J. Geissinger - Shadow’s Edge

Leander had called ahead to make sure he would have a car to himself. He guessed he would need a quick escape after eleven hours confined in a small space—luxurious though it was—wrapped in her scent and the quiet, pleasing sound of her voice.

He’d been absolutely right.

He rubbed a tired hand over his face and let his head fall back against the cushioned headrest of the sedan. God, his head ached. Staying in one place for that length of time, willing himself to remain motionless against every instinct that raged within him had produced a throbbing vise around his skull that inched very near a migraine.

He wasn’t used to sitting still. He wasn’t used to being denied what he wanted.

He watched the night flash by in patches of muted color and light, blurred with the sheen of rain and the speed at which the driver was taking the narrow roads, and wondered what it was about Jenna he found so compelling. So intoxicating.

Naturally there had been other women. Scores of them, if truth be told. His youth had been spent in study and sports and the rubric of the tribe’s tradition, but there had been plenty of time to steal away into the woods with some fetching young thing, plenty of time to explore.

And explore he did.

For the son of the Alpha, one day to be named Alpha himself, there was no shortage of willing partners. Beautiful creatures with burnished skin and brazen eyes, beckoning him shamelessly with mouthed invitations across candlelit rooms, propositioning him with words and eyes and slender-limbed bodies. He knew all the best pockets of the woods, all the darkest corners with the softest grass in which to roll.

But for all their wiles and beauty, none of those lusty panther girls of his youth had ever moved him beyond a youthful excitation. He had yet to fall in love.

He’d watched his parents for clues. Theirs had been a happy union. After thirty-five years of marriage, they still held hands, still kissed and gave each other warm and lingering looks.

It was the way with their kind. They were monogamous. They mated for life. Once wedding vows were exchanged in the tiny red-brick chapel at Sommerley, nothing could separate man and wife. No affairs, no divorce, no midlife crisis plagued the Ikati .

Only death separated them.

In a way, his parents had been lucky. Horrible though the accident was, they’d gone together. He thought his father would have had the worst of it, if he’d been the one to survive the crash without his mother. Leander pictured him wandering the empty halls of Sommerley, lost as a child, sobbing into his teacup.

They’d been inseparable in life. Somehow it seemed fitting they were inseparable in death.

He passed a hand over his throbbing head and urged the driver to go faster. He wanted to be back in his own bed tonight. He needed sleep, a good sleep. He was wrung dry from the constant ache of desire Jenna aroused in him, an ache that grew sharp as a blade when she was near and dulled to a chronic buzz of discontent when she was not.

She was lithe and rash and strong, lovely beyond description, reckless and valiant yet full of a vulnerability that moved him. She was obstinate and clever, she was heat and fire and cool, feminine mystery, she tasted of wild roses and rain, but she was not his.

Nor, as she had so clearly demonstrated, did she want to be.

His head dropped back against the headrest once more. He pressed his fingertips into the hollows of his eyes and let out a long breath.

When they finally pulled to a smooth stop before the massive, scrolled iron gates at the bottom of the long drive that led up to Sommerley, Leander’s hopes for a good night’s sleep were dashed.

A small square of fabric was posted above the stone pillar on the left, whipping hard in the wind.

It was a red flag. The Assembly’s sign for danger.

Jenna found the button on the armrest that operated the tinted black window. The smell of sodden grass and rain-cleansed country night invaded the warm, dimly lit interior of the limousine as the window silently retracted. She leaned out to stare in wonder at the ten-foot hewn stone walls, the bank of security cameras, the razor-sharp barbed wire artfully concealed beyond the gates by the grove of ficus trees, their gleaming dark foliage trimmed to precisely the right height.

“It looks like a fortress,” she said, awed. The rough stone walls fell away from the main gate in either direction for as far as the eye could see, fading into murk as they marched away from the floodlights. “What are you trying to keep out?”

“The world and all its secrets and misery,” Christian replied softly, his voice a languid caress from the front of the sedan.

He reclined, long legs sprawled casually before him, against the seat behind the driver. He faced her and Morgan, who sat together on the long, leather seat at the rear. The smoked glass window between the main compartment and the driver was rolled up, flaring into a dark corona around Christian’s head as it caught the lamplight from the windows and reflected it back.

His face was swathed in shadow, but the sheen of his perfect, white teeth glinted as he smiled. Even through the darkness, she felt the particular heat of his stare and felt a twinge of panic. Was she insane for coming here? Were these Ikati going to eat her alive? But then she was distracted by Morgan, muttering under her breath beside her.

“It’s more like what we’re trying to keep in .” She shifted her weight on the seat next to Jenna and crossed her slender arms over her chest.

Jenna frowned. The closer to Sommerley, the more morose Morgan grew. She snuck a peek at Morgan, who stared out the other window, stiff and pale-faced, her lips pursed.

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“You’ll see,” Morgan replied ominously, still looking away.

A squawk of static from outside startled her. The driver spoke into a microphone box mounted on a slender post beside the driveway. The static cleared to a tinny voice then an electronic clink as the iron gates were automatically unlocked.

The gates swung slowly inward past the stone gatehouse, its black windows staring out like empty eyes. The limousine rolled forward.

Sommerley manor was as she remembered from the images snatched from Leander’s mind, only it loomed far more vast and intimidating now that she was standing on the white gravel of the circular drive, oblivious to the liveried servant— Ikati , she sensed, like the driver—who stood slightly bent at the waist as he held the door open behind her.

It was intimidating, and also exceedingly beautiful.

Here were manicured gardens jeweled with raindrops and edged with groomed borders of fragrant herbs, burbling alabaster fountains and statues of nudes, an enormous rounded portico with marble Palladian columns washed in deep umber from spotlights hidden in shrubs beneath. Behind the sprawling main house stretched wild, deep vales shrouded in gray-blue mists that wound in thick fingers and curls to a dark horizon beyond. The forest.

The moon was an ivory pearl in the sky, casting her pallid glow over everything.

Serenaded by crickets sawing and frogs croaking and the crunch of gravel underfoot, they were led inside by the white-gloved servant through iron-studded doors twice the height of a man, and Jenna couldn’t help but gasp at what lay within.

She was astounded from the moment she stepped through the doors, hammered by beauty and voices and echoing footsteps, Christian and Morgan ahead and the servant behind, the confusion of a dozen different exotic perfumes in her nose at once, dazzled by the silk-covered walls and baroque vaulted ceilings and chandeliers sparkling in icy cold brilliance overhead.