by Alyssa Day
He was silent for several moments as they crossed the beach. Finally, he nodded to himself, as if reaching some internal decision.
“Then let us talk of unamusing things. Of vampires and shape-shifters. Of alliances and Atlanteans. It is now time for the Fae to assert our place in your world before there is no longer any possibility of so doing.”
He stopped walking and was somehow instantly standing in front of her, though she hadn’t seen him move. He stood tall and proud, with all the arrogance of his race and his house, and the quality of the light surrounding him changed, deepening and turning to liquid silver as it caressed his moon-silk hair and glittered in the depths of his eyes. The sea grasses whispered their secrets to each other and reached for him with their feathery fronds and even Grace, in spite of her own heritage, was tempted to bow before him.
He finally spoke, and his words held the weight of centuries and the solemnity of a vow. “I am Rhys na Garanwyn, and I offer treaty to Atlantis on behalf of the Seelie Court. I have chosen you, Grace, daughter of Diana, to convey this offer. We will meet on this beach at this very time, one week hence, with the chosen representative of the Seven Isles.”
Grace shrugged, which was probably not the response he’d been going for, what with the proclamations and all. “I’ll do my best, not that you asked me if I’d be willing to be your messenger girl. But Alexios and the other Atlanteans keep their own schedule.”
“Give them the message. They will come.” He bowed again and then he leaned closer to her and stared down into her eyes so intently she was afraid he was trying some super-major glamour or something. Before she could retreat, he caught her wrist in his hand and tightened his fingers until her skin burned with the contact. Then he abruptly straightened and released her arm. “You honor your brother with your actions for the cause of freedom, but your death would be the gravest of offenses to his memory.”
Ice pierced her chest, as if one of her own arrows had struck home into her heart. “What? How did you—”
But he was gone. Simply gone, as if he’d never been there at all. She rubbed her tingling wrist and absently glanced down at it, and then gasped. There on the inside of her left wrist, glowing in the moonlight, a silver arrow pierced the letter R. She furiously rubbed it with the sleeve of her sweatshirt, but the shining symbol didn’t fade or smear.
The Fae prince’s voice whispered in the sea-salt air. “A remembrance.”
Then even his voice was gone.
Alone again—always, always alone—Grace dropped to her knees in the sand. “As if I could ever forget, damn you,” she cried out to the empty night, the ache in her chest threatening to crack her rib cage wide open.
“As if I could ever, ever forget.”
Chapter 3
Yellowstone National Park and Wolf Sanctuary, the bank of the Firehole River
Alexios stood on the snow-covered ground, gazing out over the clear, moonlit waters of the rushing river, and took a deep breath of pure, unpolluted air. The bite of cold made him shiver a little, but he enjoyed the cold. Welcomed the ice and snow.
The opposite of fire.
“It’s always the water,” he said, almost to himself. “Nature at her most glorious.”
Of course his companion heard him. Wolf shifters had excellent hearing.
“Water is life,” Lucas replied in his surprisingly quiet voice. The wolf shifters he’d known before he’d met Lucas were more brawn than brain, more muscle than meditation. Yet Lucas continually clawed holes in that stereotype. “Life is beauty. Simple platitudes, perhaps, but still true.”
Alexios barked out a bitter laugh, automatically ducking his head so his hair swung forward to cover the scarred left side of his face. “I’m a warrior. What do I know of beauty?”
Unbidden, Grace’s face entered his mind. High, proud cheekbones. That glorious honey-gold skin. Masses of dark hair he’d only once—for an instant—seen unbound.
He’d lied.
He knew beauty. And he’d abandoned it. Her.
Lucas took a few paces closer to the water’s edge. “Great fishing in this river. The trout practically jump into your lap.”
“Do you use a fishing pole or just catch them in your teeth?”
It was Lucas’s turn to laugh. He turned his head to glance back at Alexios, his smile gleaming in the dark. “I’ve fished here both ways. I must admit it’s a little warmer with fur.”
Alexios didn’t doubt it. He’d seen Lucas in his wolf form. Three hundred pounds of thickly furred muscle and menacing fangs. Which reminded him.
“How’s Honey?”
Lucas’s dark face broke into a wide smile at the mention of his mate. “She’s huge. Nearly full term with our sons.”
“Congratulations, old friend. May the spirits of your ancestors grant Honey a safe delivery and bring you both two healthy boys.”
The smile faded from Lucas’s face, and he bent to pick up a stone, and then skimmed it over the water’s surface. “Healthy. That’s the issue. That’s why I called for this meeting.”
“I didn’t think you wanted me out here in the dead of winter, freezing my nuts off, just to blather on about fish and beauty,” Alexios said, jamming his hands further into the pockets of his long black leather duster. He’d spent too many years over the centuries basking in the temperature-controlled warmth of Atlantis. He was getting soft.
And the day one of Poseidon’s warriors turned soft was usually the day he got killed. Or worse, lost two years of his life.
The scars on his face burned with remembered fire and his gut started to roil. Alexios closed his eyes for a moment, reciting a simple focus chant in his mind.
