Shadow's Edge (2 page)

Moving as if underwater, the butcher wrapped the steak in waxed paper and handed it back over the counter. “Don’t overcook it; it just needs four minutes on each side.”

She wasn’t going to cook it at all, but didn’t think he needed that particular bit of information. “Great. Thanks again.”

He gave her a wink and a lazy smile that bordered on bedroom.

And that’s when it happened.

At first, it was only a slight hot sting, an odd, tangible shock that seemed to come from nowhere—yet everywhere—around her. The concussion of heat twitched her hand so sharply she nearly dropped her handbag. Startled, she glanced at her hand and watched as a rash of goose bumps covered her arm. Then the strange, heated shock rose, vibrating, pressing in toward her core. It was so molten, so intense, she felt as if she might actually be burned by it.

Carefully, moving only her eyes, she glanced around.

Nothing.

Please tell me the butcher isn’t giving me hot flashes
, she thought, glancing back at him, giving him a closer look. He was still sweating, still smiling, at least twenty years older than she. His thick forearms rested on top of the meat case like two slabs of hairy, tattooed rejects from the refrigerated display below.

No. Definitely not the butcher.

She glanced around again and caught the eye of a tall, silver-haired gentleman standing beside his nattering wife in front of the nearby wine display. He was staring at her in the way she was accustomed to being stared at by men, but no, it wasn’t him either.

Who—or what—was it?

And then a terrifying memory surfaced, one that made the goose bumps on her arms spread up to her neck.

If they ever find you...run.

They were her mother’s words, a litany repeated daily until she died. An
unexplained
litany and one that left her
with a permanent case of paranoia and a suspicion of strang-ers so profound she was never truly able to make friends.

She reminded herself that her mother had said a lot of strange things she didn’t understand—and she drank a lot. “You’re just hungry,” she muttered to herself, earning a lifted eyebrow from the sweaty butcher. “You’re hungry and probably overtired, and it’s about a thousand degrees in here. Get a grip.”

She headed to the front of the store and entered the express checkout line, behind a man so fat she didn’t think he would be able to squeeze through the aisle without ravaging the magazine and candy display racks on either side. She unloaded her cart onto the crawling conveyor belt, then turned and opened the large refrigerated case of drinks that stood between her aisle and the next checkout lane. She chose a soda because there wasn’t any milk—whole milk—her second favorite food to steak.

And when she closed the door and turned back, suddenly the very air itself seemed different. Charged somehow, with a heaviness that ate straight down through her bones.

For the second time, a sudden jolt of static electricity spiked the hair on her arms and the back of her neck, sending a shock of awareness through her core as if she’d been lanced with a spear of fire. She gasped and stiffened, earning a lethargic stare from the giant man in line in front of her. An eerie recognition pulsed over her skin.

I see you
, the pulse whispered inside her.
I know what you are.

She shuddered. Her fingers spasmed so tightly around the plastic soda bottle it split and crumpled in her fist. A fine spray of Pepsi shot out, fizzing out in a cold burst over her wrist and fingers, coating the nearby rack of magazines and gum.

“You OK?” the boyishly handsome cashier said, glancing at the ruined plastic bottle in her hand. He frowned, casting a shadow over his clear blue eyes. “That’s quite the grip you’ve got.”

“I’m sure it just had a crack,” she said through stiff lips. “Dropped during shipping, something like that.”

All the blood had drained from her face. The giant man was gazing at her steadily now, inspecting her pale face and shaking hands from beneath two unruly eyebrows that perched like hairy caterpillars on his forehead. The soda dripped into a fizzing pool on the beige linoleum floor.

The cashier pressed a button and spoke into a mike that squealed with feedback over the PA system. “Clean up on checkout five.”

She inched forward, stepping carefully in her white strappy sandals around the dark, spreading mess of soda, which looked eerily like a pool of blood coagulating at her feet. The feeling of imminent danger was so acute that she had to fight the pressing urge to run.

So because the giant man had turned his back again and the cashier was now distracted with counting out change, because none of the other shoppers in line behind her could know what she was doing, she closed her eyes and opened her senses, pushing her awareness out like an ever-widening bubble in swift, concentric rings to encompass everything around her.

The low drone of air-conditioning whispering through steel vents high overhead. The faint squeak of shoe soles against linoleum; the even fainter creak of leather. The muffled chink of coins jiggling in a pants pocket somewhere near the back of the store. An argument in the deli section—
you never let me have what I want, not even at the fucking
grocery store—
hissed low through clenched teeth. Someone’s gaze on the backs of her bare legs, heated and heavy. But not dangerous. Nothing dangerous, not yet.

