then another.

  Ember hated to hear that. The pain in those quiet sobs was…it was…

  Awful. Piercing. Bottomless.

  Ember wanted to comfort the crier. She wanted it so badly she finally managed to force her eyes open, though they felt stitched closed, to look around for the source.

  And this was confusing, because the afterlife looked a lot like…a hospital room. White walls, fabric curtain hanging from the ceiling, the sharp sting of antiseptic in the air.

  How disappointing. Why would anyone decorate the afterlife like a hospital room? Honestly, some people had no imagination. Or maybe it was God’s sick sense of humor?

  Or maybe this was hell?

  In any case, whoever this crier was, he was doing it all over her left arm.

  A head of glossy black hair, a pair of shaking broad shoulders, two large hands gripping her arm hard enough to turn his knuckles white. A big body bent over in a chair beside her bed. And tears, hot and wet, sliding over her skin.

  In a voice that sounded like it emanated from the bottom of a well, Ember whispered, “Hey. I’m trying to be dead here. Could you please cut that out?”

  Then the crier lifted his head and stared at her in shock and red-eyed joy. Ember felt electrocuted as memory came flooding back.

  Christian. The crier was Christian. And he looked very much alive.

  Which meant she wasn’t dead after all.

  He jolted out of the chair and began to plant frantic kisses her all over her face, chanting her name in a reverent whisper as if reciting the rosary.

  “Ember, Ember, oh God Ember—”

  The murmuring in the room abruptly ceased, and then she was surrounded by people and everyone was talking at once.

  “She’s awake!”

  “Jesus, you gave us a scare!”

  “Don’t crowd her, let her breathe!”

  “Dios mio, call the doctor! Call the doctor!”

  “I told you He would look out for you.”

  This last one was pronounced with quiet satisfaction from Clare, who stood on the right side of Ember’s bed next to a smiling Dante with a bandage on one side of his head. Clare wore pink pajamas, clutched Peter Parker and had the plastic oxygen tube, attached to a portable tank, wrapped beneath her nose. Pale and thin with bluish bruises under her eyes, she was nonetheless gazing at Ember with the serenity of a medieval Madonna.

  “God,” explained Clare, seeing Ember’s confused look. “Remember? I told you I asked him to look out for you, and He said he would. So He did.”

  She shrugged, as if it were preposterous any of them had doubted her, and Ember’s eyes welled with tears.

  Whoever it was, someone had definitely been looking out for her; she should be dead. Maybe it was time she repaid the favor and started being grateful for life, instead of wishing for the alternative.

  She turned her head—the room spun briefly before settling back into lucidity—and there on the other side of her bed, holding hands, were Asher, biting his lower lip and blinking back tears, and a very scared-looking Rafael. Next to him was Christian, still hovering over her, looking as if he was about to have a nervous breakdown.

  At the foot of the bed stood Allegra and Analia, pale as powder, dressed identically in black.

  “Marguerite,” Ember whispered, feeling an immense surge of guilt as those memories came back, too, sharp as knives.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” said Allegra, her round face pinched. “We know…” she swallowed and moistened her lips. “We know what a monster he was. That man. We know he was the one who…the pope…”

  She was having trouble getting the words out, and Analia placed a gentle hand on her sister’s back. She seemed to take comfort from that, and straightened. “But you killed him. He’s dead; that’s all that matters now. He can’t hurt anyone else.”

  You killed him. Ember stared up at Christian in shock, searching his face. He nodded, looking haggard with his unshaven face and dark circles under his eyes. She’d never seen him look so…human. So vulnerable. Big and beautiful and capable of carnage, at this moment he looked more like a lost little boy.

  It was painful to speak, but she managed, “But how did I…if he—”

  “I think he shielded you from the brunt of the blast. He was standing right in front of you, blocking you. He must have taken the lion’s share of the impact because there was just…nothing left of him. They’ve combed the debris, dragged the ocean bed, searched the shoreline where anything might have washed up in the currents. There was plenty of wreckage from the yacht, but…”

  He trailed off into silence, staring at her with haunted eyes, then he said in a choked whisper, “I thought I watched you die.”

