Edge of Oblivion (35 page)

“Maybe I’ll see you soon,” he whispered.

When he and Bartleby arrived back at the safe house, he found Morgan curled up on the black leather sofa in the media room with her feet tucked beneath her body, chewing on a thumbnail as she watched television. She was so absorbed in the program, she didn’t hear when he came in and stood staring silently at her from the doorway. She was dressed entirely in black, leggings and a long black cowl-

neck sweater belted at the waist to make a knee-skimming dress. Her feet were bare, her hair was pulled back in a loose bun, her face was devoid of makeup.

She was, as always, breathtaking. His heart broke all over again.

“We’re back,” he said tonelessly, and she jumped.

“Oh!” She leapt from the couch and faced him, pale as snow, the hand at her throat shaking, pulse pounding furiously in the hollow of her neck. “I didn’t—I wasn’t—” she stammered, blinking, and adjusted the neckline of her sweater, closing it tightly around her throat. “I was watching TV.

They said—the news said someone gave an undercover video to the press showing animal abuse at that facility...and the authorities have gone in to shut it down...” She trailed off, waiting for him to reply.

He said nothing. He’d already forgotten about the phone with the photos and video he’d dropped off early this morning at the local news offices. At this moment he could hardly remember anything at all; it took every ounce of his concentration not to cross the room and yank her into his arms. He wanted to bury his nose in her hair, bury himself in her warmth and scent and softness, cry like a baby while she held him and wiped his tears away.

“I was so worried,” she murmured, staring at him, her eyes soft.

Cursed!
he screamed at himself, and stayed put. He forced his face to stay in the expressionless mask it had grown accustomed to over so many years and said, “The Fever’s gone, isn’t it?”

She shifted her weight from one foot to another. A flush spread across her pale cheeks under the weight of his stare. She nodded, looking absolutely as miserable as he felt, and bit her lip.

Inwardly, he groaned in torture. He wanted to bite that lip himself. His hands clenched to fists at his sides, and he stood staring at her, willing himself to remain where he was until his body vibrated under the agony of push/pull, stay/go, hold/break. But the Fever was gone, she’d locked him out of her bedroom, they had a deal, and anyway he was no good for her.

He had to let go.

Only he had no idea how he would do that when being with her suddenly seemed more important than air.

Obviously uncomfortable with his rigid silence, she tentatively said, “I didn’t hear you come in last night. How...how did it go?”

“Mateo and Tomás are upstairs in the gym,” he answered, his voice absolutely flat.

“Oh, Xander,” Morgan breathed, visibly relaxing. “Thank God. And—and Julian?”

He looked away, ran a hand over his head. It took a few tries before he was able to mutter, “He’s dead. We buried him this morning.”

Her shocked gasp brought his head around. Morgan sank to the couch, a hand over her mouth, wide-eyed. “Oh my God,” she said in a small voice from behind her hand. Her eyes were huge and dark. “I’m so sorry, Xander. I’m so sorry. What...what happened?”

He glanced away, unable to take the emotion on her face, let alone deal with the crushing weight of his own. It felt like someone had parked a truck on his chest. “I didn’t get there in time, that’s what. Bartleby says it was an overdose of Telazol, an animal tranquilizer.”

She made a little noise of horror, rose quickly from the couch, and took a few steps toward him, her hands held out as if she wanted to embrace him.

He took a swift step back. “Don’t,” he said, hard. “Don’t touch me.”

She came to an abrupt halt and blinked at him, her eyes filling with tears. “It’s not your fault, Xander,” she whispered.

The eighteen-wheeler on his chest began to do wheelies. He closed his eyes and took deep, steady breaths, trying to block out her scent and his need for her and the awful, paralyzing reality that she didn’t really want him. If she had, she’d never have locked that door. This—this was nothing but pity. How had he not seen this before?

She felt
sorry
for him.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she went on, moving another step closer, “and it’s
not
your fault. I know how much he meant to you; I know you must have done everything you could to help him—”

“
You don’t know anything!
” he shouted, all his misery and longing and rage finally boiling over. Shaking and panting, he went on, the words tumbling from his mouth before he could stop them.

“Don’t waste your precious time worrying about it because it’s
over
! It’s
all
over! There’s nothing I can do to change it now, and talking about it isn’t going to help! So why don’t you just do what you do best and think about
yourself
! Why don’t you just concentrate on your own goddamned problems and figure out how you’re going to accomplish what you came here for so it’s not a total waste of everyone’s time and my best friend’s
life
! Because if it wasn’t for
you
, none of us would have been here in the first place! If it wasn’t for
you
and your fucking ‘different sort of life,’ Julian might still be alive!”

She stood there in stunned silence, mouth agape, livid spots of red on her cheeks as if she’d just been slapped very hard across the face.

Immediately he was ashamed. Cursed and shamed and in love with a female he could never have and—oh, yes, let’s not forget—was supposed to kill sometime very soon. Though obviously he wouldn’t, because he
couldn’t
, which was just another catastrophe waiting to happen, courtesy of Fate’s unrelentingly cruel sense of humor.

“Oh, fuck it all,” he spat. He turned on his heel and stalked out of the room.

In a daze, Morgan watched Xander go and felt something inside her leave with him.

If she thought she had been acquainted with pain before this moment, she was wrong.

She moved in a daze to the door, unseeing, unsure of what she would do, aware only that she had to get away from this room, get away from this house, get outside into the air where she could clear her head and think and maybe release the scream that was burning a hole in her chest.

She found her heels where she’d left them near the dresser and slipped them on. She walked unsteadily down the corridor, then took the stairs one at a time, slowly, her legs leaden, the soles of her shoes clicking unheard against the wood. She crossed the third floor and took another set of stairs to the staged model house above, then went outside to the backyard and stood on the porch, blinking at the sun, cold with shock in spite of the warmth of the morning.

