by Tami Lund
Given the financial state of their home, the Lightbearers would most likely be forced to leave the safety of the coterie to seek employment or other means of raising currency. They could no longer go on the way they had been for the last five hundred years.
Tanner thought about Josh Tigre’s pack. Maybe he could call on Josh, ask for his assistance in protecting the Lightbearers, as they ventured out on their own. The irony that a pack of shifters would protect them from another pack of shifters was not lost on Tanner. But he’d been absolutely convinced that Josh held none of the beliefs Tanner’s father did.
Even if Josh did agree to help protect the Lightbearers, Tanner could not be certain it would be enough. There would still be a threat. There would always be a threat. If not the shifters, then the fae. The fae did not visit this world often, but when they did, they would be well aware of any Lightbearer who happened to be wandering about outside the coterie.
Even humans were a threat, to some extent. Humans lived blissfully unaware of the magical community. If they were to suspect that Lightbearers, shifters, and the like existed, well, with social media and immediate access to news feeds, Tanner could only imagine how quickly packs and the coterie would be overcome with reporters and the paparazzi, not to mention the scientists and analysts and who knows what else.
Maybe the humans were the worst of the threats. Hell, just about the only type of being that wasn’t a threat were vampires, and that was only because a Lightbearer’s blood was poison to a vampire. That was because, Tanner assumed, a Lightbearer’s magic came directly from the sun, which was also poisonous to vampires.
According to what Tanner was looking at, the Lightbearers within this community were going to have no choice but to step outside their coterie, to intermingle with the humans. To get jobs to support themselves, and their king, if they so chose to continue in that vein.
How long would that last? Once the Lightbearers had a taste of democracy, of the American Way, how long would they continue to support their king, to look to him as their leader? Sander might be a decent enough guy, but thus far, Tanner wasn’t overly impressed with his leadership skills. And his financial management skills were clearly abhorrent.
Not to mention his sexist decisions. Refusing to acknowledge his one and only daughter as the heir to his kingdom, simply because she was female. Olivia was one of the smartest, bravest women Tanner had ever met. In his opinion, she would be a far better ruler than her father could ever be.
Sander’s refusal to train any of the women within the coterie to defend themselves, strictly on the basis they were female, was another point of contention with Tanner. Even the men weren’t trained very well, in his opinion. They might be able to summon swords and arrows with magic, but they lacked the skill, the grace, of a contingency of guards who practiced daily, who worked well together, who were prepared for any threat.
The king of the Lightbearers needed a strong CFO and an even stronger head of security. Unfortunately, Tanner suspected it might be too late.
The coterie was bankrupt.
The sound of footsteps pulled Tanner from his musings, a moment before the king walked through the door and into the library, too fast for him to slip the ledger back into the desk drawer, if he even intended to do so in the first place. When Sander spotted him, Tanner sat at the desk, the ledger open in front of him, no doubt a barely concealed and furious look on his face.
“What are you doing sitting at my desk?” Sander demanded.
Tanner continued to sit there, waiting for Sander to notice the journal sitting open before him. It did not take long.
“How dare you look at that ledger,” Sander blustered as he stormed into the room and then hesitated, his hand hovering over the desk, as if he wanted to snatch away the book but was afraid to do so.
“Go ahead,” Tanner encouraged. “Take it.”
Sander looked as if he was afraid Tanner might bite his hand if he did so. Tanner thought that it wasn’t such a bad idea.
“I’ve already looked through the entire thing. You’re broke. The coterie is broke.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“How did it happen?” Tanner asked. “Something specific, or just lack of intelligent financial planning for the past five hundred years?”
“It hasn’t been for five hundred years,” Sander said stiffly.
“So previous kings have been able to manage their finances? It’s just you then?”
Sander looked outraged, but he did not defend himself.
“What happened to send you into financial ruin?”
“That is none of your business.”
“Do your subjects know? Does your family know?”
