J. Geissinger - Edge of Oblivion

“And a good one at that,” added Tomás from the back-seat. “I heard Angelina Jolie was there just last week.”

“Please,” sneered Julian, steering the car around a corner so fast the two right-side wheels lifted a few inches from the ground. He narrowly missed crashing into an elderly couple crossing the street. “She’s too busy making movies to hang out in bars.”

The car fishtailed as Julian overcorrected. Mateo and Tomás were thrown against the windows.

“Do they even have food in a bar?” Julian continued, unperturbed by the curses that were being hurled at him. “Answer me this: What is there in a bar that I’d be interested in? Do I dance? No. Do I drink?

Well, okay, yes, but I’m not paying twenty bucks for a shot of watered-down whiskey. Do I like loud music? No. The only thing I’m going to find in a bar is—” He stopped speaking abruptly, but it wasn’t the Vespa he’d just clipped with the right front fender, sending its helmeted driver into a tailspin that launched him over the handlebars and off onto the grassy strip beside the road.

He stopped before he could say women .

The only thing to be found in a bar was human women. Lots of them. Like the one Xander had loved so long ago. The mere mention of which had caused the entire day to turn into a steaming pile of shit.

“He’s got a hero complex,” muttered Mateo to the window, knowing exactly why Julian had shut up so quickly. “Always looking to save the damsel in distress.”

But in reality, she hadn’t been in distress until she’d fallen in love with Xander.

It was a tragic tale, a cautionary tale, one still whispered about in their colony in Brazil, though of course never to Xander’s face. Esperanza had been the bright, captivating daughter of Karyo, their capoeira master, whom Xander had gone to live with at six years old when his father remarried and his dead wife’s offspring was banished from his new wife’s sight.

The five of them practically grew up together, there in that joyless compound and its morbid array of weaponry. No one ever knew what happened to Karyo’s wife or if he’d even had one; no one cared. The Ikati cared only that their human pet kept his mouth shut and kept churning out trained killers like the ocean churns out waves. And so he did. Karyo was a brilliant teacher. His students were brilliantly Gifted. Everyone was brilliantly pleased.

Everyone except Xander and Esperanza, who, as the years progressed, in between his grueling training and her schooling and subsequent betrothal to an older man she’d never met, had somehow found the time to fall in love.

It was said later that it had been inevitable. Take a damaged, wrong-headed boy like Alexander Luna—warped beyond repair by his father’s savage beatings, beatings that were soon transferred to his wife when he saw how quickly Xander toed the line when his mother’s pain was used as a deterrent —and put him in the path of temptation, give him a taste of forbidden fruit, as it were...what did anyone expect?

For years, Xander and Esperanza kept their secret well hidden. As of course they should. Had the relationship been discovered sooner, the Ikati would have moved to terminate it.

Permanently.

But as it will, fate had its own cruel way of dealing with things.

Karyo discovered them. The details of how and where, the other members of the Syndicate never knew. The only sure thing was the fact of Esperanza’s lovely, broken body discovered one misty morning lying in a pool of her own blood on the cobblestones in front of the training center.

Her neck was broken. She’d been thrown from the roof.

Julian, Mateo, and Tomás had all been there when Xander found her, when he confronted Karyo, who stood by watching, his face like a slab of stone.

“You killed her!” Xander screamed at the wiry old man.

“Better that than see her defiled by an animal,” Karyo coldly responded.

And then, at sixteen, Xander committed murder for the first time.

Afterward he was inconsolable. The Ikati didn’t much care that he’d killed Karyo. Humans, after all, were expendable. His own father, however, cared about the gossip it brought and came to the compound to give Xander a ruthless beating.

Then Xander committed his second murder.

After his father’s death—judged by the Assembly a justifiable homicide for reasons of self-

defense—his half brother, Alejandro, had been installed as the new Alpha of Manaus, and Xander had forsaken any shred of mercy, had slaughtered any tender feeling within himself that would ever allow him to feel pain, love, or happiness.

He died.

He walked, he talked, he became the best assassin the tribe had ever seen. But he was nothing more than a corpse. A zombie.

“FUBAR,” Julian muttered under his breath, then blew out a long, hard breath. “All right, show me the way to this joint. I suppose I could use a watered-down drink.” He banked hard left, turning down a one-way street, scaring pedestrians into squealing, scattered flight. “But don’t expect me to like it. And you’re paying, Tomás.”

The first of the screams erupted from somewhere above them.

Even before the screams Mateo sensed it, and Julian and Tomás weren’t far behind. As they made their way across the dance floor, watching humans skitter away like frightened puppies before them, the stinging hot recognition that there were three other Ikati males somewhere in this club hit all three of them like a heavyweight punch.

They looked up in the direction of the screams at the exact moment three huge, black animals reared up on their hind legs and set broad paws on the metal railing of the second-floor balcony.

Yellow eyes, unblinking; long tails, snaking back and forth; fangs exposed, white and sharp. One of them roared a challenge.

“Aw, shit,” said Julian. “I knew this was a bad idea.”

The music thumped, the lights flashed, and it didn’t seem as if anyone on the dance floor noticed what was happening up above until the bodies started dropping.

Suddenly there was a stampede. People couldn’t get away fast enough. Screaming and shoving, they formed a thronging mob that began to flow down the stairs. Some didn’t bother with the stairs and leapt clear over the railings, flailing, to land atop unsuspecting revelers below. It was chaos.

“We can’t Shift!” hollered Mateo over the music when he smelled Tomás’s intention as a gunpowder sting in the back of his throat. “If the Assembly finds out we Shifted in public—” Tomás sank to a crouch, baring his teeth. “Special situation. And rules are made to be broken.”

“No, Tomás!” Mateo shouted, gripping Tomás’s forearm. “No!”

Too late. Above the screams, the music, and the pounding of footsteps, a sickening crackle was heard as bone and tendon transformed, then the loud rip of fabric as it was shredded to pieces. On his other side, Julian Shifted as well, the most enormous of any Ikati he’d ever seen—his huge, wedge-

shaped head with its tapering nose and long, silver whiskers was above shoulder high to his own. He made a grizzly bear look like a Chihuahua. Clothing lay in tatters around his feet.

The three Ikati balancing on their forepaws on the railing above took it as an invitation. They pushed off with powerful hind legs and sailed over the second-story railing to land in a noiseless, menacing crouch only a few yards away on the dance floor that was now cleared of anything but the six of them.

In unison, the five panthers crouched, sprang, crashed into one another head-on in midair. They went tumbling over the floor, clawing and biting, their snarling loud and vicious enough to drown the music.