Rapture's Edge (13 page)

Eliana crashed screaming to her knees. There was a different noise behind her now, a horrible garbled snarling, vicious and wild, like a hungry predator tearing into a meal, but she didn’t turn and look and didn’t give herself the option of staying still. She struggled to her feet again, pain shooting in furious sparks down her entire leg, and limped, one leg dragging, forward.

Just as she reached the end of the hallway, something heavy hit her from behind.

She staggered, but didn’t fall because she was caught.

And held.

And turned around by a pair of huge, strangling tight hands wrapped around her arms.

Eliana stared up into Demetrius’s eyes. Black and wild, they burned down at her with the lucid incandescence of rage, and she knew this was the end. She braced herself for it, stiffening, ready for the snap of her neck or a knife through her ribs or a gun barrel shoved into her mouth.

And then a thought flashed through her mind, horrifying in its treacherous clarity:

I remember exactly how you taste.

Then the man who murdered her father leaned in close and growled, “
Gotcha!
”

As he’d been doing for the past hour, Leander stood, unmoving and silent, gazing out the tall, lead-paned windows of the East Library. Flanked by heavy silk drapes drawn back with tasseled ties, they offered a spectacular view of the rolling green expanse of lawn, the groomed rosemary hedges, the plashing marble fountain of Triton in the middle of the manicured gardens. Far beyond the boundaries of Sommerley Manor the dark line of the forest began, rolling hills dense with hardwoods and fir that went on for miles. It was beautiful today, warm and sunny, the air scented softly with the beds of lavender and garden roses planted beneath the windows. The sky above was a perfect, cloudless blue; the white falcon stood out against it like a swiftly moving star.

She was still high, but getting closer. Impatience cramped his stomach. He checked his watch.

Ten minutes. Perhaps twenty.

Unless she changed her mind, that is. His lips lifted to a wry smile. There was always the possibility she would change her mind. He clasped his hands behind his back and looked up again, subsiding back into himself with the patience of one accustomed to waiting.

From behind him a terse voice said, “We have a problem.”

Leander turned. His younger brother, Christian, stood at the open door. Second in authority only to him—the Alpha of the English colony and the head of the Council of Alphas—Christian was both brother and trusted confidant. He knew all the secrets, sat in on all the meetings, offered opinions and got things done. Over the past three years, he’d been an invaluable asset to the tribe as they struggled to adjust to the staggering shocks of discovering a new colony of their kin in Rome, discovering the leader of their ancient enemy, the Expurgari, was in fact one of their own kind, and finally discovering he’d been killed, but not before his two children had escaped with a group of rebels. Which is why most of the tribe had been moved to the colony in Brazil. It was the only colony the Expurgari still had not discovered.

Only a few were left at Sommerley. Jenna—
I’m never hiding again, Leander
—would not be moved.

Christian was known as a fixer of broken things. A problem solver. So his opening line was more than a little worrying. And so was his posture: taut as a bowstring, wound tight enough to snap.

“A problem?” repeated Leander. “Which is?”

Christian dragged a hand through his dark hair. An unconscious habit, Leander knew, and one that meant he was trying to choose his words carefully.

“Christian,” Leander prompted quietly, an imperative.

“The daughter—the missing princess of the Roman colony—she’s been
taken!
” he blurted.

The relief that poured through Leander was sweet and surprisingly intense. He hadn’t realized until just then how much he’d been dreading this moment, when someone would come and tell him that one of the rebel children of the dead leader of the Expurgari had done something terrible, wiped out an entire colony, murdered the women and children in their sleep. He wasn’t a religious man, but he almost crossed himself.

“Thank God.”

He walked to the polished cherry sideboard and took up one of the heavy glasses displayed on a silver tray with cut crystal decanters filled with amber and gold liquids. He removed the round stopper and was about to pour himself a generous measure of scotch when Christian said, “No, Leander—she wasn’t taken by
us
.”

Leander froze. The decanter became a sudden dead weight in his hand.

Carefully, he set it back on the silver tray along with the glass. He turned back to Christian and stared at him. Same dark hair. Same piercing green eyes. Same dusky coloring all the
Ikati
of his colony shared.

All the
Ikati
except one, that is. Jenna, his Queen, was pale as alabaster.

His first thought—always—was of her. Her safety was the only thing that mattered.

She wasn’t taken by us.

“You have exactly five seconds, Christian, to tell me what the hell you’re talking about.”

Christian moved from the door into the ivory and gilt opulence of the library. Radiating strain, he came and stood at the end of the sideboard. Even his voice was strained when he said, “Someone else was there. The Hunt found her at the police station, but someone else got there first, set off explosives as a diversion, went in and got her out. Whoever it was killed one of the assassins. Almost killed the rest. But he got away…with the princess.”

“Explosives,” Leander said slowly. A terrible thought crossed his mind, but he pushed it away. It couldn’t be. That would mean treason. That would mean war.

Christian shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He put his hands on his hips, looked down at the Turkish rug, then back up at Leander. “Keshav said it was one of us. A male. Big. Shaved head. Tattoos.”

Keshav—recruited from the Bhaktapur colony in Nepal—was leader of The Hunt, and if he said it was an
Ikati
male that attacked them, it was. And here came that thought again, pushing back when he tried to ignore it. “Black eyes?”

Christian nodded.

“Shit,” hissed Leander.

Christian blinked, shocked. Leander never swore. He hardly ever even raised his voice. He didn’t need to. When he said jump, the universal response was:
How high?

“Phone,” Leander demanded, hand out.

Christian pulled one from a pocket and handed it over without a word. Leander punched in a number he’d memorized long ago and raised it to his ear. He hated the damn things, never carried one himself, but cell phones were a necessity, especially now.

