Edge of Oblivion (6 page)

Or accompany convicted felons on needle-in-haystack hunting trips.

Killer or not, he was a beauty. All muscle and sinew and spare, hardened grace, he moved like nothing she’d ever seen, effortless fluidity and instinctual, unstudied prowess. He had a potent, menacing kind of charisma about him, the kind that drew the eye and held it, the kind that captivated the attention to contemplate the disparity of those sensual lips with that merciless expression, that soft, satin skin made for touching with the cold, burning threat of those dead amber eyes. He was carnal and elegant and forbidding, so forbidding even the air seemed to hold its breath as he passed through it.

A jolt of turbulence rattled the cabin, interrupting her study of him. Morgan gasped and stiffened in her seat.

As plush and comfortable as the buttercream leather seats of Leander’s private plane were, she’d soon rip hers to shreds if the turbulence kept up. She
hated
flying. She was a creature of the earth, born to slink through tall grasses and climb the sap-perfumed trunks of trees and laze sleepily in sunlit glens until her tongue was lolling and her fur was hot. Flying was for lesser creatures, for prey —the birds.

Another jolt—this one strong enough to dislodge her duffel bag from the overhead compartment and send it tumbling to the floor—and a sudden drop in altitude that sent her stomach into her throat. She clutched the armrests and closed her eyes, swallowing hard, willing herself not to throw up.

And when she opened her eyes again the assassin was sitting right beside her, staring into her face.

“What—” she blurted, startled, but before she could get it out, he reached over and grasped her wrist. He pressed his thumb and forefinger into the tendon from either side, not hard but not gently either, and the urge to vomit vanished.

“Oh,” she said, and then, “How?” because she couldn’t think of anything else.

“The inner gate.”

His voice was deep and soft, the accent indefinable. Between that, his sudden, molten proximity, and the cold fire of his unblinking tiger’s eyes, Morgan was abruptly speechless, and spinning.
The turbulence
, she thought.
I’m dizzy from the turbulence.
She made a little, wordless questioning sound and tried unsuccessfully to look away.

“It’s an acupressure point,” he added, by way of explanation. He still hadn’t blinked, and she wondered if that came from years of staring down gun sights at fleeing prey. Her wrist was still grasped in his large, warm hand.

“You’re white,” he said when she didn’t reply, and now she wondered if he only spoke in two-

to four-word sentences. Perhaps he wasn’t too bright.

“I’m fine,” she snapped and pulled her wrist from his grip.

Really, what the hell?
she wanted to shout at him.
You don’t want me to throw up but you’re perfectly okay with putting a gun to my head and blowing my brains out?

She assumed it would be a gun. He looked like the type who would own a lot of guns.

“We’ll be landing soon,” he said, and she found herself counting.

Four. Four words. She was overcome by the sudden, incongruous urge to laugh.

In two weeks, if she hadn’t completed her impossible task of finding the never-before-located headquarters of an elusive, cunning enemy in a six-hundred-square-mile city of almost three million people, she was going to be killed by a beautiful idiot. She leaned her head back against the seat and sighed. Her mother must be rolling over in her grave.

“You probably shouldn’t touch me.” She stared up at the curved ceiling and its rows of softly glowing recessed lights. “Or didn’t they tell you that?”

“Suggestion doesn’t work on me.”

Morgan turned to look at him. He really was stupid. Or maybe just stupidly cocky. She resisted the urge to reach out, touch the side of his stupidly beautiful face, and whisper,
Quack like a duck
.

“It works on everyone,” she said drily, emphasizing the last word. “No matter their intelligence level.”

One of his eyebrows lifted, but that was all. He seemed to be waiting for her to continue.

“I can make you do anything I want,” she said, enunciating every word, trying to be clear so this blunt instrument sitting next to her would understand. “It’s my Gift. All I have to do is touch you, Suggest something I want you to do, and you’ll do it.”

His lips curved into a smile that was both wicked and challenging. And not stupid at all.

“Then by all means,” he drawled. He held out his hand in invitation.
“Touch
me.”

