Page 8 of Edge of Oblivion (Night Prowler 2)
“She can try,” he relented, tilting his head to hers again. “And when she wakes up from that shock Weymouth gave her, maybe you can get her to Suggest to him that he put back on his pants.”
“He’s lucky. If I had her Gift and he’d shocked me with that thing, he’d be naked and lying in a pool of his own blood.” Jenna sighed, leaning into Leander, pressing her lips to his again. “Shall we retire to the bedroom, my love?” she murmured, fingering the knot of his silk tie. “I find myself in need of...a change of clothes.”
3
The assassin stood gazing out the same tall expanse of Tudor windows in the East Library that Jenna had looked out the day before, watching the mass of black thunderclouds that hulked overhead, ominous and opaque. Rain sheeted down in a silver, sideways slant in the wind and smeared the view of the fields and misted forest beyond to plots of muted gray and brown and green. A flash of lightning forked through the clouds, brilliant white, and illuminated the hills and trees in spare, pagan lines before dissolving again to smoke and shadow. A low rumble of thunder shivered the glass.
The storm had broken just as he’d disembarked from the Earl of Sommerley’s private plane at Heathrow this morning and showed no signs of letting up. It reminded him of the monsoons that drenched his own colony in Brazil every summer. But this squall, vigorous and lusty as it was, seemed somehow less primal. More predictable. More...restrained.
Everything in this sophisticated, sprawling English colony was so restrained. The architecture, the people, the land—even the weather. Only their Law was the same, he mused. He’d seen the evidence of that in the medieval-looking device still standing in the great hall. It exuded an animal hunger all its own, just as the machines kept by his tribe did.
“I don’t follow,” he said to the windows. “If you know where they are, why not send a garrison? Why not send a full force to wipe them out?”
“We don’t know exactly where they are. And until we do, we can’t mount a direct assault. We can’t risk the exposure or the manpower. Most of our forces are readying the tribe for the move to Manaus. And since they know about all the colonies except yours, moving the tribe to safety is our first priority. Once everyone is settled we can focus on strategy, but in the meantime we can’t just strike out blindly. We need more information.”
Leander’s tone was just tight enough to reveal his irritation. Xander had known the earl for decades and knew how he hated questions, hated explanations. Which meant that in addition to needing information, Leander needed him.
“More information.” Xander turned from the window and looked at Leander with one eyebrow cocked.
Kill first, ask questions later—that was his own motto, and it had served him well. But this man who reclined so casually against the back of his elaborate chair in his elaborate drawing room within his even more elaborate manor house couldn’t live by the simple creed of an assassin. He was Alpha, which meant careful decisions, careful questions, careful plans.
Politics. He loathed it. Thank God the role of Alpha of Manaus had gone to his half brother.
“Yes,” said Leander, gazing at him now with unveiled irritation in his sharp green eyes. He shifted in the chair, restless, and something in his expression suggested he had his own, unspoken problems with this plan. “Exact location, exact numbers. How they live. What, exactly, they know about us.”
Xander studied him, wondering what he was missing. “If you’re looking for that kind of information, you don’t need an assassin. You need an infiltrator. A mole.”
“As it happens, we need both.”
Apparently no longer content to sit, Leander rose from his chair and moved to an elegant sideboard of polished cherry that displayed a variety of cut crystal bottles filled with amber and gold and clear liquids, set out on a silver tray. Xander watched in mild surprise as his host poured a generous measure of scotch into a glass, threw back his head, and quaffed it in one swallow.
According to the long case clock in the corner, it was barely past noon. The vague feeling of something being off solidified into surety.
“Both?” he prompted when Leander didn’t continue.
There was silence in the room for several moments, unbroken except for the thrum of rainfall against the windows and the ticking of the clock. Then Leander spoke, low, to the empty glass in his hand.
“Have you ever been in love, Alexander?”
The assassin, trained from childhood to act and not to feel, was caught completely off guard.
Against his will the fleeting image of a pair of chocolate-brown eyes, liquid dark and smiling, flared in his memory. He blinked and the image vanished, leaving behind a ghost of dull pain that throbbed and mewled in his chest before he ruthlessly smothered it.
“No,” he answered flatly.
“Neither had I, until recently,” he went on, still low, still to his empty glass. Xander knew he spoke of his new wife. The Diamond Queen, they called her; just as beautiful, just as rare. She was famous in all four Ikati colonies, as famous for her Gifts and charm as she was for her past and her parentage.
The only freeborn Ikati, daughter of an outlaw Alpha and his fated, forbidden love.
A human, of all things. The enemy.
“It’s more powerful than I ever would have guessed,” Leander mused, almost to himself.
“Elemental. Transformative. And painful.” He gave a soft, humorless laugh. “Like fire.”
“Like death,” Xander rejoined, still in that flat, emotionless tone.
This conversation was headed down a very dark path, a dangerous path, one he didn’t care to follow. Love was an element, he knew too well, as cruel and violent as hurricanes or tornadoes or floods. Even speaking about it invited disaster.