  His beautiful face crumpled. He sank to his knees next to the bed and buried his face in the blanket over her stomach, gripping her so hard he shook.

  Ember was overcome with emotion. She lifted her hand to stroke his hair and blinked when she saw it was wrapped in a gauze bandage. As was her entire right arm.

  “You were burned,” Asher explained gently. “Flash burns from the explosion, first and second degree, mostly on your right hand and arm and your lower legs. There’s bleeding and swelling in your lungs from the pressure of the shockwave, and your intestines, well, they’re not going to be working right for a while. The doctors said you were lucky you weren’t in an enclosed space, and being in the water helped shield you from a lot of the debris fallout. The worst was the brain swelling, though…”

  He swallowed, and Rafael glanced at him and squeezed his hand. Asher whispered, “They had to do surgery to relieve it. We thought…we didn’t know…the doctors weren’t sure if you’d remember much…if you’d be…you…”

  She touched her hand to her head and felt skin, a bald patch where the hair had been shaved, a ragged row of stitches. Christ. With her broken nose, shaved head and burns, she probably looked like the bride of Frankenstein.

  Christian lifted his head and stared into her eyes. His own were wild and searing. “Do you?” he asked hoarsely. “Do you remember?”

  She smiled at him and watched his eyes spark with hope. “As if I could ever forget a single moment with you,” she whispered.

  And there it was again, that look of transformation she’d come to know so well. His gaze was so intense and burning, so filled with love, she thought he could light them both on fire with it. There was a surge of heat in the atmosphere and he leaned over the bed and kissed her, passionately, his mouth pressed hard and hot against hers.

  It hurt.

  She winced and protested with a weak, “Ow.” Christian instantly pulled away with a whispered apology, and there were relieved chuckles from Dante and Asher and a nervous twitter from Rafael.r />
  “We should let you rest,” said Dante, wrapping his arm around Clare’s shoulders and drawing her close. As if on cue, a wave of fatigue swept over her, and she felt as if her body weighed a thousand pounds.

  “I don’t need to rest, I want to talk to everyone,” she said, but it came out garbled. Her eyelids drooped.

  Asher reached out and squeezed her left hand, whispered, “See you later, knucklehead. Love you,” and led Rafael to the door. Analia and Allegra said their good-byes, then so did Dante and Clare, who added a kiss on her cheek and one from Peter Parker.

  Then she was alone with Christian.

  He lowered the metal bar on the left side of the bed and crawled in next to her, moving the clear tubes that were stuck in her arm and neck carefully out of the way, tucking his arm under her neck and gently cradling her. He began to croon to her and pet her, smoothing her hair off her forehead, lightly trailing his fingers over her face. He seemed proprietary and overly cautious, sober and vigilant, as if at any moment she might disappear in a puff of smoke.

  “How long have I been here?” Ember asked, soothed by his ministrations. Her lids closed and she sighed, filled with quiet joy.

  She was alive. Christian was alive. Caesar was dead.

  Everything was going to be okay.

  “Too long,” he whispered, brushing a feather-light kiss to her temple. “Five days that felt like five thousand.” He chuckled. “And the doctors are getting pretty sick of me. I’m sure they’ll be glad to see you’re awake so they can send us home.”

  She cocked an eyebrow at him, and he said, “I haven’t exactly been patient with them. The terms ‘overbearing’ and ‘maniac’ have been used on more than one occasion.”

  And why didn’t that surprise her?

  His stomach rumbled a loud complaint and Ember weakly scolded him, “When was the last time you ate?” Only it came out as, “ ’En ‘as th’ las’ time y’ate?”

  “Don’t know. Doesn’t matter. All that matters is right here in my arms, right now.” His voice dropped. “And if you ever try anything so stupid again I’ll kill you. I can’t live without you little firecracker—don’t make me.”