She pulled in a slow, deep breath through her nose, letting in the overwhelming sensory world she’d learned so long ago to shut out.

And there—there it was.

Animal.
Hungry
animal. A predator—and a large one at that.

Her eyes flew open. Her heart began to hammer. Every nerve in her body screamed
Danger! Disappear! Run!

But she couldn’t run. She was frozen. Hands shaking, heart pounding, every muscle fixed.

“Let’s get you another soda,” the cashier said, smiling warmly at her.

She was unable to answer or even move her arm to hand him the ruined bottle. She lifted her gaze to his face and he did an immediate double take.

“Wow! Your eyes are amazing! I’ve never seen that shade of green. Or...yellow? It’s so unusual. They’re beautiful.”

“Contacts,” she lied, one of many little white lies she told about herself to mask the truth.

The blaze of fear and fever hit her again, electric and stabbing, like a knife in the gut. She had to grit her teeth against a sudden, wrenching light-headedness. The cashier saw something on her face that made him blink, his brows drawn together. She dropped the ruined plastic bottle on the conveyor belt, stammering excuses.

“I think—I don’t really need another soda. In fact, I’m going to leave everything. I’m sorry. I’m not feeling well. I...I have to go.”

“You’re sure? It won’t be any trouble, it’ll just take a sec. I’ll get one from the fridge at the customer service desk, it’s
right over there—”

But Jenna had already turned away. She began to push past the giant man, but he was wedged so securely between the counter and the large refrigerated case of drinks there was no way to get past him, and there were ten people in line behind her, pressing close. She was trapped.

So because she was panicked and had no other option, she did something she never allowed herself to do and used her strength.

All of it. In front of everyone.

The collective gasps of twelve people were drowned out beneath the piercing metallic shriek of the refrigerated case as it was dragged across the linoleum, its round feet cutting deep into the steel and cement floor beneath. There was twenty feet of gouged floor between the aisle where she’d been standing and freedom, and it took only a few seconds and a very slight push. She didn’t look back as the refrigerated case came to rest against the customer service counter with a muffled
boom,
scattering a stack of coupon flyers into the air like confetti.

She began to run.

She almost made it to the sliding glass doors at the front of the store when she felt the jolt of electricity again. It was a concussion that pierced down into her muscles, into the very marrow of her bones. A rising thick pulse of intuition flooded through her veins and she felt something vast and intangible rushing at her, heated and dark and inevitable as death. She stumbled into a dust-covered display of Duraflame logs stacked in a wire rack and sent row upon row of plastic-wrapped logs bouncing to the floor.

And then, shaking and gasping for breath, gazing out the sliding glass doors into the shimmering heat of the parking lot, Jenna saw them.

Tall and graceful, lithe like dancers, sleek and silent and dark.

They stood on the far side of the parking lot in the long shadows of a tall hedge of shaped ficus trees, staring right back at her from beautiful faces with detached expressions and very sharp eyes. All three were dressed in black clothing, obviously expensive, fitted and formal and distinctly out of place in the bludgeoning summer heat. There was nothing but grace and loveliness about them, nothing to suggest danger, but her skin crawled with bone-deep fear.

Because even from here she saw it. For all their elegance, there was something very wrong.

It could be seen in the planes and angles of their faces, in the slanted set of their eyes, in the cold red curve of their unsmiling lips. Their posture, the lines of their bodies, even their faces were perfect but—odd. Carved and otherworldly, almost elfin. They were beautiful in the way that certain predatory animals are beautiful.

And just as devoid of humanity behind the eyes.

One stood apart, slightly ahead of the others. Like his companions he had ebony hair, honey-bronze skin, feral, flashing eyes. But he was larger, broad-shouldered and substantial, forbidding even with all that perfect symmetry of bone structure, that jawline that seemed sharpened on a diamond cutter’s lathe. Something about the mouth: sensual but hard, so hard it seemed he hadn’t smiled in years. Or ever.

Their eyes met, and it gave her a jolt like lightning to her toes.

Who
, she thought, and then,
what?
Her mind struggled to keep up with the adrenaline that flooded her veins. Her limbs lifted into sudden power and buoyancy, her nerves
screamed
RUN!,
but she could only stare at him across the distance of the parking lot, into eyes beast-bright and wondering, luteous green. He stared right back at her with a gaze so intense and burning she thought he might ignite her with it.

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.

“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?”