Rapture's Edge (31 page)

Mel clapped her own hands together silently in a pantomime of glee and bounced up and down on the mattress. “Oh my God, you
did it!
Tell me
everything!
”

From behind her hands Eliana scoffed, “What are you, twelve?”

Mel was too busy swooning to care about the acid in her tone. “Was he gentle? Was he rough? Was it over too fast? Oh my God, I hope it wasn’t over too fast, he’s soooooo hot—”

“He told me he loved me.”

This was said with so much pathos, such bleak hopelessness, she might as well have just said,
He told me to burn in hell
. She stared at Eliana, who had dropped her hands to her lap and was staring at them as if she’d never seen them before, as if her own ten fingers were strangers, not to be trusted. Something huge and ugly seemed to be growing in her, an evil, cancerous blossom of rage or despair, flowering slowly to life.

“Why is that bad? What exactly happened?”

Weary, weary, Eliana answered, “He’s lying about something, Mel. I don’t know if it’s that, or if it’s about what really happened the night my father died or what, but he’s hiding something.” She paused, said more softly, “They know about the serum. I can’t help thinking…”

“No,” was Mel’s instant reply. “Not him.”

Eliana turned her head and looked at her with the kind of glassy eyes you see on victims of natural disasters or wars—shell-shocked, darting. Haunted.

“That’s what I thought about my father. That’s what I thought about Silas, and my brother, too. Apparently being a good judge of character is not one of my Gifts. In fact, I think we can safely say I suck at it.”

Mel took her friend’s cold, cold hand and squeezed it in her own. “I can assure you
my
perceived awesomeness is bona fide, however, so you’re not totally hopeless.” The ghost of a smile was her only answer before Eliana looked away. “What did you find out about Silas?”

Eliana’s face hardened again. The expression reappeared too quickly and easily, as if it were a default setting and every other look that crossed it just a transient visitor. It was eerie, and Mel didn’t like it at all.

“He’s a traitor and a liar, and very soon he’s going to become well acquainted with the edge of my sword.” She hissed a breath through her teeth, then stood and looked down at her with those glassy, shell-shocked eyes. Only now they burned. “That’s why we have to get you and the others out of here, quickly and quietly. Don’t take anything, just get everyone rounded up as fast as you can.”

“A traitor?” Mel whispered, hand at her throat. She stood, the bare stone floor a jolt of cold against her bare feet. “What has he done?”

Eliana stood and went to the wooden chest at the end of the bed where Mel kept her clothes and began rifling through it. She pulled out a jacket, pants, shirt, boots, and threw it all on the bed. “What
hasn’t
he done, is the real question. If you looked up the definition of evil incarnate in the dictionary, his picture would be next to it. Right next to my father’s. Get dressed.”

Mel pulled on the clothes as fast as she could, her heart pounding like a hammer. “So what are you going to do?”

“We’re going to get you all someplace safe, and then Silas and I are going to have a little
talk
.”

“Or,” said a voice from the doorway, “we could talk right now.”

Eliana and Mel spun around in unison, and horror descended on her, thick and hot, like a blanket dropped over her head.

In the darkened doorway stood Silas, robed in black. Radiating menace, he looked back and forth between them with a little unnerving smile, fingering the gun in his hand.

The gun he now raised and pointed directly at Eliana.

This is what love was to the warrior Demetrius:

Years long as lifetimes of yearning, a yearning so sharp and terrible and unrelieved it was like a sword of heated steel permanently embedded in his chest. Love was stolen glances and smothered hopes and vivid, illicit dreams that taunted him upon waking and the cold, unrelenting fear of discovery that followed him, sly and clinging like a shadow, during all his days and nights. Because if, somehow, the love that burned inside him like a swallowed sun was discovered by the wrong person, his life would be ended as swiftly as two hands clapping, and the flame that had sustained him for as long as he could remember would be snuffed out like a wick between wetted fingers.

That was bad but bearable. He was a soldier, after all, born and bred for battle. His life was not expected to be long, and, forbidden from taking a wife, it was also expected to be loveless. Even any children he sired from the anonymous encounters with the
Electi
or
Servorum
or random human women would never know him as a father; he was a sperm donor, nothing more.

He knew it. He’d hardened himself to stark reality long ago.

What was not bearable: If somehow, against all odds, his feelings were returned…his beloved would die, too. Only it would not be swift. It would be gruesome. It would be used as a lesson to all, an assertion of power so blatant its meaning could not be misunderstood. A spectacle that would make even the most fearsome of warriors tremble in dread as they watched.

Disobedience equaled death. Taking a woman above his own caste equaled death. Taking the king’s
daughter
—slow, torturous,
epic
death. There was no other way for a soldier of his station and hadn’t been in millennia.

So love—aside from being pointless—was agony. Love was a soul-eating demon. Love was the most terrible feeling in the world.

A close runner-up: despair.

He was filled with that now. Dead cold where love was red hot, despair clogged his throat and choked him as if he’d swallowed handfuls of crematory ash.

She’d come to him and they’d fought and made love and even slept together—simple things,
normal
things he’d wanted for years—and yet he’d awoken alone, and the simple fact of the silent room and the empty bed beside him filled him with such despair he wondered for a breathless,
bottomless moment if this is what hell might be like. Not flames and screams and lakes of fire, but anguish and hopelessness and misery wound together like a wretched braid, cinched tight around his neck in an invisible noose from which he would hang for all eternity, alone.

