Edge of Oblivion (2 page)

The growl deepened, electrifying and primal. The eyes did not blink.

Nathaniel felt his own predatory animal blink wide awake inside him, hackles raised, claws unsheathed. He took a deep breath to calm it. That wouldn’t resolve anything, and he’d probably end up dead. She was the stronger of the two, the more experienced, by far the more lethal. He kept a hard grip on the cattle prod and, with his thumb, flicked on a tiny switch. The flashlight he kept angled toward the floor. It draped the walls and ceiling in gold and umber shadows.

“I’m sorry,” he added, keeping his tone even with a surprisingly difficult exertion of will. “You know this is not my doing. You know this is the Law.”

A hitch in that deep, snarling rumble, a telling note of something like agreement. It made him breathe easier, just the tiniest bit. Leaving the door open, he inched back over the uneven dirt floor, slowly, making no sudden movements, giving her more room. The cattle prod, however, he hadn’t lowered. He didn’t need to glance away from those glowing emerald eyes to know how hard his hand shook.

“I’m just going to wait here, Miss Morgan, right out here where you can see me, and you come out whenever you’re ready.”
Please, please don’t make me come in there and get you. I only just got engaged last month, I’m only twenty-one
—“Whenever you’re ready, I’ll just be waiting right here.”

He snapped his jaw shut so he wouldn’t say anything stupid and continued slowly backing up until he was a safer distance away near the stairs. After a moment, the growling subsided to a disgruntled chirrup, then a final, huffing snort.

He waited by the stairs for what felt like a thousand years, nerves screaming, ears aching for the slightest hint of movement, sincerely hoping Leander and the rest of the Assembly had thought better of their decision to send him down alone and were on their way to assist. Then all of a sudden the frigid, dark underground prison hummed with a pleasant snap of electricity that sent a wash of honeyed warmth over his skin in wave after perfumed wave.

God, she was powerful. Feeling her Shift was like standing a few feet away from a lightning strike, just as electrifying, just as lethal. And she smelled of something warm and luscious, like maple syrup or brown sugar, only darker, finer, completely unlike his fiancée, who was scented of lilac and rosewater, girlishly sweet—

“Nathaniel,” a voice purred, feminine and smooth, as dark and delicious as her scent. It sent a rash of goose bumps crawling over his skin. He saw movement beyond the open cell door. A figure glided forward through shadows without noise, maneuvering with unstudied grace and sleek elegance.

A hand on the doorframe, then a face that seemed to manifest from thin air, arched brows and huge almond eyes and lovely full lips curved into a small smile that might have been sadness or disdain.

She stepped forward past the door and into his puddle of weak yellow light, and Nathaniel could not stop the gasp that parted his lips.

She was naked. Incredibly,
perfectly
, naked.

His mind wiped blank. The cattle prod lowered to his side. Random words formed in his mind then vanished, swallowed by pleasure and astonishment:
lovely; full; curve; satin; slender; sweet; soft; want; yes, want
—

“Nathaniel,” she said again, amused at his slack-jawed admiration. “The Williams boy. I remember you.” Her gaze flickered over him, uncomfortably keen, then she smiled. “You’re all grown up.”

His tongue would not work. He could not form a coherent thought.

“I’m unfortunately without clothes,” Morgan continued, turning her wrist in a slow, graceful motion to indicate her spectacular nudity. He tried to sputter out a reply, but she went on, ignoring him. “Would you be a dear and find me something nice to wear to my execution?”

The great hall of Sommerley Manor was noisy, crowded, and hot. The tall, lead-paned windows that lined the west wall were thrown open in their casements, letting in the heather-scented glory of an English country afternoon. A desultory breeze ruffled the ivory silk curtains but did nothing to cool the sea of bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder in the grand, gilded room.

Though the entire tribe had wanted to attend the proceedings, only so many would fit, so the Assembly had held a lottery. Feeling immensely pleased with themselves for both the turnout and the demonstration of faux democracy that so gratified the crowd, the group of fifteen men now sat pompous and preening on an elevated dais at the front of the room behind a long oak table draped in somber gray linen, nodding to the crowd and murmuring smug congratulations to one another.

