Shadow's Edge

6

Although it was still a foolhardy thing to do, Christian was allowed to challenge Leander, who supposed it was good for him, in a way. It kept him grounded and reminded him he still had family, small though it was now. Since the accident that had claimed his parents three years ago last May, his older sister, Daria, and Christian were all he had left.

“So I suggest we find her current whereabouts and pay her a visit a few days before her birthday. Keep out of sight, no contact, just watch. On her twenty-fifth birthday we’ll have our answer, one way or another. I’ll go myself, if you like.”

He lifted his gaze straight to Leander’s and waited, expressionless, still casually slouched in his chair. But Leander felt what simmered beneath his brother’s air of casual indifference.

Excitement.

He narrowed his eyes, wondering at the cause, but his brother, still impassive, glanced away. Leander turned his attention back to the gathered men. “And if she is unable to Shift?”

It was Viscount Weymouth who answered him through the heavy silence that suddenly filled the grace and splendor of the East Library.

“Then you know what must be done.”So it had been agreed. Christian and Leander would travel to observe the half-Blood until her birthday, and Morgan would accompany them. She was the only woman who served in the Assembly, a concession hard-won and resented by the old guard, men who were unused to having their authority questioned, unaccustomed to a female usurping their age-old dogma of male superiority. But it had been put to a vote and she had been approved, by a threadbare margin of one.

Leander’s was the deciding vote.

Securing her place in the Assembly had been a battle. She’d sustained scars and nursed deep resentments for those who stood against her. But Leander suspected ambition and a shrewd acuity kept her quiet. In truth, her Gifts and intelligence made her worth ten of the men who’d opposed her.

Savagely cunning, an expert hunter, and completely lethal, Morgan possessed the rare Gift of Suggestion, which would make it easier for them to convince an unwilling half-Blood to return to Sommerley, if the need arose. It was also the reason she had ultimately been accepted into the Assembly.

She was also bloody high-maintenance. Leander had experienced firsthand her flair for dramatic displays of emotion, the fine-tuned and overly delicate sense of pride that made her so wary of any imagined insult. She was more prickly than a porcupine.

The plan to visit the half-Blood was implemented with a speed that hadn’t marked the Assembly’s decision making in years. The trio departed on a private plane on a course for Los Angeles that very night.

Fifteen hours and one too many scotches later, Leander stood on his balcony in the presidential suite at the Four Seasons Beverly Hills, looking over the city as twilight stained it hues of deepest indigo and violet.

As they had innumerable times since leaving Sommerley, his thoughts turned once again to Jenna.

She’d been followed in one way or another her whole life, though she was unaware of it. The Assembly had allowed her father’s sacrifice to ensure her freedom but not to erase her from their view completely. To ignore her would be simply unthinkable.

A scout had been assigned to watch her, to track her and report back to the Assembly on her progress. But over the years, as she grew from a child into a woman, Jenna showed no outward sign of the Gift other than the Eyes.

By puberty, when most other Shifters would have begun to exhibit the Gifts of their Blood—the strength, the agility, and the speed that made climbing a tree or clearing a fence a thing of ease, the heightened senses that allowed them to hear the whisper of air over the wings of the birds in the sky and the heartbeats of the little creatures that burrowed below the earth, to smell water from miles off and know if it was fresh or salt, still or running, lake or pond—Jenna had not.

And so, over time, they became convinced she never would.

The scouts were sent only once every few years now but never reported anything unusual. The possibility that she would Shift on her twenty-fifth birthday, the age when all half-Bloods first Shifted, was hardly a possibility at all.

But still, there was a chance...

Leander’s pulse quickened as a warm breeze stirred the sheer curtains of the open patio doors, the scent of baked stone and crushed flowers folded within its balmy caress. The pink marble veranda with its balustrades, cascading scarlet bougainvillea, and stone fountain lay quiet and open before him, an invitation to the night.

He raised his gaze to the darkening sky and felt the pulse within him.