Page 44 of Darkness Bound (Night Prowler 5)
“All right,” he said, satisfied. “Off we go.”
Humming “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” the viscount followed his valet out of the room.
The Sommerley colony in southern England was the largest of the five Ikati colonies spread over the globe, and by far the most opulent. The Alpha who originally settled it had been concerned only with secrecy and the safety of the few with him who’d escaped the deadly clutches of Caesar Augustus after Egypt fell to Rome, but successive generations of his offspring, emboldened over time by the hubris of those who’d outwitted death, proved particularly adept with money.
The tribe began to amass a fortune in textiles and trade.
Spices, incense, precious stones, ebony, silks, rare woods, gold . . . there were few things in which the tribe didn’t have a financial interest. By the mid-sixteenth century, they’d grown too wealthy and were comprised of too many to escape notice any longer.
The Crown itself took an interest in the secretive, dark-haired clan living like kings at the black ragged edge of the New Forest. Envoys were sent. Discussions were held. Calculated lies were presented.
Concessions to the visibility their success had brought were made.
Eventually, an earldom was granted, then a viscounty, then a barony, and the tribe that had so long tried to stay hidden found itself included in the ranks of the most visible and documented group in the civilized world: the British peerage.
So the English Ikati learned to hide even more effectively by hiding right under their enemies’ noses.
Except for the occasional shiver of fear that would tingle the spine if one looked too long into the vivid green eyes of these elegant imposters, nothing seemed amiss. No one was the wiser. Life proceeded smoothly.
Until one day it no longer did.
“Morocco,” Leander McLoughlin, current Earl of Normanton and Alpha of Sommerley, said, speaking to the beveled glass panes of the picture windows in the East Library of Sommerley Manor. He snapped the word as if it were sour, as if it tasted bitter on his tongue.
“Hmm,” agreed the woman seated in the plush comfort of an antique silk Hepplewhite chair behind him. Absently, she stroked her fingers over the downy pale fluff atop the head of the newborn she held swaddled in her arms.
Only sixteen weeks old, and so tiny. Like her twin sister, Honor, Hope was a solemn baby who rarely smiled, and even more rarely cried. The pair h
ad been born after a difficult pregnancy and a long, excruciating labor, and their somberness seemed to acknowledge the fact that they’d been brought into the world only after a great deal of pain.
Hope looked up at her mother now with a peaceful, even stare, so intent and far-reaching it was as if she saw straight through her into some other landscape. It was at moments like this the Queen felt with absolute certainty her children were creatures born not of her but through her, as if they’d existed somewhere else before, whole and infinitely intelligent, and her body had only been the portal to bring them forth into this plane of existence.
Jenna loved them with the voracious, violent adoration of a new mother. Into the darkest, smallest corner of her heart she shoved the unspeakable suspicion that her two daughters were something dangerous, the likes of which had never before been seen.
The night they’d been born, a red-tailed comet had scored the dark sky, vivid as a drop of blood. Jenna had witnessed such signs two other times in her life, and both had been harbingers of disaster.
Of death.
Stop being morbid, they’re only babies! She leaned down and placed a gentle kiss on Hope’s forehead.
Leander turned from the window. “You’re sure Caesar’s in Morocco?”
Jenna glanced up at him. Black hair that always looked windswept, even after it had been combed; a lean, taut body; the bearing and powerful presence of an emperor. And that snap of connection, every time their eyes met.
It never failed to surprise her, the way her heart took flight when he gazed at her. Still, after being married nearly five years, after two children, after everything. He could still make her pulse race with a mere look.
“He’s there. I can See it.”
It had been a mystery as to why it had fled in the first place, but as soon as she became pregnant, Jenna could no longer See. Her Gift connected her to all the Ikati across the globe. Like stars against the midnight sky, each one appeared to her as a separate, twinkling entity. Even the half-Bloods. The moment she’d gotten pregnant, however, her Sight had fled . . . and so had her ability to read minds with a touch of her hand. So had all her other Gifts. She couldn’t even Shift to panther anymore.
But the moment she’d given birth—voila. Like a switch had been turned back on. Unfortunately, the mind reading—the one Gift she needed the most—hadn’t yet returned.
“It’s too far, Jenna. It’s too dangerous.”
Leander’s voice had gone from bitter to forbidding. The way he looked at her was forbidding, too, all knife-blade eyes and thinned lips and smolder. Jenna had to press the smile from her mouth.
It wouldn’t do to let him think she was laughing at him. She wasn’t, but neither was she going to let her domineering, beloved husband dictate what she would or wouldn’t do.
She never had before. No reason to change now.
