Page 27 of Edge of Oblivion (Night Prowler 2)
Smiling.
There was a loud report, a crack of noise that ricocheted off the tall brick buildings on either side. A bright flash of light and the smell of smoke, and Xander just had time enough to concentrate before the bullet hit him.
It was a perfect aim. Four inches below the collarbone on the left side of his chest.
His heart.
The bullet went in the front and out the back, piercing a perfect, round hole in the fabric of his shirt. It left behind the scent of scorched linen. He staggered back with the force of it and lifted his hand to his chest.
“Shit,” he muttered, frowning.
He really liked this shirt. He looked back up at the man in white, who had lowered the gun to his side and was staring at him in stunned incomprehension.
“Surprise,” he said and offered the stranger a smile of his own. Then he reached for his knives.
Morgan had to shuck off her heels so she could run—the second beautiful pair deserted in less than fourteen hours, these a snakeskin, red-soled Louboutin—and had just reached the top of the Spanish Steps when she heard the shot.
She froze. Her blood chilled to ice. Everyone around her froze as well, exclaiming in various languages, and gazed at one another, wide-eyed. There were shouts in Italian that mentioned the word polizia, and she didn’t want to stick around for that. She turned and sprinted down a side street with Xander’s scent flaming hot in her nose.
She rounded the corner of the alley just in time to see him hurl a throwing star at the man in white. Just before impact, his target dissolved into a fine spray of mist, and the throwing star caught the collar of the now empty white shirt and embedded it into the brick wall behind him with a thunk. It hung from the throwing star’s spikes like laundry hung out to dry. The mist that had been the man in white coalesced and rose quickly in surging gray plumes.
The force of his Shift made her gasp. He was incredibly powerful, just as powerful as the throb of energy that had so shocked her when Xander had Shifted at the Colosseum the night before.
It was always like that with an Alpha. Power and passion and heat. Past her shock, she wondered again why Xander wasn’t the Alpha of Manaus—he was far stronger than Alejandro, the one who ruled now.
Moving fast, the gray plume of mist disappeared above the roofline, pants and shoes and underthings left behind in a heap on the dirty cement. Xander ran to the pile of clothes, crouched down, and quickly combed over them. He pocketed something, then noticed her standing there, staring.
He stood and stared back. His eyes were fierce, firelit gold, unmistakably dangerous and wild.
She felt the surge of bloodlust crackling through his body and took a step back, her hand at her throat.
“Get back to the hotel.” He was breathing heavily but his voice was perfectly controlled, perfectly cold. “Wait for me there. Don’t let anyone in but me, no matter what happens. Entendido? ”
She nodded, backing away, her hand still at her throat. If she’d had any illusion of the truth of what he was, if she’d harbored any secret hope because of their strange conversation at breakfast, it was quickly stripped away and burned by the sheer pulsing force of the rage and hatred that burned in his eyes, bright as comets.
Killer, she thought. He was a killer. Of that, there was no doubt.
Then he turned away, walked to the very end of the alley where the brick walls met behind a pair of reeking Dumpsters, and simply melted into the building, leaving behind not a single trace he was ever there.
He didn’t want to leave his knives behind, so Xander simply used Passage instead of Vapor, a convenient Gift he’d more than once been grateful for.
This way he could simply Pass through solid material—or it through him, like the bullet—
keeping his clothes and anything he carried with him. Anything that wasn’t too heavy, that is. He’d once tried to Pass a three-hundred-pound deserter from his colony through the steel bars of the country jail he’d found him in, piss drunk, and had made the unfortunate and gruesome discovery that there were weight restrictions to this particular Gift. The man had made it halfway through before things really got ugly. Xander had had to abandon the body, but he burned the jail to the ground so there was no evidence of the deserter’s unusual demise.
In another life he’d have been a cat burglar. He’d more than once dreamed of the riches he could accrue, all with no more effort than it took to concentrate.
The building he’d entered through the back had once been a multilevel private home, converted now into a modest hotel. Once through the walls, he found himself in a laundry room, steamy and strewn with mountains of unwashed sheets, pillowcases, and towels. He oriented himself for a moment, finding the muffled energy of the Alpha far above him, moving fast over the roof. Then he started to jog, dodging washing machines and ironing boards and two old Italian women folding towels who shrieked as he went past.
He went through the kitchen, the dining room, and the small, deserted front lobby—not bothering with finding doors, just Passing through the walls as he went—and ran out into the street.
His prey was there, high above, a streak of pale gray moving swiftly and silently through the sky.
Though it was all he could do to keep the animal under his skin from clawing its way out, Xander forced himself to fall back to a safer distance. A plan formed in his mind. He could always Shift to Vapor if necessary, but not only did he not want to play that particular hand just yet, he wanted the man in white to think he’d lost him in the tangled maze of Rome’s streets, and—hopefully —lead Xander to his lair. If he thought he was still being followed, the chances of that happening were exactly zero.
Xander ran to a tall stone pine, umbrella-shaped and ubiquitous around the city, and scaled the trunk quickly, forgetting in his haste to even look around for watching eyes of pedestrians below. He reached the top and steadied himself between two massive branches and looked out, his view obstructed by nothing but a small branch with clusters of dangling needles he brushed aside.
Over the landscape of rooftops and treetops and church spires there rose one massive, iconic structure, a cruciform basilica topped by the tallest dome in the world. It dominated the skyline, glittering enormous and diamond white in the morning sun.
