Page 104 of Edge of Darkness (Night Prowler 4)
As the blade sliced through the tender flesh of her left forearm, Ember abandoned all the courage she’d managed to muster on the cab ride to the bookstore, and screamed.
“Well,” said Caesar, her screams rising to an ear-splitting pitch as he dug deeper, “she’s not much to look at, but she’s got a pair of lungs on her to rival Pavarotti’s, doesn’t she boys?”
Chuckles from the four others with him, two of whom held her immobile against her father’s scarred old desk in the back room of the bookstore while Caesar investigated her arm with the cold, serrated tip of his knife.
He’d smelled metal the instant she’d walked through the door, and, desperate to offer him an explanation that would keep them from locating what was hidden beneath her bulky sweater and coat, she’d shoved up the sleeve of the sweater to reveal her scarred, metal-filled arm.
Had she known it would induce this little game of Operation, she might have tried something else.
Agony throbbed through every cell in her body. The room spun; color, sound, and scent were magnified a thousandfold, hallucinogenic in their pulsating violence.
“Well done, Nico. You’re officially off my shit list,” Caesar said to one of the tall, black-haired males standing off to the side who was watching the scene with smug pride. He clutched a bandaged hand to his chest, but when he heard those words, he dropped his hand to his side, broke into a huge, exultant smile, and stood straighter.
“Please,” sobbed Marguerite. Strapped to a chair several feet away with plastic zip ties cutting into her wrists and ankles, she was barely able to hold her head upright.
Ember had nearly gagged in horror when she’d first spied her stepmother. Blood saturated the bodice of her ripped black dress, dripped into a hideously gleaming red pool beneath the chair with an intermittent, sinister splash. Through the rips in the fabric, her breasts and abdomen showed pale against the lurid sheen of crimson. A series of oozing, irregular wounds gave awful testament to what had occurred inside this room before Ember arrived.
“Please,” Marguerite gasped again, her eyelids fluttering as she struggled to keep them open. Her dark hair had come undone from her bun, and hung around her shoulders in a wild, gray-streaked mane. “Please stop. Please let us go.”
“Oh—absolutely! All you had to do was say the magic word!”
The others laughed, while Caesar, seeming energized by the agony, by all the blood, turned away from Ember to gaze in amused affection at the blood-splattered, semi-conscious Marguerite.
Suddenly he went rigid, and sniffed the air like a hound scenting a fox. Then he whirled back around and stared at Ember with eyes very wide and black.
Handsome as the devil, tall and well-made and obviously insane, he cocked his head and let his gaze travel up and down her body while she sat there in an agonized haze, blood gushing from the gaping slices in her arm. His lips parted and a look of erotic, exultant fervor shone from his eyes. He whispered, “Oh my. What a wonderful, unexpected surprise you are, my plain little rabbit. You’re not only a pair of big lungs, now, are you? No, you’re something much more valuable than that.”
Then he moistened his lips and, as Ember tried to recoil in absolute terror and failed because of the iron clamps of his men’s hands around her biceps, wrists, and the back of her neck, Caesar leaned close to her mangled arm and inhaled, slowly and deeply.
After a moment of weighted silence, he straightened, threw back his head, and laughed.
He laughed, and laughed, and laughed—uproariously, with total abandon—while his men exchanged glances, Marguerite sobbed, and Ember’s heart shrank to the size of a peanut inside her chest.
“Holy Horus,” he gasped between hoots, “I swear I have the best fucking luck!”
“Er, sire?” one of the other men asked uncertainly.
Caesar, swiping happy tears from his eyes, waved a hand, indicating he couldn’t yet respond because he was too racked with laughter. As he took a slow turn around the room clutching his stomach, the maniacal laughter eventually faded to a series of long, blissful sighs punctuated by disbelieving chuckles. He dragged another chair across the room and set it right next to Marguerite, sat down in it and began idly playing with her hair while he stared, smiling, at Ember.
He said something to his men in a language Ember didn’t recognize, though it might have been Latin. Whatever it was, his men gasped and shared meaningful glances with one another. They looked back at her with something new in her eyes. Then the men holding her released her arms and pushed her back into her chair.
Ember moaned in pain and clamped her right hand over the throbbing wound in her left forearm, trying to put pressure on it to stop the bleeding.
But the bleeding was bad. Blood spurted between her fingers in a pulsating stream. It looked like an artery had been severed.
“Do you have a first aid kit, little rabbit?” Caesar suddenly appeared concerned, with a furrow between his brows, the laughter vanished as he stared at her arm.
“Fuck you,” Ember hissed, almost unable to answer through the pain.
“I’ll take that as a no. But we can’t have you bleeding out on us quite yet.”
He pursed his lips, twirling a lock of Marguerite’s long hair between his fingers while she leaned as far away from him as she could, sagging sideways over the arm of her chair, sobbing quietly.
Then Caesar brightened, leapt to his feet, and approached Ember with a wicked gleam in his eye. “You know, there’s something I’ve been meaning to try. And you, little rabbit, have just given me the perfect opportunity!”
Ember’s hands shook uncontrollably. The smell of blood was overpowering, sharp and penny bright in the air. Her stomach heaved and she tasted the sour bite of bile in the back of her throat. She stared at the advancing Caesar, so like Christian in his effortless grace and beauty, his perfect skin and teeth and hair, and fought desperately to maintain a semblance of control. She needed to keep her wits about her, because as soon as she could get him away from Marguerite, this bastard was toast.
Trying to rise, she lurched forward in the chair, but hands clamped around her shoulders and roughly shoved her back. She gasped as a bolt of agony seared a path up her left arm and straight down her spine. The room narrowed to a small circle of receding li
