Shadow's Edge (20 page)

“Punishment?” she whispered. She took a step back.

“It is forbidden to marry a human,” he said, carefully watching her face. “It is forbidden to have a child with a human. The punishment for this is...”
Death.
“Imprisonment.”

“Imprisonment?” she repeated, her voice small, like a child’s. “For how long?”

“Forever,” he said simply.

She took this in with a quick inhalation of breath, two spots of pink high on her cheeks. She stared at him, her lips slightly parted, sunlight haloing her hair.

“It wasn’t long for him, however,” he went on because she wasn’t speaking or moving and he had to do something to distract himself from pulling her into his arms. “He refused any food or water, refused to be...caged.”

This was true, still so real in Leander’s mind that he saw Rylan, chained and defiant even in the face of imminent death, shouting at his father and the whole Assembly that they could go straight to hell and he wouldn’t change a thing if he had to do it over.

That had made such an indelible impression on Leander—on the raw edge of eighteen, poised to become Alpha after his own father someday—he often wondered, in
the years that followed, what it must be like to love a woman so much you would willingly give your own life to protect her.

With a shock of recognition akin to plunging naked into a lake of icy water, Leander realized he had finally begun to understand.

“So that’s why we were always on the run,” she said, her voice tremulous and too high. “Because their love was forbidden. Because
I
was forbidden.” She cleared her throat, the pink spots on her cheeks darkening to crimson while the blood seemed to drain away from her skin everywhere else, leaving her pale, ghostly white.

“And all that time, every single day of my childhood, you’re telling me we were running from...
you
?”

Leander was experienced with women, so he knew, judging from the tone of her voice and the look in her eye, that no matter what he said next, it wouldn’t be the right answer. Nothing he could say would help her pain, anything would fall far short of what she needed.

So he accepted this lack of control like a bitter pill he had no choice but to swallow and spoke the truth.

“Your father was a man of great courage. A man I looked up to, a man of pride and valor and honor. I didn’t agree with what was done to him, but I was young, powerless to change his fate. And the Law is ironclad. What your father did was forbidden. If we allow even one exception, we risk the destruction of our way of life, of our existence. It’s our way. We must live in secret, we must stay together, we must adhere to the Law.”

He drew in a long, slow breath. “Or we must die.”

She stared at him, lips still parted as though she had something hard in her mouth she was unable to chew. He
thought he felt a compression about her, as if her skin were tightening over her muscles and bones, as if she were drawing invisible armor around herself.

Her eyes narrowed. “He wasn’t just imprisoned. Was he, Leander? He didn’t just die of natural causes.”

He wanted to lie. God, how he wanted to lie to her. But he couldn’t.

“No.”

Her body went completely still. It didn’t even seem she was breathing. “Say it. Just say it. Tell me what happened.”

“Jenna—”

“Tell me!” she hissed.

The look on her face gave him the kind of pain he imagined someone run through with a sword would feel. For a second he debated with himself, knowing this would be the final nail in his coffin. She’d really hate him after this. But she deserved to know. If the truth was all he could ever give her, even if it meant she’d never speak to him again, so be it.

“He was executed,” he said, low, holding her gaze. Her nostrils flared, but she didn’t move or speak. She waited for him to continue, just watching him with those wide, beautiful eyes. “There were...other things done to him first, but in the end...”

“In the end?” she prompted when he faltered.

He wanted to pull her up hard against him and bury his face in her hair and beg her forgiveness, beg for a chance to somehow make it right. But that was only wishful thinking. He took a breath and steeled himself for what would come.

“A full-Blood
Ikati
can stay in animal form forever if we want to because that’s what we really are. It’s our true nature. Our human shape is a disguise, a clever adaptation that’s allowed us to live alongside our enemies, to survive.
We can only hold our form as human or vapor for so long.” He drew another slow breath, measuring his words. “Days, weeks maybe if you’re strong enough. But you have to Shift back sometime, and when you do...”

He stood there struggling, remembering.

“Though he was ordered not to, your father Shifted to vapor to relieve the pain after he was tortured on a machine called the Furiant—”

Jenna made a small, horrified noise. All the color drained from her face. She lifted a trembling hand to her mouth.

“He was recaptured as vapor and put in a box, a special steel box designed to seal on entry so he couldn’t escape.” His final words were almost whispered. “It was a very small box.”

Her lips parted. He saw her pulse pounding in the hollow of her throat. “So when he Shifted back...”

It didn’t need further explanation, but he nodded anyway.

She stepped back and stood with one hand over her mouth and the other pressed to her heart and stared at him, swaying, her eyes fierce with unshed tears. It was several moments before she spoke.

“Do you know what I think?”

Her tone was so cold he imagined icicles falling from the shape of her words to shatter into a million frozen pieces against the stone beneath their feet.

“No.”

“I think maybe it’s
better
to die than live like you do,” she spat, clipped and hard, eyes flashing eerie citrine against the pallor of her face. “Hiding like fugitives, trapped in a gilded cage.” She made a wide, sweeping gesture that
encompassed the lawns, the gardens, the smoky forest, and the sprawling mansion behind them. “Turning against one another in the worst possible way for the sake of your precious
Law
. It makes me
sick
.
You
make me sick!”

Pain exploded under his collarbone as if a nail had been driven there. He closed the distance between them with two short steps. “Jenna—”

“
Don’t
,” she said, breathing hard and stepping back. “Don’t you
dare
.”

