Rapture's Edge (32 page)

Then Silas changed his aim and pointed the gun at Mel.

Literally translated,
budō
means “way of the warrior”. It is more than a fighting system, though it is certainly that. An ancient samurai practice from Japan,
budō
is a way of life, a philosophy. It is an art.

The art of killing.

As with all art, there is beauty in it.

Eliana had practiced ritual katas at dawn for years. It was a way of assimilating herself to a new life, and a way of acquainting herself with the sun. For a girl born and raised underground who’d never glimpsed the sky until she was twenty-three years old, the sun had been a terrifying thing to her, a monster of heat and light suspended against a canvas of blue so vast it had no edges but bled off into infinity. She cried the first time she saw the night
sky, but the first time she saw the sun, she cowered in terror.

She was a child of darkness. For her, daylight was where the bogeymen lurked, not in the cool, comforting arms of the night.

So she practiced in the garden of the ruined abbey at dawn, the rhythmic, calming flow of steps and turns and sweeping moves with her sword, until the rising sun was no longer a source of fear and her mind had sharpened, her spirit deepened, her muscles hardened from the girlish softness they once held. She practiced with a
budō
master who challenged her concentration and her form, and she became his best student. She never achieved katachi, however, that state when the repetitive mold-making of katas becomes perfection of shape and all training is aligned so you arrive at the calm center of yourself, weightless and magical, where movement is effortless, everything is slowed and crystallized, and you see with perfect vision what is all around you.

In this heightened state, even the intentions of others become visible. Their light moves ahead of them just before they do, and you can see what they are about to do.

In the hairbreadth of a second just before Silas turned his gun toward Mel, Eliana, at long last, achieved katachi.

It was instantaneous and unthinking. From one heartbeat to the next, she
became
.

A surge of energy crackled over her skin, and a wave of power, huge and pulsing, lit through her like dry kindling bursting into flame. Her sword was at her side, sheathed in its leather scabbard and hidden beneath her long coat, and then it was in her hand, sweeping up in a long, perfect arc with no more effort or concentration than it takes to inhale.
There was no conscious decision; there was only action and reaction. The clarity of her vision supplied her muscles and nerves with everything they needed to move lightning-fast, invisible.

She lunged forward, and her feet never even touched the ground.

In a single, clean stroke, she lopped off Silas’s hand at the wrist.

Still clutching the gun, it went flying into the air in a spray of crimson and landed with the flat thud of meat against the wall. It fell to the floor, and the gun popped out from between the lifeless fingers and clattered against the bare stone.

He staggered back, stunned, mouth gaping, as blood from his severed hand began to run from the wound in a trickle, then a pulse, then a flood. He clutched his wrist with his other hand and backed away, then turned and ran, trailing blood in a long, dark smear behind him.

Then as quickly as she became, Eliana
un
became, and all the light and magic drained out of her as if a switch had been flipped.

She sagged against the doorway Silas had just been standing in and let out her breath in a gust. There followed a silence so profound it seemed as if the Earth itself might have stopped spinning on its axis and everything on it—every person and bird and insect, lacking gravity—had been flung out into the far reaches of space.

Then an odd sound, liquid and gurgling, broke the unnatural stillness.

Choking.

She whirled around and—no.
No!

Mel was lying on her back on the stone floor, coughing up blood.

The bottom fell out of the world. Eliana dropped her sword and dropped to her knees beside Mel, her hands fluttering over the spreading stain in the middle of her shirt. It couldn’t be, it couldn’t be, she hadn’t heard the gunshot, she hadn’t seen the flash of light, it
couldn’t be
—

But then she smelled the sharp, lingering scent of gunpowder in the air, registered the swiftly widening pool of red around Mel’s shoulders, and she knew that it could.

“Ana.” Mel’s eyes were wild, rolling, one hand clutched at the front of her coat. “Ana.” It was almost lost beneath the horrid burble of the crimson tide that spilled from her mouth and bubbled from her nose. Her lung must have been punctured. She was drowning in her own blood.

“Help!” Eliana screamed, turning to the door. “Someone help us!”

There was the sound of fleet footsteps and murmuring voices, and then faces appeared in the doorway, blinking away sleep. One of them rushed forward—Bettina, gray-haired and nimble-fingered, she’d been the midwife back at home. She’d helped to bring Eliana into the world long ago, had been her mother’s devoted friend and something like a mother figure after she died. She’d refused to stay behind when they’d fled the catacombs, insisting her place was at Eliana’s side.

“Sweet goddess Nephthys,” she whispered, bending over to inspect Mel, “don’t take her yet.” She tore open Mel’s shirt to reveal a gaping wound in the center of her breastbone, pulsing blood. She cursed in Latin, tore a strip of the sheets from the bed, and pressed it to Mel’s chest.

Mel’s head lolled to the side. She coughed, and a spray of blood splattered Eliana.

“What happened?” It was Aldo, one of Caesar’s most devoted followers, a young male with wide shoulders and a
brash, in-your-face attitude that had rubbed her the wrong way for years. He followed Caesar like a dog follows a trainer with bacon in his pocket.

“Silas shot her!”

Aldo recoiled in disbelief. “Why? What’s going on? What did she do?”

Eliana wanted to kill him for that. “We have to get her to a hospital!” she shouted, her control beginning to crack. Everything was beginning to slip sideways, and the shape of the room was beginning, just slightly, to blur. She bit down hard on her tongue to focus herself and tasted blood, but she blinked back into control.

If she had a panic attack now, she’d be utterly useless. And Mel might die. And Mel
could not
die.

