by Leia Stone
It caused an ache that I had no idea how to deal with, an ache that was strong and fierce, right in my chest. Why the hell couldn’t I feel like this around any of my wolves? They were beautiful. Deadly. Powerful. But no … had to be a damn bear.
“Want to see something wild?” I blurted out, stepping back. We needed a distraction, the mecca was trying to push our energies together, and neither one of us were fighting very hard.
Kade shook his head as if to clear his thoughts and nodded. “I like wild,” he said, and I could tell from the low timbre of his voice that he wanted to say more but didn’t.
Uh, crap – what was I going to show him? I’d blurted out that last sentence without thought, but … maybe…
“Okay, so you cannot breathe a word of it to your people. Even Gerald.” I would be in deep shit if the council knew what I was about to show him. But with a fae war looming on the horizon I needed another powerful ally, and I trusted Kade. If he wanted me dead he’d had plenty of chances by now.
He nodded, his head tilted in a way that meant he was intrigued. A part of me, which was clearly channeling the wolf council, was asking if I was really going to show the bear king our mecca crystal, the heavily-guarded stone that had been viewed only by a very select number of heirs and rulers.
Only people with royal blood could even get near it, which wouldn’t be a problem for Kade. He was a king, and had an extra affinity for the mecca. And he might just be able to shed some light on the mystery of the crystal. Mostly I wanted to know, if the fae came, could it be used as a weapon?
Together we walked to the outer doors, where my guards stood. Kade’s were across on the other side of the room but they could still hear us.
“We’re going to have a meeting in the library room,” I said.
Both bear and wolf guards looked confused, as it was not a normal meeting room, but all had the intelligence not to question me. I wasn’t as brutal as the Red Queen had been, but I was no pushover either. It was a thing every alpha learned the hard way – you had to be tough on wolves or they would rip you to pieces. I had no problem being tough. I was the queen alpha now, the alpha of every wolf in existence.
Traversing the halls, our guards trailing us, I was glad there were no others in the vicinity. Panic tended to ensue if Kade was spotted in our territory. When we reached the room, I opened the door, turning back to the guards.
“Wait for us here. Don’t let anyone in.”
Kade’s two turned to him briefly and he nodded, letting them know to follow my orders. The king and I stepped inside then and he closed the heavy wooden door behind us. I crossed into the room, which had been set up as a sitting-library room – not the Red Queen’s personal library where she had been killed, but a similar room on a much smaller scale. Kade was silent, examining his surroundings, before he started waving his hands before him.
“What are you doing?” I asked, perplexed.
He lowered his arms, turning to focus on me completely. “I can see the mecca in here, stronger than anywhere else I’ve been.”
His gift was amazing. I could feel the mecca, and utilize the energy, but he could see the actual lines of power and manipulate them. It gave him a strength and control that I lacked.
“I’m going to show you right now, but remember, I’m trusting you with this, Kade. If you break that trust, I’ll kill you.”
My words rang true. If he did turn against me, I would kill him.
He gave me a nod. “I would expect nothing less, and you know you can trust me.”
Sucking in deeply, I reached out and pulled the book down. As the secret door swung open, Kade’s eyes met mine. “This is going to be interesting,” he said with a grin.
I gave him my best mysterious one-eyebrow-raised look. “Not scared are you, bear?” I asked, before stepping inside and leaving him to make the decision.
His footsteps were silent as he followed me, but I knew he was there. The energy of the mecca was strong, almost suffocating on this side of the secret chamber. Whoever had designed this hiding place had definitely spelled the walls around it. This much mecca would make even alpha wolves sick if it wasn’t contained.
“Well, I’ll be damned.” Kade towered over me, glancing over my head so he could see the stone clearly in the middle of the room. “I’ve never seen a mecca stone of that size.”
The stone’s purplish hue washed over his darkly tanned features. It was about four feet tall and two wide. It sparkled and shone with mesmerizing depth; the pull was great enough that I always feared if I stared into it too deeply I’d be lost in its depths forever.
Swallowing through my thick throat, I forced myself to focus on Kade. “The Red Queen always hinted that she had something powerful as a weapon,” I said, trying not to turn back and stare again. ”But none of us realized what it was.”
I was really the red queen now, but no one called me that. It had been the former leader’s title, and after her reign of over a hundred years, shifters weren’t going to break the habit anytime soon. Which was fine by me. Rumor was they were referring to me as Queen Alpha. I like that much better than the traditional title of Red Queen.
“Your father was the king before you, right?” I was learning about bear hierarchy, mostly from bits and pieces Kade let slip.
I’d been taught to fear and hate the bear shifters who held two of the five boroughs of New York City. That was all, just fear and hate. None of their history or traditions. To the best of my knowledge, their crown was inherited, not earned as ours was.
Kade was focused on the stone, his answer slow to come. “Yes, the crown remains in the royal bloodline. Only the males receive a familiar, and are strong enough to rule, so even if daughters are born to the king, they’ll never be a leader. My brother Kian was older than me, and should have been king. But he disappeared many years ago, so when my father was killed, it was up to me to take the crown.”
