It was intimidating, and also exceedingly beautiful.
Here were manicured gardens jeweled with raindrops and edged with groomed borders of fragrant herbs, burbling alabaster fountains and statues of nudes, an enormous rounded portico with marble Palladian columns washed in deep umber from spotlights hidden in shrubs beneath. Behind the sprawling main house stretched wild, deep vales shrouded in gray-blue mists that wound in thick fingers and curls to a dark horizon beyond. The forest.
The moon was an ivory pearl in the sky, casting her pallid glow over everything.
Serenaded by crickets sawing and frogs croaking and the crunch of gravel underfoot, they were led inside by the white-gloved servant through iron-studded doors twice the height of a man, and Jenna couldn’t help but gasp at what lay within.
She was astounded from the moment she stepped through the doors, hammered by beauty and voices and echoing footsteps, Christian and Morgan ahead and the servant behind, the confusion of a dozen different exotic perfumes in her nose at once, dazzled by the silk-covered walls and baroque vaulted ceilings and chandeliers sparkling in icy cold brilliance overhead.
The sheen of parquet floors was interrupted constantly by thick Persian rugs, a marble fireplace burned bright in every room they passed, Chinese porcelain and cut-crystal bowls filled with fragrant peonies and masses of orchids adorned marquetry tables, a vast drawing room was lavished in gold. Clocks ticked and fabrics rustled and voices murmured from deep within the labyrinth of the mansion, and always the potent reminder of the creatures that walked the halls of this magical place:
There were statues of panthers—slinking and hunting and prowling in polished onyx, marble, and bronze—everywhere.
“Please allow me to lead you to your chambers, Lady Jenna.”
Another liveried servant was speaking to her, bowing at the waist while he kept his gaze down and gestured toward dual winding staircases that climbed to the second floor. He also exuded the fine, humming power of Ikati, and Jenna guessed everyone at Sommerley was, even the servants. Judging by how Morgan spoke of Others, humans would be the last creatures invited here.
“Oh, please,” she said to the bowing man, “you can just call me Jenna.”
This seemed to startle him, though he recovered quickly, blinking just fast enough to let her know this was a most unusual request. “Yes, madam, if it pleases you,” he murmured, then glided silently away toward the stairs.
Jenna frowned at his retreating back. Lady Jenna?
“They’ve been expecting you,” Morgan explained, pausing to pluck a fig from a Waterford crystal bowl on a cherrywood console a few feet away. She turned it in her fingers, lifted it to her nose, then set it back down in the bowl with a sniff. “I’m starving. That little bit of caviar I had on the plane didn’t even put a dent in my appetite.”
She brushed an invisible piece of lint from the sleeve of her black taffeta blouse and sighed, glancing over the gilt-edged mirror above the console, the wall painted ivory and cream, the vaulted ceiling towering above. Her expression soured.
“Who’s been expecting me?” Jenna asked.
“Why, everyone,” Morgan said. A smile stole over her face, and Christian, standing beside her, arms crossed and legs spread wide, gave a gentle snort.
“We have a meeting to attend, Jenna, please forgive us for leaving you for a while,” he said, shooting Morgan a look. She nodded. “But we’ll be having a late supper afterward, if you’re hungry. Or you can ring the kitchen to have something brought to your room.”
Morgan called a farewell over her shoulder. “I have to freshen up. See you later, Jenna.” The servant holding Morgan’s bags snapped to attention as she passed, then fell in two steps behind her, a lethal creature outfitted in black stiletto heels, taffeta, and cashmere, down the airy corridor toward a set of carved doors inlaid with panels of mother-of-pearl.
“Stay out of trouble now,” she said with a low laugh as she closed the doors behind her.
Jenna looked to Christian.
His body vibrated with a crackling, electric tension that seemed to heat the air all around them. He smiled at her with an intensity that lent fire to his eyes and made her heart skip a beat.
“I’m sure I couldn’t get into any trouble here,” she said, vaguely embarrassed, though she didn’t know why.
