Page 56 of Edge of Oblivion (Night Prowler 2)
“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.
He made a noise of interest and gestured for D to continue.
“He was here, in the fovea.” He licked his lips. “With the female.”
The King’s eyebrows shot up. He leaned forward, put his elbows on the desk. “Go on.”
“She was naked,” he said tonelessly, “chained to the wall.”
At that, blood began to pound through the King’s veins. Naked. Chained. Two more beautiful words could not be found in any language. He’d think more on that later on, when he was alone.
Perhaps when he was with one of his human concubines; they were so much easier to scare than their Ikati counterparts, and he loved them to be scared when he took them. He loved them to scream. “And the male?”
