Shadow's Edge (17 page)

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.”

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 disarray 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.

Not that it mattered, because it was somehow
here
.

She picked up the bag, letting her fingers trail over the familiar fabric, the quilted stitching. She unzipped it; everything was packed neatly inside.

Jenna turned and eyed the frosted glass door to the walk-in closet. She set the bag on the sink, pulled the silk sash tighter around her waist, squared her shoulders, and walked over to the door.

Four pairs of jeans, a half dozen T-shirts, underwear, socks, two pairs of shoes. That’s what she’d thrown into her carry-on yesterday. That was all that had fit.

But what she stared at now—folded in fluted mahogany cubbies, tucked into rolling shelves, hanging from polished wood dowels, nestled into sliding racks row after row—was her entire wardrobe.

Every item of clothing she owned was arranged in perfect order, color by color, shirts and dresses and handbags and shoes, all lined up and tucked in and laid out within this walk-in. Her jewelry, ensconced in velvet trays within four sliding drawers of a large center island. Her panties, folded like handkerchiefs and arranged by color in drawers on the other side. Even her lingerie hung in rainbow colors in one section, categorized lightest to darkest, then by length within the color spectrum.

In addition to everything she owned, there were things she didn’t recognize. Formal dresses, cocktail dresses, and evening gowns filled a length of wall, overcoats and jackets in every style and color took up another. A third section was dedicated entirely to handbags and shoes, many which she recognized as designer and extremely expensive.

It didn’t really surprise Jenna much when she peeked at the tags on these strange and beautiful clothes. Everything was her size.

She stood motionless in the center of the large room, trying to decide what to do. She pressed her hands hard against the sides of her head and closed her eyes with a heavy exhalation.

It was in exactly this position Leander found her.

“Let me know if that helps a headache,” he said. “I’ve found nothing to cure my own.”

Because she smelled his particular fragrance of musk and exotic spices long before she felt the faint tremor of floorboards under his step travel up her spine to lodge in a knot of tension under her stomach, Jenna didn’t turn at the sound of his voice.

“I generally find,” she said, looking sourly at a fire-engine red Valentino gown with a thigh-high slit, “that throwing something heavy against a wall is a satisfying way to relieve a tension headache. Especially if it should be so accommodating as to shatter into a million pieces.”

She looked over her shoulder at him.

“My, my.” He leaned against the doorframe with a wan smile. “I had no idea you had such violent tendencies. If you like I’ll have a porcelain vase sent up. I imagine that would do the trick.”

There were faint shadows under his eyes. He wore the same black silk shirt and black trousers he wore on the plane, except now both were wrinkled. Beneath his golden complexion, he looked pale.

“Or maybe it would help if you just told me why all my clothes are in this closet.”

He gazed at her. “Because it’s your closet. Where else would they be?”

The tremor in her stomach began a slow burn.

“At my home. Where they should be,” she said. A vein pulsed in her forehead and she fought the urge to press her fingers against it.

“Which is exactly where they are,” he replied, soft as silk.

She stared daggers at him. “Don’t play games with me, Leander, please. Putting aside for a moment the logistics of how my entire wardrobe arrived here overnight, just tell me why it’s here and who the rest of this stuff belongs to.”

It was incredible to her that although he didn’t move or twitch a single muscle as he leaned casually against the door, he still managed to exude a current of rapacious action, like a bubble that engulfed everything around him.

Yet today there was dark tension beneath his veneer of effortless elegance, a hint of something she’d not seen before. Worry?

“I thought you would need a more extensive wardrobe than you brought with you, so,” he shrugged, the picture of cool composure, “I asked Morgan to find a few things for you. She loves fashion and she loves to shop, as you may have noticed.”

Jenna’s palms went clammy, but she was determined not to let him see her rising panic. She might be a coward, but she certainly wasn’t going to let him in on that little fact. “How generous. But that was hardly necessary, seeing how I’ll be leaving in a few days. To go home.”

He slowly raised his eyebrows.

“My actual home,” she clarified, breathing steadily against the blood surging through her veins. “Where I
live
.”