Not now. Some memories were made to repress.
When Alexios opened his eyes, Lucas was shaking his head. “No, not to blather, as you so elegantly put it. Although a fresh-caught rainbow trout, pan-seared and glistening with lemon and butter, can be truly a thing of beauty—”
“Lucas.” The single word hung in the air between them for a long moment.
“I know. I know,” Lucas replied, his voice turned to ice whose chill rivaled the delicate sculptures hanging from the tree branches behind them. “But naming a thing gives it power, and I had wished, if only for a short while . . . Still. No matter. We’re in trouble.”
Alexios felt the internal shift. In the space of a heartbeat, he went from standby alert status to battle ready. Scanning the area with Atlantean senses set to clear, sharp focus, he’d unsheathed his daggers almost without noticing it.
“Where? Now?”
“No. I don’t know. Maybe.” Lucas ran a hand through his thick, dark brown hair. “It’s two things. First, we’ve got local vamps setting out to enthrall shifters, and that goes against all rules of the Fae accords. You know I’m not much for politics, but even I know that. It’s here, Alexios.” The shifter’s voice held real anguish. “It’s even here in Yellowstone pack territory. After all the inter-pack cooperation we’ve developed over the past decade, working together to get the indigenous wolf population back up to non-endangered levels.”
“You’ve done an amazing job. Your animal counterparts are healthy and thriving throughout the entire three-state region of the park.”
“Yeah. Yeah.” Lucas started pacing back and forth, an almost tangible hostile energy surrounding him.
Alexios felt the prickly sensation that told him the hair on the back of his neck was standing up. Lucas didn’t need a full moon to shift, a boatload of anger would do the trick nicely.
“You said ‘first,’ which usually implies a ‘second.’ ”
Lucas stopped pacing and clenched his hands into fists, then sucked in a deep breath and stretched his fingers out and back, loosening the tension in his hands. It was an old warrior’s trick, useful after too many hours of wielding a sword in one’s grasp.
Evidently it helped with claws, too.
“Right. Sorry. The idea of traitors in my own pack damn near sends me into the moon sickne
ss,” Lucas said. After another three or four deep breaths, that sizzle of hostile energy around him dampened. “Second, the Fae are suddenly in the game. They’re putting out the word that they want to talk to you.”
“Me? I haven’t run into any of the elf kind for years. Decades, even. What would they want with me?” Alexios resheathed his daggers, but didn’t relax his vigilance.
“Not you, particularly. Your kind. Atlanteans. They want to bring a prince gift to Conlan’s new heir.”
Alexios narrowed his eyes. “The high prince’s son or daughter isn’t even born yet, though we expect Riley to give birth pretty much any minute. But we’ve kept this a tightly wrapped secret. How is it the Fae know about the baby?”
Lucas shrugged. “They have their ways and have had for longer than our packs have recorded history. They know all, see all, you know the drill. But the more important question, my friend, is what kind of gift they intend to bring. You know the dangers that come with accepting a gift from any of the Fae—or, worse, of refusing one.”
“Depends on the Fae.”
“It’s Rhys na Garanwyn putting out the word through his brother, Kal’andel.”
Alexios whistled long and low. “High court Seelie royalty? Oh, yeah. We’re screwed.”
He heard them before he saw them, and from the way Lucas lifted his head and sniffed the air, he figured the wolf’s sense of smell had warned him. They were Pack, they were in wolf shape, and there were at least a dozen of them. Worse, they were moving in fast and low to surround Alexios and Lucas.
“You mentioned being screwed?” Lucas said, his voice little more than a guttural growl as he prepared for the Change.
“We may be screwed, but we’re going down fighting,” Alexios said, daggers already in his hands. He whirled so he was standing back to flank with Lucas, who’d completed his shift and transformed fully into wolf form in seconds, as only the most powerful shifters could do.
“Okay, ladies,” Alexios called out. “Who wants to dance?”
Before the attackers could charge, two shimmering clouds of mist soared down through the air and coalesced into the shapes of two very welcome allies—Christophe and Brennan.
Christophe shook his hair out of his face and grinned. “Hey, I’m up for it. Just none of that line-dancing crap. Give me a hot, slow song where I can get up close and personal with an armful of warm, willing woman.”
Brennan nodded. “I do occasionally miss a good waltz,” he mused.
The huge shifter leading the charge, apparently no fan of either dance or witty repartee, snarled and made a gesture to his comrades, who attacked.
Alexios, daggers out, hurled himself up and over the crouching wolf coming at him low, leaving that one for Brennan, and scored a direct hit on the shifter in the second row, ripping through its jugular with his downward slash. The shifter screamed and fell, blood spouting in a macabre pattern against the stark white of the snow.
The next attacker was more prepared, though, and before Alexios could regain his balance a heavy claw smashed into his head, knocking him to the ground. The ugly ripping sound of his hair being wrenched from his head pissed him off more than the pain.
