“Oh, fuck it all,” he spat. He turned on his heel and stalked out of the room.
In a daze, Morgan watched Xander go and felt something inside her leave with him.
If it wasn’t for you, Julian might still be alive.
If she thought she had been acquainted with pain before this moment, she was wrong.
She moved in a daze to the door, unseeing, unsure of what she would do, aware only that she had to get away from this room, get away from this house, get outside into the air where she could clear her head and think and maybe release the scream that was burning a hole in her chest.
If it wasn’t for you...
She found her heels where she’d left them near the dresser and slipped them on. She walked unsteadily down the corridor, then took the stairs one at a time, slowly, her legs leaden, the soles of her shoes clicking unheard against the wood. She crossed the third floor and took another set of stairs to the staged model house above, then went outside to the backyard and stood on the porch, blinking at the sun, cold with shock in spite of the warmth of the morning.
If it wasn’t for you, Julian might still be alive.
He was right, of course. She realized that as she stared at the grass and the trees and the white fence and the bottomless azure sky above, bile rising in her throat. She was the hub this entire shit storm revolved around, and she had no one to blame but herself. Wanting and wanting and wanting her whole life through, she’d dug a hole so deep there was no climbing out of it now. And everyone around her was beginning to fall in, too.
The only way out was to make it right. To do what she’d come here to do—find the Expurgari.
And then—what then? Forget she ever knew Xander?
Yes, came the sneering answer from her subconscious. Forget him, because he thinks you killed his best friend. And sweetheart, he’s probably right.
Her eyes filled with tears, and she stifled a sob behind her hand. How much easier it would be for him now, when the time came. How much easier to slide that knife between the vertebrae in her neck.
I still have time! she thought desperately, spinning around unsteadily to stare at the house. It seemed menacing in the morning sun, full of hidden danger and a palpable charge, as if it were a giant, ticking time bomb.
As it had innumerable times since she put it on, the medallion around her neck drew her hand like a magnet. It lay stone-cold and ominous against her chest and gave her the same disquieting sense she’d had since she’d first glimpsed it that there was something here she was missing, a clue this necklace held, a puzzle piece she didn’t know how to make fit. It scraped at her mind, over and over, as irritating as a fingernail scratching down a chalkboard.
The Alpha. The Expurgari.
Somehow they were related. But how? And how would she ever find him?
She stood there staring at the house as if it held some kind of answer for a long, long time, how long she didn’t know. Cars passed by on the streets beyond the yard, birds sang in the trees, the mechanical thrum of a lawn mower broke the stillness of the morning. Then finally a thought occurred to her and she stood breathless with the horror of it.
She wouldn’t ever find the Alpha, or the Expurgari. She was fooling herself.
And the man she was in love with...was happily going to kill her.
A shudder wracked her body. With a low moan, she dropped her head into her hands.
A clock began to chime inside the house, counting the hour in low, mournful tones. Five, six, seven...off in the distance a church bell began to ring, mirroring the chiming clock, then another, then another, faint, melancholy tolling that reached her ears from far-off churches all around the city, announcing the time.
Morgan stiffened. Her mind turned over, then her stomach. Slowly, slowly, she moved her head and gazed off into the distance, where she saw through the morning haze the enormous golden dome of St. Peter’s Basilica glittering like a Fabergé egg atop the Vatican. She turned back and gazed at the safe house, at the empty façade that hid all its secrets below.
Below.
The puzzle pieces came together with a cold, solid click.
Though they had felt his energy diffused all around them at the Vatican, the feral Alpha had evaded detection because he wasn’t in the basilica. He was beneath it, safely out of sight, just as hidden and sheltered as they were in the underground rooms of the safe house.
Holding her breath, she backed one step away from the house, then another. Without bothering to think, Morgan turned and ran for the back fence.
