“All of this is mine,” he murmured. “Your every thought, your every feeling, every muscle and bone and sinew in this perfect, beautiful body is mine. And from now on, it always will be.”
“No.” Half whisper, half moan, it brought him to a standstill.
“No?” came his softly spoken challenge. The pain in her head gathered into a shrieking, howling monster with sharp, gnashing teeth that ripped and tore and shredded her flesh, a dragon devouring villagers and spewing fire inside her skull.
Dominus said, “You sound unconvinced. Perhaps a demonstration is in order.”
He grasped her by the wrist and lifted her arm away from her body, turned it in various positions until he found one he liked. Then with a murmured, “Stay,” he released it, took up her other arm, and repeated the same procedure, then angled her head. In a moment she was posed like a Renaissance statue in the posture he’d chosen, and she stood helpless in suffocating, blistering agony, buried alive.
“Venus in chains,” Dominus murmured, transfixed.
His gaze raked over her figure, ravenous, and he looked for a moment as if he would pounce on her and devour her whole. But he took several slow, deep breaths, and the rabid excitement in his eyes eventually dimmed. “Pain is a very powerful motivator, Morgan. Most creatures will do anything to avoid it. Anything at all.” He licked his lips, slow and deliberate. “Can you guess what I require from you in order for the pain to go away?”
Unable to answer, she made a high-pitched sound of terror that sounded like a mouse when it spots the cat in midleap.
“O-be-di-ence.” He drew it out, lovingly emphasizing each syllable. “You will obey me in all things. You will do whatever I ask without hesitation or I will leave you standing here like this, in agony, until you rot on your feet. Which, I happen to know from experience, takes about three weeks.” With an elegant gesture of his manicured hand, he indicated a pile of bleached bones jumbled in a huge, hideous white mess in one dark corner beside a basalt statue of the devil.
Her heart heaved. Sputtered. Started up again with a painful throb.
Dominus moved closer. “But I don’t want to do that.” His voice was tender now, stroking, and his eyes had grown soft. He touched a finger to her lower lip. “I have other things in mind for you. For us. Give me your word you will behave and I will release you, and we can begin again.”
“And in return?” she whispered, stalling. Sweat beaded along her hairline, trickled in a cold rivulet down the back of her neck. “If I agree to...obey...what will you give me?”
First he looked angry: his eyes flared; his handsome mouth drew to a hard, flat line. He dropped his hand from her face and made a fist at his side, and she braced herself for a punch. But then another emotion softened his face, and for a moment he looked younger, almost wistful.
“Are you negotiating with me?”
He sounded amused, amazed, but most of all intrigued.
“I would like to not rot on my feet,” she said, faint. “But I will if it means I have to sacrifice free will. I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees, which if you really knew me would be obvious.” She moistened her lips. “And because you don’t—that makes me think you might be full of shit.”
He inhaled a sharp, astonished breath. His mouth dropped open. His eyes, coal black and burning, popped wide. He stared at her in silence while the candles sputtered in a sudden cold breeze and the blood roared wild through her veins.
“No one has ever spoken to me like that,” he hissed, unblinking. A flush of crimson rose up his neck, and for a horrible, breathless moment, he did nothing at all.
Then—impossibly—he began to laugh.
It echoed through the vast chamber like a thing alive. It bounced off the walls and split into a hundred different laughs, each one darker and more sinister than the last. He sat back down on the velvet divan and gave himself over to it, head thrown back, eyes closed, white teeth shining in the gloom. In a moment his laughter tapered off and he composed himself and sat gazing at her with a finger rubbing his full, smiling lips.
“You amuse me,” he said, surprised. “I had no idea when I chose you that you’d be so...interesting.” And with a little flick of his hand, he released her from his control and the pain simultaneously vanished.
Morgan collapsed into the overstuffed chair, gulping air, fighting down nausea, hot and sour. Her mind wasn’t working, her body wasn’t working. She had to think!
“Ch-chose me?” she managed.
“To help me infiltrate the other colonies,” he replied, matter-of-fact. “My people had been watching them all—well, the three I knew of—for years, looking for a weak link, for someone who didn’t fit, someone rebellious, someone, perhaps, who might want a little,” he waved his fingers, coyly searching for a word, “vindictam?”
Vengeance.
“But we could never find a chink in their armor. Until...you. And you were so ripe for the taking.” He smiled. “So much loneliness. So much anger. Turning you was hardly any work at all.”
An iceberg slid silently over her and crushed her with its cold, massive weight. Suddenly, horribly, she understood everything with a blinding, brilliant clarity, like sunlight reflected off snow. “Oh my God,” she whispered.
“Yes,” he smiled wider, “I am your god, Morgan. God of vengeance, god of war, god of salvation, who will release our entire race from the oppression of man. It’s taken a lifetime of planning, but now all the players are positioned perfectly on the board and the Ikati will, finally, have checkmate. No little thanks to you.”
Her stomach heaved. The sudden, wretched knowledge of what he had done, of the part she had so willingly played, burned like poison in her throat.
“You—you planned this,” she sputtered. “You planned all of this! You set me up!”
His smile grew dangerous. “You were an easy target.”
