The first and most famous was a female named Cleopatra. Ruthless and cunning, that one, almost as fine a strategist as he. And his spies informed him another female had recently done the same, and even been named Queen of that massive colony in the ancient woods of southern England he’d had his eye on for so long.
He’d never take a half-Blood Queen for himself. Though he’d kept human women—captured and held prisoner, tourists mostly, the choicest ones—as part of his harem since his beloved Sabina died so long ago, that was pure pragmatism: humans bred like rabbits. A single female could produce a child—or two or three—every nine months for decades during the entirety of her breeding years. Full-Blood Ikati females were only fertile once per year and rarely got pregnant. It was the reason his kind had all survived on the edge of oblivion for centuries. Humans were simply outbreeding them.
Not for long, though. He was going to turn their fertility against them.
Three of the six Liberi injected with the latest version of the antiserum had survived their Transitions this past week alone. Close. So close. Only a few more trials, and he was sure he’d perfect the compound, and then he’d inject the hundreds upon hundreds of his half-Blood bastards and put the final stage of his plan into place—
“Sire.”
Dominus looked up from his perusal of the latest DNA sequence and variance report from his privately funded, state-of-the-art lab in Milan to find D and Lix standing at the arched entrance to his library. Like windows, doors were absent in all the catacombs.
Except the heavily guarded doors that led to the outside world, of course.
“Salve, Bellatores,” he said, laying aside the report on his desk. He leaned back into the comfort of a large leather chair and gazed at them while they stood in silence at the doorway, waiting for his command. They wouldn’t enter unless invited, and he had half a mind to let them stand there and sweat, but he knew they were both on edge from the incident with Celian. He liked to occasionally push them to the far edge of their constraints: anger kept a warrior razor sharp. “Better to be feared than loved,” his own father had told him, wisely.
He’d felt neither for the old man and had killed him as soon as he was old enough to lead, but still, it was good advice.
Motioning them forward with his hand, he said, “Come in. Sit with me.”
The two huge warriors sat in the two chairs opposite his desk—dwarfing the furniture and looking profoundly uncomfortable—and Dominus had to press the smile from his lips. He looked first at Lix, long-haired and unshaven, then at D, tattooed, bald, and emitting his usual aura of violence, dark as a lightning storm and just as dangerous.
Tell me, Bellator, he thought. With a clenched jaw, the warrior began to speak.
“The full-Blood male we encountered at the Vatican,” he said, moving only his lips. His entire body, big as it was, had fallen still as stone. He hated when Dominus was inside his head, which, of course, the King found highly amusing.
He made a noise of interest and gestured for D to continue.
“He was here, in the fovea.” He licked his lips. “With the female.”
The King’s eyebrows shot up. He leaned forward, put his elbows on the desk. “Go on.”
“She was naked,” he said tonelessly, “chained to the wall.”
At that, blood began to pound through the King’s veins. Naked. Chained. Two more beautiful words could not be found in any language. He’d think more on that later on, when he was alone. Perhaps when he was with one of his human concubines; they were so much easier to scare than their Ikati counterparts, and he loved them to be scared when he took them. He loved them to scream. “And the male?”
Here D inhaled and dropped his gaze to the edge of the King’s desk. “You stabbed him in the back. You killed him.”
“So I win,” he said, very soft. D glanced up at him, stone-faced. His voice came very low.
“You always win, sire.”
Dominus sat back in his chair, pleased beyond measure. That male he’d encountered had powers he’d never heard of and smelled of death and carnage and the kind of hardened soullessness he’d only ever found in himself, all of which had given him considerable worry.
But this made everything so much easier. The warrior’s dreams were never wrong, and like the one that had alerted him to the arrival of the two strangers, this one had been so strong he’d felt the echoes of it from half a mile away. He watched as Lix shifted in his chair, still uncomfortable, and abruptly decided the two of them deserved a little reward.
