“Damn straight.” He reached for his doorknob. “See you in the morning.”
“Tee?” Chico’s expression was a mixture of excitement and fear. Although they’d been training for years, neither of them had made warrior yet—and they’d never been in a real battle. “You afraid?”
“A little,” he admitted. “But I’m ready.” His animal bumped against his skin in agreement. He was a young, unmated male. He’d willingly die to protect the clan, especially the children.
Their eyes met, both their animals to the fore. Tiago knew his eyes had changed to a feral silver, while Chico’s glowed a spooky green.
“Me too,” was the reply.
Their arms came around each other in a tight hug. They half-nuzzled, half-butted each other in the way of male animals before breaking apart and entering their separate rooms.
CHAPTER SIX
“Mama, Mama!” Merry pelted down the hall to Valeria. “Guess what? We’re all going to a party.”
“Sim?” Valeria scooped her up for a kiss. “That’s nice, querida.”
She glanced at Sabela, who was following close behind, having offered to pick up Merry from the creche. “A party?” she mouthed as she set her daughter back down.
The base was on lockdown. Only a few heavily guarded men had gone out fishing. The whole clan was readying itself for war—with the sun fae, the Baltimore fada, or both. Valeria had dropped Merry at the creche and spent the morning helping the healers inventory medical supplies.
Rock Run had been awash with rumors.
Dion’s dead.
No, he got away from the sun fae.
No, he had the shit beaten out of him by Cleia’s guards.
Finally Justino and Ed had returned with the information that Dion was safe in Cleia’s apartment. Justino had scaled the four floors to the queen’s balcony and seen with his own eyes that the alpha, although bound tight in a fishing net, was unhurt. Justino had hung around as long as he dared, hoping to speak with him, but Cleia hadn’t left his side. In fact, she’d fussed over him—giving him food and water, releasing him from the net. Since it appeared Dion was safe for the time being, Justino and Ed had returned to base to report what they’d learned.
Sabela’s grin was almost as big as Merry’s. “Dion sent a message to Luis. He’s fine. He promised to stay with the sun fae for a couple of days, but he’s fine.”
“Thank the Goddess.” Valeria’s shoulders sagged with relief. And yet… “Why? Why does he have to stay?”
She could think of only one reason the alpha would’ve agreed to remain with the sun fae—and it wasn’t good. Surely he hadn’t fallen prey to Cleia’s glamour?
Sabela shrugged. “Who knows? But he swore an oath to stay with the sun fae until midsummer day. Cleia wants him to attend the ritual.”
Valeria’s brows lifted. The midsummer ritual was normally for sun fae only. “But why?”
“Who knows?” Sabela said again. “But he’ll be safe enough. Queen Cleia has promised.”
Valeria nodded. Neither the fae nor the fada found it easy to lie, and reneging on a promise was even worse. If Cleia went back on her word, she’d be left weak and ill for days, an easy target for any rival fae clan. And she’d be a target for the Rock Run assassins for the rest of her days.
Merry was chanting, “We’re going to a party. We’re going to a party.”
Valeria shook her head. “Not us. Lord Dion.”
“Us, too,” the little girl insisted.
“She’s right,” said Sabela. “The entire clan is invited to the midsummer ritual—and the festival, too. Rui and the tenentes are conferring with the elders right now.” The sun fae’s midsummer festival was a three-day celebration famous throughout the fae and fada worlds.
“Why would she want us there? Unless she wants another chance at our men,” she added a little bitterly.
“She says it’s to show there are no hard feelings between the sun fae and Rock Run.”
Valeria pursed her lips. “And we’re going to go.”
“It looks that way, sim. You can always decline. But if you’re worried about Lord Adric, only Rock Run and the sun fae are invited to the ritual.”
They both looked at Merry’s excited face. It would break her heart to stay home, and there was no way Valeria was letting her leave the base without her.
She blew out a breath. “No,” she said. “We’ll go.”
* * *
Goddamn fucking fae.
