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  "You would think so, but the truth is that I haven't been that guy—the one who was ready to back Alec no matter what—for a long time."

  "What changed?"

  "I guess you could say that I had a crisis of faith. Alec made some decisions that I didn't agree with, decisions that hurt me—that hurt people that I cared about—and suddenly I didn't know what to believe or who to trust anymore."

  "That doesn't sound unreasonable, Isaac."

  "Yeah, I know. I've been telling myself that for a while, but it's started to ring hollow lately. I'm not sure that my reasons were as pure as I originally thought. I realized a few days ago that I supported Alec at least partially because I didn't want to be the one leading the pack. Being submissive to anyone can suck, but Alec was better about that than almost anyone. By supporting him I got to enjoy the power of being the number two hybrid in the pack without the stress of trying to come up with a way to keep Brandon from rolling over the top of us."

  Celeste reached out and grabbed my hand as I walked past. She gently pulled me down onto the rock next to her.

  "That isn't something to be ashamed of."

  "Isn't it? It seems like it to me. You asked what Alec is like. Well, the truth is that he's everything you could want in a leader. He isn't perfect, but he tries hard to do the right thing and when he screws up he is willing to admit it and try to make things right.

  "Alec is the kind of guy who cares about other people. He does whatever he can to fight injustice. Even when he's falling apart he still does a better job taking care of his pack than most alphas. He's the real deal, and now that he's manifested his ability he has a chance to make a real difference, not just for his pack, but for everyone. That's why Ash agreed to join us. He came in without all of the baggage that the rest of us had and realized that Alec is the kind of guy people should want to hitch their wagons to."

  "If you really believe that then why haven't you hitched your wagon to him, Isaac?"

  "If you'd asked me this morning, I would have told you that I was resentful of the way that Alec was confiding in other people. Ash, Jaclyn, Rebekka—none of them had the history with him that I had, but they were all replacing me."

  "But you don't believe that now?"

  I shrugged uncomfortably. She hadn't let go of my hand yet, which was nice, but it felt wrong. At this point Jess—Jessica— didn't care what I did or who I saw, but it still felt disloyal to what she and I had had together before she'd lost her memories.

  "I think that all of that stuff is just a bunch of symptoms. The real problem is that I'm scared of stepping up and taking responsibility. It's easy when I don't have any choice, but it's a lot harder to do when I have other options. Being the alpha, means that there isn't anyone else to step in and fix things if you screw up.

  "A guy like Alec is the final arbiter, he doesn't have any peers, not really. I need to make a decision, I need to either step up and be who I have the potential to be, or I need to own up to the fact that I've been a fraud this entire time. Alec has moved beyond the point where he has use for someone like me. He needs someone who's all in."

  I hadn't planned on making such a heavy confession, especially not to Celeste, who seemed like she didn't know how to back down from any kind of challenge. She was so dominant that she took care of her people even after being overthrown by someone like Onyx.

  What I felt was something beyond embarrassment and all I could think of was the fact that I needed to get away from her, that I needed to hide until some of the pain had worn away. I stood to go, but Celeste still hadn't let go of my hand. She slipped in behind me and pressed up against my back as though trying to hug someone who didn't want to be hugged.

  "I think you still aren't giving yourself enough credit, Isaac. I think you're already most of the way to where you want to be. You're already taking the responsibility; you just aren't acknowledging the choice."

  Chapter 18

  Isaac Nazir

  The Lamia Enclave

  Celeste had slipped away, walking up the trail before I could say anything in response to her assertion. I was so surprised by what she'd said that I just sat there trying to make sense of her words for several seconds.

  I felt like I was almost there, like I could almost see the point she was trying to make, and then I realized that I'd let her leave the clearing without the escort that I'd promised her. I hadn't thought much of her concerns back in our rooms, but it wasn't the kind of thing that we should be leaving to chance.

  I took off at a sprint, trying to catch up with her, and my attempts to reconcile what she'd said with my view of the world were pushed to the back of my mind.

  Even at a sprint I wasn't fast enough to catch her. By the time I made it back to our rooms she'd already slipped behind the curtain to her bedroom. The vines and leaves that made up the curtains were unusually good at blocking sounds. I stood just a few feet from the curtain and imagined that I could hear her heartbeat from inside her room, but the truth was that I couldn't.

  I couldn't bring myself to go into her room and she was obviously not going to come out. She might as well have been on a different continent.

