ELIANA!
D shoved Iris away with so much force it sent a wave of water splashing against the rock rim of the thermae behind her. She stood and cursed, sputtering in indignation, wet hair dripping into her face.
He leapt from the pool, grabbed a towel and his clothes, and with a murmured word of apology and shame like cold fingers wrapped around his heart, got the hell away from the alluring Iris and the demons she roused in what was left of his black, ragged soul.
Two days later and almost a thousand miles away, in a secret underground city much like the one in which she’d been born and raised, Eliana spun on the ball of one booted foot, snapped out the opposite leg, and landed a perfect, vicious kick to the jaw of her opponent.
It sent him staggering back across the dusty limestone floor into a sea of bodies crowded together in an irregular circle against the shadowed, graffitied rock walls of New Harmony.
The crowd roared its approval and flung him back toward her.
“Had enough yet, slick?” she murmured as he went down on one knee. Sweating and panting, he looked up at her through a thicket of tangled blond hair and grinned.
“Not even close, Butterfly. I’m just getting warmed up.”
He stood and paused just long enough for her—and all the other women in the crowd—to admire his toned physique: tight muscles in tight jeans and a tight black T-shirt, all of it theatrically showcased by candlelight from hundreds of votives tucked into niches in the rounded walls that spilled a warm, flickering glow over the cavernous room. Golden blond as an angel, he had a dimpled smile to match, warm chocolate eyes, and a laugh that could melt an iceberg.
What was it she’d heard the catagirls—the groupies of the underground fight scene—call Alexi? Oh yes. Ripped. Also fine and ohmyGodsohotithurts.
He didn’t hold back as he leapt forward with a roar, arms outstretched, teeth bared, intent. She admired him fleetingly again—such animal grace and ferocity, almost like one of her kind—and then snapped into focus as instinct took over and a ripple of power shuddered down her spine.
Sensual and delicious, it sent goose bumps crawling along her skin.
She crouched into it, coiling, drawing down close to the ground, her eyes and ears and nose wide open and focused on him as he neared, seeking, calculating every nuance of his expression, every twitch of muscle and nerve that broadcasted his intent as clearly as a loudspeaker.
He was almost on her, reaching out, almost had a hand fisted in her hair—
—but she dodged his grip in one lightning-fast move and twisted away, smiling.
He skidded to a stop and swung around, growling his frustration, gravel grinding and spitting chunks beneath his heels. He whipped around and then lunged at her again, this time diving low to try and kick her legs out from under her with a sweep of his powerful legs. She leapt clear, executed a somersault in the cool air high above his head, and landed in a perfect three-point crouch, one hand and knee balancing her weight, one leg stretched out, her other arm held aloft behind her as counterweight, disturbing not even a single mote of dust as she settled silently on the ground.
Collectively, the gathered crowd gasped.
“Showoff,” Alexi muttered, glowering, but Eliana could tell by his tone and the gleam in his eyes that he wasn’t really annoyed.
He lived for this.
A successful man in the real world aboveground, Alexi was also one of the smartest people Eliana had ever met. He held postgraduate degrees in electrochemistry, applied mathematics, and computer science. By the age of twenty-one, he’d bought and sold his first company. By twenty-eight, he held patents in robotics, augmented reality and holographic technologies, and cryopreservation. And now, at thirty-two, he was CEO of an international conglomerate that was pursuing, among other things, the key to cold fusion.
Like most people of genius intellect, he was drawn to the odd and the eccentric, the unexplained and the unexplainable. So naturally he was drawn to the catacombs, and to Eliana, a riddle he was determined to solve.
Fight Club was his favorite movie, and fighting in the catacombs fed the highly competitive, thrill-seeking side of his personality. Eliana suspected he fancied himself the better-educated, European version of Brad Pitt.
He was. His combination of looks, smarts, and brawn was devastating.
“Five hundred says she pins you in sixty seconds,” Melliane called out from somewhere in the crowd behind her. A chorus of voices chimed in, arguing and yelling over one another, clamoring for a piece of the action. Eliana smiled; tonight the take would be good.
