J. Geissinger - Shadow’s Edge

“If Jenna’s back, and she’s hurt, she is not going to want to see you.” She moved in front of him just as he placed one foot on the carpeted first step.

“ Goddammit , Morgan—”

“ No ,” she interrupted. She pulled him to a stop and stared right in his eyes. “Just this once , trust me. I’ll go up first. You can follow in a few minutes if you like, but believe me on this, your face is not going to be the first thing she’s going to want to see, not after the way your last conversation ended.”

“If she is bleeding, if she is hurt— ”

“Then I will come right out and get you.”

Through the fabric of his shirt, Morgan felt the tremor beneath his skin. Tension that flexed tendon and bone into pieces of hardened flesh, poised for action, strained so taut she thought he might Shift to panther under her hand and fly up the stairs six at a time.

“Just a few minutes,” Morgan said, more softly, realizing Leander was almost past the point of reason. His eyes, blazing unearthly green, were trained on the landing at the top of the curving staircases, the landing that led to another long corridor that led directly to Jenna’s rooms. “I’ll go in first,” she persisted. “Just let me see her first. You can wait right outside the door.”

He hesitated, breathing hard, still looking up the stairs. When he finally spoke, his voice was harsh, as if his vocal cords had been strained with silent screaming. “You have one minute before I break the door down.”

He turned back to Morgan and she could see how much it took for him to grant her even this much. “ One . I’m right behind you. Go.”

He pushed her up ahead of him.

Morgan didn’t have to look back to see him follow. She felt him at her heels, more beast than man, the song of his blood pounding hard in her ears.

The cut on the sole of her foot was small, at least at first.

Produced after she’d stepped on the atom-thin edge of a piece of broken obsidian outside the cottage, its edges were clean and razored: it wasn’t deep. It bled more than it actually hurt. But it was the effect it produced that was most terrifying.

Since she’d cut herself, Jenna was unable to Shift.

She tried in every conceivable way to force the Shift, although before it had seemed to appear of its own will, if she was upset or frightened, or if she merely willed it, a single word in her mind to flee from the things coming out of Leander’s mouth— vapor .

There was a glimmer of power, but the Shift wouldn’t come.

She had no plan when she’d run away into the forest, nothing more than escape. The cottage seemed a good place to stay while she gathered herself to consider her next move. Clear, cold water ran from a little brook just twenty paces beyond the cottage, there was wild mustard and raspberries, and even a patch of morel mushrooms poked their pale heads through a scorched patch of earth from some recent fire. She had shelter, she had food, she had water.

What she didn’t have was any sense of what she should do next.

The first day she spent choked in a kind of anger that felt outside of her, as if it followed her around as she moved, a thick haze of fury she was barely able to see through. She didn’t feel anything inside of herself, no light or hope, nothing solid or substantial. It was as if the enormity of her emotions couldn’t be contained within her body and had needed more space in which to breathe.

But she couldn’t breathe. She spent long, panicked minutes gasping for air, sure she was having a heart attack, the pain in her chest was so great.

Twilight falling into the forest brought with it a loosening of the pain. A dull ache took the place of raw and hopeless anguish. The sky turned a brilliant shade of fuchsia as the sun began to sink below the horizon. Pink and violet and vast above her, she stared at it and thought of her home, her tiny apartment on the beach half a world away from this place. She missed it with a sudden, wrenching pang of melancholy. She missed Mrs. Colfax and Becky and her job at Mélisse and even felt a bit nostalgic for the hysterics of Geoffrey. At least those people were real and reliable, those things were home.

This wasn’t her home. It could never be. And these people...Christian was right. These people were animals.

She fell asleep slumped against the cold stone hearth, shivering like a dog, listening to the small creatures of the forest come awake with the dark.

When she awoke in the morning, her neck was stiff and pinched but her head felt clear, as clear as the dawn breaking over the smoke-purple hills in the distance. There were no more answers to be had, at least nothing that would set this right or help her understand.

She decided understanding the past was less important than embracing the future.

She would leave. She would leave this place and its mythical beasts and the horror of all the secrets they held and find a new life for herself somewhere else in the world.

Somewhere they’d never find her.

She knew the ways to hide, taught well as a child by one of their own. She would disappear into the wind and be done with it all. She would finally be free.

But just as she’d made her decision and squared her shoulders to take to the air, she’d stepped on that damn rock. No matter how she tried, she couldn’t Shift. She couldn’t escape.

Jenna was now faced with two choices: live in the forest as long as she could, foraging for food, exposed to the elements, or walk back into the den of beasts. It took a full hour of debate with herself on the pros and cons of both situations before she’d made a decision.

Death by starvation and exposure was only slightly less appealing.

She’d spent the last two days trudging through the woods back to Sommerley, nude, starving, the coarse blanket around her shoulders filthy with a layer of mud from when she’d had to stop and sleep on the ground.

The cut on her bare foot worsened as she walked, tearing open ever wider over the undergrowth of fallen logs, rock, and stone she’d had to traverse. And now it was infected.

“How is it, I wonder, you were able to evade all Leander’s guards in the forest and around the manor and walk right in without a single soul getting wind of your arrival?”

Morgan raised her gaze from the sole of Jenna’s left foot, which she washed in a basin of warm, soapy water while Jenna sat, stoic and silent, biting her lip against the pain.

She shrugged, a defeated motion of her shoulders underneath the pale blue silk robe Morgan had thrown around her. “I could feel them. Where they all were, when they were close, and when their attention was elsewhere.”

Except for her clean left foot, the rest of her body was still covered in grime from her trek across miles of woodland. Her shins were bruised, her ankles covered in scratches. Her hair was snared into an unholy mess of knots. She had snuck in through the kitchen, stolen up the long, curving staircase, and simply collapsed naked atop the bed in her room, falling asleep instantly when her head hit the pillow.

She’d been so exhausted she’d forgotten to lock the door.

She awoke with a start moments ago to find Morgan standing at the edge of the bed, clucking her tongue like a mother hen, covering her naked body with the robe.

“All of them?” Morgan looked startled. Her hand stilled in midair, the wet washcloth dripping into the silver basin in her lap. “You could feel all of them?”

“What difference does it make?” Jenna pulled her foot from Morgan’s grasp. She set it down on the carpet, tightened the belt around her waist, and brushed a lock of grimy hair away from her eyes. “I’m back here now, I’m sure I’ll be under lockdown—it won’t matter who I can feel and who I can’t. From what I understand of your Law, I’ll never be able to leave this room again.”