Edge of Oblivion: A Night Prowler Novel, Book 2

by J. T. Geissinger

  She spoke into the hush without opening her eyes. “Is it working?”

  “Perfectly,” Bartleby murmured. “Just a moment more and it will hit his vein—”

  Xander gave a jolt as if he’d been electrocuted.

  Her lids flew open. Beside her, his large body had jackknifed into a straining, muscled bow that both Mateo and Tomás were doing their best to subdue by wrestling him back down to the table.

  “What’s wrong?” she cried, panicking. She sat up abruptly and was dizzy. “What happened?”

  “It’s fine, it’s completely normal,” Bartleby soothed, reaching out to check the needle in her arm and the connection with Xander’s. He sent her an odd, sideways look. “It’s just your blood hitting his system. Please remain as still as you can. He’ll acclimate to it in a moment.”

  And, as she watched in startled fascination, he did.

  The muscles of his arm relaxed first. Then his jaw unclenched, his back, his legs. With a low moan that reverberated all the way through her body, Xander slumped back against the cool, polished wood and gave a long, shuddering sigh. Heat radiated out from him in pulsing waves as if he were engulfed in invisible flame.

  Mateo and Tomás relaxed as well and blew out hard, relieved breaths. They gave each other one of the looks the doctor had just sent her, and she was abruptly embarrassed.

  She’d overreacted. They thought she was a hysterical female.

  “I’ve never actually seen it done,” Morgan admitted a little sheepishly. She was the only girl in a brood of five, and though her two sets of twin brothers were younger, they were—accorded by their gender—given far more leniency and privileges than she. Even though she was smarter, stronger, faster, as a girl she’d been almost sequestered because of her sex. Until her mother had died, and then she’d run wild...

  She glanced up at them. “I didn’t think it would be quite so...dramatic.”

  “It usually isn’t,” said Bartleby. A tiny frown rucked his brows. He shot a quick, furtive glance at Mateo. “It’s nothing abnormal, but that kind of reaction usually only happens with—”

  “Check six, Doc,” said Tomás, hard. “Unless you want to end up looking like a bag of smashed asshole, this evolution does not require your input.”

  Bartleby went white, swallowed, and sat abruptly down in one of the cushioned dining room chairs.

  “Unsat,” Mateo growled back at Tomás. “We need him, so you’re going to ease up on that shit. And keep your soup cooler clean in front of the ultimecia. We clear?”

  Tomás stared at him long and hard as if he were contemplating the merits of strangulation versus a hard kick to the chest. Unblinking, Mateo stared right back. After a jaw-grinding moment, Tomás took a breath, stepped back, and said, “Clear as a fucking bell, brother.”

  Morgan looked back and forth between them, wondering what Bartleby had been about to say, why Tomas didn’t want him to say it, and what the hell an ultimecia was. But she was too tired to do anything about it. And hot. The room suddenly felt like an oven. She lifted her hand to her forehead and was surprised to find it covered in sweat.

  “Do you have anything in that bag for a headache, Doctor?” She rubbed her left eye. “I’m feeling a little...”

  “Weak?” he supplied from his chair, peering at her from behind his round glasses with an oddly intense look. “Achy? Feverish?”

  She nodded, frowning. How could he know that?

  He stood and rummaged through the bag, came up with a digital thermometer. “May I take your temperature?”

  The nod again, and he came to stand beside her. He brushed aside her hair, inserted the thermometer into her ear. In five seconds there came a beep. He withdrew the little plastic item and gazed down at it. His face went even whiter. “Oh, dear,” he said.

  Panic began to churn her stomach to knots. “What? Am I sick?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. You’re perfectly healthy,” he mumbled, distracted. He turned back to his black bag and deposited the thermometer within, then measured Xander’s pulse at his wrist and quickly took his blood pressure with a Velcro cuff around his bicep.

  “What is it, then?” she pressed.

  He glanced pointedly at Mateo and Tomás, then back at her, trying, it seemed, to communicate something crucial. “It’s just a little...” he coughed, “...female things, you know...I have something for it.” His face flamed bright, crimson red.

  Morgan narrowed her eyes. Female things?

