J. Geissinger - Edge of Oblivion

Morgan stiffened. Her mind turned over, then her stomach. Slowly, slowly, she moved her head and gazed off into the distance, where she saw through the morning haze the enormous golden dome of St. Peter’s Basilica glittering like a Fabergé egg atop the Vatican. She turned back and gazed at the safe house, at the empty façade that hid all its secrets below.

Below.

The puzzle pieces came together with a cold, solid click .

Though they had felt his energy diffused all around them at the Vatican, the feral Alpha had evaded detection because he wasn’t in the basilica. He was beneath it, safely out of sight, just as hidden and sheltered as they were in the underground rooms of the safe house.

Holding her breath, she backed one step away from the house, then another. Without bothering to think, Morgan turned and ran for the back fence.

Over two thousand years ago, or so the story went, the first Purgare —Purging—was held in a secret spot on the banks of the winding Tiber river where the giant sycamore trees bend low and weep their silver-green leaves into the burbling waters near the tiny Tiberina island in what is now the very heart of Rome. The spot had been abandoned for more and more rural locations as Rome grew up and spread sprawling over the flood plain of the Campus Martius around the river, and was now located well north of the city in a quiet place still unclaimed by man.

The location had changed, but the ceremony—solemn and ancient—had not.

Every month on the full moon’s apex the ashes of all the half-Blood Ikati who had not survived their Transitions the month prior were taken from the small clay urns they were placed in after cremation and transferred to containers fashioned from squares of white raw silk tied with cords of hand-spun gold. Green apples were placed atop the ashes to pay the hungry ferryman’s tithe to the nether-world; a small bundle of sparrow grass brought the unlucky soul peace. One by one, as the names of the dead were called by the Alpha of the tribe, the bundles were placed on slender balsa-

wood planks with lit beeswax candles at either end and set into the river, where they bobbed and dipped and finally caught flame. Mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and cousins and friends would watch in silence as the flaming bundles drifted away on the restless river until they slipped with a hiss and coils of rising gray smoke beneath the surface of the dark water, on their way to their final resting place at the bottom of the vast, enchanted Mediterranean.

Eliana sometimes wondered if there was a huge pile of Ikati ashes mounded like drifts of silt at the mouth of the Tiber where it drained into the sea.

Because she was full-Blooded, the King’s daughter, and referred to as spem futuri by the eldest of the tribal elders—hope for the future, whatever that meant—Eliana was considered too precious to attend the monthly Purgare . She stayed under guard inside the catacombs where she’d been born and had spent every waking moment of her life.

But tonight, oh, tonight—she would finally break free.

The past few days she’d been a frazzle of nerves and twitchery and pent-up emotion held in check only by the sobering realization that to fail in this—to be caught—would mean disaster. She wasn’t thinking too closely about that, though, because her full attention and indeed imagination had been captured by the thought of being alone— outside! —with Demetrius.

With heat and powerful need in his eyes he had agreed to her request and simultaneously exposed his own desire. He wanted her as much as she wanted him, and now she had her proof, evidenced undeniably by his willingness to risk death just to be alone with her for a few hours. How exactly he was going to manage it she still wasn’t sure, because he hadn’t spoken a word to her in the past few days, had just looked at her with that silent, burning intensity whenever their paths had crossed. But she knew he would figure out a way. Though Celian was the leader of the Bellatorum , D was the most clever, the most willing to take risks and defy authority, and she loved that about him.

She had only to shake her guard long enough to get to the sunken church, then D would handle the rest.

She was sighing in anticipation when her father walked into the flickering light of her large, white-on-white, candlelit bedroom.

“Eliana,” he said, and she jumped, guilty.

“Father!” She leapt from the overstuffed chair near her four-poster bed and snapped shut the book she’d been devouring: Lonely Planet’s Guide to Rome . “I didn’t expect to see you this early.

Good morning!”

Though there were no clocks in the catacombs, she knew it was morning. Dawn and dusk were felt keen as hunger pangs even far belowground. Regardless, clocks were entirely unnecessary: the Ikati of the catacombs had nowhere else to be.

“Good morning to you.” A small, secret smile flitted across her father’s lips, and he crossed to her quickly over the stone floor strewn with plush rugs and embraced her. “I’m going to be occupied all day, but I wanted to see you before the last Purgare tonight,” he said, low, into her hair.

Eliana pulled back and frowned at him, studying his handsome face, his burning, coal-black eyes, so like her own. “I don’t understand. What do you mean, the last Purgare ? We’ll have another one next month. And the month after that.”

He took her chin in hand and gazed down at her, those dark eyes alight with a wild, feverish victory that took her breath away with its strange edge. She’d never seen him so wired. In truth, he looked a little...unhinged.

“I have an announcement to make, something that concerns all of us,” he murmured, holding her face in a way that made her nervous. It was possessive, more like a jealous lover than a father, and she stepped back, out of his embrace. He noticed her discomfort and his eyes flared. “Something that concerns you, too, daughter of mine,” he drawled, a new hardness in his tone.

Eliana had been in the middle of another step back, but she froze instantly and so did the blood circulating in her veins. “Me?” she whispered, thinking only of D. Her heart became a stampede of wild stallions in her chest.

How could he know of their plans?

His small smile grew wider, revealing his perfect, ultra-white teeth. Dressed elegantly and with care in his usual impeccable white that set off his burnished skin and tousled black hair to model-like perfection yet exuding the kind of raw menace usually found only in violent criminals, he looked like the love child of Cary Grant and Blackbeard the pirate. He stepped nearer, closing the distance between them, that undercurrent of menace chilling the air in her already cool bedchamber.

“You are my life, you know that,” he said, taking her shoulders in his hands. His voice was very low, controlled, giving nothing away. His eyes burned. “And your happiness is my only concern, beautiful Eliana. It’s what I’ve worked so hard for, all these long years.”

His fingers curled into her skin, and once again she fought the urge to step back. She’d never been afraid of him before, but there was something in his eyes...something so very dark.

“Father,” she managed, swallowing the panic that was clawing at her throat, “what are you talking about?”

He lifted his hand and leisurely brushed back a strand of hair from her suddenly perspiring forehead.

“I’m talking about destiny,” he whispered. “Yours and mine. Ours.” He made a sweeping gesture with one hand, indicating, she thought, all her kin who lived together in darkness beyond the rounded walls and burnished light of her room. “We were gods once, Ana, so long ago, before our destiny was stolen from us. But now we can take our destiny back and be gods once again. I’ve finally done it. ”