Edge of Oblivion (39 page)

Consuming. Demonic.

Memories rose to assault his senses: her eyes, skin, hair, lips, scent. Words spoken, hushed and reverent, hoarse and pleading. Pleasures shared. Skin on heated skin. Love. He swallowed to try and ease the ache in his chest, breathed deep to counteract a sudden light-headedness. “Morgan,” he softly groaned.

And then a rushing cold wind engulfed him, roaring in his ears.

Underground—clammy air—dusty stone—bones and shadows and—

Danger. She was in danger, and terrified.

Xander leapt to his feet. He gazed out over the rooftops of Rome, feeling a pull like gravity, his blood scorching fire through his veins. Her name like a drumbeat inside his head, loudest when he looked west, deafening when he spied the golden, rounded rooftop of St. Peter’s Basilica.

All the breath left his body as if he’d been punched.

“I’m coming, baby,” he snarled, and took off in a flat-out run.

Morgan awoke to a jackhammer pounding pure agony through her skull.

With a moan, she lifted her head, wincing in pain. A quick glance around revealed a vast, shadowed stone chamber decorated by an eccentric hoarder with a fondness for Edwardian Gothic decor and the color red. Every inch of floor space was crammed with antiques that looked valuable and very old, and everything was saturated in shades of fresh-spilled blood, from the patterned rugs to the elaborate velvet-upholstered furniture to the woven tapestries on the walls. Even the heavy iron braziers that lined the walls had candles of red that cast a demonic, dancing glow over everything.

The chamber was retrofitted with an enormous, intricate limestone skeleton that hugged the soaring walls and created the illusion of the interior of a medieval cathedral with clustered columns, pointed ribbed vaults, and flamboyant tracery in stained-glass windows that looked out onto nothing.

There were statues and oils and carved figures of saints, gargoyles leering down from peaked columns, suits of armor and displays of antique weaponry, rows of crested flags hanging far above.

It was astonishing, morbidly beautiful, and very cold. No fireplace or other visible source of heat warmed the chamber, and the damp, clinging air sank down to chill her bones.

And there was the matter of her
head
.

She gingerly explored the back of her skull with her fingers and found an enormous, tender knot lurking just behind her left ear. When she pulled her hand away it was slick with blood.

“Damn,” she muttered. What had happened? The last thing she remembered was the tomb of the Egyptians, the sarcophagus, the steps—

“My apologies,” said a low, silky voice to her right, “but my guards tend to be a bit overzealous in their treatment of intruders. How are you feeling?”

She snapped her head around—the room went spinning—and there he was, the feral Alpha in white. He was as slickly handsome as she remembered, reclining on an elaborately carved velvet divan a few feet away. He watched her with hooded black eyes and a lazy, sinister smile.

Her body went cold, colder even than the room. “
You
,” she whispered.

He looked faintly amused. His brows lifted. “My name is Dominus, Morgan. And yes, me. You were expecting Santa Claus?”

Fight-or-flight adrenaline coursed through her body, electrifying, primal. She kept herself in the chair through sheer force of will, but her hands began, slightly, to shake.

“How do you know my name?”

“I know everything about you, elegant guest. Your strengths and weaknesses, your greatest joys, your deepest fears. You might even say I know you better than you know yourself. The inside of your mind is a very...interesting place to be.” His sinister smile grew wider. “By the way, you’re in terrible denial about that problem of yours.”

She stared at him, the shaking in her hands growing worse by the second.

“In love with an assassin?” he mused. “Hired to kill
you
? Tsk. That’s more than just your garden-variety self-loathing, my dear. That’s truly pathological. “

Morgan tried to leap to her feet—and couldn’t. Horrified, she looked down at her legs, but there were no restraints, no visible injuries, just the chair beneath her, another chunky dark velvet affair that looked transported from an eighteenth-century bordello.

I don’t need restraints to keep you where I want you, deliciae
, a voice whispered in her mind.

Even without spoken words she heard his amusement, his smug tone of victory, and the anger that flooded her body finally provided some much-needed warmth.