“No one knows,” Sander said as he scowled at Tanner.
“What happened?”
Sander’s shoulders slumped. He walked over to the windows and bent over the small, delicate table situated there. When he turned around, he held a tiny crystal glass in his hand. It was full of burgundy liquid. A guilty look crawled across his face and then he downed the contents.
He turned toward the small table again. When he turned back this time, he held two tiny wine glasses in his hands. He walked over to Tanner and offered him one. Tanner eyed it skeptically.
“Faery wine,” Sander explained, and he took a fortifying sip. “Careful, it’s potent.”
“How is it you have faery wine?” Tanner tentatively tasted the stuff. It was heady and sweet. “Not bad,” he decided.
“I maintain occasional contact with the queen of the fae,” Sander said.
The two men drank in silence for a few moments, and then Sander spoke again. “My mate likes to plan parties.” He sounded resigned.
“Olivia says it’s therapy for her.”
Sander became instantly angry. “Olivia should not be sharing such personal information with the likes of you,” he said hotly.
“Olivia is sleeping with the likes of me, and I figure you can’t get much more personal than that,” Tanner pointed out.
He hadn’t meant to be so abrupt with his announcement, but his recently acquired knowledge made him feel bolder. The Lightbearer was barely hanging on by the tips of his fingernails, and could fall from the ledge at any moment. If something wasn’t done, there wouldn’t even be a kingdom for Olivia’s firstborn son to inherit.
Sander sputtered and turned red in the face.
“Don’t tell me you hadn’t figured that out by now,” Tanner commented.
Sander lifted his glass and emptied the contents. “No,” he admitted. “I hadn’t.”
“Oh. Well, she is,” Tanner said lamely, feeling slightly abashed.
Sander squeezed the stem of his wine glass so tightly, Tanner wondered that it didn’t break.
“I expected better of my daughter,” he said coldly.
Tanner didn’t say anything, just watched Sander steadily.
“She is a princess. The only child of the king of the Lightbearers.”
“As I understand it, you won’t declare her heir because she’s female.”
“Don’t tell me it isn’t the same with your kind.”
“Haven’t you read your own books?” Tanner asked, waving at the ancient volume still lying on the desk. “With my kind, that right is based on blood link to the pack master, regardless of their sex. Hell, it doesn’t even have to be the firstborn.”
Sander pursed his lips. “I do not know what your intentions are toward my daughter, but this cannot— ”
“I intend to mate with her,” Tanner said, cutting him off.
Sander went red in the face again and began sputtering incoherently. Tanner decided then and there that he and the king would never be fast friends. They’d be lucky to tolerate one another over the obligatory family dinner. He wondered if Olivia would insist upon living here in the beach house, once they were mated, or if she would be open to getting their own place, so he would not have to deal with the stiff, angry king on a daily basis.
“You need help,” Tanner pushed forward. “You need a financial advisor, and you need someone to lead your guards, to train them properly. You aren’t going to have a choice. You are going to have to let your Lightbearers go out into the human world, to fend for themselves. The only way to truly protect them is to ensure your guards are solidly trained.”
“They managed to catch you just after you escaped,” Sander said coolly.
“We managed to escape in the first place,” Tanner pointed out. “And then they managed to put a handful of arrows through their own princess.”
The reminder infuriated him. The idea that he had almost lost Olivia... It would haunt his dreams for the rest of his life.
Sander pursed his lips again and fell silent for a moment. Then he snidely said, “You think you have all the answers? What are you that you think you can tell a king what to do?”
“I am a pack master,” Tanner replied, even though technically, it wasn’t true. “I come from the largest shifter pack in North America. And my pack isn’t anywhere near bankruptcy.”
