Edge of Oblivion (11 page)

“You’re the son of an Alpha,” she said, curious. Leander would never allow anything to come between him and his birthright. “Why aren’t you Alpha of the Manaus colony now?”

That twitch in his jaw again, but that was all. He glanced back at her, his eyes searing gold.

“Fate chose my path. And I followed it.”

She frowned at him, waiting for more, but he only turned his head and directed his gaze to the passing tourists, bobbing by in a sea of color and noise.

“You are the strangest assassin I’ve ever met,” she declared, undecided again if he was mocking her or just being evasive. This entire conversation made her head spin.

“You’re acquainted with many assassins?” he said drily, to the view of the palazzo.

She speared another ripe piece of melon, lifted it to her lips, and ate it. “Not any who’ve read Nietzsche and talk about love and fate all in the same breath,” she muttered.

He chuckled softly. “I’ve had an unusual education.”

She snorted. “I’ll just bet you—” He went rigid in his chair and whipped his head around so fast it was a black blur in her peripheral vision. He hissed, low, through his teeth, and a deep, warning growl rumbled through his chest. All the tiny hairs on her arms stood on end.

“What is it?” she said, stiffening.

The air around them seemed to warp and shimmer, and she felt his anger and adrenaline pulse over her skin in heated, dangerous waves. The arguing men at the next table fell silent, and she wondered if they felt the sudden atmospheric change, but she didn’t dare look over.

“Open your nose,” he growled, scanning the palazzo. His lips peeled back to reveal a set of perfect, gleaming white teeth. His hand went to his waist.

She glanced around. The café, the passing crowd, the bright, sunlit morning—she saw nothing out of the ordinary.

“Your
nose
,” he hissed and shot to his feet. His chair skidded back and toppled over with a clatter to the cobblestones.

There was a twitter from a table of young women as they noticed Xander for the first time; a few soft gasps rose from another. Conversation all around them ceased except for a few startled murmurs. And she could understand why. At his full height, on full alert, the assassin exuded a current of feral, crackling electricity, virile and potent, that rocked her back in her chair and left her breathless. Even the humans must have been able to sense it, but if not, there was still the fact of the taut, leashed lines of his body, those massive shoulders and arms, the face of a destroying angel, perfectly beautiful and perfectly cold. She stared up at him, startled, as an exquisite rush of heat flooded through her veins.

“Xander, there’s nothing,” she said, horrified by her body’s response. What the hell was the matter with her? “Will you
please
sit down, you’re making a scene—” But then she sensed it. Hot and heavy and peculiar, a wave of power unlike anything she’d ever felt. Enveloping. Burning. Surrounding. It felt at once intimate and alien, probing, and she knew without doubt it was meant for her. On instinct she inhaled and caught the scent of lightning and smoke, a lingering sting like gunpowder on the back of her tongue. Sweat and musk and succulence, masculine and heady.

“Alpha,” she breathed, tasting the truth with every nerve in her body. “My God, it’s an
Alpha
.”

And not one of their own—no one from any of the four
Ikati
colonies felt like this. Though it was undoubtedly one of their kind, a male of their kind, he smelled different. He tasted different. His aura was scented dark, so dark, like mulled wine and spice and violence, like secrets and whispers and tunnels beneath the earth. Intoxicating and frightening, it held her frozen in her chair, hypnotized.

“
Find him
,” Xander commanded, his eyes raking the passing crowd.

Without hesitating, Morgan closed her eyes and concentrated.

The crowd vanished. Everything fell silent. There was only warm air, the chair firm beneath her, and the glass edge of the table, cool under her wrist. She cast out her awareness in swift, concentric rings, enveloping everything around her. Warm humans and solid buildings and the corded sinew of trees, canvas umbrellas and all manner of dull, inanimate objects and the sweet, fleet wind brush of starlings flitting through the air. Cars passed by a few blocks over, a plane flew by overhead, hard and fast and metallic.

And then—oh, and then—

She collided with him and gasped.

