Edge of Oblivion (30 page)

Want had done its worst. It had driven her to make the greatest mistake of her life, one with the costliest toll. And now Want’s evil cousin Hope had hatched inside her like a dragon’s egg and she would be devoured from the
inside
, her soul driven out to the goblins’ feast.

Xander was the warmth that had incubated this terrible egg of hope. With his hands, his lips, the poetry of his words, and the glowing dark burn of his eyes, he had grown hope inside her until she could barely breathe with possibility.

What. If.

The two words by themselves were harmless. But put them together—what if?—and harmless grew fangs and sucked out all your blood.

She couldn’t afford another costly mistake. She knew now what she had to do.

She heard pounding footfalls in the house, echoing through empty rooms. Her name was frantically called, faint, then closer, louder. The sound of the back door flying open, hitting the outside wall with a sharp smack that sent a tangle of sparrows shrieking from the branches of an elm into the morning sky. Heavy breathing, a long pause, then halting footsteps brushing light as butterfly wings over the grass and he was behind her. He stood there for a moment silently, and she felt the weight of his gaze like warm pressure on her back.

“What are you doing out here?” Xander murmured, his voice full of concern. “It’s cold. Come inside. Come back to bed.”

Come back to bed
—just that was enough to make her waver. She set her teeth against the need it stirred inside her, the pain his proximity caused. The hormones of the Fever were bad enough, but her heart, oh, her heart...

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she mused, watching the orange sunrise, watching the sky lift from purple blue to amber to brilliant pink, translucent as a jellyfish. “When I was a little girl I always wondered if sunrises looked the same everywhere else. Like on a beach in Fiji, or someplace else I’d never see...would this look just the same?”

She sensed how he tensed, heard his breathing falter, just for a second. Then he came closer and knelt down behind her on the wet grass, the scent of spice and skin and
maleness
doing its best to tear her in two.

Without touching her, his voice very low, he said, “Tell me.”

God, to have someone know you like this. Without a cross word from her, without even a look, h e
knew
. It made her shiver with misery. A night of shared breaths and bodies and heartbeats, of wordless secrets passed between flesh, and hearts can knit and fuse together like two healing fragments of splintered bone.

Morgan wondered why her mother hadn’t warned her of this, too. Eviscerating this newly healed organ seemed a thing even more terrible than having a goblin devour your soul.

“What happened last night...this...thing...between us...”

She faltered, breathless, struggling. Xander’s hand pressed against her lower back, slid under her hair, spread warmth over the space between her shoulder blades. His thumb began a slow tracery of her spine, and she curled her bare toes into the wet grass. A ladybug landed on her instep and began a clumsy, zigzagging amble over her foot. It didn’t tickle; she felt nothing at all.

“This can’t end well. There are no happy endings for people like us, Xander,” she whispered, staring at the sky. “We both know that.”

It was a long, long while before he answered. His thumb kept a slow rhythm over her skin.

When he finally spoke he sounded older, and very tired.

“Yes.”

She was surprised how much that hurt, and what a relief it was he hadn’t tried to lie. She bowed her head and closed her eyes. He slid his palm up her neck and cupped the base of her head with his hand.

“But we have a while yet,” he said, softly pleading. “We have today, and tonight, and eight more days and nights after that. Some people live their whole lives and never get that much.”

She inhaled a long, shuddering breath, and then his hands were in her hair and his lips were on her shoulder, her neck, her cheek. She braced against it, trying not to crack, trying to push him away, but then he took her in his arms and clasped her against his chest and she broke, ashamed and enraged that there was nothing to be done about it all but cry.

“Let me go—I can’t—we can’t—” She couldn’t get it out, but he knew. He knew what she meant.