“A thousand if she does it in ten!” an anonymous man with a whiskey-soaked voice shouted above the noise, and that’s what finally decided it for her.
She rose to her feet in a single, fluid unbending of limbs and felt the animal rise to an almost unbearable peak within her, sinking tooth and claw into her muscles, her nerves, straining against her skin, hissing out with her own exhalation, writhing to be set free. Her eyes fixed on Alexi’s, and for a moment she was sure he saw it, too, the beast that lived ever long just beneath her skin. His brown eyes widened for a moment and then narrowed, preparing.
Finish it! the beast hissed. Without hesitation, Eliana obeyed.
One long stride, two, three…a sudden rush of cool wind as she moved, the blur of bodies in her peripheral vision, the bulk of Alexi ahead of her, the muffled roar of voices from all sides, the smell of hot wax, damp rock, and humans. In a heartbeat she was on him, heat and muscle and the heady scent of clean skin and cologne and sweat, his hard arms tightening around her back as she slammed against him and knocked them both to the ground.
His breath huffed out on impact, but he didn’t loosen his grip. She gave him bonus points for that.
“Sorry, slick,” she whispered against his ear, “but playtime’s over.”
Then she flipped onto her back, dragged him along with her, threw her legs around his neck, and squeezed.
The roar of the crowd was deafening.
He tried with all his considerable might to pry open her thighs, but his face got redder and redder by the second, and then veins began to bulge in his forehead and neck. Beneath him she mouthed it again—sorry—and gave him a little apologetic shrug.
Finally he tapped out, and she released him. He fell back against the dusty limestone, coughing and laughing at the same time, brown eyes watering, both hands at his throat.
“Hellcat!” he rasped.
If he only knew. Eliana glanced to her right and saw Mel—a dark-haired sylph sandwiched between two hooting, fist-pumping men—her arms crossed over her chest, nodding in satisfaction. She winked at her, and Mel’s face split into a grin. She danced over in a few swift strides and offered her hand. Eliana took it, stood, and brushed the fine limestone dust off the back of her favorite black leather pants and out of her hair.
“Took you long enough,” Mel murmured with a quick glance at Alexi. Two of his friends were helping him from the floor, but he pushed them away, cursing loudly, preferring to get to his feet under his own power.
“Just long enough to let him save face,” Eliana murmured back as Alexi shot her a penetrating sideways glance and then turned away to slap one of his friends on the back.
“Somebody buy me a drink—I just got my ass kicked by a girl!” he shouted.
“Again!” someone shouted back, and he hollered a good-natured curse at the man. Eliana was the only one who ever beat Alexi in the weekly matches, but she beat everyone else, too, even the monstrous MMA cage fighter who’d once come to test her skills, so it almost didn’t count.
She was a freak of nature, that’s all. It’s always easier to dismiss the freaks.
A knot of moon-eyed, squealing catagirls in heavy makeup, miniskirts, and midriff-baring tops shuffled in his direction. He glanced in her direction to make sure she was still looking and then put his arm around the nearest one and nuzzled his face into her neck.
Eliana sighed. If she had been in love w
ith him, his ploy might have worked. As it was, she only felt the same vague pang of guilt that she was so broken she couldn’t feel anything at all, even for someone she’d been so intimate with.
No—she’d never been truly intimate with Alexi. It pained her to admit she’d used him as a foil for her own black, bottomless loneliness. For a few chaotic months before she came to her senses and turned him loose, they were inseparable, her ebony to his ivory, her dark to his light.
Then, when the gifts started coming, flowers and candies and that beautiful filigree ring he called a “friendship” ring, she ended it. She sent him back to the catagirls who followed him wherever he went like a school of hungry remora.
She wasn’t good for him, and he deserved to be happy. Alexi, for all his swagger and chest-thumping, was a good guy. She hoped they could get to a place where they were truly friends, but she was beginning to doubt the possibility. It had been over a year since they’d been together, and his eyes still restlessly followed her.
