J. Geissinger: Edge of Oblivion

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.

Perhaps even more so.

“I’m not sleeping with you,” Morgan spat from behind him.

Against his will, he summoned the vivid, heart-stopping image of the two of them naked, entangled in the sheets on that very large and decadent bed, Morgan arching and moaning his name beneath him.

“Don’t be stupid,” Xander said through clenched teeth, banishing the lucid illusion. “And don’t flatter yourself. This is only for convenience. I’m not letting you out of my sight.” He turned from the window and leveled her with a lethal stare that drained the blood from her cheeks.

But— God . Even with her blood-drained cheeks and travel-rumpled clothes and the hostility that pulsed off her in waves, her loveliness was astonishing and otherworldly, the kind he’d seen only once before in a painting of an angel by Caravaggio. The kind that made every male in the airport and hotel stop and gape as she passed by.

The unforgettable kind. The dangerous kind.

Even now as he glared murder and mayhem at her, a flash of heat tightened his groin at the ghost of that wanton fantasy of the two of them together on the bed, the same blistering heat that had enveloped him the first time he’d glimpsed her at Sommerley. Tall and lithe and slender as a sapling, with the eloquent eyes of a silent-movie star, she’d walked in the room and all the air had gone out.

Then she’d tripped and he’d reacted on pure instinct to catch her and had taken in a lungful of her scent, warm skin and woman and exotic, dark muskiness, a perfume unlike anything he’d experienced before, fine and feminine and powerfully provocative.

Traitor , he reminded himself. Traitor and liar and mark.

“Well then,” she said, still frozen and fierce. “I hope you enjoy the floor.”

They stared at one another, deadlocked in silent animosity, until there came a tap on the door.

An accented male voice called out, “Porter. I have your bags, sir.”

Morgan sent him one last baleful glare, then moved with stiff grace toward the wheat-and-

cream striped sofa in the sitting room. She dropped her handbag unceremoniously on the floor and perched on the sofa’s overstuffed arm with her arms folded across her chest. One leg, slender and bare, clad in a strappy, high-heeled shoe that seemed useful only for accentuating the delicate bones of her ankle, swung back and forth in agitation.

He gritted his teeth again. Why in God’s name did she have to be wearing a skirt ?

He went to the door, let the bellman in, and indicated where the man should set the bags. There was an inordinately large amount of them—all Morgan’s—and he had to make several trips back and forth from his bell cart in the hallway. The man kept throwing heated glances at the sofa, where Morgan perched while she watched him like a cat when it hears the can opener, all eyes and appetite.

Xander went to get his billfold from the duffel bag on the desk. When he turned back, the porter stood slack-jawed and silent in front of Morgan, stupidly gaping. She brushed her hair back from her face, a gesture that seemed somehow unnatural, as if her hands had just been doing something else, and smiled at him.

“Porter,” Xander snapped. Watching men fall to pieces all over his mark was going to get old, fast.

Blinking, the man turned. Xander held out a fistful of euros and jerked his head toward the door.

“Yes, sir,” the porter murmured and walked over to him—more correctly stumbled over—his face gone a curious and very unnatural shade of green. Xander frowned.

And was able to leap out of the way just as the porter opened his mouth and sent a jet of hot, yellow vomit spraying onto the vanilla carpet in the exact spot he’d just been standing.

Disgusted, he barked a string of curses. The man went to his knees, coughing and spitting, blathering apologies in Italian. From the sofa behind him came a laugh, low and pleased, and he looked up to find Morgan smiling at him, sweet as saccharine and just as fake.