On instinct she inhaled and caught the essence of him distilled into one tiny, heady whiff: Male. Potent. Dangerous.
Then he shifted his weight forward on one leg, and with that small movement, everything changed. His expression darkened, sharpened. He looked for a moment like he would cross the parking lot and devour her whole.
Another blistering shock of heat hit her—heart- stopping, blood-curdling—and to her great horror, everything began to slide sideways in one long, nauseating pull. Her body went curiously limp, out of her control. Her eyes blurred and focused, only to lose focus again when she slumped hard against the rack of fake fireplace logs and hit her head on a metal bar.
Spots of color popped and faded in her peripheral vision, the world leached of color. Except for those eyes that remained a constant, phosphorescent glow against the encroaching darkness.
No! she thought, panicked. No! I’m not—I can’t—
Just before she fainted, Jenna saw the feral green-eyed stranger lick his lips.
2
“Well, Leander, she certainly looks charming. Though a bit equilibrium challenged. Are you sure we’ve got the right blonde?”
Leander didn’t turn at the sound of his younger brother Christian’s amused voice, nor did he move or blink, or in any way acknowledge he heard him. He only stared, with fevered eyes and a flush of blood creeping over his cheeks, across the parking lot and through the doors to the grocery store, where a small crowd had gathered around the slim female figure recently collapsed onto the floor.
“It’s her,” Leander said with a calm that hid the way his heart was pounding in his chest. “I know that’s her.”
From the moment he’d laid eyes on her, he’d known. And not only by the Eyes, by her scent as well. She smelled of youth and power and heated woman, and something else indefinable, lovely and dark and deep, particular to their kind. It was a sensual mix of forest floor, herbs and rain, fresh air and musk and moonlight.
Leander’s senses were unmatched. It was one of his Gifts, though not by any means the most powerful one. He’d spent much of his life trying to manage the assault of smells, noises, sensations, and vibrations that emanated from everywhere around him. He’d long ago learned to shut out much of the chaos, to filter how much he absorbed, but he’d opened his senses fully to take her in and now had the taste of her skin lingering on his tongue like afterglow. Every nerve ending in his body felt her. Every pore was filled with her. He was almost dizzy with desire.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” came another voice, this one female, from Leander’s other side. A dramatic sigh followed, then the sound of leather boots scraping across hot asphalt with the annoyed shifting of her weight. Without looking, Leander knew the boots were Italian, designer, and absurdly expensive. “That’s her? The wilting flower? The deer-in-the-headlights Snow White?”
“Morgan,” Christian said quietly, just the one word. Leander didn’t have to see it to feel the look of warning Christian shot at her behind his back. He allowed the smallest of smiles to curl his full lips.
As Alpha, Leander enjoyed not only the elevated rank and accompanying status among his colony but was also afforded the respect of someone with his very rare, very powerful Gifts—Gifts that the girl now being helped up from the floor of the supermarket by a huge, sweating ape of a man possibly had as well.
Not that she knew it. Not yet.
But they were here to find out if she did. If so, she would be brought back to Sommerley to take up her rightful place in the colony. If not—
But Leander didn’t want to think about what would happen if she showed no sign of the Gifts. Not after he’d felt her, not after he’d seen her.
Though they were all beautiful, even the least Gifted of their kind, she was something else altogether. An exotic sylph with elegance and strength and solid luster, all feminine curves and opalescent skin and a surfeit of raw power simmering beneath. He felt the fine, humming force of her all the way across the parking lot, like a hand caressing his skin.
“What now?” Morgan asked, her tone a tad more civilized, though he sensed her irritation like an angry bee under his skin.
Leander reluctantly turned his eyes away from the girl and met Morgan’s level, impatient gaze. Her outfit was so tight it followed every curve of her figure like a second skin—just as she wanted it to, he knew.
She was nothing if not provocative.
“Now we wait,” Leander replied evenly. “There’s only a week to go. Now that we’ve found her, we lie back. And we wait.”
“And what are we supposed to do in the meantime?” Morgan complained, one hand on her slender, leather-clad hip. “Babysit her? Make sure she doesn’t trip over a rock and bash her head in? She appears to have the tendency to faint dead away for no particular reason.”
She shot a resentful gaze at the doors of the supermarket, where a half dozen men had surrounded the now-standing Jenna to offer assistance. Several more people were running past the doors toward something he couldn’t see within the store. Maybe something that had to do with the shriek of grinding metal he’d heard moments before, just before the girl appeared in the entry.
“We go back to the hotel and relax. I can track her now that I’ve got her scent. We’ll have our answer in a week.”
Morgan blew glossy black bangs off her forehead with a sharp puff of breath and slanted him a look with her eyes, which were dark and frozen emerald green.
Leander turned away. He didn’t want to argue. He didn’t want to talk.
He just wanted to look at her.
When the subject of a reconnaissance mission was forwarded by the Assembly, Leander hadn’t been pleased. He hadn’t understood her importance, had thought it all a great bit of folly, time and energy wasted that could be better spent elsewhere.
