J. Geissinger - Edge of Oblivion

So the blanket D had squeezed between his fists was scratchy and thin.

“What time is it?’ he said to Lix, his voice a harsh scrape in the quiet. He ran a hand over his head, breathing in deep to counteract the sudden dizziness—dreams like the one he’d just had took a while to recover from.

Crouched on his heels next to D’s low cot, Lix said, “Haven’t looked at the clock recently, but the Servorum are coming in. Must be close to dawn.”

Unlike the Bellatorum , who came and went as they pleased, the servant class was allowed out only at night. But at least they were allowed out: the chosen females of the King’s harem, the Electi , and the neutered males who guarded them, the Castratus , weren’t allowed to leave the splendor of their sprawling catacombs at all. Neither were any of the hundreds of offspring that lived with the Electi , offspring of various ages and strengths of Blood.

Only full-Blooded members of the Bellatorum , the Optimates , and the King’s close relatives—

with the exception of the principessa Eliana—were allowed to come and go at will.

D stood and yanked on the clothes he’d left folded atop the footlocker at the end of the bed. He laced up his boots and got his gear strapped on: Glock nine millimeter on his right hip, kukhri—tip dipped in poison—on his left, push daggers in each of his boots, other knives tucked into pockets in his pants. He looked at the two empty beds that belonged to Lucien and Aurelio, and his mouth tightened. He had a terrible suspicion they wouldn’t ever sleep there again.

“Where’s Constantine?”

Lix stood and crossed his arms over his chest, and D felt the other male’s anger like a burning weight in his own chest. “With Celian,” Lix answered, dark.

They exchanged glances. Celian was laid out facedown on a cot in the infirmary, bloodying towel after towel that was pressed to his mangled back. The cat-o’-nine-tails was infamous for its brutality—he’d be out of commission and in a lot of pain while the chunks of scored flesh grew together.

D said, “How is he?”

Lix shrugged. “Lost a lot of blood, but he’ll be fine in a few days, you know that. Celian’s a badass—”

“I meant Constantine,” D snapped, shrugging on his long overcoat.

Lix inhaled deep, then passed a hand over his face. He dropped both hands to his waist and exhaled. “He’s not talking.”

Which meant he was taking it hard, as he always did, as Dominus, of course, knew.

The King knew everyone’s weakness, and Constantine’s weakness was his brothers. He was more loyal to them than to their cruel King, and when they hurt, he hurt. Especially when he was the cause of that hurt. Like tonight, when he’d been forced to whip Celian into unconsciousness while the King watched, amused. Dominus had been measuring Constantine’s loyalty to him with gruesome tests like these for years, and D had wondered how long it would be before Constantine finally snapped.

D cursed under his breath, remembering the dream, the particular look on Constantine’s face as he pulled the trigger: hatred and deep satisfaction. Evidently he would snap, and soon.

“Had a dream,” he said to Lix, who sent him a wry smile in return.

“I know. That’s why I’m here.”

D looked up at Lix, his brows drawn together in question, but Lix only shrugged again, the motion not exactly nonchalant. “Dominus,” he said simply.

D realized with a cold chill over his skin that the King had sensed him dreaming, as he did when the dreams were particularly vivid. And now he wanted a full report.

“Shit,” D muttered, eyeing the arched corridor at the end of the room that led out to a mess hall and connecting tunnels beyond. Those tunnels, winding and dark, led directly to the King’s chambers.

“Just tell him the truth, D,” Lix said quietly. “Just tell him what he needs to know.”

He doesn’t need to know everything , D thought, ever the rebel, but aloud he said only, “ Recte. ”

Right.

The antiserum that would allow half-Bloods to survive the Transition was almost perfect.

Dominus had been working on it for the past three decades, had in fact started the first experiments before he had earned his degree in cell and gene therapy as a young man. It had confounded him then more so than now, since he had almost solved the maddening riddle of exactly which component of human DNA warped the superior genetic characteristics of Ikati DNA. Because it so clearly did: over several thousand years of his race’s recorded history, only a tiny percentage of mixed-Blood Ikati were ever known to survive their first Shift at twenty-five.

The first and most famous was a female named Cleopatra. Ruthless and cunning, that one, almost as fine a strategist as he. And his spies informed him another female had recently done the same, and even been named Queen of that massive colony in the ancient woods of southern England he’d had his eye on for so long.

He’d never take a half-Blood Queen for himself. Though he’d kept human women—captured and held prisoner, tourists mostly, the choicest ones—as part of his harem since his beloved Sabina died so long ago, that was pure pragmatism: humans bred like rabbits. A single female could produce a child—or two or three—every nine months for decades during the entirety of her breeding years.

Full-Blood Ikati females were only fertile once per year and rarely got pregnant. It was the reason his kind had all survived on the edge of oblivion for centuries. Humans were simply outbreeding them.

Not for long, though. He was going to turn their fertility against them.

Three of the six Liberi injected with the latest version of the antiserum had survived their Transitions this past week alone. Close. So close. Only a few more trials, and he was sure he’d perfect the compound, and then he’d inject the hundreds upon hundreds of his half-Blood bastards and put the final stage of his plan into place—

“Sire.”

Dominus looked up from his perusal of the latest DNA sequence and variance report from his privately funded, state-of-the-art lab in Milan to find D and Lix standing at the arched entrance to his library. Like windows, doors were absent in all the catacombs.

Except the heavily guarded doors that led to the outside world, of course.

“ Salve, Bellatores ,” he said, laying aside the report on his desk. He leaned back into the comfort of a large leather chair and gazed at them while they stood in silence at the doorway, waiting for his command. They wouldn’t enter unless invited, and he had half a mind to let them stand there and sweat, but he knew they were both on edge from the incident with Celian. He liked to occasionally push them to the far edge of their constraints: anger kept a warrior razor sharp. “Better to be feared than loved,” his own father had told him, wisely.

He’d felt neither for the old man and had killed him as soon as he was old enough to lead, but still, it was good advice.

Motioning them forward with his hand, he said, “Come in. Sit with me.”

The two huge warriors sat in the two chairs opposite his desk—dwarfing the furniture and looking profoundly uncomfortable—and Dominus had to press the smile from his lips. He looked first at Lix, long-haired and unshaven, then at D, tattooed, bald, and emitting his usual aura of violence, dark as a lightning storm and just as dangerous.

Tell me, Bellator , he thought. With a clenched jaw, the warrior began to speak.

“The full-Blood male we encountered at the Vatican,” he said, moving only his lips. His entire body, big as it was, had fallen still as stone. He hated when Dominus was inside his head, which, of course, the King found highly amusing.