He was right, of course. She realized that as she stared at the grass and the trees and the white fence and the bottomless azure sky above, bile rising in her throat. She was the hub this entire shit storm revolved around, and she had no one to blame but herself. Wanting and wanting and wanting her whole life through, she’d dug a hole so deep there was no climbing out of it now. And everyone around her was beginning to fall in, too.

The only way out was to make it right. To do what she’d come here to do—find the Expurgari.

And then—what then? Forget she ever knew Xander?

Yes
, came the sneering answer from her subconscious.
Forget him, because he thinks you killed his best friend. And sweetheart, he’s probably right.

Her eyes filled with tears, and she stifled a sob behind her hand. How much easier it would be for him now, when the time came. How much easier to slide that knife between the vertebrae in her neck.

I still have time!
she thought desperately, spinning around unsteadily to stare at the house. It seemed menacing in the morning sun, full of hidden danger and a palpable charge, as if it were a giant, ticking time bomb.

As it had innumerable times since she put it on, the medallion around her neck drew her hand like a magnet. It lay stone-cold and ominous against her chest and gave her the same disquieting sense she’d had since she’d first glimpsed it that there was something here she was missing, a clue this necklace held, a puzzle piece she didn’t know how to make fit. It scraped at her mind, over and over, as irritating as a fingernail scratching down a chalkboard.

The Alpha. The Expurgari.

Somehow they were related. But how? And how would she ever find him?

She stood there staring at the house as if it held some kind of answer for a long, long time, how long she didn’t know. Cars passed by on the streets beyond the yard, birds sang in the trees, the mechanical thrum of a lawn mower broke the stillness of the morning. Then finally a thought occurred to her and she stood breathless with the horror of it.

She wouldn’t ever find the Alpha, or the Expurgari. She was fooling herself.

And the man she was in love with...was happily going to kill her.

A shudder wracked her body. With a low moan, she dropped her head into her hands.

A clock began to chime inside the house, counting the hour in low, mournful tones. Five, six, seven...off in the distance a church bell began to ring, mirroring the chiming clock, then another, then another, faint, melancholy tolling that reached her ears from far-off churches all around the city, announcing the time.

Morgan stiffened. Her mind turned over, then her stomach. Slowly, slowly, she moved her head and gazed off into the distance, where she saw through the morning haze the enormous golden dome of St. Peter’s Basilica glittering like a Fabergé egg atop the Vatican. She turned back and gazed at the safe house, at the empty façade that hid all its secrets below.

The puzzle pieces came together with a cold, solid
click
.

Though they had felt his energy diffused all around them at the Vatican, the feral Alpha had evaded detection because he wasn’t in the basilica. He was
beneath
it, safely out of sight, just as hidden and sheltered as they were in the underground rooms of the safe house.

Holding her breath, she backed one step away from the house, then another. Without bothering to think, Morgan turned and ran for the back fence.

Over two thousand years ago, or so the story went, the first
Purgare
—Purging—was held in a secret spot on the banks of the winding Tiber river where the giant sycamore trees bend low and weep their silver-green leaves into the burbling waters near the tiny Tiberina island in what is now the very heart of Rome. The spot had been abandoned for more and more rural locations as Rome grew up and spread sprawling over the flood plain of the Campus Martius around the river, and was now located well north of the city in a quiet place still unclaimed by man.

The location had changed, but the ceremony—solemn and ancient—had not.

Every month on the full moon’s apex the ashes of all the half-Blood
Ikati
who had not survived their Transitions the month prior were taken from the small clay urns they were placed in after cremation and transferred to containers fashioned from squares of white raw silk tied with cords of hand-spun gold. Green apples were placed atop the ashes to pay the hungry ferryman’s tithe to the nether-world; a small bundle of sparrow grass brought the unlucky soul peace. One by one, as the names of the dead were called by the Alpha of the tribe, the bundles were placed on slender balsa-

wood planks with lit beeswax candles at either end and set into the river, where they bobbed and dipped and finally caught flame. Mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and cousins and friends would watch in silence as the flaming bundles drifted away on the restless river until they slipped with a hiss and coils of rising gray smoke beneath the surface of the dark water, on their way to their final resting place at the bottom of the vast, enchanted Mediterranean.

Eliana sometimes wondered if there was a huge pile of
Ikati
ashes mounded like drifts of silt at the mouth of the Tiber where it drained into the sea.

Because she was full-Blooded, the King’s daughter, and referred to as
spem futuri
by the eldest of the tribal elders—hope for the future, whatever
that
meant—Eliana was considered too precious to attend the monthly
Purgare
. She stayed under guard inside the catacombs where she’d been born and had spent every waking moment of her life.

But tonight, oh, tonight—she would finally break free.

The past few days she’d been a frazzle of nerves and twitchery and pent-up emotion held in check only by the sobering realization that to fail in this—to be caught—would mean disaster. She wasn’t thinking too closely about that, though, because her full attention and indeed imagination had been captured by the thought of being alone—
outside!
—with Demetrius.

With heat and powerful need in his eyes he had agreed to her request and simultaneously exposed his own desire. He wanted her as much as she wanted him, and now she had her proof, evidenced undeniably by his willingness to risk death just to be alone with her for a few hours. How exactly he was going to manage it she still wasn’t sure, because he hadn’t spoken a word to her in the past few days, had just looked at her with that silent, burning intensity whenever their paths had crossed. But she knew he would figure out a way. Though Celian was the leader of the
Bellatorum
, D was the most clever, the most willing to take risks and defy authority, and she loved that about him.

She had only to shake her guard long enough to get to the sunken church, then D would handle the rest.