He didn’t want to leave his knives behind, so Xander simply used Passage instead of Vapor, a convenient Gift he’d more than once been grateful for.
This way he could simply Pass through solid material—or it through him, like the bullet—
keeping his clothes and anything he carried with him. Anything that wasn’t too heavy, that is. He’d once tried to Pass a three-hundred-pound deserter from his colony through the steel bars of the country jail he’d found him in, piss drunk, and had made the unfortunate and gruesome discovery that there were weight restrictions to this particular Gift. The man had made it halfway through before things really got ugly. Xander had had to abandon the body, but he burned the jail to the ground so there was no evidence of the deserter’s unusual demise.
In another life he’d have been a cat burglar. He’d more than once dreamed of the riches he could accrue, all with no more effort than it took to concentrate.
The building he’d entered through the back had once been a multilevel private home, converted now into a modest hotel. Once through the walls, he found himself in a laundry room, steamy and strewn with mountains of unwashed sheets, pillowcases, and towels. He oriented himself for a moment, finding the muffled energy of the Alpha far above him, moving fast over the roof. Then he started to jog, dodging washing machines and ironing boards and two old Italian women folding towels who shrieked as he went past.
He went through the kitchen, the dining room, and the small, deserted front lobby—not bothering with finding doors, just Passing through the walls as he went—and ran out into the street.
His prey was there, high above, a streak of pale gray moving swiftly and silently through the sky.
Though it was all he could do to keep the animal under his skin from clawing its way out, Xander forced himself to fall back to a safer distance. A plan formed in his mind. He could always Shift to Vapor if necessary, but not only did he not want to play that particular hand just yet, he wanted the man in white to think he’d lost him in the tangled maze of Rome’s streets, and—hopefully —lead Xander to his lair. If he thought he was still being followed, the chances of that happening were exactly zero.
Xander ran to a tall stone pine, umbrella-shaped and ubiquitous around the city, and scaled the trunk quickly, forgetting in his haste to even look around for watching eyes of pedestrians below. He reached the top and steadied himself between two massive branches and looked out, his view obstructed by nothing but a small branch with clusters of dangling needles he brushed aside.
Over the landscape of rooftops and treetops and church spires there rose one massive, iconic structure, a cruciform basilica topped by the tallest dome in the world. It dominated the skyline, glittering enormous and diamond white in the morning sun.
Xander watched in arrested curiosity as the small gray cloud of mist made its way above the city, angled down toward the dome, and disappeared into the cupola that topped it.
“
This was even worse than he thought.
12
Morgan awoke in warm darkness to the sound of Xander’s voice somewhere nearby, pitched low and tense. He paused intermittently between sentences as if he were listening.
“Yes, I’m sure. I know. I did, but he’d vanished. I’ll try again in a few hours. I’ve been at it all night. Yes, she—no.
She sat up from the couch, blinking in the dark living room. She sensed it was still a while before dawn; the birds hadn’t even started singing outside the windows in the trees yet, and the city still held that slumbering quiet of very early morning. She stretched, wincing at the crick in her neck, and rose from the couch, pushing the ivory cashmere throw aside.
It had been one of the longest nights of her life.
Pacing hadn’t helped. Worrying hadn’t helped. Four shots of very fine whiskey hadn’t helped.
Only sleep had provided an escape from the state of anxiety she’d been in since she returned to the hotel after finding Xander in the alley, and that had been a temporary solution. Now that she was awake, the anxiety came flooding back full force.
What happened? Did he catch the Alpha? Did he discover anything? Were there more stray
Was he hurt?
His voice had come from the master bedroom, and she looked toward its closed door, wondering if she should knock or just wait for him to come out. The sound of running water decided for her. Xander was taking a shower.
With a heavy sigh, she rubbed her eyes and went to forage for something to eat in the kitchen.
She had only breakfast yesterday, and now her stomach was tied in hungry, disquieted knots.
In addition to the sprawling living room, master suite, sitting area, and a twenty-five-hundred-
square-foot balcony that overlooked the rooftops of Rome, the Nijinsky suite boasted a full kitchen, a bar, and a separate dining room for ten. She looked around the marble-and-chrome kitchen and thought she could quite happily live here for the rest of her life. Except when she opened the refrigerator door there was nothing but cold air to greet her.
She pursed her lips, debating. Wait for Xander to finish his shower, knock on the bedroom door, and get down to dealing with reality—or order room service?
She thought about reality—her mission, the quickly dwindling days to its end, what would happen if she failed—and decided to order room service. Reality sucked.
She found the menu on the desk in the living room and ordered what amounted to a meal large enough for five people. It arrived in less than fifteen minutes, and she let the black-suited man who arrived with it set it all up on the long polished wood table on the terrace, beside a trellis covered in scarlet bougainvillea.
When he was finished and bowed out the door, she stared down at the white linen napkins and silver domed dishes and the glasses of fresh-squeezed orange juice, stalling. It was still dark, and the air held a cool, dewy tinge, but there was a faint hint of lavender along the eastern horizon and she knew the sun would be up soon.
Another day. Her third day in Rome. Only eleven left, and then her fate would be decided.
She caught her lower lip between her teeth.
“Oh, for God’s sake, I still have to eat,” she muttered, and stalked off in the direction of the master suite.
When she knocked on the door, there was no answer. There wasn’t an answer to her call, either, so she pushed open the door and peeked around it.
“Xander,” she said into the steamy room. “I’ve ordered breakfast.”
No response. She imagined him silently bleeding out on the tile in the shower, and her heart did a strange little flip-flop inside her chest.
“Xander,” she said, louder, moving past the door and into the center of the room “Are you all right? Where are—” But she stopped abruptly because she caught sight of him standing with his back to her, head bowed, hands flat on the marble sink in front of the large, misted mirror. He was naked from the waist up. His bronzed skin dripped with water, his hair made a dark, damp cap against his head. A white towel was wrapped around his hips, and she was afforded a spectacular view of his quite perfect physique, the musculature and proportion even a bodybuilder would envy.
But his back. Oh God, his back.
She’d never seen scars like that. Long welts raised in white, crisscrossed in dense patterns all across his shoulders, upper back, spine. Imagining exactly what had caused them stole the breath from her lungs and made her legs go weak.
