Shadow's Edge (24 page)

“After my father disappeared, my mother drank herself to death. It took eight years. It wasn’t pretty, and I was helpless to stop it. Every single day growing up, I would pray that whatever was making her so sick and so scared would
stop. I think she was literally scared to death. By the thought of what was following her, the thought of who and what wanted to see her dead.” She looked at Morgan. “The
Ikati
. And now you’re telling me I’m supposed to be—what?—in charge of?—the leader of?—the very people—
things
—that killed her? The things that killed my father?” She shook her head sharply. “No. No way. Not a chance in hell.”

Morgan gazed at her for one long, solemn moment. “I’m sorry about your mother,” she said quietly. “I didn’t know about that. All I knew—all any of us were ever told—was that your father deserted the colony for a human woman and had a child. And then he...” She moistened her lips, hesitating. “And then he...”

“Sacrificed himself so we could live. Yes,” Jenna said. “Apparently he did.”

“But he knew exactly what he was doing. He loved this place,” Morgan said softly. “He loved his people, his position, our way of life. He didn’t leave Sommerley because it was bad. He left because he couldn’t have what he wanted if he stayed. Because of the
Law
. But you can have anything you want, Jenna. Don’t you understand? Because you are who you are, you can leave, you can stay, you can have what I’ve wanted my entire life.”

Morgan leaned forward and gently took Jenna’s hand in her own and held it there with careful pressure.

“Which is what, exactly?”

“Freedom,” she breathed. “You can have your freedom.”

Morgan’s words came back to her, spoken with such pathos the night they arrived in the limousine.
It’s more like what we’re trying to keep in.

Jenna’s body was now so heavy with weariness she felt she would sink right through the mattress to the floor below.
The urge to sleep seemed as irresistible as the pull of the moon over the tides. She fought it back for just a moment longer.

“I already had that, Morgan. I already
have
that, and there’s nothing that’s going to keep me here against my will, playing nice. No matter how Leander and the Assembly or anyone else tries to force me to, I won’t play nice.” She looked at Morgan, squinting and blinking as her face went in and out of focus. “And I think
you
don’t want to play nice either, though you try to act like you do. I think you’ve had enough of their macho bullshit.”

Morgan squeezed her hand, hard. Her face blurred as exhaustion seeped like a slowly hardening cement into Jenna’s muscles.

“So promise me you won’t tell them about this. At least not yet. Not until I can figure out how to get around it—or get out of it. Promise me and you have my word, I’ll give you something in return. Whatever you want that I’m able to give.”

“Anything?” Morgan asked, suddenly tense. “You’ll give me anything? Do you promise?”

“I promise.”

Jenna’s eyelids drooped but flew open when Morgan’s fingernails pressed into the flesh of her palm. She leaned in closer, her eyes very wide and dark, unblinking.

“I want what I’ve always been denied. What others take for granted. I want what you have, Jenna.
Freedom
. I want to walk away from Sommerley and never look back, never have to worry that they’re coming for me. If you can get Leander to let me go, I won’t tell them a thing. I’ll even help you get out of here. You have my word.”

The choked passion in Morgan’s voice convinced her.

Jenna sagged over, her head hit the pillow. “It’s a deal,” she mumbled, already half-asleep. “Just don’t tell them anything. Just keep this between us...for now...and I’ll make Leander let you go...I’m sure I’ll find a way to convince him...”

Darkness began to slide over her in a sweet, easy blanket of release.

She was nearly asleep when she heard Morgan whisper something to herself. Something anguished and self-loathing, something that sounded almost like a plea for forgiveness.

But before Jenna could ask what Morgan needed forgiveness for, she tumbled into black oblivion.

The room was crowded.

Too
bloody crowded, Leander thought as he let his gaze rake over the footmen along the gallery wall, the blazing candelabras, the ocean of satins and lace that rustled as the ladies moved. The wives of the Assembly members and visiting Alphas were done up in their finery for the occasion, a dinner party he’d argued strongly against.

Any other time
. Fury climbed into his throat.
Any other time I’d have been able to stop this
. But with the Council of Alphas convened, he was simply outvoted. In his own home, no less.

This was pure madness.

This was no time for silliness and festivities, no time to have the entire leadership of the
Ikati
gathered together in one place, like sitting ducks on a pond. Over the past
twenty-four hours, the Alphas from the other colonies had arrived at Sommerley with their families and envoys and entourage. They would stay for a day, a week, or a month, however long it took for them all to come to an agreement on what precautions were to be taken, what was to be done about the Expurgari.

Of equal importance: what was to be done about Jenna Moore,
Ikati
gone rogue.

At the behest of the Assembly—and against his express wishes—Jenna had been locked up like a prisoner in her rooms for the past four days. She was now considered a threat of unknown proportion. She had yet to Shift in front of the Assembly, had fled into the woods, had refused to answer any questions whatsoever or even meet with them.

One of the Assembly members had even floated the idea she might be connected to whomever was now stalking the
Ikati.
Motivated by anger or revenge, she had both the reasons and the wherewithal to stand against them.

Leander had been restrained from snapping the man’s neck in two when this idea was forwarded. He’d very forcefully reminded them she didn’t even know about her father until
he
told her.

She was guarded carefully by a rotating watch of four of their strongest men, was brought food and water on silver trays, was allowed to see anyone she chose, but she denied access to anyone but Morgan. It had been tolerated for the past few days, but he knew the Assembly was getting restless. He knew it wouldn’t be long before she was forced to provide irrefutable proof that she was
Ikati
, she could Shift, she was friend and not foe.

