Free Edge of Oblivion by J. T. Geissinger Page A

from the window of her second-
    story bedroom. She heard the fir trees humming with sap, she tasted rain days ahead, she felt the earth turn beneath her feet. All of nature came into brilliant, perfect focus, and she was at the very center of it all, a locus of awareness.
    Then, on the morning of her fifteenth birthday, she finally Shifted to panther and discovered that in addition to strength and agility and sharpened senses, she could run so
very
fast.
    She knew that even with the collar she’d still have that lightning speed. And there was no chance in hell Mr. Rules and Regulations would Shift to pursue her, because the Law expressly forbade them from Shifting in front of humans.
    He’d have to follow her on foot.
    She sailed through the warm evening air, suspended for a breathless moment—heart pounding, arms spread wide, hair snapping in a long, dark flag behind her—and landed on a patch of grass just feet from a stone bench where two lovers were locked in a passionate embrace. They broke apart with gasps and began to exclaim in startled Italian, but she ignored them and concentrated instead on regaining her equilibrium. The ground was hard and the jolt hurt like hell, but she knew no bones would be broken. A fifteen-story free fall really wasn’t all that bad; she’d once fallen twice as far from the top of an ancient, towering fir in the New Forest at Sommerley and barely been bruised.
    Breathing heavily, still crouched on the ground, she looked over her shoulder and craned her neck to where she’d just been to see if he’d followed.
    But he hadn’t. He stared down, a small figure in black awash in gold lights, alone at the top of the Colosseum, watching her with those canny amber eyes. Feeling strong and alive and
free
, she blew him a kiss, then took off at a run.

9
    From the uppermost arcade wall, Xander watched as Morgan, in a truly astonishing display of impudence, lifted her hand to her face, puckered her red, generous lips, and blew him a kiss.
    In spite of himself, he huffed a short, disbelieving laugh. He was
Ira de Deus
. Famed, feared assassin. Bringer of death.
    No one—
no one
—had ever treated him with such disrespect.
    His regard for her grew in exact proportion to his outrage. He’d never met anyone who’d dared take such liberties as this. She was cocky and defiant, definitely reckless, and seemed to care not a damn about his reputation or the very real and imminent possibility he would be the one to end her life.
    She was...fearless. He’d never met anyone like her.
    For a brief, deranged moment as he watched her rise from her crouch on the grass and sprint off barefoot across the boulevard, traffic screeching to a halt in both directions as she passed, he was held fixed by surprise and admiration and simply watched her run. She bounded graceful and fleet like a Thomson’s gazelle through the snarl of cars and taxis and Vespas, even clearing the hood of a red Fiat that didn’t stop in time in one graceful, long-legged leap.
    His hand lifted automatically to the Ba Gua Zhang crescent moon knives sheathed in a slim leather scabbard at the small of his back, hidden inside his belt. Gifted to him by his capoeira master when he was just a boy, they were fifteenth-century throwing knives, folding and perfectly weighted, in pristine condition though frequently used.
    He hesitated, then dropped his hand. Had it been anyone else, there would have been a blade protruding between those swiftly retreating shoulders by now. Deserters were a dire threat to the tribe, and he’d caught—or killed—every one he’d been sent to look for.
    But it isn’t anyone else.
The thought rose, errant, to needle him.
It’s her.
    Without bothering to examine exactly what that meant, he lifted his gaze to the sky and saw the twinkling stars, the fat, perfect pearl of the rising moon. Then he closed his eyes and let it rise to a burning peak within him, the writhing bright power of the Shift, ever there just