Edge Of Oblivion

36

He paused, regarding her with a look he knew was mercilessly forbidding, willing himself to do the right thing and be done with all this foolishness. But he couldn’t bring himself to say it. He couldn’t make himself say yes.

She took his silence as an affirmation anyway and went even redder. “The feeling is mutual, Ace.”

He sent her a grim smile and sidestepped that. “Let’s get back to business, shall we? Do you feel him now?”

She swallowed hard and looked around. “No,” she said, low. “It’s broken.”

“And when you first felt”—he floundered for an appropriate word—“when you first felt the connection, where were you?”

She jerked her chin to a nearby chapel, decorated with mosaics and statues, featuring a prominent wood, stone, and marble altar that housed the lighted, ghoulish remains of a dead pope in a crystal casket.

“I want you to come with me over there, and if you feel anything—anything at all—we’re going to leave and I’m going to come back alone. Understood?”

She didn’t answer. She wasn’t looking at him, and he wondered if she ever would again.

“Morgan,” he said more softly, trying a different tactic. “Are we agreed?”

After a moment, she jerked her head up and down: yes.

Progress. Good.

He opened his palm to the chapel. She went before him, hesitating only when she drew near the altar.

It was topped with eight taper candles in bronze holders, just in front of a massive mosaic depicting the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. There were pink marble columns and corbels with carved cherubs and gold leaf slathered on every available surface.

“Anything?” he murmured, close behind her.

She held very still with her head c****d, as if listening. She looked left and then right, frowning a little, her chin lifted. Her gaze traveled up the soaring marble columns to the vaulted ceiling far above, and she paused, considering. Then she dropped her lashes and looked at the floor beneath her feet. “It’s...odd,” she finally said. “There’s a faint echo of something. Almost like déjà vu. But I can’t put my finger on where it might be coming from. It’s like he’s everywhere. And nowhere.”

Xander was disappointed, primarily because he’d found only the same thing in his search the night before. It made him a little harsher than he should have been. He was really looking forward to getting his hands on this bastard.

“Well, that’s helpful. Maybe it’s God you feel.”

Her lips flattened. She turned to look him full in the face. “You,” she said, “are an unmitigated ass.”

He stared back at her, wrestling with the urge to kiss her again. Those damn lips—

“And you’re not trying hard enough,” he said, his voice tight. “If he’s close you should be able to find him, like you did yesterday. Just concentrate.”

“If it were that easy, I’d have found him already!” she said, exasperated. “Maybe it’s this building.” She wrinkled her nose at the lighted casket. “There’s too much weird juju in here.”

He had to admit the dead guy was giving off a really funky odor beneath all that careful casket sealant. And there was something else he couldn’t place, something unnerving, a whiff of ancient earth and dead air and cold, unlit corridors. It reminded him of a crypt. It also very inconveniently interfered with his own ability to sense his surroundings as fully as he normally did. Everything was oddly muted.

It had been the same last night. He’d waited for the sun to go down before attempting to infiltrate the cupola where the man in white had disappeared. The scent of Alpha was on the stone outside and the glass panes, even lingered like an afterthought in the air above the altar, but then it evanesced and disappeared altogether. But there was something, some indefinable energy, in the very walls of the cathedral itself, vibrating from the foundations...

It made no sense. None of this made any sense.

The only reason he could fathom why an Ikati would go anywhere near what many considered the holiest church in Christendom was total ignorance. Since the half-Blood Queen Cleopatra had incited the rage of Caesar Augustus in AD 30, the Ikati had been hunted and persecuted, had long ago retreated into silence and small, well-fortified colonies to survive. The situation worsened in the thirteenth century when Pope Gregory IX instituted the Inquisition. Along with heretics, cats were declared diabolical. That set the stage for massive, church-approved executions. Cats were witches’ familiars, associated with the devil, dirty animals not to be trusted.

Too bad for humans. Because by the time the Black Plague hit a century later, there were barely any cats left to eat all those disease-carrying, flea-infested rats. Half of Europe’s population was wiped out in just a few years.

“Maybe we should go back to the Spanish Steps and try again there.” Morgan looked hopefully toward the massive doors behind them that led outside into fresh air and sunlight.

She didn’t look completely recovered from whatever spell the Alpha had put her under; she was still a little too flushed. And if he was still lurking around somewhere, Xander definitely didn’t want to give him another chance to get inside her skull.