Shadow's Edge (13 page)

He nuzzled his nose next to her throat and breathed in, a deep inhalation that sprouted goose bumps all over her skin. “I only want to protect you,” he whispered, his lips brushing her neck, “to keep you safe. Trust me, Jenna. Trust me. Let me take care of you.”

That was his hand at the small of her back, fingers spread, pressing her body closer to his. That was her knee drawing up to allow the weight of his muscled leg to fit between hers, the hem of her dress slipping up, leaving her bare thigh exposed. Those were her fingers digging deep into the soft down coverlet as his lips moved over her collarbone, as he murmured words in a flowing language she didn’t understand. That was her hand stealing up to glide over his arm, his shoulder, touching the warm skin of his neck, sliding into his hair...

“Leander,” she protested, her voice caught between a whisper and a groan, already beginning to surrender herself to the flush of hot pleasure his hands brought, his lips brought. Her physical reaction to him was overwhelming: instinctual, pure, and primal. Another few seconds and her body would take control of the decision making. “Please, I can’t think—”

But he cut her off with a kiss, deep and hot, and rolled half over her body so she was melting down into the soft, welcoming luxury of the mattress.

He pulled back, panting. “Don’t think,” he said, husky. “Just feel.”

And then he kissed her again and she couldn’t help herself—she kissed him back.

Leander made a sound deep in his throat, a rumbling low growl, like an animal’s. He put his mouth against her ear and rasped out six words that made her heart clench into a fist.

“I want to be inside you.”

He slid his open palm down her bare thigh, curled his fingers over her hip, and rocked his pelvis against hers. She felt the length of his arousal, hard and insistent, and desire slammed into her with so much force she moaned. A hot, eager lust that demanded satisfaction swelled up in her and began to rage and burn.

He caught her wrist in one strong hand and lifted it over her head, pressing it down, captive, against the pillow. He lowered his head against the column of her neck and fastened his lips against her skin, licking, sucking, making her arch against him.

Then he bit her.

It wasn’t hard, nothing that would break the skin or leave a mark, but a native, untapped burst of energy flashed to life inside her under the fleeting sting of his bite. A blinding white current of feral awareness shot through her muscles and blood and nerves as if she were a pile of dry leaves touched by a torch and doused with accelerant...

...As if an animal sleeping just under her skin had awoken to barbarous, savage joy.

Jenna opened her eyes and stared hard at the ceiling and felt something dark within her gather into storm.

One moment she was velvet and fire and flexed tension in his arms, the next she dissolved completely into mist.

Leander supposed it shouldn’t have surprised him. He knew this was coming, after all. From the first moment he’d laid eyes on her, he’d sensed the latent power that simmered just beneath that ivory skin—he knew she would Shift, as surely as he knew his own name.

But it wasn’t only the suddenness of it that left him frozen, staring down at her empty dress still settling back against the bedcovers with a faint rustle of silk, the perfume of her skin still lingering in his nose.

It was the fact that she’d Shifted
now
—it was still days before her birthday.

In the entirety of a recorded history that stretched back nearly two thousand years before the appearance of Christ, Leander had never heard of a half-Blood making the turn before turning twenty-five.

It was an immutable, scientific fact. When fused with its human counterpart,
Ikati
Blood was diluted, warped, corrupted from the state of purity that allowed their specific genetic characteristics to flourish. The first Shift would generally occur anywhere between twelve and sixteen for an
Ikati
child, but for a half-Blood...

Twenty-five years to the minute from birth, and the Shift either happened or it did not.

If it did come, only a tiny percentage survived it.

And so there were unmarked graves near the outskirts of every
Ikati
colony where the bones of those lesser creatures were cast into the ground. The Law was clear: Shift or die.

But Jenna had made the Shift effortlessly and had done it early. Leander didn’t quite know what to make of the anomaly she was proving to be.

He looked up to the ceiling where she had spread out against the white plaster. She moved silently toward the chandelier in the center of the room, a fine plume of white mist that hovered and dipped and flowed, a curving ghost slinking through the air.

“Jenna,” he said, his breath still coming as a ragged pant from the pleasure of her lips under his, of her body so feminine and lush. “Come back.”

He watched as she gathered herself around the chandelier, moving over it, learning its edges and cool planes as she sifted through the shining drops of crystal. His gaze skipped to the veranda doors and his heart missed a beat. He’d left one of them cracked open.

He pushed off from the bed and went to stand under the chandelier.

“Please come down.” He stared up at her as she hovered above, the most beautiful phantom. “Just think it,
down
, and it will happen.” He watched her form and unform, ripple and flow and stretch out so thin he glimpsed the ceiling beyond.

She dropped down from the ceiling in an elegant column of ruffling white mist and Shifted to woman just under his nose. To a completely nude woman, save only for strands of that cascading mass of honeyed blonde hair, which covered a few inches of bare skin as it draped over her chest but left very little to the imagination.

His breath caught in his throat as he caught sight of the rise of her breasts beneath her hair. He took a step back and tried to look straight into her eyes.

Her eyes were wide as saucers, glowing green and yellow, staring at him with a combination of horror and flat-out elation.

“You’re all right,” he said. “Don’t move.”

He snatched the soft cashmere throw from the end of the bed, spread it open and wound it in a lush expanse of dove-hued softness around her body. She was trembling. He rubbed his palms up and down her arms to get her blood circulating and thought about baseball to distract himself from the straining ache of his erection, from thinking about what pleasures were hidden under that blanket, how just one yank would leave her entirely exposed—

“Leander,” she whispered. Her voice broke over his name.

“Yes.”

“I just—I just—”

He had to clear his throat before he could speak. “You just Shifted,” he said.

She looked into his face, a clear and concentrated look, her wide-set eyes gleaming phosphorous green from under extravagantly long lashes. A faint stain of color bloomed over her cheeks. It was like watching a lovely piece of marble flush to life.

“Shifted...”

His heart skipped a beat. Even in a haze of confusion she was so beautiful it made breathing difficult. “You’re a Shifter, Jenna.
Ikati
. Like your father. Like me,” he murmured, drawn into her eyes.

She blinked once, and her shaking slowly stopped. She released all the breath in her lungs in one long, quiet exhalation, and along with it all the tension in her limbs dissolved.

“
Ikati
,” she repeated, rolling her tongue over the unfamiliar word.

“It’s an ancient word from our motherland, it means you can manipulate your human form to become...something else. Something more.”

“More than human.” She stared without blinking so deeply into his eyes he felt as if every corner of his soul was exposed, as if he was a mystery,
her
mystery, that she was trying to divine. Her lips began to lift into a smile, but they paused, then turned down. She frowned.

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.”