When he came out on the other side he was in a small service corridor that was featureless and brightly lit. He inhaled, relieved to be free of the granite, and followed the corridor around to a set of double steel doors. He paused with his ears open beside them, listening, tasting the air.
People. Statues. Glass cases and bronze figurines and...mummies?
He opened the door and stepped into the room, making a swift inspection. It was an Egyptian collection of some sort, with sarcophagi and funerary urns and statues of various pharaohs and animal gods. He smiled at a beautiful basalt sculpture of the cat goddess Bastet in a lighted case and put two fingers to his forehead in salute. Then he moved silently through the chamber, ignoring the speculative glances of the tour group he passed on the way out.
He had Morgan’s scent again. Exotic dark muskiness and heated woman, unmistakable and utterly unique, overlaid by that floral perfume she’d applied this morning. Lilies, he thought, shouldering through the crowd. Lilies and lovely hot readiness.
Snap out of it, soldier!
He ground his teeth together and kept on through the adjoining rooms, finally clearing the Egyptian wing and moving through the picture galleries and the tapestries and the ceramics, the statuary and mosaics and oils, all the masterpieces he’d seen in the dark as he’d prowled through the same halls last night in search of any trace of the man in white.
He followed her scent into the Sistine Chapel, which was very small, no bigger than the living room of their suite at the hotel, thick with tourists and uniformed officers who shushed the crowd at regular intervals and prevented photographs. He took a moment to look up and admire the work of one of their more famous kin, Michelangelo, and chuckled to himself. No one but the Ikati would ever know.
Down several narrow flights of stairs with crawling claustrophobia at the hot, pressing crowd, through a short gap in the buildings, and he was into the soaring majesty of St. Peter’s Basilica.
It was hushed and vast and eerie as a graveyard, dense with flickering candles and incense and whispers that echoed off the vaulted ceiling far overhead. Hazy sunshine spilled down like spotlights on the elaborate inlaid marble floor from the sixteen windows in the enormous dome above the altar, but here in the portico all was dim and silent.
He caught sight of a red blouse far ahead in the nave, a wave of dark hair spilling down a woman’s back, and quickened his pace. He threaded through a group of whispering tourists, went around a massive column, and she was abruptly there, flushed and panting, leaning stiff against the column with one hand at her throat and the other held out to stop him from coming any closer.
“Get away,” she whispered, hoarse. Her eyes were half-lidded, the pupils dilated so wide they nearly swallowed all the surrounding green, leaving only odd, flat black.
He froze, knowing instantly something was wrong. He cast out his awareness, opened his nose and his ears, but found nothing unusual. He stepped closer, and she let out a soft, keening moan that raised every hair on his body.
“No closer,” she insisted, oddly weak and breathless. Beneath her flawless café-au-lait complexion she was very pale. A sheen of sweat had formed on her brow.
“What is it?” he said, low, watching her eyelids flutter, the pulse beating wildly in her throat. His danger sense grew to gnaw against his skin.
“He’s here.” As she said the words, her brows furrowed and she gasped, a little startled intake through parted lips. “Somewhere—nearby—”
She choked off with another gasp. When Xander stepped closer she shuddered and moaned, arching against the column as if she were in pain.
“That’s it. We’re getting you out of here.” He made a move toward her, and she shook her head, vehement, hissing like a snake.
“No! Please! I’m trying to get him out! I have to get him out!”
He looked around again, wildly, searching and scanning, but detected nothing of that dark, violent scent and feel of the Alpha he’d detected yesterday. That greed.
“What the hell is he doing to you?”
She inhaled, long and shuddering, and looked up at him from beneath dark lashes, a concentrated look, full of heat and need and longing. “Everything,” she whispered. Her cheeks went a deep, flaming red.
With a cold shock of recognition that felt like ice water down his neck, Xander understood.
His capoeira master had once told him that the best way to win a war was to break the enemy’s resistance without ever fighting. There were better ways than direct attacks, ways to outthink and outmaneuver and outplan that were superior to engaging in a bloody, costly battle.
And a Gift like that of Telepathy—where you could insert yourself right into your enemy’s mind—might even make resistance impossible.
It might even make your enemy feel something so unthinkable as desire.
“What can I do?” he said, helpless, wanting to pick her up and carry her away to somewhere safer but not wanting to do anything to make matters worse. “I don’t feel him anywhere, Morgan. I can’t sense him—”
She gasped and arched hard against the column. With her eyes closed and her head back, she bit her lip and made a low sound deep in her throat. His heart stopped. Then she put her hands into her hair and stretched back like a cat, thrusting her chest out so he saw with perfect clarity the outline of her full breasts, her nipples straining taut against the red silk.
He stopped breathing. Instantly, he got hard.
“Do something!” she pleaded, hoarse.
He told himself in the next moment that he was only helping her, that this was the best, most effective way to distract her and break the mind link, but even as he was telling himself these things he didn’t really believe it. He knew himself far too well.
In two quick steps he closed the distance between them, wrapped his arms hard around her body, put his mouth over hers, and kissed her.
And, unexpectedly, with heat and fervor and a passion that unlocked something deep within him he’d put away long ago, she kissed him back.