  “Let’s get this show on the road, Doc,” interrupted Mateo, glancing at his watch. He pulled a phone from a pocket in his cargo pants and dialed a number. “We’re coming down in five,” he said to whomever it was that answered on the other end. “Keep frosty.” He snapped it shut and shoved it back into his pants, then addressed Bartleby. “Good to go?”

  “Yes, yes,” he said, fluttering over Xander. “He’s had enough of the transfusion. He’s strong enough to move.” His gaze flickered again to Morgan, then he turned away and finished packing his things.

  Mateo held a hand out. “Are you ready?”

  Morgan took a breath and gazed back at him. “Ready as I’ll ever be.” And she took his hand in hers.

  Xander woke up laid out flat on his back in a quiet room with his tongue glued to the roof of his mouth and pain throbbing sharp in his abdomen.

  He kept still from old habit, his eyes closed, measuring his surroundings with his senses. Anyone looking at him would have thought him still asleep, but he was on instant alert, primed and ready to fight though he was supine, that pain in his side was substantial, and he could tell by the light-headedness that he’d lost a lot of blood.

  No one was in the room with him. He cast out his awareness farther, through the walls, through empty rooms, until he came up against a cold lead wall where his exploration abruptly stopped. Good. This was good. Lead meant a safe house, which meant they’d come for him.

  Which meant Morgan hadn’t left him to die after all.

  The thought of her sent a lance of pain through his chest. His eyes blinked open and he lifted his head, looking around. A narrow bed, some plain furniture, a bathroom accessed through a door ajar, surgical instruments and bandages on a rolling silver table nearby. There were no windows, but he sensed it was close to sunrise. How long had he been out?

  With an effort that sent pain radiating in wicked lashes up his spine and all the way down to his toes, Xander pushed the sheet aside and sat up.

  He was naked, clad in only a large white bandage wrapped tightly around his waist. It was stained rust with blood in erratic circles on the right side. He inhaled, testing the limits of his tolerance, and found he could take a full breath without effort. His ribs weren’t compromised, and since he could move his arms and legs, his spine wasn’t compromised either. That was a relief, because the last thing he remembered before passing out was a terrible deadness in his legs.

  He stood carefully, balancing his weight over his bent knees. His back protested with a sharp, stabbing ache, but it was tolerable, less than when he had first sat up. He was alive, if not perfectly well. But no matter the injury, he’d heal quickly. If he wasn’t dead, he’d be fine within days.

  He crossed the room, found the black pants and shirt that had been left folded on a chair, and pulled them on carefully with gritted teeth. His weapons were laid out in a neat row on the top of the plain dresser, and he smiled as he donned those as well, strapping the knives around his waist and ankles. He pulled on a pair of new black boots, size fifteen, government issue, and laced up the ties.

  Then he walked out the door and went to find her.

  The safe house—one of dozens the Syndicate kept in every major city across the globe—was a refurbished villa in the hilly and moderately affluent Aventine section of Rome. It boasted 360-degree views of the city and over ten thousand square feet of living space, the vast majority of it underground. From the street, it was a modest turn-of-the-century affair of brick and mortar surrounded by a tall
iron fence, with gardens and trees and a bearded, chubby lawn gnome by the front gate whose pointed red hat had long ago faded to pink, and a security system to rival that of Fort Knox.

  The bedrooms and lounging area were on the bottom floor, the kitchen, dining area, and media rooms on the second floor, the gym and training center on the first floor belowground. Aboveground it was simply a house. A beautifully decorated, unoccupied house, because no one ever ate or slept or lived there. Aboveground was all for show. Once you descended beyond the reinforced lead door to the “basement,” you entered another world.

  He walked past six unoccupied bedrooms and found himself alone. A staircase twisted up to the main room, which was a large, open space decorated in dark charcoals and brown and beige without a hint of feminine softness. Beyond it were the dining room and kitchen—modern and masculine as the rest of the belowground areas—and as soon as he reached the top step of the stairs, he heard Mateo’s gravel-rough voice drifting in from that direction.

  “I can’t take it much longer, T.”

