She then regarded him with an eyebrow raised, that look of defiance he was beginning to recognize settling over her face, thinning her mouth into a firm, stubborn line.
“I think I need to sit down now,” she said.
He moved instantly to drag the ruined silk chair over to her. He positioned it behind her and she sat, her back ramrod straight, her naked body swathed securely in deep folds of cashmere.
She gazed out the windows toward the veranda and the city skyline beyond and didn’t make a sound.
“I know it must be shocking for you. Unbelievable, most likely,” Leander said, unnerved by this unnatural calm. He couldn’t begin to imagine what was behind it. The first time he’d Shifted, at eleven years old, he’d run screaming with joy in circles over the lawn at Sommerley.
But then he’d been prepared. He’d known his whole life who and what he was. He’d always wanted it. While Jenna...
He dragged the other side chair across the carpet and sat down across from her in it, while she only continued to stare out the window, silent, still as stone.
“I think I owe you an apology,” he began, uncomfortable with her continued silence. “I didn’t actually know you would—it’s not your time yet, you see, we still have a few more days—I thought I would have more time to explain. I only thought to show you how I—” He checked himself and ran a hand through his thick hair when he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Jenna gave him a long, frozen look that stripped away every pretense of softness between them. “What else can I do?” she demanded, cool and controlled. Accusing.
He was taken aback by the difference in her. Only a moment ago she had been pliant and soft in his arms, she had kissed him so passionately he’d felt himself melting. He still had the taste of her on his tongue. But now she was sitting soldier straight in her chair and glaring at him with daggers in her eyes.
“I don’t know yet. I’m not sure exactly what you’ll be capable of—”
“But you have an idea,” she interrupted, her voice still the same low, guarded cadence that twisted his heart into knots. Her lovely features hardened into a mask of wariness.
She looked at him as if he were a stranger.
As if he were an enemy.
He longed to reach out to her, find her hand under the layers of cashmere, gather her into his arms, slide his hands into the cool weight of her hair. But he knew she would only recoil, so he remained in the chair, an unhappy clench in his stomach.
“If you can make the Shift to vapor, you’ll be able to Shift to panther as well,” he said. “It’s what we are. It’s what you are.”
This time she didn’t even blink. Her eyes were clear and dark and fathomless. Her gaze flickered down to his lips, then she turned her head away again, raised her chin, and gifted him with her profile.
“A panther,” she said, without inflection.
“Yes.”
A slight pause, then—“A cat.”
“Technically, yes. A cat.”
A little huff of air escaped her lips, which could have been either amusement or disdain. She watched the heat of the day bend the air into shimmering waves over the rooftops of the city beyond the windows and her nose delicately wrinkled, as if she smelled something bad.
“Wonderful. What else?”
Leander leaned back in his chair and debated how much he should tell her. This air of bored civility might be the way she normally reacted under stress, or it could be the calm before the storm broke. He didn’t know her well enough to judge.
He hated that he didn’t know her well enough to judge.
“Not just any cat, Jenna, and certainly not the average domesticated house variety. You are a predator, and a lethal one at that. You’ll have the speed and agility all felines possess, but you’ll be far faster, far stronger.” He watched the light play over the contours of her face, watching carefully to see her reaction. To see any reaction. She gave none.
“You’ll be able to see clear as day through a night pitch black. You’ll be able to hear a whispered conversation half a mile away, smell a rainstorm a week out, and sense everything around you with perfect, unbroken clarity. You’ll be in tune with nature in a way no other creature on this planet can ever be.”
Through all of this, she remained a sphinx: beautiful and cold and unmoving.
His voice dropped to a murmur. “You’ll be able to feel the very heartbeat of the earth.”
That seemed to get through to her, barely. Her lips twitched and she inhaled deeply, then let out the breath silently through her nose.
“I assume you’ve known about some of these talents for years. You must have known you were different,” he continued, wondering what it must have been like for her to hide who she was, to try to act like the rest of the people around her, though she was so much more.
He pictured himself living a life among all those cow-witted humans and suppressed a shudder.
He leaned toward her in the chair and rested his elbows on his thighs. “But now that you’ve Shifted to vapor, they’ll be exponentially stronger. And once you Shift to panther, the surge of sensations will be almost overwhelming. In order to thrive, in order to survive,” he emphasized, “you must learn to regulate how much you let in.”
His eyes searched her face. Jenna sat mute, expressionless.
It was thoroughly unnerving.
“Also, every Shifter has talents individual to himself—or herself—which will vary in strength. You, for instance, can obviously read minds with a touch of your hand. Anything else you may be capable of will reveal itself to you when the time is right.”
“And you?” she said, barely audible.
Her hair glinted gold and honeyed blonde in the light, casting a warm gleam over the rose-cream clarity of her skin, lighting her features with a glow so bright it was almost incandescent. It did nothing to warm the ice in her eyes, however.
“I can Shift to vapor as well—”
“Can’t they all do that? All the Ikati?” she interrupted.
“No. Only a very few, only the most Gifted. Most of our kind are earthbound.”
“Could my father Shift to vapor?”