Sander reddened and sputtered and downed a third glass of wine. He muttered under his breath and probably assumed Tanner couldn’t hear or understand what he said, but Tanner’s shifter hearing allowed him to do just that. Sander felt trapped— “Just like the wild animal he is— ” he muttered to himself. Olivia’s near-death experience had given him quite a fright. His mate had been nearly inconsolable when she’d first learned of “the accident” as Sander called the attack. She’d immediately begun planning a ridiculously lavish party. There wasn’t even enough money in the coiffeurs to pay for that one party, let alone the normal cost of living for the king’s family.
“Charge a tax,” Tanner suggested after he’d let Sander mutter for a few moments. “Or have your subjects give you a portion of the goods they make or raise. If they respect you, I can’t see that there would be much complaint about it. If they don’t...” He shrugged. “You’re their king. They don’t have a choice, do they?”
Sander looked newly outraged, probably at discovering Tanner had heard his mutterings. But then the faery wine apparently kicked in, because he suddenly developed a backbone. He narrowed his eyes and glared at Tanner.
“I want you and your pack of shifters out of my coterie,” he demanded.
Tanner’s demeanor did not change. “I have found a pack for Lisa and her pups and my mother. I will let them know today, and make the necessary arrangements to get them moved out.”
“And what of you?”
He steadily watched the king. “I will let Olivia make that decision.”
Chapter 20
Sofia was an adventurous young shifter. Her parents were forever admonishing her about getting into trouble, about discovering new ways to inadvertently end up in potential danger. As she was four years old, she wasn’t yet good at comprehending the why’s and what’s about their admonishments. She was too eager to learn about new things.
Lightbearers were certainly new to her. Her old pack master believed they held great magic, and that it was possible for a shifter to gain that magic, if he could only catch and kill one of them. Part of their shifter education was to sit about the pack master’s knee and listen to him tell his stories about magic and killing and shifters being the top of the magical food chain.
“Lightbearers exist for us to kill,” he said, “In the same way as four-legged mammals exist for us to eat.”
Sofia was fascinated by the Lightbearers with whom she’d come to live. Probably, the glow they wore like elegant jewelry encouraged that enthrallment. Then there was the fact that Tanner, who, according to her mother, had become their new pack master, glowed, too. Just like a Lightbearer.
But Tanner hadn’t killed a Lightbearer. Tanner didn’t believe his dad’s stories. Besides, Tanner was so nice to them, especially to the prettiest one, the one who insisted Sofia call her Olivia.
Olivia was a princess, according to Dane’s niece, who had stopped by for a visit the day Sofia and the other shifters were taken away in magical chains. Sofia hated the chains. They frightened her, and those Lightbearer guards were not as nice as Olivia and Dane and Cici. She didn’t understand why the shifters were the ones in chains. They were the top of the magical food chain.
Then Olivia had rescued them. Rescued by a princess. It was better than any children’s book her mother had ever read to her. Now they were all living in this great big house that was full of windows and sat on a huge cliff overlooking a lake that was so large it could be the ocean. Sofia had never seen the ocean before, so she liked to pretend the lake really was an ocean.
Because of all the windows, Sofia could scarcely sleep past dawn. But her mother could, because her little baby brother had to eat every few hours all night long, so Momma said she needed to sleep whenever she could, and dawn was when the littlest pup chose to sleep.
Left to her own devices, Sofia had wandered about the big glass house until she discovered the kitchen. The kitchen was really a series of rooms, all huge and all bustling with activity. The smells had been what led her there. One lady Lightbearer was in charge. Her name was Carley and she was as nice as Olivia and Dane and Cici. She smiled warmly at Sofia and made a sandwich of warm biscuits, a sausage patty, and freshly made cherry jam. It was so good, Sofia ate two, and washed it all down with a tall glass of milk.
Carley then shooed her out of the kitchen because she said the queen was throwing a fancy dinner party tonight, and she had a million things to do to prepare. Sofia wondered if she would get to go to the fancy party. She didn’t have any fancy clothes, though, because when they’d left their pack, Momma had been crying and hadn’t really paid attention when she’d stuffed clothes into Sofia’s bag.
