Rapture's Edge

Jenna’s hand stilled. “He fights for love?” she whispered, arrested.

She heard the long exhale from so many miles away, heavy with a hundred unnamed things. “Are our ways so different, Jenna?” He refused to call her Queen as steadfastly as he’d so far refused to join the Council of Alphas, which she didn’t hold against him; in his place, she’d feel exactly the same way about both. This also gave Leander fits. “Where you’re from, will a man not forsake everything he has for the woman that he loves? Even, if necessary, his life?”

Her eyes found Leander’s sleeping form again. No, their ways were not so different. They were not different at all. She murmured, “Even if the woman he loves is the new leader of the group that’s been trying to kill us for centuries?”

Silence. Sudden, crackling anger she felt like a hand around her throat. “Eliana is not her father—”

“No,” Jenna agreed, “she’s not. But she is the daughter of the madman who left my sister-in-law maimed for life, who tortured and killed many of my kin, who kept the heads of his enemies like trophies, and who,” her voice lowered to steel, “had me tortured and beaten near to death.”

Celian had no answer to that. Jenna went on, “Blood follows Blood, Celian. It’s the way of our kind. What proof do you have that she—or her brother—hasn’t followed in her father’s footsteps?”

“I can’t speak for her brother,” he replied, his voice tight, “but Demetrius believes Eliana is innocent, therefore so do I.”

It wasn’t enough; the Council of Alphas would say it wasn’t nearly enough to grant the favor he asked, even with his willing capitulation to join them and bow to their will. Demetrius had broken ranks and gone against orders, and that made him dangerous to them all. No matter how much Celian believed in him.

And yet…and yet…

Outside a bird began to sing, a high, trilling warble in the stillness of the pink-lit dawn. Jenna glanced at the expanse of lead-paned windows that ran along the east wall of their bedchamber and saw beyond the sill a tiny white butterfly bobbing above the planted flowerbeds with bumpy grace, settling finally on the open bloom of a rose. The flower didn’t even tremble under its weight.

Life is pain and everyone dies, but true love lives forever.

Her mother’s words. They came back to haunt her at odd moments like these. She’d died years and years ago, but Jenna often wondered if she was still out there somewhere, watching over her.

Reminding her.

Jenna herself was the product of such desperate love and granite loyalty, a child of two star-crossed lovers who paid the ultimate price for their dreams. She knew what it meant to risk everything, to gamble on love, to lose in the end but never regret one brilliant, doomed moment because what was gained was worth every sacrifice, even death.

Perhaps Demetrius would come to regret following his heart. Perhaps he would be lucky enough to find true love, or cursed enough to lose it—only Fate could tell. But Fate was burdened with the minutia of the universe, and sometimes she needed a little helping hand.

Jenna sat a moment longer, thinking, then came to a decision in her usual way: she went with her gut.

“I’d like to meet this Demetrius of yours, Celian,” she said softly. “And you, too. I admire that kind of loyalty. It’s very rare. And I’m sorry…that we all got off on the wrong foot. The last thing I want is more fighting. More bloodshed. We’ve all had too many years of that.” She paused a moment, allowing the silence between them to deepen. On the other end of the phone, Celian waited, his attention honed sharp as the tip of a knife. Firmer, she said, “I’d like to see you join the confederacy, Celian, but I won’t force you to, even under the circumstances. If we’re going to work together, it has to be on equal footing. You have to want to join us. I know all too well what our laws are like.” She smiled, a wry twist of her lips. “Fortunately, I’m above them. So you have your two days. Make them count.”

There was a beat of astonished silence before she heard Celian’s low, amused chuckle. She imagined him shaking his head. “Well, for all the ways your husband and I disagree, at least we can both agree on his taste in women.”

“I’ll tell him you said so.” Jenna glanced back at Leander. Without another word, she ended the call.

She made another call—quick and to the point—and then set the phone back in its cradle on the nightstand beside the bed and snuggled into the space between Leander’s strong arm and warm body, the safest spot in the world.

He turned his head and mumbled something incoherent into her hair. “Sleep, love,” she whispered, closing her eyes and tightening her arms around him. “Go back to sleep.”

They had hours yet before the sun would crest the mountains and he and the Council would discover what she’d done. They might as well both be rested for what lay ahead.

18 Sinuous as Smoke

Belief in Fate, like belief in God, requires a certain suspension of disbelief, the ability to accept without physical proof that there is something larger than yourself operating behind the scenes in the universe, there is a Plan that’s being followed and your own small life is a part of it.

That was a concept so foreign to Keshav it was rendered not only unimaginable, but entirely ridiculous.

An assassin by trade and by nature, Keshav believed not in Fate but in Chance, Fate’s blind, gleefully chaotic sibling who had no long-term Plan but wreaked havoc on hearts and lives just because he could. Keshav had seen and done too many horrible things to harbor any tender notions of a benevolent God. He knew God was a concept humans had created back in the days when they’d first crawled from the mud, gasping air with amphibious lungs. God’s primary function was simply to help soothe the primal, animal terror of death.

The primary function of Chance, on the other hand, was to really screw with you.

Perfect example: his current situation.

Chance had not been on their side at the police station. A few moments more and they’d have had their target firmly in hand. But Chance had decided her erstwhile lover would get there first. Fine, Keshav could deal with that, and he did. They swiftly and silently removed the body of their fallen comrade from the wreckage of the building, and then they retreated, they regrouped. They decided on the best spot for a temporary grave—he’d be reburied later in his home soil because it was an abomination for any of their kind to molder in an unnamed grave in a foreign land—and discussed their next move.

Then Chance lobbed them a lovely golden apple: driving from the burial site, the girl ran across their path. Literally, right across it. They were at a stoplight on the outskirts of the city, waiting for the light to change, and she’d sprinted across the street in a blur of raven blue hair and long legs and disappeared over a fence into a quiet neighborhood backyard.

Keshav looked at the other members of The Hunt. They looked back at him. Then, without uttering a word, they abandoned the car right in the middle of the street and took off on foot after her.

Then Chance had found it amusing to equip her with a gun and a human sidekick with a sports car.

As the taillights of the Ferrari faded into the distance down the Rue de l’Arbalete, the five remaining members of The Hunt slowed from a sprint to a trot, and finally to a standstill. In flashes of swirling gray Vapor, they Shifted back to human form and stood naked in the middle of the empty road, watching.

“Couldn’t have been driving a Fiat,” commented Calder beside him. Originally from the Quebec colony, he was lean and rangy, with a thick scar that ran in a wavering line from his jaw all the way up to his hairline, bisecting one eyebrow. He never said how he’d gotten it, and none of the others had asked.

“Zero to a hundred kilometers per hour in three seconds,” answered Ang, a member of the Nepal colony who had a fetish for expensive cars. He collected and restored them in his spare time. When he wasn’t killing things. “Top speed over three hundred twenty-five kilometers per hour…We’re fast, but not even we can beat that.”

“All right,” said Keshav, cool. He knew Chance wasn’t done with them yet. “Let’s clean up and call it in.”

Clean up was assassin parlance for get rid of the