Shadow's Edge

7

The call of the Shift.

Night was when he felt it most strongly, though he, like all others of his kind, could Shift at will. But Leander had a Gift only the most powerful were blessed with. He could become more than just an animal, more than the lethal predator all his kin could become.

He could become vapor and blend without form into the very air itself.

He stepped out of his clothing, his jacket, his shirt, his fine wool trousers, letting them all fall to the warmed marble beneath his bare feet. He closed his eyes and let it rise within him, his heart hammering within his chest as the joy of the Shift took over.

It was like nothing else he’d ever felt, that final moment before disintegration, and nothing on earth compared to it. It was a cascade of sensation, a tremor that became an electric charge that became a weightlessness as his body disappeared. All human flesh was gone, all senses vanished but the silken feel of the air against him. He slipped through it, a fine spray of mist rising up, shimmering, shaping itself through his will and his mind, which remained, though his body did not.

Nothing else could make the turn with him. Not clothing or weapons or food; anything he wore or held in his hands would simply fall to the ground. It was a fact that had proved inconvenient on more than one occasion. But tonight he thought not of this, nor of the Assembly and their Law, nor of Christian and Morgan and the task set before him.

Tonight he thought only of freedom and let himself melt into the heated sanctuary of the indigo sky.

The champagne was doing little to alleviate her headache, though it was an exquisite 1996 Louis Roederer.

The subtle taste of almonds, hazelnuts, and white flowers glossed over her taste buds on the first sip, accompanied thereafter by the rounded, creamy attack of silken texture, akin to the sinful decadence of a buttery brioche. Scents of straw, citrus, light toast, and buttered corn hit the back of her nose and she almost groaned with pleasure.

This, Jenna thought as she swallowed, is an o****m for the tongue.

It cost more than four hundred dollars a bottle.

It was a gift from her thrice-divorced neighbor, Mrs. Colfax. They were more than acquaintances but not exactly friends, since neither ever divulged anything resembling personal information to each other—which was precisely how they both preferred it. Jenna guessed Mrs. Colfax had her own closet full of rattling skeletons with which to contend.

She watched the lustrous, pale gold liquid effervesce within the elegant confines of the etched Waterford flute—another gift from Mrs. Colfax—and heaved a sigh of frustration.

What happened today was ominously disturbing, though she’d nearly convinced herself she’d imagined the entire episode. The bubble bath was helping, if only to relax the taut muscles in her back. It did nothing to ease the tension in her mind, however, or the lingering static on her skin.

A static that increased every time she let herself think about him.

Yet she couldn’t get him out of her mind. The stranger with the glossy fringe of ebony hair, the face of a Botticelli angel, the eyes of a hungry wolf.

Something about him seemed so familiar. Though it had been but a glance before she’d passed out, she felt something leap against her skin under the weight of his stare, as if an unknown beast strained sinew and muscle, hungry to surface.

In that moment their eyes met, she suddenly felt like...an animal, awakening.

Jenna stretched her legs out and curled her toes over the edge of the tub, took a deep breath, and closed her eyes, shutting out the candlelit bathroom with its mirrored vanity, marbled counter, and enclosed glass shower. She shook her head to dispel the memory of his face, burning bright as a new penny under her closed lids.

He was just another stranger on the street. The strange electric charge couldn’t possibly have come from him. Could she have suffered heat stroke? She chewed on her lower lip and considered it. The symptoms were the same: dizziness, pounding heart, clammy skin, fainting.

But she was never affected by the heat. She never got sick or fainted or felt dizzy. She’d never even had a cavity, for God’s sake!

So she did what she always did when confronted with something she couldn’t figure out: she put it out of her mind. She sank down farther into the warm, perfumed water and thought about where she was going to do her grocery shopping from now on.

The bathroom was the one place she’d invested money to upgrade her tiny one-bedroom apartment, and it had been money well spent. The plumbing, though, she thought as a trickle of water from the faucet ran in a chilly sluice over her left big toe. She was going to have to talk to Saul about the plumbing.

The building was over fifty years old, done in a poorly executed art deco style, and had what her landlord Saul referred to as “character.” The faucets dripped, the toilet ran, the kitchen cabinets stuck, the walls were thin as paper. She had become overly familiar with her next-door neighbors’ personal problems.

Still, she loved it. It was home, and a home was what she most desperately needed after her mother died.

It wasn’t a shock, her mother’s early death. No one survived long drinking as much alcohol as she did. But her death had left Jenna, at eighteen years old, with no one, not a single soul in the world to call family. Once her father vanished when she was ten, her mother had adamantly refused to even speak his name.

Jenna had only the most fleeting memories of him. Tall and dark, handsome, somber, mysterious. And the memory of his smell was burned into her mind. He carried the cool scent of night on his skin no matter the time of day.

Her mother had no siblings, her grandparents were long dead...there was simply no one.