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  "How was your conversation with her?"

  "Disquieting. There are other considerations where you are concerned that make it harder than normal to assign you a proper opponent. I believe that she recommended that I stop picking your opponents and instead allow the others to volunteer. You will fight the weakest of all the combatants who volunteer for any particular challenge."

  I mulled that over. As long as the lamias were all able to watch each fight then they would have a decent idea of how good I was. In a shape shifter pack that would just mean that only the very best fighters in the pack, the ones who were virtually guaranteed to win, would volunteer to face off against me, but the lamias would probably be compelled by their honor to all volunteer unless they were absolutely positive that they couldn't beat me.

  Once again I was basing my chances of survival on the goodwill and honor of a race of beings that I knew next to nothing about, but by now I should have been used to that. I would agree to his proposal, but I was most curious about his comments about his queen.

  "Disquieting?"

  "Yes…I'm afraid I lack the words to adequately explain further."

  I wanted to press him on that point, but he'd gone completely still, which I was pretty sure was a sign that he was uncomfortable. I'd seen the guards outside the main lamia cavern freeze up in the exact same manner each time that I'd approached them.

  "You feel that the course of action…suggested by the queen satisfies the requirements of your personal honor then?"

  There was a long pause as though Set was translating a particularly difficult problem or possibly just that he didn't know how to answer.

  "She is the queen. She is beyond concepts such as honor. If she orders me to take a particular course then I have no choice. One might say that there is more honor in following the mandates of one's queen than in any other action. She supersedes individual honor."

  That wasn't very reassuring. My survival depended in no small part on the honor of Set and the others, but they could be ordered to set their honor aside at any point by their queen. I still didn't understand the other considerations Set had referenced, but he was giving the vibe of someone who had been pressed as far as he was willing to be pressed.

  "I am satisfied that you have done all that can be expected to uphold honor, Set. If you are willing, then I am ready to begin my instruction."

  Chapter 17

  Isaac Nazir

  The Lamia Enclave

  By the time that Set released me for the day I was tired and sore in a way that rarely happened to a shape shifter after we manifested our first alternate form. Despite my injuries, Set had worked me as hard as I could ever remember being worked. I was actually glad that I wasn't at one hundred percent. I wasn't sure that I would have survived the training session that Set would have put me through if I'd been healthy.

  I stumbled into our cave a little after what felt like noon, and found Celeste pacing back and forth through the kitchen. She acknowledged me with a nod, but didn't even slow down.

  Neither of us said anything for nearly a full minute while she continued to pace, and then my hunger finally got the best of me. I waited until she was on the far end of her circuit and then darted in and grabbed one of the biggest yellow melons.

  "You could have said something; I would have waited for you."

  I stopped mid-bite and looked longingly at the fruit in my hand before looking up at her. "I didn't want to spoil your crazy cabin fever motif. You seem to be putting a lot of work into it."

  For the briefest of instants I thought she was going to get mad at me, but then she smiled.

  "I guess you're right. I've been stuck inside here for days and I'm starting to go a little stir-crazy."

  "So leave. Nobody is stopping you. Ash and Kristin will be fine for an hour while you go out and stretch your legs. If you're really that worried about them I can always stay here with them."

  She looked a little guilty. "I wasn't even thinking of them, actually. You're right, they would be fine. It's the lamias. I'm not sure what they expect out of a queen. Their queen never seems to leave that cave, and I'm worried that if I go out into the valley that they will decide I'm not…queenly enough and it will ruin our chances of talking to their queen."

  "That's silly. They aren't going to decide that. Besides, it isn't even their call. The queen will decide when she wants to talk to us. The consorts and workers don't have anything to do with it."

  "How can you be so sure? The queen doesn't work in a vacuum. I'm sure she talks to the consorts at least. Who's to say that she's not going to be influenced by them if they decide that I'm not acting the part?"

  I wanted to argue with her, but I was the one with the most to lose if she was right. Given that I could lose the next challenge match at any point, it didn't seem smart to risk anything that might stretch our stay here out any longer than absolutely necessary.

  "What about if I go out there with you? The lamias said that there wasn't anything dangerous that would go past the curtain, so Ash and Kristin will be safe while we're gone. The lamias were okay with you coming here in the first place, they can hardly get up in arms about you going out to the valley as long as you have a proper escort."

  "I'm sure you have better things to do, Isaac. You look like you're about to fall over at any minute."

  I filled a large cup with water from the faucet that I was pretty sure came from some kind of overhead cistern as I shook my head.

  "I'll be okay, I'm just a little tired. Let me bring something to eat and I'll be fine. Besides, what else am I going to do? I can't take a nap yet and it's not like I can fire up my tablet and do research or anything."

  After a few seconds she hesitantly nodded. "Thanks, Isaac. That would be nice."

  We set out on one of the larger paths. It was nearly big enough for two lamia to walk alongside each other, so the two of us had no problem walking side by side in human form. The melon at my side was a reassuring weight and I found myself wondering how long it would be before she found a place to stop so that I could eat.

