Rapture's Edge (12 page)

In less than one hour, Eliana Cardinalis would be captured—or dead.

There was a rat inside her skull.

An angry, hungry rat, intent on devouring all the gray matter it could before she clawed her own eyes out to get at it. Eliana needed to kill it and she needed to kill it soon because the agony, oh gods, the
agony
.

“One hundred fifty thousand, Édoard,” said a calm male voice, strongly accented with German. The voice drifted to her from somewhere very close but also far, far away. She heard movement, fabric rustling, shoes clicking on tile, smelled the cool tang of rain in the air from a storm that was still hours off. Somewhere in the building a window was cracked and sweet, dew-tinged air leaked in.

But not in here, wherever here was. In here the air sweltered and smelled of death.

The rat really hated it. It chewed her brain more viciously than before. Tearing, squealing, clawing, eyes small and blood-red bright.

“Canine?” said another voice, almost hopefully.

The rat lifted its head and hissed. It liked this new speaker as much as she did. Édoard, she remembered past the pain, Édoard was his name. Beautiful hair, beautiful eyes…heart like a shard of obsidian.

“Bat, actually,” murmured the first voice, surprised. “Top of the auditory range. Extraordinary.”

“All right, record it and shut it down. We’ll do the UV next and see what we come up with. We’ve got to move her down the hall for that, though. And where the hell is the transfer paperwork? I needed that an hour ago.” Édoard muttered the last bit, irritated.

“Patience,” his friend answered calmly. “She’s not going anywhere.”

Then there was a small click, and all at once the rabid rat vanished, the pain in her skull subsided, and the room, spinning and white, swam into focus as she blinked open her eyes.

“Are you,
liebe
?” said a tall, white-coated, bespectacled man with ice blue eyes. He was of an indeterminate age somewhere between forty and sixty, smelled of cigarettes, and looked bland as oatmeal. He peered at her over his glasses and smiled, cheerfully benign.

The banality of evil. Eliana had heard the phrase once to describe the phenomenon whereby the most truly horrific acts were carried out not by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people socialized to accept unspeakable atrocities as “normal.” The holocaust, animal testing, genocide and capital punishment and war.

Torture.

It was the man from Gregor’s office, Agent Doe. The one she’d warned him was dangerous that day when she’d come with the Cézanne and he’d been entertaining the police. She
knew
he was trouble.

“I hope you burn in hell,” she said to the ice-eyed doctor, her voice oddly hoarse. Then she remembered: she’d been screaming. For a long time, evidently, because her throat felt raw as ground meat.

The doctor chuckled, unimpressed with her attempt at bravado. Behind her, Édoard gave another of his now-familiar snorts. “Claws, kitty cat. Mind the claws.”

He walked casually around her wheelchair—she was strapped to a wheelchair, when did that happen?—and stood next to the doctor. The table beside them held a small electronic device with wires and dials and a digital readout blinking numbers in blue against a black screen. The size of a small microwave, it must have been the source of that excruciating pain eating holes in her skull.

This was another room, clinical as the first but larger and lined with a variety of strange-looking electronic equipment in every size and variety. Testing equipment, recording equipment, some ominous stainless steel instruments laid out on a cloth on a long metal console below a video screen. It looked less like an interrogation room in a police station and more like Herr Frankenstein’s lab.

Her memory was cloudy at best. She assumed she’d been injected with something because the vein in her left inner arm burned and there was a heaviness in her limbs she’d never experienced before. Vaguely, she remembered a struggle, remembered breaking someone’s jaw with a vicious kick to the head and disabling two others with
well-targeted groin shots before she was overpowered by half a dozen more men armed with fists and billy clubs. That was all she remembered, until now.

Édoard chuckled, an evil sound, and she glanced up at him. He stared back at her with the kind of expression usually seen on the faces of new parents and lottery winners. He looked ebullient. Exultant.

In that moment, she was more afraid than she’d ever been in her life.