“One more day, then,” he urged, cupping her face in his hands. His eyes burned hot and desperate, brilliant as dying suns. “Give me one more day, just until the Fever breaks—”

“No! I’m already too—” He kissed her, hard, cut her off before she could say
too far gone
.
I’m already too far gone.
He kissed her as if it were the last time he’d kiss anyone ever again, and it muddled her brain and ignited the Fever until all her
no
s were crisped to ash in the inferno of her desire for him.

“
One
,” she panted, breaking away. “When the Fever breaks—”

“It will be over,” he promised, gathering her in his arms. “It will be over and we’ll never talk about it again.”

She was nodding, she was crying, she was trying to crush the horrible, rushing onslaught of adrenaline that made her heart pound and her blood boil dry.

Hope
, she thought, delirious.
You evil bastard. One more day, and then I’ll drive a stake through your fucking heart.

Xander put an arm around her back and another hooked behind her knees, and he lifted her off the grass in one swift move as if she weighed nothing, nothing at all. He brushed his lips against her forehead, tucked her against him, and ran back to the house with her cradled gently in his arms like a treasure, like something fragile and precious and fleeting, a broken-winged sparrow almost healed enough to fly.

Mateo was jolted awake by the loud, echoing clang of a metal door slamming shut.

Pain throbbed through his shoulder and back, the cold floor beneath him leached the warmth from his body, the sharp, acrid tang of alcohol and urine burned his nostrils. He opened his eyes and stared in blank incomprehension at his unfamiliar surroundings.

Cement block walls on three sides, a barred metal sliding door on the fourth, a cracked cement floor with a round center drain. Rows of glaring fluorescent lights shone down from the ceiling overhead.

His mouth went dry as bone.

He was in a cell. More correctly—a
cage
.

He leapt in one swift motion to all four paws and stood tense and bristling in the center of the square cage, testing the sour air with his nose, gauging the danger with all of his senses. Threads of faraway conversation flitted to his ears, disjointed words that were muffled by the low drone of an ancient air conditioner and the whir of a helicopter hovering unseen somewhere far above the roof. He picked out several words—
astonishing, investigation, specimen, tests
—noting the fact that they were in English but concentrating more keenly on the tone of excitement in the speakers’ voices.

The cage was bad enough, but that excitement boded even worse.

His gaze swept the sterile corridor beyond the narrowly spaced bars of the sliding door. He saw a stone floor, a few empty cages just beyond that were replicas of his own, and not much else. The full horror of his situation descended on him with breathtaking clarity, and he stood fixed, his mind a screaming tangle of memories, calculations, plans.

He remembered the three enemy
Ikati
males, he remembered the fight at the club, the chaos, the screams, the girl with the cellular phone, the police...his heart froze.

The police. Gunshots.

Julian.

Julian had been shot. He’d gone down on the dance floor in a spray of crimson blood while Mateo and Tomás snarled in rage and leapt at the shooter and the other
Ikati
males fled. They’d mauled the police officer beyond recognition, but there were others there, more shouting, uniformed humans with guns and batons and the Tasers that had ultimately brought him and Tomás down with jarring shocks from behind. He didn’t remember anything after that, and now there were only questions left to taunt him.

Was Julian still alive? Where was Tomás? What were the owners of those voices going to do to them?

Pain flared in his shoulder as he limped to the front of the cage. His arm felt nearly torn from the socket—one of those feral males had sunk his fangs into it and given a great, whipping shake of his head—but it would heal faster when he was in his natural form. Not that he’d be able to Shift back to human, even if he wanted to. The change wouldn’t come when there was any injury; even the smallest cut would prevent it. And he definitely wasn’t going to call the Shift while in captivity, even if he stayed here long enough to fully heal. His captors couldn’t see what he really was. His own life—

and that of Julian and Tomás—depended upon it. One of his kind had never—
never
—been taken alive by humans. He knew without question that should it come down to it, should he be unable to find a way to escape, he would have to kill himself.

If necessary, he would rip out an important artery with his own teeth.