He was power and darkness and black, grasping need, a frightening, gravitational pull, strong and elemental. She felt as if she’d entered the atmosphere of a massive black hole and was in danger of being sucked in and swallowed.

“By the steps,” she panted, pulling back from the contact with an effort that caused her an almost physical pain. “At the top of the Spanish Steps—he’s there!”

She opened her eyes, turned her head, and through the sea of people and color and movement, found him.

He stood fixed and silent on the uppermost terrace of the sweeping white staircase, leaning on the balustrade with his hands gripped so hard over the curved edge his knuckles were white. He was tall and large—not as muscular as Xander, but just as substantial—with black hair just beginning to gray at the temples. Dressed in elegant, spotless white, he stood out in the riot of color around him, and the power of his shining, bright presence made everything else fade to gray like a brilliant ray of sun against the clouds.

His face was severe yet appealing, blessed with the hard grace and undeniable beauty shared by all
Ikati
, a beauty that made heads swivel for another look as he stood staring back at her with eyes so sharp and strange she shuddered.

They were black. Coal black. Flat and endless. She had the impression of being sucked into that gravitational pull again, of falling. Of drowning.

Then Xander moved and set her free. He took off at a run, brutally shoving his way across the piazza, leaving a swath of cursing tourists in his wake. He sailed over the enormous plashing fountain in its center in one flying leap and landed on the other side—a feat no human would ever be able to achieve, evidenced by the astonished gasps of everyone that saw it—and kept running in a beeline toward the wide, sweeping staircase and the man standing near the top.

The man in white didn’t move as he watched Xander approach. He held perfectly still, his gaze trained on him, wearing an expression of mild irritation but not fear or surprise, almost as if he expected exactly this scenario.

His gaze went again to Morgan. She sat perfectly still under the cold weight of it, rigid as stone, finding it difficult to breathe.

There came a voice inside her head, and then breathing became impossible.

Just as Xander reached the first level of steps, the man in white turned and vanished into the crowd.

Xander saw him turn and vanish, and he ran even faster.

In a flat-out sprint, he took the steps three at a time, pumping his arms and legs hard, shoving past people or colliding into them, knocking them over—but he didn’t stop or even slow.

An Alpha. In Rome.

Impossible.

In all the four colonies of
Ikati
—England, Brazil, Quebec, and Nepal—there was no one unaccounted for. Travel was severely restricted, Bloodlines were carefully kept; everyone knew everyone and always had. There weren’t even any stray half-Bloods anymore, not since the new Queen had been found. And the few deserters they’d had over the past decades were all caught and returned, or killed, most to his own credit. The fact that a male of his age and potency had gone undetected and unnoticed was impossible.

But somehow it had happened.

He reached the top level of the terraced staircase and skidded to a stop, scanning the crowd, inhaling deep. He caught the unmistakable scent of
Ikati
to the west, a glimmer of power fading fast down a narrow, tree-lined side street. He took off after it.

He was dimly aware of people scurrying out of his way, of the cobbled pavement flying by beneath his feet, of his own heart pounding in his chest, of his lungs, which burned like fire. The only thing he focused on was running, as fast as he could, and the single thought his nerves and blood and bones kept screaming inside his skull.

Because of course the man in white was their enemy. A feral Alpha—with the possible exception of the Expurgari there was nothing more dangerous to the tribe than that, a fact proven time and time again over the centuries. Alpha males of the four known colonies were highly aggressive and violent toward other Alphas. They fought for dominance, almost always to the death.

If he knew of the other colonies, he would make a move to usurp their Alphas. It was in his blood, in the structure of his DNA. And total domination was the only acceptable outcome; also in his DNA. Which meant death for one Alpha or the other.

Which meant war.

Xander had smelled the Alpha’s desire first—aimed at Morgan, animal pheromones thick and pungent—and the shock of fury it gave him sent a flood of murderous aggression through his veins.

He could only imagine what he wanted from her, wanted to do to her, an unmated female, in her lush, exquisite prime—

He cursed and ran faster.