  There came an agitated grunt, then the sound of boots pacing back and forth over tile. “You can’t! I feel like I’m gonna crawl right out of my fucking skin.”

  “If he doesn’t wake up soon, we’ll have to leave Bartleby here with him and come back when it passes.”

  Xander froze, listening.

  “How much longer we got?”

  “Three days minus sixteen hours,” muttered Mateo. “And counting.”

  Groans. “Jesus Christ.”

  He waited, but they didn’t say more. Curiosity got the better of him, and he made his way silently to the kitchen, where he stood there in the doorway, unnoticed, looking them over.

  His boys. His brothers, in heart if not in Blood.

  They were assassins like him—collectively referred to as the Syndicate by the rest of their kind—and like him they were disgraced sons of powerful males who’d been handed over as children to the brutal tutelage of the capoeira master Karyo, a human the Manaus colony kept on retainer because he was both a perfect killing machine and perfectly tight-lipped about his “unique” students and their kin, who paid so handsomely for his silence. It was either study under Karyo or be tossed into the Drowning Well; bringing shame to one’s family name was not well tolerated by his kind, and at least the Academy offered a chance to save face.

  It offered their fathers a chance to save face. The young boys who would become the hardened killers of the Syndicate never gave a shit about things like that.

  Mateo was the son of a duke, of the Grandes do Imperio—Great Ones of the Empire. At six years old he’d called his pompous father a cachorro puto—dog fucker—in front of the entire Manaus Assembly. He now leaned against the counter by the sink, muscled arms crossed over his chest, chewing his lower lip.

  Tomás, eldest son of the colony’s Matchmaker, had burned his family’s home to the ground when he was eight in a fit of rage after his father had spanked his bare ass in the middle of Sunday church services when he wouldn’t stop squirming in the pew. He sat at the big square wood table with one knee jumping up and down beneath it, his head bent over, hands clasped over the back of his neck.

  Julian, a giant skull-crusher of a male with shaggy dark hair who always drove the getaway car no matter the job, had stolen apples from a neighbor’s tree. He sat hunched over a bowl of pasta at the table, mechanically shoveling it into his mouth with a blank-eyed stare as if he didn’t even know he was eating.

  And he, Xander, had simply been born to the wrong woman.

  They had trained together in Brazil since boyhood in the fine arts of murder and mayhem, until his three adopted brothers had gone into the American military as spies of sorts and he had gone slowly insane.

  They were the only three souls in the world he trusted with his life. They knew all his secrets and he knew all theirs, and if anything was finer than that, he hadn’t seen it.

  “Boys,” he said.

  Uncharacteristically, all three of them jumped. They gaped at him as if he were Lazarus, risen from the dead.

  His brows arched. “What’s doing, gentlemen?”

  And then they were on him like a pack of enormous, rough-and-tumble puppies, hugging him, slapping him on the back, making him see double in pain with arms squeezed around his middle.

  “You look like shit,” Tomás said when it was over. He stepped back to peer at him with a critical eye. “You shouldn’t be up yet.”

  “How’s the gash, man? Thought we lost you there for a minute, bro. You were pretty chopped up,” said Julian, his big hand wrapped around Xander’s shoulder.

  Mateo merely looked him up and down and shook his head. “You’re one tough fuck, you know that?”

  “And you’re just as ugly as I remember,” Xander answered, grinning. “But I guess a jarhead isn’t supposed to be pretty, right?”

  “Navy SEAL, asshole,” growled Julian from beside him. “Jarhead’s a marine. And we have better hair.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re all cannon fodder as far as the military is concerned. But we know better what you really are, don’t we?” He winked, and the big male grinned at him, nodding, and slapped his shoulder.

  “He’s a shitty driver is what he is,” Tomás said in an affectionate tone, looking sideways at Julian. “We would have gotten to you sooner at the hotel, but Driving Miss Daisy here took his sweet time leaving Monte Carlo.”

  Julian scowled at him. “I made a seven-hour trip in under three, jerkoff. Top that!”

  Tomás shrugged. “Would have been quicker if that bus of bikini models hadn’t been unloading in front of the Fairmont.” He smiled, the lines around his mirror eyes crinkling. “Thought you were going to have whiplash. Or a heart attack.”

