Lycan Legacy - 4 - 5 - 6: Princess - Progeny - Paladin: Book 4 - 5 - 6 in the Lycan Legacy Series

by Veronica Singer

  "You drove a hard bargain," said Naomi. "Let us have our fun. Anyway, aren't you proud of being called a bitch? I don't mind being called a vixen."

  "Yeah," said Logan, "lighten up, alpha. You're the toughest bitch on two worlds. Can't you take a joke?"

  "Anyway," offered Mike, "people will probably assume that 'BITCHCoin' refers to the wolf on the back of the coin, not the saint on the front."

  "The choices are bitch or saint?" I asked. I crossed my arms and humphed. "Okay, I can take a joke. BITCHCoin it is." I forced my claws to retract.

  Logan, Mike, and Christopher all let out the breath they had been holding. Was I really that frightening?

  We wrapped up the meeting with some accounting. Naomi got thirty-three activated coins for the kitsune to use, Mason took thirty-three, and I got thirty-four. I stored those unactivated coins in my invisible handbag.

  Naomi and Kuga took their leave. Mike, Christopher, and Logan soon followed, leaving Mason and me alone.

  We cleared the conference table together. In a few minutes the entire room was clean, and we moved to the kitchen and sat at the table waiting for the teapot to whistle. I tugged my ear, our code for a private talk. Mason created a soundproof bubble for us.

  "Mason, I have a lot of questions."

  "Ask me anything, dear."

  "You just gave away one hundred coins, each worth at least fifty thousand dollars. That's, what, five million dollars? Can we afford that? They shut the mine down and we won't be getting any income until that situation is straightened out. The hospital is nearly self-sufficient, except that the other hospitals in the area have taking to dumping all their indigent cases on us."

  At his gentle smile, I hastened to explain myself. "I know you don't care about money and you've always been a great support, but we're coming up on a money crunch soon."

  "Don't worry about the money. It will all work out."

  I glared at him. "That's what my dad told my mom, just before he revealed he had lost his residency at the hospital. That did not work out for us."

  He shrugged his shoulders. "If you need money, you have money. Your talents are worth a great deal."

  I rubbed my belly. "That's nice to say, but I can't do any big magic until after the cubs are born. I'm afraid to try the transmutation process to get more gold because having a contraction at the wrong time would be disastrous. I had hoped Dad’s healing talents would increase our profits at the hospital, but he refuses to work on the people who can most easily afford our services."

  "The hospital needs funding? I can help with that."

  "You know I don't like to take money from you," I said. I slumped back. "I want to be self-sufficient, not supported by a husband who has billionaires on speed-dial."

  "I won't use my money. I'll 'speed-dial a billionaire’ I know and ask him to make a charitable contribution to your hospital. It'll be a win-win: He gets to advertise he's supporting a worthwhile cause and your hospital gets funding."

  I debated before conceding, "Okay, as long as the contribution doesn't come from you directly and the donor really wants to help the hospital. But I don't want to depend on donors. There's got to be a way to make the hospital self-sufficient."

  Mason picked up his phone and typed quickly. He hit ‘send’ and smiled at me. "We should get an answer soon."

  I took a deep breath to hold the question in, then let it out and asked, "Mason, dear. Just how many billionaires do you have on speed-dial?" I felt like a gold-digger, but curiosity got the best of me.

  "About two dozen," he replied. "We're a tight group."

  "We?" I blurted. "You're a billionaire?"

  He waggled his hand in a ‘so-so’ gesture, "It depends on the stock market. Sometimes yes, sometimes no." He talked as if we were discussing a comic collection from his high-school days.

  I had to drink my juice to moisten my suddenly dry mouth. "And you didn't think to tell me before we got married? Or at least ask for a pre-nup?"

  Mason tilted his head and looked at me as if I had spoken in a foreign language. "No, why?"

  "To protect yourself from predatory women," I blurted. I realized how that sounded, and added, "Do you want a post-nup?"

  "Of course not," he said. "You know human money doesn't mean much to me." He reached over and rubbed my belly tenderly. "You and the cubs are the most important thing in my world."

