Shadow’s Edge

leaving her bare thigh exposed. Those were her fingers digging deep into the soft down coverlet as his lips moved over her collarbone, as he murmured words in a flowing language she didn’t understand. That was her hand stealing up to glide over his arm, his shoulder, touching the warm skin of his neck, sliding into his hair...

“Leander,” she protested, her voice caught between a whisper and a groan, already beginning to surrender herself to the flush of hot pleasure his hands brought, his lips brought. Her physical reaction to him was overwhelming: instinctual, pure, and primal. Another few seconds and her body would take control of the decision making. “Please, I can’t think—”

But he cut her off with a kiss, deep and hot, and rolled half over her body so she was melting down into the soft, welcoming luxury of the mattress.

He pulled back, panting. “Don’t think,” he said, husky. “Just feel.”

And then he kissed her again and she couldn’t help herself—she kissed him back.

Leander made a sound deep in his throat, a rumbling low growl, like an animal’s. He put his mouth against her ear and rasped out six words that made her heart clench into a fist.

“I want to be inside you.”

He slid his open palm down her bare thigh, curled his fingers over her hip, and rocked his pelvis against hers. She felt the length of his arousal, hard and insistent, and desire slammed into her with so much force she moaned. A hot, eager lust that demanded satisfaction swelled up in her and began to rage and burn.

He caught her wrist in one strong hand and lifted it over her head, pressing it down, captive, against the pillow. He lowered his head against the column of her neck and fastened his lips against her skin, licking, sucking, making her arch against him.

Then he bit her.

It wasn’t hard, nothing that would break the skin or leave a mark, but a native, untapped burst of energy flashed to life inside her under the fleeting sting of his bite. A blinding white current of feral awareness shot through her muscles and blood and nerves as if she were a pile of dry leaves touched by a torch and doused with accelerant...

...As if an animal sleeping just under her skin had awoken to barbarous, savage joy.

Jenna opened her eyes and stared hard at the ceiling and felt something dark within her gather into storm.

9

One moment she was velvet and fire and flexed tension in his arms, the next she dissolved completely into mist.

Leander supposed it shouldn’t have surprised him. He knew this was coming, after all. From the first moment he’d laid eyes on her, he’d sensed the latent power that simmered just beneath that ivory skin—he knew she would Shift, as surely as he knew his own name.

But it wasn’t only the suddenness of it that left him frozen, staring down at her empty dress still settling back against the bedcovers with a faint rustle of silk, the perfume of her skin still lingering in his nose.

It was the fact that she’d Shifted now—it was still days before her birthday.

In the entirety of a recorded history that stretched back nearly two thousand years before the appearance of Christ, Leander had never heard of a half-Blood making the turn before turning twenty-five.

It was an immutable, scientific fact. When fused with its human counterpart, Ikati Blood was diluted, warped, corrupted from the state of purity that allowed their specific genetic characteristics to flourish. The first Shift would generally occur anywhere between twelve and sixteen for an Ikati child, but for a half-Blood...

Twenty-five years to the minute from birth, and the Shift either happened or it did not.

If it did come, only a tiny percentage survived it.

And so there were unmarked graves near the outskirts of every Ikati colony where the bones of those lesser creatures were cast into the ground. The Law was clear: Shift or die.

But Jenna had made the Shift effortlessly and had done it early. Leander didn’t quite know what to make of the anomaly she was proving to be.

He looked up to the ceiling where she had spread out against the white plaster. She moved silently toward the chandelier in the center of the room, a fine plume of white mist that hovered and dipped and flowed, a curving ghost slinking through the air.

“Jenna,” he said, his breath still coming as a ragged pant from the pleasure of her lips under his, of her body so feminine and lush. “Come back.”

He watched as she gathered herself around the chandelier, moving over it, learning its edges and cool planes as she sifted through the shining drops of crystal. His gaze skipped to the veranda doors and his heart missed a beat. He’d left one of them cracked open.

He pushed off from the bed and went to stand under the chandelier.

“Please come down.” He stared up at her as she hovered above, the most beautiful phantom. “Just think it, down, and it will happen.” He watched her form and unform, ripple and flow and stretch out so thin he glimpsed the ceiling beyond.

She dropped down from the ceiling in an elegant column of ruffling white mist and Shifted to woman just under his nose. To a completely nude woman, save only for strands of that cascading mass of honeyed blonde hair, which covered a few inches of bare skin as it draped over her chest but left very little to the imagination.

His breath caught in his throat as he caught sight of the rise of her breasts beneath her hair. He took a step back and tried to look straight into her eyes.

Her eyes were wide as saucers, glowing green and yellow, staring at him with a combination of horror and flat-out elation.

“You’re all right,” he said. “Don’t move.”

He snatched the soft cashmere throw from the end of the bed, spread it open and wound it in a lush expanse of dove-hued softness around her body. She was trembling. He rubbed his palms up and down her arms to get her blood circulating and thought about baseball to distract himself from the straining ache of his erection, from thinking about what pleasures were hidden under that blanket, how just one yank would leave her entirely exposed—

“Leander,” she whispered. Her voice broke over his name.

“Yes.”

“I just—I just—”

He had to clear his throat before he could speak. “You just Shifted,” he said.

She looked into his face, a clear and concentrated look, her wide-set eyes gleaming phosphorous green from under extravagantly long lashes. A faint stain of color bloomed over her cheeks. It was like watching a lovely piece of marble flush to life.

“Shifted...”

His heart skipped a beat. Even in a haze of confusion she was so beautiful it made breathing difficult. “You’re a Shifter, Jenna. Ikati. Like your father. Like me,” he murmured, drawn into her eyes.

She blinked once, and her shaking slowly stopped. She released all the breath in her lungs in one long, quiet exhalation, and along with it all the tension in her limbs dissolved.

“Ikati,” she repeated, rolling her tongue over the unfamiliar word.

“It’s an ancient word from our motherland, it means you can manipulate your human form to become...something else. Something more.”

“More than human.” She stared without blinking so deeply into his eyes he felt as if every corner of his soul was exposed, as if he was a mystery, her mystery, that she was trying to divine. Her lips began to lift into a smile, but they paused, then turned down. She frowned.

She then regarded him with an eyebrow raised, that look of defiance he was beginning to recognize settling over her face, thinning her mouth into a firm, stubborn line.