Rapture's Edge

almost sensual appeal. He couldn’t wait to get a better look at it. He and Aldo moved closer.

“Your sister,” Silas began, but Caesar interrupted him.

“Yes, I know.” He finally met Silas’s eyes. “She’s always been unreasonable.”

Silas exhaled, strangely relieved. “She’s seen Demetrius—”

“Demetrius!”

“She slept with him, my lord. I overheard her talking with Melliane—”

“Slept with him!” Caesar screeched, eyes bulging. The world ground to a halt.

“He’s somehow convinced her I’ve been lying to her, to all of you—”

“SLEPT WITH HIM!”

Caesar felt as if a bomb had detonated inside his body. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t move. He was frozen with horror and a fury so gargantuan it felt nuclear. She’d slept with the vermin who’d murdered their father. Slept with him. Slept with him. It kept slapping against the inside of his skull like a trapped bird.

“Kill her,” he choked out. Silas and Aldo stared at him. The fire crackled merrily, sending up feathers of glowing ash and whorls of smoke. “We have to kill her! She’s a traitor! She’s—she’s a whore!”

Slowly, Silas smiled. It was more of a grimace the way his lips peeled back over his teeth, but the blood was pounding through Caesar’s veins and there was a booming in his head and he couldn’t see much of anything anymore because the room had started to spin.

Slept with him. Slept with him.

He imagined it in stunning, Technicolor detail, their naked bodies pressed together, the warrior’s big hands all over her bare flesh, her wanton moans and their sweat and the squeaking of a mattress beneath them—

Aldo caught him as he staggered sideways. Caesar shoved him away and began pacing to and fro with his hands clenched in his hair to manage his sudden dizziness, the acid burning his lungs. Hatred glittered through him, consuming, and Caesar had never wanted to kill something—hurt something—so much in his entire life.

He swung around and spied the dagger in Silas’s hand. “What are you doing with that dagger, Silas?” he hissed, prowling forward.

Silas’s face hardened. Sweat dripped from his chin. “I have to stop the bleeding, my lord.”

Caesar looked at the dagger, at the fire, and understood in a flash that was like a thunderbolt. He yanked the dagger from Silas’s hand, held it over the fire until the tip glowed white hot and his own fingers were blistering, and then spat at Aldo, “Hold him.” He looked back at Silas, and his smile was like an animal’s, rabid and wild. “This is going to hurt.”

A man walking his dog down a quiet residential street six blocks away heard the screams. He stopped and crossed himself, peering up. A mother walking her two children to school heard it, too, and so did the fruit vendor and his wife setting up their stall on the Rue de Marquet. Many more heard it as well, the long, eerie shriek that seemed to descend from the sky itself, echoing off walls and trees and buildings before being cut off abruptly, leaving all to wonder just what had caused such a terrible noise.

Or who.

31 It's Only Food

Eliana had no idea how much time had passed. It might have been minutes, it might have been hours. It might have even been centuries for all her dead heart could tell.

She was slumped against the wall in the long corridor on the level of the bedrooms, her arms resting on her bent knees, staring down at the fibers of the black carpet, seeing nothing. Demetrius had been inside the room with Mel since they arrived. She’d brought him hot water in pans and all the towels she could find, then left him alone as he’d asked. Her last sight of Mel had been of her still, pale body lying on the bed, Demetrius leaning over her with a scalpel in one hand.

She would die. Eliana was sure of it. She’d lost too much blood. She would die.

Her fault. Her fault. So much blood and chaos and the unending, nearly unendurable agony of living with half-truths and twisted lies that passed for their sad reality. And what was the point of it all, really? More and more and more years of living on the run and hiding from still more people she once thought were her friends and family. More dragging days and endless nights, hoping for a future that would probably never come, more betrayal, more assassins, a future of living in the open with another species that seemed to prefer her dead, or —worse—caged?

The answer was: there was no point. It had all been a pipe dream, a castle built in the sand. Emptied of the dreams that had sustained her for so long, she felt gutted. She felt hollowed out.

The door cracked open. Eliana’s head snapped around. She staggered to her feet.

“Well?”

Demetrius looked as if he’d gone down to hell to do battle with demons, and lost. His face was strained, his shoulders were hunched forward in an attitude of defeat, and there were dark smudges of blue under his eyes which, to her great horror, reflected the defeat in his posture. The utter lack of hope.

“You should sit with her,” was his cryptic response, and then he brushed past her and walked slowly up the twisting stairs to the level above.

No. Her heart began to pound it out like a drumbeat in her chest. No. No. No. No.

She went into the room and had to bite her lip to keep from sobbing.

There was a pile of bloody towels in one corner, gruesomely vivid, pans full of now cold water that had all turned red pushed against the baseboards along one wall. A tray of bloodied instruments lay on a dresser near the door, and Mel’s ruined shirt hung from the back of a chair, tossed there in an obvious rush. And Mel was on the bed, still, silent as a corpse.

D had cleaned her and washed the blood from her face and arms, and he’d covered her up to her neck with a sheet and folded her hands over her chest. She was peaceful and ghostly pale, and if she wasn’t already dead, she looked as if she soon would be.

On the white sheet just at the center of her chest was a tiny spot of red.

She sank down beside the bed and took Mel’s icy hand in her own. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

Mel didn’t answer. She didn’t move. The long dark plait of her hair had come undone and lay bedraggled on the pillow, wisps like eiderdown from the softest underbelly of a black swan. With shaking hands, Eliana unwound the braid and ran her fingers through the strands, tidying them, brushing them smooth over the pillow until they lay in a glossy fan all around her head. She was barely holding herself together, and only because she thought Mel would be horrified if she could see her face, all screwed up and red with the effort not to cry. She knew she’d tell her to snap out of it and grow a pair, and then she’d laugh her wonderful, witchy laugh at what a sissy she’d turned out to be after all.

Eliana thought maybe she should pray, but all that came out of her mouth was a plea instead. “Please. Please, Mel. Don’t leave me. Don’t die. Please don’t die.”

But Mel’s pale lips formed no encouraging words, and her bluish lids stayed closed, and finally the dam broke and Eliana dissolved into tears. Her body was wracked with sobs, and she gave herself over to it, kneeling at the bedside with her face pressed to the mattress, Mel’s hand beneath her forehead, her cold, cold fingers getting wet with tears.

Time passed. Her tears slowed, then stopped. Her legs went numb. She slid from her knees and sagged against the bed, still clinging to Mel’s hand, unwilling to let go. Her lids grew heavy and she let herself drift, and finally she fell asleep in the same spot, still holding Mel’s hand.