Rapture's Edge

talent of anonymous street artists and remember the long-forgotten dead. Graffiti, vivid as nightmares, was everywhere. Splashed over the rock walls in lurid swaths of purple and black and red, yellow flowers painted on towering columns, a swirl of kaleidoscope color on the rounded cavern ceiling far above his head. There were flying gold dragons and mincing white geisha and snarling pale ghouls with clawed hands reaching out. There were enormous letters in some forgotten alphabet and an eight-foot-tall depiction of a nude woman with one arm draped over her head.

But the bones were far more bizarre than the artwork.

Rising all the way to the ceiling along one long, curving wall was displayed an artfully arranged array of human bones. Countless bones, possibly thousands, femurs and ribs and skulls stacked with careful, almost reverent precision. It was an ossuary, ghoulish in its grandeur, made all the more eerie by the hundreds of candles that glowed along its walls.

And somewhere in this empire of paint and bones, Eliana was hiding.

He couldn’t see her but he felt her, that frisson that tingled over every inch of his skin like thunderclouds just before they disgorged a bolt of lightning. He took another step forward into the cool, echoing space, his gaze searching every shadowed corner, every crevice, every hiding place.

She was nowhere to be seen.

“I’m not here to hurt you, Eliana.” His voice carried through the quiet space, echoing softly and then dying to silence. The naked graffiti woman seemed to mock him with her sly, painted smile. “I only want to talk. I’ll say what I have to say, and then I’ll leave. You have my word.”

The sound of dripping water. A candle in a niche in the wall behind him sputtered out. Then a disembodied voice from somewhere in front of him said with gentle sarcasm, “Your word? Well, how reassuring.”

He froze. The voice, he was sure of it, came from the deepest shadow of the room, a hollow created by the intersection of two massive, perpendicular slabs of limestone. He narrowed his eyes, stretched his senses, and allowed every bit of ambient light to enter his swiftly dilating pupils. Beneath the veil of shadows where he was certain the voice originated lurked only painted mushrooms that sprouted wild from the cavern floor, foresting the two walls of rock with slender stalks and spreading caps that loomed cartoonishly large.

She wasn’t there.

He took a step forward, then another. Hoping to get her to speak again and get a better lead on her location, he said, “Tell me what would convince you, then. Tell me and I’ll do it.”

The rueful, answering snort came from that empty corner, he knew it did. But how? He took another step forward, carefully, then inhaled and opened all his senses to let the relentless drone of his surroundings sink in.

A pair of mice, scurrying along a ledge somewhere above his head. That dripping water, falling through caverns before it hit a body of standing water, far, far below. Rock dust and bone dust, both fine as silt, suspended and diffused as atoms in the air. A pulse of heat ahead of him, the scent of her bright in his nose. He took another sure step toward that sultry scent, and she said abruptly, “Stop.”

He did. He put both hands up in a posture of surrender. The air, cool and damp, felt delicious against his heated skin.

“I can kill you now and you won’t even see it coming. Stay where you are or I’ll spill your guts all over the floor. Understood?”

Considering the fact that he somehow couldn’t see her now but the last time he had she’d been quite handy with a dagger, D thought it prudent to nod.

He sensed movement without seeing its source, felt the pulse of her body heat move slowly around to his left. Nonchalant, feigning boredom, he lowered his gaze to the ground and then slid it left, following that delicious, satiny heat. There in the pale sifting of dust that covered the ground was a trail of footsteps, unremarkable in themselves, but astonishing for the fact that they appeared as they did, one in front of the other, right before his eyes.

Damn, he thought, floored by the sheer impossibility of it.

Eliana was invisible. How the hell had she managed that?

“I don’t feel the other Bellatorum nearby. Or your new team. So I have to assume you’ve come to kill me on your own this time.”

Instantly he said, “You don’t believe that. You know I’d never hurt you.”

“Do I?” she murmured in response, her voice now directly behind him. It took every ounce of willpower he had not to whirl around, but he held himself immobile, his limbs and posture and breathing nonthreatening and relaxed.

“Yes. And the team you mentioned isn’t mine. As I told you before, they’re called The Hunt. They’re assassins from the confederate colonies.”

The movement behind him ceased. He imagined he felt her glaring at the back of his head, willing it to explode.

“Do tell,” she invited, not cold but not particularly warm, either.

His hands were still lifted in the air, and he itched to lower them, but instead he turned his head and said over his shoulder, “They think you’re the new leader of the Expurgari.”

She spoke Latin as well as he did. So her voice was a little more heated when she said, “Purifiers? What is that supposed to mean? Why would they think that?”

Careful, he’d have to be very, very careful now. “I’d like to say this to your face, if you don’t mind,” he murmured. “Can I turn around?”

“No,” came the instant reply. Something sharp and cold pressed against the space between his shoulder blades: a knife. “And you have about ten seconds left to tell your story, so make them count.”

He accepted both the verbal threat and the more immediate one of the weapon with the tranquility of someone long used to facing death as a matter of course in his daily life. A soldier through and through, his self- preservation instinct had been deadened in infancy, when he’d been taken from the nursery and began his training as a warrior. He protected a colony of supernatural creatures, he protected their genocidal leader, he’d long ago come to peace with the simple fact that in all likelihood, his life would be short and violent. There were no grandchildren in his future; that was for sure.

“They think you’re the new leader of the Expurgari because your father was the old one.”

A quarter turn of the blade against his back. A slight hesitation, then, very quietly, “And what is it that these purifiers purify?”

He inhaled. He exhaled. “Us.”

“That makes no sense,” came the instant response. The knife pressed deeper into the flesh of his back. He felt it like an exclamation point on the end of a sentence, emphatic.

“It’s complicated.”

“Nine.” She sounded as if she’d like to shove the blade through his spine even sooner.

“They’re a militant branch of the Church, trained assassins—”

“More assassins!”

“Who’ve been led since the Inquisition by an Ikati disguised as a human—”

“Eight.”

“Which was a very ingenious way, if you think about it, to use humans to kill their own kind without drawing attention to the real culprit—”

“To what end? For what reason?”

“Vengeance, Eliana. Vengeance.”

“Seven.” Her voice, hard as granite.

“Why do you think your father was so devoted to Horus? God of vengeance, god of war…ring a bell? He used humans as a spy network to gain information about the other colonies so he could overthrow them, all the while disguising himself as a devout disciple of the Church, a spiritual warrior against evil. Against human heretics and that nonhuman scourge, that abomination against God and nature…shifters.”

“Six, five, four—”

“I have proof,” he said abruptly, and he felt the knife at his back give a little jerk.

“What proof can a liar give?” Her voice was bitter.