J. Geissinger - Shadow’s Edge

“Do you?” he murmured. The chandelier above threw sparks of blue off his black hair as it caught the flow of warm air. The light in the room seemed to grow even brighter and everything smelled of blooming jasmine and relentless heat.

Jenna could not read his expression. It was utterly neutral.

“Yes. You’re what I’m supposed to be running away from.”

This seemed to startle him as he stood blinking down at her, his lips parted.

He gathered himself and motioned to the chair opposite her. “May I?”

She nodded. He sat down and crossed his legs, letting his gaze fall to the cut glass bowl of mixed nuts on the table-top between them. He was casually dressed today, in fitted beige trousers and a white silk shirt, sleeves rolled up over his tanned and muscled forearms. A shadow darkened his jaw; he hadn’t shaved.

He plucked a walnut from the bowl and began rolling it between his fingers.

Jenna was abstractly aware of the sunlight slicing through the massive glass doors of the lobby behind him, the muffled din of conversation and high heels clicking over marble tiles, the heat that crawled down her back until she could barely breathe, but every molecule of her body, every atom, was focused on him.

“I’m not quite sure how to respond to that,” Leander said carefully. He raised piercing eyes to her face, his tone still so neutral. “Perhaps you’d like to elaborate?”

Jenna kept her lasered focus when she answered. “If you’re going to play games with me,” she said quietly, staring right into his eyes, “I won’t go back to Sommerley with you.”

His expression still blank, his gaze sharp and frozen green on her face, Leander crushed the walnut to dust between his fingers.

“Excuse me?” he whispered.

She smiled in grim triumph. Not so cool after all.

“Did you think I’d be totally unprepared? Did you overlook the fact that I might have thought about how this moment would play out—that I might have even been expecting you, or someone like you, for years? Do you take me for a complete fool?”

She raised her eyebrows at him, waiting, but he only gaped at her in silence, utterly astonished.

“My mother warned me this day would come, though I’m not sure I ever really believed her,” she said, her heart hammering against her ribs. “She told me to run, she showed me how to live a life in hiding, but quite frankly, I got tired of running a long time ago.” She paused. When she spoke again, her voice had dropped an octave. “And I’ll be damned if I’m going to hide, from you or anyone else.”

Jenna was finished with hiding. Finished with secrets.

Since she was an infant, her father had moved the family every few months, never staying anywhere long enough to set down roots. Her childhood was a constant blur of strang-ers. A succession of transient faces—neighbors, teachers, classmates—materialized in and out of her life as if they were apparitions on a merry-go-round. They made one quick turn then vanished into thin air, never to be seen or heard from again.

And then her father became an apparition as well and vanished like all the rest.

“You are different from other girls, Jenna,” her mother would say, which was more than obvious in a thousand different ways. “But you have to pretend you are not. No matter what happens, you have to blend in. Like your father did. It’s the only way to stay safe. It’s the only way to stay free. And if they ever find you... run .”

She was utterly certain that something she was supposed to run from was now sitting across the table from her, exotic and coiled and still, like a cobra before it strikes.

“I want to make a bargain with you.” She reached over to brush the dust of the crushed nut into a little pile on the starched white tablecloth beneath his frozen hand. “Tell me the truth, and I’ll go with you without a fight. I’ll go willingly. If you tell me the truth. What do you say?”

He didn’t move, or blink, or speak. He only stared at her with narrowed eyes, calculating.

“I know it wasn’t what you were expecting, but I hope you’ll consider it. It’s a damn sight better than your own plan, at any rate.”

Jenna kept her face carefully neutral and didn’t allow the fact that she was mostly bluffing to distract her from what she wanted. She’d seen bits and pieces, had gotten so many images and impressions that much of it had been horribly garbled. But there was no way he could know what she’d seen.

She wanted answers. After that...he could go back to Sommerley, wherever that was.

Or he could go straight to hell.

Leander slowly leaned back in his chair and stared at her. He released a long breath through his nose. After a minute in which neither of them spoke and the rising tension in her body felt like a wire pulled close to snapping, the barest of smiles lifted his cheek. His voice, however, did not sound amused. It sounded guarded and shrewd and almost...admiring.

“You can read minds.” His fingers unclenched and he brushed the walnut dust from them without moving his appraising gaze from her face. “How very inconvenient.”

“Only yours so far. And this is a new development in my life so don’t expect too much.”

He reached down and began idly tracing an invisible pattern on the tabletop, his gaze following his finger, and when he looked back up at her again everything was between them, everything she’d felt since the first time she’d seen him, the hum of electricity and magic and the menace he exuded like perfume. “You seem remarkably serene for someone who’s just discovered something so unusual,” he murmured.

A knot formed in her stomach. “My entire life has been unusual. Moving from place to place, running from some phantom menace, a father who disappeared without a trace, a mother who drank herself to sleep every night, knowing I was different but never having any answers, never, ever knowing the truth.”

She stopped herself abruptly, looked down at the table, and blinked away the sudden moisture in her eyes. When she spoke again, her voice came in a whisper. “And believe me when I say I’m not serene. In fact, my breakfast is having some serious thoughts about making a reappearance.”

Leander leaned forward in his chair. “Jenna—”

But he broke off as someone new appeared at their table, a handsome young man, lithe and black-haired like Leander, with a widow’s peak and knife-blade, lingering eyes that hinted at ruthlessness and sensuality in equal measure. He lowered himself onto one of the chairs, sighed, and stretched his arms over his head.

“Couldn’t resist getting out of the room for a bit. Beautiful morning, isn’t it?” He grinned at her with an open voraciousness that belied his casual demeanor and slung his arm over the back of his chair.

Jenna knew this one. He was the other one from the parking lot, that first day.

Another followed just after, the stunning dark-haired woman who’d been with Leander that day also, wearing a dress so provocative a man walked straight into a wall as he gaped at her when she passed by. She gracefully sat down at their table as well, disregarding the look of icy fury Leander shot her.

Jenna ignored both of them and shifted her weight forward in the chair. A rush of rash determination flooded through her veins.

“All you have to do now is tell me the truth and I’ll keep my word,” she said to Leander. “I’ll leave with you. I didn’t see anything in your mind that made me believe you want to hurt me.” A flush of scarlet darkened her cheeks. “Quite the opposite, actually. I believe you may be the only person I’ve ever met who can answer the questions I have. And I have a lot of questions. But if I think you’re lying, or holding anything back, there is nothing that will compel me to move from this chair. There is nothing you’ll be able to say or do once my trust is gone to get it back. I chose a public place for this meeting for a very good reason. I will sit here in this chair and scream bloody murder until the police come and then I’ll run so goddamn far away you’ll never be able to find me again.”