“Really?” His gaze was steady. “Out of the frying pan as you are?”
She made a little noise of irritated disbelief. “Is that your way of trying to make me feel better? Because it isn’t working.”
There was a long pregnant pause, then he stepped closer, slowly, fire still burning in his eyes. He stopped just feet away, almost as tall as Leander, muscled and substantial, and she had to look up to hold his gaze.
“It’s my way of saying be careful, Jenna,” he said. “Alphas are known for getting what they want. By any means possible.”
Embarrassed by that, her face flamed. “Duly noted. And not that it’s any of your business, there’s nothing between Leander and me, and I have no intention of letting that change.”
Christian stared at her for several seconds, head cocked as if weighing the truth of her statement. Then hesitantly, with a conflicted look as if he didn’t want to but just couldn’t help himself, he reached out and lightly touched a finger to her hot cheek. She stiffened, and seeing her unease, the expression on his face changed from conflicted to pained. He dropped his hand and his eyes grew terribly sad.
“He doesn’t need your permission,” he murmured. “You’re in his world now. There’s no one that will stop him from doing anything he likes.” His gaze drifted over her face, down her throat, to the open collar of her white silk blouse, and his own cheeks grew ruddy. “Anything at all.”
She resisted the urge to step back and instead squared her shoulders. “I can take care of myself.”
His gaze flickered back to hers and he nodded. One corner of his mouth lifted. “I know you can.” The lopsided smile disappeared and his brows drew together. His next words came out in a fumbling, disjointed rush. “But...if you need...anything...I’m here for you...I’d be happy to...you can always...what I mean to say is that I want...I want...”
He stammered to a halt and she frowned at him, waiting. He flushed even redder, looked away, and blew out a hard breath. Then he cursed and hid his face behind a hand as if he was embarrassed, and that was when several things fell into place at once.
She realized Christian was offering her more than just his assistance.
Her pulse went jagged. She was caught between empathy—she knew the terrible toll loneliness and longing could take—excruciating self-consciousness, and the strong desire to run away into the moonlit night and leave all this insanity behind.
Answers, she reminded herself. I came here for answers, and I’m not leaving until I get them. No matter how weird this gets.
She put on her resolve like armor and remembered what her mother would say when things got especially rough—“Remain calm and carry on.” She groped for the right thing to say, and it wasn’t until she spoke that she knew she really meant it.
“Thank you,” she said.
Christian’s head snapped up and he stared at her, expectant.
“I mean...” She was momentarily distracted by his molten aura, flaring bright as danger between them, and tried to compose herself and say something coherent that wouldn’t make the situation worse. “I mean I hope we can be friends because I need all the friends I can get. And you seem like someone I can trust.”
She was immediately sorry she chose that particular phrase.
His eyes closed for just longer than a blink and an urgent sorrow contorted his face, here then gone. He opened his eyes and his gaze raked over her figure with a naked hunger so palpable she felt it like a hand on her skin.
“You shouldn’t trust me,” he said, his voice rough. “If I were Alpha I’d have already claimed you for my own, regardless of what you wanted. At least my brother is showing some r
estraint.” He paused, his breathing gone ragged. “I wouldn’t.”
Now she did step back, not just one step but two, thankful suddenly for the servant waiting by the stairs who was looking quite pointedly down at his own shoes.
“I don’t believe that,” she said, startled. “You’re a gentleman.”
He laughed, a dark, ruthless sound, and closed the distance between them in one long stride. He loomed over her, large and male and menacing. “Am I?” He snatched up her hand, pulled open his shirt with one hard yank that sent buttons popping, and pressed her palm flat against his bare, muscled chest. He held it there when she gasped and tried to pull away. “You can read minds, so tell me what you see, Jenna,” he said, eyes searing. “Tell me exactly how much of a gentleman I am.”
