Rapture's Edge

oatmeal. He peered at her over his glasses and smiled, cheerfully benign.

The banality of evil. Eliana had heard the phrase once to describe the phenomenon whereby the most truly horrific acts were carried out not by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people socialized to accept unspeakable atrocities as “normal.” The holocaust, animal testing, genocide and capital punishment and war.

Torture.

It was the man from Gregor’s office, Agent Doe. The one she’d warned him was dangerous that day when she’d come with the Cezanne and he’d been entertaining the police. She knew he was trouble.

“I hope you burn in hell,” she said to the ice-eyed doctor, her voice oddly hoarse. Then she remembered: she’d been screaming. For a long time, evidently, because her throat felt raw as ground meat.

The doctor chuckled, unimpressed with her attempt at bravado. Behind her, Edoard gave another of his now-familiar snorts. “Claws, kitty cat. Mind the claws.”

He walked casually around her wheelchair—she was strapped to a wheelchair, when did that happen?—and stood next to the doctor. The table beside them held a small electronic device with wires and dials and a digital readout blinking numbers in blue against a black screen. The size of a small microwave, it must have been the source of that excruciating pain eating holes in her skull.

This was another room, clinical as the first but larger and lined with a variety of strange-looking electronic equipment in every size and variety. Testing equipment, recording equipment, some ominous stainless steel instruments laid out on a cloth on a long metal console below a video screen. It looked less like an interrogation room in a police station and more like Herr Frankenstein’s lab.

Her memory was cloudy at best. She assumed she’d been injected with something because the vein in her left inner arm burned and there was a heaviness in her limbs she’d never experienced before. Vaguely, she remembered a struggle, remembered breaking someone’s jaw with a vicious kick to the head and disabling two others with well-targeted groin shots before she was overpowered by half a dozen more men armed with fists and billy clubs. That was all she remembered, until now.

Edoard chuckled, an evil sound, and she glanced up at him. He stared back at her with the kind of expression usually seen on the faces of new parents and lottery winners. He looked ebullient. Exultant.

In that moment, she was more afraid than she’d ever been in her life.

“What are you going to do to me?” she demanded, masking her fear beneath an icy tone. He didn’t answer, but his smile grew wider.

Just then, without warning, the room went black.

“What the…”

Edoard muttered an oath under his breath and moved to the door. With a turn of the knob, he yanked it open and walked a few steps into the dark corridor.

“Jean-Luc!” he shouted. It echoed off the bare stone walls, fading into silence. “Henri!”

Nothing. The hallway was silent as a graveyard. Though why he expected an answer at all was a mystery; the building was vast, and if they were anywhere close to the original interrogation room she’d been in, they were deep in the very bowels of it. At this hour—she sensed it was close to dawn, as she always did, even far below ground—it would likely be almost deserted.

There came a low rumble that shivered the walls, and then with a grudging fzzzttt the emergency lights that lined either side of the hallway flickered on. They weren’t steady, though, and a few were burned out so the hallway was drenched in an eerie, flickering half-light that was extremely creepy. Inside the room, all the ominous electrical equipment had fallen dead.

“There we go,” said a satisfied Edoard, walking back into the shadowed room. “Just a little hiccup. Not enough to keep us from our work, eh, kitty?” She watched as he prowled to her, smiling, and then positioned himself behind her wheelchair. With a little bump, he released the brakes and the chair started to slide forward over the floor. “Or at least, not for long. Agent Doe, lead the way,” he said to the doctor, who wasted no time pulling the door wide open so the three of them could pass through.

And then, the instant they were in the hallway, she felt it.

Correction: him. She felt him, and the air went to fire.

Demetrius.

Burning heat and electric intensity and a crackling current of danger; she’d know him anywhere. He’d finally found her.

And now, as he had in every nightmare she’d had over the past three years, as Silas had warned her over and over again, he’d try to kill her.

Every cell in her body exploded into high, shrieking alert.

“Get me out of here!” she screamed, thrashing against the bindings at her wrists and ankles. Her heart pounded, her blood raced, every muscle clenched. She had to get out, she had to get away, now, now, now, now, NOW—

“Oh, that’s right, you’re afraid of the dark, aren’t you?” said a very calm Edoard, sarcasm dripping from his voice. He didn’t miss a step, just kept pushing the wheelchair at a leisurely pace down the spooky hall as she continued to buck wildly. One of the wheels hadn’t been oiled and made a high-pitched squeal with each revolution that echoed off the cold stone walls and fractured to a million tiny smaller squeals, a chorus of horrible, nonhuman screams that all seemed to say, “You’re going to die! You’re going to die!”

She fought harder. Even though she was still weak and a little foggy from whatever they’d injected her with, one of the ankle straps popped its metal binding with a tinny squeal and broke free.

Behind her, Edoard cursed and snapped, “Tranq, Doe!”

But before the doctor could react, a thunderous BOOM shook the building to its foundations. An entire section of the plain stone wall at the far end of the cavernous hallway ahead of them exploded inward in a monstrous spray of brick and dust that carried with it a shockwave of heated air that knocked the wheelchair on its side with Eliana in it and both Edoard and the doctor off their feet.

Her head bounced against the floor.

Fireworks erupted in her vision.

She heard screaming, smelled smoke and scorched fabric, felt the ground shake as another thundering boom rattled the building, but the sound seemed to travel to her ears slowly, distorted as if from far away or underwater. In fact, everything had slowed to a crawl. She lifted her head, blinking through a murky haze of dust, and saw the doctor a few feet away, crumpled on the floor with a widening pool of liquid crimson on the white stone beneath his head. He was twitching grotesquely, mouth open in a silent scream. One eye was open, too, but from the other protruded a bent shard of metal. His broken glasses dangled from one ear.

Edoard shouted something from behind her that she couldn’t make out because there was another deafening explosion, somewhere close but out of sight. With a grinding groan, a large chunk of ceiling collapsed into a pile of rubble on the floor not ten feet away and sent another choking blast of dust into her face. Her ears rang. She coughed and sputtered, struggling against her restraints, trying to push the wheelchair nearer to the wall with her one free foot. A tangle of black electrical conduit hung down from the gaping hole in the ceiling and, with a zapping crackle, began to spark and twist like a nest of angry snakes.

The emergency lights in the hallway flickered out and then came right back on, stuttering intermittently as if they might go out completely at any moment. A siren began to whine.

And through it all, the pulse of Demetrius beat like a drum against her skin, stronger every second.

Get up! she screamed silently to herself. Get out of here or die!

She didn’t want to die. So with strength lent by fury and fear, Eliana snapped the binding around her right wrist.

Panting, she fell on the other wrist restraint and tried with trembling fingers to work open the clasp. She managed it just as a terrifying shock of electricity hit her, and she knew with sudden cold certainty that Demetrius wasn’t alone. There were six—she stiffened—no, eight more Ikati with him.

She struggled to sit up sideways and worked the ankle strap open, bent almost in half at the waist, holding herself up with one elbow. Dust coated her nose and eyelashes, making it hard to breathe and see. The strap gave, and she scrambled out of the toppled wheelchair on her hands and knees, scraping her palms and kneecaps