J. Geissinger - Shadow’s Edge

“Leander,” she whispered. Her voice broke over his name.

“Yes.”

“I just—I just—”

He had to clear his throat before he could speak. “You just Shifted,” he said.

She looked into his face, a clear and concentrated look, her wide-set eyes gleaming phosphorous green from under extravagantly long lashes. A faint stain of color bloomed over her cheeks. It was like watching a lovely piece of marble flush to life.

“Shifted...”

His heart skipped a beat. Even in a haze of confusion she was so beautiful it made breathing difficult. “You’re a Shifter, Jenna. Ikati . Like your father. Like me,” he murmured, drawn into her eyes.

She blinked once, and her shaking slowly stopped. She released all the breath in her lungs in one long, quiet exhalation, and along with it all the tension in her limbs dissolved.

“ Ikati ,” she repeated, rolling her tongue over the unfamiliar word.

“It’s an ancient word from our motherland, it means you can manipulate your human form to become...something else. Something more.”

“More than human.” She stared without blinking so deeply into his eyes he felt as if every corner of his soul was exposed, as if he was a mystery, her mystery, that she was trying to divine. Her lips began to lift into a smile, but they paused, then turned down. She frowned.

She then regarded him with an eyebrow raised, that look of defiance he was beginning to recognize settling over her face, thinning her mouth into a firm, stubborn line.

“I think I need to sit down now,” she said.

He moved instantly to drag the ruined silk chair over to her. He positioned it behind her and she sat, her back ramrod straight, her naked body swathed securely in deep folds of cashmere.

She gazed out the windows toward the veranda and the city skyline beyond and didn’t make a sound.

“I know it must be shocking for you. Unbelievable, most likely,” Leander said, unnerved by this unnatural calm. He couldn’t begin to imagine what was behind it. The first time he’d Shifted, at eleven years old, he’d run screaming with joy in circles over the lawn at Sommerley.

But then he’d been prepared. He’d known his whole life who and what he was. He’d always wanted it. While Jenna...

He dragged the other side chair across the carpet and sat down across from her in it, while she only continued to stare out the window, silent, still as stone.

“I think I owe you an apology,” he began, uncomfortable with her continued silence. “I didn’t actually know you would—it’s not your time yet, you see, we still have a few more days—I thought I would have more time to explain. I only thought to show you how I —” He checked himself and ran a hand through his thick hair when he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Jenna gave him a long, frozen look that stripped away every pretense of softness between them. “What else can I do?” she demanded, cool and controlled. Accusing.

He was taken aback by the difference in her. Only a moment ago she had been pliant and soft in his arms, she had kissed him so passionately he’d felt himself melting. He still had the taste of her on his tongue. But now she was sitting soldier straight in her chair and glaring at him with daggers in her eyes.

“I don’t know yet. I’m not sure exactly what you’ll be capable of—”

“But you have an idea,” she interrupted, her voice still the same low, guarded cadence that twisted his heart into knots. Her lovely features hardened into a mask of wariness.

She looked at him as if he were a stranger.

As if he were an enemy.

He longed to reach out to her, find her hand under the layers of cashmere, gather her into his arms, slide his hands into the cool weight of her hair. But he knew she would only recoil, so he remained in the chair, an unhappy clench in his stomach.

“If you can make the Shift to vapor, you’ll be able to Shift to panther as well,” he said. “It’s what we are. It’s what you are.”

This time she didn’t even blink. Her eyes were clear and dark and fathomless. Her gaze flickered down to his lips, then she turned her head away again, raised her chin, and gifted him with her profile.

“A panther,” she said, without inflection.

“Yes.”

A slight pause, then—“A cat .”

“Technically, yes. A cat.”

A little huff of air escaped her lips, which could have been either amusement or disdain. She watched the heat of the day bend the air into shimmering waves over the rooftops of the city beyond the windows and her nose delicately wrinkled, as if she smelled something bad.

“Wonderful. What else?”

Leander leaned back in his chair and debated how much he should tell her. This air of bored civility might be the way she normally reacted under stress, or it could be the calm before the storm broke. He didn’t know her well enough to judge.

He hated that he didn’t know her well enough to judge.

“Not just any cat, Jenna, and certainly not the average domesticated house variety. You are a predator, and a lethal one at that. You’ll have the speed and agility all felines possess, but you’ll be far faster, far stronger.” He watched the light play over the contours of her face, watching carefully to see her reaction. To see any reaction. She gave none.

“You’ll be able to see clear as day through a night pitch black. You’ll be able to hear a whispered conversation half a mile away, smell a rainstorm a week out, and sense everything around you with perfect, unbroken clarity. You’ll be in tune with nature in a way no other creature on this planet can ever be.”

Through all of this, she remained a sphinx: beautiful and cold and unmoving.

His voice dropped to a murmur. “You’ll be able to feel the very heartbeat of the earth.”

That seemed to get through to her, barely. Her lips twitched and she inhaled deeply, then let out the breath silently through her nose.

“I assume you’ve known about some of these talents for years. You must have known you were different,” he continued, wondering what it must have been like for her to hide who she was, to try to act like the rest of the people around her, though she was so much more.

He pictured himself living a life among all those cow-witted humans and suppressed a shudder.

He leaned toward her in the chair and rested his elbows on his thighs. “But now that you’ve Shifted to vapor, they’ll be exponentially stronger. And once you Shift to panther, the surge of sensations will be almost overwhelming. In order to thrive, in order to survive ,” he emphasized, “you must learn to regulate how much you let in.”

His eyes searched her face. Jenna sat mute, expressionless.

It was thoroughly unnerving.

“Also, every Shifter has talents individual to himself—or herself—which will vary in strength. You, for instance, can obviously read minds with a touch of your hand. Anything else you may be capable of will reveal itself to you when the time is right.”

“And you?” she said, barely audible.

Her hair glinted gold and honeyed blonde in the light, casting a warm gleam over the rose-cream clarity of her skin, lighting her features with a glow so bright it was almost incandescent. It did nothing to warm the ice in her eyes, however.

“I can Shift to vapor as well—”

“Can’t they all do that? All the Ikati ?” she interrupted.

“No. Only a very few, only the most Gifted. Most of our kind are earthbound.”

“Could my father Shift to vapor?”

Among other things , he wanted to say. But that didn’t seem prudent. “Yes.”

She gave a little, satisfied nod, then turned her face away to gaze out the window once again. She crossed one leg over the other, sending a tiny whiff of the warm, wind-clean fragrance of her skin to his nose. He watched one slender bare foot begin to dance up and down.