She managed to disentangle herself and stumble away, hand to her mouth, both faint and furious, the lightning strike of images still burning in her mind. They were a jumble of carnality and tenderness and vivid color blurred by speed, pictures of her and him locked together in passionate kisses and even more passionate lovemaking, images of children that looked like the two of them combined and a few odd, fuzzy scenes of a great many people bowing down to her over bended knee that were quickly crowded out by the overwhelming flood of pornographic depictions of her lips saying yes as she was astride him, beneath him, arching against him in ecstasy.
Seeing her obvious shock at his split-second metamorphosis from benign to not, Christian’s lips twisted into a joyless smile. “Don’t mistake us for humans, Jenna. The Ikati are animals. And like all animals, we’re concerned with only three things: hierarchy, territory, and procreation.” That searing gaze traveled over her body, lingering, and when he looked into her eyes again her mouth went dry with dread. He opened his mouth and said, “But every time I’m close to you I can only think about one.”
Then he turned on his heel and stalked away, leaving her speechless and shaking in the cold, echoing hall.
“Another body has been found,” came the terse voice of Viscount Weymouth as Leander entered the fire-warmed confines of the East Library. He paused at the door and looked at the gathered men, every one gray-faced with fear, wearing the look of interrupted slumber: bleary eyes, disheveled hair, unshaven faces.
They all had wives and children, homes and livelihoods. They all had something precious to protect.
Leander hadn’t bothered to unpack or eat or even remove his traveling clothes. He’d come directly from the limousine. He knew they would be waiting, most likely been waiting for hours, and it was his duty to make decisions.
Swiftly.
With a shrug of his shoulders he was out of his heavy woolen overcoat. He slung it over a side chair on his way to take his place at the head of the rectangular mahogany table. He didn’t sit but gripped the carved wooden back of the Alpha’s chair, stared at the silent congregation, listened to the crackle of dry wood as it burned and the thumping, frightened heartbeats pounding against the ribs of the men of his tribe.
He nodded to Morgan as she came through the door and took her usual seat, then frowned as Christian, grim and tight-jawed with his blue Oxford unbuttoned halfway down his chest, followed only moments behind. Without glancing in Leander’s direction, Christian went to stand in front of the fireplace, crossed his arms over his chest, and stared down at the flames.
Leander turned his attention to Viscount Weymouth. “Tell me,” he commanded.
“Outside the Quebec colony this time, frozen stiff in a lake just beginning to thaw. They think it may have been there since winter.” The viscount slid a French newspaper to him across the long table. A blurred photograph showed the naked body of a man being pulled from the lake by a team of local officials.
Like the first body discovered in March outside the Bhaktapur colony in Nepal, this one was headless. What he couldn’t tell from the picture was if it had been burned too.
Leander did a quick calculation. Two bodies in a few months, possibly even less depending if they could establish a time of death for this new one. Both found very near an Ikati colony, both headless.
It was the indelible calling card of their ancient enemy, the Expurgari. Torture the victim, burn him alive, cut off his head. What they did with the heads, none of the Ikati knew.
But if they had been discovered, why not more victims? Why not a direct attack?
“Has the body been identified?” Leander asked, pulling the paper toward him, almost dreading to touch it. He squinted at the picture and read the caption beneath: Body of missing activist found in frozen lake near Mt. Tremblant.
“Yes,” Viscount Weymouth replied, frayed nerves ringing in his voice. “It was Simon Bennett.”
Leander felt the blood drain away from his face.
Bennett was a vocal environmental activist, fighting for tougher laws on pollution, championing clean energy and a move toward more earth-friendly life-styles, working to bring man and animals and the planet in harmony with one another. Working to stop overpopulation, stop wasting natural resources, stop the destruction of their mother, planet Earth.
Working, very vocally and in the public eye, to stop the habitat encroachment on the local population of cougars, lynx, and jaguars. Panthers.
Like Viscount Weymouth, both men killed were Keepers of the Bloodlines.
Leander slowly looked around at the faces in the room, faces he had known his entire life, men he had grown up with or looked up to as a young boy, as the son of the Alpha. Men he had sworn to protect once he became the Alpha himself.
