Rapture's Edge

18

Mel paused with her hand in midair, staring at her with one eyebrow c****d. “Ah. We’re in that kind of mood, are we? Let me guess…jerkass number one, or jerkass number two?”

Eliana exhaled hard, and whiskey fumes seared her nose. “Both.”

“Double-team.” Mel nodded sagely. “That’ll do it every time.” She looked down at the flask in her hand and then thrust it back. “You definitely need this more than I do.”

“I’m pretty sure I finished it,” Eliana said mournfully.

She’d fled to the catacombs after her breakfast with Caesar and Silas, and she’d been prowling around for hours, hoping to find someone to spar with, thinking a good fight would lift her mood. No such luck. The candlelit corridors were all but deserted with the exception of the two of them. Mel had found her just a few minutes ago, kicking down a row of empty bottles someone had lined up along a crevice in the rock. Carved gargoyles leered down from the ceiling, staring with empty eyes, and all along one wall someone had painted a beautiful, cresting tsunami, swallowing cliffs and villages in Japan.

Monsters and mayhem. It perfectly suited her mood.

Eliana put her hands over her face, rubbed her throbbing temples, and sighed. “In my next life, I’d like to have a p***s. Whoever wrote that song about it being a man’s world was spot on.”

“Death wishes and p***s envy. You are having a bad day.” Mel’s sarcastic voice gentled as she studied her face. “What happened?”

“What always happens. Caesar happened.”

Mel let it hang there for a minute and then very quietly said, “Eliana, you know you’re the reason we all left Rome, right?”

She lifted her head and looked at Mel.

“Not your brother, not Silas, not this shining great plan to live in the open with humans that you’re all so gung ho about. None of us cared about any of that. We left because you were leaving. You.” Her voice dropped even lower, to nearly a whisper, conspiratorial. “You’re the Alpha of this colony, Eliana, whether you realize it or not. Silas was just one of your family’s Servorum back home, even though he acts like he owns the keys to the castle now. And it’s well known that your brother is unGifted and…problematic. You could formally challenge him—”

Eliana clapped a hand over Mel’s mouth and held it there, horrified. “Don’t you dare say it!” Though she’d hissed it as low as she could, her voice seemed amplified in the cavernous, echoing space. She had to take several long, deep breaths before continuing. “He’ll have your head on a stick in ten seconds flat if he thinks you’re conspiring to…to…”

Her voice muffled beneath Eliana’s hand, Mel said, “You’re stronger than he is. You’d win.”

“Shhh!”

Mel shrugged. Above Eliana’s hand, her black eyes were solemn, but filled with challenge. “Besides, you’re the real breadwinner around here. He’d starve to death without you.”

“Mel,” she warned, but before she could say more there came the sounds of voices and footsteps from one of the corridors that spilled into New Harmony. Someone was coming.

Eliana stood and ran a hand through the choppy blue tangle of her hair. “Please, not another word!” Mel rose beside her, folded her arms across her chest, and made a vague gesture with her shoulders that seemed to say for now.

“Butterfly!”

Alexi, coming through the low archway of the access corridor, pulled up to an abrupt halt. Beside him looking around in awe at the graffitied walls and rows of stalactites that hung from the high, arched ceiling like monstrous rows of teeth was a girl in a short leopard-print miniskirt with teased blonde hair and a deep tan that appeared to be sprayed on. She had the kind of voluminous breasts typically seen on models in men’s magazines and long nails painted an alarming neon pink. Their hands were clasped together, but as soon as Alexi caught sight of Eliana, he dropped the girl’s hand as if it burned.

Oh gods. Not today. Not now.

“What fun!” snickered Mel beside her. “Ken and Hooker Barbie!”

Eliana elbowed her in the side. “We were just leaving, slick,” she called out, edging toward the corridor behind them. She reached out and grabbed Mel’s arm, but she wouldn’t be budged. Clearly, she wanted to stay for the fireworks.

The girl muttered to Alexi, “Who’s slick? And who’s she?”

Another tug on her arm and Mel relented with a sour look. “I’ve got five hundred on my girl for Friday night, slick, you in?”

Alexi looked at Eliana. “I’m always in,” he said solemnly, and the double meaning couldn’t have been clearer.

“Good luck with that,” said Mel under her breath, and then she smiled brightly and waved good-bye as Eliana dragged her off into the corridor.

When Alexi and his flavor of the week were out of earshot, Eliana said, “You’re terrible. Stop baiting him, will you?”

“Why? It’s fun to poke the bear and watch him dance.”

“Be nice.”

“Is he being nice by dragging every single low-rent skank in Paris down here to rub in your face? I think not. Therefore, he deserves everything he gets.” Mel made this pronouncement with a queenly wave of her hand. “God, it’s like he clones them or something.”

“He’s just…trying to get a rise out of me. Because he cares. It’s sweet, in its own sick, twisted way.”

“Sweet? Are you serious?” she scoffed. “It’s a cheap, immature trick. He deserves to have his boy bits cut off for that kind of behavior.”

“Mel,” Eliana warned, but her friend only laughed, a merry snort that echoed off the rock walls around them.

“Don’t worry, I’ll leave his boy bits unharmed for the time being. But he’s on my list, E, along with a few other people who will remain unnamed.”