Page 92 of Edge of Oblivion (Night Prowler 2)
As it had innumerable times since she put it on, the medallion around her neck drew her hand like a magnet. It lay stone-cold and ominous against her chest and gave her the same disquieting sense she’d had since she’d first glimpsed it that there was something here she was missing, a clue this necklace held, a puzzle piece she didn’t know how to make fit. It scraped at her mind, over and over, as irritating as a fingernail scratching down a chalkboard.
The Alpha. The Expurgari.
Somehow they were related. But how? And how would she ever find him?
She stood there staring at the house as if it held some kind of answer for a long, long time, how long she didn’t know. Cars passed by on the streets beyond the yard, birds sang in the trees, the mechanical thrum of a lawn mower broke the stillness of the morning. Then finally a thought occurred to her and she stood breathless with the horror of it.
She wouldn’t ever find the Alpha, or the Expurgari. She was fooling herself.
And the man she was in love with...was happily going to kill her.
A shudder wracked her body. With a low moan, she dropped her head into her hands.
A clock began to chime inside the house, counting the hour in low, mournful tones. Five, six, seven...off in the distance a church bell began to ring, mirroring the chiming clock, then another, then another, faint, melancholy tolling that reached her ears from far-off churches all around the city, announcing the time.
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.
31
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.
