Edge of Darkness (28 page)

After Christian’s outburst, Leander’s silence felt deadly. He quietly asked, “And she feels the same way about you?”

There was a pause filled by the sound of Christian’s labored breathing. He whispered, “Yes.”

“Then I feel sorry for her.”

Leander’s tone had entirely changed. Vanished was the sarcasm, the anger and outrage, and in its place: weariness, and a bitter kind of disappointment. “Because I’d rather cut off my own arm than do anything to hurt my woman. But you were willing to let her fall in love with you, knowing there was no future for the two of you, knowing being with you would put her in danger, knowing full well there was nothing in it for her but pain. You, brother, are a
prick
.”

“I know.” Christian’s voice broke. He sounded on the verge of tears. “And I hate myself, believe me. But I just couldn’t stay away. I can’t…I can’t breathe without her, Leander. I tried, I tried
so hard
to let her go. But I couldn’t. My heart didn’t give me a choice.”

There was a low, muttered curse, a long, aggravated sigh, then more silence. Finally, sounding resigned, Leander asked, “How can I help?”

Christian drew a few ragged breaths and Ember imagined him standing there with his jaw tight and his beautiful face flushed, running his hand through his thick dark hair. He said hoarsely, “Afterwards—when it’s done—she’ll need support. She doesn’t have family…she’ll need—”

“We’ll be there,” was his brother’s instant reply.

“God…thank you Leander.” The relief in Christian’s voice was palpable, but Ember barely heard it over the howling ice storm inside her skull.

Christian was going to die.

Tomorrow.

Impossible!
her mind screamed, reeling and recoiling from the horror of it. And then, as Christian and Leander continued to talk, their conversation fading from her hearing as if a dial had been turned down, Ember was gripped but the sudden, fierce conviction Christian was
not
going to die.

Because she was going to save him.

An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. Her own life in trade for his. Then maybe, finally, her soul would be free.

She would find out what his plan was, and do it herself.

Ember waited until Christian and Leander disconnected their call, then with shaking hands she slowly returned the phone to its cradle. She knew if he found her like this, he would immediately be able to tell something was wrong, so she forced herself up, climbing to her feet by dragging herself up the desk with arms like rubber, and walked unsteadily into the bathroom. She shed the sheet on the floor, turned on the water, and stood under the spray, not knowing whether it was hot or cold, if she was burning or freezing, because all her limbs had gone strangely numb under the crushing weight of her new resolve.

Save him.

Yes, that’s exactly what she was going to do.

Disappointment was not something Thirteen was accustomed to, but as he stood in the slanting, sun-dappled light of the unfinished Sagrada Família cathedral’s central nave, and stared up at the soaring columns, designed to look like a forest of trees rising from the floor to the vast, vaulted ceiling above, he felt its ugly sting, and was not pleased.

Today had not gone well.

First he’d been delayed at the hotel by a group of odd men who silently milled around the lobby like a swarm of restless sharks. He’d barely pressed through their sinister, black-clad bulk and made it to the street where he’d hoped to catch a taxi, when they’d exited the hotel en masse and shoved roughly past him into a cavalcade of black SUVs with dark tinted windows that pulled around the corner in a coordinated line and screeched to a stop at the curb. The line of bulky cars idled for a few more minutes, effectively blocking traffic on the narrow street, until another man appeared through the revolving glass doors of the hotel.

Thirteen narrowed his eyes at this new arrival. Big, bald, blinding white as snow on sunlight, he had burn scars on one side of his grim face and walked with a determined, rigid gait, as though in pain but trying not to show it.

Intrigued, Thirteen watched as the big albino climbed into the first SUV and drove away with the cavalcade following behind like ducklings following their mother, all in a row. He went back into the hotel and discreetly inquired at the front desk about the men who’d just left.

“
Sacerdotes
,” came the response from the clerk. “
Desde el Vaticano
.”

If those were priests from the Vatican, he was Mickey Mouse.

But he decided to investigate that later, and finally hailed a taxi to take him to his first stop of the day: the catacombs beneath the
Església de Sant Just
, one of the city’s oldest Christian churches, dating from the fourth century. Much smaller than those beneath Paris where the creatures he hunted once lived, these catacombs were darker and narrower and ultimately a bust.

That was just his first stop. There were many, many underground hiding spots on his list.

Over the past few days he’d explored the parts of the subway that had collapsed into a sinkhole and been abandoned. He explored the sewer system, the stone quarry, the archeological digs that exposed an ancient, subterranean Visigoth town. He’d searched three more churches, two cathedrals, and a castle, all rumored to have catacombs or large underground fortifications, but none of which did.

