Edge of Oblivion

“Because?” Lix said, surprised.

Constantine moved closer. Though he was so beautiful Michelangelo could have modeled the David after him, a feeling of darkness moved with him, the subtle chill of death. The crowd parted to let him pass, shoving one another in their hurry to get out of his way.

“Because this situation is going to take care of itself.”

Lix’s face clouded, then cleared. “Your dream—that’s right. Dominus killed that male in your dream.” He sat back. “Not that it makes me feel any better. I’d like to get my hands on that bastard myself.” His gaze searched D’s face. “Did you see anything else? Anything before—or after?”

D shook his head and avoided Lix’s gaze. He just couldn’t chance the King’s finding out about his treason during one of his regular trips through Lix’s brain.

He’d learned how to hide things. He’d learned how to tuck things away into small, unseen places in his mind, places the King never bothered to go. There he kept his fantasies of Eliana, the visions of her soft body and soft eyes and soft mouth, there he kept his suspicions of her father, there he kept the snippets of dreams he edited, those dreams that hinted at terrible things to come.

There he kept his fear.

It was the fear that kept him awake nights, bathed in sweat, his body rigid and his mind a churning inferno. He didn’t know exactly what was coming, but he knew something was, something vast and dark and cold that felt like oblivion. And now that the two full-Blood Shifters had arrived just as his dreams foretold, he felt an unseen clock ticking down to zero hour.

But to what? What?

“I need a drink,” said Constantine, who had arrived to stand dead-faced and hulking beside their table.

D was about to open his mouth to speak but froze, the breath stolen from his lungs. Constantine and Lix froze as well; then all three turned in unison to look down at the dance floor below as the crowd parted to let three enormous, muscled males pass.

Ikati. Strangers.

Enemies.

The three strangers looked up at them just as Constantine said, “On second thought, a fight will do just fine.”

“A bar?” complained Julian from behind the wheel of the Maserati he’d stolen in Monaco. He, Tomas, and Mateo were randomly driving through the dark, rainy streets of Rome, making a game of seeing how close he could come to pedestrians without actually hitting any of them.

He was fairly sure that nun on the Via Veneto would survive.

“It’s a nightclub, not just a bar,” grumbled Mateo, staring out the window at the buildings flashing by. He still wasn’t over the incident with Xander, though it had been a good twelve hours prior. Those seven words were more than double what he’d spoken all day.

“And a good one at that,” added Tomas from the back-seat. “I heard Angelina Jolie was there just last week.”

“Please,” sneered Julian, steering the car around a corner so fast the two right-side wheels lifted a few inches from the ground. He narrowly missed crashing into an elderly couple crossing the street. “She’s too busy making movies to hang out in bars.”

The car fishtailed as Julian overcorrected. Mateo and Tomas were thrown against the windows.

“Do they even have food in a bar?” Julian continued, unperturbed by the curses that were being hurled at him. “Answer me this: What is there in a bar that I’d be interested in? Do I dance? No. Do I drink?

Well, okay, yes, but I’m not paying twenty bucks for a shot of watered-down whiskey. Do I like loud music? No. The only thing I’m going to find in a bar is—” He stopped speaking abruptly, but it wasn’t the Vespa he’d just clipped with the right front fender, sending its helmeted driver into a tailspin that launched him over the handlebars and off onto the grassy strip beside the road.

He stopped before he could say women.

The only thing to be found in a bar was human women. Lots of them. Like the one Xander had loved so long ago. The mere mention of which had caused the entire day to turn into a steaming pile of shit.

“He’s got a hero complex,” muttered Mateo to the window, knowing exactly why Julian had shut up so quickly. “Always looking to save the damsel in distress.”

But in reality, she hadn’t been in distress until she’d fallen in love with Xander.

It was a tragic tale, a cautionary tale, one still whispered about in their colony in Brazil, though of course never to Xander’s face. Esperanza had been the bright, captivating daughter of Karyo, their capoeira master, whom Xander had gone to live with at six years old when his father remarried and his dead wife’s offspring was banished from his new wife’s sight.

The five of them practically grew up together, there in that joyless compound and its morbid array of weaponry. No one ever knew what happened to Karyo’s wife or if he’d even had one; no one cared. The Ikati cared only that their human pet kept his mouth shut and kept churning out trained killers like the ocean churns out waves. And so he did. Karyo was a brilliant teacher. His students were brilliantly Gifted. Everyone was brilliantly pleased.

Everyone except Xander and Esperanza, who, as the years progressed, in between his grueling training and her schooling and subsequent betrothal to an older man she’d never met, had somehow found the time to fall in love.

It was said later that it had been inevitable. Take a damaged, wrong-headed boy like Alexander Luna— warped beyond repair by his father’s savage beatings, beatings that were soon transferred to his wife when he saw how quickly Xander toed the line when his mother’s pain was used as a deterrent —and put him in the path of temptation, give him a taste of forbidden fruit, as it were...what did anyone expect?

For years, Xander and Esperanza kept their secret well hidden. As of course they should. Had the relationship been discovered sooner, the Ikati would have moved to terminate it.

Permanently.

But as it will, fate had its own cruel way of dealing with things.

Karyo discovered them. The details of how and where, the other members of the Syndicate never knew. The only sure thing was the fact of Esperanza’s lovely, broken body discovered one misty morning lying in a pool of her own blood on the cobblestones in front of the training center.

Her neck was broken. She’d been thrown from the roof.

Julian, Mateo, and Tomas had all been there when Xander found her, when he confronted Karyo, who stood by watching, his face like a slab of stone.

“You killed her!” Xander screamed at the wiry old man.

“Better that than see her defiled by an animal,” Karyo coldly responded.

And then, at sixteen, Xander committed murder for the first time.

Afterward he was inconsolable. The Ikati didn’t much care that he’d killed Karyo. Humans, after all, were expendable. His own father, however, cared about the gossip it brought and came to the compound to give Xander a ruthless beating.

Then Xander committed his second murder.

After his father’s death—judged by the Assembly a justifiable homicide for reasons of self-

defense—his half brother, Alejandro, had been installed as the new Alpha of Manaus, and Xander had forsaken any shred of mercy, had slaughtered any tender feeling within himself that would ever allow him to feel pain, love, or happiness.

He died.

He walked, he talked, he became the best assassin the tribe had ever seen. But he was nothing more than a corpse. A zombie.

“FUBAR,” Julian muttered under his breath, then blew out a long, hard breath. “All right, show me the way to this joint. I suppose I could use a watered-down drink.” He banked hard left, turning down a one-way street, scaring pedestrians into squealing, scattered flight. “But don’t expect me to like it. And you’re paying, Tomas.”

The first of the screams erupted from somewhere above them.

Even before the screams Mateo sensed it, and Julian and Tomas weren’t far behind. As they made their way across the dance floor, watching humans skitter away like frightened puppies before them, the stinging hot