  After the better part of five minutes I forced myself to turn around and go into my room. I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep, but I dropped down onto my bed regardless. I closed my eyes but the scenes from the clearing kept playing through my mind.

  I could see her on the back of my eyelids, stretched out on the slab of rock taking in the sun as though we were a couple of normal teenagers out at the beach. The image changed and I could see her the way she'd looked the first night we'd arrived at the enclave, pale skin showing above and below the soft black material of her dress.

  The images started speeding up to the point where she seemed to run and jump—like a character from one of the old stop-motion films. It was as though my subconscious mind had been taking pictures of her at random times for days now without my conscious mind being aware of what was happening.

  My left hand was tingling from where she'd touched me earlier. It was intense almost to the point of being uncomfortable, much like the actual experience had been. It was as much a relief as it was a surprise when I fell asleep a few minutes later.

  Celeste was still in her room when I woke the next morning. I was pretty sure she wasn't asleep, but again I couldn't bring myself to break the silence between us. My feelings, about Jess and Celeste both, were just too confused for me to want to wade any deeper into that particular pool than I had to right now.

  I showered, grabbed something to eat on the way and then left our rooms as fast as possible so that Celeste wouldn't have to continue hiding in her rooms.

  Set found me walking down the path towards the main lamia cavern and accompanied me to the challenge ring without saying a word. Once we arrived, he waited only long enough for me to shift forms and stretch before beginning the training session.

  We started out with actual techniques again and I found myself learning a system of fighting that seemed to favor short, raking slashes, knees, and elbows, all of which were executed from extremely close range.

  It was an interesting style of combat, but partway through the session I started wondering why anyone as large as Set would want to fight at such close range and use striking surfaces that didn't allow him to use the venom in his claws that was the lamias' single greatest asset. The close-in blocks and attacks that I was learning were the kind of techniques that a small person would use against a much larger individual, but I couldn't think of any enemies other than the werewolves who were significantly larger than a lamia consort.

  Even werewolves weren't that much larger than a lamia. Definitely not enough larger to justify developing a completely different style of combat.

  "Set, this kind of fighting doesn't fit with what I would expect from your people."

  He looked at me for several seconds before nodding in agreement. Once again, I got the feeling that he was trying to translate difficult concept
s into English.

  "You know that we aren't from this place?"

  I pursed my lips. "There are legends among the people in South and Central America that I believe were spawned by interactions with your people. Is that what you mean?"

  "You mean the Aztec people?"

  I nodded, excited that we seemed to have found a common frame of reference, but he just frowned.

  "No, that wasn't our enclave. Before we were here, near the territory of your queen, we were somewhere else. With the…I think you call them pharaohs?"

  My eyes practically bugged out of my head. "How did you move your entire enclave? My understanding from Celeste, from my queen, is that you arrived here on this continent before its discovery by the Old World. How did you travel across the ocean when sailing technology was still so primitive?"

  "No, we didn't move. The enclave remains in the same place, only the portals move."

  My mind was spinning. It was the clearest proof yet that the enclave wasn't in Louisiana. When they wanted to move away from Egypt they apparently had just changed the position of the enclave as compared to what I thought of as the real world.

  "Okay, I think I understand, not how that is possible, but the fact that you did it. How does being in Egypt, being with the pharaohs, explain a fighting system that is best suited for fighting someone much bigger than you?"

  "No. Different move. Before we were here near your queen we were with the pharaohs. Before we were with the pharaohs we were somewhere else."

  Things that historians had wondered about for centuries suddenly clicked into place for me. The pyramids. The lamias were somehow responsible for them. There had been pyramids in Egypt, but there had also been pyramids in the Americas and in parts of Asia.

  Various historians had tried to prove a link between the different ancient cultures that had built pyramids, but nobody had been able to come up with a hypothesis that worked.

  All of those man-hours wasted. They'd never had any chance of figuring the link out, not without being willing to believe in things like werewolves, vampires and lamias. The sad thing was that we wolves could have put the pieces together if we'd ever managed to expand beyond North America.

  We had such a long life expectancy that we could have easily tied some of those disparate threads together, but the jaguars had been solidly in control of everything from current-day Mexico down, and Europe and the rest of the Old World was such a vampire and werewolf cesspit that nobody had gone over there and come back to report their findings.

