Rapture's Edge (20 page)

“No,” said Constantine, “you didn’t.”

“Well…thanks for that.”

With those few words, Constantine knew that the rancor between them from the last three years had been forgiven. D held his gaze for a beat, nodded, and then resumed his restless pacing.

“So my problem is, unless I have some kind of proof that Silas is no good, Eliana will just keep running forever.”

“Like, written proof?” Lix piped in. Three pairs of questioning eyes turned to look at him, and he stared back at them, waiting for them to guess. When they didn’t he rolled his eyes and said, “The journal, geniuses. Her father’s journal. We still have it.”

The air went electric.

The journal of the mad King Dominus had been found after he’d been killed and the princess and her retinue had fled the catacombs of Rome that night three years ago. It outlined—in meticulous detail—his plan to take over the other colonies, his genocide against his own people, the genetic testing he’d commissioned, which resulted in a serum that allowed human and
Ikati
blood to be compatible. Like all sadistic megalomaniacs, his ultimate goal had been world domination. He was going to put the
Ikati
back at the top of the food chain, using human DNA and fertility to do it.

And then he was going to wipe them off the face of the earth.

Silas—his trusted servant, equally sadistic and power-hungry—had been assisting him with all of that.

D looked at Celian. “How soon can you—”

“Twenty-four hours, maybe sooner if we leave right now.”

“You’ll call Leander on the way?”

Celian nodded, rising from the table. “I can’t guarantee he’ll call The Hunt off Eliana’s trail, but I’ll get
you
a few more days. We’ll figure it out from there. You better work fast, though.”

Constantine rose as well. “Do you have any idea where she might have gone from here? How are you going to track her?”

D smiled, and it was almost gleeful, the happiest any of them had seen him in years. “While I was taking a little nap thanks to your tranquilizer, I had a dream, brother.” He tapped his temple. “I had a dream.”

The first bullet screamed by Eliana’s right ear, and the second embedded itself into the wall next to her head at eye level with an ominous
thunk
that dislodged a puff of smoke and spat razor-fine chunks of drywall right into her face. Clutching Gregor’s hand, she threw up an arm and twisted away, cursing.

“How many of these bastards
are
there?” Gregor shouted, barreling down the stairs three at a time, dragging Eliana along like a sack of rocks behind him.

Just before the third shot rang out—another near miss that ricocheted off the metal handrail with a high-pitched, ringing
twang
—Eliana shouted back, “Seven!”

The ferocity of their pursuit made it seem more like seventy. She felt each one of them as separate, stinging
waves of heat across the surface of her skin, their silent intent to kill her as clear as if they’d screamed it. Four
Ikati
assassins behind and three more somewhere nearby, unseen beyond the walls, moving fast on different floors of the building.

Probably, like them, headed for the exits.

They were in a narrow stairwell, racing down in headlong, dizzying spirals. Gregor’s footsteps clattered loudly off the unpainted walls and metal steps, and the torn soles of Eliana’s bare feet left little bloody prints like a trail of crimson breadcrumbs. She didn’t know how they’d found her, she’d been so careful to disguise her scent, but somehow she’d led the assassins right to Gregor’s building, right into the very
heart
of her friend’s business—and life.

If they survived the next few minutes, she was resolved to kill them all.

Then she’d get on her knees and beg his forgiveness.

Gregor crashed through an unmarked door on one of the stairwell landings, and suddenly they were in a parking garage, dim and silent except for the ominous sound of the steel door slamming shut behind them with cold, unnerving finality, grim as the lid on a crypt.

Eliana gazed around at the long lines of cars, their dark windshields like rows of blank eyes, reflecting back nothing. She muttered, “This is always the scene in a movie where someone dies.”

Gregor ignored her and yanked her forward over the cracked cement, heading directly for a sleek, two-tone gunmetal-and-black Ferrari parked two aisles down at the end of the row. It only took a few seconds to get there, get the doors unlocked, and start the engine.

But it was long enough.

Just as they tore out of the parking spot—engine roaring, tires squealing and sending up plumes of acrid white smoke, a deep, rumbling vibration rising up through the leather seat to set her teeth a-clatter—the door they’d entered the garage through flew open to reveal the tall, straight figure of a man in a tailored dark suit and white dress shirt, gripping an enormous silver gun in each raised hand. The guns were leveled directly at the Ferrari.

“Oh shit,” said Gregor, stomping his foot on the gas pedal.

The only way out was
toward
the assassin, unfortunately, and they took four bullets to the windshield as they raced down the aisle. Swerving wildly, they ducked and screamed as the glass splintered into a spider’s web confusion of tiny cracks that surrounded four perfect holes, but didn’t shatter. Around a corner shots rang out again, but everything was a flying muddle of noise and motion in Eliana’s brain. All she could do was dig her heels into the floor mat, clutch the molded leather of the seat, and hang on.

With rubber laid on the cement in two long, black, wavering lines, they left that level of the parking garage—and the shooter—behind them. Inside Eliana flared a brilliant white hope, clear and crackling like a firework:
They’d escaped!

Oh, so wrong. Laughably wrong. Hope, she quickly discovered, was not particularly helpful when there were over half a dozen trained killers gunning for one’s head.

Around two sharp turns they entered a double helix exit ramp collared by thick cement columns. Both sides of the ramp yawned open between parking levels, and like swiftly descending spiders, a trio of men scuttled with effortless
leaps from level to level beside them, clinging briefly to the cement columns before pushing off, heading down.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me!” shouted Gregor, apoplectic. “Seriously! You’ve
got to
be kidding!”

“Watch out!” screamed Eliana as one of the suited spiders dropped to the ramp directly in front of them and raised his weapon. She sank down in the seat and threw her arms over her face, but then there was a bump and a sickening sort of crunch, and the gun-wielding assassin disappeared under the car.