“You killed your own kind!” she shouted as blood flooded her face. “You had them tortured! You worked with humans—”
“Destruction is one of nature’s mandates, as the Marquis de Sade so eloquently said,” he answered calmly, “and a king must be willing to sacrifice a few rooks in order to win a war. And as you know, lovely Morgan, we have been engaged in war since the beginning of time.”
She hated him, hated him with a ferocity that made her heart pound and her fingers itch to claw his eyes out. “You bastard! We’ve been hunted for centuries—forced to run—forced to hide—”
“Silence!” he shouted, and leapt from the divan.
He began to pace in front of her, lithe and menacing, bristling like a caged animal. He ran an agitated hand through the mane of his silver-black hair.
“They started this. They declared war on us. Are you familiar with the old adage ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer’? That is what the Alphas of my lineage have done since the Inquisition began in twelve thirty-one. My ancestors quickly realized that a church-sanctioned mass-murder spree was a golden opportunity to infiltrate the bastion of human leadership and wreak a little havoc of their own, vengeance, if you will. What a wonderful excuse to kill humans! And in such imaginative ways!” He stopped pacing and turned to look at her. His voice dropped an octave, and his expression sent a chill of fear over her skin.
“And that is when the organization was first formed.”
“The Expurgari,” she whispered.
“The Purifiers,” he agreed, nodding. “At first the goal was only to kill as many humans as possible. Thousands were slaughtered, branded heretics, and the church never suspected a thing. They gave us gold, mountains of gold, for the wonderful job we did. We pretended to be their most devout disciples, when all we really wanted was to see their blood run in the streets. And it worked out perfectly...until, in our travels rounding up all their falsely accused, we discovered another colony of Ikati, living hidden in France.”
He resumed his pacing. “Up until that point, we thought we were the only ones. Our records only g
o as far back as the Roman soldier who brought back four strange, orphaned children from Egypt after Cleopatra was defeated by Caesar Augustus at the battle of Actium. But once the colony in France was discovered, the goal of the Expurgari changed.”
Morgan breathed, “There is no colony in France.”
Dominus stopped pacing. He smiled. “Not anymore.”
“Why?” Her voice broke. “Why would you want to wipe out an entire colony of your own kind?”
“I don’t,” he said, offended, then shrugged. “My ancestors were a little less big picture than I am, however. They didn’t like rivals any more than humans do.”
“But you’re killing the Keepers of the Bloodlines! You’re torturing women—the Queen of our colony—”
“Yes, that,” he said, sour, and returned to his position on the divan. He spread his arms over its scrolled back and fixed her with an intense, penetrating look. “That was a mistake, brought about by the idiotic leader of one of our less organized cells. Humans are so unreliable, but there’s so many of them and so few of us...they’ve been useful minions, for the most part, but what happened at your colony was not planned. He was supposed to take the Keeper, as you know, but unfortunately bungled the job and wound up with a female instead.” A wry smile crept over his face. “I understand your Alpha took care of him, however.”
Morgan moaned, squeezed her eyes shut, and dropped her head into her hands. It was worse than she’d ever thought possible, the worst thing she could imagine, a nightmare from which there would be no awakening.
She’d found the feral Alpha. And she’d found the head of the Expurgari.
They were one and the same.
“I don’t understand,” she whispered through her fingers. “I don’t understand.”
“My plan was never to destroy the other colonies, Morgan,” he said softly, as if to a child. “The Alphas, yes—there can be only one King, and that is me. I wanted the Keepers because they would tell me everything I needed to know about each colony, about the Alphas, the most Gifted Bloodlines, about their defenses and weaknesses and their more disgruntled members who might be convinced it was time for a change. And then I had to kill them, obviously, so they didn’t expose me.”
“But...why?”
She wasn’t looking at him, but she heard the smile in his voice. “Because we are going to come together as one, as it was always meant to be. We will combine our resources and infiltrate their gene pool and take back everything that was stolen from us so long ago. And then...we will rule the world.” His voice dropped to a zealous whisper. “ ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.’ Such a lovely sentiment, don’t you think? The human Bible is full of little gems like that; their god is a petty, bad-tempered sort with some substantial insecurity issues, but on this he got it right. Vengeance is best left to the gods. Best left to me.”
Morgan shuddered. Beautiful and genius and completely insane, he had lured her into his trap and she had fallen willingly, like a honeybee drunk with the heady smell of nectar.
He came and stood beside her, touched a gentle hand to her hair. “Think of it,” he said, reasonably, as she shrank away. “No more running. No more hiding. No more living like mice, shaking in the baseboards. We’ll be free, Morgan. Free.” His voice hardened. “And you—more like me than you’re willing to admit—will stand beside me. As my Queen.”
She stiffened, all her muscles tensed for flight, but before she could move he sensed her intention and yanked her head back with his hand fisted painfully in her hair.
“Or,” he said, gazing down at her, perfectly controlled, “you will end up there.”
He pointed, moving his hand and her head so she was forced to twist around in the chair, craning her neck.
Beyond the horned statue of the devil, beyond the gruesome pile of bones, even farther into the long, sliding shadows of the room stood a modern glass case against the wall, lighted from within to illuminate the contents, row after row of large, screw-top jars with bobbing dark somethings inside.
