Rapture's Edge

drawled, his eyes narrowed, “you wily old dog, you. You’re proving to be even more resourceful than I thought.”

Silas inclined his head, the picture of deference, but suddenly Caesar found himself not only convinced he’d underestimated him, but wondering by exactly how much.

“If you like, we can load the money onto the containers as well, ship it all together.”

His voice was mild, entirely without guile, but Caesar realized that a man who could be stoic when a limb was chopped off could certainly manage to conceal a great many other things, without much effort.

He smiled cheerfully. “No, Silas, thank you, but I’ll make arrangements for the money to be sent to our final destination.”

A flicker of annoyance crossed his face, there then gone, and then Silas said, “As you wish, my lord. Shall we begin the taping?”

“Ah!” At once, Caesar forgot his suspicions. He clapped, and Aldo jumped down from the lift gate of the truck and snapped to attention in front of him. “Is it ready?”

“Yes, sire, the camera and lights have all been set up!” Aldo sounded nearly as excited as he felt; this little endeavor was, against all odds, proving to be fun.

“Well, then, hup to!”

Aldo and the five others scattered like ants, heading toward the shack at the end of the driveway. It was a ramshackle mess of a place that he guessed used to be a gamekeeper’s shed or kennel, with a caved-in ceiling and one wall missing. They’d draped a sheet across one of the standing walls and had set a wooden chair in front of it.

Opposite the chair was a video camera on a tripod, and to another tripod in the corner was affixed a light.

“My lord.” Aldo gestured to the chair and positioned himself behind the camera. He flipped a switch, and a little red light at the front of the camera blinked on. “We’re recording.”

Caesar seated himself in the chair, smoothed a hand over his hair, and smiled. Into the unblinking eye of the video camera he said, “Merry Christmas, humans, and allow me to introduce myself.” His smile grew wider. “I’m your new God.”

The taping had, of course, been Silas’s idea.

He watched Caesar smile and preen and posture, reciting the words he’d written himself, and in spite of the pain searing white pathways down every nerve ending in his body, he felt deep, deep satisfaction.

Caesar would be the one the humans blamed. It would be Caesar’s name they cursed, his likeness they remembered. Silas would be free to operate behind the scenes as he always had, planning and scheming without the burdens notoriety inevitably brought.

No matter what happened now, his days of servitude were over.

Because when Caesar’s part had been played, he would have to die.

Remembering the look on Caesar’s face when he’d pressed the heated steel against the raw, bleeding stump of his wrist, Silas smiled. Yes, Caesar would have to die. By his hands. Hand, he mentally corrected himself. By his hand.

He was really looking forward to that.

Three hundred and fifty miles away across the English Channel, the Queen of the Ikati was once again sitting up in bed in the pale pink rays of early dawn. She sat peering around the opulence of her bedchamber for a moment, listening hard into the silence, her heart thundering inside her chest.

It wasn’t a phone call that had awoken her this time, but a dream. She dreamt of a comet streaking across the night sky, trailing fire in a long, flared tail of orange. The comet had illuminated a dark landscape below, an ancient, hilly city with miles of twisting streets and red-roofed houses and a river winding through all of it, slow and serpentine.

There was a familiar dome in the center of the city, an enormous white dome that glittered atop an even more enormous cathedral, which was built atop the bones of the most famous saint in all the world. In all of history.

Beneath the fiery glow of the comet, St. Peter’s Basilica and Vatican City looked bathed in red.

They looked bathed in blood.

With a glance at the slumbering form of her husband beside her, Jenna slid from beneath the warmth of the goose down duvet and crossed the room on silent feet to stand at the lead-paned window. She pushed aside one heavy velvet drape and gazed up at the heavens, a sense of dread gnawing at her like swarming insects.

Her father had once told her the ancients believed comets were a sign of ill repute, an omen of terrible things to come. Famine and earthquakes and floods, destruction and death and crops lost to frost.

Plague. Pestilence.

War.

The last time she ever saw her father, when she was ten years old, a comet had blazed a brilliant trail across the night sky. A comet with a tail of fiery orange, just like the one in her dream.

She shivered, suddenly ice cold, cold straight down to her bones, as if a ghostly wind sliced right through her.

“What is it?”

The voice was smooth and masculine, carrying that wary weight she’d come to know so well. Jenna turned from the window to see Leander sitting up on his side of the massive, four-poster bed, staring at her through the silvered half-light. He was alert and on edge; she felt the tension in him even from all the way across the room. As he must have felt her thundering heart. Her pulse like a kettledrum beating a dire warning through her veins.

“Wake the others,” she said into the hush. “Wake everyone. Something is going to happen. Something very bad.”

“He’s not answering the damn phone.” Celian’s voice was tight, darker and more tense than either Lix or Constantine had ever heard it, and that was saying something.

“Can’t you leave a message?” asked Lix.

“The fool doesn’t have voice mail set up.”

Lix snorted, his usual response to something he found ridiculous. “Leave it to D. That would require speaking.”

“It’s not funny,” Celian snapped, pulling up short from the pacing he’d been doing for the last several minutes, long, agitated strides that took him back and forth over the blood-red woven rug in the candlelit opulence of what had once been the king’s personal library, but now was open to anyone in the colony who desired it. “We haven’t heard from him in days, and his time is up and so is Eliana’s, and our good friend Leander has his panties in a twist over this entire situation, not the least of which is because I managed to talk his wife into allowing something he never would have allowed in the first place, which didn’t pan out and made me look like I can’t be trusted, in addition to making me look like a total ass.”

He dragged a hand through his dark hair, cursed, and started pacing again.

Lix and Constantine shared a look; Celian rarely lost his temper. He was the rational one, the controlled one, the one with an iron will and a stare that could make men shrivel like testicles exposed to cold. In opposition to Lix’s lighthearted good humor and Constantine’s sensitivity—which he took great pains to hide—Celian had no soft spots or sentimentality. He was pragmatic and nearly always stone-cold calm, which made him a strong leader and an even stronger warrior, and his agitation was a good indicator of just how bad this situation was.

“That Queen of theirs…I had a chance, at least, with her. She’s the only one in that entire colony who seems reasonable.” His voice dropped. “But now all bets are off. D’s been formally declared a deserter and a traitor, and our colony has been declared persona non grata. Unless we hand D over to them, of course. Otherwise, we’re essentially at war.” He paused and his face grew grim. “Which means they could invade at any time.”

In stereo, Lix and Constantine gasped.