He eased silently to the front of the cell, ears flat against his head, scanning the walls and ceiling for any sign of surveillance cameras. There were none, and nothing else modern either. This facility looked and smelled half a century old. It wasn’t a zoo, that much was clear, though a musty whiff of long-vanished primates emanated from moist cracks in the floor. Apes, he thought. Gorillas and orangutans. Other animals, too, living unseen nearby. A confusion of rodent and mammalian scents crowded his nose, but beneath it all there lingered a curious scent of decay. No, not decay, exactly, it was colder and more acrid, more like...death.

A jolt of fear rocked him with the realization that this was probably an animal shelter.

Judging by the smell of it, a
kill
shelter.

An angry, low growl rumbled through his chest. It echoed through the empty cage with an eerie, hitching twang and was immediately answered by another just like it, somewhere close.

Mateo’s heart went into overdrive. He called a greeting with a low, huffing chirrup and limped over the cold cement to the front of the cage. His gaze darted over the opposite cages until suddenly he saw at the far end of the long corridor a sight that eased his heart rate, if not the churning chaos of his mind.

The hulking black figure of Tomás stared back at him with fierce, storm-lit eyes from behind the narrow bars of his own cage.

Mateo made a soft, disgruntled whine low in his throat—
can you believe this shit?
—and Tomás answered back with a clipped chirrup of frustration. Claw marks scored a ragged, red path down the side of his tapering nose, but otherwise he appeared unhurt. He reared up silently on his hind legs and, long tail snaking back and forth behind him, tested the strength of the barred door with his large, padded paws. It rattled and flexed under his weight but didn’t give, and Tomás dropped back to the cement, growling his discontent. He began to pace back and forth in tight circles within the confines of the metal cage.

He was still pacing when the heavy door at the end of the long hallway opened and six white-

coated humans walked into the room.

The female reporter on the evening news was blonde and busty and sported one of those toothy, salacious smiles perfectly suited for television. In one hand she gripped a mike, in the other, a sheaf of scribbled notes her gaze kept darting to as she reported on the headlining story. She stood in the glare of halogen lights in front of a squat, redbrick building that was windowless and ringed with a tall metal fence topped with razor wire that lent it the menacing air of a secret government facility or a sanatorium. A crowd the
polizia
was trying to herd away from the television cameras had surrounded the fence, chanting something about animal rights, while two helicopters flew overhead, raking the scene with jittering floodlights that cut through the night like white lasers and sent leaves and dust and hairdos swirling in the wake of their whirring blades.

“The injured suffered everything from broken bones to concussions in the fray,” the reporter enthused, blue eyes sparkling, “and the police are not saying how these animals came to be inside one of the most popular and upscale dance clubs in the heart of Rome. Our sources are telling us there were
three more
panthers that escaped the scene and remain at large, but this hasn’t been confirmed by authorities. For now all we know for sure is that the three that were captured are being held under quarantine while the decision is being made whether to transfer them to one of the euro zone’s zoos or —because of the violent attack on the police officer—euthanize them.”

Her smile became positively blinding. “Back to you, Reuben!”

Dominus clicked off the television with a push of a button on the remote on his desk, and the library drifted into silence. Smiling, he sat back into his chair, steepled his fingers beneath his chin, and let his gaze slowly rove over the sparsely lit chamber. The corners were all in shadow, and so was the high arch of the ceiling above, just as he preferred. Though candlelight flickered dimly from the iron braziers along the wall, most of the room was a mask of twilight, sullen and gloomy, in exact opposition to his mood.

Euthanization. How perfect. How utterly sublime.

It was an inviolable law of nature that even the most glorious creatures had their Achilles’ heels. The wily fox had its eye-catching red coat, the swift hare had its tufted white tail, the grizzly bear was slow, the dolphin was trusting, the shark had to keep moving forward or perish.

For the
Ikati
, the weakness was even more profound. They could not Shift when injured.

Evanescence became permanence. Mutable became fixed. Camouflage became cage.