Shadow’s Edge np-1

by J. T. Geissinger

  “I appreciate that, Christian,” Jenna answered quietly. “But your Assembly doesn’t seem to share that opinion.” Her voice dropped even lower. “And neither does your brother.”

  Leander, oh, Leander, how close we came.

  She still smelled him on her skin, she still felt his hot breath in her ear and heard his moans of pleasure as he found his bliss inside her. She almost tasted the velvet sweetness of his tongue as he thrust it into her mouth.

  But now it was gone, all gone with the blink of an eye, and nothing could ever bring all that sweetness back.

  Christian continued to gaze at her with an inscrutable expression. His eyes and face were shadowed as the gray light from the windows flared into nimbus around his head.

  “Do you love him?” he suddenly asked, his voice too loud.

  It startled her. She stared at him across the silent room and realized there was a distinct possibility she would be sent to a traitor’s death within the hour. She wouldn’t be a coward now, here at the end of everything.

  She wouldn’t lie. To him, or to herself.

  “Yes,” she rasped, her throat closing around the word.

  He only blinked and turned back to the window. He seemed to contract into himself, drawing down like a flame in an airless room, a phantom of a man fixed in a room of feminine frills and very tight locks.

  “How do you know?” he murmured, gazing out upon the rain-swept day to some faraway point she couldn’t see.

  Because every time I see his face, I feel like I could fly.

  She didn’t realize she’d spoken aloud until Christian slowly turned and sent her a small, pained smile. “Yes,” he said, holding still, his eyes fiercely bright. “That I understand.”

  They stared at each other in weighted silence for a moment. He turned away once again.

  “What will he do to Morgan?” Jenna heard her voice from the far-off dream place she still moved within.

  I love him, oh, God help me, I do.

  “Most likely kill her.”

  This ripped through her waking dream like a knife through flesh. Blood flooded her cheeks. “Of course,” she said, hard. “Why not? After all, she’s disposable—she’s only a woman.”

  “It has nothing to do with her gender,” he said, staring out the window. “She’s a traitor, Jenna. She admitted it herself. Because of her, at least one man has died—I expect she was the one responsible for the deaths in our sister colonies. And now, if the Expurgari know where we are, if they know of all our colonies around the world...we’re all in grave danger. She hasn’t only betrayed Viscount Weymouth. She’s betrayed us all.”

  Jenna thought of betrayal, of revenge, of how much Morgan must have hated these men, the way they controlled every aspect of her life. She understood her anger, her powerlessness. She thought of her father and how he left this place because he wasn’t allowed to love as he pleased.

  When she thought of Leander pain came stealing back, spiraling up from her gut to sink icy claws into her heart. She felt her nails digging into her palms and was glad for the pain there. It lessened it everywhere else.

  “And what is it, I wonder, that you are going to do now?” Christian asked, interrupting her thoughts. He lifted his hand and trailed one tapered finger very slowly over a beveled pane of glass, leaving a trace of gathered mist from the warmth of his skin.

  She looked away, found the familiar sight of her hands clenched pale in her lap. She drew in a deep, bitter breath and flexed her fists open. There were little red crescents where her nails had broken the skin.

  “You say that like I have a choice in the matter. I’m probably going to sit here in this room, watched over like a bird in a cage, until the Assembly decides my fate.”

  Maybe they would imprison her forever. Maybe they would kill her and bury her next to her father.

  Or maybe...maybe they would torture her.

  She imagined it would be Leander who would do it. She imagined his beautiful face hard as he beat her, as he whipped her and flayed her skin and made her blood run onto the ground.

  And maybe they will all burn in hell. She fought back sudden, bitter tears.

  “No,” Christian said. Jenna looked at him, blinking past the moisture in her eyes. “No, that simply won’t do.” He stared at her, fierce and hungry. “Not for you.”

  He smoothed one hand over his mess of thick black hair, straightened his shoulders beneath his ivory linen shirt, and bent down to pick up a marble-topped accent table near his feet. He threw it straight through the wall of windows.