Over two thousand years ago, or so the story went, the first Purgare—Purging—was held in a secret spot on the banks of the winding Tiber river where the giant sycamore trees bend low and weep their silver-green leaves into the burbling waters near the tiny Tiberina island in what is now the very heart of Rome. The spot had been abandoned for more and more rural locations as Rome grew up and spread sprawling over the flood plain of the Campus Martius around the river, and was now located well north of the city in a quiet place still unclaimed by man.
The location had changed, but the ceremony—solemn and ancient—had not.
Every month on the full moon’s apex the ashes of all the half-Blood Ikati who had not survived their Transitions the month prior were taken from the small clay urns they were placed in after cremation and transferred to containers fashioned from squares of white raw silk tied with cords of hand-spun gold. Green apples were placed atop the ashes to pay the hungry ferryman’s tithe to the nether-world; a small bundle of sparrow grass brought the unlucky soul peace. One by one, as the names of the dead were called by the Alpha of the tribe, the bundles were placed on slender balsa-wood planks with lit beeswax candles at either end and set into the river, where they bobbed and dipped and finally caught flame. Mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and cousins and friends would watch in silence as the flaming bundles drifted away on the restless river until they slipped with a hiss and coils of rising gray smoke beneath the surface of the dark water, on their way to their final resting place at the bottom of the vast, enchanted Mediterranean.
Eliana sometimes wondered if there was a huge pile of Ikati ashes mounded like drifts of silt at the mouth of the Tiber where it drained into the sea.
Because she was full-Blooded, the King’s daughter, and referred to as spem futuri by the eldest of the tribal elders—hope for the future, whatever that meant—Eliana was considered too precious to attend the monthly Purgare. She stayed under guard inside the catacombs where she’d been born and had spent every waking moment of her life.
But tonight, oh, tonight—she would finally break free.
The past few days she’d been a frazzle of nerves and twitchery and pent-up emotion held in check only by the sobering realization that to fail in this—to be caught—would mean disaster. She wasn’t thinking too closely about that, though, because her full attention and indeed imagination had been captured by the thought of being alone—outside!—with Demetrius.
With heat and powerful need in his eyes he had agreed to her request and simultaneously exposed his own desire. He wanted her as much as she wanted him, and now she had her proof, evidenced undeniably by his willingness to risk death just to be alone with her for a few hours. How exactly he was going to manage it she still wasn’t sure, because he hadn’t spoken a word to her in the past few days, had just looked at her with that silent, burning intensity whenever their paths had crossed. But she knew he would figure out a way. Though Celian was the leader of the Bellatorum, D was the most clever, the most willing to take risks and defy authority, and she loved that about him. She had only to shake her guard long enough to get to the sunken church, then D would handle the rest.
She was sighing in anticipation when her father walked into the flickering light of her large, white-on-white, candlelit bedroom.
“Eliana,” he said, and she jumped, guilty.
“Father!” She leapt from the overstuffed chair near her four-poster bed and snapped shut t
he book she’d been devouring: Lonely Planet’s Guide to Rome. “I didn’t expect to see you this early. Good morning!”
Though there were no clocks in the catacombs, she knew it was morning. Dawn and dusk were felt keen as hunger pangs even far belowground. Regardless, clocks were entirely unnecessary: the Ikati of the catacombs had nowhere else to be.
“Good morning to you.” A small, secret smile flitted across her father’s lips, and he crossed to her quickly over the stone floor strewn with plush rugs and embraced her. “I’m going to be occupied all day, but I wanted to see you before the last Purgare tonight,” he said, low, into her hair.
Eliana pulled back and frowned at him, studying his handsome face, his burning, coal-black eyes, so like her own. “I don’t understand. What do you mean, the last Purgare? We’ll have another one next month. And the month after that.”
He took her chin in hand and gazed down at her, those dark eyes alight with a wild, feverish victory that took her breath away with its strange edge. She’d never seen him so wired. In truth, he looked a little...unhinged.
