Page 77 of Rapture's Edge (Night Prowler 3)
Aldo had never seen anyone sober so quickly. Caesar’s eyes, slightly glazed only seconds before, sharpened and took on a sinister, predatory edge. He stiffened, hissed in
a breath.
“Where’s Silas?”
“I don’t know, my lord. I didn’t see him, but your sister…it appears your sister has cut off one of his hands.”
Caesar recoiled with a gasped exhalation. He recovered, muttered, “That bitch,” then snapped, “Wait for me,” and slammed the door in Aldo’s face.
It wasn’t two minutes before he reemerged, dressed and radiating anger, his eyes a deadly, flat black Aldo had seen on many, many occasions, right before something terrible happened.
Caesar said, “Let’s go.”
They found Silas in one of the old outlying buildings on the abbey property, a crumbling, mossy stone structure that had once been used as an infirmary. Seated on an upended milk crate next to a small fire he’d built in the middle of the bare floor, he was shirtless, sweating profusely, and pale as a sheet. On the arm missing a hand, he’d tightly tied a strip of fabric—torn from the discarded shirt that lay at his feet—just above the elbow as a tourniquet. How the hell he’d managed to tie a tourniquet with one hand was a mystery Caesar had no intention of unraveling.
Below the tourniquet the flesh had turned a waxen, lifeless gray. There was a trail of blood from the door to where he was sitting, and a crazy splattered pattern of crimson drops zigzagged back and forth across the bare room, a visual map of where he’d been since he arrived. Smoke from the little fire gathered against the vaulted wood ceiling was funneled off toward rotted gaps in the boards in long white fangs.
In Silas’s one remaining hand, he gripped a dagger.
“My lord,” he greeted him, stronger than Caesar would have thought for someone missing an important body part. But Caesar couldn’t look at Silas’s face, because the bloody stump of his missing hand held a hypnotic, almost sensual appeal. He couldn’t wait to get a better look at it. He and Aldo moved closer.
“Your sister,” Silas began, but Caesar interrupted him.
“Yes, I know.” He finally met Silas’s eyes. “She’s always been unreasonable.”
Silas exhaled, strangely relieved. “She’s seen Demetrius—”
“Demetrius!”
“She slept with him, my lord. I overheard her talking with Melliane—”
“Slept with him!” Caesar screeched, eyes bulging. The world ground to a halt.
“He’s somehow convinced her I’ve been lying to her, to all of you—”
“SLEPT WITH HIM!”
Caesar felt as if a bomb had detonated inside his body. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t move. He was frozen with horror and a fury so gargantuan it felt nuclear. She’d slept with the vermin who’d murdered their father. Slept with him. Slept with him. It kept slapping against the inside of his skull like a trapped bird.
“Kill her,” he choked out. Silas and Aldo stared at him. The fire crackled merrily, sending up feathers of glowing ash and whorls of smoke. “We have to kill her! She’s a traitor! She’s—she’s a whore!”
Slowly, Silas smiled. It was more of a grimace the way his lips peeled back over his teeth, but the blood was pounding through Caesar’s veins and there was a booming in his head and he couldn’t see much of anything anymore because the room had started to spin.
Slept with him. Slept with him.
He imagined it in stunning, Technicolor detail, their naked bodies pressed together, the warrior’s big hands all over her bare flesh, her wanton moans and their sweat and the squeaking of a mattress beneath them—
Aldo caught him as he staggered sideways. Caesar shoved him away and began pacing to and fro with his hands clenched in his hair to manage his sudden dizziness, the acid burning his lungs. Hatred glittered through him, consuming, and Caesar had never wanted to kill something—hurt something—so much in his entire life.
He swung around and spied the dagger in Silas’s hand. “What are you doing with that dagger, Silas?” he hissed, prowling forward.
Silas’s face hardened. Sweat dripped from his chin. “I have to stop the bleeding, my lord.”
Caesar looked at the dagger, at the fire, and understood in a flash that was like a thunderbolt. He yanked the dagger from Silas’s hand, held it over the fire until the tip glowed white hot and his own fingers were blistering, and then spat at Aldo, “Hold him.” He looked back at Silas, and his smile was like an animal’s, rabid and wild. “This is going to hurt.”
A man walking his dog down a quiet residential street six blocks away heard the screams. He stopped and crossed himself, peering up. A mother walking her two children to school heard it, too, and so did the fruit vendor and his wife setting up their stall on the Rue de Marquet. Many more heard it as well, the long, eerie shriek that seemed to descend from the sky itself, echoing off walls and trees and buildings before being cut off abruptly, leaving all to wonder just what had caused such a terrible noise.
Or who.