  My thoughts were swirling, and I spoke them out loud. "So I married a billionaire magician prince from a fairy tale? That's so unbelievable that if I saw this in a movie, I'd walk out of the theater."

  "Please don't walk out, Luna. The show is just beginning."

  I refilled our drinks, coffee for Mason and a cup of hot chamomile for me. Doing busywork let me process this new information. By the time we sat back down and sipped our drinks, I had come to some conclusions.

  "This doesn't really change our situation," I said. "I still want to live here with my pack, run the mine and the hospital, learn more about magic and healing." I stared into his eyes. "I don't want to jet off in a private plane and live in a castle on an island somewhere."

  "That's what I love about you. You're very practical." Mason gestured at his phone. "Most of the people on my contact list would give anything to slide back into obscurity. When you're wealthy, everyone you meet wants something. I keep a low profile for that reason."

  My phone pinged with a high-priority message from the hospital. An email was attached, forwarded by the director of the hospital. Her message was simple: Is this real?

  I opened the attachment and read, "The Yates Foundation is pleased to announce that we will donate the sum of $50,000,000.00 (fifty million dollars) to the recently upgraded Moonrise Hospital in Henderson, Nevada." The rest was standard press-release verbiage.

  I stopped reading at that point. The number of zeros was too much for me. I responded to the message: "Yes, it's true. We'll have a meeting on Wednesday to discuss. If asked, imply that this was in the works for a while and say that the generous donation will go to help the residents of Las Vegas and Henderson."

  Mason was looking at me with his little grin, like the time he had given me a single flower. I jumped up and sat my extra-large body in his lap, eliciting a tiny "oof" from him. He hugged me, and we kissed for a long moment.

  I pulled back finally and said, "Thank you for your help."

  "It didn't take much; Bill is happy to help."

  There was something in his voice that told me there was more to the transaction. "You bargained with something else, though. What?"

  "I might have offered an additional inducement," said Mason, nodding at the stack of coins on the table.

  "But what would a billionaire need a make-a-wish coin for? They can buy almost anything."

  Mason picked up a coin from his stack and activated it. The coin glowed with magic as Mason flipped it into the air. Instead of dropping back to his palm, the coin hovered in mid-air, spinning lazily.

  "There are things we can offer that no amount of human money can buy. Like the pack link you created for Kuga. You seriously undercharged for that. You let her share in the strength and vitality of a wolf pack, put her cancer into remission, and now she's in on the ground floor of our new enterprise."

  I had to laugh. "At the time, I thought charging eighty thousand a month was outrageous. Now it seems like small change. But she's been a loyal ally to the pack and has helped tremendously with our banking and management issues."

  "If you're interested in creating another pack link, I'm sure I could find a billionaire who would make a much more substantial offer."

  I shook my head. "We're maxed out with two links, any more would drain the pack." I was rubbing my belly. "And might endanger the cubs. So the answer is no."

  "You could enlarge the pack. You'd get more energy that way."

  "Enlarge the pack? With whom?"

  "Didn't your mother have several other litters?" He said "litters" hesitantly, as if afraid I would take it as an insult.
"If you could add them to your pack, you'd have a lot more werewolf energy to share."

  "That's a bad idea on many levels. They're untrained and uncivilized. Even if they appear fully grown, they're still immature. Dumping a litter of my step-brothers into my pack would be enormously disruptive. They would naturally fight to determine their place in the pack hierarchy. With the new cubs coming, jealousy would flare up." I shook my head. "That's not an option." I shuddered at the thought of the damage my step-siblings could do. After Raymond's indoctrination, they had no love for me. Well, maybe the later litters would be more open-minded, but the A-group was stubbornly against me.

  "Okay, no new recruits, no new pack links," said Mason. "We have other benefits to offer. We can offer healing much better than any clinics on Earth."

  "I don't think what we do is that much better…"

  "How would Mike be if you hadn't healed him? Hell, it was more of an upgrade than a mere healing. He's damn near as tough as a werewolf at full moon. You can perform much better than any doctors on Earth."

