Edge of Oblivion (32 page)

He drew a long breath, and she edged out of his arms and sat staring at him with the sheet rucked up between them. “Mateo and Tomás and...” His voice wobbled. He swallowed and then said, “Julian. There was a fight. Those other males—they’ve been caught.”

Morgan gasped. She drew the sheet up to her chin, the nightmare forgotten but a newer, darker dread taking hold. “Caught!”

He nodded, brushed a lock of hair from her forehead where it had fallen into her eye. “They’re being held at some kind of animal shelter close by. I have to go help them. You understand?

Bartleby’s coming with me. You’ll be here alone for...a while.” He swallowed again, looking pained.

“You don’t think...” she faltered, drew her knees against her chest and hugged her arms around them, “...you don’t think I’m going to run away, do you?”

He blinked, startled. “No. I know you won’t—I know I can trust you. I just can’t stand the thought of leaving you alone.” He licked his lips and his voice dropped. “I don’t want to be away from you.”

Her toes curled in pleasure. She allowed herself to wallow in it for a moment while they stared at one another. She hoped to remember someday what this felt like, wishing with all her heart some tiny echo of this feeling would last. Even the faintest memory of it could sustain her for all the dark years to come.

If she survived the next week, that is. Though they’d shared something here—something precious—he was still what he was. If she didn’t find the Expurgari...

That thought quashed the warm blossom of pleasure, and she looked away, heart pounding.

“I’ll be fine,” she whispered.

He rose from the bed—he didn’t seem to notice her sudden paleness—and pressed a soft, fleeting kiss to her cheek. The cell phone on the dresser began to ring.

“I know you will.” He put a knuckle beneath her chin and tilted up her head so she had to look up into his face. “My fierce little warrior. But I’m not so sure I will be.” His eyes darkened, and for a moment he looked haunted. Pensive, somewhere far away, he trailed his thumb slowly over her lower lip. “God, Morgan,” he whispered, holding her chin, gazing down at her, “what you do to me.”

The cell phone kept ringing. He never looked away from her face.

“Go,” she urged, pushing his hand away. “Go get them. I’ll be here when you get back.”

He nodded, slowly backed away, then crossed the room and picked up the phone. He glanced at the number on the readout, then pocketed it with a dark sigh. He crossed to the door.

She said weakly, “Be careful.”

He paused with his hand on the doorknob and just looked back at her. His intense gaze trailed over her face, her hair, her bare shoulders and arms above the sheet. One corner of his mouth quirked, then he pulled the door open and walked out of the room.

Midnight is historically viewed as the witching hour, when supernatural creatures appear and black magic is at its most powerful, but Xander knew from many years of experience that 3:00 a.m.—the devil’s hour, deepest of the night, when all the world’s abed—is best for hunting prey. Or in this case, staging a dicey, hastily conceived search and rescue operation. So it was just before 3:00 a.m. when he and Bartleby rolled to a stop in the black shadows of a grove of Roma pines that ringed a small urban park, and killed the engine of the huge black SUV he’d “appropriated” from one of his neighbors in the Aventine, a burly Russian he suspected was an arms dealer, judging by the automatic weapons—

modified to high capacity—he’d found stashed in the spare tire well.

If all went well, they’d be back at the safe house in less than an hour and his neighbor would be none the wiser. If it didn’t go well and he had to abandon the vehicle...his neighbor might be in a lot of trouble with the authorities.

The animal shelter was located adjacent to the ancient ruins of Largo di Torre Argentina, a large square of dirt and broken travertine pavers that hosted four crumbling Roman temples and the remains of Pompey’s Theater where Julius Caesar was killed in 44 BC. Located just minutes away from landmarks such as the Piazza Navona, the Pantheon, the Colosseum, and the Campo de’Fiori, it was smack in the middle of ancient Rome.

Which posed some rather obvious problems.

“There’s a lot of apartments around here,” Bartleby muttered disapprovingly, peering up through the windshield at the rows of brick buildings surrounding the park. Hundreds of windows gleamed in the light from the streetlamps, windows that might be hiding watchful eyes.