Among other things, he wanted to say. But that didn’t seem prudent. “Yes.”
She gave a little, satisfied nod, then turned her face away to gaze out the window once again. She crossed one leg over the other, sending a tiny whiff of the warm, wind-clean fragrance of her skin to his nose. He watched one slender bare foot begin to dance up and down.
The cashmere blanket covering her legs moved higher over one knee, rising up her unclad thigh, but she didn’t seem to notice. He gritted his teeth.
“Morgan? Christian?”
He didn’t particularly care for the sound of his brother’s name on her tongue. “Neither can Shift to vapor. Morgan has the power of Suggestion—”
“Suggestion?” she repeated, her voice rising an octave. Her head swiveled around sharply and she fixed him with a wide-eyed stare. “Like mind control?”
“Didn’t you see that when you touched me?” Leander said, surprised.
He realized instantly it was a poor choice of words. She winced and closed her eyes for just longer than a blink. “I was too busy seeing everything else,” she muttered as she turned her head. All at once the unnatural poise and calm seemed to flow out of her like water down a drain, leaving only a pale shadow of barely concealed distaste flattening her lips.
She fell silent once again.
He forced himself to remain relaxed, willed himself to be calm, fought his instinct to pull her back into his arms. After long minutes of watching her breathe and gaze numbly into the heat-glazed horizon, he spoke.
“Is there anything else you want to ask me, Jenna?” He waited patiently for her to respond.
He waited for a very, very long time.
Jenna stared out the bright windows. She listened to the faint hiss of traffic on the streets below, caught the scent of heat-baked stone a
nd wilting roses rising up from the rose garden, tasted the ashes of her former life in her mouth. She stared out at everything, but saw nothing at all.
Her mother had warned her something was coming. And now it was here.
The sensation of her corporeal body dissolving into mist was the most exhilarating—and frightening—thing she had ever experienced. Cushioned on an updraft of heated air, her back flattened against the cool plaster of the ceiling, she saw and heard everything as before, yet it was all amplified a thousandfold. As vapor she was free as a ghost to move over and through anything she wished, she had only to will it and she could drift in any direction.
A song of joy pierced her straight through as she realized her body was gone. All the cumbersome heft of muscle and bone disappeared, the pull of gravity evaporated completely, leaving nothing but lovely and weightless air. It was like coming home to paradise after being imprisoned in a dark cell for the whole of eternity.
She thought she might die from the sheer bliss of release.
It wasn’t the first time, of course. It had been happening in fits and starts since she was ten years old, since the day her father disappeared. Her mother had told her he’d never be back, and she’d shut herself in her bedroom and simply disintegrated into nothingness. It was just for a moment, and she half-believed she imagined it, but then it happened again, and again, and always when she was angry or somehow out of control.
It was the main reason she never had a long-term relationship with a man. Once her emotions got involved, once she let go of her vigilant control, it was all over. It hadn’t happened at all in years now—she’d been much too careful.
But this was entirely different, this Shift. It felt like a million fevered dreams of release, it felt like home. She would have gladly left the world behind and stayed as vapor forever.
It was only his voice calling her from below that brought her back from the beautiful edge of oblivion. There was a weight underscoring the velvet tone of it that pulled her back down to earth like ballast. It was as if he was in command of her will, as if the mere sound of his voice could affect her so deeply she would turn away from anything to obey it, even the sweetest pleasure she had ever known.
That had been the frightening part. She did not want to consider what it meant.
Jenna slowly filled her lungs with air and said a silent good-bye to everything that existed for her before this moment. Because now she intended to keep her promise to Leander, now that everything had changed, now that the key had been pushed through the keyhole, the tumblers turned in the lock, the door pushed wide open.
Now that she was Alice, down the rabbit hole.
She understood precisely what he meant when he said she’d have to learn to control the sensations she let in; she thought she’d learned how to do that years ago. But now everything was even brighter, even louder; her surroundings pummeled her harder than they ever had before.
Every breath he took now was a rasp in her ears, every sunbeam that sliced through the windows seared her eyes, every scent in the room and pouring through the open patio doors hammered her relentlessly.
Sun-warmed skin, stale wool and perfumed silk, polished wood, scented soap, freshly laundered sheets, cut grass, car exhaust, arid air. Fecund earth and heated sky and every animal for miles around, pulsing hot with blood. But underneath it all, something new and dark and very unpleasant. The rotten scent of human desperation threaded through like a stain, rising up from the people moving over the earth below to sting her nose with its savage, acrid bite.
Sorrow. Loneliness. Grief. Remorse.
More than anything he said, this moved her, very nearly to tears, though she wouldn’t let him see it. For she was human still, only half the Ikati he spoke of. Her mother’s blood ran true in her veins, just as her father’s did.
It was her mother’s pain she smelled in all those people below. And her father...
“Do you know where my father is?” she asked Leander in a fierce whisper, still looking out over the city.
He answered without hesitation. “I do.”
She bit her lip hard to force back the sob of relief that wanted to escape her mouth. She couldn’t crumble now, that wasn’t even her most important question. She watched a peregrine falcon circle lazily in the bottomless azure sky. It soared on an updraft, hunting, feathers ruffled gray and black by the wind. She felt its eyes of piercing jet flicker over her for a moment, then it banked and soared away.
