J. Geissinger - Shadow’s Edge

He smiled again, only this time it was bittersweet, filled with longing and regret, and did not reach his eyes. “Somewhere warm. That’s where I’d go, if I could.” He turned to the shattered window and stared off into the distance. “Somewhere without all this dreadful fog.”

“Thank you, Christian,” she whispered, blinking away the moisture that blurred her vision. “Thank you.”

She kept staring at him as the pounding on the door grew louder. She knew it would be the last time she’d see his face, a face that was as flawless and carved as all the rest of his kind, a face full of a pain that nearly broke her heart, a face she would never be able to erase from her memory...

...a face so like Leander’s, the man who’d captured her heart and inflamed her body and wanted to see her dead.

The sound of wood cracking under pressure snapped her out of her reverie.

“Go,” Christian urged, backing away, his gaze fixed to her face. “ Go !”

Without another word, Jenna Shifted to vapor and surged out the broken window into the windswept sky just as the door splintered open and five men burst into the room.

Leander was the first one through the ruined door, but she was already gone.

The house was nondescript, deceptively so. Red brick and white shutters with a tiny green lawn and a picket fence, just like its neighbors to the left and the right. Nothing stirred beyond the lace-curtained windows, no voices were heard above the chirping birds and the evening traffic and the faint whine of the jet airplane that tracked a line of pearl gray across the indigo sky overhead. No lights shone from within to indicate an occupant.

It had taken all day to find this place.

The neighborhood was good, if unfashionable. She gathered from the older model cars lining the streets that the people who lived here were hard-working but not affluent. The gardens were small but well tended, the houses modest but kept in good repair. The suburb itself was altogether forgettable, like one of thousands found everywhere, on every continent on earth.

It was a place where you could blend in, if you had a mind to.

But it wasn’t where Jenna had chosen to blend in. It was where they had.

The stink of the Expurgari was all over it.

It was a rank, vicious scent of violence and jealousy and greed, with an underlying bloodlust that was unmistakable. It lay thick on the grass in the rose garden where Daria was taken, and it oozed from the benign-looking house like an evil vapor. It made her skin crawl.

She’d never been to London before in her life. She’d never tracked a murderous band of psychopaths either. But today, she thought bitterly, staring at the brick house from her hiding place behind a reeking Dumpster in the alley across the street, today was a day for all kinds of firsts.

First time to Shift to a wild animal.

First time to fall in love.

First time to be accused of treason by a pack of rabid beasts pretending to be men.

She’d wanted nothing more than to fly away and forget him—forget all about him and his underhanded, arrogant Assembly with their ancient, feudal, ridiculous Laws—Laws that would have most likely had her head on a chopping block if Christian hadn’t intervened—but she’d caught the scent of tea roses and blood as she’d lifted into the air above Sommerley and couldn’t help herself. She’d twisted on an updraft of air and followed the scent as it led far away from the pastoral perfection of Sommerley into the smoggy, noisy mess of humanity and clogged streets that was London.

No one had helped her father. He’d died a traitor’s death. Friendless, forsaken. But she wasn’t like them, she was nothing like them. She wasn’t going to leave Daria to die, not if there was something she could do about it. She would prove to them that their prejudice against humans was just as wrong as the prejudice leveled against them.

And then she would be done with them all.

It had taken hours of strenuous flight, holding herself in vapor form, mingling with rain-thick clouds and polluted city air, until she finally found this place. She’d gone on smell alone. She couldn’t sense Daria at all, she couldn’t summon her under her closed lids or feel her heartbeat anywhere near. It was as if she had vanished, but for her scent.

And now she was hunched low, naked and hungry in a filthy alley that smelled of rotting garbage, hiding behind an overflowing trash bin, inhaling the stench of men so vile they exuded a fetid fog around themselves.

She’d spent the better part of the past hour mentally castigating herself for yet another massive show of stupidity. This little side trip was most likely going to get her killed.

There was no way in. From the inside, there would be no way out. Not a hole in a brick, not a crack in a window, not a single loose tile on the roof. Along with the distinct smell of Daria and evil, this was how she knew she was in the right place.

The front door of the house opened. Jenna hissed a sharp breath between clenched teeth and shrank back against the metal Dumpster.

A man looked out. Tall, wiry, and rachitic, he wore head-to-toe black and held a slim silver briefcase in one hand. His eyes raked the quiet street. He didn’t move for one long moment, but then, seemingly satisfied there was no danger, he stepped out onto the porch and motioned with his head for someone else to follow. He walked quickly to the waiting car in the driveway, got in, and turned the engine over.

Another man followed him, dressed also in black, but this one had enormous biceps and thighs that strained against his clothing. He carried a zippered nylon shoulder bag. He paused at the door for one final glance inside, then turned and began to close the door behind him.

Just before the lock slid shut in the bolt, a fine sheen of mist drifted above the man’s head for an unseen, silent moment, then slipped between the lead-enforced jamb and the door. It disappeared like a sylph into the foreboding gloom of the house.

Once upon a time, when he was a boy of fourteen, just beginning to understand the world he lived in and his future role within it, Leander ran away from home.

He hadn’t planned it. He awoke in the dead of a particularly balmy spring night with the glow of the moon so bright through his windows it lit the entire room with a magical, pearled brilliance. He slid out of bed and crossed to the windows, looked out over the foggy, leafy shire, and felt the overwhelming need to feel the dewed grass under his bare feet.

He’d always been stealthy, even more so once he’d begun to Shift three years before, so it was effortless to steal down the long curving staircase of what was then his parents’ manor house and slip out through the back kitchen door, the one with such well-oiled hinges they never squeaked when opened.

He couldn’t Shift in the house. His father would have sensed it. Discovery was inevitable.

So he waited until he was deep within the fragrant borders of the chest-high rosemary hedges that surrounded the marble fountain of Triton in the back gardens and Shifted then.

He remembered how he felt, roaming, running, Shifting back and forth at will between animal and human and vapor, ruler of the velvet-dark forest, prince of the star-studded skies, king of the beautiful, magical world:

Free.

It thrilled him, this stolen freedom. It sent the blood pounding through his veins as he skipped over soft dirt and silken grass, the breeze murmuring through the ancient trees, moonlight dripping down to crown him in opal and pearl.

He was never alone like this. He could never play and explore and run until his lungs hurt and his legs burned. There was always someone watching, someone to make sure he didn’t fall, he didn’t fail, that he did as he was told and toed the line as befit his position.