Page 4 of Shadow's Edge (Night Prowler 1)
“It’s her,” Leander said with a calm that hid the way his heart was pounding in his chest. “I know that’s her.”
From the moment he’d laid eyes on her, he’d known. And not only by the Eyes, by her scent as well. She smelled of youth and power and heated woman, and something else indefinable, lovely and dark and deep, particular to their kind. It was a sensual mix of forest floor, herbs and rain, fresh air and musk and moonlight.
Leander’s senses were unmatched. It was one of his Gifts, though not by any means the most powerful one. He’d spent much of his life trying to manage the assault of smells, noises, sensations, and vibrations that emanated from everywhere around him. He’d long ago learned to shut out much of the chaos, to filter how much he absorbed, but he’d opened his senses fully to take her in and now had the taste of her skin lingering on his tongue like afterglow. Every nerve ending in his body felt her. Every pore was filled with her. He was almost dizzy with desire.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” came another voice, this one female, from Leander’s other side. A dramatic sigh followed, then the sound of leather boots scraping across hot asphalt with the annoyed shifting of her weight. Without looking, Leander knew the boots were Italian, designer, and absurdly expensive. “That’s her? The wilting flower? The deer-in-the-headlights Snow White?”
“Morgan,” Christian said quietly, just the one word. Leander didn’t have to see it to feel the look of warning Christian shot at her behind his back. He allowed the smallest of smiles to curl his full lips.
As Alpha, Leander enjoyed not only the elevated rank and accompanying status among his colony but was also afforded the respect of someone with his very rare, very powerful Gifts—Gifts that the girl now being helped up from the floor of the supermarket by a huge, sweating ape of a man possibly had as well.
Not that she knew it. Not yet.
But they were here to find out if she did. If so, she would be brought back to Sommerley to take up her rightful place in the colony. If not—
But Leander didn’t want to think about what would happen if she showed no sign of the Gifts. Not after he’d felt her, not after he’d seen her.
Though they were all beautiful, even the least Gifted of their kind, she was something else altogether. An exotic sylph with elegance and strength and solid luster, all feminine curves and opalescent skin and a surfeit of raw power simmering beneath. He felt the fine, humming force of her all the way across the parking lot, like a hand caressing his skin.
“What now?” Morgan asked, her tone a tad more civilized, though he sensed her irritation like an angry bee under his skin.
Leander reluctantly turned his eyes away from the girl and met Morgan’s level, impatient gaze. Her outfit was so tight it followed every curve of her figure like a second skin—just as she wanted it to, he knew.
She was nothing if not provocative.
“Now we wait,” Leander replied evenly. “There’s only a week to go. Now that we’ve found her, we lie back. And we wait.”
“And what are we supposed to do in the meantime?” Morgan complained, one hand on her slender, leather-clad hip. “Babysit her? Make sure she doesn’t trip over a rock and bash her head in? She appears to have the tendency to faint dead away for no particular reason.”
She shot a resentful gaze at the doors of the supermarket, where a half dozen men had surrounded the now-standing Jenna to offer assistance. Several more people were running past the doors toward something he couldn’t see within the store. Maybe something that had to do with the shriek of grinding metal he’d heard moments before, just before the girl appeared in the entry.
“We go back to the hotel and relax. I can track her now that I’ve got her scent. We’ll have our answer in a week.”
Morgan blew glossy black bangs off her forehead with a sharp puff of breath and slanted him a look with her eyes, which were dark and frozen emerald green.
Leander turned away. He didn’t want to argue. He didn’t want to talk.
He just wanted to look at her.
When the subject of a reconnaissance mission was forwarded by the Assembly, Leander hadn’t been pleased. He hadn’t understood her importance, had thought it all a great bit of folly, time and energy wasted that could be better spent elsewhere.
The colony had more pressing business to attend to, of late.
“Of what interest is she to us?” he argued, standing before the sixteen men and one woman of the Assembly, his jaw set, his hands spread wide.
The East Library, where the Assembly regularly met, was filled with fractured, golden sunlight reflected from the crystal chandelier overhead. The room had a magnificent gilded ceiling and a seventeenth-century marble fireplace, a spectacular view of the river Avon snaking through the New Forest beyond, and was normally Leander’s favorite place at Sommerley. It was a place where he could hide from the world and think.
When the Assembly was not in session, that is.
“A half-Blood whose father was executed for treason?” Leander added. He shook his head in frustration. “She’s hardly worth a second glance. The probability she has any Gift is beyond remote. She’s displayed none of the s
igns—”
“She has the Eyes,” came the quiet response to his right from Edward, Viscount Weymouth. He reclined in a beige and ivory-striped silk Dupioni chair with his hands folded over his waistcoat. Spindly legs stretched out in front of him, round spectacles teetered on the end of a long, aquiline nose. “This has been confirmed by more than one scout,” he added.
Leander pursed his lips and considered him.
He was a trusted man, a man who kept a record of the ancestry of each member of the colony, a man who knew all their secrets and every facet of their history back to their ancient days of glory in the equatorial rainforests of Africa.
