Rapture's Edge (14 page)

Before Celian could reply, Leander clicked shut the phone and disconnected the call.

Outside the snowy falcon dissolved into a funnel of swirling mist and descended to the grass in a silken plume
that began to coalesce into something else altogether as it touched down. Feet first, then legs, then a body—nude and breathtaking—a face that could make grown men cry for its beauty. Hair of spun gold bounced around her shoulders, cascaded in glinting waves down her chest.

Jenna. His Queen. His miracle. The only one of them who could Shift into anything she wished.

Her father’s daughter, to be sure.

She quickly crossed the few feet from where she’d landed, watching him watch her as she came. Sensual and unabashed as an odalisque, she waded through the waist-high rosebushes and thick beds of lavender and stood just outside the window. She had to look up a little, her head tipped back, her shell pink lips tipped up at the corners.

He pressed his palm to the glass. She mirrored it, her fingers spread open against his on the opposite side of the window.

“Come in,” he murmured, knowing she heard him clearly through the closed, double-paned window. “Jenna. Come in.”

She studied his face, and her lips lost their upward curve. A little furrow appeared between her brows. How well she knew him.

“Come inside,” he insisted, huskier than before.

Leander heard the door shut behind him, but he’d already altogether forgotten Christian was there.

For ten seconds in which the rage building inside him felt like he was being hollowed out with knives, Celian stood with the phone to his ear, listening to dead air.

Then, with a curse, he turned and threw it clear across the room.

It exploded against the bare rock wall with a dull metallic clatter and fell in a tinkling heap to the floor.

“Good news, I take it.” Lix’s dry humor, ever present, only served to enrage him even more.

“Smug son of a bitch!” Celian spat.

Lix’s dark brows shot up, but Celian waved his hand dismissively, indicating he hadn’t meant him. He sat down heavily into his carved wood chair, identical to the one Lix occupied across from him at the solid oak square that served as the
Bellatorum
’s version of a conference table. Like King Arthur’s famed round table, this meeting place of knights had no head, no hierarchy. Everyone was on equal footing.

Everyone but D, that is, because he’d missed the morning meeting. He could only be equal if he bothered to show up.

To Celian’s right sat Constantine, glowering. He even glowered prettily, which, at the moment, also pissed Celian off.

Today wasn’t starting off well. He’d already lost two promising young half-Blood
Legiones
to the Transition, and five more would have their twenty-fifth birthdays within the next thirty-six hours. If they didn’t make it…at this rate, they’d run out of the half-Blood caste of soldiers within a few years.

They were dying off faster than they could be replaced. Especially now since the Council of Alphas—even in his mind he said it with a sneer—had forbidden them to mix with humans under penalty of death. So breeding new half-Blood stock was out of the question.

You can’t be too cautious during times of war,
Leander had said, smiling his smug British smile at Celian the one and
only time they’d met. He spoke slowly, with cool condescension, as if the gathered
Bellatorum
before him would have a little trouble with the big words, looked at them like they were nothing but dirty barbarians living like Neanderthals in caves. Celian had wanted to smash his face in. Only one thing stopped him.

Leander, unfortunately, was right.

The dead king Dominus had turned out to be far more treacherous than anyone had guessed, plotting to take over as dictator of all the colonies, killing his own kind if it suited his needs. Even working with humans. There was no doubt his network of paid killers and spies was still out there, waiting for the chance to pounce.

Caesar was still out there.
Silas
was still out there, and he was craftier and therefore more dangerous than the king’s egotistical, Giftless son.

He didn’t know what those two were planning, if anything, but Celian hated feeling like a sitting duck. And now—if it was true—D had thrown an ugly wrench into this already colossally bad situation.

“What is it?” Lix leaned his bulk over the table and propped himself up on his elbows.

“Little Lord Fauntleroy is at it again,” Celian muttered, drumming his fingers on the wood.

“He’s still insisting you join the Council of Alphas?” Lix asked, surprised.

In the three years since they’d met, Leander and the other three leaders who comprised the Council of Alphas had attempted to persuade him by coercion and flattery and thinly veiled threat that
not
to join was a declaration of war. But Celian had lived long enough under one dictator, and he would never trade one for four, no matter how nice
they pretended to be or how many flowery promises they made.
Stronger together than apart. All for one and one for all. Duty to the tribe,
etc. etc.

He wasn’t having any of it. He’d agreed to keep his people contained within the catacombs until the rebels were found, and that was enough to hold them off for now. But now this…

Celian looked at Constantine, who immediately dropped his gaze to the table and shifted his weight in the chair.

Interesting.

Celian watched him carefully as he said, “Actually, he had a bit of news about Eliana.”

A muscle in Constantine’s jaw twitched. He glanced up, then back down again.

“What?” exclaimed Lix, bolting upright. “Eliana? What is it? What happened? And why were you talking about D?”

Yes, that’s the correct reaction,
thought Celian, staring at a very still, quiet Constantine. Aloud he said, “Apparently someone who looks a lot like our beloved brother has blown up a Paris police station and stolen the missing princess.”

Lix stood abruptly, shoving back the heavy wooden chair in the process. “WHAT?”

“What indeed,” Celian murmured, looking at Constantine. “Anything you’d like to add to the conversation, Constantine?”

Constantine took a deep breath, spread his big hands flat on the table, exhaled, and quietly said, “I owed him one.”

Lix looked at Constantine. “WHAT?” he shouted again.

