Page 33 of Shadow's Edge (Night Prowler 1)
Leander leaned back in his chair and debated how much he should tell her. This air of bored civility might be the way she normally reacted under stress, or it could be the calm before the storm broke. He didn’t know her well enough to judge.
He hated that he didn’t know her well enough to judge.
“Not just any cat, Jenna, and certainly not the average domesticated house variety. You are a predator, and a lethal one at that. You’ll have the speed and agility all felines possess, but you’ll be far faster, far stronger.” He watched the light play over the contours of her face, watching carefully to see her reaction. To see any reaction. She gave none.
“You’ll be able to see clear as day through a night pitch black. You’ll be able to hear a whispered conversation half a mile away, smell a rainstorm a week out, and sense everything around you with perfect, unbroken clarity. You’ll be in tune with nature in a way no other creature on this planet can ever be.”
Through all of this, she remained a sphinx: beautiful and cold and unmoving.
His voice dropped to a murmur. “You’ll be able to feel the very heartbeat of the earth.”
That seemed to get through to her, barely. Her lips twitched and she inhaled deeply, then let out the breath silently through her nose.
“I assume you’ve known about some of these talents for years. You must have known you were different,” he continued, wondering what it must have been like for her to hide who she was, to try to act like the rest of the people around her, though she was so much more.
He pictured himself living a life among all those cow-witted humans and suppressed a shudder.
He leaned toward her in the chair and rested his elbows on his thighs. “But now that you’ve Shifted to vapor, they’ll be exponentially stronger. And once you Shift to panther, the surge of sensations will be almost overwhelming. In order to thrive, in order to survive,” he emphasized, “you must learn to regulate how much you let in.”
His eyes searched her face. Jenna sat mute, expressionless.
It was thoroughly unnerving.
“Also, every Shifter has talents individual to himself—or herself—which will vary in strength. You, for instance, can obviously read minds with a touch of your hand. Anything else you may be capable of will reveal itself to you when the time is right.”
“And you?” she said, barely audible.
Her hair glinted gold and honeyed blonde in the light, casting a warm gleam over the rose-cream clarity of her skin, lighting her features with a glow so bright it was almost incandescent. It did nothing to warm the ice in her eyes, however.
“I can Shift to vapor as well—”
“Can’t they all do that? All the Ikati?” she interrupted.
“No. Only a very few, only the most Gifted. Most of our kind are earthbound.”
“Could my father Shift to vapor?”
Among other things, he wanted to say. But that didn’t seem prudent. “Yes.”
She gave a little, satisfied nod, then turned her face away to gaze out the window once again. She crossed one leg over the other, sending a tiny whiff of the warm, wind-clean fragrance of her skin to his nose. He watched one slender bare foot begin to dance up and down.
The cashmere blanket covering her legs moved higher over one knee, rising up her unclad thigh, but she didn’t seem to notice. He gritted his teeth.
“Morgan? Christian?”
He didn’t particularly care for the sound of his brother’s name on her tongue. “Neither can Shift to vapor. Morgan has the power of Suggestion—”
“Suggestion?” she repeated, her voice rising an octave. Her head swiveled around sharply and she fixed him with a wide-eyed stare. “Like mind control?”
“Didn’t you see that when you touched me?” Leander said,
surprised.
He realized instantly it was a poor choice of words. She winced and closed her eyes for just longer than a blink. “I was too busy seeing everything else,” she muttered as she turned her head. All at once the unnatural poise and calm seemed to flow out of her like water down a drain, leaving only a pale shadow of barely concealed distaste flattening her lips.
She fell silent once again.
He forced himself to remain relaxed, willed himself to be calm, fought his instinct to pull her back into his arms. After long minutes of watching her breathe and gaze numbly into the heat-glazed horizon, he spoke.
