He lifted her up against him—her knees crooked over his left arm, her head lolling against his right—and swept her out the back door of the restaurant to the middle of the wide, brick-paved patio. It was a deserted place, a safe place, cloaked in darkness, free from anything that could fall on them from above.
Amid the dark enclosure of the cypress and oak trees that encircled them like an open-air cathedral, the sky above them smoke and ebony-blue, Leander stood braced against the shaking, his legs open wide, his arms wrapped around her hard.
The boughs of the trees swayed and thrashed above while the eerie groans and creaks of the buildings around them—stressed to their foundations with the earth bucking like a creature alive—tightened his stomach into a fist.
If it weren’t for Jenna, lush and passive in his arms, he would have Shifted to panther, climbed the nearest tree, and roared down in fury at the insanity below.
Her face was very clear in the moonlight, pale and beautiful like something forged from marble, her long lashes a dark smudge against the satin perfection of her ivory cheek. He knew she hadn’t fainted, though her eyes were closed, her breathing shallow. He knew because she kept a hand pressed firm against his chest.
The heat of her palm burned straight through the fabric of his shirt.
He didn’t know if she was seeking reassurance in the steady beat of his heart, or trying to keep him from getting any closer. Could she sense how he longed to touch his lips to her forehead, her hair, her cheek?
He very badly wanted to kiss her, anywhere, everywhere, even as the ground under his feet went mad.
When the shaking stopped and the world settled into a more reasoned lucidity, Jenna opened her eyes and stared straight up at him, beseeching. The electronic clamor of hundreds of sounding car alarms rose into the night air above the city to create a ghostly requiem for the quake. It was underscored by the rising shouts of panic and shock from the restaurant behind them.
“I felt it coming,” she whispered up at him, her voice thin and frightened. Her hand curled around the front of his shirt. “I felt it in my bones. I smelled it. I
It was then Leander realized the Assembly had their answer.
So did he.
He set her gently down on a chaise lounge with a whispered reassurance and left her, briefly, to use the phone inside. A mild pandemonium had broken out inside the restaurant, which Geoffrey was doing little to assuage, being too busy with his alternating fits of screaming, hysterical hand-waving, and hyperventilating. The paramedics arrived within minutes and took control. At his insistence, Jenna was one of the first to receive their attention, but they found nothing wrong with her. Though shaken, she was fit, unhurt, perfectly sound. They advised her to go home and get some sleep, and then they turned their attention to the others.
She pushed away from him when he came back to her, looked at him as if she suddenly knew some terrible secret—
She was wicked fast. She could run even faster than he, though he was stronger, faster than anyone in all the colonies. Faster than any other predator on earth.
Except, evidently, her.
He hadn’t been prepared for that either.
When he lost her trail around the dark corner of the bank building at Second Street, when all he could smell when he opened his senses was the vanishing trace of her perfume diffused through the heated, salt-laden air like a memory of something almost forgotten, he very nearly lost his mind.
Her apartment was the only place he could think to go—the only logical place to wait for her, though he kept carefully out of sight. He shed his clothes behind a stinking Dumpster in the back alley as he Shifted, discarding the handmade Italian suit as if it were offal, then rose as a fine mist to settle against the rough stucco wall of her apartment building.
He hovered there for hours in the warm evening air, spread so thin it was uncomfortable, knowing one strong gust of wind could tear him clean apart. He was thankful it wasn’t below freezing; there wouldn’t even be any bones left if he died like this.
The night was arid, the heated air so much drier than in England, even at the edge of the sea. He didn’t need to breathe—spread sheer and disembodied like smoke—or feel his heart beating like a drum or suffer the scorching of his blood through his veins. The sensations and burning passions of his body had disappeared. It was peaceful. Restful.
If only he could shut off his mind too.
He imagined her lost, injured, attacked by drug addicts, rapists, gang members. The longer he waited, the worse his fantasies became. For the first time in his life, he cursed himself. If he had the Gift of Foresight, he would know where to look. He could protect her.
He could
She finally came stumbling through the silent, early hours of the morning with the look of a zombie raised from the dead: disheveled and shuffling, gray-faced, wide-eyed, stiff. The elegant lines of her dress were creased and thrown out of kilter, as if she’d slept in her car or fallen down. Repeatedly.
This did little to alleviate his anxiety.
He slid down the uneven wall of the old apartment building, molecule by molecule, flowing softly over cracks and bumps, past dark window panes, melting silently through the climbing ivy and flowering hibiscus until he found her bedroom window.
He settled as a gray plume of mist against the sill and waited.
Jenna came into sight through the dim corridor from the kitchen like a ghost materializing through the night, moving so slowly she seemed drugged, hands lifted slightly out in front of her as if she didn’t trust her eyes to lead the way. She didn’t turn on any lights. She stood in the doorway to her bedroom with one hand on the doorjamb, just looking around. She stared silently at her bed, the small desk in the corner with its lamp and photo frame, her closet door half-opened, the shoes she’d pulled out and decided not to wear earlier still lying on the carpet at the foot of the bed.
She finally passed a shaking hand over her face, smoothed her hair, and reached behind her neck to unzip her dress.
Leander sank from the windowsill and floated above the bed of mint outside her bedroom window, the fragrant, velvet leaves brushing against him, ruffling his edges. He allowed her the privacy of undressing and climbing into bed without his gaze on her, though it was all he could do to resist breaking down her door, taking her back to Sommerley right then, forcing her to return with him to the place he now knew was her rightful home.
She looked so lost. So frightened. So...vulnerable.
The need to protect her lashed at him, sudden and insistent. Unmerciful.
It had been done before. There were safeguards in place for these situations, defenses that would keep her bound, provisions in the Law. He could take her back, keep her there, make her safe.
Against the demand of every nerve in his body, he restrained himself, and waited.
Once inside her apartment through the now-familiar crack in the bathroom window, he Shifted to man and watched over her as she slept to make sure she was unhurt, watched for any sign of distress, watched to see if she would need him.
Arms akimbo, hair splayed wild over the pillow, she slept, restless and moaning, tossing the sheets like a drowning swimmer fighting the vast, relentless sea.
It was only when she finally began to stir from her haunted sleep, late in the morning as the sun slanted saffron and gold through the windows, he’d been able to leave her and return to the hotel.
“So it’s true, then,” said Christian, low. “The little stray can Shift. Who would have thought?”
From the sofa of the presidential suite, Christian watched Leander in the chair opposite with eyes that were unnaturally bright. He was tense and grim and there was something unusual in his voice, a hint of ragged emotion Leander had never seen him display before. Something about his whole demeanor set Leander’s nerves on edge, his instincts on high alert. Why would he care if Jenna could Shift or not?
“If she can sense an earthquake, smell the ghost of a decades-old fire in a glass of wine, and outrun
