Page 41 of Shadow's Edge (Night Prowler 1)
Leander turned his attention to Viscount Weymouth. “Tell me,” he commanded.
“Outside the Quebec colony this time, frozen stiff in a lake just beginning to thaw. They think it may have been there since winter.” The viscount slid a French newspaper to him across the long table. A blurred photograph showed the naked body of a man being pulled from the lake by a team of local officials.
Like the first body discovered in March outside the Bhaktapur colony in Nepal, this one was headless. What he couldn’t tell from the picture was if it had been burned too.
Leander did a quick calculation. Two bodies in a few months, possibly even less depending if they could establish a time of death for this new one. Both found very near an Ikati colony, both headless.
It was the indelible calling card of their ancient enemy, the Expurgari. Torture the victim, burn him alive, cut off his head. What they did with the heads, none of the Ikati knew.
But if they had been discovered, why not more victims? Why not a direct attack?
“Has the body been identified?” Leander asked, pulling the paper toward him, almost dreading to touch it. He squinted at the picture and read the caption beneath: Body of missing activist found in frozen lake near Mt. Tremblant.
“Yes,” Viscount Weymouth replied, frayed nerves ringing in his voice. “It was Simon Bennett.”
Leander felt the blood drain away from his face.
Bennett was a vocal environmental activist, fighting for tougher laws on pollution, championing clean energy and a move toward more earth-friendly life-styles, working to bring man and animals and the planet in harmony with one another. Working to stop overpopulation, stop wasting natural resources, stop the destruction of their mother, planet Earth.
Working, very vocally and in the public eye, to stop the habitat encroachment on the local population of cougars, lynx, and jaguars. Panthers.
Like Viscount Weymouth, both men killed were Keepers of the Bloodlines.
Leander slowly looked around at the faces in the room, faces he had known his entire life, men he had grown up with or looked up to as a young boy, as the son of the Alpha. Men he had sworn to protect once he became the Alpha himself.
If the Expurgari had obtained any information from these men before they were killed, if they had tortured these men who knew every secret of their colonies, every member within it, every location of their kind throughout the world...
He now felt the same seed of fear he saw on the faces of all these men plant itself firmly into the soil of his heart, take root, and push up an evil, dark leaf.
“Guard the colony. Take every precaution. No one comes in, no one goes out. Edward,” he said, turning to look at the pale face of Viscount Weymouth, “convene a meeting of the Council of Alphas to take place immediately, here at Sommerley.”
He drew in a long breath that felt like acid scoring his lungs and spoke the words that acknowledged their fears, that would change all their lives from this moment forward.
“They’ve found us again. Prepare for war.”
Jenna awoke slowly in a soft square of sunlight that poured like honey through the dormered windows into her second-story room. Eyes still closed, she inhaled a deep, cleansing breath, the scent of morning and freshly laundered cotton soft in her nose. She languorously stretched her arms and legs beneath the smooth sheets, curling her toes, flexing her fingers.
So comfortable, this bed, so large and deliciously warm. So pillowed with down and fine linens, she felt as if she had slept on a cloud.
It was quiet in the neighborhood today. No noise from the boardwalk, no garbage trucks rumbling over the asphalt in the early morning hours, no muffled conversations overheard through the thin walls of her apartment. The only sounds were the sheets sliding over her naked skin as she rolled onto her back and the warbling of a lone so
ngbird, a pure note held high and trembling in the dewy, pink-tinged dawn.
The stillness was unbroken, idyllic, and very unusual...
A frown ruched her eyebrows. Was it a holiday? A Sunday? Why was everything so hushed?
Her eyes snapped open. A swath of shimmering fabric warmed by sunlight swam into focus overhead, saffron and apricot organza threaded with gold, folded and tied between four mahogany posts with heavy silk tassels.
Jenna bolted upright and stared around the room in a fog of confusion. She recognized nothing.
Walls painted coral and vanilla, overlaid in a delicate scroll of trompe l’oeil gardens, climbing ivy and jasmine in lavender and green. Furnishings at home in a palace: a French secretaire, a raw silk settee, hanging tapestries, carved wood chairs, and velvet pillows in disarray upon a divan. Soaring windows across the east wall coaxed in the early summer morning, suffusing everything with a flush of amber-pink radiance.
It took seconds of heart-stopping panic before her memory flowed back and she could breathe again.
England. Sommerley. Her room. Ikati.
Leander.
