Rapture's Edge (36 page)

Opposite the chair was a video camera on a tripod, and to another tripod in the corner was affixed a light.

“My lord.” Aldo gestured to the chair and positioned himself behind the camera. He flipped a switch, and a little red light at the front of the camera blinked on. “We’re recording.”

Caesar seated himself in the chair, smoothed a hand over his hair, and smiled. Into the unblinking eye of the video camera he said, “Merry Christmas, humans, and allow me to introduce myself.” His smile grew wider. “I’m your new God.”

The taping had, of course, been Silas’s idea.

He watched Caesar smile and preen and posture, reciting the words he’d written himself, and in spite of the pain searing white pathways down every nerve ending in his body, he felt deep, deep satisfaction.

Caesar would be the one the humans blamed. It would be Caesar’s name they cursed, his likeness they remembered. Silas would be free to operate behind the scenes as he always had, planning and scheming without the burdens notoriety inevitably brought.

No matter what happened now, his days of servitude were over.

Because when Caesar’s part had been played, he would have to die.

Remembering the look on Caesar’s face when he’d pressed the heated steel against the raw, bleeding stump of his wrist, Silas smiled. Yes, Caesar would have to die. By his hands.
Hand,
he mentally corrected himself. By his hand.

He was really looking forward to that.

Three hundred and fifty miles away across the English Channel, the Queen of the
Ikati
was once again sitting up in bed in the pale pink rays of early dawn. She sat peering around the opulence of her bedchamber for a moment, listening hard into the silence, her heart thundering inside her chest.

It wasn’t a phone call that had awoken her this time, but a dream. She dreamt of a comet streaking across the night sky, trailing fire in a long, flared tail of orange. The comet had illuminated a dark landscape below, an ancient, hilly city with miles of twisting streets and red-roofed houses and a river winding through all of it, slow and serpentine.

There was a familiar dome in the center of the city, an enormous white dome that glittered atop an even more enormous cathedral, which was built atop the bones of the most famous saint in all the world. In all of
history
.

Beneath the fiery glow of the comet, St. Peter’s Basilica and Vatican City looked bathed in red.

They looked bathed in blood.

With a glance at the slumbering form of her husband beside her, Jenna slid from beneath the warmth of the goose down duvet and crossed the room on silent feet to stand at the lead-paned window. She pushed aside one heavy velvet drape and gazed up at the heavens, a sense of dread gnawing at her like swarming insects.

Her father had once told her the ancients believed comets were a sign of ill repute, an omen of terrible things to come. Famine and earthquakes and floods, destruction and death and crops lost to frost.

Plague. Pestilence.

War.

The last time she ever saw her father, when she was ten years old, a comet had blazed a brilliant trail across the night sky. A comet with a tail of fiery orange, just like the one in her dream.

She shivered, suddenly ice cold, cold straight down to her bones, as if a ghostly wind sliced right through her.

“What is it?”

The voice was smooth and masculine, carrying that wary weight she’d come to know so well. Jenna turned from the window to see Leander sitting up on his side of the massive, four-poster bed, staring at her through the silvered half-light. He was alert and on edge; she felt the tension in him even from all the way across the room. As he must have felt her thundering heart. Her pulse like a kettledrum beating a dire warning through her veins.

“Wake the others,” she said into the hush. “Wake everyone. Something is going to happen. Something very bad.”

“He’s not answering the damn phone.” Celian’s voice was tight, darker and more tense than either Lix or Constantine had ever heard it, and that was saying something.

“Can’t you leave a message?” asked Lix.

“The fool doesn’t have voice mail set up.”

Lix snorted, his usual response to something he found ridiculous. “Leave it to D. That would require
speaking
.”

“It’s not funny,” Celian snapped, pulling up short from the pacing he’d been doing for the last several minutes, long, agitated strides that took him back and forth over the blood-red woven rug in the candlelit opulence of what had once been the king’s personal library, but now was open to anyone in the colony who desired it. “We haven’t heard from him in days, and his time is up and so is Eliana’s, and our
good friend
Leander has his panties in a twist over this entire situation, not the least of which is because
I
managed to talk his wife into allowing something
he
never would have allowed in the first place, which didn’t pan out and made me look like I can’t be trusted, in addition to making me look like a total
ass
.”

He dragged a hand through his dark hair, cursed, and started pacing again.

Lix and Constantine shared a look; Celian rarely lost his temper. He was the rational one, the controlled one, the one with an iron will and a stare that could make men shrivel like testicles exposed to cold. In opposition to Lix’s lighthearted good humor and Constantine’s sensitivity—which he took great pains to hide—Celian had no soft spots or sentimentality. He was pragmatic and nearly always stone-cold calm, which made him a strong leader and an even stronger warrior, and his agitation was a good indicator of just how bad this situation was.

“That Queen of theirs…I had a chance, at least, with her. She’s the only one in that entire colony who seems reasonable.” His voice dropped. “But now all bets are off. D’s been formally declared a deserter and a traitor, and our colony has been declared
persona non grata
. Unless we hand D over to them, of course. Otherwise, we’re essentially at war.” He paused and his face grew grim. “Which means they could invade at any time.”

In stereo, Lix and Constantine gasped.

“Yeah. Welcome to the party.”

Constantine leapt to his feet and Lix followed, the two of them flexing and snarling like the animals they were. They’d been lounging on a velvet sofa watching as Celian spoke on the phone with Leander before trying, in vain, to reach D, but their quiet repose had been replaced instantaneously with fierce readiness, and the willingness to rip out the throat of an enemy and lay down their own lives in order to protect their colony.