“Hotels, too.” Xander watched a pair of doormen at a boutique hotel across the street load luggage into an airport transfer van that idled at the curb. Two groggy tourists stumbled their way into the van, and it lurched away from the curb, coughing smoke, even before the door was shut. “But that’s why it’s called a clandestine op.”

Bartleby lifted a pair of field glasses to his eyes and said, “Not a covert op?”

“Covert ops are about deniability,” Xander explained, checking his weapons pack one last time.

Inside were his daggers, a pair of wire cutters, a length of rope, a grenade, a canister smoke bomb, a lock pick, and six cyanide capsules encased in a blister pack in case the entire op went to shit. He never carried guns: too loud, too heavy, too unreliable. “Clandestine ops, on the other hand, are about secrecy.”

The doctor lowered the field glasses and looked over at him. “What’s the difference?”

Xander gave him a grim smile. “Politics.”

Bartleby returned his smile. “Ah. Well, at least the tourist traps don’t open for another six hours. Hopefully we’ll be long gone by then, with no one the wiser.” He pointed to something beyond the windshield, several blocks down. “They might be a problem, though.”

Camped out on one side of the wire-topped fence outside the facility where his boys were being held were three mobile television trucks with their camera-topped jib arms extended high over their roofs. The press. Vultures.

“I saw them when we pulled up,” Xander said. Only a few reporters were ambling around, smoking and talking on cell phones. The rest of the area was deserted. “At least the animal rights demonstrators are gone.”

“They were probably too weak to stand up all night. A diet of tofu and lawn clippings will do that to a person.” Bartleby leaned over, picked up a small stainless steel suitcase near his feet, and set it on his lap. He flicked two latches and popped it open, then pulled out a laminated photo ID on a lanyard, an official-looking document, and a business card—all fake, of course—and shut the case. He wound the lanyard around his neck, folded the document in fourths, put it in the front pocket of his white lab coat along with the business card, and turned to Xander.

“Ready to go balls to the walls?”

In spite of himself, Xander laughed. “You’ve been hanging around the Syndicate far too long, my friend.”

Bartleby opened the door and stepped into the street. “I’ll take that as a yes,” he said, adjusting his spectacles. He checked his wristwatch. “The taxi should be here any minute.”

As if on cue, another airport transport turned the corner behind them. It crawled slowly down the street, searching for the address they’d called in to the dispatcher just moments before from one of the disposable cell phones Xander always kept handy.

“Are you sure about this, Doc?” Xander asked quietly, noting the slight tremor in the old man’s hands as he watched the cab approach.

Bartleby inclined his head and gave Xander a penetrating look. “You boys are the only family I’ve got. You’re like sons to me, and there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for any one of you,” he said softly.

Then he pursed his lips. “But don’t let it go to your head. That’s big enough already.”

Xander saluted, suppressing a smile.

Without another word, Bartleby closed the door. He walked briskly toward the cab, whistling through his fingers. The cab jerked to a stop, and Bartleby got in. Xander watched from the shadows as the taxi slid by, made its way slowly down the street, then turned into the gated entrance in front of the shelter. The driver spoke into a wireless call box mounted on the wall in front of the gate. Nothing happened for several moments, then two armed guards appeared in the main doors of the facility and approached the taxi. One of them, tall and burly, exchanged words with Bartleby through the window, then took the documents he presented. The guard studied them briefly, then nodded.

A barked shout, then the press spilled from their mobile vans like a swarm of locusts. But too late: the taxi had already deposited the impostor Dr. Hermann Parnassus, who, striding quickly through with the steel briefcase clutched in hand, breached the inner sanctum of the facility’s fenced parking lot before they could reach him. The gate swung shut with a solid
clang
behind him, and the guards, stone-faced and silent, followed Bartleby inside as the reporters shouted questions at their backs.

Xander started the car and took side streets and a back alley to skirt the facility. He parked the car behind it, close enough that he could carry his boys out if necessary, but far enough that he was out of sight of the reporters and any security cameras. He’d come in from the back or the roof, whichever was more expedient, while Bartleby provided a distraction to whomever might be inside.

