Rapture's Edge

The Alpha’s mouth fell wide open. The Queen gave a small, astonished laugh.

“This is ridiculous!” the viscount shouted. “Why are we listening to this nonsense? Just this admission is enough to confirm her guilt! My lord,” he entreated the Alpha, “please! Can we not move on?” And he pointed to something Eliana had not noticed before in her pain and her panic, something large and bulky in the corner of the room, partially hidden beneath a drape of black fabric.

A machine. Some kind of tall, wooden machine—with blades.

But it wasn’t the Alpha who answered, it was the Queen, and her green eyes burned.

“Yes. Let’s get this over with.”

With hard fingers digging into her arm, Keshav yanked Eliana to her feet.

39 Shield

But she wasn’t taken to the draped machine, as she’d assumed. The Queen ordered, “Bring her to me,” and Eliana was led across the cold floor and up the steps of the dais, then forced to kneel before the Queen’s throne.

The Queen proffered her hand.

Eliana stared at it, confused. What did this mean? What was expected?

“Take it,” the Queen said. “If you are innocent as you claim, take it.”

She lifted her gaze and stared into her brilliant, searching eyes.

“Or let them have their way with you,” the Queen murmured with a glance at the viscount, the machine. “You decide.”

So Eliana did as she was told and slid her hand into the cool, soft hand of the Queen.

There was a silence, breathless and pregnant. Then she frowned.

“Jenna?” The Alpha jerked forward, radiating violence, his hand gripped around the carved wooden arm of his throne so hard his fingers turned white.

“She’s…she’s…” She trailed off, wondering, and the sense of anticipation in the room ratcheted higher. Her lashes lifted, and she met Eliana’s gaze with her own. Astonishment was there, along with uncertainty. “She’s a Shield.”

“What?”

“A Gift,” the Queen mused, staring into her eyes. She seemed strangely impressed.

“What does it mean?”

“It means I can’t See in unless she lets me. Her mind is impenetrable.”

The room went utterly still. Wound tight enough to snap, the Alpha looked back and forth between them. “That’s why I was never able to locate them. That’s why it seemed as if they’d disappeared altogether. She was Shielding them.”

Locate them? Eliana was struck with horror and sudden comprehension. This woman could find them, over vast distances, with just her mind? Panic lit through her like kindling touched with a match. Everyone at Alexi’s—

Watching her carefully, the Queen said, “I don’t think she even knows she was doing it.”

“The Blessing,” Eliana blurted. “That’s what I called it. My father—he couldn’t—”

“Read your mind,” the Queen finished, with distaste. “I’d heard he was quite good at that. Among other things.”

“But to hide all of them?” said Leander incredulously.

The Queen nodded. “It’s remarkable.” She cocked her head, lips quirked, and murmured, “Always the females…”

The mood in the room had grown restless, and Eliana’s panic began to spread. If she couldn’t prove her innocence with words or by allowing the Queen access to her mind, what would become of the Roman colony? Of her kin at Alexi’s?

Of Demetrius?

“Tell me how to let you in—how can I do it?” Suddenly desperate, her commitment to not be intimidated vanished, Eliana gripped the Queen’s hand harder, but at that moment her head snapped up and she examined the high, frescoed ceiling above with narrowed eyes.

Beside her, the Alpha hissed, “What is it?”

To which the Queen replied, “We have company.” The men around the tables leapt to their feet, as did the Alpha, everyone on instant, crackling high alert.

“How many?” Leander snarled.

“Only one.” The Queen dropped her gaze back to Eliana and pulled her hand free. “And he’s moving fast.”

40 Proper Punishment

D didn’t bother to try to disguise himself, to slink in through a chimney or a back door or a crack in a windowpane. He simply flew straight down and landed without ceremony in the center of the circular drive, Shifted to panther, and bounded toward the tall iron-studded doors of the entry to the mansion, spraying gravel in his wake.

He crashed through the doors, and splinters of wood went flying.

Once inside, he used his nose to guide him, and he ran, snarling murderously, past room after empty, lavish room, seeing none of it, running on pure instinct, the scent of Eliana’s fear pulling him onward like a hook, like the gravitational force of a collapsing star.

She was in pain. He felt it, and thought, I will slaughter them all. With a terrifying roar, Demetrius blew through the open doors at the far end of the throne room. As soon as he passed the threshold, every one of the men behind the tables on either side of the thrones with the exception of Leander and the viscount Shifted to panther as well, in a unified burst of power that sent a shock wave like a bomb detonation ripping through the room.

Her heart stopped. In a flash, Eliana saw what would happen.

There were over a dozen of them, maybe twenty, and only one of Demetrius.

It would be a bloodbath.

Without thinking, she seized the Queen’s hand and screamed, “No!”

Instant, electrifying connection, like a plug into a socket.

All the air sucked out of the room, gravity ceased to exist, and she was hurtling through space at a thousand miles per hour, mute, blind, paralyzed. The sense of invasion was acute, as was the nausea that roiled her stomach. Bile rose into her throat.

And then the memories came, hard and fast and nearly indecipherable from one another, flashes of color and voices and sounds and smells, violently drawn out of her by an invisible force, like starlight sucked into the vast, inescapable vacuum of a black hole. She was being inhaled, she was being emptied, and the worst part was that she was as helpless as a kitten against it.

As abruptly as it started, it stopped. She was released, gasping and reeling, and fell to the floor.

Beside her, in a clear, commanding voice, the Queen said, “Stop!”

And everyone—everything—did.

Eliana raised her spinning head, too weak to stand, not too blind to see but not quite understanding what she was seeing. In a circle around Demetrius were a dozen or more glossy, muscular animals, hundreds of pounds each, spitting and hissing and bristling, fangs bared, long tails twitching menacingly back and forth. Demetrius himself was silent and unmoving in the center, ears flat against his head, crouched to spring.