Her heart screeched to a stop inside her chest. Then her mind took off, wild and careening, shooting a million miles out into space in the expanse of one second to the next.

She could make him forget.

She could make him forget and make him unconscious and then do the same for the pilot—

well, maybe after they landed—and escape into the never-ending maze of Rome’s storied, sun-washed streets and never be seen again. It was only the three of them, it would be so easy, Leander hadn’t even sent any other guards. She could travel to Paris and Prague and even Iceland if she wanted, she could find her own way in the world and leave Sommerley and the Law and the
Ikati
all behind, forever.

She could be free.

Before he could change his mind, she seized his outstretched hand.

Warmth and a charge of electricity, a tingle up her arm. “Forget me,” she whispered, vehement, staring into the depths of his kohl-rimmed amber eyes. “Forget me and sleep.”

Then, quite inconveniently, nothing happened.

Never, never, never, it’s never happened before. Since infancy I’ve had this Gift, and no one is impervious, no one can resist. I trained for years to be careful not to touch, not to hug, not to think any random thoughts that would hurt one of the tribe
—

“
Meu caro
,” the assassin murmured. He gazed into her eyes, still with that sly, wicked smile, his hand grasped in hers. “My dear. How could one ever forget a woman like you?”

It hit her like a wrecking ball, swift and solid and just as devastating: immune. He was immune. And
toying
with her.

“Son of a bitch!” she hissed and snatched her hand away.

That earned her a laugh, dark and dangerous. “Son of an
Alpha
,” he corrected, reaching behind him to grasp something clipped to his belt. He pulled it out in a move so fast all she registered was the glint of shining silver, the musical
chink
of metal sliding against metal, solid and sleek.

Then his hands were around her throat.

She screamed and pushed back, but she was held in place by the lap belt, her feet struggling to find purchase against the slick, low-nap rug. He was suddenly on top of her, muscle and heat and a low, growled curse, his leg over hers, his arms around her shoulders, his fingers tightening on her neck, cutting off her air. She swung out blindly and connected with his jaw, found a handful of his shining jet hair and yanked as hard as she could. Another curse and then he was off her, standing a few feet away, breathing hard and staring at her with glittering, wary eyes.

She tore off the lap belt and leapt to her feet, lissome and lightning fast, and stood facing him in the middle of the aisle, her feet spread apart, legs flexed, hands balled to fists. Shaking and furious, she realized with a shock that her neck was throbbing and sore where he’d wrapped his hands around it.

He’d
hurt
her.

The urge to Shift came over her in a blinding white spark, violent and primal. Reason and caution and calm were stripped away, replaced by the instinctual and overpowering urge to claw her way out of her human skin and fly roaring through the air to land on top of him and slash out his eyes, tear off his arms, eat out his heart.

“You are going to die,” she snarled and stepped forward.

The heated charge came, then the flare that sparked and caught like gunpowder, then the scent of smoke and honey, the swift and terrible flash of pain as her muscles and tendons and bones began to transfigure into her other self, her
real
self. She inhaled, savoring the pain, savoring the thought of his blood on her tongue.

And then...nothing.

She faltered. The pain in her throat increased, pressure and an odd, electric hum that sent agony flaring down her spine and held her just at the brink of the turn. She lifted her hands to the pain, searching for the source, for the circle of fire that ringed her neck.

Her fingers touched cool metal. There was something around her throat.

“No,” she whispered. Her heart became a sudden, frozen weight inside her chest.

“I’m afraid so,” the assassin answered without regret. He took a step back down the aisle, watching her carefully, his face blank, barren of all emotion. “Your Gift of Suggestion can’t harm me, but I’m afraid fangs and claws are another situation entirely.”

She was horrified. Horrified. She might as well be dead. “You
collared
me!”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to; the evidence was right there, cold and tight against the throbbing pulse in her throat. He just kept backing away toward the front of the plane, toward the closed door that led out of the main cabin into the dining room and media room beyond.