It seemed simple enough. God knew he’d executed a thousand ops more dangerous and complicated than this. But a faint buzz of discontent, the feeling he was missing something, nagged at him.

As he slung the weapons pack over his shoulders and set off at a trot down the street, the soles of his shoes silent over the asphalt, the night air cool on his face, it hit him.

Armed guards. Barbed wire.

Why was an animal shelter surrounded by barbed wire?

Julian knew he was drugged by the way his limbs refused to answer his brain’s instructions to move.

He was thick-tongued and groggy, and his head weighed a thousand pounds. Maybe more.

“And the neocortex is considerably larger and more grooved than expected,” a male voice was excitedly saying somewhere nearby, “surpassing that of even a human brain, indicating both advanced evolutionary status and extraordinary intelligence. But the most remarkable aspect of this mammal—

and one that also suggests we are not dealing with a species we have seen before, in spite of its outward physical similarity to members of the
panthera
family—is a small organ located directly adjacent to the sinoatrial node.”

There was a click, some rustlings, more clicks, then murmurs of surprise as the voice continued on.

“As you recall, the SA node serves as the natural pacemaker for the heart by sending out the electrical impulse that triggers each heartbeat. In these MRI scans you can see how deeply entangled the nerve network is between the ventricles of the heart, the SA node, and this new, unknown organ.

What it suggests to me—and mind you, this is merely untested hypothesis at this point—is that this organ might be some kind of backup in case of heart failure, in the way a generator is used in the event of electrical failure. Or...” the speaker paused for dramatic effect, “...it might possibly be a separate electrical supply in and of itself.”

“To power what?” chimed a voice, this one female.

Julian tried to move his head but couldn’t, nor could he open his eyes. Jumbled memories surfaced. Strobing lights, pulsing music, screams.

“I don’t know. It’s a mystery. But since this subject”—Julian felt a touch on his spine—“who has, as you can see, been ear-tagged with the identifier TS-4187, is so badly injured, he’s been selected for vivisection, which will tell us more. As you saw, the other two animals are doing much better, so other testing on them will begin as soon as Dr. Parnassus arrives.”

Vivisection. Julian searched his foggy brain while the group—six people? Ten?—stood around murmuring words like
remarkable
and
breakthrough
and
discovery
. Vivisection meant...

Dissection. Dismemberment. Cutting.

While he was
alive
.

Fury gave him the strength he needed. Silently he lifted his head, opened his eyes, and looked around.

He was in a large, sterile room with white walls and white floors and shining metal surgical instruments laid out down the length of a polished steel shelf bolted to the wall like silverware on display in a wedding registry. In his animal form, he was laid out on his side on a long metal table with a tube attached with tape to a vein in his arm, a patch of fur shaved around it. The group of white-

coated humans stood clustered in front of an X-ray light box on the wall, staring at the illuminated black-and-white film hanging from clips along the top.

When he let out a ear-piercing roar that shivered the rows of metal instruments and echoed through the room like cannon fire, however, they all jumped and stared at him, gasping and bug-eyed, mouths hanging open.

“Jesus Christ!” one of them shouted, lunging for a recessed panel on the wall by the door. “The anesthesia’s already wearing off!” He slammed his hand against the panel, and it popped open, revealing a row of buttons. He stabbed a finger onto one of the buttons, and Julian felt a new heat surge up the vein in his arm.

He glanced down and froze, shocked and horrified by what he was seeing. Or more correctly, what he
wasn’t
seeing.

His legs—both his legs—were gone.

Morgan stood silent and pensive in front of the steam-misted mirror in the bathroom at the safe house, staring down at the necklace and heavy medallion glittering gold in the palm of her hand. She knew the symbol depicted on the medallion, and seeing the large, stylized Egyptian eye made her blood run cold.

It was the same symbol the feral males at the hotel had tattooed on their massive shoulders.

She’d found it when she’d gone searching for something to wear in the dresser after her shower. Most of her luggage had been abandoned at the hotel in the rush to get Xander to the safe house, but Mateo had allowed her to bring two bags. The contents of both had been placed carefully into dresser drawers and hung in the closet by someone—it had to have been Xander—when she was sleeping.