Rapture's Edge

Flushed, nearly euphoric with a heady mixture of hope and fear, she stared at him.

“Once upon a time,” he softly prompted.

“Once…” When she faltered, Gregor nodded reassuringly, as if to say, Go ahead. Unable to bear his keen gaze any longer, she turned her face to the fire and stared into the crackling flames. She moistened her lips and began again.

“Once upon a time, in a kingdom of magic and mystery and permanent darkness, there lived a princess. She was powerless and overprotected and also, as fairytale princesses are, incredibly naive. She didn’t know not to trust strangers. She didn’t know how to properly choose friends. She didn’t know, unfortunately, that behind the most beautiful smiles sometimes lurk the ugliest, most dangerous lies.”

She closed her eyes, remembering, the ache of betrayal still so deep after all these years.

“Born to a family of great wealth and a people of great—and unusual—Gifts, the princess only knew that though her world was privileged and she was pampered, another world lay beyond the confines of her gilded cage. A world of adventure and possibility. A world of what if. The human world. The world to which she did not belong, yet yearned to see with every fiber of her being.”

She glanced at Gregor, and he nodded again, encouraging, so she took a breath and continued.

“But because she was the daughter of a great and powerful king descended from an ancient line of great and powerful kings who had learned to survive the human world by hiding from it, the princess was not allowed to dip her toes into the forbidden waters of humanity’s enticing delights. She was kept under lock and key in her sumptuous underground palace and satisfied her craving for adventure with books and movies and daydreams about what could never be.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “One day, however, fate intervened.”

The fire mesmerized her, orange flickering wraiths that danced and spun and drew her back, back, into the past, into the bittersweet memory of the time before she split into two people. Eliana Before and Eliana After, one happy and blissfully ignorant, one frozen forever, encased in a coffin of ice.

“The king was murdered. Like the human king Caesar Augustus who once hunted their kind near to extinction, he was betrayed by those closest to him. The kingdom was stolen, and the princess…the princess fled, never to return.”

Her throat tightened. The flames wavered and swam in her vision. Gregor hadn’t moved, and she didn’t look at him. She was afraid if she did she’d dissolve into tears.

He murmured, “What happened to her?”

“She…she changed. She learned the ways of the world. She began to steal.” Her gaze flickered to Gregor’s. “To survive. For money. And for…other things. Things she needed.” She looked back at the fire.

“And these other things she needed,” Gregor murmured, “were they for protection from whoever killed her father?”

Eliana closed her eyes and felt a lone tear track down her cheek. Silas’s voice whispered in her head, There is a war coming, principessa. Survival of the fittest is the only thing that matters now. “That’s only part of it,” she whispered, drawing the cashmere closer around her shoulders. Suddenly she felt very cold.

“And the rest? What’s the rest for?”

“Revenge.”

The word hung there in the air between them, simple and sinister. Gregor regarded her gravely, weighing it. “That’s an awful lot of burners for revenge.”

“It’s more complicated than that.”

A slight shake of his head and Eliana knew he didn’t fully understand and wanted her to explain. Because she was feeling like she was having an out-of-body experience anyway, she went ahead and said, “Every country derives power in a myriad of ways, from population size to natural resources to financial stability. Without those things, power is impossible. Freedom is impossible. But there is one thing that can even the playing field so that even the weakest David can trump the strongest Goliath.” She glanced at him, and he was staring back at her, rapt. “Weapons.”

Gregor started, understanding dawning on his face. “You’re building an army,” he accused.

He was quick, she had to give him that. “I’m just telling a story, remember?” She swiped at her face with the back of her hand and refused to look at him.

He sat stiffly forward in his chair. “So I’m helping you stockpile weapons so you can, in turn, do what? Kill people—humans?”

Shocked, she stiffened. “No! Of course not! We merely have to protect ourselves! We want to come out of the shadows and coexist peacefully, but we have enemies—”

Gregor stood and glared down at her, radiating tension. “Protect yourselves with automatic weapons? With land mines?”

“Gregor,” she said, hard. “Sit down.”

He must have seen something in her face because he complied, begrudgingly. He folded his arms across his chest and gazed unblinking at her, all the softness from before gone.

She downed the rest of the whiskey and set the glass on the low table beside her chair with a sharp clink. “We have a lot of enemies, and they’re very nasty, Gregor. This isn’t about hurting people, this is about protecting ourselves from those who want to hurt us.”

He looked dubious, so she said, “Do you remember the man who was in your office that day I came with the Cezanne? The one who was with the police—the German with a shard of ice where his heart is supposed to be?”

Lips as tight as his jaw, Gregor gave a curt nod.

“When I was taken to the police station, he tortured me.”

It was as if he was an overfilled balloon that had been pricked with a pin. He visibly deflated. Weakly, his face paling, he said, “What?”

“They know, somehow, about us. They were”—she grimaced, then went on, determined—“experimenting on me. Running tests, seeing how I reacted to different stimuli, that sort of thing. They know about us, but they don’t know, and we have to protect ourselves if we’re going to take the risk to be out. Maybe it started with that video a few years ago,” she muttered, “stupid Constantine and his stupid disco fight —”

“Wait. Wait.” Gregor sat forward in the chair again, hands spread wide. “The infamous video in the disco in Rome? With the…the uh…” He trailed off into silence, unable to say it himself.

Eliana gazed at him from beneath her lashes. “Panthers. Yes.”

He visibly blanched. She saw him replay it in his mind, the grainy cell-phone video caught by a bystander at a popular nightclub that showed the bizarre sight of six impossibly huge black panthers engaged in snarling, bloody battle on a dance floor before the police had shot one and captured two others. She’d seen it herself because it had received a lot of air time before being roundly dismissed by the authorities as fake. At least publicly.

“Huh. Huh,” he said, turning it over in his mind, wrapping his head around it. He leaned back in his chair and exhaled a long, quiet breath. “Cat sidhe after all, eh?”

“Every culture has their shape-shifter myths,” Eliana said gently. “Some of them are just closer to the truth than others.”

He sat on that for a minute, recalibrating, and Eliana waited, watching his expression flit from one emotion to another, her heart in her throat.

Had she done something very, very stupid?

After a while, his lips quirked. “Should have known when you stole my soul,” he murmured.

Relief coursed through her, and she let out the breath she didn’t even know she’d been holding. “Silver- tongued devil.”

“Thieving feline.”

She grinned at him, and he leaned over and grasped her hands, suddenly grave again. Vehemently he said, “Promise me you’re not going to pull a Montecore on me. Or anyone else for that matter.”

“Montecore?” She was confused. “What’s a Montecore?”

Utterly serious, firelight shining red and gold off his ginger hair, Gregor stared at her and said, “The white tiger that ate that fruit loop Las Vegas magician. Roy what’s-his-name. You know, in the show at the Mirage