Rapture's Edge (21 page)

There was a pause, a cleared throat, another pause that felt pregnant. Then Celian said simply, “Love.”

Jenna’s hand stilled. “He fights for love?” she whispered, arrested.

She heard the long exhale from so many miles away, heavy with a hundred unnamed things. “Are our ways so different, Jenna?” He refused to call her Queen as steadfastly as he’d so far refused to join the Council of Alphas, which she didn’t hold against him; in his place, she’d feel exactly the same way about both. This also gave Leander fits. “Where you’re from, will a man not forsake everything he has for the woman that he loves? Even, if necessary, his life?”

Her eyes found Leander’s sleeping form again. No, their ways were not so different. They were not different at all. She murmured, “Even if the woman he loves is the new leader of the group that’s been trying to kill us for centuries?”

Silence. Sudden, crackling anger she felt like a hand around her throat. “Eliana is not her father—”

“No,” Jenna agreed, “she’s not. But she
is
the daughter of the madman who left my sister-in-law maimed for life,
who tortured and killed many of my kin, who kept the heads of his enemies like trophies, and who,” her voice lowered to steel, “had
me
tortured and beaten near to death.”

Celian had no answer to that. Jenna went on, “Blood follows Blood, Celian. It’s the way of our kind. What proof do you have that she—or her brother—hasn’t followed in her father’s footsteps?”

“I can’t speak for her brother,” he replied, his voice tight, “but Demetrius believes Eliana is innocent, therefore so do I.”

It wasn’t enough; the Council of Alphas would say it wasn’t nearly enough to grant the favor he asked, even with his willing capitulation to join them and bow to their will. Demetrius had broken ranks and gone against orders, and that made him dangerous to them all. No matter how much Celian believed in him.

And yet…and yet…

Outside a bird began to sing, a high, trilling warble in the stillness of the pink-lit dawn. Jenna glanced at the expanse of lead-paned windows that ran along the east wall of their bedchamber and saw beyond the sill a tiny white butterfly bobbing above the planted flowerbeds with bumpy grace, settling finally on the open bloom of a rose. The flower didn’t even tremble under its weight.

Life is pain and everyone dies, but true love lives forever.

Her mother’s words. They came back to haunt her at odd moments like these. She’d died years and years ago, but Jenna often wondered if she was still out there somewhere, watching over her.

Reminding her.

Jenna herself was the product of such desperate love and granite loyalty, a child of two star-crossed lovers who paid
the ultimate price for their dreams. She knew what it meant to risk everything, to gamble on love, to lose in the end but never regret one brilliant, doomed moment because what was gained was worth every sacrifice, even death.

Perhaps Demetrius would come to regret following his heart. Perhaps he would be lucky enough to find true love, or cursed enough to lose it—only Fate could tell. But Fate was burdened with the minutia of the universe, and sometimes she needed a little helping hand.

Jenna sat a moment longer, thinking, then came to a decision in her usual way: she went with her gut.

“I’d like to meet this Demetrius of yours, Celian,” she said softly. “And you, too. I admire that kind of loyalty. It’s very rare. And I’m sorry…that we all got off on the wrong foot. The last thing I want is more fighting. More bloodshed. We’ve all had too many years of that.” She paused a moment, allowing the silence between them to deepen. On the other end of the phone, Celian waited, his attention honed sharp as the tip of a knife. Firmer, she said, “I’d like to see you join the confederacy, Celian, but I won’t force you to, even under the circumstances. If we’re going to work together, it has to be on equal footing. You have to
want
to join us. I know all too well what our laws are like.” She smiled, a wry twist of her lips. “Fortunately, I’m above them. So you have your two days. Make them count.”

There was a beat of astonished silence before she heard Celian’s low, amused chuckle. She imagined him shaking his head. “Well, for all the ways your husband and I disagree, at least we can both agree on his taste in women.”

“I’ll tell him you said so.” Jenna glanced back at Leander. Without another word, she ended the call.

She made another call—quick and to the point—and then set the phone back in its cradle on the nightstand beside the bed and snuggled into the space between Leander’s strong arm and warm body, the safest spot in the world.

He turned his head and mumbled something incoherent into her hair. “Sleep, love,” she whispered, closing her eyes and tightening her arms around him. “Go back to sleep.”

They had hours yet before the sun would crest the mountains and he and the Council would discover what she’d done. They might as well both be rested for what lay ahead.

Belief in Fate, like belief in God, requires a certain suspension of
dis
belief, the ability to accept without physical proof that there is something larger than yourself operating behind the scenes in the universe, there is a Plan that’s being followed and your own small life is a part of it.

That was a concept so foreign to Keshav it was rendered not only unimaginable, but entirely ridiculous.

An assassin by trade and by nature, Keshav believed not in Fate but in Chance, Fate’s blind, gleefully chaotic sibling who had no long-term Plan but wreaked havoc on hearts and lives just because he could. Keshav had seen and done too many horrible things to harbor any tender notions of a benevolent God. He knew God was a concept humans had created back in the days when they’d first crawled from the
mud, gasping air with amphibious lungs. God’s primary function was simply to help soothe the primal, animal terror of death.

The primary function of Chance, on the other hand, was to really screw with you.

Perfect example: his current situation.

Chance had not been on their side at the police station. A few moments more and they’d have had their target firmly in hand. But Chance had decided her erstwhile lover would get there first. Fine, Keshav could deal with that, and he did. They swiftly and silently removed the body of their fallen comrade from the wreckage of the building, and then they retreated, they regrouped. They decided on the best spot for a temporary grave—he’d be reburied later in his home soil because it was an abomination for any of their kind to molder in an unnamed grave in a foreign land—and discussed their next move.

