Edge of Oblivion

“What the hell do you—how could you—what the hell were you thinking?”

That last bit was shrieked, and the cathedral’s vaulted marble ceiling conducted it, splintering it into an echoing symphony that shattered the silence in the vast halls all around them. Startled exclamations and muttered reprovals came from various angles, but he ignored them.

In spite of the uncomfortable strain against the front of his pants and the horrifying realization that perhaps it wasn’t him she’d been thinking of when they shared that passionate kiss, Xander kept his voice carefully neutral and businesslike when he answered.

“You asked me to help—”

“I didn’t mean like that!”

“And because I couldn’t sense him anywhere nearby, that was the most expedient way to break the link. Otherwise I would have gone after him.” He cleared his throat. “Obviously.”

She was shaking and flushed and clearly free of whatever spell she’d been under. With her rigid bearing and glittering eyes and flustered distraction, she was utterly lovely. She was also pissed.

Right now he was very glad for that collar.

“You’re trying to tell me you knew that would work?” she asked, dubious. She crossed her arms over her chest and narrowed her eyes at him.

He crossed his arms as well, rose to his full height, and coldly gazed down his nose at her. “Of course. Why else would I kiss you?”

Her nostrils flared. She tossed her hair back over one shoulder with a shake of her head. “I see,” she said, regaining a little of her fractured poise. “Am I that repulsive to you?”

He paused, regarding her with a look he knew was mercilessly forbidding, willing himself to do the right thing and be done with all this foolishness. But he couldn’t bring himself to say it. He couldn’t make himself say yes.

She took his silence as an affirmation anyway and went even redder. “The feeling is mutual, Ace.”

He sent her a grim smile and sidestepped that. “Let’s get back to business, shall we? Do you feel him now?”

She swallowed hard and looked around. “No,” she said, low. “It’s broken.”

“And when you first felt”—he floundered for an appropriate word—“when you first felt the connection, where were you?”

She jerked her chin to a nearby chapel, decorated with mosaics and statues, featuring a prominent wood, stone, and marble altar that housed the lighted, ghoulish remains of a dead pope in a crystal casket.

“I want you to come with me over there, and if you feel anything—anything at all—we’re going to leave and I’m going to come back alone. Understood?”

She didn’t answer. She wasn’t looking at him, and he wondered if she ever would again.

“Morgan,” he said more softly, trying a different tactic. “Are we agreed?”

After a moment, she jerked her head up and down: yes.

Progress. Good.

He opened his palm to the chapel. She went before him, hesitating only when she drew near the altar.

It was topped with eight taper candles in bronze holders, just in front of a massive mosaic depicting the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. There were pink marble columns and corbels with carved cherubs and gold leaf slathered on every available surface.

“Anything?” he murmured, close behind her.

She held very still with her head cocked, as if listening. She looked left and then right, frowning a little, her chin lifted. Her gaze traveled up the soaring marble columns to the vaulted ceiling far above, and she paused, considering. Then she dropped her lashes and looked at the floor beneath her feet.

“It’s...odd,” she finally said. “There’s a faint echo of something. Almost like deja vu. But I can’t put my finger on where it might be coming from. It’s like he’s everywhere. And nowhere.”

Xander was disappointed, primarily because he’d found only the same thing in his search the night before. It made him a little harsher than he should have been. He was really looking forward to getting his hands on this bastard.

“Well, that’s helpful. Maybe it’s God you feel.”

Her lips flattened. She turned to look him full in the face. “You,” she said, “are an unmitigated ass.”

He stared back at her, wrestling with the urge to kiss her again. Those damn lips—

“And you’re not trying hard enough,” he said, his voice tight. “If he’s close you should be able to find him, like you did yesterday. Just concentrate.”

“If it were that easy, I’d have found him already!” she said, exasperated. “Maybe it’s this building.” She wrinkled her nose at the lighted casket. “There’s too much weird juju in here.”

He had to admit the dead guy was giving off a really funky odor beneath all that careful casket sealant. And there was something else he couldn’t place, something unnerving, a whiff of ancient earth and dead air and cold, unlit corridors. It reminded him of a crypt. It also very inconveniently interfered with his own ability to sense his surroundings as fully as he normally did. Everything was oddly muted.

It had been the same last night. He’d waited for the sun to go down before attempting to infiltrate the cupola where the man in white had disappeared. The scent of Alpha was on the stone outside and the glass panes, even lingered like an afterthought in the air above the altar, but then it evanesced and disappeared altogether. But there was something, some indefinable energy, in the very walls of the cathedral itself, vibrating from the foundations...

It made no sense. None of this made any sense.

The only reason he could fathom why an Ikati would go anywhere near what many considered the holiest church in Christendom was total ignorance. Since the half-Blood Queen Cleopatra had incited the rage of Caesar Augustus in AD 30, the Ikati had been hunted and persecuted, had long ago retreated into silence and small, well-fortified colonies to survive. The situation worsened in the thirteenth century when Pope Gregory IX instituted the Inquisition. Along with heretics, cats were declared diabolical. That set the stage for massive, church-approved executions. Cats were witches’ familiars, associated with the devil, dirty animals not to be trusted.

Too bad for humans. Because by the time the Black Plague hit a century later, there were barely any cats left to eat all those disease-carrying, flea-infested rats. Half of Europe’s population was wiped out in just a few years.

“Maybe we should go back to the Spanish Steps and try again there.” Morgan looked hopefully toward the massive doors behind them that led outside into fresh air and sunlight.

She didn’t look completely recovered from whatever spell the Alpha had put her under; she was still a little too flushed. And if he was still lurking around somewhere, Xander definitely didn’t want to give him another chance to get inside her skull.

“All right. We’ll come back tomorrow.” He made a move to take her arm, and she sent him a look of such frozen hostility it held his hand in place.

“I’m not an invalid,” she said.

He pressed his lips together to keep from smiling. “Clearly.”

“And you already know I’m not going to run away.”

“So you’ve said,” he replied, curt.

“Then why do you keep taking my arm whenever we’re walking?”

Because I like to touch you.

“Habit.” It was the first thing out of his mouth but not what he’d been thinking and obviously not what she was expecting, either, if her expression was any indication.

“So you’re a gentleman killer,” she said with soft scorn. “Did they teach you that at Assassin Academy? How to Make Nice with Your Prey One O One?”

He closed his eyes for just longer than a blink and found the memory of another soft, feminine arm he’d once loved to touch ready to torture him with fresh pain. Being around Morgan was peeling back the scabs on