“No hospitals, Eliana, you know that,” replied Bettina, very softly. She met the woman’s gentle black eyes. “We can’t take the risk.”

She read it in Bettina’s eyes. It wasn’t only the risk, it was the way of their kind since time immemorial. Survival of the fittest meant exactly that; all who were no longer fit due to age, injury, or infirmity were left to die. It was a hard, cold truth they all lived with, a law of nature that until now had seemed brutal but just. Necessary, even. Strength was their one advantage over all the other species. Only the
Bellatorum
, who were too valuable to her father to be discarded if injured, were given medical attention, trained to do it themselves. Everyone else was SOL.

Shit out of luck.

Her face hardened. No. Not this time. She would do whatever it took to keep Mel alive.

Mel writhed on the floor between them, wracked with a spasm of pain. Her mouth was working, and Eliana leaned
down to hear her. “Mel,” she whispered, “Mel, you’re going to be okay, we’re going to figure something out—”

“Demetrius.” Mel choked it out, the veins on her neck straining. “Take me to Demetrius. He’ll know what to do.”

At the mention of his name, Bettina drew back, horrified, and there were more murmurs of shock from the doorway where more of the others had gathered. She noticed that Aldo had disappeared.

“What is she saying?
Demetrius?
” hissed Bettina. “Why does she mention the King Slayer?”

That’s what he was to all of them now, the King Slayer, the one who’d plotted to kill Dominus and take over the kingdom for himself. Better the devil you know than the one you don’t, and Silas had done a wonderful job of convincing them all that Demetrius wouldn’t hesitate to slay them all if he ever found them, or if they ever returned to the catacombs.

He’d convinced her best of all.

“Help me lift her,” she said to Bettina, ignoring the question, and then she turned to the gathered group, gray-faced and wide-eyed in the faint light that was just beginning to show through the cracked window. “Geo.” She looked at a tall, young male standing near the door who had a talent for hot-wiring anything electrical. “Find a car. Fast. Bring it to the south entrance. We’ll meet you there.”

Geovanni nodded and disappeared.

From the others that were left, there were murmurs of confusion, Silas’s name repeated in shocked whispers, the shuffling uncertainty that accompanies a scene of such jarring unreality. No one knew exactly how to react or what to believe.

“Silas is a traitor.” Eliana, voice throbbing, looked at each of the gathered group in turn. “He’s a liar and a murderer
and cannot be trusted. He shot Mel and would have shot me, too, if I hadn’t stopped him.”

Eliana jerked her head toward the corner, to the bloodied stump of Silas’s hand lying still near the gun it had been grasping, and some of the shocked whispers turned to cries of disgust. “Everyone go to the Tabernacle and wait for me until I get back. Has anyone seen my brother?”

“He went out, my lady,” came a small voice from the back of the gathered group.

They turned aside and Lina stepped forward, the youngest of them all, a girl with glossy black bangs and a shy smile who’d fled with them from the catacombs because her highborn father had informed her that very night she’d be wed to the son of another highborn family the day she turned fifteen. That boy had been known to enjoy torturing stray dogs he captured by taping their muzzles shut until they suffocated to death.

“I saw him leave, and he hasn’t come back; I’ve been up since he left.”

“All right. Never mind. Get to the Tabernacle as quickly as you can and wait for me there, all of you. I’m going to get Melliane some help, and then I’ll come back for you. We can’t stay here anymore.”

More shocked whispers and shuffling, but no one challenged her openly. In the absence of Caesar or Silas, she was the temporary head of the colony and they had to do what she said…at least until one of them came back.

“Bettina, please, help me.” Eliana slid her arms gently beneath Mel, who sagged against her, heavy, but then someone stepped forward. Fabrizio—universally called Fabi—was a gentle giant, one of the
Castratus
charged with guarding the harem in his former life, now charged with doing all
the cooking for the tiny new colony; it was his eggs she took such pains to avoid eating every morning. How she wished that was the least of her problems now.

“I’ve got her,” Fabi rumbled, his deep voice like a balm on her shredded nerves. He lifted Mel easily in his arms as if she were a child and cradled her body against his chest. Mel moaned, her eyes shut, her lips a terrifying shade of pale blue. The pulse at the base of her throat had grown faint.

“Hurry.
Hurry
,” Eliana urged, moving to the door and waving him along. The gathered group parted to let them pass, and Bettina followed close on her heels, pressing the bloodied remnant of sheet against Mel’s chest to try and stanch the bleeding as they quickly made their way through the echoing, arch-ceilinged common room toward the back of the abbey. Behind them, the whispering crowd began to split apart into smaller groups, conferring.

Eliana didn’t give herself time to wonder how many of them would actually be waiting for her when she got back. She had her own loyalists, but so did Caesar.

So did Silas.

To get to the back of the abbey where the main gates opened to the only access to a road, they had to pass through the old church, dusty and gloomy in the half-light of dawn that spilled down from the windows carved into the white-pink stone far above. There was an iron door set into the east wall in a niche adjacent to the altar. It was rusted and padlocked, but Eliana gave it a vicious kick and the lock and chain crumbled. The door swung open with an eerie groan, and they pushed through, heading for the weed-choked gravel driveway.

And Geo was already driving up.

Relief surged through Eliana, and she ran toward the black SUV, waving frantically, her boots crunching over the
gravel. The headlights blinded her for a brief moment, and she lifted a hand, shading her eyes against the glare, and then pulled up short as her vision adjusted and her heart threatened to crawl right out of her throat.

It wasn’t Geo behind the wheel of the SUV.

It was Demetrius.

He wasn’t smiling.