J. Geissinger - Edge of Oblivion

The three of them stood in uncomfortable silence until Tomás finally spoke.

“He’ll get over it. He’s just worried about you. And he’s probably just jealous. That girl of yours is one serious piece of—” Cut off by Xander’s deep, warning growl, Tomás threw up his hands. “Point taken! I’m not saying another word.”

Julian spoke. “You won’t be able to stay here without...you know. That’s a physical impossibility.”

“I can control myself,” he said, stiff.

Julian glanced down at the bulge straining in Xander’s pants. “Sure you can.”

“X,” said Tomás, very quietly. Their eyes met, and Xander saw something he’d never seen there before: pity. “Don’t make this another Esperanza, man. You couldn’t save her, and you can’t save this one either. Don’t be a fucking tragedy.”

Xander walked up to Tomás, pressed his chest against the other male’s, and stood looking at him, eye to eye, nose to nose, vibrating rage. When he spoke, his voice was low, controlled, and cold as ice.

“Back off, Tomás. You’re stepping into a minefield. And we all know what happens to fools who take strolls in minefields.”

They stood like that, eyeball to eyeball, unblinking, until Julian intervened. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he spat, shoving them apart. “What the hell is wrong with you! We’re on the same team, you idiots!”

“Tell that to your friend Romeo,” Tomás snarled, then turned his back and headed for the stairs. He went up, but stopped halfway. He turned and fixed Xander with a hard look. “Take the next three days to get your head straight, bro. Fuck her, don’t fuck her, I really don’t give a shit. But if you don’t finish her when you’re supposed to, you know what happens. The Assembly will come to us.

Then we’ll have to take her out, and you too, you dumb fuck. Otherwise we’re all dead meat. So don’t put us in that position. We’ve been through too much together to get killed for a skirt.”

Then he stalked up the stairs, leaving Xander alone with a pensive Julian.

“Sorry, X,” he said, sounding as if he truly were. “But he’s right. You know he’s right.” He clapped a hand on Xander’s shoulder in farewell, then, like his two brothers before him, made his way to the stairs.

“There’s a feral colony somewhere in the vicinity of the Vatican,” Xander said to Julian’s retreating back. The big male spun around to face him, eyes wide. Xander went on, his voice dull, his heart clenched to a fist in his chest. “Those two males you saw in the hotel room weren’t deserters.

They’re feral; they don’t belong to any of the known colonies. They were with four others when I first saw them. And there’s another, an older male who I think is their leader. So if there’s that many males, there’s females. There’s a colony nearby.”

“How?” Julian said, shocked.

Xander looked at the white tile floor, shook his head, took a deep breath, and blew it out. “I don’t know. But they want Morgan.” He looked up into Julian’s wide eyes, and his voice took on a darkly menacing tone. “And I’m not going to let them have her.”

“Oh, man,” said Julian, shaking his head. “This situation has gone totally FUBAR.”

Xander allowed himself a small, mirthless smile. FUBAR was one of the many slang terms that peppered the speech of the three members of the Syndicate who’d trained in the American military.

The abbreviation stood for fucked up beyond all recognition .

“Just remember,” Xander said without a hint of sarcasm, knowing from experience he was right about this, “things can always get worse.” Then he crossed the kitchen, clapped his hand on Julian’s shoulder, and took the stairs three at a time, heading for the gym.

D was dreaming.

A part of his mind—the part that was always lucid, whether he was asleep, awake, or stone-

cold drunk—recognized this fact and began to record the details of the dream so he could access them when he woke. Many of his dreams meant nothing; many more held fractured clues that he had to fit together like puzzle pieces over a few days or weeks in order to see the full picture of the future his dreams painted for him.

But some dreams, like the one he was enmeshed in now, arrived fully formed and presented him with an image of the future as vivid as a van Gogh.

He’d had the Gift of Foresight since birth, long before he was able to Shift to Vapor or panther, long before he realized what the dreams actually were. And though it was an incredibly powerful Gift —one he’d been careful to downplay just as he minimized his intelligence and maximized his ruthlessness because he believed that being underestimated and misunderstood put him at a distinct advantage with friend and foe alike—he hated it with every fiber of his being.

Because knowing exactly how and when everyone you loved was going to die was not a walk in the park.

Someone was dying in this dream, too, but not someone D loved. It was the strange male with the flaming orange tiger eyes Celian had fired on at the Vatican, the one who had so impressed the Bellatorum with his display of fearlessness and bravado, the one who had taunted them with lewd gestures and feigned boredom and a mocking smile.

The one who could walk through walls. Whose body filtered bullets like a fan filtered air.

In the dream a knife protruded from the male’s back, sunk hilt-deep between his shoulder blades. There was a great deal of blood, spurting from the wound and splattering over the black stone floor, running in tiny crimson rivulets over the fist clenched around the blade of the knife, the fist that twisted the blade and sent the male crashing to his knees with a bellow.

It was Dominus who had plunged the knife into the male’s back. Dominus who twisted it.

Dominus who stood grinning over the male as he collapsed sideways onto the floor and lay there, silent and still, leaking out his life in swiftly widening circles that pooled beneath him and glinted red in the candlelight.

The beautiful full-Blood female was there, too, chained naked to the fovea wall behind them where Celian had been whipped near to death at midnight when Lucien and Aurelio had failed to show up. Thrashing against the steel cuffs that held her wrists overhead, she screamed something he couldn’t make out, screamed with such force and anguish it sent a concussion like a detonated bomb through the room and buffeted Dominus forward several feet, knocking him off balance.

None of this surprised D’s dream self. Dominus always won. He always had. And clearly the male would have to die if the female was to be taken. Whoever he was, he was dangerous, and powerful, and wouldn’t give her up without a fight. She was obviously powerful, too; all you had to do was be near her to feel the unique, humming current exuded by the most pure-Blooded of their kind.

What surprised D was when a coldly smiling Constantine appeared behind Dominus, pointed a gun at his head, and pulled the trigger.

“D! D! Demetrius! Wake up!”

Lix’s voice pierced the dream like a dagger punched through skin. He sat up abruptly in bed and looked wildly around, weighing the darkness, feeling his heart like a hammer in his chest.

Everything was exactly as he’d left it when he’d fallen asleep—how long ago?—the six metal cots, the wood lockers lined at their feet, the bare walls, the spartan, undecorated space.

The catacombs where the Bellatorum lived and slept and trained were designed and decorated much like a military barracks, with sleeping quarters, dining quarters, armories, and meeting rooms, with training areas that included a gym, fighting arena, and shooting range. Because they were the elite of the King’s guard, they had more freedom and privileges than the half-Blood soldier class of Legiones who lived in the nearby chambers, but were given nothing in the way of luxuries that would make them soft.