J. Geissinger - Edge of Oblivion

In a tone filled with dark threat, he said, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

“Well, obviously you’re not me. And going down there is exactly what I’m going to do.”

“No,” he replied, emphatic. “You’re not.”

Morgan pushed her windblown hair from her eyes and glared at him. “I’m not asking permission!”

“And I’m not making a suggestion. You’re not going anywhere but down those stairs”—he jerked his head, indicating the wide stone steps that led to the lower levels and the street—“and back to the hotel. With me. Now. ”

His hands were empty and flexed open. He stood with his legs apart, knees slightly bent, weight on the balls of his feet. Fighting stance. She recognized it from years of fencing lessons she’d been forced to take by her father. His archaic ideas of femininity were probably surpassed only by those of this dust-encrusted Spartan glaring daggers at her.

“I didn’t realize Leander sent you along so you could irritate me to death.”

He smiled—grim, without a trace of humor or warmth—and answered in the most menacing tone she’d ever heard, delivered soft as silk. “Whatever works.”

Oh, oh, and oh . The flush of blood that crept up her neck to spread throbbing over her ears was hot, painfully so. She felt shamed and unsteady, unduly exposed, and knew without question he had aimed for exactly that.

Don’t let him see it! Don’t let him win!

“You’re lucky you collared me.” Her voice was steady, her face was composed, but everything inside was a riot of lashing emotion. The need to Shift ate through her blood like acid, but she was crippled by the damn collar. That’d he’d put on. She cocked her head and let her gaze travel over him.

Measuring. “But I’ll bet...”

“What?” he prompted. His fingers flexed.

She smiled sweetly at him. “I’ll bet I’m still faster than you.”

A heartbeat before he recognized the challenge, then his expression changed, a microscopic shift from flat contempt to something more heated, closer to curiosity, or anticipation. “Don’t even think—” Before he could finish his sentence, Morgan turned, took two long, running steps, and launched herself off the Colosseum’s highest wall and out into empty space.

When she was fifteen years old, Morgan Shifted for the first time.

Tremors of it had been surfacing for years. A flash of illusory pain in her bones, an unexpected sharpening of smell and hearing. All the Ikati had heightened senses from birth, but suddenly she was able to smell a bird on the wing from miles off and know if it was hawk or starling, suddenly she was able to see every dewdrop on every blade of grass on the lawn outside from the window of her second-

story bedroom. She heard the fir trees humming with sap, she tasted rain days ahead, she felt the earth turn beneath her feet. All of nature came into brilliant, perfect focus, and she was at the very center of it all, a locus of awareness.

Then, on the morning of her fifteenth birthday, she finally Shifted to panther and discovered that in addition to strength and agility and sharpened senses, she could run so very fast.

She knew that even with the collar she’d still have that lightning speed. And there was no chance in hell Mr. Rules and Regulations would Shift to pursue her, because the Law expressly forbade them from Shifting in front of humans.

He’d have to follow her on foot.

She sailed through the warm evening air, suspended for a breathless moment—heart pounding, arms spread wide, hair snapping in a long, dark flag behind her—and landed on a patch of grass just feet from a stone bench where two lovers were locked in a passionate embrace. They broke apart with gasps and began to exclaim in startled Italian, but she ignored them and concentrated instead on regaining her equilibrium. The ground was hard and the jolt hurt like hell, but she knew no bones would be broken. A fifteen-story free fall really wasn’t all that bad; she’d once fallen twice as far from the top of an ancient, towering fir in the New Forest at Sommerley and barely been bruised.

Breathing heavily, still crouched on the ground, she looked over her shoulder and craned her neck to where she’d just been to see if he’d followed.

But he hadn’t. He stared down, a small figure in black awash in gold lights, alone at the top of the Colosseum, watching her with those canny amber eyes. Feeling strong and alive and free , she blew him a kiss, then took off at a run.

From the uppermost arcade wall, Xander watched as Morgan, in a truly astonishing display of impudence, lifted her hand to her face, puckered her red, generous lips, and blew him a kiss.

In spite of himself, he huffed a short, disbelieving laugh. He was Ira de Deus . Famed, feared assassin. Bringer of death.

No one— no one —had ever treated him with such disrespect.

His regard for her grew in exact proportion to his outrage. He’d never met anyone who’d dared take such liberties as this. She was cocky and defiant, definitely reckless, and seemed to care not a damn about his reputation or the very real and imminent possibility he would be the one to end her life.

She was...fearless. He’d never met anyone like her.

For a brief, deranged moment as he watched her rise from her crouch on the grass and sprint off barefoot across the boulevard, traffic screeching to a halt in both directions as she passed, he was held fixed by surprise and admiration and simply watched her run. She bounded graceful and fleet like a Thomson’s gazelle through the snarl of cars and taxis and Vespas, even clearing the hood of a red Fiat that didn’t stop in time in one graceful, long-legged leap.

His hand lifted automatically to the Ba Gua Zhang crescent moon knives sheathed in a slim leather scabbard at the small of his back, hidden inside his belt. Gifted to him by his capoeira master when he was just a boy, they were fifteenth-century throwing knives, folding and perfectly weighted, in pristine condition though frequently used.

He hesitated, then dropped his hand. Had it been anyone else, there would have been a blade protruding between those swiftly retreating shoulders by now. Deserters were a dire threat to the tribe, and he’d caught—or killed—every one he’d been sent to look for.

But it isn’t anyone else. The thought rose, errant, to needle him. It’s her.

Without bothering to examine exactly what that meant, he lifted his gaze to the sky and saw the twinkling stars, the fat, perfect pearl of the rising moon. Then he closed his eyes and let it rise to a burning peak within him, the writhing bright power of the Shift, ever there just beneath his skin.

Then, without noise or warning, he dissolved into mist.

It was the same every time, effortless as breathing, a mere focus of the will. As if an eyelid had been peeled back to reveal everything around him in vivid color from all angles, he perceived above and below exactly as he perceived forward and back. There was no impediment to his sight, though he lacked eyes through which to focus or even, for that matter, a head. He existed as a part of the very air itself, weightless, and moved through it by applied thought— up, down, fast, slow .

The one inconvenience was his clothes. Anything he wore or held in his hands simply dropped to the ground as his body dissolved into mist. He’d never been able to take things with him as Vapor, but he had another utterly unique and powerful Gift at his disposal for that.

He’d come back for his clothes and knives later. Right now he had a runaway to catch.