Adric lifted the quartz that dangled from a leather cord around his neck and stared at the screen in disbelief. All the data they’d gathered about the Rock Run base was gone, wiped out as if it had never been, his quartz still vibrating as it did after an energy surge.
“Hang on.” Adric looked around at his four lieutenants—his sister Marjani and three young but battle-hardened men who’d earned his absolute trust during the Darktime: Lucas, Jace and Zuri. The five of them were seated at a circular table in his den twenty feet below Baltimore.
“Something’s happened,” he told them. A few quick taps on the screen contacted the clan’s head surveyor. “Mason. Do you still have the data on the Rock Run base?”
Mason was one of the few older men who’d accepted Adric as alpha—which was why he was still alive. Now he was silent for a long moment before shaking his head. “The file’s empty. Damn it, that’s impossible. I encrypted that file myself—three times over. Nobody but you, me or Jace should’ve been able to access it.”
“Nobody but a fae.” Adric let out a vicious curse. It had to be the sun fae. They could do things with energy that would make an electric eel green with envy. “Dion got to their queen. Hell, you’d have thought the woman didn’t want to be rescued.” When he’d arrived with the sun fae, Cleia had been naked and on her knees, about to be fucked by the Rock Run alpha.
“I’ll do my best to retrieve the information,” Mason said. “But I can’t make any promises.”
“Don’t waste your time. The sun fae are forgetting one thing; I was at Rock Run. I know where the entrances are.” Including the single entrance that could be reached from land.
Adric was a Gifted tracker. He only had to be somewhere once for the location to be imprinted in his memory.
Except—his hand clenched on the quartz. “I don’t fucking believe this,” he breathed. “They messed with my mind as well. I remember being there, but everything else is gone—its location, what it looked like. All I can remember is its scent.”
He frantically searched his memory, but all that remained was the odor of Rock Run Creek: lush, moist, organic. Which probably applied to every damn river in the world.
He growled. “How the hell did they do that—get in my mind like that?”
“I’m sorry,” Mason said. “I’ll keep trying, but it looks like it’s been wiped clean.”
Adric expelled a breath. “Not your fault.”
He cut the connection and looked around at the others. The four lieutenants stared back with varying degrees of shock and anger—except for his sister, whose expression was carefully blank. He knew damn well she was pleased, though. Marjani had been against invading Rock Run from the start.
Lucas spoke first. He was Adric’s right-hand man and a shifter with his animal so close to the surface, he was basically a human wolf. “I’ll tell the clan to stand down.”
Adric’s jaw tightened. “Not yet.” He refused to accept they’d been cut off at the knees. Not when he’d been dreaming of this day ever since he’d first heard the stories about how the clan had almost taken Rock Run sixty years ago. He’d decided then and there that was what his people needed to become whole again. “Maybe Jace can recover the data.”
Jace was the clan’s ace hacker and the main architect of the quartz smartphone technology. “Already on it.” He frowned down at his own quartz.
He wouldn’t touch Adric’s quartz except in a dire emergency. No one would. Earth fada had a direct connection to their quartz. Each piece was
attuned to its owner’s energy, a unique vibration that fed both the owner and the quartz. But as their go-to tech guy, Jace had a backup copy of every important document.
“Sorry.” Jace shook his head, scowling. “No can do. Whoever did this didn’t even bother breaking the encryption. They just wiped the whole file clean.”
Adric’s hand went to his own quartz again. The gray-and-orange crystal vibrated in a short, agitated pattern, attuned to his emotions in a way that was eerily sentient. “I’d say the S.O.B.s broke our agreement, but they never said I could keep the data on Rock Run.” In fact, the sun fae had been careful to make no promises beyond the large sum they’d paid for his help in tracking their queen.
Fucking fae.
They were so damn clever with their promises. Well, at least he had the payment safely tucked in a bank account that could only be accessed by him or Marjani. It was money his clan desperately needed. They’d been nearly destroyed by the fighting during the Darktime. They were poor, hungry and demoralized. As alpha, his first priority was to rebuild their crumbling homes, make sure the children had food in their bellies.