“I can’t live like this! I can’t go two weeks without Shifting!” she shouted, digging her fingers into the skin around the collar, searching for a way to get it off. But even as she did it, she knew there wasn’t a way. The locks, once fitted together, fused closed. It could only be removed by a welder’s torch in a dicey process that often left hideous scars. It was the
Ikati
’s most effective means of punishing minor offenders, and one of their most feared. Living with the collar meant never being able to Shift. It meant staying in human form, for as long as was deemed necessary to foster a more cooperative attitude.

“Find the Expurgari sooner, and it won’t be two weeks,” the assassin suggested, cold as ice. He reached the door and opened it, paused for a moment to gaze at her. She stared back at him in impotent, white-faced fury, her mouth open in horror. “Or perhaps in the meantime,” he said with an evil glint in his eye, “I’ll
forget
why I put it on in the first place.” He turned and disappeared through the door, closing it with a definitive thud behind him.

Morgan sank to her knees in the middle of the aisle, her fingers still clutched around the cold links encircling her throat. “Son of a bitch!” she shrieked.

From behind the closed door, there might have been laughter.

Rome. Spectacular city of living history, of emperors and poets and lovers, of red-tiled roofs hugging a kink in the dark river that winds serpentine through it, of saints and artists and ancient monuments erected in exaltation of long-dead gods.

From the air it looked like a magical fairy-tale city, Morgan thought, gazing out the airplane window to the sprawling maze below. Painted in warm washes of terra cotta and cinnamon and ochre, surrounded by verdant, hilly countryside dotted with crumbling ruins, it glittered rare and beautiful like a topaz against a backdrop of emeralds. The streets were snarled and writhing and interlocked like a drawer full of snakes, forested with bell towers and palazzos and cathedral domes that gleamed gold in the afternoon sun. She felt a thrill of real excitement that she’d soon be walking those streets, which was followed by the sour, jarring realization that
he
would be walking right beside her.

Her fingers stole up again to trace the rigid metal rings of the collar. He better not be in the room with her when it came off, because slicing his face to ribbons with her claws had moved to the very top of her priority list.

The plane shuddered as the landing gear was engaged, and she leaned back into the plush confines of her seat.

First things first
, she thought bitterly, watching the city rise up to meet them.
Beautiful bastard. I’ll find them first, and then I’ll take care of you.

“There’s only one bed,” Morgan declared bitingly and turned to gaze at him in frozen, green-eyed hostility.

“Observant,” Xander replied drily and brushed past her into the plush opulence of the Nijinsky suite. The door swung shut on silent hinges behind him.

The Hotel de Russie was not the most famous hotel in Rome—that honor went to the Hassler, hands down—but it was the best. He’d stayed here on many occasions and appreciated its lush, terraced gardens, its central location between the Spanish Steps and the Piazza del Popolo, its uniquely Roman air of sexy, sophisticated gentility. It was immaculate and beautiful, decorated in classic Italian luxury: silk-paneled walls; gilt-framed oils; copious use of creamy marble and glistening mirrors and the kind of outrageously expensive, decadent bedding found only in five-star hotels or the very finest brothels.

But even the best brothels didn’t offer a pillow menu. It was here he’d first found he had strong feelings on the matter of duck feathers for his pillows versus goose.

He set the small bag with his clothes and the locked leather case that housed his collection of knives—the small collection, for traveling—on the large glass-topped desk in the main room, then walked across the expanse of vanilla carpet to the curtained windows. He pushed aside the ivory silk with one hand and gazed down at the piazza six floors below, at the Egyptian obelisk of Pharaoh Rameses at its center. Relocated to Rome by Caesar Augustus from its original home in Heliopolis—

City of the Sun, oldest of the old Egyptian settlements—it was carved in hieroglyphs and towered over one hundred feet tall, a stark reminder of the blended, bloody history of the two empires.

The Romans had held public executions in the square below for centuries, right up until the last one in 1826. The thought struck him, not for the first time, that the
Ikati
really weren’t all that different from the humans they so despised. More Gifted, perhaps, but just as violent.