Edge of Oblivion

you and your fucking ‘different sort of life,’ Julian might still be alive!”

She stood there in stunned silence, mouth agape, livid spots of red on her cheeks as if she’d just been slapped very hard across the face.

Immediately he was ashamed. Cursed and shamed and in love with a female he could never have and—oh, yes, let’s not forget—was supposed to kill sometime very soon. Though obviously he wouldn’t, because he couldn’t, which was just another catastrophe waiting to happen, courtesy of Fate’s unrelentingly cruel sense of humor.

“Oh, fuck it all,” he spat. He turned on his heel and stalked out of the room.

In a daze, Morgan watched Xander go and felt something inside her leave with him.

If it wasn’t for you, Julian might still be alive.

If she thought she had been acquainted with pain before this moment, she was wrong.

She moved in a daze to the door, unseeing, unsure of what she would do, aware only that she had to get away from this room, get away from this house, get outside into the air where she could clear her head and think and maybe release the scream that was burning a hole in her chest.

If it wasn’t for you...

She found her heels where she’d left them near the dresser and slipped them on. She walked unsteadily down the corridor, then took the stairs one at a time, slowly, her legs leaden, the soles of her shoes clicking unheard against the wood. She crossed the third floor and took another set of stairs to the staged model house above, then went outside to the backyard and stood on the porch, blinking at the sun, cold with shock in spite of the warmth of the morning.

If it wasn’t for you, Julian might still be alive.

He was right, of course. She realized that as she stared at the grass and the trees and the white fence and the bottomless azure sky above, bile rising in her throat. She was the hub this entire shit storm revolved around, and she had no one to blame but herself. Wanting and wanting and wanting her whole life through, she’d dug a hole so deep there was no climbing out of it now. And everyone around her was beginning to fall in, too.

The only way out was to make it right. To do what she’d come here to do—find the Expurgari.

And then—what then? Forget she ever knew Xander?

Yes, came the sneering answer from her subconscious. Forget him, because he thinks you killed his best friend. And sweetheart, he’s probably right.

Her eyes filled with tears, and she stifled a sob behind her hand. How much easier it would be for him now, when the time came. How much easier to slide that knife between the vertebrae in her neck.

I still have time! she thought desperately, spinning around unsteadily to stare at the house. It seemed menacing in the morning sun, full of hidden danger and a palpable charge, as if it were a giant, ticking time bomb.

As it had innumerable times since she put it on, the medallion around her neck drew her hand like a magnet. It lay stone-cold and ominous against her chest and gave her the same disquieting sense she’d had since she’d first glimpsed it that there was something here she was missing, a clue this necklace held, a puzzle piece she didn’t know how to make fit. It scraped at her mind, over and over, as irritating as a fingernail scratching down a chalkboard.

The Alpha. The Expurgari.

Somehow they were related. But how? And how would she ever find him?

She stood there staring at the house as if it held some kind of answer for a long, long time, how long she didn’t know. Cars passed by on the streets beyond the yard, birds sang in the trees, the mechanical thrum of a lawn mower broke the stillness of the morning. Then finally a thought occurred to her and she stood breathless with the horror of it.

She wouldn’t ever find the Alpha, or the Expurgari. She was fooling herself.

And the man she was in love with...was happily going to kill her.

A shudder wracked her body. With a low moan, she dropped her head into her hands.

A clock began to chime inside the house, counting the hour in low, mournful tones. Five, six, seven...off in the distance a church bell began to ring, mirroring the chiming clock, then another, then another, faint, melancholy tolling that reached her ears from far-off churches all around the city, announcing the time.

Morgan stiffened. Her mind turned over, then her stomach. Slowly, slowly, she moved her head and gazed off into the distance, where she saw through the morning haze the enormous golden dome of St. Peter’s Basilica glittering like a Faberge egg atop the Vatican. She turned back and gazed at the safe house, at the empty facade that hid all its secrets below.

Below.

The puzzle pieces came together with a cold, solid click.

Though they had felt his energy diffused all around them at the Vatican, the feral Alpha had evaded detection because he wasn’t in the basilica. He was beneath it, safely out of sight, just as hidden and sheltered as they were in the underground rooms of the safe house.

Holding her breath, she backed one step away from the house, then another. Without bothering to think, Morgan turned and ran for the back fence.

31

Over two thousand years ago, or so the story went, the first Purgare—Purging— was held in a secret spot on the banks of the winding Tiber river where the giant sycamore trees bend low and weep their silver-green leaves into the burbling waters near the tiny Tiberina island in what is now the very heart of Rome. The spot had been abandoned for more and more rural locations as Rome grew up and spread sprawling over the flood plain of the Campus Martius around the river, and was now located well north of the city in a quiet place still unclaimed by man.

The location had changed, but the ceremony—solemn and ancient—had not.

Every month on the full moon’s apex the ashes of all the half-Blood Ikati who had not survived their Transitions the month prior were taken from the small clay urns they were placed in after cremation and transferred to containers fashioned from squares of white raw silk tied with cords of hand-spun gold. Green apples were placed atop the ashes to pay the hungry ferryman’s tithe to the nether-world; a small bundle of sparrow grass brought the unlucky soul peace. One by one, as the names of the dead were called by the Alpha of the tribe, the bundles were placed on slender balsa-

wood planks with lit beeswax candles at either end and set into the river, where they bobbed and dipped and finally caught flame. Mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and cousins and friends would watch in silence as the flaming bundles drifted away on the restless river until they slipped with a hiss and coils of rising gray smoke beneath the surface of the dark water, on their way to their final resting place at the bottom of the vast, enchanted Mediterranean.

Eliana sometimes wondered if there was a huge pile of Ikati ashes mounded like drifts of silt at the mouth of the Tiber where it drained into the sea.

Because she was full-Blooded, the King’s daughter, and referred to as spem futuri by the eldest of the tribal elders—hope for the future, whatever that meant—Eliana was considered too precious to attend the monthly Purgare. She stayed under guard inside the catacombs where she’d been born and had spent every waking moment of her life.

But tonight, oh, tonight—she would finally break free.

The past few days she’d been a frazzle of nerves and twitchery and pent-up emotion held in check only by the sobering realization that to fail in this—to be caught—would mean disaster. She wasn’t thinking too closely about that, though, because her full attention and indeed imagination had been captured by the thought of being alone— outside! —with Demetrius.

With heat and powerful need in his eyes he had agreed to her request and simultaneously exposed his own desire. He wanted her as much as she wanted him, and now she had her proof, evidenced undeniably by his willingness to risk death just to be alone with her for a few hours. How exactly he was going to manage it she still