And now it was just before sunset and he stood empty-handed in the half constructed Sagrada Família with a knot of tourists chattering in a dozen different languages, and he was not happy.

He sighed and reached into his coat pocket. From it he withdrew a typed list, sent to him from the Chairman. There were half a dozen locations beneath those he’d crossed out so far, and the last one on the list looked interesting.
Spanish Civil War bunkers
, it read, with map coordinates beside it. He decided to try that one first tomorrow.

When he arrived back at the hotel, he was surprised to find the desk clerk he’d spoken to in the morning conferring quietly with two uniformed officers of the municipal police. Turning to another guest who had stopped near the door to stare at the pair of officers, Thirteen asked, “What’s going on?”

To which the guest replied with his upper lip curled in distaste, “Some sicko strangled an animal and dumped it in the pool out back. Apparently it had been floating there for days before the gardener found it, bloated as hell.” Thirteen knew the pool had been closed for the winter; the little sign on the front desk attested to that. The guest—a man in his early fifties, with short gray hair and the doughy paunch of someone who enjoys too much food and too little exercise—added, “Can you believe it?”

In fact, Thirteen had no problem believing it. People did all kinds of strange things. His curiosity piqued, he asked, “What kind of animal?”

With a quizzical look in his direction, the man replied, “A goat.”

Then he walked away, while Thirteen mused over the kind of person who would strangle a goat and dump it into a public pool. A sick person no doubt—but a goat seemed an odd choice. Why not a cat, or a dog, something a little easier to come by in the middle of a city, and definitely more discreet than a large, ornery farm animal?

He watched two animal control personnel in khaki coats transport a dripping lump covered in a white sheet through the lobby on a stretcher. The dark shine of a cloven hoof peeked out from beneath one edge, and it occurred to him that a goat was far more symbolic than a house pet. Dogs weren’t historically used as sin offerings, whereas goats…well, there was a reason behind the term “scapegoat.”

A biblical reason.

Two and two clicked together in his mind like a plug into a socket, and Thirteen smiled to himself, wondering when the “priests” would be arriving back at the hotel.

He’d love to have a nice chat with the albino.

A survivor of the Majdanek death camp in Poland during World War II, Ursula Adamowicz was a woman who had long ago been stripped of fear.

By the age of ten, she’d seen both her parents murdered before her eyes, had survived rape, beatings, starvation, and torture, and been forced to watch as thousands of her countrymen were systematically eliminated by such wonderful means as firing squad and burning alive. Once the camp was liberated in 1944, she went to live with a distant relative in Spain, but they were poor, and life was hard. Life had never been anything but hard for Ursula, and she didn’t expect it to be.

So the man standing before her with a gun pointed in her face was not much of a surprise. Or much of threat, for that matter.

“Which apartment?” the dark-haired man growled, holding up a drawing of a young woman.

Ursula inspected the drawing. Quite good, she thought. The artist had talent.

“Two-oh-four,” she replied calmly, pointing to the end of the hall. “But she’s not home. Hasn’t been in a few days.”

The man stepped forward in a menacing way, taut and wild-eyed, but Ursula merely raised her brows at him, refusing to step back and let him in her apartment. Clearly he didn’t expect that, as he blinked at her, confused.

“I don’t know what your business is with her, and I don’t care,” she said bluntly, staring down the barrel of the ominous silver gun. “But I do care if you get blood on the carpet. Bloodstains don’t come out.” Ursula knew from firsthand experience exactly which fabrics and materials bloodstains could be removed from. “So don’t get any blood on the carpet, got it?”

The man blinked at her again, and Ursula shut the door in his face.

Then, with a better idea, she reopened the door. “She works at the little bookstore on Baixada Viladecols—Antiquarian, something like that. Six days a week. You’ll find her there.”

Then she shut the door in his face once again.

She waited a few minutes, until the sound of his receding footsteps had faded off into the evening, then picked up the phone and dialed a number she had written down a month ago and stuck to her refrigerator with a magnet. The number had been broadly advertised on television and radio, in all the papers internationally and locally, even in the gossip rags Ursula liked to read. It was a reward hotline for any information leading to the capture of the notorious terrorist who’d killed the pope, the man known only by the name Caesar.

Ursula knew the man at her door wasn’t Caesar. But with those midnight black eyes, that dark hair, high cheekbones, and sharp, shiny teeth, he sure looked damn close. He was one of those creatures, she was sure of it.

And she knew where he was headed. That kind of information could be very, very lucrative indeed.

“I have to go out for a little while.”

