Edge of Oblivion

into his eyes. The two Ikati performed a swift, silent sweep of the rooms and the terrace, looking behind doors, checking locks and exits. When satisfied no threats lurked inside, the green-eyed Ikati holstered the gun in the front of his waistband and went to stand over the doctor while he worked. He watched silently while the other male did a quick check of the two bodies that had lain on the floor for the past few hours. Gray and stiff, they were beginning to emit the faint, distinct odor of decay.

“And?” said the green-eyed Ikati. His voice was deep and gravelly.

The human adjusted his glasses and made a small, dissatisfied noise. Cottony tufts of white hair wreathed his head like a crown of miniature clouds. “He’s lost too much blood, Mateo. I’ve got to do surgery to get this piece of glass out and stop the bleeding, but we can’t move him to the safe house like this. He’ll die before we get him there.”

Mateo ran a hand over his head and cursed. The other Ikati male finished his inspection of the bodies and stood, surveying the room with those smoky mirror eyes. “I told you we should have brought a donor.”

“We didn’t have time, Tomas,” Mateo responded, sharp. “And where the hell would we have found one, anyway?”

“Excuse me,” Morgan said. Everyone ignored her.

“Let’s get him up on the table,” the human said, gesturing to the glossy mahogany dining table.

“I can work better up there. And I’ll need towels and blankets, and something for him to bite down on if we’re going to do the surgery here. A wooden spoon is good.”

“Um, gentlemen?” Morgan tried again. And failed again. The two Ikati took hold of Xander’s shoulders and legs while the human rushed over with his medical bag and began clearing the silk flower arrangements from the center of the table.

“Easy, watch his head!” the human man chastised as Mateo and Tomas laid him out on the table. Xander jerked and groaned when he was set down, but his lids remained closed. “Roll him on his side, like this,” the man said, working over him. “Gently, please. Gently.”

“Guys—”

“Meu deus, he’s lost a lot of blood,” Tomas muttered. He stood at the head of the table, looking down at Xander’s pale face, his blue lips.

“He’s strong,” Mateo said, by Xander’s feet. His face was as almost as pale as Xander’s, his jaw clenched tight. “He’s made it through much worse.”

Morgan cleared her throat. “May I just have a word—”

“He won’t last long without a transfusion,” murmured the doctor, peering at Xander’s bare lower back. “You’ll have to find someone local, and quick because he’s fading—”

“You let him die, and we’ll have your head, Bartleby,” snapped Tomas, bristling.

“Not helpful,” said Mateo, noting how the man blanched under the assault of Tomas’s anger.

He addressed the doctor directly. “There is no one local. There’s no colony in Italy, and obviously it can’t be either of us since his body will reject blood from another male. You’ll just have to find a way to make it work without—”

“Hello!” shouted Morgan.

Three heads swiveled in her direction.

“I can give him blood,” she said, calmer now that she had their attention. “I can be the donor.”

Frozen, Bartleby glanced first at Mateo, then Tomas, both of whom had turned to stare at her with the flat, killer gaze of jihadists. No one moved.

“You are the mark,” said Mateo. Dispassionate, his gaze traveled over her body.

“I am the Morgan, actually,” she answered tartly.

“Mark means target,” Tomas cut in with a curl of his full upper lip. “Hit. Job. Pigeon. Victim

—”

“How enlightening,” Morgan interrupted, folding her arms over her chest. She glared at him so hard she thought her eyes might cross from the effort. “Thank you for the vocabulary lesson. Now are you going to let me be the donor or let your boy bleed to death on that lovely Cassina table?”

There followed a long, crackling silence.

Morgan was at the very end of her reserves of patience, a well that was shallow under the best of circumstances. She was exhausted. Her body ached, her bones ached, even her teeth ached, and her blood was boiling like someone had lit a fire beneath her feet. If she had anything to compare it to, she’d have thought she was coming down with the flu. So the fact that there were two more strange, hostile males staring at her as if she were lunch didn’t freak her out as much as it should have.

“He can only take blood from an Ikati female,” she said, exasperated at their continued silence, their narrow-eyed hostility. “And if he doesn’t get it soon, he’s going to die. Right?” she added, glancing at the human. With a quick, birdlike dip of his white head, he nodded. She nodded back, already knowing the answer before she asked. Ikati had no blood types, no blood-borne diseases, and human blood was useless to them, as weak as water. Only a female could give a male blood and vice versa.

“So I’m offering,” she said in conclusion.

Still no response. Mateo and Tomas stared at her while somewhere outside a dog began to bark.

Morgan exhaled and dropped her arms to her side. The exhaustion sank down to stain her bones, and it felt suddenly as if her skin were too tight. “Fine,” she said, bitter. “It’s on you, then.

When the Assembly asks what happened, it’s on you.”

She turned and was about to walk to the phone on the glass-topped desk in the living room to call Leander when Mateo’s gravel-rough voice stopped her.

“Why would you do that?”

In her stiff, blood-encrusted clothes, Morgan turned back and looked at him. He gazed back at her, all muscle and bulk and green-eyed menace, the light shining raven blue off his hair.

“If I’m not mistaken, his assignment is to kill you, if you fail in your task. Why would you give him your blood?” he persisted.

Good question. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a good answer. At least, not one that made any kind of sense. She stood there for almost a minute, thinking.

“He just saved my life,” she finally answered, gesturing to the two bodies sprawled in gory proof on the terrace, the living room floor. “I owe him the chance, at least. He deserves that much from me. And...because I want him to live.” She blew out a long, exhausted breath, realizing how insane she sounded for even saying it, realizing too it was God’s honest truth. “Even if it means...”

that he’s ultimately going to have to kill me, she thought. And that I am a self-destructive moron with a death wish. But she didn’t say that. Instead she lamely ended with, “...you know.”

A nerve behind her eye throbbed, sending a spike of pain through her skull. She pressed her fingers against it, thinking this was going to be the mother of all migraines. And how was that possible, since she’d never had one before? Only humans suffered headaches. Humans and Ikati females who were about to—

“You honor us,” Mateo said, husky.

Blinking, she dropped her hand from her face and looked at him. He was gazing back at her with something like...awe.

“What?” She glanced at Tomas, whose expression had changed from one of total suspicion only seconds before to one that looked alarmingly close to gratitude.

“What you do to any one of us, you do to every one,” Tomas replied, cryptic, his mirror eyes gone curiously round.

Morgan looked back and forth between the two Ikati males and the frozen, dumfounded human doctor. “Uh...”

“It’s their code,” the doctor said with a swift glance to his companions. He pushed his glasses up farther on his nose. “The assassin’s code. Cross one, cross us all. Kill one, kill us all. Love one