He flipped over and shot up off the ground, leading with his daggers. Before the shifter could get in another blow, both of Alexios’s blades were buried in its abdomen. Alexios kept shoving upward through flesh and muscle until the shifter’s eyes went slack, telling him the tips of his daggers had reached its heart. It took a lot to keep a wolf shifter down, and he had no time for do-overs tonight.
“Oh, did the wolfie make you mad when he pulled out your pretty golden hair?” Christophe said, laughing.
“I am so going to kick your ass when we’re done here,” Alexios said, whirling around, searching for his next target.
Christophe, already calling power, hurled a blue-green energy sphere at a shifter who was charging straight for Alexios. This sphere smashed into the wolf’s chest and knocked him through the air a good fifteen feet, slamming him into a tree. There was an audible crack—skull or spinal cord, probably—and the shifter fell into a heap at the base of the tree, head at an unnatural angle.
“That one’s not getting up again, Lexi,” Christophe gloated.
“Call me Lexi again, and my next dagger is going up your—”
“Incoming!” Brennan shouted, interrupting the very real threat that Alexios had in mind. Alexios spun around to see two shifters charging for him in a coordinated attack.
“It seems rather unfair that all the dance partners prefer you,” Brennan said, materializing beside Alexios, throwing stars in his hands.
“Well, I am prettier,” Alexios replied, grinning.
Brennan’s hands flashed out almost quicker than even an Atlantean eye could see, and two pairs of shuriken, made of Atlantean metal instead of the customary silver of Japanese throwing stars, sliced through the air and found their marks, dead center in the foreheads and hearts of each of the two shifters. Momentum carried the shifters forward a few more steps before they dropped.
But by then Alexios had already turned to scan the area and see where the next threat would be coming from. Lucas was caught up in battle with two more of the attackers at the edge of the water, fangs and claws slicing, tearing, and rending. Alexios took off toward them, but some instinct tickled at the edge of his consciousness and, acting purely on instinct, he knelt and drove his daggers straight behind him and up, catching another one of the wolf shifters under its neck on its downward leap. It howled as it died, and the eerie sound shivered ice down Alexios’s spine.
He didn’t have time for shivers, though. He sprang back up and headed for Lucas again, but by the time he’d reached his friend, the two attackers lay on the ground, dying or dead.
Brennan flashed toward them, scanning the edges of the trees for any further attackers. “I had thought there were more of them, but perhaps they fled.”
Alexios shook his head. “I doubt it. They’re too intent on this attack, no matter the cost. I’d really like to know what was behind it.”
Lucas snarled, the blood dripping from his muzzle underscoring the feral sound.
“I hate wolf shifters nearly as much as cat shifters—no offense, Lucas,” Christophe said, walking toward them. “I still can’t believe Bastien is going to wed a kitty cat. Wonder if they’ll need a litter box? Oh, and you might want to duck.”
Brennan and Alexios hit the ground simultaneously as if choreographed; centuries of fighting together had taught them that hesitation often proved fatal. Lucas snarled again, but crouched low.
Alexios had barely caught sight of the four remaining shifters, lurking at the edge of the tree line, when Christophe’s razor-sharp blades of ice arrowed through the air and sliced through their necks.
The Atlantean power over water could be quite deadly when wielded by an expert. Too bad it had to be Christophe.
“That’s four at once,” Christophe said smugly. “The ale is quite definitely on you three.”
“Are there any more of them, Lucas?” Alexios knew the shifter’s keen sense of smell would discover any remaining attackers.
Lucas’s heavy head lifted as he scented the air. Then he slowly shook his head back and forth, taking a few steps away. The shimmer of the Change hung in the air for a few moments while Lucas returned to human form. The Change had healed the worst measure of his wounds, but what remained showed how badly he’d been hurt in the fight.
Alexios bent to clean his daggers in the rushing waters of the river, then dried and resheathed them, not trusting himself to talk just yet.
Lucas evidently didn’t have that problem. “Private meeting. Private. I don’t quite see how bringing your goons along fulfilled that request,” he snarled.
“Goons? Did he just call us goons, Brennan?” Christophe asked. “Listen, doggie boy, I can show you goons—”
Alexios sliced a hand through the air, cutting him off. Turned back to Lucas. “Are you freaking kidding me? D
id you set me up? What in the nine hells was this?”
Lucas’s rage and the shimmer of the incipient Change hung in the air for a moment, but then the shifter visibly forced himself to calm down. “Set you up? Set you up? I called you here to ask for help. Which, as you might guess, wasn’t easy for me to do in the first place. Do you really know me so little that you think I would set you up? I was going to ask you to stand as second pack-father to my sons, you damn fool.”
Brennan bowed, elegant as always. “Congratulations on the imminent birth, and may the waters of your world serve to nourish your family now and for always.”
Lucas’s eyes widened at Brennan’s formal speak, but he inclined his head. “Thank you. As you may or may not know, the pack-father protects the children as if they were his own—would die for them. The first must be Pack, but there is precedent for naming a second. I’ve chosen you, Alexios. Maybe that was a mistake.”