  “You drove here from Monaco?” Xander said, surprised. “What were you doing there?”

  The three of them knew how to fly—and hijack—anything from a single-engine Cessna to a military fighter aircraft, so he’d assumed they’d come by plane. Fortunately they had been close enough to get to him quickly. If they’d been in Quebec or Manaus, his chances of survival might have been exactly zero.

  Tomás and Mateo shared a dour look. “Ali Baba sent us to do recon on some big-shot casino owner named Stark,” Mateo said. “Seems he’s into this guy Stark for some serious cash and is looking for a way out of it. And if Stark has a little accident, so to speak, Ali Baba won’t have to pay at all.”

  Xander’s jaw tightened. “He’s gambling again,” he said, and the three other assassins nodded.

  Ali Baba was their nickname for Xander’s half brother, Alejandro, who ruled as Alpha of the Manaus colony. A preening, undisciplined, shifty-eyed male with an ego the size of a small country, Alejandro was also incredibly lucky. Hence the nickname. Though he had a knack for winning big at casinos—and occasionally losing big, which it seemed he had been recently—that wasn’t what had earned him the sarcastic moniker first coined by Tomás years ago. The Syndicate called him Ali Baba because he’d been crowned Alpha only by a lucky turn of fate that propelled him to a position of power he hadn’t earned and didn’t deserve. He wasn’t as Gifted as Xander, or half as strong or smart.

  But he was the firstborn son of their father’s new wife. The new wife who hated Xander with an elemental ferocity and was ultimately responsible for having him shipped off to the Academy. The new wife who’d taken Xander’s mother’s place when she died. More correctly, when she was killed.

  By his father.

  Ancient history, that. But some scars never fade. Like the scars on his back where his father had whipped him whenever he was disobedient and then poured salt over the flayed skin just to hear him scream. So the mention of his half brother’s name brought his blood to a boil.

  “The gambling will have to stop when the rest of the Alphas convene on Manaus,” Xander said, dark, thinking of the move all the colonies were preparing to make. Since it had been discovered the Expurgari knew the locations of all the colonies
except Manaus, preparations had been in the works to combine all four colonies into one mega-colony. Logistics were proving to be a nightmare, but once Alejandro was surrounded by three other snarling Alphas, he wouldn’t stand a chance of getting away with his usual idiocy.

  And hopefully he’d do something to piss one of them off and there would be a bloody—deadly—fight.

  “Maybe,” said Julian. “But our friend Mr. Stark still might not wake up in the morning.”

  “Speaking of morning, how long have I been out?” Xander asked, curious how long it had taken him to heal this time. He wasn’t fully operational, of course, but a human wouldn’t have survived the hit he’d taken, forget about being up and around.

  Silence, sudden tension, and furtive looks passed back and forth. Mateo said, “Sixteen hours. Exactly.”

  Xander’s nervous system went on instant high alert. They’d been talking when he came in the room, three days minus sixteen hours, Mateo had said...did that have to do with Morgan—had she been hurt? Where was she? Something in his chest went cold.

  His voice lowered an octave, he said, “What’s wrong?”

  “How’s your sniffer, X?” said Mateo, watching him from hooded green eyes.

  Xander was confused. And he hated to be confused. “What are you talking about?”

  Mateo glanced at Tomás, who said with a lifted eyebrow, “Inhale, man.”

  When he did, Morgan’s scent hit him like a wrecking ball. Fire and fever and a dark, searing need, laced with her normal perfume of exotic spices and warm skin and lush woman, all of it overlaid with the distinct, exquisite aroma of a female, aroused.

  The Fever. She was deep in her Fever. And there was absolutely nothing more irresistible to an Ikati male than that.

  He staggered back, wide-eyed. An erection sprang to rock-solid life in his pants.

  “Yeah,” Tomás said sarcastically, by way of explanation. “So there’s that.”

  He swallowed, his throat like a desert. “Where is she?” he croaked.

  “Bartleby’s with her,” said Mateo with a glance upward. “In the gym—”