  The room exploded into noise.

  Jenna covered her face on instinct as great, jagged chunks of glass flew in every direction, glinting through the air like a thousand miniscule blades. The dust of shattered marble and destroyed lead casings sifted around them, settling in her hair and on her arms, drifting down after a moment into thin, unnatural silence as she sat frozen in shock.

  A shout from outside the door, the sound of the handle being tried. It didn’t open, he’d locked it. Jenna stared openmouthed at the door, then at Christian. He stood amid the rubble of the demolished window with his hands hanging loose at his sides. His serene expression hadn’t changed, but his eyes shone ferociously green from the depths of his shadowed face.

  “Leander is Alpha of the Ikati, Jenna.” His voice was full of ancient sorrow and such forsaken need it chilled her skin. “But you are the Queen. Whether they recognize it or not, whether you wish to rule or not...”

  A faint, melancholy smile curved his lips. His voice grew soft. “Whether you choose to love one brother over another, that fact remains.”

  He motioned with one hand to the windows, to the gaping hole and the cool breeze that stole in to disturb the curtains and send them lifting and flapping in heavy silken ruffles around his legs. “I’ve never been more than the second son, the second best. But above all else, I am Ikati. I’m bound by the Law. I’m goddamned defined by it. And on this, the Law is perfectly clear.”

  He drew a long breath, the muscles in his jaw working. “You are the Queen. I believed Morgan because I’ve known it from the beginning. Anyone just has to look at you, to feel you, to know. They’re all just afraid of what it means for them. But you are the Queen, and your life is your own.”

  Jenna breathed in and out, blinking in shock and abrupt understanding. Sunlight crawled along the threaded colors of the rug beneath her feet. A pair of starlings rose into the sky beyond the windows and winged off, zigzagging drunkenly into the silvery-blue horizon.

  She stood without thinking, crossed to him, touched her hand to his unshaven cheek. “I knew you were a gentleman,” she whispered.

  His small, sad smile made another appearance. Angry fists began pounding on the bedroom door. Neither of them moved.

  “But I can’t let you do this.” She stared into his eyes, shaking her head. “They’ll have your head for this. You know they will.”

  He lifted his hand and gently pressed her fingers to the side of his face, covering her fingers with his own. He turned his nose to her wrist and inhaled. “My head...” his voice faltered. “My head is not your concern.” He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his lips, very briefly, to her skin. “But yours is of great concern to me. Please, go. Quickly.”

  “Jenna!”

  Leander’s enraged voice tore through the door. His fists kept an intense, throbbing rhythm on the wood. “Christian! What’s going on in there? Open this door! Open this goddamned door!”

  “You can’t go home,” Christian said calmly, lifting his head to gaze at her, ignoring the thundering racket. “They’ll look there first. Go somewhere they can’t find you and live your life.”

  He smiled again, only this time it was bittersweet, filled with longing and regret, and did not reach his eyes. “Somewhere warm. That’s where I’d go, if I could.” He turned to the shattered window and stared off into the distance. “Somewhere without all this dreadful fog.”

  “Thank you, Christian
,” she whispered, blinking away the moisture that blurred her vision. “Thank you.”

  She kept staring at him as the pounding on the door grew louder. She knew it would be the last time she’d see his face, a face that was as flawless and carved as all the rest of his kind, a face full of a pain that nearly broke her heart, a face she would never be able to erase from her memory...

  ...a face so like Leander’s, the man who’d captured her heart and inflamed her body and wanted to see her dead.

  The sound of wood cracking under pressure snapped her out of her reverie.

  “Go,” Christian urged, backing away, his gaze fixed to her face. “Go!”

  Without another word, Jenna Shifted to vapor and surged out the broken window into the windswept sky just as the door splintered open and five men burst into the room.

  Leander was the first one through the ruined door, but she was already gone.

