Rapture's Edge

bodies. Two of the team were still back at the building, one felled by bullets, the other flattened by over a ton of metal. The bullets he understood; travelling at over a thousand miles per hour, a bullet headed in your direction affords only milliseconds to react before you’re dead. A car, on the other hand—why that idiot hadn’t just Shifted to Vapor was beyond Keshav’s comprehension. He deserved to get run over.

One by one, the five assassins now did exactly that. Five glittering gray plumes of mist gathered sinuous as smoke, surged up into the cool weight of the night sky, and headed back the way they’d come.

Laurent had worked for nineteen years as the head of the emergency medicine department at the Centre Hospitalier Sainte-Anne, one of the oldest and most prestigious hospitals in Paris. He’d seen nearly every trauma and injury in his long career, and it had been many years since he’d been surprised by what occurred in hospitals, by what people did to one another in anger or to themselves in despair.

But tonight had proven he still had the capacity to be shocked.

He heard their approach first. He’d been standing at the nurse’s station near the sliding doors to the entrance of the ER, flicking through the admitting form for a patient with a severe head cold who was convinced she was dying of plague, when from somewhere down the street outside came the distinct sound of a car screeching to a protracted halt, its brakes locked and screaming in protest. Whatever the driver of the car had been trying to avoid, he failed spectacularly because the car in question came flying into the hospital parking lot and collided with half a dozen parked cars as it careened to and fro like a pinball in an arcade game, and then as Laurent and the night nurse at the desk watched in openmouthed horror, it made a beeline for the sliding glass emergency room doors.

At full speed.

He leapt over the desk, grabbed the frozen nurse by her fleshy white bicep, and ran.

At the last second the driver gained a measure of control over the car. And by measure, Laurent would later tell his wife, I mean une petit quantite. A smidge. A squealing sideways slide slowed it down enough so that when the low-slung sports car finally made impact with the building, it only destroyed the row of groomed rosemary bushes along the front walk, the wrought iron railing beside them, and a portion of the low brick wall where he sat contemplating his sins during his smoke breaks. A rather substantial portion, but it could have been much worse.

When the smoke had cleared and the flying bricks and shrubbery had settled and the only noise was the angry hiss of a fractured radiator releasing pressurized steam, Laurent emerged from his hiding place behind the tiled column near the staff elevators just in time to see a woman—young, indigo-haired, half-dressed in men’s underclothing—tear off the driver’s door of a mostly demolished Ferrari, toss it aside like it weighed no more than a feather, and lift an unconscious, bleeding man twice her size in her arms.

His first thought was PCP.

Long out of fashion but still available, the hallucinogenic drug phencyclidine tended to imbue users with superhuman strength. When it wasn’t making them schizophrenic. His second thought as the duo entered through the sliding doors and the woman pierced him with her eyes—silvery-black and glittering, like coins at the bottom of a wishing well—was Dieu aidez-moi!

God help me.

She was supernaturally stunning, with an abstract face and courtesan’s body Picasso would have swooned over. She possessed a weird species of beauty, the type average people have no words or use for, alien and compelling, all lips and eyes and smoldering stare. Seeing her, Laurent thought for a moment he was having a heart attack. She literally took his breath away.

“You!” she growled, freezing him in place with those ferocious inkwell eyes. “Help me!”

Her French was nearly perfect, but not completely so; obviously, she wasn’t a native speaker. Perhaps she hailed from Mars.

“Now!” she said as he remained rooted to the linoleum. The word was hard as two fingers snapping, and it jolted Laurent into action.

“In there.” He pointed to an exam room just behind her, watching as she shouldered through the door and gently deposited the man she carried on the white-sheeted hospital bed. A quick glance over his shoulder and a mouthed instruction to Michelle, the night nurse—Call the police—and he followed her in.

“He’s been shot.” The alien beauty stepped back to allow Laurent to move closer.

He took his glasses from the pocket of his white lab coat and donned them, snapped on a pair of thin nitrile gloves, and did a quick, cursory examination of the victim. Blood had spread in an erratic circle over the front of his button-down dress shirt, and Laurent ripped it open with a yank that sent buttons flying. There it was—a perfect, round hole four inches below the burly man’s collarbone. Just above—or in—his heart.

“Will he be all right?” The woman stood almost too close, watching intently as he examined the wound.

“He’s lost a lot of blood. There’s no exit wound, which means the bullet is embedded. We need to prep him for surgery.”

He straightened, faced her, and made a swift, visual assessment of her condition. No pupil dilation. No nervous twitching or shaking. No obvious signs of drug intoxication. She was, oddly, barefoot, even more oddly wearing men’s boxer briefs and an undershirt gone slightly translucent with perspiration that made it cling to her beautiful breasts in a most distracting, enticing way—

She stepped closer, took his elbow in an iron grip, and said, very quietly, “He lives, or you die. Understood?”

Laurent had heard this on more than one occasion from distraught family members. Threats to his life or safety were not so uncommon, but something about the way this woman shaped the words, the cold, cold intent in her dark eyes, truly frightened him. He chose not to antagonize her and instead simply said, “You’re family? We’ll need to get some information for treatment. And for the police.”

At the word police, she released his arm as if she’d been burned and stepped back with a low, spine-tingling growl that reverberated through the room, animal, chilling. It was like nothing he’d ever heard before. Slowly, she backed away to the door.

She was going to run. He’d seen this before, too.

“Madam,” he said, holding out a hand, but she cut him off with a savage snarl that froze him in place and had his bowels threatening to spill themselves.

“He lives or you die,” she reiterated, deadly soft, vibrating menace. She glanced at the cursive stitching on the front pocket of his lab coat. “Laurent.”

The high, wailing scream of sirens underscored his hissed name. Wild, she glanced over her shoulder at the ER doors and then back at him. For a moment he imagined her eyes changed, something about the pupils…Had they elongated? To slits?

But then she was gone. Like a gazelle she bounded away and disappeared through the glass doors into the night, just as three blue-and-white police cars with sirens wailing and lights flashing blazed into the parking lot.

18 Diversion

Eliana limped into the catacombs just before dawn, exhausted as she’d never been, every muscle aching, every step burning sharp with pain.

The pain of heartache. The pain of confusion. The intense, stabbing pain of guilt.

If Gregor died, she’d never, ever forgive herself.

It took nearly an hour of navigating the silent, twisting passageways before she came upon the rusted metal stepladder hidden around a black corner deep in the belly of the catacombs. The ladder, drilled right into the rock, led up three stories through a ragged fissure in the limestone to the basement of the abbey. She climbed slowly, dazed, the chilled air doing little to soothe her abraded skin.

She needed a bath, and sleep, and to talk to Mel about everything that had happened. Not necessarily in