“Stay the hell out of my head!”

His face darkened. Suddenly she couldn’t move her arms either. They fell limp to her sides, and though she tried frantically to get them to respond, nothing happened. It was as if her spinal cord had been severed at her neck.

“Demands are not something I tolerate from my females,” Dominus said, deadly soft, gazing at her from the shadows with menaced focus like a predator contemplating its next meal.

“Since you know everything about me, you should know I’m not
yours
,” she snapped.

Pain exploded in a white-hot firework behind her right eye. She stiffened and gasped.

Languidly Dominus unfolded himself from the divan. He came to stand beside her and slowly stroked a cold, cold finger down her cheek, watching its progress with glittering, hungry eyes.

“Aren’t you?” he murmured. His smile struck a note of pure terror in her heart.

Stand
, came the unspoken command.

Without a breath of hesitation, her limbs leapt to comply, and she was on her feet, speechless and furious and terrified, her body a puppet to his invisible strings. The pain behind her eye radiated through her head, searing, blisteringly hot, and she had to bite her lip hard to keep from screaming.

Dominus began a slow circle around her, inspecting, smiling his malevolent smile. She was frozen, mummified, unable even to move her eyes to follow his progress. She felt a soft touch on her shoulder, a slight tug as his fingers combed through her hair, a gentle hand caressed her back. As his hand slid down to linger possessively at her waist, her skin crawled as if a thousand spiders were scuttling over her body.

“All of this is mine,” he murmured. “Your every thought, your every feeling, every muscle and bone and sinew in this perfect, beautiful body is mine. And from now on, it always will be.”

“
No.
” Half whisper, half moan, it brought him to a standstill.

“No?” came his softly spoken challenge. The pain in her head gathered into a shrieking, howling monster with sharp, gnashing teeth that ripped and tore and shredded her flesh, a dragon devouring villagers and spewing fire inside her skull.

Dominus said, “You sound unconvinced. Perhaps a demonstration is in order.”

He grasped her by the wrist and lifted her arm away from her body, turned it in various positions until he found one he liked. Then with a murmured, “Stay,” he released it, took up her other arm, and repeated the same procedure, then angled her head. In a moment she was posed like a Renaissance statue in the posture he’d chosen, and she stood helpless in suffocating, blistering agony, buried alive.

“Venus in chains,” Dominus murmured, transfixed.

His gaze raked over her figure, ravenous, and he looked for a moment as if he would pounce on her and devour her whole. But he took several slow, deep breaths, and the rabid excitement in his eyes eventually dimmed. “Pain is a very powerful motivator, Morgan. Most creatures will do anything to avoid it. Anything at all.” He licked his lips, slow and deliberate. “Can you guess what I require from you in order for the pain to go away?”

Unable to answer, she made a high-pitched sound of terror that sounded like a mouse when it spots the cat in midleap.

“
O-be-di-ence.
” He drew it out, lovingly emphasizing each syllable. “You will obey me in all things. You will do whatever I ask without hesitation or I will leave you standing here like this, in agony, until you rot on your feet. Which, I happen to know from experience, takes about three weeks.”

With an elegant gesture of his manicured hand, he indicated a pile of bleached bones jumbled in a huge, hideous white mess in one dark corner beside a basalt statue of the devil.

Her heart heaved. Sputtered. Started up again with a painful throb.

Dominus moved closer. “But I don’t want to do that.” His voice was tender now, stroking, and his eyes had grown soft. He touched a finger to her lower lip. “I have other things in mind for you. For
us
. Give me your word you will behave and I will release you, and we can begin again.”

“And in return?” she whispered, stalling. Sweat beaded along her hairline, trickled in a cold rivulet down the back of her neck. “If I agree to...obey...what will you give me?”

First he looked angry: his eyes flared; his handsome mouth drew to a hard, flat line. He dropped his hand from her face and made a fist at his side, and she braced herself for a punch. But then another emotion softened his face, and for a moment he looked younger, almost wistful.

