Free Rapture's Edge by J. T. Geissinger Page B

blankly at the empty glass in his hand.
    “When have I ever wanted to talk about it?” D muttered. The camaraderie from hours earlier had evaporated along with the scotch, and D was surlier than ever. He knew from experience that drinking only dulled the pain but didn’t numb it, and that ache beneath his breastbone would needsomething stronger to kill it than an eighteen-year-old single malt. A machete might do the trick.
    “So we’re just going to sit here all night and stare at the walls?”
    D glanced up at Constantine, and a hot flash of anger lit through him when he saw the pity on his face. “I seem to remember it was you who insisted on coming,” he snapped.
    “If I’d known your little pity party was going to be this much fun, I wouldn’t have.”
    D bristled and sat up, glaring at Constantine. “I’m not feeling sorry for myself!”
    “Right, you’re just drinking this much because you’re
happy
.”
    “Screw you, Constantine.”
    “Get real, D. You need to get a grip on yourself, brother. This can’t go on forever…”
    Constantine kept talking, but D didn’t hear the rest because his attention was diverted by the flat-screen television hung above the pool table across the room. It was tuned to a news station, and the picture on the screen froze his blood to ice.
    Eliana. Good God, it was
her
.
    Hands cuffed behind her back, dressed only in a man’s wrinkled white button-down shirt, she was being hauled out of a police car by a pair of uniformed gendarmes sporting enough weaponry to outfit a small army. Though her head was turned, he saw her clearly in profile, and the image instantly seared itself into his mind. The proud lift of her chin, the elegant line of her neck, the elongated limbs that lent her the look of a ballerina, pixie-like and delicate. She was exactly as he remembered, except for hair dyed thecolor of lapis lazuli and an ominous bloodstained bandage wrapped around one bare calf.
    The television was muted, but the caption on the screen screamed, “French police apprehend notorious thief!”
    Everything around him vanished.
    Gone was the dim, smoky room with its rickety tables and tacky décor, gone was the humid fug of cigarettes and stale beer, gone was the flickering neon Peretti sign in the window and the empty scotch bottle on the table next to his left hand. There was only her. Every nerve, every cell and atom of his body came into brilliant, throbbing focus and began to roar:
Eliana! Eliana! Eliana!
    Frozen, he stared at the television and watched as the two gendarmes swiftly maneuvered her—limping—past a crush of shouting reporters and up a wide flight of marble steps toward the double glass doors of the entry to an enormous brick building. Just before she disappeared through the doors, she glanced over her shoulder and looked directly into the camera.
    Wide-set doe eyes, liquid soft and black as midnight, stared at him.
Through
him. D’s heart stopped dead in his chest. He shot out of his chair and at the top of his lungs shouted the only word that came to mind.
    “Shit!”
    Despite this outburst, none of the other bar patrons chanced a glance in his direction. He came to this dive bar fairly regularly, and they’d more than once seen the huge, glowering, tattooed male beat someone to a pulp for no discernible reason and had learned to keep their eyes averted or risk a beating of their own.
    “Nice,” said Constantine dryly as he drummed the fingers of one big hand on the scarred, sticky tabletop betweenthem. His back was to the television. “Is that just a general observation, or are you experiencing some kind of emergency with your bowels?”
    “It’s her! On television! It’s
her!
” D sputtered past numb lips.
    Constantine closed his eyes for a second longer than a blink and sighed. “You’ve had about a liter of scotch, D. You’re seeing things. Why don’t you take a seat and we’ll—”
    “
Turn it up!
” D shouted at the skinny bartender,