The
Servorum
he’d sent looking for D chose that exact moment to burst into the room. Young and gangly, he skidded to a stop inside the arched doorway. “Gone!” he said,
breathless. “He’s gone! The guards at the north gate were overpowered—”

Celian lifted a hand, and the boy instantly lapsed into silence. A wave of his hand and the boy backed from the room with a bow. The entire time, Celian’s gaze never left Constantine’s face. “Tell me all of it now, because if I have to hear it from that fucking British peacock—”

“I was with him when we saw Eliana on TV being taken in by the French police—”

“WHAT?”

“Sit down, Lix, and shut the hell up!” Celian snapped. The long-haired warrior lowered his bulk to the chair, slowly, looking back and forth between him and Constantine with a look of horrified disbelief.

Constantine spoke, low, to his spread hands. “She was being arrested. They said on the news she was some notorious thief. They had her in handcuffs—”

“She was injured,” Celian deduced instantly. She’d never have been captured otherwise.

Constantine nodded. “D just…he just went crazy. There was no stopping him. I tried to talk him out of it, but you know how he is…about her…he was totally unreasonable…” He glanced up at Celian.

It was getting very difficult to hear above the adrenaline roaring through his veins. “Keep talking,” he said.

“Like I said, I owed him one.” His big shoulders hunched to a shrug, and he dropped his gaze again to the tabletop.

The room was utterly silent and still. Around his ankles, one of the hundreds of feral cats that ran wild through the catacombs twined back and forth, rubbing its whiskered face against his leg. “You risked all our lives,” Celian said
very quietly, “you risked
war
with the other colonies because of a guilt trip.”

Slowly, Constantine raised his eyes and met Celian’s gaze. He shook his head. “No. I risked war with the other colonies because he’s my brother and he needed my help. I would do the same for either of you.”

Celian stood and began to pace over the bare rock floor. “It was hard enough convincing their
Council
that we didn’t have anything to do with the Expurgari, that we didn’t know what Dominus had been up to all those years. I
still
don’t think they completely believe it.”

Lix said to no one in particular, “Eliana is a thief?”

Celian kept talking. “And now I’ve got to convince them that we had nothing to do with D and this new clusterfuck—”

“A
thief
?” Lix interrupted, staring incredulously at a morose Constantine.

“Silas must have put her up to it,” he muttered, nodding. “She’d never do something like that on her own. She was too…”

Sweet, he didn’t say. Sweet and lovely and innocent as a fawn.

“We don’t know that,” said Celian, stopping in midstep beside the table. Lix and Constantine both looked up at him. “We don’t know who she is anymore. Or what she’s been up to the past three years since she disappeared. All we know for sure is that she saw the three of us standing over her dead father who was lying on the floor with a bullet in his head.” He paused, gazing at them with a new intent. “And the male she may or may not have been in love with had a gun in his hand. How do you think that would change you?”

They didn’t answer. They didn’t have to. Each one of them knew they’d be changed by that experience, and not for the better.

“Is he planning on trying to bring her back here?” Lix asked Constantine, who just shook his head.

“I don’t know. He didn’t say. I’m not sure if he even had a plan, other than getting her away from the police.”

“Okay.” Celian took his seat at the table. “Any ideas where he might take her once he did that? Assuming they’re not coming back here?”

“He’d need shelter, food,” Constantine said slowly, thinking. “And if Eliana is injured, somewhere with medical supplies. Somewhere he could lay low until he figured out a plan.”

“Somewhere like a safe house. Probably one not too far from the prison,” said Lix, and they both turned to him. He looked back at them, a lock of black hair obscuring one eye, and suddenly Celian had an idea where D might have gone.

He said, “I’m going to need another phone.”

A subtle hum in his blood, a thrill along the nerves in his spine; D felt it the instant Eliana awoke.

He froze, an oiled chamois cloth in one hand, the muzzle of his Glock in the other, taken completely by surprise.

That she was awake so soon, that is. The sedatives he’d given her should have been strong enough to knock out a male twice her size, for twice as long. He’d given her an extra dosage because he had to be certain she didn’t wake up during the surgery to remove the bullet from her hip and sew her up, but—

A loud thump from below. Then another. D glanced at the floor beneath his feet. In one of the bedrooms one level below Eliana was awake, and judging by the sound—another ominous thump, this one accompanied by a shiver
in the floorboards and the unmistakable crash of breaking glass—she was less than happy.

Damn. He really shouldn’t have left that crystal vase in her room.

He’d picked flowers from the garden outside, had thought it might please her to see the pretty bouquet when she awoke, but now it seemed like a very stupid, obvious mistake. That heavy crystal vase would make an effective weapon if applied with force against the side of his head. He preferred to keep his skull intact, but if the noise coming from downstairs was any indication, she might have other plans.

He made a quick mental inventory of her room: two more vases, desk, chair, flat-screen television…all could definitely be bad for the future state of his head.

He set the gun and the cleaning cloth on the table and wiped his fingers carefully on a dish towel to rid them of the oil, trying to ignore the very slight, sudden shaking in his hands. His heartbeat had picked up, too, irregular spikes that almost painfully pounded against his ribcage. He breathed in slowly, trying to calm himself.

He’d been awaiting this moment for three years, and now that it was here, he felt like a schoolgirl—dry mouth and trembling knees and a stomach full of dancing butterflies.

“Get a grip on yourself, soldier,” he muttered, throwing the towel on the table with a flick of his hand. He rose and made his way through the kitchen, the living room, the media room, everything done in masculine shades of charcoal and black and brown, Spartan as the assassins who’d previously owned this safe house liked it. They kept one just like it in every major city across the globe, for occasions such as this, and today he was thankful for it.

Slowly he went, down a set of spiral stairs to the bottom floor. The bedrooms.

He stood at the end of the carpeted hallway looking down the corridor. All the doors were open except one, at the far end, which was locked.