He still wanted to solve her riddle.
“He’s got the right idea, anyway.” She turned her attention back to Mel, who was watching her carefully, something she’d caught her doing on more than one occasion. Eliana knew Mel worried about her, but the cornerstone, unspoken rule of their friendship was don’t ask, don’t tell. Relationships were one of a dozen topics Eliana did not discuss, with anyone. Ever.
“About?”
“Drink. Let’s go get one.”
Mel nodded. “Give me ten and I’ll meet you at the Tabernacle.” She grinned, and it made her face look even more impish than usual. “I’ve got to collect the money.” She turned and danced away in that particular way she had, almost skipping over the ground, her long, plaited black hair slapping lightly against her back.
Right, Eliana thought, turning away. Keep your eye on the prize, Butterfly. Eye on the prize.
Beneath the glitz and glamour and city lights of Paris, there exists a cool, quiet world of freedom and possibilities. Les Carrières de Paris is a deep, intricate web of nearly four hundred miles of abandoned limestone quarries, pits and old wells, subway and sewer networks, canals and reservoirs and aqueducts that leak into the surrounding rock and make the walls weep silent tears. It is a beautiful, mysterious, and some would say frightening subterranean paradise; it’s been said the gate to hell can be found there, just beyond the catacombs named the Empire of Death for the six million nameless souls buried in its dark embrace, moldering bones jumbled in vast, dusty piles at the bottoms of wells and stacked in macabre precision along dark walls, common as discarded seashells.
These catacombs form the arteries and intestines of Paris. Ancient and eerie, they’re decorated with wall carvings and acres of neon graffiti, bone sculptures and dripping stalactites, all of it illumed by thousands of candles tucked into niches whose flames never waver because the air is so still. It is an underground kingdom few know of, and fewer still ever see.
The few who do risk arrest—entering the catacombs has been illegal for many decades—keep the secret of their entry spot closely guarded. Through the mouths of abandoned railways, down manholes that fall away into darkness, in the basements of old buildings and churches and banks, the “cataphiles” come seeking relief from daily life in the spiritual night of the underworld. Freedom and anarchy reign, all the cataphiles have nicknames to conceal their true identity, and they share a single, simple philosophy:
“To be happy, stay hidden.”
Eliana and her group of two dozen were exiles, and they were well acquainted with hiding, so life in the catacombs suited them perfectly. For now.
As she made her way through the crowd, people fell back to allow her passage, and whispers followed in her wake. “You ever see anyone move like that?” murmured a tattooed, lanky young man to his muscled friend who stood beside him. They stared at her like she might suddenly sprout horns.
“Told you, man,” the muscled one said with pride. “The Butterfly’s a legend in the underground. Never been beat.”
Eliana raised a hand to the back of her neck, imagining she could feel her own tattoo there, the vivid indigo and black butterfly that spread its wings between her shoulder blades and earned her the nickname. Phengaris arion transformed its original shape, was painted the colors of night, and teetered on the razor’s edge of extinction; they had a lot in common.
Leaving the heat and crowd of the amphitheater behind, Eliana made her way down a winding corridor, ducking under an outcropping of sewer pipes and carefully avoiding the crumbling stone support columns wedged between the floor and the low ceiling above. There had been many cave-ins over the years—the old quarries had been overmined and were as fragile as a dry skeleton—so she stayed well clear. Down a narrow passageway where the light sank to murky green and a few more twists and turns around corners she knew by heart, and suddenly the walls fell away and the room opened into soaring, silent space.
The Tabernacle was the closest the underground had to a church. It was a sanctuary, though a nondenominational one, where thousands of unnamed people had left mementoes of loved ones they’d lost over the years. Photos and trinkets, poems and wedding rings, yellowed letters with curled edges and tear-shaped stains…a million dusty memories lined the walls and littered the floor, and everyone who entered this place spoke in a reverential hush.
Everyone, that is, except Caesar, who never failed to make a dramatic entrance wherever he went.
