Page 54 of Rapture's Edge (Night Prowler 3)
She hadn’t been able to find Mel after leaving Silas in the afternoon. The need to discuss what he’d said about her father was overwhelming, a gnawing compulsion that had her heart thrashing like a shark on a chum line inside her chest. Several things Mel had said—and her voice, eyes, and posture when she’d said them—had stuck with her also, irritating as a splinter under skin.
Never missed a thing, your father.
Because he ordered me not to.
Made us swear to never tell a soul.
Why? Eliana circled back to that one question, over and over. Why?
Why had her father insisted Mel keep her marriage a secret?
Why would Demetrius go out of his way to clean and stitch her wounds?
Why were those assassins—who she’d honestly told Silas were not of the Legiones or the Bellatorum—trying to kill her?
Could what Silas said abo
ut her father actually be true?
Nothing added up. None of it. Uncertainty slithered, cold and reptilian, under her skin.
By the time she entered the heated, cavernous enclave of New Harmony, she’d worked herself into an epic lather.
The crowd was huge tonight. Bodies pressed against the bare stone walls, against one another, nearly everyone with a drink in hand, many laughing, dancing, shouting to be heard above the thumping bass and electronica music of a DJ who had set up a mobile turntable and speakers in one candlelit corner. It was nights like these—drinking and talking and being with humans—that made her believe all she and her father had dreamed was possible. No, they didn’t know the truth of who and what she was, the gritty details, but most of them seemed to know on some animal, primal level that she was different. That she was Other. They watched her, they moved aside to let her pass, they glanced away when her dark gaze met theirs.
And still they came.
They came to have fun and be entertained and escape the drudgery of daily lives spent at desks, in cubicles, behind windowless office walls. They came to lose themselves in darkness and adventure and the camaraderie of the underground. They came to fight. They came to dance. They came to play and drink and love.
They came to live. And tonight, more than ever before, Eliana needed to live, too.
A roar went up as she was spotted. She strode from the shadows of the connecting tunnel, her black trench billowing out behind her, a small, satisfied smile on her face. This was her home, and these were her people—related or not—and she loved it. She loved them all.
“Butterfly!” someone shouted from the back of the crowd, and hundreds of voices took it up in a chant that swelled and crested like a wave. Butterfly! Butterfly! Butterfly!
Always a chilly fifty-five degrees, the air in the catacombs took on a decidedly electric vibe.
She prowled to the middle of the grotto and paused. She shrugged off her coat, handed it to an anonymous person who darted forward from the crowd to take it, and let her gaze drift over the sea of bodies. She knew what the cataphiles saw when they looked back at her: choppy blue hair and tight black leather, motorcycle boots and a cinched bustier that left her arms and shoulders bare, the butterfly between her shoulder blades exposed and strangely animated as the shadows played over her skin. For the first time in a long time she’d worn makeup, smoky eye shadow and eyeliner drawn out past the corners of her eyes to accentuate their catlike tilt. Her lips were a curving slash of vermilion.
“Who wants to go first?” she shouted above the noise.
A group of four men, money held aloft in fists, pushed to the front of the crowd. One of them—the biggest one, blocky and grinning, with ham-hock hands and the cauliflower ears of a professional boxer—peeled off his shirt, dropped it to the ground, lifted his hand, and pointed a stubby finger at his chest.
Eliana smiled and thought, The bigger they are, the harder they—
“I’ll go first,” boomed a deep, masculine voice from the shadows along the back wall, a voice every cell in her body recognized, and every head in the crowd craned around to see.
They didn’t have to try very hard. He stood head and shoulders above everyone else. He stepped forward from the shadows, and one by one, mouths hanging open, every person shrank back as he passed.
Demetrius.
Here.
Here!
The music died. Hushed whispers ran through the gathering. A palpable crackle of excitement leapt from person to person, viral, infectious.
He prowled toward her, exuding a raw current of danger, feral and heated, his eyes locked on hers. When he reached the edge of the crowd he paused. Deliberately, holding her gaze, he slowly unzipped the black hoodie he was wearing, shrugged it off, and let it fall to his feet.