“It’s three days until the next Purgare,” he said, thinking of the ritual burial ceremony that took place at midnight under every full moon for all the Liberi who hadn’t survived their treacherous first Transitions over the previous month. Their mothers, the Bellatorum, and the rest of the upper classes gathered to scatter the ashes into a secret spot of the river Tiber along with flowers and murmured farewells, and he’d come to hate each and every Purgare as a personal affront to his pride.
But not for long. This next could be the last.
“Take the next few days off,” the King continued, gratified when the two warriors looked at him, shocked. “Go out, get drunk, Shift in the Villa Borghese if you like. Silas will give you money.” He motioned to his most trusted servant, who glided forward silently from the shadows of the room and bowed in their direction. “Enjoy yourselves.”
“Thank you, sire,” said Lix, sounding more than a little confused, and he tried not to smile again. The King wasn’t known for leniency or charity, but he dearly loved to keep them guessing.
“Take Constantine as well,” he added, in a rare swell of benevolence. The male had taken his task of punishing Celian exceptionally hard and might not leave his bedside until he healed. A small gesture of generosity would go a long way toward mending his raw emotions. After all, a king needed his warriors loyal. And as the very intelligent human Niccolo Machiavelli once said, “Severities should be dealt out all at once...but benefits ought to be handed out drop by drop, so that they may be relished the more.”
“Father,” said a female voice from the door. The two warriors leapt to their feet and stood at attention, eyes fixed on some far-off point behind the King’s head.
Dominus rose from his chair. “Eliana,” he said, his voice warm.
She walked toward him over the hand-knotted Persian rug with the poise and grace of a runway model and paused beside him, offering her cheek.
He leaned down and kissed her, thinking she was too thin. Her cheekbones stood out in the perfect oval of her face, which made her dark eyes look even larger than normal. He brushed a lock of her choppy black hair from her forehead and wished she’d grow it longer. He didn’t like this modern look on her.
As beautiful as her mother had once been, his only daughter was twice that and had his intelligence and drive to boot. Trained in martial arts—unnecessary, but it kept her occupied—an expert in computer science, and fluent in several languages, she was worth a hundred of someone like her older brother, Caesar. The boy was cowardly and unGifted and had he not been his son Dominus would have given him over to the Castratus. But Eliana was his pride and joy. Unfortunately she chafed just as her mother had at the life of sheltered privilege she’d been forced to lead.
But Dominus would never risk allowing her the leniency to roam free in the world. She was the only thing he truly loved, the only precious spark of light in his life of war and darkness, and he protected her from the dangers of the outside world just as he protected her from the ugly truth of what he was and all the things he’d done to get that way.
But someday, if his plan worked, she could live free as a bird. As could they all.
Forever.
She turned to the warriors. “Bonum mane, Bellatores,” she murmured, gazing at D. Lix gave a murmured hello, but D remained silent. His gaze flickered to hers, and he inclined his head, then glanced away. That muscle in his jaw flexed again.
Dominus smiled. He’d not
iced it before, the hunger that wafted from the tattooed warrior like perfume whenever his only daughter was near, and he welcomed it. Eliana would never find him attractive; of that he was sure. She had suitors aplenty and was quite literally out of his class. And Demetrius—rebellious, insubordinate, combative Demetrius—had more than once been induced to follow some order he found egregious simply because he’d had Eliana utter it for him.
Oh, how he loved to prey upon weakness. Just thinking about it warmed the frozen cockles of his heart.
“I heard a rumor a strange full-Blood male was spotted near the Vatican,” Eliana said, turning back to him with a little furrow between her dark brows. “An Alpha. Are you in any danger?”
He smiled down at her. Out of necessity, he’d told her—everyone, actually, he’d told everyone long ago—that they were being hunted by others of their kind, that they’d be massacred if found by these savage interlopers.
That his own father had been killed by one of them.
“That’s nothing for you to worry about, love,” he said with a meaningful glance at D. The big male met his gaze straight on.
