Page 1 of Rapture's Edge (Night Prowler 3)
Take me as I am.
I offer scars, imperfections—
touch me and embrace my flaws
I am your beloved
You look at my failings and see stories
legends, maps of me before you.
I will tell the tales, my lover, only
whisper where I will find you
and I will come out of hiding.
Or we can play cat and mouse…
pursuing, escaping
one another until we collide.
I’ll follow your trail and
you follow mine.
From My Lover Is Mine
by Aly Hawkins & Bryan Ashmore
©2007 Regal Books, Ventura, CA 93003
Used by permission.
Of all the places in all the world to spend a clandestine night alone, the Louvre museum in Paris is quite possibly the finest.
Of course, to do so is illegal.
Visiting hours are nine in the morning to six in the evening every day except Tuesday, with slightly extended hours on Wednesdays and Fridays. But for visitors with certain special abilities, visiting hours mean exactly zero.
Because when you can vanish into mist and nothingness by the mere focus of your will, a great many rules and regulations applicable to others cease to impress you.
It was one of these “special” people—beings, rather, or more accurately creatures—who happened to be contemplating a sculpture by Michelangelo titled Dying Slave at twenty minutes to three on one starlit, crystalline December morning, hours before daybreak and even longer before the tourists would begin to line up outside again. At almost eight feet tall, the dramatic, bone-hued marble sculpture of a naked man bound at wrist and chest was described by the plaque beneath as “the moment when life capitulates before the relentless force of dead matter.”
Brilliant, mused Eliana Cardinalis as she stood before the statue, admiring the uncanny representation of that fleeting moment just before death. I know just how he feels.
As naked as the dying marble figure she was so arrested by, she wasn’t cold or uncomfortable or in any way self-conscious. She was, simply, content. Alone—blessedly alone and free of the watchful eyes and whispers that normally followed her—her natural curiosity and good humor returned. She’d rambled through the cool, echoing corridors of the museum for longer than strictly necessary for the task at hand, but a pastoral Monet had called to her, then a fierce Caravaggio, then a glassed display of Egyptian funerary implements laid over woven palm leaves in a fascinating, ghoulish row.
The canopic jars—ceramic receptacles for storing the inner organs of a mummy—had made her snort in disdain. Dead was dead, but her kin, the ancient Egyptians, wholeheartedly believed in life after death, a leap of faith Eliana found seriously lacking.
Stupidly lacking.
She knew from firsthand experience that leaps of faith were nothing more than acts of willful self-delusion. Nowadays, she operated on two simple principles: I’ll believe it when I see it and It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission. Both had served her far better than the blind faith of her childhood.
Faith was a luxury she could no longer afford.
But she hadn’t always been a cynic. Born and raised far below ground in a dark, sprawling labyrinth of incense-scented catacombs no human eye had ever seen, her education in the lore of ancient gods and secret spells, of rituals steeped in magic, had been thorough and effective. She prayed to all the old gods and left offerings of handmade lace and ripe fruit for the new, she lit candles in honor of dead ancestors, she watched with all her kin on the once-monthly Purgare nights as the silk-wrapped ashes of the unfortunates who didn’t survive the Transition bobbed slowly down the Tiber on balsawood planks until they vanished from sight around a sinuous bend in the dark river. She accepted all she was taught by her elders with the open-armed trust of childhood, because even at twenty-three when most would have considered her a woman, Eliana had been still in many ways a child.
