Shadow's Edge (31 page)

She was distracted, undeniably, with the news that had spread like buckshot through the gathered gentry that Jenna’s Shift had been confirmed, in front of the Assembly, that Leander himself had made her do it—with a
kiss
, no less—then they both had disappeared.

To discuss things further, most likely.

She smiled, gazing up at the stars, thinking of a match between the two of them. For all his independent ways, she knew her brother longed for a partner who could love him, who would stand up to him and stand by him and challenge him to be his best. And Jenna seemed perfectly suited to that task. Perhaps she could even persuade him to allow the women of the colony a more active role in the decisions that affected their lives.

A cluster of stars in Virgo blinked down at her, millions of light-years away, winking with dreams and promise.

And then the hands closed hard around her mouth.

They were calloused and rough and covered in something tacky and viscous, like pine resin. There was a blinding stab of pain in the back of her head that sent scarlet and orange fireflies exploding behind her closed lids. A wave of intense dizziness hit her, followed very quickly by a rising swell of blackness, then nothing at all.

Until she had awoken to the fact of her limbs bound, her skin bruised and cut, her body lying atop a filthy, stinking blanket in the black prison of the trunk. The low, melancholy hum of spinning tires and the road rolling away beneath her sang a song of good-bye. She was being taken far from her home, far from any hope of rescue.

There would be no escape from them, she knew. She was smaller and shackled and weak with injury. She couldn’t Shift. She bit her lip to hold back a sob and prayed she would be strong enough not to talk.

Though they would surely have gruesome ways of trying to make her.

Daria’s heart began a painful throb within her chest as the car slowed, then stopped. She heard doors opening and closing, the crunch of boots on gravel, low, masculine voices muttering something she couldn’t make out. A burst of cold air hit her naked skin as the lid of the trunk popped open.

She screamed against the gag as two pairs of big hands closed around her wrists and ankles and hauled her from the trunk.

Leander hadn’t anticipated Jenna’s reaction to seeing her father’s grave. He couldn’t have. Everything he knew of her until this moment was of a woman so strong and defiant you couldn’t even tell her the time without garnering a swift contradiction.

Yet at the sight of the flat stone carved with her father’s name, she crumpled to the ground like a discarded tissue and began to weep, great wracking sobs that shook her whole body as she knelt, her hair spread wet and thick over her shoulders and back like a dripping funeral shroud, her knees and fingers sunk deep into the sodden grass.

“Why?” she said in an agonized, hoarse whisper to the headstone. Her voice was nearly swallowed by the boom of thunder in the sky. “Why did you leave me?”

Leander knelt next to her and put a gentle hand on her shoulder, but she knocked it away, leaving a smear of mud on his wrist, dark splatters across his chest. She turned to him with wild eyes.

“You could have helped him!” she hissed, her face deathly white. She rocked back to her heels, her teeth bared, hot tears and cold rain streaming down her cheeks, mingling together to drip from the curve of her jaw. “You could have stopped it!”

He felt the animal in her, coiled just beneath the surface, a dark and deadly creature awakened by rage, ready to claw its way out.

“No,” he said, careful and low.

He didn’t move, he didn’t look away, though the icy rain and the freezing air bit at his naked skin until it was painful. His fingers and toes were numb with cold, but he kept them where they were, sunk into the long grass and mud. He kept his breathing even and his face neutral. He didn’t want to make any sudden moves that would push her over the edge.

If she Shifted to panther now, he was sure she would attack him without hesitation.

In their animal form, the
Ikati
were primal and dangerous, prone to sudden bursts of violence. Their human mind, every aspect of their human heart, was engulfed by this primal side. They retained the ability to reason, they retained their memory and core personality, but they became highly unpredictable, often lethally so.

In her panther form, with the amount of anger in her eyes at this moment, Jenna was fully capable of killing him, and quite easily. She would be full of fresh power, her emotions would be raw and overwhelming, her instinct to lash out at the source of her pain would be overpowering.

He held himself at the brink of the turn, blood rising, muscle and sinew humming with the effort of holding his human form while every nerve in his body screamed
danger
!

“I was not the Alpha then, Jenna. I was hardly more than a child.”

A crack of lightning lit up the sky overhead in a brilliant blaze of white. It was followed by more thunder, then the rain, impossibly, seemed to increase. They were both drenched, and he knew she had to be freezing, exposed as she was with only her mass of hair to shield her from the elements.

But Jenna didn’t move from her crouch. She ignored the rain and the thunder and the lightning and only stared at his face with an expression that hurt him so much it felt like his heart had been pierced by the tip of a dagger.

Hatred. She glared at him with unveiled, unmitigated hatred.

“
I don’t believe you
.” It was nearly a growl, the snarl of an animal.

Cold and stinging rain poured over them both, bounced high off the grass, dripped from the end of his nose. He felt a sudden, hot frisson crackle between them, smelled that familiar scent of smoke and gunpowder sting the back of his throat, and knew what was about to happen.

“I would never lie to you, Jenna,” he said roughly, knowing he was putting his own life in danger if he didn’t Shift
now
, right now, before she did. “I swear to you, I would never do that.”

Leander watched her, shaking and panting, begin to blink. Her eyes lost their focus, then found it again. They narrowed to sharp points of burning fell green, flat and dark with animal rage.

