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widened enough to be seen by the naked eye.
    It was watching her sleep that proved difficult.
    She slept with the innocent abandon of a child. Breathing deeply, body slanted across the middle of the queen-sized bed, arms flung wide, hair spilling silken, honeyed gold over the pillows. Moonlight burned white fire over the slope of her throat and bare shoulders.
    He watched from the corner of the dark bedroom as her chest slowly rose and fell, her nude body outlined beneath the sheets.
    He’d been through her apartment, trying to find clues. Trying to find anything that would lead him to believe she possessed any of the powers of their kind.
    So far, he’d found nothing.
    She loved art and music, loved to read, this was plain from the things she kept. Her books, her eclectic CDcollection, the ticket stubs to the Molière exhibition at the Getty Museum. Paystubs from a French restaurant, unopened mail stacked neatly in a wicker basket by the kitchen phone, takeout menus in a drawer.
    There was no sign of a lover, no photos of friends, no indication she was close to anyone at all. Her photo album contained only old pictures of her mother, of herself as a child, mementos of places she’d visited, postcards.
    Her orderly and sterile apartment illustrated the life of someone utterly alone.
    He’d had no thought of coming here when he Shifted, had no destination in mind as he allowed himself to be caught in the updraft of heated night air that lifted him from his veranda at the Four Seasons. The lights and noise of the city grew distant as he melded into the atmosphere, rolling and spinning through thin sapphire clouds, free upon the wind.
    He knew her name, he knew her address. He had a picture, though it was a few years outdated and slightly blurry.
    But he didn’t know
her
, this creature of gilt and satin and feminine curves, skin like roses and cream and sunlight on water where the rest of his kind were dark, with hair as dark as the forest floor at midnight, skin tones of café au lait and buttered rum.
    He didn’t know that the force of his desire would make him sink to his knees, crouching naked in the dark with his heart in his throat and the scent of her flaming hot in his nose.
    He hadn’t expected this.
    His eyes drank her in and he wondered that she possessed the Gift of beauty all the
Ikati
shared. She was half human, after all, an inferior race evolved from mud, proneto violence, greed, and all manner of disease. He’d never found a single one of them attractive.
    But her father had. He’d done the unthinkable and
mated
with a human.
    He’d also exacted a promise from his successor that his half-Blood offspring would not be brought back to Sommerley to live a life of confinement until the time of her first Shift as the Law decreed for the circumstance. She would be allowed to grow and live as a creature free from the shackles of protection, duty, and constraint that defined life within the colony.
    And for a female, there was more constraint than some could bear.
    They’d had deserters in their history as well. Those were dealt with as swiftly and mercilessly as the colony dealt with any other threat.
    He watched her until the muscles in his thighs began to ache with inactivity, then stood and walked silently over to her bedside. In human form, he was as silent as a cat. He saw through the darkness as if it were high noon, he retained all the heightened senses of his animal side.
    Normally this was a blessing. Now...it was closer to torture.
    A book lay on her bedside table. He flipped it open with one finger, read a single paragraph.
     
    Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself
.
     
    Leander’s lips