He stumbled into the room on the arms of two girls from an egg-shaped access tunnel several yards away. As soon as he spotted her, he shouted, “There she is!”
The girls were covered in dust, their shoes caked with muck, their bare arms and legs streaked with mud from the limestone powder and moisture that invaded every crack and crevice, but between them Caesar was spotless, his clothes unwrinkled, his hair in its usual perfect shape. “How’s my little prizefighter?”
It echoed off the walls, dying slowly into silence. He was slurring a little, weaving a little, and the girls were supporting most of his weight.
Wonderful.
“Brother,” she greeted him stiffly.
“Sister.” He smiled, a slow, mocking curve of his sculpted lips, and then bent his head to the ear of the girl on his right and whispered something. She giggled and stole a quick glance in Eliana’s direction, and then the trio stumbled off into the shadows of the far wall where several couches were hidden behind stacks of old wooden crates some long-ago cataphile had erected.
“Don’t let him get to you,” Mel said softly, coming up behind her.
“It’s fine,” Eliana lied, breathing hard through her nose. “I’m fine.” She brushed away the hand Mel had placed on her shoulder—she could handle humiliation, but never pity—and turned to face her.
Mel held up an old-fashioned silver flask and wiggled it. “Victory drink?”
Eliana took it without hesitation, unscrewed the cap, and swallowed a long draught of liquid. A rotgut hooch made from fermenting pears and potatoes, it burned like acid going down. Coughing, she handed it back to Mel. “Ugh! Did you cook that up in your shoe? I like to think I’m the kind of girl who can drink anything, but this stuff is volcanic. Why can’t my victory drinks ever be champagne?”
“Champagne tastes on a beer budget.” Mel shrugged. She tipped the flask to her lips and swallowed. Her face screwed up just as Eliana’s had, and she hacked a lung-clearing cough. “Besides, Ms. Pouty Pants, with the way we drink, in a few months someone would have to get a bulldozer in here to dig us out from under the mountain of empty bottles.”
Eliana paused, considering that. She had a point. Neither of them drank to the point of stupidity like her brother, Caesar, did; they drank just enough to take the edge off and get beautifully blurred. Sometimes it even worked. “Volcanic moonshine it is, then.”
Mel handed the flask back to her, and she drained it, grimacing, as Mel watched.
“Alexi asked me where you’d gone.”
“Pff
t. He was so draped in women, I’m surprised he even noticed I’d left.”
Mel’s mouth twisted to a rueful smile. “He always notices what you do, E.”
“Yeah, well, ancient history notwithstanding, I hope he doesn’t catch something from those catagirls he was with. They didn’t exactly look…virginal.”
Mel laughed, a decidedly witchy cackle that was at odds with her appearance. She was shorter and daintier than her lean, long-limbed friend, with beautiful waist-length black hair she wore in a French braid. Matched with her doe-like prance and a snarky, irrepressible sense of humor, Mel’s travel-size frame lent her the general air of a mischievous woodland creature, a sexy trickster elf who might lead you out of the forest to safety or right over the edge of a cliff.
In other words, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Though she was six years younger than her friend, and Mel was perfectly capable of defending herself, Eliana felt violently protective of her. She considered Melliane the sister she’d never had.
“Look who’s talking trash!” Mel cried in delight. Dark eyes dancing with mirth, she pointed a finger at her. “Pot, meet kettle!”
“Shut up,” Eliana answered good-naturedly, and then she froze as the sharp, unmistakable sound of flesh smacking flesh broke the stillness. It was followed quickly by a low moan, a growled admonition, and then eerie silence. Mel glanced over at the high stack of crates Caesar and his two companions had disappeared around, but Eliana didn’t have to look. She’d heard it all before, and it made her sick to her stomach.
“Let’s get out of here.” Mel’s pretty face had darkened. “I don’t want to stay for the freak show.”
Me neither, thought Eliana as they quickly turned and headed for another access tunnel that would lead them out of the catacombs and into the basement of the abandoned abbey where they slept. I already know how it ends.
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