Rapture's Edge

There was a moment of silence followed by the rustle of fabric. She imagined Alexi sitting up in bed, sending a look to the unmoving bump beside him that would be his latest conquest. “Anything,” he said, low. “What do you need?”

A sigh of relief escaped her. She hadn’t been entirely sure of him, but Alexi sounded instantly alert and sincere. Thank God for trustworthy ex-boyfriends. “I need a safe place to stay.”

“Eliana,” he breathed, “yes. You can always stay with me.”

“It’s not only me,” she equivocated. “There are a few people I have to…hide. Just for a few days until I can make other arrangements.”

She heard his confusion in his voice. “What, like your family? What happened? Is everything all right?”

“No,” she answered honestly. “Everything is the opposite of all right.” She swallowed, suddenly hoarse. “Mel’s been shot,” she whispered.

“Shot!” he exclaimed. In the background, she heard another sleepy mumble, this one female. He covered the phone with his hand and muttered something sharp, then got back on the line. “What’s going on, Butterfly? Where are you?”

Eliana cleared her throat. “I need you to go to the Tabernacle, Alexi. There will be people waiting there for you, ten, no more than fifteen—”

“Fifteen people! What the—”

“Just get there as fast as you can and bring them back to your place and try not to let anyone else see you. I’ve got to get Mel some help, but I’ll come as soon as I can, and I’ll explain everything then. Okay?”

Another silence, this one weighty, then the sound of Alexi exhaling through his nose. “Okay. But this isn’t going to be like the usual Eliana where you come and go like the weather and I’m left wishing I had a barometer. I’ll go get your people, and you can stay with me as long as you need to, but as soon as you get here you’re going to have to level with me. You’ll have to tell me what’s going on, Eliana. And I want the truth. Deal?”

“Deal,” she whispered miserably, because she really had no other option. She hung up after saying good- bye and looked back at Mel, white and silent on the backseat of the car. She reached over and took her hand, feeling for a pulse. It was there, but weak.

“How far?” she asked D without looking at him.

“Close.” It was clipped and hard. She glanced over to find him staring in cold fury at the windshield. They were going so fast the streetlights flashed by in a near-solid blur, headed back to the safe house where D had medical supplies and anesthesia.

“Who is he?”

Eliana let out a breath. She knew D would have easily been able to hear the entire conversation, sitting so close with his stupid, heightened hearing. He’d have heard the inflection in Alexi’s voice. The emotion…the intimacy.

“He’s a friend.”

“What kind of friend?” he growled. His fingers wrapped around the steering wheel so hard they turned white.

“The best kind—one I can trust,” she shot back, because who the hell was he to interrogate her? Mister I won’t answer your questions, but you have to answer mine? Mister no, of course I didn’t kill your father the crazy lunatic, but oops, yeah, I was kind of standing over him with that pesky smoking gun?

He didn’t speak again, but his rage was palpable. The final minutes to their destination seemed interminable, but they finally pulled into the driveway and a garage door slid open and shut behind them on silent, well-oiled automatic tracks.

D burst from the car as if it had coughed him out, opened the rear door, and gently picked up Mel in his arms. She was deathly pale and limp, blood soaked through her shirt and splattered all over her neck and arms. Without looking in her direction, he snapped, “Hot water. Fresh towels—you’ll find them in the bathroom on the second level. Bring both to the third level bedrooms. Then stay the hell out of my way.”

He disappeared through the garage door into the house, leaving Eliana standing alone beside the car, shaking, blinking back tears, and swallowing the sob that was caught in her throat.

30 Stop the Bleeding

Aldo knew where Caesar was even if the others had no clue. Their lord and master was where he always was when he went missing—with some degenerate whore.

This time it was two.

Though it was well after sunrise when most people were getting ready for work or making breakfast for their families or doing one of a million everyday things one does in the early morning, Caesar’s whoring adhered to no particular schedule. Neither did his drinking, or his predilection for unprovoked cruelty. One of the women lay stunned on the bed, bleeding profusely from the nose, the other cowered in a corner of the room, sobbing, and Caesar himself was standing in the open doorway, naked, reeking of alcohol fumes.

“You dare disturb me?” he said imperiously, glaring in black-eyed, thin-lipped displeasure at the sight of Aldo, who’d knocked on the door of room 9 where the terrified clerk had told him Caesar checked into when Aldo had snarled a warning right into his face. He’d gone to Caesar’s other favorite haunt first, a seedy hotel a few miles from this one, but that place had been closed due to a murder a few nights before that the police were still investigating.

Caesar drew himself up to his full, imposing height. “What the hell do you want?”

He wasn’t quite slurring. Not quite. Aldo wished he would cover himself; it was unnerving to be standing so close to a naked man. Especially a drunken, naked king. He could reach out and tap him on the breastbone if he wanted.

“Your sister, my lord. She’s told the colony Silas is a traitor and a liar. She’s rounding them up and preparing to leave for—somewhere. I don’t know where. I thought you’d want to know.”

Aldo had never seen anyone sober so quickly. Caesar’s eyes, slightly glazed only seconds before, sharpened and took on a sinister, predatory edge. He stiffened, hissed in a breath.

“Where’s Silas?”

“I don’t know, my lord. I didn’t see him, but your sister…it appears your sister has cut off one of his hands.”

Caesar recoiled with a gasped exhalation. He recovered, muttered, “That bitch,” then snapped, “Wait for me,” and slammed the door in Aldo’s face.

It wasn’t two minutes before he reemerged, dressed and radiating anger, his eyes a deadly, flat black Aldo had seen on many, many occasions, right before something terrible happened.

Caesar said, “Let’s go.”

They found Silas in one of the old outlying buildings on the abbey property, a crumbling, mossy stone structure that had once been used as an infirmary. Seated on an upended milk crate next to a small fire he’d built in the middle of the bare floor, he was shirtless, sweating profusely, and pale as a sheet. On the arm missing a hand, he’d tightly tied a strip of fabric—torn from the discarded shirt that lay at his feet—just above the elbow as a tourniquet. How the hell he’d managed to tie a tourniquet with one hand was a mystery Caesar had no intention of unraveling.

Below the tourniquet the flesh had turned a waxen, lifeless gray. There was a trail of blood from the door to where he was sitting, and a crazy splattered pattern of crimson drops zigzagged back and forth across the bare room, a visual map of where he’d been since he arrived. Smoke from the little fire gathered against the vaulted wood ceiling was funneled off toward rotted gaps in the boards in long white fangs.

In Silas’s one remaining hand, he gripped a dagger.

“My lord,” he greeted him, stronger than Caesar would have thought for someone missing an important body part. But Caesar couldn’t look at Silas’s face, because the bloody stump of his missing hand held a hypnotic,