Obviously startled, Ember looked up at Christian from her chair on the back patio, and covered her eyes to shade them from the setting sun. He’d found her here, staring past the rose garden into the dark line of the forest beyond, with her legs pulled up under her chin, pensive and silent.

“Oh. Okay. See you later.”

Christian frowned at this response. No “Where are you going?” No “Can I come with you?” It didn’t seem like her.

Then again, she’d been acting strange all day. He’d gone to the bedroom after his call with Leander in the morning to find her already showered and dressed, standing at the windows with her arms hanging loosely at her sides, breathing deeply and staring off into space. Much like she was doing now. Senses prickling with the certainty something was wrong, he opened his nose, sniffing for the cool, bittersweet tang of sadness, the sour acidity of fear, the telltale heat and spice of anger.

What he smelled was only the natural perfume of her skin; warmed vanilla and orange blossom. He breathed a sigh of relief, crossed to her and pressed a kiss to the top of her head.

“Are you hungry? I can have some food brought out—”

She startled him by looking up into his eyes and blurting in a low, terse voice, “I’m only hungry for you, Christian. Always, only you.”

She reached up, grasped his face, and pulled him down for a fevered and demanding kiss. He broke away with a groan when he felt the all-too-familiar flash of heat to his groin, and chuckled, pulling her out of her chair and wrapping his arms around her. He nuzzled his face into her neck, inhaling the clean, woodsy scent of her hair.

“I’m glad to hear it. But I’ll never get anything done if you keep kissing me like that,” he said, smiling.

“How long will you be gone?” she asked into his shirt, her voice still low.

He stroked his hands over her hair and down her back, trailing his nose down her throat to the warm, steady pulse at the base of her neck. “Just an hour or two.”

He’d arranged a late meeting with the manager at his local bank; he was going to finalize the paperwork that would transfer all his liquid assets to a trust in Ember’s name. He meant what he’d told her: she’d be well taken care of, for the rest of her life. That was the one thing of which he was determined to make sure.

She tipped her head back and looked at him, really
looked
at him, her eyes shadowed and intense, her gaze lingering over his face as if trying to memorize his features. Slanting sunlight caught in her lashes and tipped them fairy dust gold.

Somewhere in the garden, a bird began to trill a song, notes that rose and fell and rose again, haunting and sweet.

“I’ll be waiting for you,” she whispered, staring deep into his eyes. “Don’t take too long.”

Christian frowned at her, certain there was something he was missing, some hidden meaning beneath those words that her tone and the haunting birdsong hinted at, but then she broke into one of her brilliant, heartbreaking smiles, and his heart melted like a pat of butter on a hot scone.

She kissed him again and then pushed him away, still smiling. “Go on, then. Go get your work done. And when you get back…” she cocked a seductive eyebrow, “we’ll have dinner in bed.”

“Oh, you evil temptress,” he said, smiling back at his love, “you have no idea.”

She blew him a kiss and he turned and left, eager to get the errand over with, eager to get back into her waiting arms.

Eager to make every last second together they had really count.

Ember watched him go and felt all her false bravado, and the tenuous calm it had taken her all day to perfect, unravel.

A sob rose in her throat; she smothered it with the back of a hand to her mouth. She couldn’t cry now—not while he was still so close, not when she still had so much left to do.

There would be time enough for crying later.

Knowing he’d be able to sense her moods, she’d done her absolute damndest to quell any stray emotions with the deep breathing and visualization exercises she’d learned all those years ago when she first went into therapy. Calm was a state relatively easy to achieve if one knew how…but extraordinarily difficult to maintain over hours, with adrenaline flooding the central nervous system. She done it with a strength of will she didn’t even realize she had, because she had to fool Christian before she could save him.

She made her way to the front drawing room and watched Christian’s Audi slowly pull away from the circular driveway and disappear up the long gravel road. Then she turned and ran up the curved staircase, her heart pounding like a drum, every nerve on fire.

She checked the master bedroom first. Closets, desks, beneath the bed, in the bathroom. Nothing. She rifled through drawers in the library, she upended boxes that turned out to contain only files, she peered into cupboards and cabinets and the dark, dusty niches of the attic.

Nothing.

Room by room she swept the mansion, looking for anything deadly, any poison or bombs or strange-looking devices, anything that screamed
I can kill you!

But she found nothing. She even searched Corbin’s room because he’d left with Christian, the housekeeper’s room because she was out shopping, and the groundskeeper’s room because he was off on the east side of the front of the property, mowing the emerald lawn. There wasn’t a single thing in the entire mansion that hinted at danger, at least nothing she was able to find.