Then Chance lobbed them a lovely golden apple: driving from the burial site, the girl ran across their path. Literally, right across it. They were at a stoplight on the outskirts of the city, waiting for the light to change, and she’d sprinted across the street in a blur of raven blue hair and long legs and disappeared over a fence into a quiet neighborhood backyard.

Keshav looked at the other members of The Hunt. They looked back at him. Then, without uttering a word, they abandoned the car right in the middle of the street and took off on foot after her.

Then Chance had found it amusing to equip her with a gun and a human sidekick with a sports car.

As the taillights of the Ferrari faded into the distance down the Rue de l’Arbalete, the five remaining members
of The Hunt slowed from a sprint to a trot, and finally to a standstill. In flashes of swirling gray Vapor, they Shifted back to human form and stood naked in the middle of the empty road, watching.

“Couldn’t have been driving a Fiat,” commented Calder beside him. Originally from the Quebec colony, he was lean and rangy, with a thick scar that ran in a wavering line from his jaw all the way up to his hairline, bisecting one eyebrow. He never said how he’d gotten it, and none of the others had asked.

“Zero to a hundred kilometers per hour in three seconds,” answered Ang, a member of the Nepal colony who had a fetish for expensive cars. He collected and restored them in his spare time. When he wasn’t killing things. “Top speed over three hundred twenty-five kilometers per hour…We’re fast, but not even we can beat that.”

“All right,” said Keshav, cool. He knew Chance wasn’t done with them yet. “Let’s clean up and call it in.”

Clean up
was assassin parlance for
get rid of the bodies
. Two of the team were still back at the building, one felled by bullets, the other flattened by over a ton of metal. The bullets he understood; travelling at over a thousand miles per hour, a bullet headed in your direction affords only milliseconds to react before you’re dead. A car, on the other hand—why that idiot hadn’t just Shifted to Vapor was beyond Keshav’s comprehension. He deserved to get run over.

One by one, the five assassins now did exactly that. Five glittering gray plumes of mist gathered sinuous as smoke, surged up into the cool weight of the night sky, and headed back the way they’d come.

Laurent had worked for nineteen years as the head of the emergency medicine department at the Centre Hospitalier Sainte-Anne, one of the oldest and most prestigious hospitals in Paris. He’d seen nearly every trauma and injury in his long career, and it had been many years since he’d been surprised by what occurred in hospitals, by what people did to one another in anger or to themselves in despair.

But tonight had proven he still had the capacity to be shocked.

He
heard
their approach first. He’d been standing at the nurse’s station near the sliding doors to the entrance of the ER, flicking through the admitting form for a patient with a severe head cold who was convinced she was dying of plague, when from somewhere down the street outside came the distinct sound of a car screeching to a protracted halt, its brakes locked and screaming in protest. Whatever the driver of the car had been trying to avoid, he failed spectacularly because the car in question came flying into the hospital parking lot and collided with half a dozen parked cars as it careened to and fro like a pinball in an arcade game, and then as Laurent and the night nurse at the desk watched in openmouthed horror, it made a beeline for the sliding glass emergency room doors.

At full speed.

He leapt over the desk, grabbed the frozen nurse by her fleshy white bicep, and ran.

At the last second the driver gained a measure of control over the car. And by measure, Laurent would later tell his wife, I mean
une petit quantité
. A smidge. A squealing sideways slide slowed it down enough so that when the low-slung sports car finally made impact with the building, it only destroyed the row of groomed rosemary bushes along
the front walk, the wrought iron railing beside them, and a portion of the low brick wall where he sat contemplating his sins during his smoke breaks. A rather substantial portion, but it could have been much worse.

When the smoke had cleared and the flying bricks and shrubbery had settled and the only noise was the angry hiss of a fractured radiator releasing pressurized steam, Laurent emerged from his hiding place behind the tiled column near the staff elevators just in time to see a woman—young, indigo-haired, half-dressed in men’s underclothing—tear off the driver’s door of a mostly demolished Ferrari, toss it aside like it weighed no more than a feather, and lift an unconscious, bleeding man twice her size in her arms.

His first thought was
PCP
.

Long out of fashion but still available, the hallucinogenic drug phencyclidine tended to imbue users with superhuman strength. When it wasn’t making them schizophrenic. His second thought as the duo entered through the sliding doors and the woman pierced him with her eyes—silvery-black and glittering, like coins at the bottom of a wishing well—was
Dieu aidez-moi!

God help me.

She was supernaturally stunning, with an abstract face and courtesan’s body Picasso would have swooned over. She possessed a weird species of beauty, the type average people have no words or use for, alien and compelling, all lips and eyes and smoldering stare. Seeing her, Laurent thought for a moment he was having a heart attack. She literally took his breath away.

“You!” she growled, freezing him in place with those ferocious inkwell eyes. “Help me!”

Her French was nearly perfect, but not completely so; obviously, she wasn’t a native speaker. Perhaps she hailed from Mars.

“
Now!
” she said as he remained rooted to the linoleum. The word was hard as two fingers snapping, and it jolted Laurent into action.

“In there.” He pointed to an exam room just behind her, watching as she shouldered through the door and gently deposited the man she carried on the white-sheeted hospital bed. A quick glance over his shoulder and a mouthed instruction to Michelle, the night nurse—
Call the police
—and he followed her in.

“He’s been shot.” The alien beauty stepped back to allow Laurent to move closer.

He took his glasses from the pocket of his white lab coat and donned them, snapped on a pair of thin nitrile gloves, and did a quick, cursory examination of the victim. Blood had spread in an erratic circle over the front of his button-down dress shirt, and Laurent ripped it open with a yank that sent buttons flying. There it was—a perfect, round hole four inches below the burly man’s collarbone. Just above—or in—his heart.