Around a bend in the road, and he saw a flash of white disappearing into an alley. He lunged forward, anticipation seething in his blood. He bared his teeth in victory. The man in white would be trapped—

Xander rounded the corner of the alley and ground to a sudden halt.

There, at the end of the long alley, stood the man in white.

Holding a gun.

Smiling.

There was a loud report, a crack of noise that ricocheted off the tall brick buildings on either side. A bright flash of light and the smell of smoke, and Xander just had time enough to concentrate before the bullet hit him.

It was a perfect aim. Four inches below the collarbone on the left side of his chest.

His heart.

The bullet went in the front and out the back, piercing a perfect, round hole in the fabric of his shirt. It left behind the scent of scorched linen. He staggered back with the force of it and lifted his hand to his chest.

“Shit,” he muttered, frowning.

He really liked this shirt. He looked back up at the man in white, who had lowered the gun to his side and was staring at him in stunned incomprehension.

“Surprise,” he said and offered the stranger a smile of his own. Then he reached for his knives.

Morgan had to shuck off her heels so she could run—the second beautiful pair deserted in less than fourteen hours, these a snakeskin, red-soled Louboutin—and had just reached the top of the Spanish Steps when she heard the shot.

She froze. Her blood chilled to ice. Everyone around her froze as well, exclaiming in various languages, and gazed at one another, wide-eyed. There were shouts in Italian that mentioned the word
polizia
, and she didn’t want to stick around for that. She turned and sprinted down a side street with Xander’s scent flaming hot in her nose.

She rounded the corner of the alley just in time to see him hurl a throwing star at the man in white. Just before impact, his target dissolved into a fine spray of mist, and the throwing star caught the collar of the now empty white shirt and embedded it into the brick wall behind him with a
thunk
. It hung from the throwing star’s spikes like laundry hung out to dry. The mist that had been the man in white coalesced and rose quickly in surging gray plumes.

The force of his Shift made her gasp. He was incredibly powerful, just as powerful as the throb of energy that had so shocked her when Xander had Shifted at the Colosseum the night before.

It was always like that with an Alpha. Power and passion and heat. Past her shock, she wondered again why Xander wasn’t the Alpha of Manaus—he was far stronger than Alejandro, the one who ruled now.

Moving fast, the gray plume of mist disappeared above the roofline, pants and shoes and underthings left behind in a heap on the dirty cement. Xander ran to the pile of clothes, crouched down, and quickly combed over them. He pocketed something, then noticed her standing there, staring.

He stood and stared back. His eyes were fierce, firelit gold, unmistakably dangerous and wild.

She felt the surge of bloodlust crackling through his body and took a step back, her hand at her throat.

“Get back to the hotel.” He was breathing heavily but his voice was perfectly controlled, perfectly cold. “Wait for me there. Don’t let anyone in but me, no matter what happens.
Entendido?
”

She nodded, backing away, her hand still at her throat. If she’d had any illusion of the truth of what he was, if she’d harbored any secret hope because of their strange conversation at breakfast, it was quickly stripped away and burned by the sheer pulsing force of the rage and hatred that burned in his eyes, bright as comets.

Killer
, she thought. He was a killer. Of that, there was no doubt.

Then he turned away, walked to the very end of the alley where the brick walls met behind a pair of reeking Dumpsters, and simply melted into the building, leaving behind not a single trace he was ever there.

He didn’t want to leave his knives behind, so Xander simply used Passage instead of Vapor, a convenient Gift he’d more than once been grateful for.

This way he could simply Pass through solid material—or it through him, like the bullet—

keeping his clothes and anything he carried with him. Anything that wasn’t too heavy, that is. He’d once tried to Pass a three-hundred-pound deserter from his colony through the steel bars of the country jail he’d found him in, piss drunk, and had made the unfortunate and gruesome discovery that there were weight restrictions to this particular Gift. The man had made it halfway through before things really got ugly. Xander had had to abandon the body, but he burned the jail to the ground so there was no evidence of the deserter’s unusual demise.