Rapture's Edge (2 page)

A Degas was the prize tonight. Not too famous, not too large, it would still command a good price on the black market and wouldn’t be too easy to trace by the authorities, or too hard to remove from the wall.

Contrary to popular belief, museum security systems are typically some of the worst. Unlike the movies, which would lead one to believe a field of invisible lasers and infrared cameras are de rigeur, the reality is closer to the sorry duo of underpaid, badly trained security personnel and mechanical gates. Most jewelry stores are far more secure, as are all banks; Eliana knew this from experience.

And for a woman who could not only dissolve into a wisp of air but who was able—even better—to become invisible in the cover of shadow while still retaining a physical body that could lift and carry a painting, the temptation of stealing into buildings that were closed, locked, and legally verboten became too great.

But that wasn’t the primary reason. Money was the primary reason. Crass, yes, but she needed money to continue her father’s research, and her people needed to eat, so she’d resorted to using her Gifts as a way to avoid starvation.

It wasn’t as if they were going to start feeding on humans, after all, no matter how much her brother, Caesar, tried to convince her it was their birthright, and that the sorry creatures were quite tasty.
Think of them as cows,
he’d argued again not two days prior.
You like beef, don’t you?

Yes, she liked beef, but she liked humans, too. For the most part. Either way, she wasn’t going to eat them. It just seemed like one of those things you don’t do.

She’d thought of getting a job to bring in money, but quickly realized how ridiculous that notion was. Not only did none of the
Ikati
have any work experience or what could be deemed “skills” by an employer, they were too different from humans. They stood out.

An ancient Zulu word from their even more ancient homeland in the darkest heart of Africa,
Ikati
meant “cat warrior,” and it was a near perfect description of Eliana and her kind. Sleek and lithe and powerful, able to move without sound on two feet or four, able to strike a killing blow before their prey ever sensed danger, the
Ikati
were part of the human world but not
of
it, and even in clever disguise it was evident for all to see.

The eyes gave it away. Flashing and feral, alight with a predatory gleam even when they smiled, Eliana and her kin of the Roman catacombs had eyes of deepest midnight, a black so deep it was fathomless. The most stalwart of human men had been known to falter in his step when one of her kind looked a moment too long in his direction.

So the eyes were a problem, but so was nearly everything else. The way they spoke, the way they walked, the way the very air seemed to hold its breath around them. Even at night when they usually went out their differences were apparent, so Eliana and her little band of rebels kept apart from the rest of the everyday world as best they could.

One day soon, however, the world would become well acquainted with them. Then everything would change.

Until then she’d have to keep stealing.

And there—just around another quiet corner, hanging benignly on the wall in a square gilt frame unprotected by glass—was the Degas.

The first thing to rematerialize was her lips, and they were smiling.

She took shape as a woman again, her feet alighting soundlessly on the stone floor with the casual grace of years of practice. Her senses surged back: the dull tang of cloistered air in her nose, the stone cool and smooth beneath her feet, a faint car horn from the traffic on the Rue de Rivoli that never dissipated, even at this hour. Her stomach growled with a hunger pang, and she realized she hadn’t eaten in hours.

She’d just reached up and grasped the painting—ethereal light and shadow around the voluptuous figure of a retreating woman—when she heard a trio of faint noises and froze.

Snap.

Click.

The
creak
of leather shoes.

For a split second her heart stopped beating. It started up again and took off at a thundering gallop.

She wasn’t alone. Someone was
here
.

Eliana didn’t even have time to turn before the darkness was sundered by a dozen wide yellow beams of light, aimed at her back. The soaring wall in front of her was bathed in brilliance, and the row of gilt frames caught the light and reflected it back in blinding glints of gold. She whirled around with one hand raised to shield her eyes, and just before she heard the loud report, in the infinitesimal second between the sting of gunpowder in the back of her throat, the flash of dazzling white and the pain that ripped through her bare calf, sending a flare of agony through her entire body, she heard a male voice shout something in French.

She crumpled to the floor. Blinded by the lights, unable to run or stand or even breathe, Eliana watched in horror as a dozen armed gendarmes ran crouched from hiding places on either side of the long corridor.

Police. Humans.

She touched her calf, felt the wound there, a ragged, wet slice through skin and muscle. She raised her hand, and for a suspended, horrible moment she stared down at it, slick with blood, her mind wiped utterly blank.

The male voice came again, still shouting at her in frenzied French, and she realized what he’d said before. A cliché she’d heard a dozen times in the American movies she loved, the old Westerns where it was easy to tell who the bad guys were because they always wore the black hats.

He’d shouted, “Stop or we’ll shoot!”

As she watched the booted knot of armed gendarmes creep closer—guns drawn, eyes rabid—to where she crouched naked and bleeding on the floor beneath the Degas, Eliana had the brief, ironic thought that he’d gotten that perfectly backward.

Seven days earlier

For the fourth time in as many weeks, the police paid a visit to Gregor MacGregor.

They had their reasons, of course. He wasn’t what could be called a good man—he wasn’t the worst, either—but he was an excellent
business
man, and the type of business he specialized in never failed to attract the scrutiny of the authorities. Women, weapons, drugs, or thugs, Gregor could satisfy nearly every nefarious desire of his well-heeled clientele, and it had made him outrageously wealthy.

He managed his various business enterprises from the plush confines of a black leather recliner situated behind a massive, gleaming desk in an office on the top floor of a high-rise he owned in central Paris that housed a nightclub
and a bordello, among other things. The police knew about the nightclub but not the bordello; only the very rich could afford to step beyond the opulent gold leaf doors that led to the garden of delights hidden deep in the bowels of the building, and they weren’t inclined to talk.