  "Why don't you lead the way, Isaac? You probably know of a place where we could stop and sit down."

  I nodded and steered her towards a large clearing off to one side of the valley. A tiny tributary of the stream trickled through one side, but other than that it was fully enclosed except for the path that connected it to the rest of the valley.

  The privacy would hopefully mean that Celeste would be able to relax a little. It looked for a moment as though she still wasn't going to be able to let her hair down, but then she took a deep breath and walked over to the stream.

  As she sat down and rolled up her jeans to mid-calf so that she could put her feet in the stream, I sat down on a nearby rock and bit into the melon I'd brought along with me.

  Celeste waded in the cold water for a couple of minutes and then about the time that I finished up with my lunch, she came over to a nearby slab of rock and sat down.

  "So you were Alec's right-hand man for the last four or five years. What's he like?"

  For a second I thought she wasn't serious, but when I looked over at her, there wasn't any indication that she was trying to be funny. She wasn't grinning at me, she wasn't even watching to see my expression. She'd stretched out on the rock with her eyes closed and her shirt pulled up so her bare stomach could get some sunlight.

  "He's okay."

  "Really? You've known him basically your entire life and that's the best you can manage?"

  I felt a spark of something from my beast, but he was too tired and well-fed to get worked up over anything right now.

  "Alec is everything you would expect out of the heir to the monarchy."

  "A power-hungry fiend who will sacrifice anyone and anything to expand his sphere of influence?"

  I frowned at her despite the fact that her eyes were closed. "No, he's nothing at all like that."

  She opened her eyes a crack to look at me and then shrugged and closed them a
gain. "Sorry, the monarchy represents different things to different people. My family felt like his ancestors screwed them out of their position in the old order. Before the monarchy was established we were one of the preeminent packs in North America. His family and mine both had a history of producing hybrids with exceptional abilities, but unlike his ancestors, mine never used their abilities to take over the rest of North America."

  "I've been through all of this with Ash. I did some research after the last time we talked and there were some very well-respected pack leaders who contradicted the history that your ancestors passed down to you."

  "The victors always rewrite history to make themselves look better. You should know that, Isaac."

  "Why is it that I should know that?"

  She looked over at me again and shook her head. "You don't really think that you're some kind of anonymous face in the crowd, do you? Every single wolf pack, regardless of whether they come down for or against the Coun'hij, maintains a file on the dominant personalities in every other pack. We all have a big dossier on Alec Graves and most of us have at least a small file with your name on it."

  "Why? I'm basically nobody."

  "We both know that isn't the truth. You have to know how uncommon it is for any hybrid to back up their alpha like you did for all of those years. It happens, but not often. In a lot of packs it's only the lowest-of-the-low subordinates who display that level of loyalty to the pack leader. They know that the alpha is their natural ally against the other dominants inside the pack, the ones who tend to make their lives miserable.

  "Then again, maybe you don't know all of that. Sometimes I forget. I grew up in a pretty messed-up situation, but in some ways your pack has always been even unhealthier than mine. You were always half a step from being devoured by the other Sanctuary pack."

  "Yeah, we were. Brandon nearly killed us all half a dozen times and nobody else even lifted a hand to help us out."

  I didn't even try to keep the bitterness from my voice. Celeste had lain back down and closed her eyes, but she reached over and patted me on the leg.

  "Welcome to the club. My family has been clawing tooth and nail for centuries in an effort to keep the New Orleans pack from being taken away from them. We've had hundreds of millions of dollars extorted from us and most of us die before we hit middle age. As soon as there is a couple of spare Hunts walking around, whoever is running the pack arranges for some kind of accident to befall the older generation and then starts hammering away on the younger pair of Hunts.

  "Nobody has helped us out either, everything we've accomplished has been on our own, but I think that's something to be proud of. I take care of the submissives inside of my pack. I shield them from the worst of Onyx's excesses."

  Her eyes were closed still, so I took advantage of that fact to really look at her again. She was still gorgeous, nothing had changed there. Someone else might have registered the flawless skin and perfect body and stopped there, but I already knew there was more to her than just her beauty.

  It was there all of the time if you knew what to look for, but it was especially obvious now that she was talking about her pack. There was a fierceness to her that was breathtaking. It was the kind of thing that made me want to spend hours watching her. That protectiveness was the perfect complement to her unearthly physical perfection. It completed her in ways that I'd never even realized were possible.

  "You're very loyal to your people back in New Orleans."

  "Damn straight I am. It's Onyx's pack to everyone in the outside world, but it's me who keeps the wheels from coming off. I'm the one they turn to when there's some kind of disaster and they are loyal to me in return. If Onyx wasn't so powerful I would have overthrown him long ago and taken my pack back."

  I believed her. She seemed like someone who wouldn't be stopped if there was a way to achieve what she wanted.

  "What is Onyx's power? Back in the day we didn't have much information on the other packs. Alec and Donovan were mostly just focused on trying to keep one step ahead of Brandon. They're getting up to speed on the rest of the world now that Brandon is out of the way, but I haven't been in a position to see any of the reports that they've been reading."