Celian turned and stared at them. “Get the
Legiones
ready. Call the elders to order and make sure everyone knows what’s at stake. Get the women and children to the Domitilla; the sunken church is the farthest outpost, and they can escape easily from there if worse comes to worst. And then join me in the armory. We’re going to lay some traps for these rats.”

He smiled, mirthless, his lips curving cold red.

“There’s a thousand secret passageways in these catacombs, a million black, dead-end corridors to get lost in. If they do invade, that British peacock and his friends won’t be getting out of here alive.”

“We can’t stay here long.”

D was turned away from her with his hands on his hips. His voice was low and solemn.

She’d found him this way, staring out the curved bay window in the living room into the pale, shifting light of dawn. She’d eaten, checked on Mel—no change—and then wandered around the safe house aimlessly, not realizing until she found herself at the top of the stairs of the main level that she’d been looking for him.

“Why not?” She thought of his ringing cell phone from before, and her heart fluttered in panic. “You’ve had news?”

A nod of his head, almost imperceptible. His shoulders were stiff, pulled back in a way that accentuated their
breadth and belied his inner tension. He seemed to be scanning the street outside, looking for something. Or someone.

“They’ll be checking everywhere now. This place isn’t safe anymore.”

Eliana swallowed. “
They?
”

He turned and looked at her. His face was set in a grim mask, and his eyes were dark and fathomless. “Mel has to be moved. This Alexi”—his voice took on a dangerous edge when he said his name—“his place is secure?”

With that question, Eliana understood with perfect, terrible clarity that there was a choice to be made, a choice between her nemesis, Faith, and her old, comfortable friend, Doubt.

She would need his help to safely move Mel. And where else could Mel be moved but to Alexi’s, where she could be given care and watched over? But then
he
would know where Alexi’s was, and all the other members of the colony who’d fled there. She had few options, little time, and no money on hand to secure them other lodgings, and only his word that he would never hurt her to go on. His word and the look in his eyes when he said it, which had almost,
almost
made her believe.

If she took him to Alexi’s, there would be no more hiding. There would be no more secrets. There would be nothing but hope and desperate, blind Faith.

She was going to have to trust him or stay here and risk death for herself and Mel. Either way, she suddenly realized, their lives were already in his hands.

And he hadn’t let her down yet.

He watched her face as these thoughts crowded her mind, watched her silently and unmoving, until finally she drew in a slow breath and chose.

She nodded. “Yes. It’s secure. I’ll give you directions in the car.”

Let the chips fall where they may,
she thought, turning away.
I can always kill him later
.

Alexi’s place turned out to be far more than a mere
place
. It was practically its own postal code.

Six stories tall, nearly as wide as a city block, the modest, classic stone exterior hid a lavishly opulent interior of cream silk furnishings, polished marble floors and antiques, and a collection of modern art to rival that of the finest museums, which hung in vivid pops of color from walls painted delicate eggshell white. Located on the Avenue du Président Kennedy directly across from the Eiffel Tower, it also sported a rather awe-inspiring view of the Seine.

“Let me guess. Rich parents? Trust fund?” D said sourly to Eliana as he stood beneath an elaborate chandelier in the grand foyer that threw sparkling prisms of color in rainbow radiance around the room.

She shook her head. “He’s self-made. Came from nothing. Hard work and talent got him where he is. He’s a genius, really.” Her lips lifted to a faint, fond smile. “I wouldn’t be surprised if someday he rules the world.”

D began to hate this rich, genius Alexi with an almost biblical wrath. He hadn’t made an appearance yet; they’d been admitted to the foyer by an arch, elderly butler in a tuxedo who took one look at the two of them and pursed his lips, then glided away to inform the master of the house more “guests” had arrived.

“Does he know what you are?”

Eliana contemplated that for a moment, staring at a crystal Lalique figurine on a nearby table of a couple entwined in an embrace, and then murmured, “He knows what I’m not.”

“Which means?”

She slid him an indecipherable, sideways glance. “He’s doing me an incredible favor, Demetrius, letting us stay here. Please don’t antagonize him.”

D ground his teeth together, and all the broken things inside him ground together, too. He said between clenched teeth, “He should take care not to antagonize
me
, Ana. I suddenly feel like ripping someone’s head off.”

“Which won’t help anything—”

“No, but it would make me feel a hell of a lot better—”

“Demetrius, please—”

“You can’t expect dogs and cats to play nice together—”

“Alexi is not a dog!”

D smirked, and Eliana glared back at him. “He’s a dog, all right. I noticed him at the catacombs, Ana. He’s a pedigreed, pampered little yipper who likes to bury his bone all over town.”

Eliana’s mouth dropped open. Her face went pale and then flushed red. She opened her mouth to, no doubt, excoriate him, but at that moment the little yipper decided to show up.

He burst through a set of etched glass doors at the opposite end of the glistening foyer with his arms held out, worry lines bunching his golden brow. Blond and tanned and fit, he was one of those men who managed to look well groomed and wealthy even in bare feet, torn jeans, and a tight Rolling Stones T-shirt, which served double duty as an “I’m-too-rich-to-be-bothered” fashion statement and a showcase for his gym-hardened physique.

Without a glance in D’s direction, Alexi enveloped Eliana in a tight, possessive embrace.

D’s hate ratcheted up to a thermonuclear malignity. He
did
want to see this poser’s head torn from his body—torn from his body and impaled on a post. A growl, low and threatening, rumbled through his chest, and he stepped forward, bristling.

Eliana broke away from Alexi and angled her body between them. Alexi looked at D, and to his credit, he didn’t balk. He gave him a swift, disdainful once-over, as if just noticing his presence, and then said, “Ah. You.”