J. Geissinger - Edge of Oblivion

“He can only take blood from an Ikati female,” she said, exasperated at their continued silence, their narrow-eyed hostility. “And if he doesn’t get it soon, he’s going to die. Right?” she added, glancing at the human. With a quick, birdlike dip of his white head, he nodded. She nodded back, already knowing the answer before she asked. Ikati had no blood types, no blood-borne diseases, and human blood was useless to them, as weak as water. Only a female could give a male blood and vice versa.

“So I’m offering,” she said in conclusion.

Still no response. Mateo and Tomás stared at her while somewhere outside a dog began to bark.

Morgan exhaled and dropped her arms to her side. The exhaustion sank down to stain her bones, and it felt suddenly as if her skin were too tight. “Fine,” she said, bitter. “It’s on you, then.

When the Assembly asks what happened, it’s on you.”

She turned and was about to walk to the phone on the glass-topped desk in the living room to call Leander when Mateo’s gravel-rough voice stopped her.

“Why would you do that?”

In her stiff, blood-encrusted clothes, Morgan turned back and looked at him. He gazed back at her, all muscle and bulk and green-eyed menace, the light shining raven blue off his hair.

“If I’m not mistaken, his assignment is to kill you, if you fail in your task. Why would you give him your blood?” he persisted.

Good question. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a good answer. At least, not one that made any kind of sense. She stood there for almost a minute, thinking.

“He just saved my life,” she finally answered, gesturing to the two bodies sprawled in gory proof on the terrace, the living room floor. “I owe him the chance, at least. He deserves that much from me. And...because I want him to live.” She blew out a long, exhausted breath, realizing how insane she sounded for even saying it, realizing too it was God’s honest truth. “Even if it means...”

that he’s ultimately going to have to kill me , she thought. And that I am a self-destructive moron with a death wish. But she didn’t say that. Instead she lamely ended with, “...you know.”

A nerve behind her eye throbbed, sending a spike of pain through her skull. She pressed her fingers against it, thinking this was going to be the mother of all migraines. And how was that possible, since she’d never had one before? Only humans suffered headaches. Humans and Ikati females who were about to—

“You honor us,” Mateo said, husky.

Blinking, she dropped her hand from her face and looked at him. He was gazing back at her with something like...awe.

“What?” She glanced at Tomás, whose expression had changed from one of total suspicion only seconds before to one that looked alarmingly close to gratitude.

“What you do to any one of us, you do to every one,” Tomás replied, cryptic, his mirror eyes gone curiously round.

Morgan looked back and forth between the two Ikati males and the frozen, dumfounded human doctor. “Uh...”

“It’s their code,” the doctor said with a swift glance to his companions. He pushed his glasses up farther on his nose. “The assassin’s code. Cross one, cross us all. Kill one, kill us all. Love one ...”

He cleared his throat. “ Love us all. ”

“More assassins,” Morgan said, a little more feebly than she would have liked. She closed her eyes. “How many of you are there, exactly?”

“Four,” said Mateo and Tomás together.

Could have been worse. At least it wasn’t four hundred. She glanced down at Xander, back up to them. “Where’s the other one?”

It was Mateo who answered this time. “Waiting downstairs with the car.”

“The car?”

His rough voice was tinged with something like amusement. “You didn’t think we were going to fly out of here, did you?”

A girl can only hope. “Okay. Let’s get this over with,” she sighed.

“Hop to, Doc,” Mateo said to Bartleby.

The doctor leapt into a blur of action. He snatched up his black bag and removed a large, wicked-looking syringe and a length of plastic tubing with pointed silver cannulas at each end. He threaded the tubing through the syringe, readied a small glass bottle that smelled like alcohol, a stack of white bandages, and cotton swabs, and set all of it on the table beside Xander’s still form. He snapped on a pair of thin latex gloves.

“On the table, if you please.” He motioned with an open hand to the long dining table. Morgan sat on the edge with as much dignity as she could muster in her bloodstained clothes with her bare legs dangling over the side like a child’s. She crossed then uncrossed her legs, noting with no small trepidation that neither Mateo nor Tomás was looking at anything but her.

She felt like an ant under a very large—very male —microscope.

“You should lie down,” said Bartleby gently. He made to lift a hand to her shoulder, but a low snarl from Tomás quickly divested him of that idea. His hand dropped to his side. His face went pink.

“Would you please lie down?”

“Is it really necessary?”

“You might find yourself a bit light-headed,” he said, glancing between Mateo and Tomás.

When he spoke again his voice was apologetic. “And it’s going to sting.”

She looked down at Xander, beautiful and unconscious and on the verge of death, and wondered if it would sting as much as a knife thrust between the vertebrae of her neck. The thought made the blood drain from her face. She lay down beside him in one quick motion. The doctor rolled up the sleeve of her blouse and swabbed her arm with alcohol.

“How long will it take?”

“Not long.” He carefully swabbed Xander’s arm, then repositioned it, palm up, trying to balance it on his hip. It didn’t work. “Hold it like this, if you would,” he said to Mateo. The assassin complied, silently, looming so large over the table he blocked out the orb of light from the lamp on the ceiling above.

She closed her eyes, breathed in through her nose, and tried not to think about the colossal stupidity of what she was doing.

There was a prick of pain at her arm, the bite of cold steel sliding into her vein, a pull as the syringe was depressed and her blood was pumped out of her body. Then nothing.

She spoke into the hush without opening her eyes. “Is it working?”

“Perfectly,” Bartleby murmured. “Just a moment more and it will hit his vein—” Xander gave a jolt as if he’d been electrocuted.

Her lids flew open. Beside her, his large body had jackknifed into a straining, muscled bow that both Mateo and Tomás were doing their best to subdue by wrestling him back down to the table.

“What’s wrong?” she cried, panicking. She sat up abruptly and was dizzy. “What happened?”

“It’s fine, it’s completely normal,” Bartleby soothed, reaching out to check the needle in her arm and the connection with Xander’s. He sent her an odd, sideways look. “It’s just your blood hitting his system. Please remain as still as you can. He’ll acclimate to it in a moment.”

And, as she watched in startled fascination, he did.

The muscles of his arm relaxed first. Then his jaw unclenched, his back, his legs. With a low moan that reverberated all the way through her body, Xander slumped back against the cool, polished wood and gave a long, shuddering sigh. Heat radiated out from him in pulsing waves as if he were engulfed in invisible flame.

Mateo and Tomás relaxed as well and blew out hard, relieved breaths. They gave each other one of the looks the doctor had just sent her, and she was abruptly embarrassed.