Isn’t that right, my friend?
Slowly, D nodded his head yes, and the King’s smile grew wider. “That’s nothing for you to worry about,” he repeated, and sent the warriors on their way.
When Xander opened the door to the gym and stuck his head inside, the perfume that hit his nose was so lusciously overpowering he sagged against the jamb, momentarily stunned.
“Who’s there?” came Bartleby’s aggravated voice from behind a folding screen erected in one corner of the darkened room.
Morgan’s scent, a voluptuous bloom of heated woman and exotic dark loveliness, drew him forward, had him salivating like one of Pavlov’s trained dogs. Following it was a compulsion, a decision made in some deep, animal part of his brain that overrode all logic and restraint. He pushed off the doorjamb and let the door swing shut behind him.
It was hot in the room, a tropical heat, the air humid and perfumed. Along with the lack of light it reminded him of a night he’d spent once in Bali, but there hadn’t been this amazing, sensual force pulling him forward then. There hadn’t been this need.
Because it was need. As basic as the need to eat or breathe or Shift, the urge to mate with the source of all that lovely, deep, feminine scent was a lashing demand in every cell of his body.
He took several steps into the room but froze when he heard a low moan.
Morgan’s moan.
“Go away,” hissed Bartleby from behind the screen, “you’ll make it worse!”
Just going to move her to a bedroom, Xander thought, one ragged part of his brain still functioning. Just going to get her off the floor, get her comfortable...
He staggered across the polished bamboo floor of the gym one step at a time, trying not to breathe too deeply because it sent the animal inside him into a frenzy of snarling hunger. Morgan moaned again, and the doctor cursed. Xander rounded the side of the folding screen and froze, looking down with his lips parted and his heart a sudden throbbing clench in his chest.
She was lying on her back on a futon unfolded on the floor, arms and legs akimbo, a sheet bunched up around her waist as if she’d been thrashing in it. She was clothed, but not by much: a simple camisole gone see-through with sweat, a glimpse of plain, girlish white panties beneath the wrinkled sheet. Her hair was a tangled dark mess over the pillow beneath her head, her eyes were closed, her skin shone with the Fever and a fine sheen of perspiration. Strands of hair curled mermaid damp across her brow, clung to her neck, and he itched to push them from her skin with his fingers.
Looking at her, every atom in his body, every nerve, screamed, I want! I need! Mine!
“I told you, it’ll make it worse if you’re—”
Bartleby, crouching over Morgan with a syringe in his hand, turned while he spoke. When he saw Xander standing there, he broke off in surprise and came to his feet. “You’re up! How are you feeling?”
Xander’s mouth felt like baked stone. He didn’t take his gaze from Morgan when he answered. “At this exact moment?” he said, his voice shaking. “Like King Kong on Viagra.”
“It’s the hormones she’s emitting,” Bartleby said, sending a worried glance toward Morgan. As if she knew he was looking at her, she let out a whimper. Her head rolled back and forth on the pillow, and she arched on the futon, radiating heat. Bartleby glanced back at Xander, whose mouth had begun to water. “You can’t be in here. You know that,” he said, moving between Xander and Morgan so he blocked the view.
A low, warning growl rumbled through Xander’s chest. He couldn’t help it.
“Alexander,” said the doctor, careful to keep his voice mild, “I’m only trying to make this easier for her. She is in a lot of discomfort—pain, actually—and though I’ve just given her a shot of morphine, she’ll still be able to feel you here and it will make the pain worse. You need to leave. For her.”
He didn’t move. His brain sent the command, but his feet refused. His entire body was in mutiny. Desire pounded through him in wave over dark, powerful wave, and he stood there fighting it, fighting the almost overpowering urge to rip off that sheet and those innocent white panties and take her right here, on the gymnasium floor.
“Why would Leander send me with a female about to go into her Fever?” he wondered aloud. His voice cracked over every other word. “Why would anyone be so stupid?”
