Edge of Oblivion

back his head, and quaffed it in one swallow.

According to the long case clock in the corner, it was barely past noon. The vague feeling of something being off solidified into surety.

“Both?” he prompted when Leander didn’t continue.

There was silence in the room for several moments, unbroken except for the thrum of rainfall against the windows and the ticking of the clock. Then Leander spoke, low, to the empty glass in his hand.

“Have you ever been in love, Alexander?”

The assassin, trained from childhood to act and not to feel, was caught completely off guard.

Against his will the fleeting image of a pair of chocolate-brown eyes, liquid dark and smiling, flared in his memory. He blinked and the image vanished, leaving behind a ghost of dull pain that throbbed and mewled in his chest before he ruthlessly smothered it.

“No,” he answered flatly.

“Neither had I, until recently,” he went on, still low, still to his empty glass. Xander knew he spoke of his new wife. The Diamond Queen, they called her; just as beautiful, just as rare. She was famous in all four Ikati colonies, as famous for her Gifts and charm as she was for her past and her parentage.

The only freeborn Ikati, daughter of an outlaw Alpha and his fated, forbidden love.

A human, of all things. The enemy.

“It’s more powerful than I ever would have guessed,” Leander mused, almost to himself.

“Elemental. Transformative. And painful.” He gave a soft, humorless laugh. “Like fire.”

“Like death,” Xander rejoined, still in that flat, emotionless tone.

This conversation was headed down a very dark path, a dangerous path, one he didn’t care to follow. Love was an element, he knew too well, as cruel and violent as hurricanes or tornadoes or floods. Even speaking about it invited disaster.

Another rumble of thunder rattled the windows, and Leander seemed to snap out of his reverie.

He set the empty glass down on a beaded coaster and turned abruptly, his face wiped clean of emotion.

“We want you to accompany a member of our colony to Rome to hunt the Expurgari.”

Xander’s eyebrows shot up. “They’re in Rome?”

“I know,” Leander said. “I always imagined the Expurgari lived in the worst places in the world, the desolate or diseased places. Somewhere like Calcutta or Death Valley.”

“Or Chernobyl,” Xander added, very dry.

“But perhaps they never left Rome. It all started with a Roman emperor, after all. One of his descendants might be their leader now.”

“But why me?” Xander persisted. “I’m not a bodyguard, as you well know. In fact, I’m quite the opposite. If your tribesman needs muscle, there are far better choices than I—”

“No,” Leander interrupted, gazing askance at Xander. He inhaled a slow breath that lifted his shoulders, then walked across the room and sank back into the plush comfort of his ornate, high-

backed chair. He trained his gaze on the storm outside the windows. “It’s not a bodyguard we’re after.

Your particular skill set is exactly what’s required. For our tribesman.”

There was something ironic in the way he pronounced the last word, something mocking.

Xander waited, knowing he’d get the answers he was looking for if he waited long enough. His patience was legendary, almost as much as his precision and efficiency, his total lack of emotion.

“Once in Rome,” Leander said quietly, still gazing out the window, “you will stay two weeks, not one day more. And if in that time period the exact location of the Expurgari headquarters is not determined by the person you will accompany, if the detailed information we seek is not gathered, you will do what you do best.” He turned his head and his gaze flicked over Xander once in keen, cold assessment. “You will kill her.”

“Her? ” Xander echoed, shocked, though his expression remained stoic as ever.

But before he could say more, there was a sharp knock on the library door. When it opened to Leander’s curt “Come,” Xander was shocked once again, this time into silence.

4

“That’s the best I can do,” Jenna said, her voice strained, and released Morgan’s fingers. She fell back into the riot of scarlet and pink peonies that decorated her overstuffed silk chair and rested a pale, shaking hand over her eyes.

Morgan sank back into the spine-numbing chill of her own metal chair set across from Jenna’s and tried very hard not to vomit. She still fought against that sideways, lurching pull, that disorienting loss of gravity, those vivid images that had popped and flared and drunkenly reeled from the first moments Jenna had grasped her hand.

The Queen’s Gift of Sight was extraordinary, as powerful and elegant as the woman herself.

She could read a person’s thoughts with a touch, see future plans and past remembrances, glean information, and find the truth behind lies. She could also replay that information back to someone else in a kind of silent, maniacal movie, just as she now had. But Morgan had never thought being inside someone else’s mind— someone else’s memories—would be quite so terrifying. Or quite so nauseating.

She’d seen everything. Everything they’d done to the Queen, everything she’d suffered at the enemies’ hands, and it literally made Morgan sick.

A guard stepped forward, black-clad and muscular, one of the dozen or so that stood watching with hawklike intensity near their facing chairs in the solarium. It was a soaring, glass-ceilinged chamber of enormous potted palms and frescoed walls and silk sofas, surrounded on all four sides by arched windows, slick with rain. The room housed an extraordinary variety of exotic birds in hanging gilt cages, beating clipped wings impotently against the bars. Morgan thought it a perfect allegory for her entire life. Their chirps and whistles made an eerie symphony with the relentless drumming of the rain on the glass panes overhead.

“Majesty,” the guard murmured, throwing a dark glance in Morgan’s direction. He stepped near and hesitated a few respectful feet away. “Are you unwell?”

“Fine,” Jenna said, cross, waving him away. “I’m perfectly fine. It wasn’t her,” she added, knowing they suspected Morgan of some nefarious Suggestion, akin to the little scenario with the viscount yesterday. The Queen pinched the bridge of her nose between two fingers and muttered, “Always this hovering. It’s enough to drive you mad.”

“Yes,” Morgan said, very softly. “It is.”

The guard retreated to his place with the other men, and Jenna opened her eyes and leveled her with a look so clear and compassionate it made her want to shrink away in shame, so undeserving was she of the kindness there. But she couldn’t shrink away; all she could do was close her eyes to avoid it.

“I’m so sorry,” Morgan whispered. Her face grew hot; tears threatened behind her closed eyes.

“I’m so sorry for what they did to you—that I’m responsible—for that.”

With a rustle of fabric, Jenna leaned forward in her chair. A gentle hand touched Morgan’s knee. “I know you are. I know you didn’t mean...I know that wasn’t what you wanted.” Almost as an afterthought she added, “I can See it, you know.”

Morgan opened her eyes, looked into the pale, somber oval of Jenna’s face, and endured a moment of self- loathing so gut-ripping it felt like she’d swallowed a grenade. “Why are you doing this for me? Why not just let them kill me?”

She didn’t think it possible, but Jenna’s face went a shade paler. She removed her hand from Morgan’s knee and leaned slowly back, settling into her chair with the barest of melancholy sighs. It was a sound with a lifetime of pathos behind it. Her gaze drifted over Morgan for a silent moment before she began, low and halting, to speak.