Morgan would accompany them. She was the only woman who served in the Assembly, a concession hard-won and resented by the old guard, men who were unused to having their authority questioned, unaccustomed to a female usurping their age-old dogma of male superiority. But it had been put to a vote and she had been approved, by a threadbare margin of one.
Leander’s was the deciding vote.
Securing her place in the Assembly had been a battle. She’d sustained scars and nursed deep resentments for those who stood against her. But Leander suspected ambition and a shrewd acuity kept her quiet. In truth, her Gifts and intelligence made her worth ten of the men who’d opposed her.
Savagely cunning, an expert hunter, and completely lethal, Morgan possessed the rare Gift of Suggestion, which would make it easier for them to convince an unwilling half-Blood to return to Sommerley, if the need arose. It was also the reason she had ultimately been accepted into the Assembly.
She was also bloody high-maintenance. Leander had experienced firsthand her flair for dramatic displays of emotion, the fine-tuned and overly delicate sense of pride that made her so wary of any imagined insult. She was more prickly than a porcupine.
The plan to visit the half-Blood was implemented with a speed that hadn’t marked the Assembly’s decision making in years. The trio departed on a private plane on a course for Los Angeles that very night.
Fifteen hours and one too many scotches later, Leander stood on his balcony in the presidential suite at the Four Seasons Beverly Hills, looking over the city as twilight stained it hues of deepest indigo and violet.
As they had innumerable times since leaving Sommerley, his thoughts turned once again to Jenna.
She’d been followed in one way or another her whole life, though she was unaware of it. The Assembly had allowed her father’s sacrifice to ensure her freedom but not to erase her from their view completely. To ignore her would be simply unthinkable.
A scout had been assigned to watch her, to track her and report back to the Assembly on her progress. But over the years, as she grew from a child into a woman, Jenna showed no outward sign of the Gift other than the Eyes.
By puberty, when most other Shifters would have begun to exhibit the Gifts of their Blood—the strength, the agility, and the speed that made climbing a tree or clearing a fence a thing of ease, the heightened senses that allowed them to hear the whisper of air over the wings of the birds in the sky and the heartbeats of the little creatures that burrowed below the earth, to smell water from miles off and know if it was fresh or salt, still or running, lake or pond—Jenna had not.
And so, over time, they became convinced she never would.
The scouts were sent only once every few years now but never reported anything unusual. The possibility that she would Shift on her twenty-fifth birthday, the age when all half-Bloods first Shifted, was hardly a possibility at all.
But still, there was a chance...
Leander’s pulse quickened as a warm breeze stirred the sheer curtains of the open patio doors, the scent of baked stone and crushed flowers folded within its balmy caress. The pink marble veranda with its balustrades, cascading scarlet bougainvillea, and stone fountain lay quiet and open before him, an invitation to the night.
He raised his gaze to the darkening sky and felt the pulse within him.
The call of the Shift.
Night was when he felt it most strongly, though he, like all others of his kind, could Shift at will. But Leander had a Gift only the most powerful were blessed with. He could become more than just an animal, more than the lethal predator all his kin could become.
He could become vapor and blend without form into the very air itself.
He stepped out of his clothing, his jacket, his shirt, his fine wool trousers, letting them all fall to the warmed marble beneath his bare feet. He closed his eyes and let it rise within him, his heart hammering within his chest as the joy of the Shift took over.
It was like nothing else he’d ever felt, that final moment before disintegration, and nothing on earth compared to it. It was a cascade of sensation, a tremor that became an electric charge that became a weightlessness as his body disappeared. All human flesh was gone, all senses vanished but the silken feel of the air against him. He slipped through it, a fine spray of mist rising up, shimmering, shaping itself through his will and his mind, which remained, though his body did not.
Nothing else could make the turn with him. Not clothing or weapons or food; anything he wore or held in his hands would simply fall to the ground. It was a fact that had proved inconvenient on more than one occasion. But tonight he thought not of this, nor of the Assembly and their Law, nor of Christian and Morgan and the task set before him.
Tonight he thought only of freedom and let himself melt into the heated sanctuary of the indigo sky.
3
The champagne was doing little to alleviate her headache, though it was an exquisite 1996 Louis Roederer.
The subtle taste of almonds, hazelnuts, and white flowers glossed over her taste buds on the first sip, accompanied thereafter by the rounded, creamy attack of silken texture, akin to the sinful decadence of a buttery brioche. Scents of straw, citrus, light toast, and buttered corn hit the back of her nose and she almost groaned with pleasure.
It cost more than four hundred dollars a bottle.
It was a gift from her thrice-divorced neighbor, Mrs. Colfax. They were more than acquaintances but not exactly friends, since neither ever divulged anything resembling personal information to each other—which was precisely how they both preferred it. Jenna guessed Mrs. Colfax had her own closet full of rattling skeletons with which to contend.
She watched the lustrous, pale gold liquid effervesce within the elegant confines of the etched Waterford flute—another gift from Mrs. Colfax—and heaved a sigh of frustration.
What happened today was ominously disturbing, though she’d nearly convinced herself she’d imagined the entire episode. The bubble bath was helping, if only to relax the taut muscles in her back. It did nothing to ease the tension in her mind, however, or the lingering static on her skin.
A static that increased every time she let herself think about
Yet she couldn’t get him out of her mind. The stranger with the glossy fringe of ebony hair, the face of a Botticelli angel, the eyes of a hungry wolf.
Something about him seemed so familiar. Though it had been but a glance before she’d passed out, she felt something leap against her skin under the weight of his stare, as if an unknown beast strained sinew and muscle, hungry to surface.
In that moment their eyes met, she suddenly felt like...an animal, awakening.
Jenna stretched her legs out and curled her toes over the edge of the tub, took a deep breath, and closed her eyes, shutting out the candlelit bathroom with its mirrored vanity, marbled counter, and enclosed glass shower. She shook her head to dispel the memory of his face, burning bright as a new penny under her closed lids.
He was just another stranger on the street. The strange electric charge couldn’t possibly have come from him. Could she have suffered heat stroke? She chewed on her lower lip and considered it. The symptoms were the same: dizziness, pounding heart, clammy skin, fainting.
But she was never affected by the heat. She never got sick or fainted or felt dizzy. She’d never even had a cavity, for God’s sake!
So she did what she always did when confronted with something she couldn’t figure out: she put it out of her mind. She sank down farther into the warm, perfumed water and thought about where she was going to do her grocery shopping from now on.