“What are you going to do to me?” she demanded, masking her fear beneath an icy tone. He didn’t answer, but his smile grew wider.

Just then, without warning, the room went black.

“What the…”

Édoard muttered an oath under his breath and moved to the door. With a turn of the knob, he yanked it open and walked a few steps into the dark corridor.

“Jean-Luc!” he shouted. It echoed off the bare stone walls, fading into silence. “Henri!”

Nothing. The hallway was silent as a graveyard. Though why he expected an answer at all was a mystery; the building was vast, and if they were anywhere close to the original interrogation room she’d been in, they were deep in the very bowels of it. At this hour—she sensed it was close to dawn, as she always did, even far below ground—it would likely be almost deserted.

There came a low rumble that shivered the walls, and then with a grudging
fzzzttt
the emergency lights that lined either side of the hallway flickered on. They weren’t steady, though, and a few were burned out so the hallway was drenched in an eerie, flickering half-light that was extremely creepy. Inside the room, all the ominous electrical equipment had fallen dead.

“There we go,” said a satisfied Édoard, walking back into the shadowed room. “Just a little hiccup. Not enough to keep us from our work, eh, kitty?” She watched as he prowled to her, smiling, and then positioned himself behind her wheelchair. With a little bump, he released the brakes and the chair started to slide forward over the floor. “Or at least, not for long. Agent Doe, lead the way,” he said to the doctor, who wasted no time pulling the door wide open so the three of them could pass through.

And then, the instant they were in the hallway, she felt it.

Correction: him. She felt
him
, and the air went to fire.

Demetrius.

Burning heat and electric intensity and a crackling current of danger; she’d know him anywhere. He’d finally found her.

And now, as he had in every nightmare she’d had over the past three years, as Silas had warned her over and over again, he’d try to kill her.

Every cell in her body exploded into high, shrieking alert.

“Get me out of here!” she screamed, thrashing against the bindings at her wrists and ankles. Her heart pounded, her blood raced, every muscle clenched. She had to get out, she had to get away, now, now, now, now,
NOW
—

“Oh, that’s right, you’re afraid of the dark, aren’t you?” said a very calm Édoard, sarcasm dripping from his voice. He didn’t miss a step, just kept pushing the wheelchair at a leisurely pace down the spooky hall as she continued to buck wildly. One of the wheels hadn’t been oiled and made a high-pitched squeal with each revolution that echoed off the cold stone walls and fractured to a million tiny smaller
squeals, a chorus of horrible, nonhuman screams that all seemed to say, “
You’re going to die! You’re going to die!
”

She fought harder. Even though she was still weak and a little foggy from whatever they’d injected her with, one of the ankle straps popped its metal binding with a tinny squeal and broke free.

Behind her, Édoard cursed and snapped, “Tranq, Doe!”

But before the doctor could react, a thunderous
BOOM
shook the building to its foundations. An entire section of the plain stone wall at the far end of the cavernous hallway ahead of them exploded inward in a monstrous spray of brick and dust that carried with it a shockwave of heated air that knocked the wheelchair on its side with Eliana in it and both Édoard and the doctor off their feet.

Her head bounced against the floor.

Fireworks erupted in her vision.

She heard screaming, smelled smoke and scorched fabric, felt the ground shake as another thundering boom rattled the building, but the sound seemed to travel to her ears slowly, distorted as if from far away or underwater. In fact, everything had slowed to a crawl. She lifted her head, blinking through a murky haze of dust, and saw the doctor a few feet away, crumpled on the floor with a widening pool of liquid crimson on the white stone beneath his head. He was twitching grotesquely, mouth open in a silent scream. One eye was open, too, but from the other protruded a bent shard of metal. His broken glasses dangled from one ear.

