Free Shadow's Edge by J. T. Geissinger Page B

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
tasted
it.”
    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, hystericalhand-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—
his
secret—and disappeared into the night like a ghost, before he could speak, before he could catch her.
    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 itwasn’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.