Shadow's Edge (36 page)

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.

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.”

Leander crossed his arms over his chest and glared at his father, defiant, unrepentant. “I don’t want to be a leader. I just want to be left alone.”

His father gave him a sidelong glance and a smile filled with compassion.

“Things change, Leander. Day by day, the future comes nearer, the past recedes. Whether we like it or not, change is inevitable.” His father’s gaze slid to where the light from the gatehouse pooled saffron and gold on the cobbled road leading away from Sommerley. His gaze followed the road until the light dwindled and the cobblestones were swallowed by shadow.

“Your time is coming, son. And I know you’ll be ready. But if you are unwilling to live the life that’s set before you”
—his father lifted his hand to the night, a simple gesture filled with grace and authority—“then go.”

Leander stood frozen on the wall. The night breeze rustled the trees around them, the smell of elderberry and wet grass was crisp and cool in his nose.

“Deserters are considered one of the worst threats to the tribe,” Leander said slowly, thinking it through. His mind turned, leaping ahead. “They’re desperate. Uncontrolled. Dangerous. Almost as dangerous as...”

But he didn’t say the word. It hung in the air between them.

“Yes,” his father answered.

He chewed the inside of his lip. “The Assembly would come after me.”

His father smiled serenely. “Yes.”

“I’d have to find somewhere forested, somewhere I could live and Shift without being noticed...”

“I daresay you would be able to take care of yourself, to find a way to survive alone. You’re the bravest of my children, by far the most resourceful. Though you’re young, I’ve no doubt you’d manage. And the world is full of wooded places, to be sure.”

Leander sent a glace back toward Sommerley, toward where his home lay deep in the wild and beautiful woods. His heart seized with sudden emotion—elation or remorse, he couldn’t tell. “Mother would kill you.”

His father nodded ruefully. “Undoubtedly.”

Leander’s temper snapped. “Then why! Why would you do such a thing! Why would you let me go when it’s against the Law—when
no one
can leave, not even you, the Alpha!”

His father suddenly looked older. His handsome features betrayed the burden of a lifetime of leadership in the lines around his mouth, in the furrows carved in his brow.

“Because you are my son, and I love you. You have a choice, as do we all, but you must be willing to pay the consequences. You must be willing to forsake everything you have, or ever will have here at Sommerley: your friends, your family, your home. You must be willing to walk away from your heritage and your future and any kind of security. You must be willing to be chased, and possibly—most likely—caught and punished severely by the Assembly.