Edge of Oblivion

were ever known to survive their first Shift at twenty-five.

The first and most famous was a female named Cleopatra. Ruthless and cunning, that one, almost as fine a strategist as he. And his spies informed him another female had recently done the same, and even been named Queen of that massive colony in the ancient woods of southern England he’d had his eye on for so long.

He’d never take a half-Blood Queen for himself. Though he’d kept human women—captured and held prisoner, tourists mostly, the choicest ones—as part of his harem since his beloved Sabina died so long ago, that was pure pragmatism: humans bred like rabbits. A single female could produce a child—or two or three—every nine months for decades during the entirety of her breeding years.

Full-Blood Ikati females were only fertile once per year and rarely got pregnant. It was the reason his kind had all survived on the edge of oblivion for centuries. Humans were simply outbreeding them.

Not for long, though. He was going to turn their fertility against them.

Three of the six Liberi injected with the latest version of the antiserum had survived their Transitions this past week alone. Close. So close. Only a few more trials, and he was sure he’d perfect the compound, and then he’d inject the hundreds upon hundreds of his half-Blood bastards and put the final stage of his plan into place—

“Sire.”

Dominus looked up from his perusal of the latest DNA sequence and variance report from his privately funded, state-of-the-art lab in Milan to find D and Lix standing at the arched entrance to his library. Like windows, doors were absent in all the catacombs.

Except the heavily guarded doors that led to the outside world, of course.

“Salve, Bellatores,” he said, laying aside the report on his desk. He leaned back into the comfort of a large leather chair and gazed at them while they stood in silence at the doorway, waiting for his command. They wouldn’t enter unless invited, and he had half a mind to let them stand there and sweat, but he knew they were both on edge from the incident with Celian. He liked to occasionally push them to the far edge of their constraints: anger kept a warrior razor sharp. “Better to be feared than loved,” his own father had told him, wisely.

He’d felt neither for the old man and had killed him as soon as he was old enough to lead, but still, it was good advice.

Motioning them forward with his hand, he said, “Come in. Sit with me.”

The two huge warriors sat in the two chairs opposite his desk—dwarfing the furniture and looking profoundly uncomfortable—and Dominus had to press the smile from his lips. He looked first at Lix, long-haired and unshaven, then at D, tattooed, bald, and emitting his usual aura of violence, dark as a lightning storm and just as dangerous.

Tell me, Bellator, he thought. With a clenched jaw, the warrior began to speak.

“The full-Blood male we encountered at the Vatican,” he said, moving only his lips. His entire body, big as it was, had fallen still as stone. He hated when Dominus was inside his head, which, of course, the King found highly amusing.

He made a noise of interest and gestured for D to continue.

“He was here, in the fovea.” He licked his lips. “With the female.”

The King’s eyebrows shot up. He leaned forward, put his elbows on the desk. “Go on.”

“She was naked,” he said tonelessly, “chained to the wall.”

At that, blood began to pound through the King’s veins. Naked. Chained. Two more beautiful words could not be found in any language. He’d think more on that later on, when he was alone.

Perhaps when he was with one of his human concubines; they were so much easier to scare than their Ikati counterparts, and he loved them to be scared when he took them. He loved them to scream. “And the male?”

Here D inhaled and dropped his gaze to the edge of the King’s desk. “You stabbed him in the back. You killed him.”

“So I win,” he said, very soft. D glanced up at him, stone-faced. His voice came very low.

“You always win, sire.”

Dominus sat back in his chair, pleased beyond measure. That male he’d encountered had powers he’d never heard of and smelled of death and carnage and the kind of hardened soullessness he’d only ever found in himself, all of which had given him considerable worry.

But this made everything so much easier. The warrior’s dreams were never wrong, and like the one that had alerted him to the arrival of the two strangers, this one had been so strong he’d felt the echoes of it from half a mile away. He watched as Lix shifted in his chair, still uncomfortable, and abruptly decided the two of them deserved a little reward.

“It’s three days until the next Purgare,” he said, thinking of the ritual burial ceremony that took place at midnight under every full moon for all the Liberi who hadn’t survived their treacherous first Transitions over the previous month. Their mothers, the Bellatorum, and the rest of the upper classes gathered to scatter the ashes into a secret spot of the river Tiber along with flowers and murmured farewells, and he’d come to hate each and every Purgare as a personal affront to his pride.

But not for long. This next could be the last.

“Take the next few days off,” the King continued, gratified when the two warriors looked at him, shocked. “Go out, get drunk, Shift in the Villa Borghese if you like. Silas will give you money.”

He motioned to his most trusted servant, who glided forward silently from the shadows of the room and bowed in their direction. “Enjoy yourselves.”

“Thank you, sire,” said Lix, sounding more than a little confused, and he tried not to smile again. The King wasn’t known for leniency or charity, but he dearly loved to keep them guessing.

“Take Constantine as well,” he added, in a rare swell of benevolence. The male had taken his task of punishing Celian exceptionally hard and might not leave his bedside until he healed. A small gesture of generosity would go a long way toward mending his raw emotions. After all, a king needed his warriors loyal. And as the very intelligent human Niccolo Machiavelli once said, “Severities should be dealt out all at once...but benefits ought to be handed out drop by drop, so that they may be relished the more.”

“Father,” said a female voice from the door. The two warriors leapt to their feet and stood at attention, eyes fixed on some far-off point behind the King’s head.

Dominus rose from his chair. “Eliana,” he said, his voice warm.

She walked toward him over the hand-knotted Persian rug with the poise and grace of a runway model and paused beside him, offering her cheek.

He leaned down and kissed her, thinking she was too thin. Her cheekbones stood out in the perfect oval of her face, which made her dark eyes look even larger than normal. He brushed a lock of her choppy black hair from her forehead and wished she’d grow it longer. He didn’t like this modern look on her.

As beautiful as her mother had once been, his only daughter was twice that and had his intelligence and drive to boot. Trained in martial arts—unnecessary, but it kept her occupied—an expert in computer science, and fluent in several languages, she was worth a hundred of someone like her older brother, Caesar. The boy was cowardly and unGifted and had he not been his son Dominus would have given him over to the Castratus. But Eliana was his pride and joy. Unfortunately she chafed just as her mother had at the life of sheltered privilege she’d been forced to lead.

But Dominus would never risk allowing her the leniency to roam free in the world. She was the only thing he truly loved, the only precious spark of light in his life of war and darkness, and he protected her from the dangers of the outside world just as he protected her from the ugly truth of what he was and all the things he’d done to get that way.

But someday, if his plan worked, she could live free as a bird. As could they all.

Forever.

She turned to the warriors. “Bonum mane, Bellatores,” she murmured, gazing at D. Lix gave a murmured hello, but D remained silent. His gaze flickered to hers, and he inclined his head, then