“It’s for the best, Ric.” Marjani leaned forward, hands on the table. “We’re not ready. The clan’s still recovering. Even if we took Rock Run, we’re not strong enough to hold it. We have the money—more than we ever dreamed of. Be grateful for that.”
“You’re wrong. We could take their base—and if we did, we’d damn well hold it. Even if we have to kill every male above the age of ten—and the female soldiers too, for that matter.”
Female fada were less likely to have the aggressive instincts necessary to make soldier, but every clan had women like Marjani who fought alongside the men. Two years his junior, she was slim, almost delicate-looking with an oval face and large dark eyes. But she’d guarded his back with a pit-bull-like determination as he’d fought his way up the hierarchy on his way to becoming alpha.
She dragged a hand through her short black hair. “This isn’t us,” she asserted. “We don’t go into people’s homes and murder them. Not since—” She looked away, throat working.
They all knew what she’d almost said. Not since the Darktime. When their parents had been executed by an alpha brutally consolidating power. When a few years later the two of them had almost been murdered in their beds by their own uncle, who had assassinated the previous alpha. When Jace’s sister had been raped and murdered, and Lucas had been imprisoned and tortured for over a year—simply for being Adric’s friends.
The stories went on and on. The end result was their clan had split into a number of small, weak factions which had nearly ended in them all being exterminated, hunted by one another and the more nasty fae.
Adric crossed his arms. “We need that territory. Our cats and wolves need the space, need the room to run. Even deer need more space than they get here in Baltimore.”
Marjani’s full lips thinned, but she kept silent. Adric might be her brother, but he was also her alpha.
He glanced at Zuri, who as usual hadn’t spoken, preferring to listen to the others as he weighed options. The man was frankly beautiful, with curly black hair and brown skin touched with gold—but he was a lieutenant because of his cool head.
“Well?” Adric asked. “Is it worth a shot?”
Zuri lifted a finger. “One—we know the boundary of their territory. The spell concealing the base’s actual location is functional again, but we can work around that. We already knew its approximate location even before the sun fae neutralized the spell. They may have wiped our memories of the exact location, but those are recent memories. An older, more-entrenched memory may still exist.”
Adric narrowed his eyes. “You’re right. I can still picture the area we’d narrowed it down to. We can start from there, use scent to locate the entrance.”
Zuri inclined his head and raised another finger. “Two, their alpha is with the sun fae. They have to be upset, off-balance. They may even be challenging each other for leadership.” A third finger. “Three, we’re young, hungry. It’s their home ground, but our people want this. A year ago I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but you’ve got the whole clan behind you, Ric. If we can just find a way in, this may be our best chance in a long time to take them.”
Adric smiled. “My thoughts exactly.”
“I don’t know why the hell we’re wasting our time talking,” Luc inserted. “We need to strike now, before they recover from the loss of their alpha.”
Jace and Zuri nodded agreement. Only Marjani abstained, her face carefully blank. But he scented her dismay.
Adric came to his feet. He didn’t like upsetting his sister, but this time she was wrong. They might never have a chance like this. His animal, coldly ruthless, was in full agreement. It was time. He was opening his mouth to give the order to invade when a white mist formed in the palm of his hand.
He jerked even as he smelled the silver that was the mark of a fae spell. Words in a formal script formed in the mist, one elegant black letter at a time.
Queen Cleia requests the pleasure of your company and that of a guest at a Summer Ball to be held at Rising Sun on Midsummer Day at two in the afternoon.
His jaw went slack. “Well, hell.” He looked at his lieutenants. “I’ve been invited to a fucking ball. The sun fae.”
There was a stunned silence. No member of the Baltimore clan had been invited to a sun fae celebration. Ever.
Luc recovered first. He snorted. “Probably a trick.”
Adric shook his head. “I don’t think so.” He read the invitation aloud to the others; a fae message was only for the recipient’s eyes. Already the invitation was dissolving, leaving behind only the faint, metallic odor of silver.
