Page 64 of Edge of Oblivion (Night Prowler 2)
He died.
He walked, he talked, he became the best assassin the tribe had ever seen. But he was nothing more than a corpse. A zombie.
“FUBAR,” Julian muttered under his breath, then blew out a long, hard breath. “All right, show me the way to this joint. I suppose I could use a watered-down drink.” He banked hard left, turning down a one-way street, scaring pedestrians into squealing, scattered flight. “But don’t expect me to like it. And you’re paying, Tomás.”
The first of the screams erupted from somewhere above them.
Even before the screams Mateo sensed it, and Julian and Tomás weren’t far behind. As they made their way across the dance floor, watching humans skitter away like frightened puppies before them, the stinging hot recognition that there were three other Ikati males somewhere in this club hit all three of them like a heavyweight punch.
They looked up in the direction of the screams at the exact moment three huge, black animals reared up on their hind legs and set broad paws on the metal railing of the second-floor balcony.
Yellow eyes, unblinking; long tails, snaking back and forth; fangs exposed, white and sharp. One of them roared a challenge.
“Aw, shit,” said Julian. “I knew this was a bad idea.”
The music thumped, the lights flashed, and it didn’t seem as if anyone on the dance floor noticed what was happening up above until the bodies started dropping.
Suddenly there was a stampede. People couldn’t get away fast enough. Screaming and shoving, they formed a thronging mob that began to flow down the stairs. Some didn’t bother with the stairs and leapt clear over the railings, flailing, to land atop unsuspecting revelers below. It was chaos.
“We can’t Shift!” hollered Mateo over the music when he smelled Tomás’s intention as a gunpowder sting in the back of his throat. “If the Assembly finds out we Shifted in public—” Tomás sank to a crouch, baring his teeth. “Special situation. And rules are made to be broken.”
“No, Tomás!” Mateo shouted, gripping Tomás’s forearm. “No!”
Too late. Above the screams, the music, and the pounding of footsteps, a sickening crackle was heard as bone and tendon transformed, then the loud rip of fabric as it was shredded to pieces. On his other side, Julian Shifted as well, the most enormous of any Ikati he’d ever seen—his huge, wedge-
shaped head with its tapering nose and long, silver whiskers was above shoulder high to his own. He made a grizzly bear look like a Chihuahua. Clothing lay in tatters around his feet.
The three Ikati balancing on their forepaws on the railing above took it as an invitation. They pushed off with powerful hind legs and sailed over the second-story railing to land in a noiseless, menacing crouch only a few yards away on the dance floor that was now cleared of anything but the six of them.
In unison, the five panthers crouched, sprang, crashed into one another head-on in midair. They went tumbling over the floor, clawing and biting, their snarling loud and vicious enough to drown the music.
Then to his great horror, Mateo spotted a human female in the far corner of the club crouched beneath a cocktail table, holding something out in her trembling hand. His first thought was that it was a gun. He focused, then almost wished it was.
A small metal object, a glowing blue screen.
A phone.
A camera.
The entire thing was being filmed.
24
“Why do you suppose it is,” said Bartleby to Xander as they sat on the back lawn of the safe house in two folding chairs, “that you have kept me in your employ all these years?”
Xander sighed, feeling a lecture coming on. He stared up at the glimmering Milky Way peeking through rifts in the rolling, velvet dark clouds above. The cool tang of moisture in the air and the tingle of electricity that lifted the little hairs on his arms told him it was going to rain, and soon.
He said, “Because of your charm and good looks, obviously.”
But that wasn’t it. The truth of Xander’s loyalty to the doctor lay somewhere far darker.
Bartleby had been Karyo’s personal physician. In desperation—his mind unable to grasp that Esperanza was gone, really gone—Xander had called him on that terrible day so long ago, had watched through his tears as the doctor examined her, met Xander’s gaze, shook his head in wordless confirmation of the horrible truth.
He’d been kind that day, the only kind older male Xander had ever known, human or otherwise.
Since then the Syndicate had kept Bartleby as their own physician. He was trusted and respected and had saved their lives on more than one occasion.
Because he knew the doctor so well, Xander didn’t even have to look over to feel the sour look his old friend shot him.