  "Mike would have died that night without our help," I conceded, "but that healing took a lot out of me. Even with your help, it was a very close call. I can't do that again—at least not until after the kids are born."

  "What did you learn that night?" Typically for a magician, Mason was going off on a tangent I couldn't follow. But he usually had a reason for his questions.

  "I learned a lot about healing, setting bones, and fixing joints," I said.

  "Could you do it better, more efficiently today?"

  I went over the spells and techniques I had used, mentally juggling the spells and processes to see if I could have done them differently. "Sure, I used too much power in some places. For example, instead of increasing the density of his bones all at once, I could have taken care of the life-threatening breaks and left the spell working at a low level on the rest of his skeleton. That would have had the same effect, taking a few days instead of a few hours. There were a few things I could have done in a different order, to let the healing proceed more naturally. It still took a lot of magical energy."

  "Your skill as a healer is improving."

  "I guess," I said. "I'm still afraid to try any more sessions. Some healing processes are delicate. And I can't take a pee break in the middle, even if the power requirements wouldn't endanger the cubs."

  I rose from his lap and returned to my chair. I took a sip of my tea and continued, "I'm not as skillful as my dad. He can do a lot more with less energy."

  Then Mason said something that changed my world. "So your father would be a great healer, if he had more power."

  15

  Wednesday morning Mason and I stepped through the Emergency Room doors of the newly renovated Moonrise Hospital in Henderson. We could have gone through the main entrance, but I wanted to see how the ER was doing.

  Mom was working the main desk, dressed in nurse's scrubs although she wasn't a nurse. She was exceptionally good at processing incoming patients. The best drug-seeking addict was an open book to her werewolf's nose. She was also diplomatic enough to turn away fakers without resorting to violence.

  If violence was necessary, one of my step-brothers was standing behind her in a security guard's uniform. Someone from the C-group—Charles? Cramer? Carver! It was right there on his name tag. Carver looked us over with disdain. Despite my best efforts, most of my steps didn't like me. For them, Mason and I had rebelled, defeated their alpha, and ruined the pack. I had killed the most senior of the A-group, Aaron, when he had challenged me. Lots of history to unravel there.

  Mom rushed over and hugged me, inhaling my scent and rubbing my belly. "Luna, it's great to see you!" Mom was two inches shorter than my five-nine; her black hair was up in a practical bun and she had a slim figure. Although she was pushing fifty, she looked more like my older sister than my mother. Werewolves don't live longer than humans, but we stay youthful much longer.

  She pulled away, still holding my hand, and looked at Mason. "Hello, Mason," she said coldly. She sniffed as if a skunk had entered the ER. I guess neither of us got along well with our mothers-in-law.

  "Hello, Nurse Ratched," quipped Mason.

  Mom's lips pursed in disapproval. She looked at me as if to see whether I would reprimand Mason. After all the ‘Tinkerbell’ insults I had hurled at his mother, I thought Mason getting smart at Mom's cool tone was acceptable.

  Mom stepped to the far end of the room, away from the waiting patients, gesturing for us to follow.

  Mom smiled her best saccharine smile and said, "You know I could have you committed for three days. I've got the form on my desk." She warmed her tone. "It would be like a mini-vacation. Doesn't that sound nice?"

  Mason matched her fake smile. "That's your go-to move, isn't it?"

  Mom's face froze. "What do you mean?"

  "You have men you don't like committed. Like your husband," said Mason. "You shoved him away into a mental hospital for fifteen years so you could be free to screw the alpha werewolf you really wanted."

  Mom snarled, "You know nothing about me or my life!"

  "I know when it was your turn to lose your mind, your daughter moved heaven and earth to get your husband free from the clutches of witches and demons. They were snacking on his soul while you screwed a monster. The man you betrayed saved you a second time, restoring your memories. Now you're not even living together. You don't deserve the love of a magician."

  Mom turned to me, "You see? All these magicians are alike, twisting the truth to make other people look bad."