He stared down at the fading invitation in disbelief. Wasn’t that just like the fae? “They wipe our minds and our crystals of data and then they invite me to an effing ball?”
“You’ll go,” said Marjani.
He scraped his fingers through his spiky hair. “Will I?”
“You don’t refuse a fae invite without a good reason,” Zuri pointed out. “Not unless you want to piss them off. And you’ll be safe enough. Hospitality is sacred to the fae. They’d be shunned if they treated a guest dishonorably.”
Another message appeared.
Lord Dion and the Rock Run Clan will be in attendance as our special guests.
“Fuck,” Adric said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He could almost hear the crack as his plans collapsed around him like a castle built on a fault line. He stared at the words as the message slowly dissolved.
“What?” asked Marjani.
“They invited Lord Dion and his clan. Damn him anyway. I knew that sun fae bitch had the hots for him.”
Zuri was the first to catch on. “She’s saying he’s an ally.”
Luc looked from Zuri to Adric, baffled. “Even though he held her hostage?”
“Yes, damn her.” Adric turned and slammed the side of his fist against the cavern wall.
It was Zuri who explained. “The word is that Dion took Cleia as retaliation for all those Rock Run men she took as lovers. I’m guessing she decided to cut her losses, declare them even. Everyone knows the sun fae women have a thing for fada men.”
Adric blew out a breath and forced himself to think beyond his anger and frustration.
“Order the soldiers to stand down. But this is not over. I’ll go the damn ball and see what’s what. And then we’ll plan our attack—sun fae or no sun fae. If we can’t take Rock Run in a straight battle, we’ll find another way.”
Marjani’s full lips tightened.
He stabbed a finger at her. “You want to be a diplomat? Here’s your chance. Because you’re coming along as my guest.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Cleia was beautiful, Valeria would grant her that.
Her mouth turned down as she watched the queen stroll through the crowd of sun fae and Rock Run fada assembled for the midsummer ritual.
A long, in
candescent candle of a woman, she drew everyone’s gaze without even trying with her bright hair and body like a dancer’s. Next to her, Valeria felt like a plump troll with her ordinary brown coloring and a form that was several inches shorter and ten pounds heavier.
She grabbed Merry’s hand and edged backward so that Cleia would pass by without seeing her. Most of the people from Rock Run were happily greeting the queen. They had come to like and respect her during the two weeks she’d been imprisoned at Rock Run, but Valeria had kept out of her way, only meeting the queen once, and that briefly. And Cleia wouldn’t recognize her; Dion had kept the queen blindfolded the entire time, which apparently bound her powers in some way so that she was as helpless as a human.
As a relative newcomer at Rock Run, Valeria had refrained from weighing in on whether it was right of the alpha to keep a sun fae imprisoned underground. But that didn’t mean she had to interact with the woman, because frankly, it was hard to feel warm and fuzzy about someone who’d stolen your mate, then thrown him back like a too-small fish when she tired of him.
And she’d kept her curious daughter far, far away, especially when people began to whisper that Cleia was behind Rock Run’s mysterious decline, that she was sucking energy from them like a night fae. She’d been glad of her caution after little Xavier had fallen ill with the same wasting disease as the others.
Now Cleia paused near Valeria. She tensed and placed her hands on Merry’s shoulders, instinctively peeling back her upper lip. But Lord Dion caught her eye, his expression warning that she’d better remember she was a guest here. Abashed, she averted her head, and Cleia passed by without noticing her.
The sun was almost at its zenith. The queen entered the center of the small outdoor amphitheater where the midsummer ritual was to take place. The sun fae required energy from the sun for life. Although they could draw directly from the sun, it wasn’t enough; everyone in the seven clans depended on the Conduit—currently Queen Cleia—to draw the extra energy they needed. The midsummer ritual was where the Conduit renewed her or his bond with the sun. Without that bond, the flow of energy would gradually cease and the sun fae would wither and die like plants kept too long in the dark.
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