She looked at him as if he were a stranger.

As if he were an enemy.

He longed to reach out to her, find her hand under the layers of cashmere, gather her into his arms, slide his hands into the cool weight of her hair. But he knew she would only recoil, so he remained in the chair, an unhappy clench in his stomach.

“If you can make the Shift to vapor, you’ll be able to Shift to panther as well,” he said. “It’s what we are. It’s what you are.”

This time she didn’t even blink. Her eyes were clear and dark and fathomless. Her gaze flickered down to his lips, then she turned her head away again, raised her chin, and gifted him with her profile.

“A panther,” she said, without inflection.

“Yes.”

A slight pause, then—“A cat.”

“Technically, yes. A cat.”

A little huff of air escaped her lips, which could have been either amusement or disdain. She watched the heat of the day bend the air into shimmering waves over the rooftops of the city beyond the windows and her nose delicately wrinkled, as if she smelled something bad.

“Wonderful. What else?”

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.

“Is there anything else you want to ask me, Jenna?” He waited patiently for her to respond.

He waited for a very, very long time.

Jenna stared out the bright windows. She listened to the faint hiss of traffic on the streets below, caught the scent of heat-baked stone and wilting roses rising up from the rose garden, tasted the ashes of her former life in her mouth. She stared out at everything, but saw nothing at all.

Her mother had warned her something was coming. And now it was here.

The sensation of her corporeal body dissolving into mist was the most exhilarating—and frightening—thing she had ever experienced. Cushioned on an updraft of heated air, her back flattened against the cool plaster of the ceiling, she saw and heard everything as before, yet it was all amplified a thousandfold. As vapor she was free as a ghost to move over and through anything she wished, she had only to will it and she could drift in any direction.

A song of joy pierced her straight through as she realized her body was gone. All the cumbersome heft of muscle and bone disappeared, the pull of gravity evaporated completely, leaving nothing but lovely and weightless air. It was like coming home to paradise after being imprisoned in a dark cell for the whole of eternity.

She thought she might die from the sheer bliss of release.

It wasn’t the first time, of course. It had been happening in fits and starts since she was ten years old, since the day her father disappeared. Her mother had told her he’d never be back, and she’d shut herself in her bedroom and simply disintegrated into nothingness. It was just for a moment, and she half-believed she imagined it, but then it happened again, and again, and always when she was angry or somehow out of control.

It was the main reason she never had a long-term relationship with a man. Once her emotions got involved, once she let go of her vigilant control, it was all over. It hadn’t happened at all in years now—she’d been much too careful.

But this was entirely different, this Shift. It felt like a million fevered dreams of release, it felt like home. She would have gladly left the world behind and stayed as vapor forever.

It was only his voice calling her from below that brought her back from the beautiful edge of oblivion. There was a weight underscoring the velvet tone of it that pulled her back down to earth like ballast. It was as if he was in command of her will, as if the mere sound of his voice could affect her so deeply she would turn away from anything to obey it, even the sweetest pleasure she had ever known.