Erected in the center of the crowded, cavernous room was a tall, evil-looking device atop a scaffold. A clever assembly of blood-darkened wood and shining metal and sharp, angled blades, the machine had been rolled in on a wheeled platform from its storage place in a well-avoided shed near the back of the property, once the gamekeeper’s storage shack. Now it housed a collection of macabre items such as this, racks and crushers and saws and garrotes, used not infrequently. Beside the machine stood a hooded executioner, hulking and silent.

Though well entrenched in the twenty-first century, the soul of the tribe had not changed in millennia. Neither had its Law, nor the punishment for those who broke it.

And colluding with the enemy exacted the direst punishment of all.

Beside the dais on their own platform were two elaborately carved mahogany chairs, cushioned and large. In one sat a man, handsome and leonine, wolf-eyed and silent, black-haired like the rest of his kin. His posture was relaxed except for the tanned forefinger of his right hand, which kept a steady beat against the polished arm of his throne, belying his inner turmoil. The throne beside him, toward which he sent a swift, occasional glance, sat empty.

His wife had refused to attend.

They’d been close, everyone knew, the new Queen and the traitor the excited crowd awaited.

And the Queen had taken the betrayal particularly hard.

It was common knowledge also that the Queen had thus far refused to intervene or even offer an opinion on what was to be done in the name of justice. This was taken as a clear sign of her approval of the Assembly’s resolution, though it was well within her rights and authority to do exactly as she wished, even as far as granting a full pardon. She alone stood outside the Law that so tightly bound the rest of her kind; she alone was sovereign, even above her husband, the Alpha, strongest male of all the colony. Unlike the rest, if she wished it she could leave, or stay, or dance a naked jig atop the lighted ball that dropped on New Year’s Eve in Times Square, so many thousands of miles away. She’d come from the outside world and was free to rejoin it yet had elected to stay with her clan of secretive, Gifted people and her handsome, distracted husband, who now waited to watch an execution he approved of but did not wish to witness.

Because she’d chosen to stay, her people adored her. And because she had chosen not to intervene in their business, the Assembly had—grudgingly—begun to offer her their respect.

With a slow, majestic pageantry that swiftly silenced the gathered crowd, the ivory-and-gold-

leaf double doors at the far end of the Great Hall swept open, and everyone turned, breathless, to look.

Until she actually saw what awaited her, Morgan had thought herself prepared for this moment. She had stupidly hoped it would be swift and relatively painless: the guillotine, beheading by sword, a firing squad perhaps. Something she could endure with dignity that would cause more pain to her psyche than to her body. Something poetic or tragic or morbidly elegant.

How mistaken she had been. How naive.

This would not be over quickly. They were out for more than just her blood—they wanted to humiliate her, make her an example. They wanted spectacle. They wanted
theatre
.

The horrible machine, the rabid, hissing crowd, her heart clenched to a fist in her chest. The air so choked with malice and bloodlust she could barely breathe without feeling suffocated. A shouted accusation from the back of the room: “Traitor!” and the crowd began to jeer, taking it up in chorus, stamping their feet.

She prayed she wouldn’t break too soon and give them the satisfaction of hearing her beg for mercy. She hadn’t been broken yet, in all the weeks of isolation and deprivation and brutality suffered in the holding cell.

But this, oh, this...

She swallowed, hands trembling, fought the clawing animal fear rising to a scream in her throat, and silently repeated four words that encompassed everything she believed in, everything she had so desperately wanted, her lifelong dream turned to prophecy and curse.

One or the other. She had chosen long ago.

She wasn’t born to hide. She wasn’t born to live like a domesticated animal, tame and docile, chained to a stake in the yard. She had never really fit in. Even as a child all she’d wanted was
more
, though she didn’t know exactly more of what.

Live free or die. So be it.

With Nathaniel trailing a few hesitant feet behind her, still clutching his cattle prod, she advanced through the parting crowd with her head held high, her shaking hands hidden in the folds of her dress, her gaze fixed forward on the dais and its group of watchful, waiting men.