She swallowed, gathered her courage, and lifted her gaze straight to his. “Is he alive?”
Leander didn’t answer in the affirmative, nor did he answer in the negative. He only gazed at her in silence and drew a weighted breath.
This she took as the answer she dreaded. Her father was dead, years dead, had been so since he vanished like ether when she was a child. She closed her eyes against the hot tears that welled up and fought to swallow around the fist that formed in her throat.
She didn’t know how much time passed before she could speak again. She just repeated one thing over and over in her mind.
You will not let him see you cry. You will not.
When she finally spoke, it was a whispered directive. “You will take me to him.”
“I will take you anywhere on earth you want to go,” he said, his eyes soft.
She nodded back at him, a numbness like frostbite beginning to sink icy runners into her heart. “There are others there—at Sommerley—others like my father. Others like you and....me. There are more of us there?”
“Many more,” he said. That look of wolf-hunger illumed his face again, the thump of his heart rang strong and clear in her ears.
She felt his desire, hot and thick as maple syrup. She smelled his skin, tasted his lips, felt the ghosted heat of his hand branding the small of her back. And she wanted him too, though it was reckless and crazy: he’d come to kidnap her. She couldn’t ever trust him.
So she decided she simply wouldn’t allow herself to feel anything for him at all. She wouldn’t ever let him in.
With an effort of will she didn’t know she had, she blocked it all out. His desire—her own as well—the crush of noises, the assault of smells and sensations. Hardest of all was smothering the sound of his heartbeat. Its echoing beat refused to fade in her ears, though she concentrated so hard she nearly stopped breathing.
“I’m going to require something from you now, before we go any further,” Jenna said softly. She let her gaze trail over his face one final time, memorizing its carved and perfect planes and angles the way she had memorized those of her father’s face, so long ago.
Another beautiful memory she’d had to erase to survive.
“Yes,” he answered, his voice rough. He sat forward in the chair, coiled so tight he seemed ready to spring. His eyes glittered bright, unearthly green. “Anything.”
She looked at him, at his eyes, at his lips, at his body so strong and muscled. His beauty was almost sublime, but now she felt nothing. In the space of a single moment, her heart had turned to something cold and barren. Lifeless.
Jenna nodded, satisfied. This deadness was good. This would help her move forward.
“I require your word now, Lord McLoughlin. Actually, no,” she corrected herself with a tiny jerk of her head that sent waves of honeyed blonde cascading over the cashmere wrap. “I require your oath.”
“Anything,” he repeated, instinctively lifting a hand out toward her.
“Promise me you won’t ever touch me again,” she said, hard and cold like the glacier inside her.
His hand frozen in the air between them, Leander stared into her eyes and found a new, resolute hardness staring back at him. He realized with an unpleasant shock that turned his mouth to dust that she was dead serious.
His hand lowered slowly to rest on the cool wood arm of the chair. He considered her in a beat of silence and everything seemed to grind to a slow, molasses stop. Dust motes coiled lazily in a shaft of sunlight from the windows, suspend
ed in the air, suspended like his heartbeat.
He had found her. He had wanted her. He had failed to move her. Now that she’d made her intentions clear, he had only his duty to return her to Sommerley left.
He allowed his rigid body to lean against the solid, grounding back of the chair. His answer came soft and very low.
“If that is what you require, Jenna, you shall have it.”
A fraction of the tension she held in her body disappeared. She even smiled, small and tight. “Well then,” she said, a little brighter. “When do we leave?”
10
“....and the beluga,” Morgan said between mouthfuls of the glistening white caviar, “is exceptional. You really should try it.”
Jenna wrinkled her nose at the mound of gelatinous fish roe and looked back out the rain-streaked pane. They were descending. Vast swaths of emerald forest interspersed with fields of rolling green hills and low stone walls rose up to meet them. Thunderclouds heavy with rain boiled overhead in the dark sky, and off in the distance, a lone spike of lightning scorched the air with a fleeting, electric brilliance.
“I thought caviar was supposed to be black,” Jenna said to the window, wondering if the lightning was a bad omen. “Or red.”
“The cheap stuff is,” Morgan replied with a shrug that rustled the black taffeta stretched over her shoulders. The blouse was low cut, tight, fronted with a row of delicate pearl buttons. It showed off more than a hint of décolletage, while her miniscule skirt showed off what seemed like ten miles of tanned, bare leg. With a set of carved cheekbones, a fall of shiny, sable hair rippling over one shoulder, and a cherry-red pout, she was intimidatingly beautiful.
“The older the sturgeon, the lighter the caviar is in color, the more exquisite the taste. This is Almas, from the Caviar House & Prunier in London. It’s the best money can buy.”
She swallowed another bite spread thick on a lightly buttered toast point and sighed in pleasure. “It’s heaven, nothing less. Let me make you one.” She dug the tiny mother of pearl spoon into the crystal bowl set in front of her on the dining table. It smelled faintly of salt water and hazelnuts.
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