“I have an announcement to make, something that concerns all of us,” he murmured, holding her face in a way that made her nervous. It was possessive, more like a jealous lover than a father, and she stepped back, out of his embrace. He noticed her discomfort and his eyes flared. “Something that concerns you, too, daughter of mine,” he drawled, a new hardness in his tone.
Eliana had been in the middle of another step back, but she froze instantly and so did the blood circulating in her veins. “Me?” she whispered, thinking only of D. Her heart became a stampede of wild stallions in her chest.
How could he know of their plans?
His small smile grew wider, revealing his perfect, ultra-white teeth. Dressed elegantly and with care in his usual impeccable white that set off his burnished skin and tousled black hair to model-like perfection yet exuding the kind of raw menace usually found only in violent criminals, he looked like the love child of Cary Grant and Blackbeard the pirate. He stepped nearer, closing the distance between them, that undercurrent of menace chilling the air in her already cool bedchamber.
“You are my life, you know that,” he said, taking her shoulders in his hands. His voice was very low, controlled, giving nothing away. His eyes burned. “And your happiness is my only concern, beautiful Eliana. It’s what I’ve worked so hard for, all these long years.”
His fingers curled into her skin, and once again she fought the urge to step back. She’d never been afraid of him before, but there was something in his eyes...something so very dark.
“Father,” she managed, swallowing the panic that was clawing at her throat, “what are you talking about?”
He lifted his hand and leisurely brushed back a strand of hair from her suddenly perspiring forehead.
“I’m talking about destiny,” he whispered. “Yours and mine. Ours.” He made a sweeping gesture with one hand, indicating, she thought, all her kin who lived together in darkness beyond the rounded walls and burnished light of her room. “We were gods once, Ana, so long ago, before our destiny was stolen from us. But now we can take our destiny back and be gods once again. I’ve finally done it.”
Relief flooded her, and she almost sagged into his arms, her heartbeat thrumming like a hummingbird’s. “Your project,” she breathed, trying to gather her wits. He couldn’t read her mind, but he was exceptionally good at reading her face. “Oh, Father, that’s wonderful...”
She trailed off because she really hadn’t the slightest idea if it was wonderful or not. No one could be secretive the way her father could, and for all the years she’d been alive she was aware of his work in the lab, aware of some grand scheme involving the fates of all her underworld kin, but he revealed almost nothing except to a very few of his closest confidants, and she wasn’t among them.
Her father took her face in both his hands and vehemently whispered, “My beautiful daughter. Your young will rule the earth.”
Eliana’s heartbeat grew faint. First because her father seemed entirely beyond reason and second because she did not want young, and never had. But...did she have a choice? She was about to open her mouth to ask, but her mercurial father released her and smiled in a way that made all the tiny hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.
“You will be at the convergence room at dawn tomorrow,” he commanded, “to stand by my side when I make the announcement. In the meantime, get some sleep.” His voice grew softer. “You look a bit...frazzled, my dear.”
Oh, he really had no idea. She sank back down into the overstuffed chair, trying to control her breathing, when a burst of inspiration hit. She cleared her throat and gazed up at him through her lashes. “I am frazzled. I haven’t been sleeping well, lately, Father.”
His brows shot up. “Oh?”
She nodded, then cast her gaze to the floor at his feet. “The new guard you assigned as my escort...”
“Yes?” he said sharply, instantly tense.
“Well, he...makes me uncomfortable.” This was absolutely true. The new guard watched her every move like a hawk. She didn’t know what had happened to the old—friendlier—one and didn’t dare ask; her father’s decisions were never questioned.
“Uncomfortable,” Dominus repeated, deadly soft.
Eliana glanced up at him. “It’s just...it’s just the way he looks at me.”
Dominus drew in a sharp breath. His head whipped around to the entrance of her bedchamber, where the guard stood vigilant outside, just his elbow and booted right foot visible beyond the heavy swagged drape that partially covered the rounded doorway.
“He hasn’t done anything inappropriate, Father,” she rushed to assure him, knowing it might save the guard’s life, “but still I would feel better if you could assign me someone else. Perhaps tomorrow, after the announcement? I’d be fine for just one day without a guard, I’m sure.”