So far Leander was the only one who had seen her Shift to vapor. In these perilous times, his word alone was not
enough to convince the rest of them that she was indeed one of their kind.

We can’t know her mind, Leander
, the Alpha from the Manaus colony had said.
She remains a danger to us until she is proven otherwise
.

His neck had also been in danger of Leander’s grip.

His gaze found Morgan standing across the ballroom. She was pale and erect with her back against an alabaster column, clad in an uncharacteristically chaste dress of simple ivory satin. She wore a guarded look, but he sensed her elation.

He frowned. Morgan hadn’t seemed herself the past few days. Only planning this ill-conceived and hastily arranged dinner party had brought her—barely—out of her strange and fevered distraction. She remained silent through the Assembly meetings, through all their heated arguments about what to do with Jenna, wearing an enigmatic expression very close to the one on her face now.

She turned her head and caught him looking. With a Mona Lisa smile that lifted one-half of her mouth, she put two curved fingers to her forehead and inclined her head.

His frown deepened, but then he was distracted by someone laughing very loudly in his ear. He angled away. He ran a finger under the stiff collar of his shirt and pulled it away from his burning skin. Not only was the room overcrowded, it was overheated.

The Council of Alphas was scheduled to meet this evening at ten o’clock, after the dinner. After the—unbelievably stupid—dancing. The orchestra already labored away in a box of their own on the second floor, far above the crush, sawing on violins and blaring into horns, playing under branched candelabras that threw an uneasy glow over
them all. Slices of moonlight washed through the second-story windows, gleaming pale over the gathering below.

A brooding Christian sidled up to him. He wore a perfectly cut jacket of sable and fawn, an Italian silk shirt open at the throat, and clutched a large glass of single-malt whiskey in his hand.

Leander knew it was his fourth whiskey so far tonight. He’d been watching Christian carefully since Morgan’s comment in the East Library. The comment that felt castrating with the horrible, cutting surge of jealousy it brought. The comment that made him so angry he nearly couldn’t speak.

He’d never been in competition with his brother. Nor did he want to be. But he suspected, in a dark, abandoned part of his heart, that a competition was exactly what the two of them were ensnared in—albeit a silent, unacknowledged one. He couldn’t describe the excruciating misery this brought him, both for himself and for Christian...for what it might mean to their relationship.

Leander had another suspicion he would never admit to himself. Doing so would be like unlocking Pandora’s box to unleash the selfish, snarling beast inside him that had no thought for anyone but himself.

The suspicion was this: no matter the pain it caused them both, he would do anything to claim Jenna as his own.

Anything, including laying waste to all his familial ties and every Law that bound him.

“All the usual suspects,” Christian said dryly. He lifted the glass to his lips and swallowed the amber liquor, draining it quickly. He lowered his arm and motioned to a waiter hovering nearby for a refill. “I think our friend Alejandro over there is going to challenge you to a duel later.”

Alejandro, the Alpha from Manaus, Brazil, who had impugned Jenna’s motives, glowered at Leander from behind a protective cluster of women who flitted about him like delirious moths. He was tall, as tall as Leander, though somehow lacking physical substance, as if you could put your fist into his abdomen and it would simply come out through his back, trailing smoke.

He had long teeth and a slick smile and wore his hair in the combed-back and pomaded style of a mid-century Sicilian mobster. His colony was small—as were all the other colonies in comparison to Sommerley—but his cunning and ambition were not.

“Good,” Leander said, gazing at him evenly. He was the only other unmarried Alpha, younger than Leander by four years and a lifetime, conceited and pompous and too fond of himself for his own good. “Maybe then I’ll get the chance to finish what I started in the Assembly meeting.”

Alejandro dropped his gaze and turned his attention to one of his female admirers, a rotund woman cocooned in a dress two sizes too small, which caused her ample bosom to be in imminent danger of breaching the restraints of the delicately beaded neckline. He lowered his head and whispered something into her ear. She broke out in a flurry of giggles and waved her plump hand in front of her face.

And then a few strange things happened at once.

First, the orchestra missed two bars of the sonata entirely. The violinist pulled his bow in an awkward, off-key screech in between. They stumbled for a moment, unable to find their way back to harmony while Leander looked up at them, eyes narrowed.

Then a hush fell over the ballroom. People stopped talking in midsentence, stopped walking about and laughing,
the ice in their drinks even seemed to stop clinking. Silence filled the room. The plump, laughing woman with Alejandro lifted her hand to her mouth, clutched his arm, and sank her fingers so deep into it that Leander almost felt the bruise forming from where he stood.

Alejandro frowned down at her—all his teeth showing though he wasn’t smiling—then lifted his gaze. He too froze in place, as if struck by an arrow.

At the exact same moment, Leander heard a hissed inhalation from Christian. His danger-sense rising to gnaw at his skin, Leander whirled around.

And there she was, an angel swathed in demon red.

Jenna stood poised at the arched doorway, one hand resting lightly against the head of a marble statue of a muscled panther in midleap. The other trailed slowly down the narrow, cinched curve of her waist outlined beneath the scarlet red Valentino gown he’d told her not to wear, but had known she would exactly because of it.

She was serene, smiling mysteriously as if she hadn’t a care in the world, as if she were not facing down an entire room full of eager beasts ready to pounce on her at a moment’s provocation, the living dark heart of the tribe gathered as one to bear witness to her glory.

Or her imminent destruction.

She was always beautiful, in his memories, in his best fantasies. But now she became, with the candlelight marking her skin and the shadows dancing over her face and body in layer upon silky layer, something searingly magical and poetic, like the brilliance of a sunbeam slicing through a thundercloud.