“Are you
negotiating
with me?”

He sounded amused, amazed, but most of all intrigued.

“I would like to
not
rot on my feet,” she said, faint. “But I will if it means I have to sacrifice free will. I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees, which if you
really
knew me would be obvious.” She moistened her lips. “And because you don’t—that makes me think you might be full of shit.”

He inhaled a sharp, astonished breath. His mouth dropped open. His eyes, coal black and burning, popped wide. He stared at her in silence while the candles sputtered in a sudden cold breeze and the blood roared wild through her veins.

“No one has ever spoken to me like that,” he hissed, unblinking. A flush of crimson rose up his neck, and for a horrible, breathless moment, he did nothing at all.

Then—impossibly—he began to laugh.

It echoed through the vast chamber like a thing alive. It bounced off the walls and split into a hundred different laughs, each one darker and more sinister than the last. He sat back down on the velvet divan and gave himself over to it, head thrown back, eyes closed, white teeth shining in the gloom. In a moment his laughter tapered off and he composed himself and sat gazing at her with a finger rubbing his full, smiling lips.

“You amuse me,” he said, surprised. “I had no idea when I chose you that you’d be so...interesting.” And with a little flick of his hand, he released her from his control and the pain simultaneously vanished.

Morgan collapsed into the overstuffed chair, gulping air, fighting down nausea, hot and sour.

Her mind wasn’t working, her body wasn’t working. She had to
think
!

“Ch-chose me?” she managed.

“To help me infiltrate the other colonies,” he replied, matter-of-fact. “My people had been watching them all—well, the three I knew of—for years, looking for a weak link, for someone who didn’t fit, someone rebellious, someone, perhaps, who might want a little,” he waved his fingers, coyly searching for a word, “
vindictam
?”

Vengeance.

“But we could never find a chink in their armor. Until...you. And you were so ripe for the taking.” He smiled. “So much loneliness. So much
anger
. Turning you was hardly any work at all.”

An iceberg slid silently over her and crushed her with its cold, massive weight. Suddenly, horribly, she understood everything with a blinding, brilliant clarity, like sunlight reflected off snow.

“Oh my God,” she whispered.

“Yes,” he smiled wider, “I
am
your god, Morgan. God of vengeance, god of war, god of salvation, who will release our entire race from the oppression of man. It’s taken a lifetime of planning, but now all the players are positioned perfectly on the board and the
Ikati
will, finally, have checkmate. No little thanks to you.”

Her stomach heaved. The sudden, wretched knowledge of what he had done, of the part she had so willingly played, burned like poison in her throat.

“You—you planned this,” she sputtered. “You planned all of this!
You set me up!
”

His smile grew dangerous. “You were an easy target.”

“You killed your own kind!” she shouted as blood flooded her face. “You had them tortured!

You worked with
humans
—”

“Destruction is one of nature’s mandates, as the Marquis de Sade so eloquently said,” he answered calmly, “and a king must be willing to sacrifice a few rooks in order to win a war. And as you know, lovely Morgan, we have been engaged in war since the beginning of time.”

She hated him, hated him with a ferocity that made her heart pound and her fingers itch to claw his eyes out. “You
bastard
! We’ve been hunted for centuries—forced to run—forced to
hide
—”

“
Silence!
” he shouted, and leapt from the divan.

He began to pace in front of her, lithe and menacing, bristling like a caged animal. He ran an agitated hand through the mane of his silver-black hair.

“
They
started this.
They
declared war on us. Are you familiar with the old adage ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer’? That is what the Alphas of my lineage have done since the Inquisition began in twelve thirty-one. My ancestors quickly realized that a church-sanctioned mass-

murder spree was a golden opportunity to infiltrate the bastion of human leadership and wreak a little havoc of their own,
vengeance
, if you will. What a wonderful excuse to kill humans! And in such imaginative ways!” He stopped pacing and turned to look at her. His voice dropped an octave, and his expression sent a chill of fear over her skin.