Because Gregor had been subjected to these impromptu visits by the police on dozens of occasions, he was more irritated than worried. They never found anything incriminating; he was much too careful for that.

What bothered him about this particular visit, however, was the man who sat in a shadowed corner of the office on his custom Louis Vuitton silk divan, smoking a cigarette, watching him with hawklike intensity from blue eyes as clear and cold as an arctic sky. Wearing a black suit, black oxfords, and no watch or rings or adornment of any kind except a pair of small round spectacles, he’d never accompanied the police on any of their other surprise visits, and something about this man didn’t sit right.

Gregor had grown up in the dodgy end of Edinburgh to impoverished parents who had eight children in quick succession until his father disappeared—fled, more like—and he’d been forced to survive as best he could. By the time he was ten years old, he’d committed nearly every crime imaginable and was well acquainted with all manner of thieves and cutthroats.

So he knew a soulless bastard when he saw one.

Gregor turned his attention back to the man seated across the desk from him. Tall, impeccably dressed, and utterly French, he was the chief of police’s right-hand man, and a royal pain in Gregor’s ass. “This is bordering on harassment, Édoard. I’m a law-abiding, tax-paying citizen of this country. I tolerate it because I’ve got nothing to hide, but if you keep up these witch hunts, I’ll call my lawyer.”

The blandly handsome Édoard smiled, revealing a row of perfectly straight, white teeth, a little too big for his mouth, like Chiclets. “Tax-paying, I’ll give you. We’ve already looked into that.
Law-abiding
, however…” The Chiclet smile grew mocking. “You and I both know that’s a stretch.”

They stared at each other. Behind him on the divan, the blue-eyed man lifted his chin and, like the fire-breathing red dragon on the MacGregor family coat of arms, exhaled a long, gray plume of smoke.

Flanking either side of Édoard’s chair were two standing gendarmes, glancing around his luxurious office in obvious envy. Gregor wondered why Édoard never brought the same men twice. Maybe he hoped new recruits would see something the old ones hadn’t?

“What do you want?” His Scottish accent still added faint music to his speech, even after two decades in France, but its charm was lost on Édoard, whose smile never wavered.

“We’re looking for a thief. An art thief, to be specific.” His gaze flickered to the oil painting hanging on the wall behind Gregor’s head. It was large and abstract; Picasso in his blue period. Original. “I understand you’re well connected in the art community.”

A laughable understatement. Art was a small and insular community, and he was both a dealer and a collector. Some of the deals were even legitimate. But to Édoard he only said, “This
La Chatte
I keep reading about in the press?”

“The very same.”

Gregor shook his head. “Don’t know him. Can’t help you there.”

“You do realize, MacGregor,” said Édoard, his voice slightly lower than before, “I can make life much more difficult for you than I have. I can have men in here every night. I
can have your every move watched. I can crawl right up your ass and plant a flag there if I like, and there’s not a thing you can do about it. So please, take a moment to think it over.” He paused, and that slick smile stayed affixed to his face as if it were carved on. “Perhaps you’ve overheard something in your travels. Perhaps there’s someone you don’t particularly like who might have some interesting news for us. Perhaps there might even be something you’d like to”—his brows lifted, hopeful—“confess. Even the smallest tidbit of information will do wonders for my general sense of leniency. You do enjoy all your expensive toys, don’t you?”

His gaze slid to the Picasso. “You wouldn’t want your art collection and your penthouse and your nightclub and your Ferrari to suddenly be seized by the government due to a paperwork error, would you? An unfortunate mix-up that would certainly take months, possibly years to untangle?”

Like a snake, anger unfurled in a slick, cold coil in Gregor’s stomach. A reptilian slither that wound its way up through his gut and into his chest until his lungs were constricted, it was as familiar as his own face in a mirror. With it came the equally familiar, nearly overwhelming urge to beat something to a bloody, unrecognizable pulp.

Luckily for Édoard, the urge wasn’t
completely
overwhelming.

With the steely control of a man who’d once stabbed a rival to death with his platinum Mont Blanc pen and hours later used the same pen to sign his name with a flourish on a check with six zeroes at the mayor’s annual charity ball, Gregor mused, “Did you know that hydrofluoric acid is one of the only things that can completely decompose human bone? It can also dissolve glass, it’s so corrosive. Even if as little as a few inches of your skin come into contact with it, you’ll die
within hours. Reacts with the calcium in your body, causes systemic toxicity and tissue death. It’s untraceable, too.”

Édoard’s bland smile died a quick, ugly death. He sputtered, “Are you…are you
threatening
me?”

“What?” Gregor blinked, feigning innocence. “Sorry, I was just thinking about this thing I watched on TV last night. Amazing what you can learn from those crime shows.”

From behind Édoard came a low, amused chuckle. Gregor glanced at the man in the black suit and found him smiling, a flat slash across his face that did nothing to warm the frozen intensity in his gaze. With those sly, vulpine eyes and the clouds of smoke billowing around him, the man was reminding Gregor more and more of an ice serpent conjured from some glacial version of hell.

Édoard sprang from the chair. “Have it your way,” he snapped. “I’ll be back in the morning with a warrant. Plan on spending all day here. We’re going to need access to all your files.”

Muttering oaths, he jerked his head toward the door and turned. The two gendarmes followed on his heels. “Agent Doe!” he barked over his shoulder, then he stepped through the door and vanished.

The man in black rose from the couch with quiet, confident economy. He took one last drag from the cigarette and then dropped it to the handwoven Turkish rug beneath his feet. With the toe of his gleaming black oxford, he unapologetically ground it into the thick pile. He clasped his hands behind his back and regarded Gregor with those chilling blue eyes. When he spoke, his voice was a perfect complement to that look—cold and lifeless, with a pronounced German accent that could make even the most lighthearted child’s song sound like a funeral dirge.