Time spun away, sound faded out, everything ground to a standstill. Her hands were in his hair and his were on her soft curves, her jaw, the dip of her waist. She arched into him, soft and lush, and he thought he’d never felt anything so fine as her and this and the sweet warmth of her mouth, of her tongue on his, gliding and sensual and wantonly demanding.
More, her body said, straining against him. More, her soft mouth said, hungry. More! that little mewling noise in her throat demanded when he pressed his pelvis to hers and she felt the full length of his arousal, throbbing hot.
And he wanted to give her more. In that moment he wanted to give her anything and everything—whatever she asked for, whatever would quench this aching burn in his chest and the roaring in his ears and the poison eating through his blood, poison he’d had his first taste of the moment they’d met.
He wanted to be inside her. He wanted to hear her moan his name. He wanted—
Suddenly she broke away.
She stood there staring at him, blank, panting, her arms still tight around his neck. Then, with a horrified cry, she skipped back and slapped him hard across the face.
“Son of a bitch!” she cried, distraught.
He worked his jaw where she’d hit him and tried very hard to concentrate on the fact that she no longer seemed to be happy about the kiss. Inside him, his desire for her pounded.
“You do realize that’s not my name,” he said drily.
“What the hell do you—how could you—what the hell were you thinking?”
That last bit was shrieked, and the cathedral’s vaulted marble ceiling conducted it, splintering it into an echoing symphony that shattered the silence in the vast halls all around them. Startled exclamations and muttered reprovals came from various angles, but he ignored them.
In spite of the uncomfortable strain against the front of his pants and the horrifying realization that perhaps it wasn’t him she’d been thinking of when they shared that pa
ssionate kiss, Xander kept his voice carefully neutral and businesslike when he answered.
“You asked me to help—”
“I didn’t mean like that!”
“And because I couldn’t sense him anywhere nearby, that was the most expedient way to break the link. Otherwise I would have gone after him.” He cleared his throat. “Obviously.”
She was shaking and flushed and clearly free of whatever spell she’d been under. With her rigid bearing and glittering eyes and flustered distraction, she was utterly lovely. She was also pissed.
Right now he was very glad for that collar.
“You’re trying to tell me you knew that would work?” she asked, dubious. She crossed her arms over her chest and narrowed her eyes at him.
He crossed his arms as well, rose to his full height, and coldly gazed down his nose at her. “Of course. Why else would I kiss you?”
Her nostrils flared. She tossed her hair back over one shoulder with a shake of her head. “I see,” she said, regaining a little of her fractured poise. “Am I that repulsive to you?”
He paused, regarding her with a look he knew was mercilessly forbidding, willing himself to do the right thing and be done with all this foolishness. But he couldn’t bring himself to say it. He couldn’t make himself say yes.
She took his silence as an affirmation anyway and went even redder. “The feeling is mutual, Ace.”
He sent her a grim smile and sidestepped that. “Let’s get back to business, shall we? Do you feel him now?”
She swallowed hard and looked around. “No,” she said, low. “It’s broken.”
“And when you first felt”—he floundered for an appropriate word—“when you first felt the connection, where were you?”
She jerked her chin to a nearby chapel, decorated with mosaics and statues, featuring a prominent wood, stone, and marble altar that housed the lighted, ghoulish remains of a dead pope in a crystal casket.
“I want you to come with me over there, and if you feel anything—anything at all—we’re going to leave and I’m going to come back alone. Understood?”
She didn’t answer. She wasn’t looking at him, and he wondered if she ever would again.
“Morgan,” he said more softly, trying a different tactic. “Are we agreed?”
After a moment, she jerked her head up and down: yes.
Progress. Good.
He opened his palm to the chapel. She went before him, hesitating only when she drew near the altar.
It was topped with eight taper candles in bronze holders, just in front of a massive mosaic depicting the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. There were pink marble columns and corbels with carved cherubs and gold leaf slathered on every available surface.
“Anything?” he murmured, close behind her.
She held very still with her head cocked, as if listening. She looked left and then right, frowning a little, her chin lifted. Her gaze traveled up the soaring marble columns to the vaulted ceiling far above, and she paused, considering. Then she dropped her lashes and looked at the floor beneath her feet.
“It’s...odd,” she finally said. “There’s a faint echo of something. Almost like déjà vu. But I can’t put my finger on where it might be coming from. It’s like he’s everywhere. And nowhere.”
Xander was disappointed, primarily because he’d found only the same thing in his search the night before. It made him a little harsher than he should have been. He was really looking forward to getting his hands on this bastard.
“Well, that’s helpful. Maybe it’s God you feel.”
Her lips flattened. She turned to look him full in the face. “You,” she said, “are an unmitigated ass.”
He stared back at her, wrestling with the urge to kiss her again. Those damn lips—
“And you’re not trying hard enough,” he said, his voice tight. “If he’s close you should be able to find him, like you did yesterday. Just concentrate.”
“If it were that easy, I’d have found him already!” she said, exasperated. “Maybe it’s this building.” She wrinkled her nose at the lighted casket. “There’s too much weird juju in here.”