  26

  The house was nondescript, deceptively so. Red brick and white shutters with a tiny green lawn and a picket fence, just like its neighbors to the left and the right. Nothing stirred beyond the lace-curtained windows, no voices were heard above the chirping birds and the evening traffic and the faint whine of the jet airplane that tracked a line of pearl gray across the indigo sky overhead. No lights shone from within to indicate an occupant.

  It had taken all day to find this place.

  The neighborhood was good, if unfashionable. She gathered from the older model cars lining the streets that the people who lived here were hard-working but not affluent. The gardens were small but well tended, the houses modest but kept in good repair. The suburb itself was altogether forgettable, like one of thousands found everywhere, on every continent on earth.

  It was a place where you could blend in, if you had a mind to.

  But it wasn’t where Jenna had chosen to blend in. It was where they had.

  The stink of the Expurgari was all over it.

  It was a rank, vicious scent of violence and jealousy and greed, with an underlying bloodlust that was unmistakable. It lay thick on the grass in the rose garden where Daria was taken, and it oozed from the benign-looking house like an evil vapor. It made her skin crawl.

  She’d never been to London before in her life. She’d never tracked a murderous band of psychopaths either. But today, she thought bitterly, staring at the brick house from her hiding place behind a reeking Dumpster in the alley across the street, today was a day for all kinds of firsts.

  First time to Shift to a wild animal.

  First time to fall in love.

  First time to be accused of treason by a pack of rabid beasts pretending to be men.

  She’d wanted nothing more than to fly away and forget him—forget all about him and his underhanded, arrogant Assembly with their ancient, feudal, ridiculous Laws—Laws that would have most likely had her head on a chopping block if Christian hadn’t intervened—but she’d caught the scent of tea roses and blood as she’d lifted into the air above Sommerley and couldn’t help herself. She’d twisted on an updraft of air and followed the scent as it led far away from the pastoral perfection of Sommerley into the smoggy, noisy mess of humanity and clogged streets that was London.

  No one had helped her father. He’d died a traitor’s death. Friendless, forsaken. But she wasn’t like them, she was nothing like them. She wasn’t going to leave Daria to die, not if there was something she could do about it. She would prove to them that their prejudice against humans was just as wrong as the prejudice leveled against them.

  And then she would be done with them all.

  It had taken hours of strenuous flight, holding herself in vapor form, mingling with rain-thick clouds and polluted city air, until she finally found this place. She’d gone on smell alone. She couldn’t sense Daria at all, she couldn’t summon her under her closed lids or feel her heartbeat anywhere near. It was as if she had vanished, but for her scent.

  And now she was hunched low, naked and hungry in a filthy alley that smelled of rotting garbage, hiding behind an overflowing trash bin, inhaling the stench of men so vile they exuded a fetid fog around themselves.

  She’d spent the better part of the past hour mentally castigating herself for yet another massive show of stupidity. This little side trip was most likely going to get her killed.

  There was no way in. From the inside, there would be no way out. Not a hole in a brick, not a crack in a window, not a single loose tile on the roof. Along with the distinct smell of Daria and evil, this was how she knew she was in the right place.

  The front door of the house opened. Jenna hissed a sharp breath between clenched teeth and shrank back against the metal Dumpster.

  A man looked out. Tall, wiry, and rachitic, he wore head-to-toe black and held a slim silver briefcase in one hand. His eyes raked the quiet street. He didn’t move for one long moment, but then, seemingly satisfied there was no danger, he stepped out onto the porch and motioned with his head for someone else to follow. He walked quickly to the waiting car in the driveway, got in, and turned the engine over.

  Another man followed him, dressed also in black, but this one had enormous biceps and thighs that strained against his clothing. He carried a zippered nylon shoulder bag. He paused at the door for one final glance inside, then turned and began to close the door behind him.

  Just before the lock slid shut in the bolt, a fine sheen of mist drifted above the man’s head for an unseen, silent moment, then slipped between the lead-enforced jamb and the door. It disappeared like a sylph into the foreboding gloom of the house.

