Edge of Oblivion (19 page)

Three heads swiveled in her direction.

“I can give him blood,” she said, calmer now that she had their attention. “I can be the donor.”

Frozen, Bartleby glanced first at Mateo, then Tomás, both of whom had turned to stare at her with the flat, killer gaze of jihadists. No one moved.

“You are the mark,” said Mateo. Dispassionate, his gaze traveled over her body.

“I am the Morgan, actually,” she answered tartly.

“
Mark
means
target
,” Tomás cut in with a curl of his full upper lip. “Hit. Job. Pigeon. Victim

—”

“How enlightening,” Morgan interrupted, folding her arms over her chest. She glared at him so hard she thought her eyes might cross from the effort. “Thank you for the vocabulary lesson. Now are you going to let me be the donor or let your boy bleed to death on that lovely Cassina table?”

There followed a long, crackling silence.

Morgan was at the very end of her reserves of patience, a well that was shallow under the best of circumstances. She was exhausted. Her body ached, her bones ached, even her
teeth
ached, and her blood was boiling like someone had lit a fire beneath her feet. If she had anything to compare it to, she’d have thought she was coming down with the flu. So the fact that there were two
more
strange, hostile males staring at her as if she were lunch didn’t freak her out as much as it should have.

“He can only take blood from an
Ikati
female,” she said, exasperated at their continued silence, their narrow-eyed hostility. “And if he doesn’t get it soon, he’s going to die. Right?” she added, glancing at the human. With a quick, birdlike dip of his white head, he nodded. She nodded back, already knowing the answer before she asked.
Ikati
had no blood types, no blood-borne diseases, and human blood was useless to them, as weak as water. Only a female could give a male blood and vice versa.

“So I’m offering,” she said in conclusion.

Still no response. Mateo and Tomás stared at her while somewhere outside a dog began to bark.

Morgan exhaled and dropped her arms to her side. The exhaustion sank down to stain her bones, and it felt suddenly as if her skin were too tight. “Fine,” she said, bitter. “It’s on you, then.

When the Assembly asks what happened, it’s on you.”

She turned and was about to walk to the phone on the glass-topped desk in the living room to call Leander when Mateo’s gravel-rough voice stopped her.

“Why would you do that?”

In her stiff, blood-encrusted clothes, Morgan turned back and looked at him. He gazed back at her, all muscle and bulk and green-eyed menace, the light shining raven blue off his hair.

“If I’m not mistaken, his assignment is to kill you, if you fail in your task. Why would you give him your blood?” he persisted.

Good question. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a good answer. At least, not one that made any kind of sense. She stood there for almost a minute, thinking.

“He just saved my life,” she finally answered, gesturing to the two bodies sprawled in gory proof on the terrace, the living room floor. “I owe him the chance, at least. He deserves that much from me. And...because I want him to live.” She blew out a long, exhausted breath, realizing how insane she sounded for even saying it, realizing too it was God’s honest truth. “Even if it means...”

that he’s ultimately going to have to kill me
, she thought.
And that I am a self-destructive moron with a death wish.
But she didn’t say that. Instead she lamely ended with, “...you know.”

A nerve behind her eye throbbed, sending a spike of pain through her skull. She pressed her fingers against it, thinking this was going to be the mother of all migraines. And how was that possible, since she’d never had one before? Only humans suffered headaches. Humans and
Ikati
females who were about to—

“You honor us,” Mateo said, husky.

Blinking, she dropped her hand from her face and looked at him. He was gazing back at her with something like...awe.

“What?” She glanced at Tomás, whose expression had changed from one of total suspicion only seconds before to one that looked alarmingly close to gratitude.

“What you do to any one of us, you do to
every
one,” Tomás replied, cryptic, his mirror eyes gone curiously round.

Morgan looked back and forth between the two
Ikati
males and the frozen, dumfounded human doctor. “Uh...”

“It’s their code,” the doctor said with a swift glance to his companions. He pushed his glasses up farther on his nose. “The assassin’s code.
Cross one, cross us all. Kill one, kill us all. Love one
...”

He cleared his throat. “
Love us all.
”

“More assassins,” Morgan said, a little more feebly than she would have liked. She closed her eyes. “How many of you are there, exactly?”

“Four,” said Mateo and Tomás together.

Could have been worse. At least it wasn’t four hundred. She glanced down at Xander, back up to them. “Where’s the other one?”

It was Mateo who answered this time. “Waiting downstairs with the car.”

“The car?”

His rough voice was tinged with something like amusement. “You didn’t think we were going to
fly
out of here, did you?”

A girl can only hope.
“Okay. Let’s get this over with,” she sighed.

“Hop to, Doc,” Mateo said to Bartleby.

The doctor leapt into a blur of action. He snatched up his black bag and removed a large, wicked-looking syringe and a length of plastic tubing with pointed silver cannulas at each end. He threaded the tubing through the syringe, readied a small glass bottle that smelled like alcohol, a stack of white bandages, and cotton swabs, and set all of it on the table beside Xander’s still form. He snapped on a pair of thin latex gloves.

“On the table, if you please.” He motioned with an open hand to the long dining table. Morgan sat on the edge with as much dignity as she could muster in her bloodstained clothes with her bare legs dangling over the side like a child’s. She crossed then uncrossed her legs, noting with no small trepidation that neither Mateo nor Tomás was looking at anything but her.

She felt like an ant under a very large—very
male
—microscope.

“You should lie down,” said Bartleby gently. He made to lift a hand to her shoulder, but a low snarl from Tomás quickly divested him of that idea. His hand dropped to his side. His face went pink.

“Would you
please
lie down?”

“Is it really necessary?”

“You might find yourself a bit light-headed,” he said, glancing between Mateo and Tomás.

When he spoke again his voice was apologetic. “And it’s going to sting.”

She looked down at Xander, beautiful and unconscious and on the verge of death, and wondered if it would sting as much as a knife thrust between the vertebrae of her neck. The thought made the blood drain from her face. She lay down beside him in one quick motion. The doctor rolled up the sleeve of her blouse and swabbed her arm with alcohol.

“How long will it take?”

“Not long.” He carefully swabbed Xander’s arm, then repositioned it, palm up, trying to balance it on his hip. It didn’t work. “Hold it like this, if you would,” he said to Mateo. The assassin complied, silently, looming so large over the table he blocked out the orb of light from the lamp on the ceiling above.

She closed her eyes, breathed in through her nose, and tried not to think about the colossal stupidity of what she was doing.

There was a prick of pain at her arm, the bite of cold steel sliding into her vein, a pull as the syringe was depressed and her blood was pumped out of her body. Then nothing.

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?