He had to admit the dead guy was giving off a really funky odor beneath all that careful casket sealant. And there was something else he couldn’t place, something unnerving, a whiff of ancient earth and dead air and cold, unlit corridors. It reminded him of a crypt. It also very inconveniently interfered with his own ability to sense his surroundings as fully as he normally did. Everything was oddly muted.
It had been the same last night. He’d waited for the sun to go down before attempting to infiltrate the cupola where the man in white had disappeared. The scent of Alpha was on the stone outside and the glass panes, even lingered like an afterthought in the air above the altar, but then it evanesced and disappeared altogether. But there was something, some indefinable energy, in the very walls of the cathedral itself, vibrating from the foundations...
It made no sense. None of this made any sense.
The only reason he could fathom why an Ikati would go anywhere near what many considered the holiest church in Christendom was total ignorance. Since the half-Blood Queen Cleopatra had incited the rage of Caesar Augustus in AD 30, the Ikati had been hunted and persecuted, had long ago retreated into silence and small, well-fortified colonies to survive. The situation worsened in the thirteenth century when Pope Gregory IX instituted the Inquisition. Along with heretics, cats were declared diabolical. That set the stage for massive, church-approved executions. Cats were witches’ familiars, associated with the devil, dirty animals not to be trusted.
Too bad for humans. Because by the time the Black Plague hit a century later, there were barely any cats left to eat all those disease-carrying, flea-infested rats. Half of Europe’s population was wiped out in just a few years.
“Maybe we should go back to the Spanish Steps and try again there.” Morgan looked hopefully toward the massive doors behind them that led outside into fresh air and sunlight.
She didn’t look completely recovered from whatever spell the Alpha had put her under; she was still a little too flushed. And if he was still lurking around somewhere, Xander definitely didn’t want to give him another chance to get inside her skull.
“All right. We’ll come back tomorrow.” He made a move to take her arm, and she sent him a look of such frozen hostility it held his hand in place.
“I’m not an invalid,” she said.
He pressed his lips together to keep from smiling. “Clearly.”
“And you already know I’m not going to run away.”
“So you’ve said,” he replied, curt.
“Then why do you keep taking my arm whenever we’re walking?”
Because I like to touch you.
“Habit.” It was the first thing out of his mouth but not what he’d been thinking and obviously not what she was expecting, either, if her expression was any indication.
“So you’re a gentleman killer,” she said with soft scorn. “Did they teach you that at Assassin Academy? How to Make Nice with Your Prey One O One?”
He closed his eyes for just longer than a blink and found the memory of another soft, feminine arm he’d once loved to touch ready to torture him with fresh pain. Being around Morgan was peeling back the scabs on some old, nasty wounds, and he didn’t know what to do about it.
“My mistake. It won’t happen again.”
His voice was shorn of all emotion, but something dark moved within him, something angry and violent that needed an outlet. He felt the urge to fight, to beat something bloody, so keenly she sensed it and took a quick step back, blinking. He stared at her, cold as stone, then turned his back and walked away, out into the blinding bright sunshine of St. Peter’s Square.
And there, ringed around the base of the soaring granite obelisk in its center, stood six huge Ikati males, feral as wolves, staring right at him.
Adrenaline blasted like dynamite through his veins. Xander spun around,
took four long running strides back inside the cathedral, grabbed Morgan’s arm, and yanked her hard against him.
“Run!” he hissed into her ear. He shoved her in front of him.
She yelped in surprise and slipped in her heels over the slick marble, but it didn’t matter because he was right behind her, shoving her forward, holding her up when she stumbled.
“Xander! What’s going on! What are you—”
He didn’t listen to a word she said, didn’t listen to the startled gasps of the people he shoved by, didn’t slow or look back to see if they were being followed. He knew his best—his only—chance of getting Morgan to safety was to move fast.
Faster than them.
The two of them skidded around an enormous marble column, her heels clattering against the floor. She lost one then the other as he towed her mercilessly toward the great, golden papal altar where morning service was being held in the shadow of the colossal Baldacchino, a ninety-five-foot-tall bronze monument carved by Bernini.
He felt the Ikati males enter the front of the cathedral one by one, dark bursts of energy that stung his skin like needles.
Morgan felt it too because she gasped and stiffened, turning to look over her shoulder.
“No!” he shouted, pulling her forward. His shout splintered to a thousand nos that collided and crashed together overhead in the vast sunlit dome like the broken chiming of bells. The red-robed bishop conducting mass didn’t miss a beat—he looked about a hundred years old and was probably deaf—but several dozen worshippers turned in their chairs and craned their necks to get a look at the disturbance.
They flew by the worshippers, ran into the massive, semicircular, white-and-gold transept, skidded around red velvet ropes on stanchions erected to keep the public out of this off-limits area, and headed directly for the altar and its mosaic of the martyrdom of St. Processus.
“Hold your breath!” Xander shouted, towing Morgan behind him like a tug. Up and over the marble steps, across the altar, right to the wall with the colorful mosaic—
Morgan balked, panicking. “Where are you going? There’s no way out!”
Edge of Oblivion: A Night Prowler Novel, Book 2 Page 11
