Page 12 of Rapture's Edge (Night Prowler 3)
Wonderful.
“Brother,” she greeted him stiffly.
“Sister.” He smiled, a slow, mocking curve of his sculpted lips, and then bent his head to the ear of the girl on his right and whispered something. She giggled and stole a quick glance in Eliana’s direction, and then the trio stumbled off into the shadows of the far wall where several couches were hidden behind stacks of old wooden crates some long-ago cataphile had erected.
“Don’t let him get to you,” Mel said softly, coming up behind her.
“It’s fine,” Eliana lied, breathing hard through her nose. “I’m fine.” She brushed away the hand Mel had placed on her shoulder—she could handle humiliation, but never pity—and turned to face her.
Mel held up an old-fashioned silver flask and wiggled it. “Victory drink?”
Eliana took it without hesitation, unscrewed the cap, and swallowed a long draught of liquid. A rotgut hooch made from fermenting pears and potatoes, it burned like acid going down. Coughing, she handed it back to Mel. “Ugh! Did you cook that up in your shoe? I like to think I’m the kind of girl who can drink anything, but this stuff is volcanic. Why can’t my victory drinks ever be champagne?”
“Champagne tastes on a beer budget.” Mel shrugged. She tipped the flask to her lips and swallowed. Her face screwed up just as Eliana’s had, and she hacked a lung-clearing cough. “Besides, Ms. Pouty Pants, with the way we drink, in a few months someone would have to get a bulldozer in here to dig us out from under the mountain of empty bottles.”
Eliana paused, considering that. She had a point. Neither of them drank to the point of stupidity like her brother, Caesar, did; they drank just enough to take the edge off and get beautifully blurred. Sometimes it even worked. “Volcanic moonshine it is, then.”
Mel handed the flask back to her, and she drained it, grimacing, as Mel watched.
“Alexi asked me where you’d gone.”
“Pff
t. He was so draped in women, I’m surprised he even noticed I’d left.”
Mel’s mouth twisted to a rueful smile. “He always notices what you do, E.”
“Yeah, well, ancient history notwithstanding, I hope he doesn’t catch something from those catagirls he was with. They didn’t exactly look…virginal.”
Mel laughed, a decidedly witchy cackle that was at odds with her appearance. She was shorter and daintier than her lean, long-limbed friend, with beautiful waist-length black hair she wore in a French braid. Matched with her doe-like prance and a snarky, irrepressible sense of humor, Mel’s travel-size frame lent her the general air of a mischievous woodland creature, a sexy trickster elf who might lead you out of the forest to safety or right over the edge of a cliff.
In other words, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Though she was six years younger than her friend, and Mel was perfectly capable of defending herself, Eliana felt violently protective of her. She considered Melliane the sister she’d never had.
“Look who’s talking trash!” Mel cried in delight. Dark eyes dancing with mirth, she pointed a finger at her. “Pot, meet kettle!”
“Shut up,” Eliana answered good-naturedly, and then she froze as the sharp, unmistakable sound of flesh smacking flesh broke the stillness. It was followed quickly by a low moan, a growled admonition, and then eerie silence. Mel glanced over at the high stack of crates Caesar and his two companions had disappeared around, but Eliana didn’t have to look. She’d heard it all before, and it made her sick to her stomach.
“Let’s get out of here.” Mel’s pretty face had darkened. “I don’t want to stay for the freak show.”
Me neither, thought Eliana as they quickly turned and headed for another access tunnel that would lead them out of the catacombs and into the basement of the abandoned abbey where they slept. I already know how it ends.
“Caesar’s late again.”
Eliana absently poked the tines of her fork into the gelatinous yolk of the fried egg on her plate. It quivered and split apart, oozing over the porcelain in a spreading stain of yellow. She shuddered, disgusted. Chicken stillbirths. Who liked these hideous things?
Silas did, apparently, because he cut into his own with surgical precision and ate half of it in one bite. Mildly he said, “He’s sleeping in.”
This didn’t fool her; Eliana knew Caesar too well. Sleeping in meant sleeping it off. He’d spent another night carousing with the catagirls—new ones, ones who didn’t know his particular tastes—or at the infamous Moulin Rouge, where the girls were paid handsomely to cater to those kinds of tastes and the men who possessed them. It had been five days since she’d witnessed the ugliness at the Tabernacle, and he’d only made one of their morning breakfast meetings.
It was their long habit to take breakfast in the back garden of the DuMarne, the old, sprawling abbey they’d moved to when they’d decided to take refuge in Paris after fleeing Rome three years before. A beautiful ruin, cavernous and neglected but in no danger of being sold because of its historical value, it was the perfect temporary hideaway for their little colony. The access to the catacombs was an added bonus they all took advantage of; they were creatures of the underworld, after all, even more so than all the other human cataphiles who went there to cavort and hide from real life in the cool, succoring dark.
“Maybe if he didn’t spend so much time sleeping I wouldn’t have to spend so much time working,” she said. As it usually did when the subject was Caesar, her stomach tightened to a fist.
“You don’t like the fighting?”
She glanced up at Silas to find him staring at her in sharp-eyed assessment. His shoulder-length black hair, gathered in a neat queue with a slim leather tie, framed a square-jawed, imposing face that others described as handsome but she saw only as hard. And preternaturally intelligent; Silas never missed a thing.