  27

  Once upon a time, when he was a boy of fourteen, just beginning to understand the world he lived in and his future role within it, Leander ran away from home.

  He hadn’t planned it. He awoke in the dead of a particularly balmy spring night with the glow of the moon so bright through his windows it lit the entire room with a magical, pearled brilliance. He slid out of bed and crossed to the windows, looked out over the foggy, leafy shire, and felt the overwhelming need to feel the dewed grass under his bare feet.

  He’d always been stealthy, even more so once he’d begun to Shift three years before, so it was effortless to steal down the long curving staircase of what was then his parents’ manor house and slip out through the back kitchen door, the one with such well-oiled hinges they never squeaked when opened.

  He couldn’t Shift in the house. His father would have sensed it. Discovery was inevitable.

  So he waited until he was deep within the fragrant borders of the chest-high rosemary hedges that surrounded the marble fountain of Triton in the back gardens and Shifted then.

  He remembered how he felt, roaming, running, Shifting back and forth at will between animal and human and vapor, ruler of the velvet-dark forest, prince of the star-studded skies, king of the beautiful, magical world:

  Free.

  It thrilled him, this stolen freedom. It sent the blood pounding through his veins as he skipped over soft dirt and silken grass, the breeze murmuring through the ancient trees, moonlight dripping down to crown him in opal and pearl.

  He was never alone like this. He could never play and explore and run until his lungs hurt and his legs burned. There was always someone watching, someone to make sure he didn’t fall, he didn’t fail, that he did as he was told and toed the line as befit his position.

  Freedom was something new and foreign to him.

  It was also exquisitely intoxicating.

  Hours later, at the far edge of Sommerley, as he perched naked atop the towering hewn walls that marked the end of their territory, he stared out into the vast, unknown world on the other side and it suddenly came upon him.

  What if I keep going?

  The thought arrested him. For one blind moment, he teetered between an agonizing, heart-wrenching need to flee his future and his people and his heritage and everything that came with these things...and the yoke of duty that had hung around his neck since birth.

  He
was Alpha heir. He was the future of the colony. With all the privilege and power that accompanied his position, he was bound and tethered in ways none of the others were.

  He stared into the sultry sky, at the fat, perfect moon overhead. He envisioned a future for himself that included freedom and romance and swashbuckling adventures...and just like that, the decision was made. He smiled up at the moon, straightened from his crouch, and was just about to Shift to vapor...

  ...when his father reached out and, very firmly, grasped his wrist.

  “Before you go,” he said lightly, “a moment of your time.”

  Leander spun between shock and indignation and twitched out of his father’s grasp.

  Unfortunately, and to Leander’s eternal chagrin, his father was one of the few others in the colony who could Shift to vapor. His Gifts were unmatched, his senses powerful. Leander had been caught, more than once, in some boyish act of insubordination precisely because of it.

  “I wasn’t going anywhere,” he huffed, dropping his gaze from his father’s face, enigmatic and shadowed by the canopy of alder trees that spread their boughs overhead.

  “No?” his father answered, laughter warming his voice. “I rather thought you were.”

  Leander didn’t answer. He turned away and stared sullenly at his feet, breathing heavily through his nose. Humiliation and anger washed over him in awful, pummeling waves.

  “At any rate, you should know a few things before you make your decision.”

  “It’s not as if you’d really let me go anyway,” Leander said, sullen and indignant. “I never get to do anything I want.”

  A car drove by in the night, unseen, somewhere far off in the black distance beyond Sommerley. Just the low-pitched hum of tires moving over asphalt on a road he’d never seen was enough to make him ache with longing for all the things he’d never be allowed.

  “We’re very alike, you and I,” his father said softly, studying his son’s face. “It was hard for me, and it will be hard for you. Even harder, I imagine. Murder, assassination, lying, espionage...all these things will be required of you, all these and more if you are to lead our kind. But you are strong, and that is a very good thing. Because being the leader of the Ikati is a duty that would crush the weak.”