The colony had more pressing business to attend to, of late.
“Of what interest is she to us?” he argued, standing before the sixteen men and one woman of the Assembly, his jaw set, his hands spread wide.
The East Library, where the Assembly regularly met, was filled with fractured, golden sunlight reflected from the crystal chandelier overhead. The room had a magnificent gilded ceiling and a seventeenth-century marble fireplace, a spectacular view of the river Avon snaking through the New Forest beyond, and was normally Leander’s favorite place at Sommerley. It was a place where he could hide from the world and think.
When the Assembly was not in session, that is.
“A half-Blood whose father was executed for treason?” Leander added. He shook his head in frustration. “She’s hardly worth a second glance. The probability she has any Gift is beyond remote. She’s displayed none of the signs—”
“She has the Eyes,” came the quiet response to his right from Edward, Viscount Weymouth. He reclined in a beige and ivory-striped silk Dupioni chair with his hands folded over his waistcoat. Spindly legs stretched out in front of him, round spectacles teetered on the end of a long, aquiline nose. “This has been confirmed by more than one scout,” he added.
Leander pursed his lips and considered him.
He was a trusted man, a man who kept a record of the ancestry of each member of the colony, a man who knew all their secrets and every facet of their history back to their ancient days of glory in the equatorial rainforests of Africa.
Viscount Weymouth was Keeper of the Bloodlines, as were his father and grandfather before him, and every other male of his line, back to the beginning.
It was an important job in the colony, a revered one. Because for the Ikati, Bloodlines were of secondary importance to only two other things:
Secrecy. Allegiance.
“I believe there have been other half-Bloods in our history who had the Eyes, and few of them showed any other sign. Even fewer were ever able to Shift,” Leander reminded the Viscount.
The Viscount stared at him, stony and silent, for one long moment. Then he uttered something that made the other members of the Assembly shift in the
ir seats and murmur to one another in worried agreement.
“What you say is true. But none of the other half-Bloods were his.”
“Leander.”
His brother spoke his name, and the room turned to his voice. Christian sat in second position around the rectangular mahogany table, to the left of Leander, his gilt beechwood armchair with its carved wooden back only slightly less ornate than his brother’s.
He was pretending to relax, slouched slightly in his chair, a sardonic smile on his handsome face. His hair spilled in a silken jet tangle over his shoulders. He was the less physically imposing of the two, but equally intelligent, sloe-eyed, and lithe, with the height and grace and dusky coloring all the Ikati shared.
And like all the others, he gauged Leander’s reaction with every word he spoke. One poorly turned phrase could lead to very unpleasant consequences.
“Perhaps it would be wise to pay this half-Blood a visit,” he began slowly. “If only to assure ourselves that she is not a threat. Under normal circumstances, she would have been dealt with at birth. The mere fact that she remains free puts us all at risk.”
Leander’s only response was an arched eyebrow and thinned lips. Emboldened by Christian’s words, Robert Barrington leaned forward over the table, green eyes narrowed in a handsome, leonine face. “I agree. If she were to Shift for the first time outside the walls of the colony, unsupervised, perhaps in plain view of who knows how many people, the results could be disastrous.”
Another man, a set of belligerence to his jaw, sat forward. Grayson Sutherland. Newly wed, always confident, he’d competed as a young man against Leander for the attentions of one of the tribe’s most sought-after females, a raven-haired beauty with rose petal lips and notoriously free hands. Sutherland had lost.
“They’re right, Leander. This little stray could be the undoing of us all. She should immediately be brought here to face the Assembly and her fate.”
A few other men around the table made low noises of agreement, all of them privileged, all of them Gifted, every one of them stepping into very dangerous territory.
Leander’s face darkened with anger. He felt the blood rise to his face.
Shifter Law—ancient, iron-clad, and utterly patriarchal—was clear on this matter. Though it was allowed for Shifters to dally outside their race with humans—frowned upon but allowed—it was forbidden to marry, expressly forbidden to breed. The punishment for this very rare transgression was death for the human and the offspring and a lifetime of imprisonment for the Shifter.
With a single exception. If the Shifter gave his life in their stead.
Leander’s gaze, burning with cold fire, picked out each member of the Assembly, one by one. “A sacrifice was made to ensure her freedom. You know that.” Above all, he revered honor and courage, duty and discipline, and therefore admired what Jenna’s father had done. Though to admit his admiration would in itself be a kind of treason.
“You all know that. An oath was sworn and paid for in blood. My father, Charles McLoughlin, Alpha Lord of this colony before me, exacted the price himself. It was done according to the Law and will stand. She will not be taken.”
Though it was quiet and controlled, his voice cracked like a bullwhip across the room, silencing them all.
“Yes,” Christian agreed after a long and awkward moment in which the only sound was the ticking of the Belgian clock on the Chippendale burlwood desk. “We cannot break the oath of the Alpha. She and her mother were permitted to live, and so far she has given no other sign but the Eyes. But the risk remains.”
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 bougainv
illea, 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.
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.
3
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.
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