All kinds of things Leander hated had recently become necessities.

He stalked back to the windows, raised his gaze to the sky, and found the falcon still high above the forest, making wide, lazy turns. He didn’t take his eyes from her as the line was answered and a deep, male voice drawled in lightly accented English, “Your highness! How unexpected. This must be a dire emergency if you’re calling during teatime.”

Leander’s jaw went so tight it popped. “Celian,” he said through his clenched teeth, “I’ve told you not to call me that.”

Celian chuckled, raising Leander’s hackles even higher. “Spoken like a true dictator. Call yourself Alpha or president or whatever you like, Leander, but if you’re the only one who gets a vote, you’re still a dictator.”

Goading him, as always. Celian had very different ideas about how best to rule his colony, ideas that included words like
democracy
and
consensus
and the ever-popular
freedom
.

Bad ideas. Ideas that could get them all killed. Or worse. He only tolerated it for the time being because there were bigger—badder—fish to fry.

“And you’re a fool,” said Leander very quietly, “if you think for one moment I won’t wipe you and your ‘democracy’ off the face of this earth if you do anything to jeopardize the rest of us. Do not test me, Celian. I’m in no mood.”

Silence. Loud,
gratifying
silence.

They’d only met face-to-face once, he and the leader of the newly discovered Roman
Ikati
colony, and it hadn’t been pleasant. Alphas of their kind never got along, having all the territorial, animal instincts of their nature, and he and Celian were no exception. He’d managed to get Celian to agree to keep a tighter rein on his colony until the rebels
were found, but fully expected him to start allowing them to come and go as they wished as soon as this crisis was over.

High in the winter sky, the falcon made a graceful, sweeping turn.

He knew what Jenna would have to say on the matter.
He’s right, Leander. We all need to be free. It’s time.

He categorically disagreed. They all needed to be
safe
, and sometimes that meant restrictions on such rarefied ideals as freedom. Mainstreaming, as Jenna referred to it, was a disaster of epic proportion, just waiting to happen. Unfortunately, she was Queen, and her word held even more weight than Leander’s. Her word held the heaviest weight of all.

The
Ikati
, though by nature feline, had developed over thousands of years a patriarchal, hierarchical society similar to that of a wolf pack. Each of the four confederate colonies—in Nepal, Canada, Brazil, and England—had an Alpha, the most powerful male of all the tribe, who through Bloodlines or ritual challenge and battle had proven himself the strongest. But every so often, once in a dozen generations, a female was born to the tribe who was more powerful than all the male Alphas combined. Like Marie Antoinette, the last
Ikati
Queen before her, and Cleopatra, the most infamous Queen of them all, Jenna had Gifts that made her sovereign over them all.

Because prides of cats, unlike packs of dogs, are by nature ruled by a Queen. Only in the absence of one powerful enough do the boys get to play.

He’d managed to persuade Jenna so far—war is always a convenient scapegoat for restrictions on liberty—but he knew he couldn’t hold her off forever. She’d have her way whether he liked it or not.

Whether the entire tribe became extinct because of it.

Hiding is for mice,
she’d say, watching him steadily with her brilliant, yellow-green eyes.
And we are not mice, my love.

No. They weren’t mice. They were beasts pretending to be people. They were animal and Vapor and stealthy, deadly predator, relics of a lost age before man ever walked the earth and magic still lived and breathed. He shuddered to think what would happen if humanity ever found out about them. Again.

“Shaved head. Tattooed. Big. Does that sound like anyone you know?” said Leander into the phone.

More silence. Then, “Excuse me?”

“One of the rebels, one of your colony who left with the daughter the night your king was killed…was he big and bald with tattoos?”

“No,” said Celian, but Leander heard the slight hesitation, and his blood rose to a boil.

“Do not lie to me,” he began, nearly spitting with rage, but Celian cut him off.

“That’s not one of the rebels. That’s Demetrius. One of my council. One of my most trusted brothers. What about him?”

“Are you trying to tell me you have no knowledge that your
trusted brother
blew up the Paris prefecture of police and took your missing princess?” said Leander, disbelief clear in his voice.

“Impossible,” Celian scoffed. “Demetrius is here. He wouldn’t leave without telling me…” He trailed off, thinking, and then resumed slightly less confident than before, “
Blew up
the prefecture of police?”

“So help me God, Celian, if you had any knowledge of this—”

“It must have been one of the others who ran away with her…it can’t be—”

“Are there many of you that are shaved and tattooed?” Leander cut in impatiently. The falcon outside descended in a slow looping arc, heading for Sommerley and the windows by which he stood. He watched, eyes unblinking, jaw tight.

“No,” admitted Celian after another pregnant pause. “But they’ve been gone three years; it’s possible one of them decided to get inked. And shaved his head.”

Without turning from the window, Leander moved the phone down to his jaw and said to Christian, “Any other details, Christian? About this male who took the princess?”

“Pierced eyebrow. Three silver rings in it,” came Christian’s answer from the other side of the room.

Leander lifted the phone back to his mouth. “Eyebrow pierced with silver. Ring a bell?”

He heard Celian mutter an angry, “Fuck,” and then direct someone nearby to go and look for someone else. The name was garbled, but Leander guessed who it was.

“Your
brother
. Demetrius. If you don’t find him there…if this was his doing—”

“If he was stupid enough to pull something like this, I’ll kill him myself,” Celian hissed, and Leander was satisfied by the conviction in his voice.

“See that you do,” said Leander as he watched the falcon descend just a few yards above the manicured lawn outside, talons extended, wings beating noiselessly, piercing yellow-green eyes avid on his face. “Or I will.”