  "Pain. Onyx's power is the ability to create the kind of all-consuming pain that makes even a hybrid wish they were dead. It's completely debilitating. What's worse, he sucks something away from you while he's using it. I've seen him kill people with nothing more than the extended application of his ability."

  A low whistle escaped me. "That's pretty world-class. That makes him more dangerous than Agony was, more deadly than Jaclyn Annikov or any of half a dozen other tier one or two hybrids who come to mind. How is he not on the Coun'hij as one of the inner circle already?"

  I'd almost said that Onyx was more deadly than Grayson, but I'd remembered at the last second that most of the rest of the world didn't know that he'd been working for Alec. It wasn't that I didn't trust Celeste, but if she was possibly going to be hanging around someone like Onyx after this then it would be better for her not to know certain things. What she didn't know couldn't be tortured out of her.

  "He could have taken a place on the Coun'hij at almost any time, but he doesn't want one. In his mind, ruling the New Orleans pack is a better route to power than what he would get by joining in with Puppeteer and the rest. He still stays on good terms with them, but so far he's retained his independence."

  "Because of the money. He's staying with your pack because of the money he hopes to steal from you."

  "Yeah, only you'd be more correct if you were to say that he's staying because of the money that he's hoping to continue to steal from us. The rate of decline in our family's wealth has more than quadrupled since Onyx took over the pack. He's got a real gift for finding weaknesses and using them against people. Just since Ash left, Onyx has made himself more than half a billion dollars richer just off of what he's taken from me.

  "That doesn't include the tithe from the pack or the investment returns that he's made on the rest of his money. At the rate he's going he'll be able to challenge Alec Graves on the financial front before too much longer."

  I chuckled. I couldn't help myself, the thought of an upstart thief like Onyx trying to buy and sell the combined team of Alec and Donovan was just so funny.

  "Sorry, I'm not making light of what you've been through. You'd just have to know…it's not really my place to say, but trust me—Onyx has a long, long way to go before he'll be in a position where he can threaten Alec on a financial level. Alec and Donovan are in a class all by themselves."

  Celeste had started to sit up, obviously ready to give me a piece of her mind, but my explanation mollified her enough to avoid a fight.

  "That doesn't really make me feel any better, but it's nice to know that there are bigger fish than Onyx out there. I've been stuck inside the same tiny little pond for so long that sometimes it seems like Onyx is the biggest threat conceivable."

  My mirth died instantly. "I can understand that. That's the way that I used to feel about Brandon. It's hard when you're in those kinds of situations to worry about the bigger picture. That was part of the difference between Alec and me. He always kept one eye out for the stuff that none of the rest of us figured we'd ever live long enough to have to worry about.

  "Even now, it's hard sometimes for me to believe that Brandon is really dead. He was like a force of nature. Alec didn't see it because he was the one who was usually mixing it up with Brandon, but there were times when I'd be in the middle of a fight of my own and I'd catch bits and pieces of their fight. I think Brandon was holding back on everyone all along. I think that as deadly as he was, he was still keeping people from seeing his real potential because he was worried that it would scare the Coun'hij badly enough for them to have Puppeteer show up with two dozen hybrids."

  Celeste was silent for a while as she digested what I'd said. I realized that was one of the things that I liked about her. She was as capable of rattling off a re
sponse in anger as anyone else, but most of the time she considered what she heard and made sure that she understood what it really meant before she responded.

  "I wasn't there, I didn't see the body, but all indications are that Worthingfield really is dead. He's not the kind of person to keep a low profile for months to convince everyone that he's gone. He was too narcissistic for something like that."

  I nodded. "I know. I did actually see his body before we buried him, and you're right about the fact that he isn't the kind of person to go to ground, but even so it still feels like this impossible thing."

  "You guys accomplished something great. You should be proud to have brought him down. Everything I ever heard about him indicated that Worthingfield was no good."

  "I didn't have anything to do with it. That was all Alec. It was the very first time that his ability manifested. One second Brandon was about to kill Alec and then everyone collapsed to the ground. I was positive that we were all about to die, but Alec came through for us."

  "I think that you aren't giving yourself enough credit, Isaac. I said earlier that the kind of loyalty you displayed to Alec was rare, but the reason it is so significant is that when an alpha has that kind of support they invariably accomplish a lot more than they would have without it. Knowing that they've got the second strongest fighter in the pack backing them up means that they can do things other pack leaders couldn't even consider, it means that they can take risks that nobody else can take. It makes a difference."

  "That's not making me feel any better."

  "Now you're not making any sense. I just basically told you that Alec and the rest of your pack wouldn't have survived long enough for him to manifest his power if not for you supporting him like you did. Indirectly or otherwise, you saved all of your friends and family. You should feel like a million bucks right now."

  I couldn't remain seated any longer. I stood and started pacing, making a circuit around the clearing while Celeste watched me.