Her pupils turned to black, vertical slits, her eyes blazed to unearthly, phosphorescent malachite. The shaking in her body became more violent, her limbs twitched as if invisible ants crawled over every inch of her skin, but she didn’t move. She vibrated hostility, coiled tight like a deadly cobra ready to strike.

He felt it now. He knew it was coming.

The freezing wind stole the breath from his lips.

Just as another crack of lighting tore through the sky to illuminate the rain-swept graveyard in which they knelt, Jenna Shifted to panther.

Earth. Sky. Trees. Rain. Him.

Everything, all at once. Perfect awareness. Perfect perception.

Power.

There was nothing before in her life to compare to this sensation, to this rushing great flood of feral electricity that scorched through her veins. There was a flash of acute pain as bone and muscle and tendon transformed—fleeting but terrible—then a sweet, aching surrender that glittered through her blood, smoldered over her skin. She was heady with it. She was staggered with the glut of raw power and sensation that vibrated through every molecule of her body.

Her new, streamlined, muscular body.

She recalled a pale human emotion from only moments before—anger or fear, she couldn’t recall which—the residue of which still lingered in her nose like a cheap perfume. But she was so far beyond that now, pushed into a world so much better, so much finer, so filled with the utter, aching beauty of light and sound and taste.

Every breath she took now was pure and cold, like inhaling snow, every minute ray of light now pierced clear through the black clouds overhead like a million shining filaments in a light bulb, every scent for miles around flowered into her nose and over her tongue with a taste better than the finest of wines.

And she saw everything.
Everything
.

She opened her mouth to laugh with the surprising rapture of this feeling, a fierce joy that came from nowhere to grab her around the throat and shred every earthly care to pieces. The sound that came from her throat brought the man in front of her to his feet.

It was a rumbling, jungle-deep growl, rich and spine-chilling, vibrating with danger and potency and the warrant of a lineage fulfilled.

It was the most beautiful sound she had ever heard.

The man took another step back, held a hand out, fingers spread and hesitant. He said her name in a tone of whispered awe.

She knew him, yes, she knew he wasn’t a danger to her. She knew he wasn’t afraid though his eyes were very wide and he was hardly breathing at all. She knew he was Alpha; she smelled the ripple of power and sovereignty he exuded like some delicious perfume that wrapped around her, filling every pore, settling into every atom.

She knew his name, though it hardly mattered now. Only one word came to mind when she looked up at him, silhouetted large and male against the raw and streaming sky.

Mate.

She didn’t know
how
she knew, but she knew he belonged to her, and she to him, and together they belonged to the fecund earth and the wild forest and the heart-piercing song of nature that cried out to her from everywhere around them.

The song was strongest behind her. Beckoning in sweet, rising thick notes that washed over her, unrelenting, undeniable, it called from the trees.

She turned her head to look at the forest—to the place where the song came flowing strong and high with a delectable, irresistible siren’s call of HERE HERE HERE—then turned back to the man.

She tried to speak, but the only sound that came from her throat now was a strange, rumbling chirrup, a low, chuffing invitation that made the man’s shoulders relax. He filled his lungs with air, the tension left his body, and he smiled at her, eyes shining, face exultant, astonished.

With one swift motion that occurred without thought or conscious effort other than she desired it, Jenna pushed off the ground from four strange, wonderful points of pressure, pivoted in midair, and landed in a perfect, noiseless crouch, facing away from the man. A long flash of pure white whipped by her head as she moved. With her nose low to the ground, she scanned the trees before her, smelling and tasting and hearing all the chatter of nature that swam around her, a buzzing that grew and swelled inside her head like a symphony, like an opus written just for her.

The forest called with the sweetest song she had ever heard in her life.

A song of sanctuary. A song of home.

Jenna pushed off from the earth and began to run in great, loping strides to the trees, her feet a blur beneath her as the welcoming arms of the forest came up fast.

She didn’t look back.

He followed because he had to. His feet gave him no other choice.

Leander ran after Jenna, pumping his arms and legs hard as she became a blur of white streaking over the open meadow toward the trees. The animal in him roared to life, clawing out of his skin. He Shifted to panther in midstride, the rain now bouncing from sleek black fur and compact muscle, never breaking his gait.

His gaze never left her. Against the dark day and the darker forest ahead, she was impossible to miss.

She was pure white, as white as the most perfect pearl, exotic and luminous and rare.

He had heard of the legends of white panthers, members of their tribe in that lost, long-ago paradise where they lived like gods before it all came crumbling down to ruin. But to see her with his own eyes, to
feel
her—

He was so astonished he couldn’t catch his breath.

The forest was gloomy and damp and thick with fog. Low tendrils of it swam just above the ground, higher up it swallowed the tops of the trees in a dense layer the pale light of day barely penetrated. This was the most ancient part of the woods, one never before breached by humans, hidden like a pristine jewel in the heart of the New Forest. The trees
grew to heights of over three hundred feet, the forest floor was buried beneath a foot-deep layer of perfumed leaves and moss and pine needles, the silence was unbroken save for the calls of birds and the sound of water dripping from low boughs to pool in clear puddles or sink into the earth.