  "Tell me where I lied," said Mason.

  Mom ignored him and continued talking to me. "Why couldn't you have married a nice werewolf? Dmitri's pack leader from Russia was always interested in you. He's a fearsome fighter, and he has a large pack."

  "Mom, he's sixty-seven years old!"

  "Better than a magician!" Mom turned to Mason. "Big man. Take away your card tricks and magical gadgets and what are you?"

  "Genius, billionaire, philanthropist," snapped Mason.

  "Delusions of grandeur," scoffed Mom. "You're no billionaire, nor a philanthropist. As for genius, you weren't smart enough to avoid Raymond."

  Mom shook her head and turned to me. "Something is wrong with that man. He thinks he's a character from a Marvel movie. All you have to do is sign the form and he'll have a nice vacation."

  "You're the one who is delusional. Big woman. Take away your magical rabies and what are you?"

  Mom's teeth extended and my step-brother took one step closer. He froze at my glare. Mom and Mason would have to work this out.

  "I'm the meanest woman you'll ever meet."

  "I was mean enough to kick the dogshit out of the alpha you betrayed your family to screw."

  "You used magic to win!"

  Mason shrugged. "He used teeth and claws. I just leveled the playing field."

  I felt like a spectator at a tennis match with hand grenades in the place of tennis balls. One or the other would get blown up.

  "Raymond should have won," said Mom.

  "I agree," said Mason. "Then you'd be a drooling idiot hidden away in the woods, instead of here giving me a bad attitude."

  Mom spluttered. She was insulted but was left without a comeback since Mason had agreed with her.

  "The only loser would have been Luna."

  "What do you mean?"

  Mason looked at me. "Is it possible she didn't know?"

  "Know what?" asked Mom.

  "That Raymond had been grooming your daughter from a young age—grooming her to take your place as a puppy factory once you became too stupid to breed."

  "That's not true! I was Raymond's mate."

  Was it possible that Mom hadn't seen what Raymond's plan had been? Or had her memory—erased by spending too much time as a wolf, then imperfectly restored by Dad—failed her?

  "Mom, it's true. Raymond planned on making me his next mate," I stated.

  "No! You're both insane." Mom tur
ned back to Mason. "You're clever, like a lot of mentally ill men. I still think I should commit you."

  Mason laughed. "You think this place could hold me?"

  Mom laughed just as brightly, "I've got a pack of werewolves here that would love to try." Mom stared into Mason's eyes, trying for dominance.

  "And destroy the hospital that your daughter bought so you and those jobless mutts could have a place to call home? Naw, I don't think so."

  Mason matched her stare, and the smell of ozone and magic increased. The waiting patients had finally caught the tension in our conversation. The background chatter of the twenty patients waiting went away, leaving a silence that stretched out interminably.

  Damn, I would have to grab the hand grenade and stop this match. I stepped between them, breaking their stares. "Okay, enough joking around. There are too many people here who don't get your sense of humor and you're freaking them out. Besides, we have a meeting upstairs."

  Mom glared at me for a long moment, then turned her gaze downward, acknowledging my orders. There's only room for one alpha bitch in this place, and that's me.

  We rode the elevator up to the top floor boardroom in silence. As we walked down the carpeted hallway toward the conference room, I said, "I'm sorry about my mom. She's changed since she recovered her memory."

  Mason chuckled. "My mom tried to have you killed. I think that puts your mom one-up from my mom."

  "Thanks," I said.

  "Although, to really even it out, I should beat up all of your step-siblings and force your mother to submit with my foot on her throat."

  I had a sudden image of Mason standing above my mother, a boot on her throat as she whimpered in submission. That brought back memories of how Raymond had treated her. Anger flared, then I took a deep breath and pushed it down. "That's what I did to your half-sisters and your mom," I conceded. "But let me try diplomacy with her before we resort to violence."

  "Diplomacy? With that kind of attitude? She will not change and I'm not going to start kissing her ass."

  We entered the conference room together. Around the table were the people responsible for running the day-to-day operations of the hospital.