Free Rapture's Edge by J. T. Geissinger

she suddenly remembered the task she’d been assigned. “Speaking of those unnamed people, they’ve decided I should hit the Louvre tonight.”
    Mel stopped dead in her tracks, and Eliana turned, surprised, to look at her. The corridor they were in was dark and winding, filled with the sound of trickling water and long, crawling shadows, but Eliana could easily make out the dismay on Mel’s face.
    “The
Louvre
! Why there? That seems so risky!”
    Eliana sighed in agreement. “I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks so. As if I had a choice,” she muttered as an afterthought. “Anyway, security personnel can’t see me in the dark. Cameras can’t capture an image of me. Plus, I can Shift to Vapor if I need to. Really, what’s the worst that could possibly happen?”
    It was a rhetorical question, of course, and one Mel didn’t have an answer to, but as they turned and began the long walk back to the upper levels of the catacombs and the hidden entrance that would lead them into the basement of their abandoned abbey, Eliana couldn’t shake the dark, nagging feeling that, somehow, she was about to find out.

Heart pounding, D shot up in bed and blinked into the cool stillness of the dark room, trying to regain his equilibrium. Trying, without success, to swallow around the cold, devouring terror that clawed at his throat. An echo of a scream died into silence off the curved rock walls as he sat there sweating and panting with the sheets rucked up around his waist, and D realized it must have come from him.
    The dream was the worst he’d had yet.
    Fighting panic, he dropped his head into his hands and concentrated on getting himself under control. Images still battered him relentlessly—gunfire, blood, men with weapons descending on the naked, terrified figure of Eliana crouched against a wall like a cornered animal. There wasnothing he could do, but every nerve ending in his body screamed for him to do
something
.
    Because like the others before it, this dream was a harbinger of things to come.
    He swung his legs over the side of the cot and pushed off. Naked, he went to the footlocker at the end of the bed and pulled on the pair of black cargo pants and shirt he’d tossed there hours earlier. He laced up his boots and crossed to the dresser on the other side of the room that held the various weapons he always carried, laid out in a careful row on top. He strapped them on in the same order he did every time: Glock nine-millimeter on his right hip, kukhri—tip dipped in poison—on his left, push daggers in each of his boots, folding knives tucked into pockets in his pants. He was a walking arsenal and, as one of the king’s elite guards, had been most of his adult life.
    Not that there was a king to guard any longer, but that hadn’t reduced the threats to their colony. If anything, the king’s death increased the threats tenfold.
    He ran a hand over his head, his dark hair shorn so close to his skull it couldn’t accurately even be called a haircut, and grabbed the keys to his Ducati from the small wooden bowl where they were always kept. He needed a ride. He needed a drink, as well. Ignoring the fact that they were all basically under martial law and forbidden to leave the catacombs without express permission from Celian—once the king’s main enforcer, now the leader of the
Bellatorum
and de facto ruler of the colony—D had been making clandestine reconnaissance trips ever since Eliana had disappeared.
    He groaned aloud. Even
thinking
her name hurt.
    With a curse, he spun on his heel and made his way from the Spartan sleeping chambers the
Bellatorum
used into the chilled gloom of the main corridor of the catacombs.
    Fifteen minutes later he emerged in the shadows of the subterranean basilica of Domitilla that the
Bellatorum
used as their own special entrance and exit to the catacombs and came face-to-face with a pair of nasty-looking guards lounging against the ancient Doric columns. Young,