Page 76 of Shadow's Edge (Night Prowler 1)
She’d been winded by al
l the dancing, taking turns with her husband and a flushed, distracted Christian and many other men of the tribe—friends and relations both—and had gone out to the rose garden for a breath of fresh air. She was alone for only a moment, leaning against a flowering trellis of jasmine, gazing up at the stars.
She was distracted, undeniably, with the news that had spread like buckshot through the gathered gentry that Jenna’s Shift had been confirmed, in front of the Assembly, that Leander himself had made her do it—with a kiss, no less—then they both had disappeared.
To discuss things further, most likely.
She smiled, gazing up at the stars, thinking of a match between the two of them. For all his independent ways, she knew her brother longed for a partner who could love him, who would stand up to him and stand by him and challenge him to be his best. And Jenna seemed perfectly suited to that task. Perhaps she could even persuade him to allow the women of the colony a more active role in the decisions that affected their lives.
A cluster of stars in Virgo blinked down at her, millions of light-years away, winking with dreams and promise.
And then the hands closed hard around her mouth.
They were calloused and rough and covered in something tacky and viscous, like pine resin. There was a blinding stab of pain in the back of her head that sent scarlet and orange fireflies exploding behind her closed lids. A wave of intense dizziness hit her, followed very quickly by a rising swell of blackness, then nothing at all.
Until she had awoken to the fact of her limbs bound, her skin bruised and cut, her body lying atop a filthy, stinking blanket in the black prison of the trunk. The low, melancholy hum of spinning tires and the road rolling away beneath her sang a song of good-bye. She was being taken far from her home, far from any hope of rescue.
There would be no escape from them, she knew. She was smaller and shackled and weak with injury. She couldn’t Shift. She bit her lip to hold back a sob and prayed she would be strong enough not to talk.
Though they would surely have gruesome ways of trying to make her.
Daria’s heart began a painful throb within her chest as the car slowed, then stopped. She heard doors opening and closing, the crunch of boots on gravel, low, masculine voices muttering something she couldn’t make out. A burst of cold air hit her naked skin as the lid of the trunk popped open.
She screamed against the gag as two pairs of big hands closed around her wrists and ankles and hauled her from the trunk.
Leander hadn’t anticipated Jenna’s reaction to seeing her father’s grave. He couldn’t have. Everything he knew of her until this moment was of a woman so strong and defiant you couldn’t even tell her the time without garnering a swift contradiction.
Yet at the sight of the flat stone carved with her father’s name, she crumpled to the ground like a discarded tissue and began to weep, great wracking sobs that shook her whole body as she knelt, her hair spread wet and thick over her shoulders and back like a dripping funeral shroud, her knees and fingers sunk deep into the sodden grass.
“Why?” she said in an agonized, hoarse whisper to the headstone. Her voice was nearly swallowed by the boom of thunder in the sky. “Why did you leave me?”
Leander knelt next to her and put a gentle hand on her shoulder, but she knocked it away, leaving a smear of mud on his wrist, dark splatters across his chest. She turned to him with wild eyes.
“You could have helped him!” she hissed, her face deathly white. She rocked back to her heels, her teeth bared, hot tears and cold rain streaming down her cheeks, mingling together to drip from the curve of her jaw. “You could have stopped it!”
He felt the animal in her, coiled just beneath the surface, a dark and deadly creature awakened by rage, ready to claw its way out.
“No,” he said, careful and low.
He didn’t move, he didn’t look away, though the icy rain and the freezing air bit at his naked skin until it was painful. His fingers and toes were numb with cold, but he kept them where they were, sunk into the long grass and mud. He kept his breathing even and his face neutral. He didn’t want to make any sudden moves that would push her over the edge.
If she Shifted to panther now, he was sure she would attack him without hesitation.
In their animal form, the Ikati were primal and dangerous, prone to sudden bursts of violence. Their human mind, every aspect of their human heart, was engulfed by this primal side. They retained the ability to reason, they retained their memory and core personality, but they became highly unpredictable, often lethally so.
In her panther form, with the amount of anger in her eyes at this moment, Jenna was fully capable of killing him, and quite easily. She would be full of fresh power, her emotions would be raw and overwhelming, her instinct to lash out at the source of her pain would be overpowering.
He held himself at the brink of the turn, blood rising, muscle and sinew humming with the effort of holding his human form while every nerve in his body screamed danger!
“I was not the Alpha then, Jenna. I was hardly more than a child.”
A crack of lightning lit up the sky overhead in a brilliant blaze of white. It was followed by more thunder, then the rain, impossibly, seemed to increase. They were both drenched, and he knew she had to be freezing, exposed as she was with only her mass of hair to shield her from the elements.
But Jenna didn’t move from her crouch. She ignored the rain and the thunder and the lightning and only stared at his face with an expression that hurt him so much it felt like his heart had been pierced by the tip of a dagger.
Hatred. She glared at him with unveiled, unmitigated hatred.
“I don’t believe you.” It was nearly a growl, the snarl of an animal.