It was kind of odd that bears appeared to be the direct opposites of wolves. In our royal lineage, only female wolf shifters could be queen; we were the only ones to get familiars. In the bears it was only males. Odd.
Right now, Finn, my huge white wolf familiar, and Nix, Kade’s eagle, were off fae hunting, making sure no more of those hideous erchos were hiding in Central Park. Both of them were on high alert, and since familiars were extremely hard to kill, they thought they were the best first line of defense.
It calmed my mind to know I could check in on Finn at any time. Our mental link was strong and thrumming within me. I knew Kade felt the same way about his Nix. It was a bond that could not be replicated.
“How did your father die?” I asked, hoping this wasn’t too painful for him.
Kade had been king for a couple of years, and while this was not a long time in the few hundred years we could live, he already held the respect of his people. He was a just leader, I could tell.
“I remember the queen tolling the bells and informing us that King Roland had fallen and that the bears were vulnerable, but that she would honor the peace accords. It was a hunting accident, right?”
He focused fully on me then, some of the awe from the mecca fading out of his masculine features. The power within us was so much more potent this close to the stone, our connection back in full force. I actually took a step closer to him, unable to stand my ground. Kade was all of my woodcutter fantasies rolled up in one package – dark brown, bordering-on-black hair, tousled, thick, and shiny across his forehead; neatly trimmed beard against his throat and around his full lips, showcasing a slight dimple in his cheek. His height topped out near seven feet, and that package was finished off with broad shoulders and heavy muscles. He was huge, and his bear even bigger.
The gods could have helped me out and made the bear royal line less attractive or something. A girl only had so much restraint.
He was still staring at me, and hadn’t answered my question yet. I was about to apologize for my bluntness when he said, “Hunting accident was the cou
ncil’s spin so that no one would know we had a traitor in our own house. A king should be able to manage his guard, but he didn’t. My father was killed by his friend and advisor. The traitor thought himself in love with my mother, the queen, and decided that by getting rid of my father he’d have a free run.” Kade’s eyes, normally bronze, were now the color of whiskey, deep and rich, filled with emotion.
“He’d never have bested my father in a normal fight of course, but the ambush was unexpected. My father trusted him above all others. He never even saw the blow coming. Poisoned my father with dinner the night before, then killed his familiar first, to weaken him before finishing him off.”
To the wolves, Kade’s father had been hard and cruel. He’d initiated more than one scuffle with our queen in a bid to gain territory. But when Kade talked of him, there was a sense of softness in the tone.
“And your mother…” I said.
He smiled suddenly, and I had to blink a few times to ground myself. “Still alive. Ordering me around. She’s the real ruler of the bears, I just give the final order. They all adore her.”
He loved his mother too. Of course he did. Was there anything wrong with him?
“So your father married your mother? Like mates?” I couldn’t remember the last time a wolf queen had actually married her wolf mate, and we certainly didn’t refer to those mates as “king.” They were simply the queen’s mate, one step up from a lover.
“Mates … yes. My father met my mother when he was nineteen, at the summer festival on the Island. Declared right then and there in front of everyone that she would be his queen.”
I grinned. Sounded like the man knew what he wanted in life. I could respect that. “What did your mother say?”
Kade suddenly gave a deep rumbling laugh. “My mother replied without an ounce of hesitation that my father wasn’t her type. She would never marry an arrogant, over-confident, pushy man like him.”
Now I was laughing. His mother sounded like my kind of woman.
Kade shrugged. “My father loved a challenge. He fought for her. Every day. Two years later, they wed.”
“That’s a nice story,” I said, feeling soft emotions battering my body. All the feelings.
A sudden pulse of purple light had both of us focusing on the stone again. Kade stepped closer, about five feet from it, and I found myself flashing back to Breanna. The mecca power had been too much for her to handle. This had left her unfit for the throne. I could still see her seizing wolf in my mind’s eye, the memory of carrying her out of here, not knowing if she would make it or not.
I knew Kade wouldn’t have the same issue, but it still made me nervous.
I joined him, both of us crossing to the side of the most powerful stone in existence. It was still a challenge, like wading through very deep sand, each step more effort than the last, but we were able to make it to stand right before the pulsing rock.
“I never knew this existed until the Summit,” I said. “You have to prove your strength with the mecca. When I touched this, there were images, flashes of purple. The council had never seen that happen before, and many of them were here for the last Summit of the Red Queen. My entire body glowed, almost as if I was more mecca than shifter … for a second.”
On occasion I still had nightmares, pulled from sleep with memories of this stone. The power should be feared, even though the shifters had been controlling the mecca for half a millennium. That was how long it had been since fae had ruled this energy, over five hundred years, so why the hell were they coming back now? Why was the mecca energy so out of control?
“So, does it seem as if the energy is still filtering from the Otherworld to ours?” I asked Kade. It felt like it had slowed a little to me, but there was still a massive imbalance.
“Yes and no. The filtering is still there, but much slower. Before it was like the mecca was growing in great rushes, but now it’s subtle. I notice it every few days, just a slight increase in power.”