Heads.
Row upon row of heads preserved in pale yellow liquid with staring wide eyes and clouds of dark hair, desiccated flesh peeling from skulls, lips shrunken and curled back over grinning teeth, the very same heads Jenna had shown her what felt like a lifetime ago.
A roar rose in her ears, pain throbbed in her skull, she felt faint and nauseous and cold. The shaking began somewhere deep in her stomach and spread to her arms and legs, leaving her weak, wobbly as a foal.
“As I said before, I do not tolerate demands, and I do not tolerate disobedience of any kind,” Dominus said, holding her fast. “One act of defiance,” he lifted the index finger of his other hand, “one, and I will not hesitate to put you in my trophy case along with all the others who didn’t see things my way.”
He smiled down at her, excitement burning hot in his eyes. “Obey me, submit to me, rule with me,” he whispered. “Or die. Choose. Now.”
Without thinking, without breaking eye contact, Morgan opened her mouth and very quietly said, “Fuck. You.”
Faint surprise registered in his coal-black eyes. He blinked. Then, with his hand still fisted painfully in her hair, he rose to his full height and dragged her, limp, along with him.
“Interesting choice of words.”
He opened his fist and released her. She staggered back, panting in sudden terror, until she was brought up short by the icy, invading claw of pain that punched through her chest and flared out in a cold, crackling frost all over her body. The cold spread, hardening her muscles, immobilizing her. Once again she was trapped, breathless, held hostage inside her own body.
With his arms folded across his broad chest, Dominus said, “Yes, very interesting choice of words, considering what I’m about to do to you.”
His tone was light, but the fury on his face was not, and if she thought she had been afraid before, she knew this was to be an education in fear.
Suddenly, with the numb, jerky movements of a marionette, her hands lifted and began to pull at the material of her dress, grabbing at it, sliding it up over her hips. She stared down at her alien hands in horror, and all she could think was, Xander! Xander! Xander!
“Oh, yes, thank you for reminding me,” Dominus said. “Your boyfriend is coming to save you, but I kill him before he can. Just thought you’d like to know. Now,” he said, his tone a little lower than before, “let’s get you out of that dress.”
And before she could open her mouth to scream, her own puppet hands had pulled the dress over her head and let it fall in a silent puddle to the bare stone floor.
D had shown Eliana as much as he could in the few short hours they had between twilight and the Purgare, cramming it all into a whirlwind, epic trip.
The Forum, the Colosseum, the Pantheon, his favorite ancient ruins and curio shops and the artifacts and arcades of Trajan’s market, the decadent Baths of Caracalla, the Piazza Navona with its lavish baroque fountains and busy cafés. He kept a motorcycle—Italian, of course, a sleek, muscular black Ducati—covered in a garage near the Domitilla, and they’d flown around the city with her thighs pressed against his, her arms wrapped tight around his waist, her heat and softness molded into the hard muscles of his back.
He’d never been happier in his life.
But now it was nearing midnight. Time was short.
“We have to get back,” he murmured, watching her devour a triple stracciatella gelato at the small sidewalk café they’d stopped at to eat.
“What is this?” she exclaimed around a mouthful, tapping the little wooden spoon against the plastic cup. “It’s like heaven in my mouth!”
Seeing her like this—awed, excited, full of wonder—was the best gift he’d had in a long, long time. Maybe ever. He inhaled, smelling citrus blossom from a pair of nearby lemon trees, tasting a bittersweet flavor on his tongue he imagined was the fleeting taste of joy.
“Chocolate chips with cream. Next time I’ll buy you the cinnamon pear.”
He leaned over the table and gently grasped her wrist, forcing the spoon out of her mouth. “Yes, next time. And stop sucking so suggestively on that spoon, or I’ll think you’re teasing me on purpose.”
“And then you’ll have to spank me,” she whispered, eyes alight with mirth.
He growled and pulled her out of her chair and onto his lap. She squealed and dropped the cup of gelato while an elderly couple at a table nearby tutted their disapproval.
“Don’t make me do it right here,” he growled, nuzzling her neck.
She giggled and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. “Promises, promises,” she said, a little breathless, and then gazed at him with those dark, beautiful eyes that lit his soul aflame.
“Principessa,” he murmured, enthralled, “I would die a thousand deaths to wake a single morning to that smile.”
“Well,” she teased, leaning down to press her lips against his, “let’s hope it doesn’t have to come to that.”
And then they were kissing, passionately, oblivious to time or place or dark or light, wrapped so completely in one another, nothing else existed in that moment, nothing at all.
She broke away first, and he let out a soft moan at the loss of her warm, sweet mouth, at the bitter ache of withdrawal.
“I don’t want to go back,” she whispered, grasping the leather collar of his coat. “Not yet.”
He opened his eyes. “We have to. You know we have to.”
She traced the bow of his upper lip with the tip of a finger, trailing fire across his skin. “Are you going to keep pretending you can’t stand me?” she asked in a small voice.
Edge of Oblivion: A Night Prowler Novel, Book 2 Page 30
