deep and craned her neck, desperately searching the dark forest for him. The clawed boughs of trees loomed close and black overhead. “Xander, help me!”
And then there he was, walking slowly through the forest toward her in a ray of light, smiling, heart- stoppingly beautiful, a black-clad angel with swords sheathed on his back.
“Help me!” she gasped, the cold, wet sand sliding thick over her shoulders, her neck, her chin.
It slid between her lips and she spat it out, choking. “Xander!”
He stopped beside the pool of sand and gazed down at her, beatific, his brilliant golden eyes dazzling in the gloom. “You’re in too deep,” he murmured, calm as morning. “A thousand kisses deep.
Nothing can save you now.”
The sand was in her ears, her mouth, her eyes. The silence of the forest echoed all around them.
“Please!” she begged, crying, suffocating, drowning in darkness. “Please!”
“Farewell, my love,” Xander crooned, smiling. “Give the devil my fond regards.”
He turned and disappeared back into the forest. The darkness swallowed her whole.
“Morgan!”
She jerked up in bed, gasping, her hand at her throat. Something touched her shoulder and she reeled, swinging blindly at it.
“It’s only me! Morgan! Wake up! It’s me!”
Xander had her by the shoulders, shaking her awake. It took a moment before her mind registered it, recognized his voice and his scent, then she threw herself into his arms, trembling.
“It’s all right,” he murmured, holding her tightly against his chest. He sat on the edge of the mattress with his arms around her as she shook and blinked, trying to dispel the horrible feeling of doom. “You were having a nightmare. It was just a dream.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. Just a dream.
He pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “I have to go out for a while.”
She raised her head and looked into his eyes. They were worried, tense, and suddenly she was, too. “Why? What is it?”
He drew a long breath, and she edged out of his arms and sat staring at him with the sheet rucked up between them. “Mateo and Tomas and...” His voice wobbled. He swallowed and then said, “Julian. There was a fight. Those other males—they’ve been caught.”
Morgan gasped. She drew the sheet up to her chin, the nightmare forgotten but a newer, darker dread taking hold. “Caught!”
He nodded, brushed a lock of hair from her forehead where it had fallen into her eye. “They’re being held at some kind of animal shelter close by. I have to go help them. You understand?
Bartleby’s coming with me. You’ll be here alone for...a while.” He swallowed again, looking pained.
“You don’t think...” she faltered, drew her knees against her chest and hugged her arms around them, “...you don’t think I’m going to run away, do you?”
He blinked, startled. “No. I know you won’t—I know I can trust you. I just can’t stand the thought of leaving you alone.” He licked his lips and his voice dropped. “I don’t want to be away from you.”
Her toes curled in pleasure. She allowed herself to wallow in it for a moment while they stared at one another. She hoped to remember someday what this felt like, wishing with all her heart some tiny echo of this feeling would last. Even the faintest memory of it could sustain her for all the dark years to come.
If she survived the next week, that is. Though they’d shared something here—something precious—he was still what he was. If she didn’t find the Expurgari...
That thought quashed the warm blossom of pleasure, and she looked away, heart pounding.
“I’ll be fine,” she whispered.
He rose from the bed—he didn’t seem to notice her sudden paleness—and pressed a soft, fleeting kiss to her cheek. The cell phone on the dresser began to ring.
“I know you will.” He put a knuckle beneath her chin and tilted up her head so she had to look up into his face. “My fierce little warrior. But I’m not so sure I will be.” His eyes darkened, and for a moment he looked haunted. Pensive, somewhere far away, he trailed his thumb slowly over her lower lip. “God, Morgan,” he whispered, holding her chin, gazing down at her, “what you do to me.”
The cell phone kept ringing. He never looked away from her face.
“Go,” she urged, pushing his hand away. “Go get them. I’ll be here when you get back.”
He nodded, slowly backed away, then crossed the room and picked up the phone. He glanced at the number on the readout, then pocketed it with a dark sigh. He crossed to the door.
She said weakly, “Be careful.”
He paused with his hand on the doorknob and just looked back at her. His intense gaze trailed over her face, her hair, her bare shoulders and arms above the sheet. One corner of his mouth quirked, then he pulled the door open and walked out of the room.
Midnight is historically viewed as the witching hour, when supernatural creatures appear and black magic is at its most powerful, but Xander knew from many years of experience that 3:00 a.m.—the devil’s hour, deepest of the night, when all the world’s abed—is best for hunting prey. Or in this case, staging a dicey, hastily conceived search and rescue operation. So it was just before 3:00 a.m. when he and Bartleby rolled to a stop in the black shadows of a grove of Roma pines that ringed a small urban park, and killed the engine of the huge black SUV he’d “appropriated” from one of his neighbors in the Aventine, a burly Russian he suspected was an arms dealer, judging by the automatic weapons—
modified to high capacity—he’d found stashed in the spare tire well.
If all went well, they’d be back at the safe house in less than an hour and his neighbor would be none the wiser. If it didn’t go well and he had to abandon the vehicle...his neighbor might be in a lot of trouble with the authorities.
The animal shelter was located adjacent to the ancient ruins of Largo di Torre Argentina, a large square of dirt and broken travertine pavers that hosted four crumbling Roman temples and the remains of Pompey’s Theater where Julius Caesar was killed in 44 BC. Located just minutes away from landmarks such as the Piazza Navona, the Pantheon, the Colosseum, and the Campo de’Fiori, it was smack in the middle of ancient Rome.
Which posed some rather obvious problems.
“There’s a lot of apartments around here,” Bartleby muttered disapprovingly, peering up through the windshield at the rows of brick buildings surrounding the park. Hundreds of windows gleamed in the light from the streetlamps, windows that might be hiding watchful eyes.
“Hotels, too.” Xander watched a pair of doormen at a boutique hotel across the street load luggage into an airport transfer van that idled at the curb. Two groggy tourists stumbled their way into the van, and it lurched away from the curb, coughing smoke, even before the door was shut. “But that’s why it’s called a clandestine op.”
Bartleby lifted a pair of field glasses to his eyes and said, “Not a covert op?”
“Covert ops are about deniability,” Xander explained, checking his weapons pack one last time.
Inside were his daggers, a pair of wire cutters, a length of rope, a grenade, a canister smoke bomb, a lock pick, and six cyanide capsules encased in a blister pack in case the entire op went to shit. He never carried guns: too loud, too heavy, too unreliable. “Clandestine ops, on the other hand, are about secrecy.”
The doctor lowered the field glasses and looked over at him. “What’s the difference?”
Xander gave him a grim smile. “Politics.”
Bartleby returned his smile. “Ah. Well, at least the tourist traps don’t open for another six hours. Hopefully we’ll be long gone by then, with no one the wiser.” He pointed to something beyond the windshield, several blocks down. “They might be a problem, though.”
Camped out on one side of the wire-topped fence outside the facility where his boys were being held were three mobile television trucks with their camera-topped jib arms extended high over their roofs. The press. Vultures.
“I saw them when we pulled up,” Xander said. Only a few reporters were ambling around, smoking and talking on cell phones. The rest of the area was deserted. “At least the animal rights demonstrators are gone.”
“They were probably too weak to stand up all night. A diet of tofu and lawn clippings will do that to a