Édoard shouted something from behind her that she couldn’t make out because there was another deafening explosion, somewhere close but out of sight. With a grinding groan, a large chunk of ceiling collapsed into a pile of rubble on the floor not ten feet away and sent another choking
blast of dust into her face. Her ears rang. She coughed and sputtered, struggling against her restraints, trying to push the wheelchair nearer to the wall with her one free foot. A tangle of black electrical conduit hung down from the gaping hole in the ceiling and, with a zapping crackle, began to spark and twist like a nest of angry snakes.

The emergency lights in the hallway flickered out and then came right back on, stuttering intermittently as if they might go out completely at any moment. A siren began to whine.

And through it all, the pulse of Demetrius beat like a drum against her skin, stronger every second.

Get up!
she screamed silently to herself.
Get out of here or die!

She didn’t want to die. So with strength lent by fury and fear, Eliana snapped the binding around her right wrist.

Panting, she fell on the other wrist restraint and tried with trembling fingers to work open the clasp. She managed it just as a terrifying shock of electricity hit her, and she knew with sudden cold certainty that Demetrius wasn’t alone. There were six—she stiffened—no,
eight
more
Ikati
with him.

She struggled to sit up sideways and worked the ankle strap open, bent almost in half at the waist, holding herself up with one elbow. Dust coated her nose and eyelashes, making it hard to breathe and see. The strap gave, and she scrambled out of the toppled wheelchair on her hands and knees, scraping her palms and kneecaps on sharp chunks of brick debris that littered the floor. She turned and saw Édoard, disoriented, staggering toward her with his hands out. He was saying something, she knew because his mouth was moving, but her ears rang so badly all she
heard was a painful, high-pitched buzz that made her eyes water.

She glanced behind him, and her heart stopped dead in her chest.

There at the end of the long corridor stood a hulking dark figure, impossibly huge, face in shadow, silhouetted by a wash of weak yellow light from the emergency lamps behind him. Booted feet spread wide, hands flexed open at his sides, enormous, muscled frame almost entirely blocking the open doorway to the connecting corridor from which he’d emerged. Though wreathed in shadow and smoke, terrifying details emerged.

Shaved head. A glint of silver in one eyebrow. Black, black eyes out of which stared an even blacker soul.

Her scream was an animal that clawed its way out of her, tearing her throat, alive. On instinct, she skipped back a step, and her heel caught on a chunk of stone. She fell in slow motion, still screaming, hands flailing, and landed on her rear end with a teeth-jarring jolt that knocked the breath from her lungs.

Time and motion, slowed to a crawl only moments before, suddenly sped up, and everything seemed to happen at once.

Édoard, seeing her back away but thinking it was from him, lunged forward with an oddly animalistic snarl. Before he could lay a finger on her, he was wrenched aside from behind and flung against the wall with such force he actually bounced off it and landed, sprawling and limp, facedown on the floor where he slid until stopped by the opposite wall.

Demetrius looked down at her with such savage fury in his expression it froze her in place like a mouse staring into
the jaws of a snake. He crouched as if to spring, but then his head snapped up, his eyes focused on something behind her, and a hair-raising growl rumbled through his chest.

Faster than her eyes could track, he shot past her in a black blur. She rolled to her stomach and lifted herself up on her elbows in time to see shadowy figures emerge through the settling dust at the far end of the hallway, past the snarled electrical conduit and rubble from the destroyed wall.

His team.

In one lithe, lightning-fast move, she sprang to her feet, turned, and sprinted in the opposite direction toward the open door, thinking only of escape, her blood scorching like liquid fire in her veins and her vision narrowed to the rectangle of light at the end of the hallway.

In the seconds that followed, she heard just below the whine of the alarm and the ringing in her ears the distinctive muffled pop of a semiautomatic handgun fitted with a silencer. Then another. A bullet whizzed past her head with an acrid whiff of gunpowder and ricocheted off the stone wall with a piercing twang and a puff of smoke. She feinted left, then right, desperately trying to make herself an uncertain target, but another bullet flew past, then another, and before she could twist away again one of them found the tender flesh of her hip.