J. Geissinger - Shadow’s Edge

Leander felt his brother’s fingers press a light squeeze against his shoulder as he walked behind his chair. He turned to watch him walk slowly from the room, gait heavy, shoulders hunched. When he looked back to the windows, Jenna had moved out of sight.

As the days passed, Jenna retained her silence and the ivory pallor of her skin, and she kept so somber and apart Leander knew he was right. She would leave as soon as she was able.

It was only a matter of time.

He found her early one evening dozing in a rocking chair in an unused bedroom on the second level of the manor. A book was open in her lap. A small fire muttered in the fireplace, lumpy piles of orange and yellow kindling cooling to embers and ash. He watched her gravely from the doorway, her face tinted with the last of the setting sunlight, her chest rising and falling in a slow, even tempo.

Her bare feet poked out from under the edge of the knitted afghan thrown over her lap and legs. Seeing how pale and vulnerable they looked against the dark wood floor sent an unexpected lance of anguish through his heart.

“You do that a lot, you know,” she murmured, rousing. She turned to gaze at him through heavy-lidded eyes, her hair a tousled fall of honey around her bare shoulders.

“What, exactly?” he asked, leaning against the doorframe.

Her lips quirked. She looked him up and down once before answering.

“Stare at me.”

“I do? Well, I beg your pardon. I wasn’t aware that I did.”

A crystal vase of garden roses dropped scarlet petals over a bureau near her chair. Their scent filled the air. He crossed to it, moving casually, and took a blossom between his fingers. He imagined her picking them from the garden, filling the vase with water, bringing it up to liven this deserted, silent room and wondered what—if anything—that could mean.

“Well, you do. You’ve even been watching me sleep,” she softly accused.

He turned to her before he could cover his surprise. She watched him through chocolate lashes, her expression either curiosity or malaise or burning disdain. They stared at each other across the room as the dying sun sent orange and ginger and gold in gleaming bright prisms across the polished floor. She dropped her gaze to her hands, to the book open on her lap. She shut it with a firm snap and set it aside on the rosewood table next to her chair.

“How did you know?” Leander kept his voice even with a monumental effort. “You were awake?”

She smiled, a little sadly he thought, looking off into the fiery horizon, then shrugged. “Awake or asleep, it seems I can always...feel you,” she said softly. She folded her hands together in her lap, then slid them up to clench bloodless against her upper arms.

“Ah. Yes.”

He inched closer to her chair, the rose still velvet soft in his grasp. He rubbed the petals between his fingers and imagined the silken firmness he touched was her skin. “Morgan told us about your Gift. Your quite...extraordinary Gift.”

He stopped next to the window and looked out at the sky, at her reflected back at him like a ghost dancing in the panes. “You can see all of us, then? You can feel everyone? Everywhere?”

She adjusted her weight in the chair and he turned to look at her. She’d lowered her head so her hair tumbled forward, covering her face in a fall of gilded, shifting light. “Some more than others.”

He didn’t miss the innuendo, but his ego required her to say it aloud.

“Meaning...me?”

She drew her knees up under her chin, her cotton flowered sundress bunching and slipping under the afghan that protected her bare legs from the drafty room, and wrapped her arms around her shins. “Yes,” she murmured to her knees. Then, darker, “Especially you.”

He waited a moment for more, but she remained as she was, lowered eyes and silence and a veil of hair across her face.

“I didn’t kill Morgan,” he finally said.

“I heard,” she said. Her fingers dug deep into her upper arms again. “But you didn’t let her go either.”

Was that condemnation in her soft tone? A fleeting distaste in her half-hidden expression?

“Her betrayal has cost us a great deal, Jenna. Some of our finest men have been lost, our defenses have been breached. Our protected existence is over. Who knows what the future holds for us. And you—”

He stopped himself abruptly. When he spoke again his voice was very low. “She almost cost you your life. What would you have me do?”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about that,” she said quietly and looked up at him. “And to be totally honest...I don’t know.” Her eyes were clear and almost colorless in the light. He could not read her expression. “But I made a promise...a promise I have to keep. Somehow.”

She stopped speaking and he frowned at her, waiting. She said nothing more, only glanced up at him, expressionless.

Doe eyes raked his face and then his chest, where a white bandage peeked above the open collar of his shirt.

“You’re injured,” she murmured.

He gave her a very dry smile. “I’ll live, I’m afraid. It wasn’t very deep, nothing like...” His smile slowly faded. His jaw began to work and he looked away from her, to the petals crushed in his fist. He opened his hand and they tumbled slowly to the floor.

“How is Daria?” she asked softly, after a time. “Christian told me she’s doing well, better than could be expected but...” She swallowed and dropped her lashes. Her arms tightened around her legs. “She looked so bad. I thought he must be trying to cheer me up with a little finessing of the facts.”

Leander raised his gaze to her face. She had her lower lip caught between her teeth and rocked, very slowly, in the chair.

“It’s too early to tell. The probability of permanent injury is there, the doctor tells me. And,” he added, sharper than he intended, “there will be scars aplenty.”

She pressed a pale hand over her eyes. “God. If only I had gotten there sooner,” she whispered. “It took me so long to find her, nearly all day. If I had gotten there faster...” She drew a ragged breath and shook her head. She squeezed her eyes together. A line of tears beaded her lashes. She swiped them away with the back of her fingers.

“Jenna,” Leander said, his voice roughened. “It’s not your fault. If you hadn’t found her, if you hadn’t gone looking for her, she’d be dead. What you did, back there...”

He lost the words.

Staring at her now, so beautiful and fragile and visibly despondent, twilight sliding like a lover’s touch across her face, sent a terrible ache through his body, a fierce burning through his lungs that left him stunned and breathless. He tried to inhale, he tried to catch his breath, but he couldn’t seem to manage it.

How long did he have? How many more days or hours or minutes until she left him behind with a gaping hole in his chest where his heart used to be?

The thought of living without her was like acid in his throat.

“So...” She drew in a long breath, gathered herself, and sat up straighter in the chair, folding her hands primly together in her lap. She gazed down at her hands and spoke in a small, quiet voice. “When are you going to do it?”

The hopelessness in her voice snapped him back to reality. His eyebrows ruched.

“Do what?”

She sent him a dark, resigned look. “Imprison me.”

He stared at her, aghast.

“With Morgan,” she explained, when he still didn’t speak.

“Who...why... what? ” he sputtered.

She waved a pale hand in the air in front of her face, weakly dismissive. “You don’t have to put on an act for me, Leander.” She sighed. “I know you think I helped Morgan. You accused me of it, that day in front of the Assembly. On top of that, I ran away—again—and broke the Law—again. That’s your job, isn’t it? Enforce the Law? Protect the colony?” She stared at him, her gaze grim and unflinching. “Punish the enemy?”