Rapture's Edge

long, deep breaths before continuing. “He’ll have your head on a stick in ten seconds flat if he thinks you’re conspiring to…to…”

Her voice muffled beneath Eliana’s hand, Mel said, “You’re stronger than he is. You’d win.”

“Shhh!”

Mel shrugged. Above Eliana’s hand, her black eyes were solemn, but filled with challenge. “Besides, you’re the real breadwinner around here. He’d starve to death without you.”

“Mel,” she warned, but before she could say more there came the sounds of voices and footsteps from one of the corridors that spilled into New Harmony. Someone was coming.

Eliana stood and ran a hand through the choppy blue tangle of her hair. “Please, not another word!” Mel rose beside her, folded her arms across her chest, and made a vague gesture with her shoulders that seemed to say for now.

“Butterfly!”

Alexi, coming through the low archway of the access corridor, pulled up to an abrupt halt. Beside him looking around in awe at the graffitied walls and rows of stalactites that hung from the high, arched ceiling like monstrous rows of teeth was a girl in a short leopard-print miniskirt with teased blonde hair and a deep tan that appeared to be sprayed on. She had the kind of voluminous breasts typically seen on models in men’s magazines and long nails painted an alarming neon pink. Their hands were clasped together, but as soon as Alexi caught sight of Eliana, he dropped the girl’s hand as if it burned.

Oh gods. Not today. Not now.

“What fun!” snickered Mel beside her. “Ken and Hooker Barbie!”

Eliana elbowed her in the side. “We were just leaving, slick,” she called out, edging toward the corridor behind them. She reached out and grabbed Mel’s arm, but she wouldn’t be budged. Clearly, she wanted to stay for the fireworks.

The girl muttered to Alexi, “Who’s slick? And who’s she?”

Another tug on her arm and Mel relented with a sour look. “I’ve got five hundred on my girl for Friday night, slick, you in?”

Alexi looked at Eliana. “I’m always in,” he said solemnly, and the double meaning couldn’t have been clearer.

“Good luck with that,” said Mel under her breath, and then she smiled brightly and waved good-bye as Eliana dragged her off into the corridor.

When Alexi and his flavor of the week were out of earshot, Eliana said, “You’re terrible. Stop baiting him, will you?”

“Why? It’s fun to poke the bear and watch him dance.”

“Be nice.”

“Is he being nice by dragging every single low-rent skank in Paris down here to rub in your face? I think not. Therefore, he deserves everything he gets.” Mel made this pronouncement with a queenly wave of her hand. “God, it’s like he clones them or something.”

“He’s just…trying to get a rise out of me. Because he cares. It’s sweet, in its own sick, twisted way.”

“Sweet? Are you serious?” she scoffed. “It’s a cheap, immature trick. He deserves to have his boy bits cut off for that kind of behavior.”

“Mel,” Eliana warned, but her friend only laughed, a merry snort that echoed off the rock walls around them.

“Don’t worry, I’ll leave his boy bits unharmed for the time being. But he’s on my list, E, along with a few other people who will remain unnamed.”

She sent Eliana a dark, loaded glance, and she suddenly remembered the task she’d been assigned. “Speaking of those unnamed people, they’ve decided I should hit the Louvre tonight.”

Mel stopped dead in her tracks, and Eliana turned, surprised, to look at her. The corridor they were in was dark and winding, filled with the sound of trickling water and long, crawling shadows, but Eliana could easily make out the dismay on Mel’s face.

“The Louvre! Why there? That seems so risky!”

Eliana sighed in agreement. “I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks so. As if I had a choice,” she muttered as an afterthought. “Anyway, security personnel can’t see me in the dark. Cameras can’t capture an image of me. Plus, I can Shift to Vapor if I need to. Really, what’s the worst that could possibly happen?”

It was a rhetorical question, of course, and one Mel didn’t have an answer to, but as they turned and began the long walk back to the upper levels of the catacombs and the hidden entrance that would lead them into the basement of their abandoned abbey, Eliana couldn’t shake the dark, nagging feeling that, somehow, she was about to find out.

6 The Cat

Heart pounding, D shot up in bed and blinked into the cool stillness of the dark room, trying to regain his equilibrium. Trying, without success, to swallow around the cold, devouring terror that clawed at his throat. An echo of a scream died into silence off the curved rock walls as he sat there sweating and panting with the sheets rucked up around his waist, and D realized it must have come from him.

The dream was the worst he’d had yet.

Fighting panic, he dropped his head into his hands and concentrated on getting himself under control. Images still battered him relentlessly—gunfire, blood, men with weapons descending on the naked, terrified figure of Eliana crouched against a wall like a cornered animal. There was nothing he could do, but every nerve ending in his body screamed for him to do something.

Because like the others before it, this dream was a harbinger of things to come.

He swung his legs over the side of the cot and pushed off. Naked, he went to the footlocker at the end of the bed and pulled on the pair of black cargo pants and shirt he’d tossed there hours earlier. He laced up his boots and crossed to the dresser on the other side of the room that held the various weapons he always carried, laid out in a careful row on top. He strapped them on in the same order he did every time: Glock nine-millimeter on his right hip, kukhri—tip dipped in poison—on his left, push daggers in each of his boots, folding knives tucked into pockets in his pants. He was a walking arsenal and, as one of the king’s elite guards, had been most of his adult life.

Not that there was a king to guard any longer, but that hadn’t reduced the threats to their colony. If anything, the king’s death increased the threats tenfold.

He ran a hand over his head, his dark hair shorn so close to his skull it couldn’t accurately even be called a haircut, and grabbed the keys to his Ducati from the small wooden bowl where they were always kept. He needed a ride. He needed a drink, as well. Ignoring the fact that they were all basically under martial law and forbidden to leave the catacombs without express permission from Celian—once the king’s main enforcer, now the leader of the Bellatorum and de facto ruler of the colony—D had been making clandestine reconnaissance trips ever since Eliana had disappeared.

He groaned aloud. Even thinking her name hurt.

With a curse, he spun on his heel and made his way from the Spartan sleeping chambers the Bellatorum used into the chilled gloom of the main corridor of the catacombs.

Fifteen minutes later he emerged in the shadows of the subterranean basilica of Domitilla that the Bellatorum used as their own special entrance and exit to the catacombs and came face-to-face with a pair of nasty-looking guards lounging against the ancient Doric columns. Young, muscular, and glowering, they sprang to attention and trained the sights of their automatic rifles on the center of his chest. D noted with no small satisfaction he was at least a head taller than both of them.

Then again, at over six foot five, he was at least a head taller than almost everyone.

“Gentlemen,” he said calmly, looking first at one, then the other.

One of them cleared his throat, a froggy sound that echoed softly off the crumbling stone walls. “Can’t let you pass, D.”