If the Expurgari had obtained any information from these men before they were killed, if they had tortured these men who knew every secret of their colonies, every member within it, every location of their kind throughout the world...
He now felt the same seed of fear he saw on the faces of all these men plant itself firmly into the soil of his heart, take root, and push up an evil, dark leaf.
“Guard the colony. Take every precaution. No one comes in, no one goes out. Edward,” he said, turning to look at the pale face of Viscount Weymouth, “convene a meeting of the Council of Alphas to take place immediately, here at Sommerley.”
He drew in a long breath that felt like acid scoring his lungs and spoke the words that acknowledged their fears, that would change all their lives from this moment forward.
“They’ve found us again. Prepare for war.”
12
Jenna awoke slowly in a soft square of sunlight that poured like honey through the dormered windows into her second-story room. Eyes still closed, she inhaled a deep, cleansing breath, the scent of morning and freshly laundered cotton soft in her nose. She languorously stretched her arms and legs beneath the smooth sheets, curling her toes, flexing her fingers.
So comfortable, this bed, so large and deliciously warm. So pillowed with down and fine linens, she felt as if she had slept on a cloud.
It was quiet in the neighborhood today. No noise from the boardwalk, no garbage trucks rumbling over the asphalt in the early morning hours, no muffled conversations overheard through the thin walls of her apartment. The only sounds were the sheets sliding over her naked skin as she rolled onto her back and the warbling of a lone songbird, a pure note held high and trembling in the dewy, pink-tinged dawn.
The stillness was unbroken, idyllic, and very unusual...
A frown ruched her eyebrows. Was it a holiday? A Sunday? Why was everything so hushed?
Her eyes snapped open. A swath of shimmering fabric warmed by sunlight swam into focus overhead, saffron and apricot organza threaded with gold, folded and tied between four mahogany posts with heavy silk tassels.
Jenna bolted upright and stared around the room in a fog of confusion. She recognized nothing.
Walls painted coral and vanilla, overlaid in a delicate scroll of trompe l’oeil gardens, climbing ivy and jasmine in lavender and green. Furnishings at home in a palace: a French secretaire, a raw silk settee, hanging tapestries, carved wood chairs, and velvet pillows in d
isarray upon a divan. Soaring windows across the east wall coaxed in the early summer morning, suffusing everything with a flush of amber-pink radiance.
It took seconds of heart-stopping panic before her memory flowed back and she could breathe again.
England. Sommerley. Her room. Ikati.
Leander.
She remembered she’d dreamt of him, here in this gilded room as the sunlight stole over the horizon and warmed the darkness beneath her closed eyelids to burnished ambers and golds. Dreamt of his face and his eyes and the silky-sweet timbre of his voice as it rolled over the vowels in her name.
She’d dreamt of him and of the dark forest beyond her windows, a forest that beckoned to something deep and dark inside her, a forest she explored with him by her side, a muscled, ebony panther who moved through trees and bracken and undergrowth without a sound except the whisper-thin noise of wind sliding over sleek fur.
Don’t mistake us for humans, Jenna. The Ikati are animals...
She was going to have to do something about both Christian and Leander, and she had no idea what that something might be. She’d fled to the relative safety of this lavishly feminine room last night after her confrontation with Christian and hadn’t emerged since, not even to eat.
Coward.
Aggravated, she flung back the heavy duvet and picked up the sheer robe of ivory silk left by the maid who had turned down her bed. She swung it over her shoulders and, with a jerk, tied the sash around her waist.
She felt plush carpet then cool marble beneath her feet as she padded through the sun-washed room into the adjoining bathroom. She reached for the curved handle of the sink faucet to wash her face, but her hand stilled midreach as she saw a quilted cosmetics bag on the marbled countertop next to a soap dish that looked like solid gold.
Her cosmetics bag.
She straightened and frowned at it.
Leander had waited outside her apartment in the limousine yesterday while she packed. He’d given her twenty minutes. She had flung everything she thought she’d need for a short trip into a single leather suitcase, but hadn’t remembered until this moment she’d left her cosmetics bag behind.
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