Bartleby sighed and set the syringe down on a low table that was filled with towels and water bottles and various medical supplies, then turned back to Xander. “He didn’t know. She said it’s her first Fever.”
Xander started. He’d never heard of a female going into Fever for the first time later than puberty. “What? That’s impossible! She’s—how old is she?”
“Twenty-six,” came the reply. “And, yes, it’s almost unheard of to happen this late. But not impossible.” His tone shaded with sarcasm. “Clearly.” He put a gentle hand on Xander’s bicep and gave a small push. It was like trying to move a building.
“I just want to move her somewhere more comfortable,” Xander said, licking his lips. “I can’t stand seeing her on the floor. Just to one of the bedrooms, downstairs.” He glanced at the doctor. “Will it hurt her if I move her?”
Bartleby shook his head. His eyes were worried. “But it might hurt you.” A flush spread across his cheeks.
“The wound is healing,” Xander said. “It hurts, but you know I heal fast. And she probably only weighs a buck ten, a buck twenty at the most—”
“It’s not your wound I’m worried about, old friend,” said the doctor, then sent a pointed glance at the front of Xander’s trousers, at the bulge straining there. Bartleby coughed into his hand and glanced away.
Xander dismissed that. He was under control. If he had stood here with the scent of her readiness pummeling him for the past few minutes and had done nothing to satisfy the screaming need it unleashed in him, he could control himself.
He was relatively sure of that.
He brushed past Bartleby and knelt beside the futon. He leaned over Morgan. His gaze traveled over her flushed face, her tangled hair, her chest...
He squeezed his eyes shut, banishing the sight of hard pink nipples straining taut through the sheer, clinging fabric of the camisole, of her breasts, so full and round.
“Morgan,” he whispered, opening his eyes. She made a little sound in her throat and her brow furrowed, but her eyes didn’t open. “I’m going to move you to a more comfortable place, to a bed. All right?”
She didn’t answer. He smelled the drug the doctor had given her, smelled the chemical harshness of it in her blood beneath the amazing, opulent scent of the Fever, and knew it wouldn’t last long. Her body was burning through it even as he knelt there.
He gathered the sheet around her, carefully slid his arms beneath her body, and pulled her against him, cradling her to his chest. He lifted her and stood up. Her head fell against h
is shoulder, she breathed a little, discontented sigh. Her skin was hot, so hot—
The fingers of one of her hands curled around the front of his shirt. Eyes closed, she burrowed against him, inhaling, breathing his own scent into her nose. Then she made another sound in her throat, but this one was purely erotic.
A shudder wracked him. He had to get her to that bed, and fast, and then he had to get the hell away from her.
Without another word to the doctor, he crossed the darkened gym, kicked open the doors, and headed toward the stairs.
Morgan was on fire.
Everything burned, everything hurt, her skin and her muscles and her bones. Even her thoughts—chaotic and disjointed as they were—scorched a painfully blazing path through her brain, pounding one word over and over.
Mate. Mate. Mate.
She’d never felt anything like this incinerating, elemental urgency before but supposed she shouldn’t have been so surprised; her own mother had her first Fever late, though not as late as this. Once Morgan passed puberty without a sign of it appearing, then twenty, then twenty-five, everyone just assumed she was an anomaly. That possibly her powerful Gift of Suggestion came with a darker side. Infertility.
But no. She was fertile. Now she felt it to the very marrow of her bones.
And there was a male holding her. An Ikati male, not the human doctor that had tended to her since the first signs of the Fever hit. She smelled the difference between them, the power, the strength of this male carrying her in his arms. She smelled his lust, dark and deep.
Her lids were so heavy from the drug she couldn’t open her eyes, but she could inhale, and she took that heavenly scent of lust into her lungs. This close, it was thick and sweet like candy, delicious. It sent a spike of heat straight down between her legs.
Edge of Oblivion: A Night Prowler Novel, Book 2 Page 17
