J. Geissinger - Shadow’s Edge

Daria is right , he thought with a sudden stab of guilt, I am a dolt.

“Perhaps a walk in the garden,” he suggested briskly, tossing his napkin onto the table. “It’s a beautiful morning. Maybe you’d like to get outside?”

“Outside...” she murmured, pulling back from her contemplation of the seedless grape she held between her fingers. She dropped it onto her plate and stood abruptly, scraping the chair across the parquet with a screech.

She blinked at him, at last awakening. “Yes. Outside would be...better.”

Through the maze of corridors that led from the gallery to the French doors at the rear of the manor, Jenna remained silent, moving gracefully by his side, ignoring the veiled, speculative looks of the servants as they passed.

Though their heads were always lowered, faces impassive, every one of them was profoundly, instinctively interested in her.

Everyone at Sommerley had felt her arrival by now. She was new, and different, and potent. Even the servants were atwitter with gossip and guesswork. Everyone knew who she was and why she was here, and he couldn’t stop their instinct to see her, to look at her, no matter how many hard, silent looks he threw.

Twice he felt her glance at him, but when he turned his head, she had already looked away.

They strolled through the French doors into the cool, dewy morning, footsteps striking lightly against the marble slabs. He looked to the sky and the profusion of white and lavender clouds floating gently there like tufted fleece, emptied of their burden of rain. A knot of starlings scored the pale horizon, a skein of silver-gray and black as they rose from the treetops, flashing in the light like quicksilver.

It felt bloody good to get a lungful of fresh air. He’d been confined to the East Room the entire night, arguing strategy and logistics with more than a dozen other sleep-deprived and agitated men, breathing air that had been inhaled so many times it was stale and humid.

Leander had set his guards at the perimeter of their territory. The few who could Shift to vapor floated overhead as small, drifting clouds, patrolling in tandem with dozens of sleek and lethal beasts concealed in the shadows of the forest. His orders were explicit.

If you see anyone new, anyone who isn’t Ikati, kill them.

His gaze slanted to Jenna. He couldn’t take any chances, not now.

She wore a sleeveless dress of pale blush cotton, tea length, cinched around her slender waist, one of the few ladylike things Morgan had chosen for her. It was feminine and soft and lent color to her ivory cheeks.

It made him think of cotton candy and hand-churned strawberry ice cream and a great many other pink and delectable things he’d like to run his tongue over.

“Am I the first human to ever come here?” Jenna asked as a pair of housemaids who’d been watering baskets of scarlet and purple flowers froze, dropped swift curtsies then fled, wide-eyed and whispering, through the French doors Jenna and Leander had just emerged from.

“You’re not human,” Leander corrected, “you’re a half-Blood. Those are two very different things.” They moved down the marble steps of the shaded colonnade onto the green expanse of the lower lawns. The air parted around him, sweet, thick with moisture and the scent of rosemary and garden roses, free of the smog that had choked his lungs in Los Angeles.

“But everyone else here is like you.”

He inclined his head.

“Then how do you decide who’s in charge? How do you decide who’s a servant and who gets to be on the Assembly?”

“When we first settled here generations ago, every-one was assigned a particular job according to his or her Gifts. The most Gifted were members of the Assembly, the least Gifted were servants, with a dozen different layers in between. It’s stayed mostly the same since then. Many of the maids and cooks and footmen here now had great-grandparents who served my great-grandparents.”

“And I suppose no one gets a vote in all this? The Alpha’s word is law?”

Leander’s lips twisted into a smile. “This isn’t a democracy.”

“So I’ve been told,” she said, dark, but didn’t add anything else, and he wondered what Morgan had told her on the ride from the airport. Nothing good, he’d bet.

He paused beside a groomed hedge of rosemary and turned to look at her. “There’s something else you should know.”

“Only one thing?” she replied, staring straight ahead at the wall of the forest that began in dappled sunlight beyond the dells and vales and turned to dusk a few yards in. “How reassuring. I was inclined to think there were several things I might need to know. If there’s only one thing, why, I feel so relieved.”

He sighed.

She looked at him and smiled, green eyes bright. “How bad could it be, if there’s only one little thing?”

He studied her. She was remarkably resilient, this iron-willed female who looked about as tough as a frosted marzipan rose.

But then she’d had to be tough , he thought suddenly, hadn’t she?

“The Ikati are under attack,” he said, drinking in her creamy complexion, the elegant line of her throat, the soft rise of her chest. Her skin was as dewy as the morning, pearl-escent, shining in the sun. “At least we have very good reason to believe we are.”

“Attack?” Jenna repeated, just as calm. She gave him a measured, assessing look before turning to gaze once more at the dark line of forest in the distance. “Well, how very inconvenient for you. I know how you hate to be on defense.”

He looked away and stood with his hands clasped behind his back.

For a long while, neither of them spoke.

“That’s true,” he finally said, quietly and without a shadow of sarcasm. “More true than you know, Jenna. I’ve been groomed to succeed my entire life, expected to lead and make decisions, trained to win . I take neither my responsibility nor my position lightly. I can’t. I’m the Alpha. There are scores of people who depend on me, women and children and families I must protect, at any cost. It’s a privilege, yet also a burden, because I’ve no one to share it with, no one who understands how I fear losing. If I fail, the Ikati fail. If I lose...”

He turned toward her. “We all lose.”

“Losing,” she mused, turning back toward the forest, eyes hazy and unfocused. Morning light glowed against the slope of her sculpted cheekbone, caught the tips of her long eyelashes, warming them gold. Her gaze flickered back over him, assessing. “I wonder if someone like you has any idea what it really means to lose.”

“We all have things to lose, Jenna, even me. Especially me. My people are in danger, our way of life is in danger.” He angled a step closer, inhaling the soft scent of dew and roses that clung to her skin. “ You are in danger,” he said, his voice roughened. “And that is something I simply will not tolerate.”

Jenna didn’t protest or step back, as he expected. She accepted his proximity without comment, without moving away, but she turned her head and lowered her eyes.

“You’re right,” she murmured. “We all have things to lose.” A flush crept over her cheeks. “Things like faith, trust, hope—all the things we were taught to believe in. All those make-believe saviors, like knights in shining armor. Like second chances.” Her voice lowered to the barest of whispers and was shaded with sorrow. “Like true love. And as for the danger...” She slowly raised her gaze to his face.

Leander heard everything around them for twenty miles: the air whispering through the pines, the river Avon flowing swift and deep over granite rock and polished stones, the birds in the sky and the squirrels in the trees and the moles rustling deep in their underground burrows.