He turned to look at her with narrowed eyes, and her heartbeat skyrocketed again. Terrified he sensed her little deception, she pleaded, “I’ll sleep better tonight without someone new watching me. I’ll be fine, just for one day. One night. I really don’t think I can sleep knowing he’s there.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” he hissed, stepping closer to loom over her. “I would have dealt with him—”
“I don’t want you to deal with him, Father, please! Just—just let me have another guard. Tomorrow.”
He considered her in silence for several long, tense moments. Then his face softened and he said, “As you wish.”
Really? She couldn’t believe that had worked. She put a shaking hand to her face, adrenaline wreaking havoc on her nerves. “Thank you,” she whispered.
He bent and planted a kiss on the top of her head, then abruptly turned on his heel and walked toward the door. He paused just before passing over the threshold and said over his shoulder, “By the way, a very special guest will be arriving this morning. Someone who’ll be staying with us from now on, who I hope you’ll...like...as much as I do.”
His voice, low and husky, throbbed with emotion. Her ears pricked. “A guest?”
He turned slightly and met her curious gaze. That menacing smile of his made another appearance. “Yes. I’ll introduce you tomorrow morning, after the announcement.”
“Why not today?”
His face grew flushed, his eyes hot. “Because today we’ll be spending some time together, getting to know one another better.”
Eliana stared at him, confused. Was this why he was in such a state?
“Who is this guest?”
A gleam came into his eyes, one that made her scalp prickle with dread.
“Your new mother,” he answered. Then he turned and disappeared beyond the door, leaving Eliana gaping after him in shock.
By the time Morgan arrived at the Vatican, the morning sun had risen over the rooftop of St. Peter’s and bathed the vast cobblestone square in warm, golden light. It was too early for the tourists,
but the Swiss Guard was ever present, and she made her way across the sun-washed square to a lone guard posted at the top of the stairs on the left side of the entrance to the basilica, hoping to draft him into her plan.
He was a large man, physically imposing even in that silly, striped Renaissance uniform with boot covers, white gloves, and white ruff around his throat. The rapier at his hip, however, looked more ominous than silly, as did the sidearm strapped to his other hip, and she approached with caution. When she finally stood directly in front of him, he made no indication he was aware of her presence except for a slight inhalation of breath. Looking up into his pale blue eyes—affixed on some point above her head—she saw his irises dilate.
Just as Xander’s had when he’d stared down at her as he pushed himself inside—
Stop! Morgan screamed at herself and bit her tongue hard to banish the thought. With her hands now trembling and her heart thrumming, she turned her attention back to the guard.
“Excuse me,” she said. He completely ignored her.
Hmmm.
She lifted both hands to pull her hair back from her face as if she were going to make a ponytail. It forced her rib cage to lift, and her breasts—unfettered by a bra—pressed against the clinging fabric of her dress. “Excuse me, signore? I think I’m a little lost. I’m looking for the tour that goes below the Vatican? The necropolis tour, I think?”
She’d heard of this from the cab driver on the way over. There was some guided tour of the rarely seen areas beneath the Vatican, ancient grottoes and catacombs with tombs of long-dead saints, including the tomb of St. Peter around which the entire church had been built. It sounded like the perfect place to start her search.
A muscle in the guard’s jaw twitched, but he still didn’t respond. Obviously he was well trained to ignore all manner of foolishness from the tourists. Or just stubborn as hell.
Either way he was dust, because now this was personal.
Morgan dropped her arms and shook her hair back, then slid both hands slowly down the front of her dress, over her waist and hips, smoothing imaginary wrinkles. She shifted her weight to one foot and thrust out her hip, then jauntily rested her hand on it, gazing at him with an intensity she knew he felt, because the faintest hint of color flushed his cheeks.
Edge of Oblivion: A Night Prowler Novel, Book 2 Page 27