Shadow’s Edge

The Smoking Man leaned in, waiting. He spoke, a sibilant hiss, and she almost couldn’t hear him over the noise in her head.

“Yes? What is it, my helpless little pussycat? Tell me what you think.”

She opened her mouth again and he leaned even closer, so close she saw the tiny red blood vessels snaking through the whites of his eyeballs. He hadn’t shaved recently, he had a bit of meat from his last meal caught between his front teeth, and he was in dire need of a bath. He leaned in even closer, reached out, and touched one long, clammy finger to the pulse at the base of her throat.

She looked him up and down through her lashes and smiled at him, sweetly, without a trace of guile.

“I think you’re even more stupid than ugly,” she whispered. “A bitch is a female dog.”

There was a suspended beat of silence before he registered it, before he stood up abruptly, dropped his cigarette on the floor, and kicked the chair over backward with his boot.

She felt a weary, thorough satisfaction that—finally!—his spidery smile had vanished. She began to drift, carried by a current of pain that flowed and tumbled and held her in its clutches, spiraling her down into the waiting blackness.

Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet. Eating her curds and whey. Along came a spider. And sat down beside her, And frightened Miss Muffet away...

“Give me the pliers,” he snarled with his hand out. Another man, still hovering just out of sight, jumped to comply.

Before he reached the tray of tools set out so neatly on the wooden desk across the room, Leander smashed through the door.

He flew into the room—a blur of black fur and outraged snarling and long, sharp teeth—and landed first on the Smoking Man. He sank his claws into his chest and his fangs into his throat and with one hard shake and a wet, tearing nose, snapped his head off. It went bouncing into a corner of the room.

Leander Shifted to vapor just as a knife went hissing by his head and landed with a thunk in the drywall behind him. The body of the Smoking Man slid to its knees, then collapsed on its side on the floor.

Leander turned and saw the lead door was demolished completely. Though reinforced with steel bars from both sides, his impact had sheared the bars in half and taken out huge chunks of the drywall and a portion of the ceiling with it. Two men stood in the ruined doorway, shouting something at him as he floated above the room in a roiling mass of white mist.

He saw Jenna like a broken china doll on the bed below him, naked and wounded and covered in ribbons of dark, slick blood. Her wide green eyes stared up at him from a face white as snow.

A blinding fury tore through him like a hurricane, and all he thought over and over was I will slaughter you all.

A shout from the back of the house and he knew a third man was coming. Leander didn’t wait for him to arrive before he Shifted back to panther and attacked.

Jenna, slipping in and out of consciousness, watched it unfold around her from her prison of chains on the blood-soaked bed. There was a bizarre, slow-motion quality to the action, almost amusing in its soundless, languid violence, like some video game gone horribly wrong.

There was the massive black panther flying across the room, its muscled forelegs reaching, stretching, long claws out, pointed fangs bared. It made a terrible roar that sounded like it traveled to her from under a body of water.

There were the silently screaming men, with their gaping mouths and bulging eyes, collapsing like paper dolls as he landed on them with the fury of his full, snarling weight. There was the faint, echoing snapping of bones like the crunching of dry leaves underfoot. There went a huge spray of crimson, arcing through the flickering light, splattering in a dripping long curve across the ceiling.

It’s almost pretty, she thought, gazing up calmly and with restful detachment at the streaks of blood and gore above her. It’s almost like...art. Performance art.

She couldn’t feel anything anymore, not her arms or her legs, not the pain, not even a trace of horror or alarm or anything resembling emotion. She cast about for a description for this lassitude and realized she simply felt...resigned.

That’s how she knew she was going to die.

And suddenly a third man was upon the sleek black form, slashing down with a blade that winked in the light. The man’s heart was torn out by a powerful pair of jaws that ate through his chest, ripped out the pumping organ, and tossed it aside. More spurting blood, more silent screams, the dagger still on a downward trajectory that abruptly ended as the panther turned back to a man—a very beautiful, naked man—and the blade sank into his chest.

He stumbled back. The heartless man crumpled to the floor. Everything fell still.

She thought she must be very close to death now because her father was here again, sitting in the chair by the wooden desk, gazing at her somberly. He looked as if he wanted to tell her something, as if he was just about to open his mouth and speak, but the panther had turned back to a man, a very beautiful, naked man, and was leaning down beside the bed, blocking out everything else in the room with the shape of his golden, muscled body.

“Stay with me, Jenna!” he shouted, snapping the chains that linked her handcuffed wrists to the bedposts. There was a wound on his chest, a long smear of blood beneath it. Two more snaps and he’d freed her legs. “Stay with me!”

She tried to tell him it was all right, she was going somewhere else now, somewhere she could see her father again and there wouldn’t be any pain or any confusion or any more secrets or lies or running away—or spiders—but all that came from her lips was a sigh.

She gazed up at him, at his trailing dark hair sliding over his shoulders and glorious face and his panicked, pleading eyes. He was shouting something else, his lips moving in slow motion, but she couldn’t hear anything, and she thought maybe it didn’t matter anyway.

Only one thing mattered. She wished she had the strength to say it out loud.

I love you, she thought, falling, floating, feeling the swirling black water rise up her chest, her neck, rushing over her chin and her cheeks and her nose, blocking out the sky and the moon and all the twinkling stars.

Leander, I love you.

She hoped he understood.

Then she closed her eyes and sank down into that dark river that had been waiting to claim her all along, hearing it echo over and over like a refrain, like a reverie, those three little words she just couldn’t find the strength to say.

I love you.

30

Jenna didn’t die.

Neither did she recover, not exactly. She lingered for over a week in a state of restless slumber, tossing in her bed. Only the occasional low moan broke her ominous, pallid silence.

Leander—who watched her day and night from the chair by the door or the settee at the end of the four- poster bed or pacing back and forth through the confines of her room—was in a matching state of arrested development. He couldn’t grieve, he couldn’t rejoice. She was here but she was not, and the doctor couldn’t tell him much of anything useful.

“She’s strong, Leander. But she’s had a bad time of it. Her mind and body both need time to heal. Luckily she has no infection from her wounds. When she’s ready, she’ll awake.”

Luck. He didn’t believe in it. He put no stock in the word.

Courage. Valor. Stubborn, pigheaded bravery. These were words he valued, these were words that described this woman lying so still and deathly pale on the bed, her long flaxen hair lying in