Jenna Shifted to vapor just as he reached for her arm, leaving him grasping at nothing but air. Leander watched helplessly as her empty cotton dress slithered to the ground, a castoff ghost curving pink and soft to lie in mournful silence against the dewy grass.

Jenna streaked like a bullet into the cool sanctuary of the forest.

She had never moved like this before, had never thought it possible. Nothing but the sheer animal force of her will propelled her straight ahead through the thicket of towering trees. Sunlight slanted down from above as she flew, a shooting arrow filled with rage and a despair so deep it was bottomless.

Her father. Those bastards killed her father.

She sped on under primal instinct, darting through misty air and dappled shafts of sunlight, startling a family of deer into flight, flashing over fallen logs and mossed bracken, scattering a trail of dead leaves high in her wake. She sliced through a delicate, dew-heavy spiderweb and felt
its silken fibers cling to her until they sheared away, one by one, torn off by her velocity.

She was grateful she didn’t have the capacity to cry now, folded in vapor as she was. She was grateful she couldn’t feel her heart throb, feel her guts twist into knots.

She was grateful she couldn’t scream. Because if she started, she didn’t think she would be able to stop.

“If they ever find you, run,” her mother had emphatically said, a few months after her father had disappeared so many years ago.

“Who?” she’d asked, suddenly alert, abandoning the show she’d been watching on television in the living room and turning to look at her mother, who was staring out the front window of their house, her gaze darting this way and that as if she expected someone to jump from the bushes at any moment. A large glass of clear liquid was clutched in her shaking hand, and even from where she sat cross-legged on the floor a room away Jenna could smell the alcohol.

“It was too late for me by the time I found out what he was,” she answered, cryptic, still peering out the window. “I was already in love with him. A real Romeo and Juliet kind of love too, quick and deep and star-crossed, with everyone and everything against us.” She took a long swallow from the glass, ice cubes clinking, then pressed it against her forehead and closed her eyes. “Not that I would change it,” she whispered. “Not that I would go back and change a thing.”

“Mom?” Jenna said, afraid of the incoherent rambling, the dark, desolate tone in her voice. Her mother turned from the window and Jenna saw for the first time the deep grooves around her mouth, the furrow between her brows, the lines fear and mourning had carved into her face. Though frail and ill, she was still beautiful—statuesque and
elegant with a mane of long blonde hair she’d inherited from her own mother and passed along to Jenna.

“And no more sports,” she said abruptly, her voice changed from desolate to fierce. “No more gymnastics, no more soccer, no more track. You can’t risk standing out like that. You have to blend in, try to act like everyone else—”

“I won a trophy in track!” Jenna cried, leaping to her feet. “Gymnastics too! I’m way better than those other girls—”

“Oh, honey,” Jenna’s mother said, her eyes welling with tears. “That’s because you’re not like those other girls. You’ll never be like them.”

Those words held a ring of prophecy, and it had struck Jenna speechless. She stood looking at her mother, tall and blonde and pale, just like she was, but broken, and felt the earth turn under her feet.

“Who am I like, then?” she asked, already knowing.

A lone tear tracked down her mother’s cheek. She didn’t bother to brush it away. “You’re like your father,” she said, and the desolation was back. “You look like me, but you’re like him, strong and fast and...different. And like him, you’ll be hunted. So you need to learn to pretend to be something you’re not, because I won’t always be around to protect you.”

There was nothing in Jenna’s short time on earth to prepare her for that. Not only the thought that her mother might eventually leave or die or otherwise cease to take care of her, but also the admission that she was like her father, who she worshipped as something close to divine, and the proclamation that she was going to be hunted.

Like him. Her father was
hunted
. Her body went cold with horror.

“What happened to him?” she whispered, terrified her mother might actually tell her this time. But she didn’t. She only took another drink from her glass and turned back to the window. It was a long while before she answered.

“He’s gone, and he’s never coming back,” she said, and Jenna had never heard such anguish in another person’s voice. Her mother drained the final ounce of liquid from the glass, set it on the windowsill, and stared at it,
through
it, as if she wasn’t seeing it at all.

Jenna sank to her knees on the bare wood floor, shaking so badly her legs wouldn’t support her anymore. Her cheeks were hot and wet, and she realized she was crying.

“Why not? Why won’t you ever tell me what happened?”

“When you’re older,” her mother replied in an eerie, dead tone, still staring at the glass. “I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

That became a promise that was never fulfilled. And now Jenna was flying like the wind through a forest that once belonged to her father, fleeing from the answer to a question that had gnawed and hurt and grown unchecked like a cancerous tumor for fifteen years.

She covered miles of primeval undergrowth until finally she tired.

Drifting down against the rough bark of a sapling, she pooled, exhausted, in a watery plume into a fork in its branches. She listened to the sounds of the forest, leaves rustling, branches creaking, squirrels chattering, the patter of tiny, unseen feet scraping over the dirt below. A red-throated sparrow alighted on the branch above her and began to whistle, feathered belly expanding sweetly in song.

She couldn’t think of what to do. She could hardly think at all. She had wanted answers so desperately, had felt as if
the world would be righted if only she knew all the details of her past, if only she knew the
why
and the
how
and the
when
. But even the small piece of information Leander had given her hadn’t helped her world align in any way—it had only served to throw it even further off its axis.

Execution. A very small box.
The thought of it made the sparrow blur into a shape she didn’t recognize, a blob of color stark and sharp against the haze. She reared up against the branch, flattened herself over the peeling bark as she lost her balance. The sparrow flew away with a shriek into the forest.