“Incredible,” Leander heard one of the Assembly members spit under his breath. He didn’t turn to look who it was; his gaze was trained too keenly on Morgan.

She was thinner, he thought; definitely thinner and paler, though it hadn’t reduced her beauty or her sensual, magnetic appeal. He watched heads swivel and mouths drop in her wake, men, women, and children alike. Though all his kind were beautiful to the point of being meaningless, she outshone them all.

Somehow—as always—she’d found something glamorous and dramatic to wear, though she’d been sent to her cell almost four weeks ago in nothing more than bloodied rags. Now she wore simple, serious funeral black but made it look like the most elaborate couture: a long, sleeveless silk gown, one-shouldered, drifting over her lithe curves like enchanted gossamer; silver high-heeled sandals; thick mahogany hair swept back from her face in a stylish, casual chignon. Even unadorned, with no paint or ornament, even outcast and reviled and walking toward her imminent, grisly death, she was truly magnificent.

In spite of himself, he smiled. In this moment, she reminded him of his wife.

Proud. Regal. A born fighter.

He’d never really
looked
at her before, not like this, like a stranger seen for the very first time.

They’d grown up together, after all, and he’d had nothing but admiration for her fire and intelligence, for her drive to succeed where no tribeswoman before her had. She was the first woman to serve on any Assembly in any of the Colonies, the first to jump into any fray, the first to seriously rebel against her role as a wife and, in time, valued breeder. She might have even intimidated him if he hadn’t been the Alpha and therefore immune to that sort of thing.

But you
are
Alpha
, the animal inside him hissed, angry, rising up to sting his skin.
And she almost killed your sister. She almost killed your wife. She betrayed you all.

His smile faded. He relaxed back into the plush comfort of his enormous carved chair, inhaled a deep breath, and waited for it to begin.

“Morgan Marlena Montgomery,” Viscount Weymouth intoned over the cacophony, staring down his aquiline nose through his spectacles. He took particular pleasure in his role in the proceedings because it was
he
whom she’d plotted to kill, after all, regardless of her failure to do so. “Daughter of Malcolm and Elizabeth, former sworn member of this Assembly, do you understand the charges brought against you?”

Morgan stood demurely before the dais, hands folded at her waist, head bowed. The jeering crowd fell suddenly into tense silence, and even the breeze creeping through the open windows seemed to still. Slowly, she raised her head and leveled the viscount with her gaze, calm and direct.

Slanted sunbeams caught in her hair and haloed her head in glimmering auburn and bronze, a faerie crown of light, and she looked for a moment like a Michelangelo Madonna, pure and sweet, and nothing at all like the treacherous viper he knew her to be.

“I do,” she answered, her voice soft but clear. “And I accept the will of the Assembly.”

The viscount sniffed, displeased. She did not seem appropriately afraid. Well, no matter. She’d be afraid very soon, he assured himself. Very soon. He’d have her stripped and shorn and trussed like a turkey; he’d give her to the crowd to soften her up before fixing her to the Furiant, his personal favorite of the tribe’s torture devices, so named in honor of the bohemian dance of spinning and flailing bodies and limbs.

Soon
, he promised himself again, nearly salivating with anticipation.
I’ll see you naked and begging soon, my duplicitous dove.
He snapped the thick sheaf of papers in his hands and moistened his lips, lowering his gaze once more.

“Then by unanimous resolution of this Body,” he read, his sonorous voice carrying to the far reaches of the silent room, “we do hereby sentence you to—”

“Wait.”

The voice came from behind him, clear and commanding, the American accent evident even with that single word. He turned, startled, and the room turned with him, all gazes now focused on the woman who’d appeared so suddenly beside the empty throne. She was lovely and pale, the palest creature in the room, golden-haired and delicate in a gown of ivory satin that nearly matched her skin.

She stood there like a shimmering opal among a sea of black pearls.

He glimpsed her solemn face, registered the stubborn lift of her chin, and his heart sank.

“Majesty,” he murmured, executing a low, practiced bow. The men on either side of him rose and bowed in turn, and so did everyone in the crowd, in utter silence. Like static electricity sparking in invisible bursts over all their heads, the sense of anticipation in the air ratcheted higher.