Edge of Oblivion

“You bonded with her, you fucking idiot!” Mateo shouted. “You bonded with your mark! Are you crazy?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Xander snarled, straining against Julian’s grip. “I’m just doing my job!”

“Oh, yeah? Tell that to the arm that just took a swing at me! Tell that to your blood!”

Xander froze. “What did you say?” he whispered, staring hard at Mateo. All the light in the room was suddenly bright, so horribly bright—

“Get off me,” Mateo spat, and broke free of Tomas. He circled around the kitchen, throwing off heat and flexing his muscled arms, staring black murder at everyone and everything. Finally he turned and looked at Xander, and when he spoke his voice sounded like he’d been swallowing rocks. “Doc did a transfusion, direct from her to you. Yes,” he said when Xander went stone stiff. “Her blood. In you.

That’s how you made it through.” He turned away, sat down heavily in the kitchen chair Julian had occupied, and stared down at the plate of cooling rigatoni.

“She did that? She did that for me?” Xander barely had the breath to speak. His body went completely lax. Julian released him but kept a wary hand on his shoulder.

Mateo glanced up at him. After a moment of weighted silence, he exhaled a heavy breath through his nose. “Yeah. Maybe you’re not the only one who’s bonded.”

“I’m not bonded,” he said, hoarse.

A bonded male was aggressively territorial, insanely jealous, and utterly devoted to his female.

He would kill for her, he would die for her, he worshipped the very ground she walked on.

He didn’t feel any of that. He felt...not like that. He didn’t. He couldn’t.

“Oh, man,” said Mateo, glaring. “Shut the fuck up. Who do you think you’re talking to here?”

Xander stared at him, his mind an utter blank. “I don’t even know her.”

“Apparently you know enough. When her blood hit your system you jacked like you were riding the lightning.”

If he’d felt any shred of humor at the moment, he might have laughed at Mateo and his amusing colloquialisms. “Riding the lightning” meant being electrocuted. In the electric chair. Which is how it looked when an Ikati received blood from their mate.

From their mate.

For all Ikati, love was much more than a state of mind. It went deeper than emotion, deeper than wishes or vows made in a chapel or a lifetime of shared values and goals. It changed something within, on a physiological level. It left a mark, a fingerprint, a soul print that was never erased. Though some of their kind were Matched for propagating the race in hopes of imparting Gifts to their offspring and some of them were mated in love, as true lovers and soul mates and friends, all of them were mated for life. “Until death do us part” wasn’t just five words spoken on a Sunday. It was an ironclad pronouncement by fate. Among their kind, there was no divorce, no affairs, nothing at all that came between mates. Ever.

Except death.

No! his mind screamed. It can’t be! It cannot be!

Mateo stood and jerked his chin at Julian and Tomas. “Either which way, we’re out of here for the next sixty hours or so. There’s enough food and meds to last until we get back. Bartleby will stay to take care of you both.” He strode to the staircase that led upstairs and took the steps two at a time.

“And you’re welcome for rescuing your sorry ass,” he muttered just before his boots disappeared from sight.

The three of them stood in uncomfortable silence until Tomas finally spoke.

“He’ll get over it. He’s just worried about you. And he’s probably just jealous. That girl of yours is one serious piece of—” Cut off by Xander’s deep, warning growl, Tomas threw up his hands. “Point taken! I’m not saying another word.”

Julian spoke. “You won’t be able to stay here without...you know. That’s a physical impossibility.”

“I can control myself,” he said, stiff.

Julian glanced down at the bulge straining in Xander’s pants. “Sure you can.”

“X,” said Tomas, very quietly. Their eyes met, and Xander saw something he’d never seen there before: pity. “Don’t make this another Esperanza, man. You couldn’t save her, and you can’t save this one either. Don’t be a fucking tragedy.”

Xander walked up to Tomas, pressed his chest against the other male’s, and stood looking at him, eye to eye, nose to nose, vibrating rage. When he spoke, his voice was low, controlled, and cold as ice.

“Back off, Tomas. You’re stepping into a minefield. And we all know what happens to fools who take strolls in minefields.”

They stood like that, eyeball to eyeball, unblinking, until Julian intervened. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he spat, shoving them apart. “What the hell is wrong with you! We’re on the same team, you idiots!”

“Tell that to your friend Romeo,” Tomas snarled, then turned his back and headed for the stairs. He went up, but stopped halfway. He turned and fixed Xander with a hard look. “Take the next three days to get your head straight, bro. Fuck her, don’t fuck her, I really don’t give a shit. But if you don’t finish her when you’re supposed to, you know what happens. The Assembly will come to us.

Then we’ll have to take her out, and you too, you dumb fuck. Otherwise we’re all dead meat. So don’t put us in that position. We’ve been through too much together to get killed for a skirt.”

Then he stalked up the stairs, leaving Xander alone with a pensive Julian.

“Sorry, X,” he said, sounding as if he truly were. “But he’s right. You know he’s right.” He clapped a hand on Xander’s shoulder in farewell, then, like his two brothers before him, made his way to the stairs.

“There’s a feral colony somewhere in the vicinity of the Vatican,” Xander said to Julian’s retreating back. The big male spun around to face him, eyes wide. Xander went on, his voice dull, his heart clenched to a fist in his chest. “Those two males you saw in the hotel room weren’t deserters.

They’re feral; they don’t belong to any of the known colonies. They were with four others when I first saw them. And there’s another, an older male who I think is their leader. So if there’s that many males, there’s females. There’s a colony nearby.”

“How?” Julian said, shocked.

Xander looked at the white tile floor, shook his head, took a deep breath, and blew it out. “I don’t know. But they want Morgan.” He looked up into Julian’s wide eyes, and his voice took on a darkly menacing tone. “And I’m not going to let them have her.”

“Oh, man,” said Julian, shaking his head. “This situation has gone totally FUBAR.”

Xander allowed himself a small, mirthless smile. FUBAR was one of the many slang terms that peppered the speech of the three members of the Syndicate who’d trained in the American military.

The abbreviation stood for fucked up beyond all recognition.

“Just remember,” Xander said without a hint of sarcasm, knowing from experience he was right about this, “things can always get worse.” Then he crossed the kitchen, clapped his hand on Julian’s shoulder, and took the stairs three at a time, heading for the gym.

21

D was dreaming.

A part of his mind—the part that was always lucid, whether he was asleep, awake, or stone-

cold drunk—recognized this fact and began to record the details of the dream so he could access them when he woke. Many of his dreams meant nothing; many more held fractured clues that he had to fit together like puzzle pieces over a few days or weeks in order to see the full picture of the future his dreams painted for him.

But some dreams, like the one he was enmeshed in now, arrived fully formed and presented him with an image of the future as vivid as a van Gogh.