So the fae had either figured out how to slow the exodus of power from their world, or whatever had manipulated the mecca in the first place was still in control and had slowed the imbalance.
“Do you think we could use this as a weapon somehow?” I asked, reaching out and gliding my hand above the stone. I wanted to touch it, badly, to see what might happen this time now that I was queen, but it was so much stronger than it was at the Summit and I was worried it’d try to kill me again. It was hard to forget the suffocation of power during my coronation, that moment I thought I was going to die, and Kade had saved me.
“Anything this powerful could certainly become a weapon if controlled.” He answered my question after a slight pause, as if he had thought it over first. “We need to start planning for war, gathering our weapons, pooling our magical knowledge so our magic borns might have a chance against the fae spellcasters.”
The magic born were able to touch the mecca in a way no other could, not even me and Kade. Both of us were starting to sway now; it was time to get out of this room. I started to move away, and Kade followed my lead.
“Has your council made a decision yet about the Island?” he asked as we both shuffled our way backward.
With each step, the pressure on my chest decreased until I felt I could finally breathe again. When we reached the secret door, I said, “They still won’t give me an answer. They want to deal with the meeting of the alphas first. We all decided it was too risky to tell all wolf shifters about the fae yet, but we will have a meeting to speak to the alpha of each borough, and also the other leaders of individual packs. I’ll tell them about the fae, and they can make sure the packs are secure without causing a major panic.”
Kade nodded, not seeming surprised at all by this information. We knew it was going to be hard to convince others that a myth was now all too real and was gunning for our world. Even harder: convincing them that working with the bears was our best chance of survival. Kade and his people wanted to start preparing for battle. We were going to use the Island – shifter neutral territory – during the summer festival to work out the logistics, but the council wasn’t agreeing to anything of that nature yet. I understood: one step at a time. But it was still frustrating.
“My council and bear leaders know of the threat, but we too have not spread the word to the general shifter community,” Kade said, dropping a hand onto my shoulder. “I have to return to my boroughs now. Never a good idea to leave bears alone for long without their king.”
We were nearing the door of the library and I could hear our guards softly talking on the other side, Chelle’s short, blunt answers a clear sign that she was not warming up to my people. I would have thought for sure Blaine would have won her over; my friend was a real charmer when he wanted to be. Not to mention he was gorgeous. And very, very dominant. Chelle was a tough cookie to crack, though, which is probably why she was one of Kade’s guards.
“Send Nix with word when you want to train again,” I said to Kade. No matter how difficult controlling the mecca was for me, his training was helping immensely. My control was stronger; the amount of energy I could funnel through my body was increasing. Even the headaches were less frequent and intense – still terrible – but I was taking any improvement.
He gave a slight head bow. “I have to go away for a few days, but I’ll be in touch. Good luck with your alpha meeting.”
Then those eyes locked me down and I couldn’t move. Mecca energy oozed from him, and wrapped around me with a strength that would have had my knees buckling, but I was used to it now.
“Stay safe, Ari,” he said, and then with a dispelling of the energy, he was gone.
I must have been standing like that for some time, because suddenly my dominants were around me. Blaine, one of my oldest friends, with his rich, auburn hair and green eyes, blinked at me in concern.
“Your Highness … are you okay, Ari?” He was one of the worst with protocol, always forgetting to address me as the queen.
I didn’t ca
re. It was just a title. He would die for me. A title was hardly important compared to that.
“Do you think that bear did something to her?” Monica, the more cautious of the two females who were part of my inner five, said to the others.
A chuckle escaped me. “I’m standing right here, and my brain is not defective. Kade didn’t do anything to me. It’s just the mecca. The energy is strong and sometimes it takes a few minutes for me to get everything back into place. Mentally speaking.”
This wasn’t even a lie, and they all relaxed at the clear truth in my words. Still … Kade had something to do with it all. Kade and the mecca energy equally destroyed and rebuilt me. Almost like I couldn’t survive now without both of them, and yet I knew I had to. Neither were mine to keep forever.
Chapter Three
Burning bridges. Scarred feet.
After training with Kade, I showered and dressed for my royal appointments. Calista managed to get me into a dress and everything – hair up in a crown braid, mecca stone diadem on my head. First order of business was the summer festival on the Island, which was two weeks away, and apparently the queen had to be involved in every aspect of it, including decorations. Boring. But my people expected a royal touch in all aspects of the event. I was still hoping the day would have a double purpose – discussing an alliance with the bear and wolf armies so we could fight the fae as one – which was the only reason I was giving it any of my time.
I almost couldn’t believe it was summer festival time again. Where had the last twelve months gone? The leaves would soon be turning their multitude of reds, oranges, and yellows; fall was on the horizon. The wolves looked forward to it every year, the festival to celebrate the last days of summer.
It was a longstanding tradition, only missed in times of full-on shifter wars. All of the wolves and bears converged on the Island for a huge two-day festival. Two days without many rules, two days to try and reinforce the peace between our people. Some of the wolves chose to stick strictly to the wolf side of the Island, as did bears on their side, but a good number of shifters did venture out and mingle together. Got drunk, played games, got in fights, made friends, and of course enemies.