Sofia tried to retrace her steps and head back to the suite of rooms she shared with her mother and baby brother, but the glass house was so huge that she became lost, and found herself at the end of a corridor, in front of a door leading outside. There was a garden outside the door, and the north side of the garden was edged with several rows of cherry trees. Sofia loved cherries, and she could see that the trees were heavy with fat, ripe fruit. She wasn’t supposed to eat cherries unless it was under the strict supervision of her mother, but Sofia knew how to bite into the fruit and spit out the pit so she wouldn’t choke. She didn’t need to wait for her momma to wake up to have a taste of fresh cherries, plucked right from the source.
She slipped through the door and ran through the garden toward the trees. She could hear voices, kid voices, indicating she wasn’t the only one who thought cherries were delicious. When she came upon the cluster of Lightbearer children, they all had red stains on their faces and the front of their shirts, and their fingers were dark from picking so much fruit.
“Hi,” she said shyly, and all five turned to look at her at the same time. There were three boys and two girls. All but one was at least a few years older than her. The youngest girl, who looked to be about Sofia’s age, widened her eyes and backed away as if she thought Sofia might attack her.
“I’m Sofia,” she announced proudly.
The boys looked at one another and then back at Sofia. None of them introduced themselves.
“You’re a shifter,” one of the boys commented.
Sofia nodded. It wasn’t a big secret. Not anymore.
“I heard your kind likes to try to eat my kind,” the same boy said.
Sofia shook her head. Eat Lightbearers? Gross.
The boy walked toward her. The other two fell into formation, flanking him. The two girls hesitated, and then trailed after them. Sofia stood there, feeling a strange sense of alarm. The way the first boy looked at her, it didn’t seem very nice. More like the guards than Olivia or Dane or Cici or Carley the cook.
He was two heads taller than her, and the other two boys were only a shade shorter than him. They towered over her, looking down at her as if she were a particularly disgusting sort of bug. She shrank away from them, frightened
by the menacing look in their eyes. The girls stepped up, and Sofia was surrounded by Lightbearer children.
She sensed she would regret her decision to help herself to cherries right from the tree.
* * * *
Genevieve Bennett, once Genevieve Vanderling, had been born and bred to be a queen. Her family, so it was said, was connected to fae royalty. Her parents raised her with the expectation that she would catch the young prince’s eye, that they might be mated someday.
Their plan worked.
Unfortunately, Genevieve fully understood her role as queen, and held incredibly high standards for herself. She lost three babes in the womb, before Olivia finally, finally stuck.
Sander fretted and her healer relegated her to her bed for the duration of the pregnancy, to ensure this one would, indeed, see its way to the end, even though they knew almost from the start that it was a girl, not a boy. But Genevieve figured if she could carry this one to the end, she would be able to carry another. A male, for Sander to declare as his heir, to carry on the line, to be king someday.
She would be the mate of a king and the mother of a king.
The labor and delivery were terrible. It was a ridiculously long, painful affair. No matter what the healer tried, the babe would not leave Genevieve’s womb. After three days, mother and babe were exhausted, near to giving up. The desperate healer suggested something so daring, so frightening, that at first, Sander refused. But another day went by and it became all too clear that he would lose both his mate and his babe if he did not do something.
“Cut her,” he instructed.
So the healer did, slicing open the mother’s body to free the babe who would not come out via normal means. The process was actually uncomplicated, and the babe was pulled from her mother’s womb without incident. While a servant tended to the babe, the healer focused on healing the queen.
Therein lay the problem. Closing up the gaping, bleeding wound was the difficult part. It took the full magic of three healers to finally complete the task, and it was so sloppy, so poorly done, that they warned the queen she might have difficulty conceiving again. Lightbearer healers did not normally resort to such drastic measures to heal someone, so they were wholly unprepared for the process of repairing the cut afterward.