D had no Foresight to anticipate this. His sleep had been deep and silent.

Slowly, painfully, he rose from the bed he and Eliana had shared together, his heart like a wild thing in his chest, refusing to settle. He’d told her the truth last night; he had no idea where her colony was, he’d just followed those laughing men through a silent graveyard and then into the winding bowels of the earth. He could go back there, he supposed, but what hope did he have to find her in the same place? If she wanted to be lost to him, she would be. She wouldn’t go back to the same place. She might already be on another continent.

Or captured by The Hunt.

The thought sent an electric jolt of fear through his body, which was swallowed quickly by fury.
Damn
her. Damn her stubborn pigheadedness, damn her refusal to believe him when he said it wasn’t him who shot her father. Okay, he’d concede it didn’t look good, him standing over Dominus’s corpse with a gun, but she should
know
that his word was his
oath—

He stiffened. The hair rose on the back of his neck. He looked around the darkened room, listening hard into the silence.

Was that a scream?

He held still, breathless for a long moment, every nerve alert, every pore attuned to any noise, until—

No. It wasn’t a scream. It was a
pulse
, an invisible push, palpable as a hand reaching out to shove him, which sent a
shockwave of recognition through his body. It came again, fainter than before, but unmistakable.

D never dressed so fast in his life. Shirt, pants, boots, and blades, all of it donned without thinking, both ears attuned to the feeling that might come again at any moment, the vibration that would show him the way to find her.

Because it was her. He didn’t know how, but he knew it was Eliana, and she was in trouble, and she needed him.

And because she was his life, his heart—his soul—he would find her. He
would
.

It thrummed through him like the bloodlust he sometimes felt after a kill, bright and blinding. In the sharing of their bodies, their breath, in the consummation of a love so long unrequited, his soul had fused to hers the way a grain of sand accretes to the nacre of a shell, and something else had been born between them. Passion had always existed, but tonight a pearl of something deeper had formed, permanent and unbreakable.

Possession.

She belonged to him now. He’d find her.

Not even death could keep him away.

“Demetrius,” said Silas with a sneer, his handsome face contorted with anger. “Always this obsession with Demetrius. It’s beneath you, my dear. He’s nothing but the help.”

Eliana felt frozen to the floor. She didn’t have to look over at Mel to see she was frozen as well, her face reading white against the dark stone wall behind her, eyes wide and staring at the gun in Silas’s hand.

“So are you,” Eliana said calmly in spite of the blood roaring through her veins.

He clucked, disapproving, but it didn’t faze him. Silas smiled, a malicious specimen that pulled his lips flat over his teeth, and took a slow step into the room. “Probably not smart to antagonize the man holding the gun. However, you are incorrect. I
was
a servant—and a loyal one, at that—but
now I’m something a bit more elevated, wouldn’t you agree? Your father’s death created a vacuum, my dear, and as we all know, nature abhors a vacuum.”

“My brother—”

“Your brother is a sock puppet.” It was hard, abrupt, and possibly louder than he intended, because his glance flickered to the doorway behind him before it settled back on her. “Not only is he unGifted, he’s a fool, unworthy of his position. Not even worthy of his
name
. Caesar, indeed. What a bit of wishful thinking that was! Didn’t it ever bother you, Eliana, that you were the one in the family with the brains but you were never allowed to be…
anything…
because you were a woman?”

He took another step forward, and she and Mel took corresponding steps back. He seemed to be enjoying this, their shock and patently obvious fear. His smile grew wider and more excited by the second.

“I would have changed all that, you know. I would have let you lead beside me. We could have made a glorious team, you and I.” His voice grew soft, while his eyes, ever dark and glittering, grew heated. “Unfortunately, I don’t team up with
whores
.”

He’d heard everything, then. It didn’t sting, him calling her a whore; it hardly even registered because she was too intent on formulating a plan for getting out of this that didn’t include getting shot.

She backed away another step as he moved closer. “What are you going to do?”

“I?” he replied with feigned innocence. “I’m not going to do anything. You, however, are going to kill your best friend.”

What?

She wasn’t sure if she spoke it aloud or not, but Silas answered as if she had, smiling his chilling, rabid smile all the while.

“Terrible how you just couldn’t adjust to our new life here. You never really got over the sudden death of your father, did you, my dear? Everyone could see how much it affected you. How depressed you’d grown. It won’t be much of a surprise when you finally go over the edge and kill your best friend, and then yourself. So tragic, really. Such a waste of life when we were on the verge of such momentous things.”

It hit her with sudden clarity, and she knew he’d be able to pull it off because he had a way of making people believe him. Mel’s dead body, her own beside it, his gun in her hand…she saw it with the detail of a photograph. How her kin would react with shock, how Silas would comfort them, how he’d use their grief to his own advantage and make them rely on him even more. He would kill the two of them, and no one would be the wiser to his treachery.

His callousness, his cunning, sent a surge of rage unlike anything she’d ever known singing through her body. There was a thrum of light and noise inside her, a sound like a thousand wing beats, a gathering that incinerated her fear and honed everything to a pure, crystalline sharpness.