“That’s right, asshole!” shouted Gregor gleefully, pounding his big fist on the steering wheel. “Suck on
that!
”

Eliana turned and through the rear window saw a crumpled figure tumbling lifelessly down the ramp behind them, arms and legs akimbo, limbs bent at awkward, unnatural angles.

They hit the bottom level of the garage in a sliding sideways spin, fishtailing as Gregor struggled to keep control of the wheel.

“There!” Eliana shouted over the squealing tires, pointing to a small neon exit sign that hung on the opposite side of the level.

Gregor tightened his hands on the wheel, the Ferrari leapt forward with a near-deafening roar, and Eliana was slammed back into her seat with the sudden propulsion. As they rounded the final corner, she was horrified to see not one but
two
assassins standing with spread legs and raised guns directly in front of the metal gate that led to the exit.

The
closed
metal gate.

“Glove compartment!” shouted Gregor. “Gun!”

“
Now
you tell me!”

With the press of a button, the compartment lid
snicked
open, and Eliana snatched up the gun. It was heavy and cold in her hand, sleek and utilitarian, and at that moment she thought it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen in her life.

Gregor rolled the window down, and Eliana leaned out, aimed, squeezed the trigger, and fired off four rounds…and the assassins didn’t even twitch.

“Where’d you learn to shoot a gun, the goddamn school for the blind?” Gregor screamed.

But then one of them sagged to one knee, lowered his weapon, and looked down, surprised, at the front of his white shirt, where a dark liquid stain had begun to spread.

The other one, luminous green gaze canny and unwavering, leveled his gun at Gregor in the driver’s seat and fired. Just from that single look—murderous,
certain
—Eliana knew even before Gregor jerked back and hollered that the bullet would hit its intended target.

A spray of blood misted the dashboard. The Ferrari barreled ahead. Gregor’s hands slid from the wheel.

They crashed into the metal access gate at full speed with Eliana twisted sideways, gripping the steering wheel, screaming at the top of her lungs. The assassin leapt clear at the last moment, still shooting, but everything had taken on a dreamlike unreality, color and lights flashing by at hyper-speed, sound warped slow and strange as if it traveled underwater.

The beating of her heart seemed like cannon on a battlefield. The coppery smell of blood hung penny bright and thick in the air.

The gate tore from its hinges with a violent, ear-splitting screech, and they blasted through it in a shower of orange
sparks. It flew away overhead like a huge, warped bird, and jagged chunks of metal and plastic from the damaged hood and both shattered headlights followed it. Something heavy caught on the undercarriage and dragged beneath them, setting off an unearthly clamor as they hit the pavement again, breaking free of the garage, and careened down the deserted collector road that ran alongside the building.

“Gregor!” she shouted, frantic. “
Gregor!
”

Slumped motionless in the seat, he didn’t respond.

Eliana glanced in the rearview mirror just in time to see four more assassins appear in the quickly receding rectangle of the garage door, which glowed a ghostly white against the dark building and the night. Gregor’s foot was still pressed against the accelerator; she yanked hard on the wheel, and they spun around a corner onto a side street at breakneck speed, narrowly missing getting wrapped around a streetlamp.

Right before the building they’d left behind disappeared from sight, she saw all five dark figures in the rectangle of light transform in a violent eruption of black fur and sharp fangs and sleek, sinewy muscle that shredded their tailored clothing into a spray of black-and-white confetti that hung suspended for a moment before drifting slowly to the ground.

With savage roars she heard even above the strung-out whine of the engine, five impossibly huge black panthers leapt forward from powerful hind legs and took off after the car at a flat-out run.

It was five o’clock in the morning in England, the palest blush of dawn beginning to spread pink and lavender over
the smoke-dark hills. Thrushes and sparrows had begun to stir in the dewed branches of trees and sing their first, tentative songs of the morning, and the fog that curled in thick fingers around trunks of pines and elms had begun to lift. All the little creatures of the woods were still abed, but in the village of Sommerley—quaint as a postcard, tucked back against the New Forest in a lush, green valley far away from the prying eyes of civilization—one creature was wide, wide awake.

She was pearl pale and feminine, a poet’s muse of golden hair and Mona Lisa smiles and quiet, effortless grace. Born a commoner, she was now a Queen, the most Gifted and powerful Queen her kind had seen in centuries. She could read a mind with a touch of her hand, she could change from woman to mist to lethal, cunning predator, among other things. She could even, when the mood struck, change into something that quite shocked and offended all her predator kin, and made her happy precisely because it did.

Cats thought birds were lesser creatures,
silly
creatures, good for only one thing: snacks.

But for the moment she was only a woman, sitting upright and breathless in bed, listening to the low, rumbling voice on the other end of the telephone.

“…and if you grant me this, I will agree to join the confederacy. I’ll agree to…your terms.”

Jenna had never met the man on the other end of the phone, but she knew him regardless. Celian, leader of the Roman colony, gave her husband fits.

She glanced over at that beloved husband now, sleeping on his back with one heavy arm thrown over his face, his muscular chest bare and gleaming in the pale morning light. His other arm was still wrapped around her naked
waist; he hadn’t moved, even when the shrill ring of the phone broke the stillness of dawn.

Leander always slept like the dead after a long night of loving. Which meant he almost always slept like the dead.

“Tell me, Celian,” Jenna said, tracing a light finger down her husband’s chest. At her touch, he stirred and made a low sound in his throat, then sank back into slumber. “Why would this Demetrius—your brother, you call him—take it upon himself to do what he did? He must have known what the consequences of his actions would be. Help me understand why he would risk so much, for what appears to be so little.”