  The lamias probably even explained the myths in Asia when it came to hydras and dragons. The lamias had taught them how to construct pyramids and in the process they'd spawned legends of giant, snake-like creatures that served as sources of knowledge and enlightenment.

  Set moved impatiently and I realized that I'd spent too long lost in the ramifications of what I thought he was telling me.

  "Sorry. Before you were with the pharaohs you were somewhere else. I think it was probably Asia— Thailand or Cambodia? I don't remember exactly where the pyramids over there are located."

  Set looked even more frustrated now. "No, that was another enclave. We were somewhere different. Not Louisiana, not Egypt. Not here…"

  He lapsed back into his native tongue for several words before looking at me expectantly. I had a feeling that we weren't going to make much progress now, but I decided to try one last time.

  "You weren't here? In the enclave?"

  "No. Enclave came later."

  "Where was your enclave before this one?"

  Set bent down and drew a circle in the sand that I thought was supposed to represent the Earth. Once I indicated that I understood, he wiped the circle away with his foot.

  "Not an enclave. Home. Enclave came later."

  I didn't think he was telling me that his people were from outer space, but I was drawing a blank on what else it could all mean.

  "You came from somewhere else."

  "Yes, but other things came here with us. Hunters. Much bigger than lamias, very dangerous. We call them-it the Consumed."

  It was hard, but I temporarily put aside the question of where his people had come from and focused on what he was telling me now.

  "So this is the style of fighting that you use when you are fighting the Consumed?"

  "Yes. That."

  It was interesting that Set's language skills seemed to degenerate so much when we got into more abstract questions. He obviously wasn't stupid, the only logical explanation seemed to be that we were touching on things that were important to him, things that he wasn't entirely comfortable discussing.

  "Are the Consumed the reason that you left Egypt, Set?"

  "Yes, and no. There were complications. It was the order of the queen."

  The things that I was learning were incredible, but they wouldn't keep me alive in the next challenge match, a match that was getting closer with each second. Still, there was a part of me that couldn't bear to let such an incredible source of information go.

  "Set, would it be possible for me to come here sometime later? After I've left with my queen? I wouldn't be coming back to ask for an audience with your queen, I'd be coming to talk to you."

  Set looked at me as though I'd lost my mind. "You have many strange ideas, Isaac Nazir. Men do not visit another enclave without their queen. Such a thing is without honor. How could you leave your queen without assistance?"

  I struggled for a way to explain things in a way that matched up with Set's world view. "My…queen may not be able to return. She has commitments that may not allow her to visit again, but she does not always need my help. What if I were to return with a different queen? Possibly the tiny queen who accompanied me here with my queen and the other sun person. Is there a way for me to return and not have to face challengers?"

  I was pretty sure that the concept of changing queens, of shifting one's loyalty between women would be anathema to Set, but I was hoping that I could muddy the waters by throwing Kristin into the mix. Surely they occasionally had new queens born in the enclave, and when that happened it was only logical that some of the lamias from the original enclave would be allowed to accompany the adolescent queen when she left to set up a new enclave.

  Set considered my question for several long moments.

  "I start to wonder if some of my brethren might not be right. Our very presence here exposes us to things that workers and consorts are not meant to know. These are questions and ideas that are meant for queens. I fear that our people will not recognize us when we return home."

  Fearing that I'd inadvertently pushed too hard, I started to apologize, but Set stopped me with a gesture.

  "With someone else it might be possible. It would be a question for my queen, but it would not be possible for you to return, Isaac Nazir. You stress the way of things too much."

  "I'm sorry that my questions are so disruptive, Set. I meant no harm by them. I merely wish to learn more about your people."

  "You misunderstand me. Your questions and ideas are concerning, but they are not the reason that you wouldn't be able to return. Your sun is too bright and it grows brighter still."

  "I don't understand what you mean."

  Set waved at the cavern we were standing in. "It grows smaller with every passing day. Surely you have noticed this."

  I looked around and realized for the first time that he was right. The change was very small, but during my last fight there had been a ring of lamias watching us that had been two deep in spots. Now there wasn't enough space between the wall and the circle for two lamias to stand.

  "How is this possible?"

  Set shrugged. "It is the queen. She shapes the world stuff, but we consorts and workers hide the enclave from the Consumed. Fewer workers mean the enclave has to be smaller to hide it, but the presence of sun people always makes it harder to hide."

  "So shape shifters create some kind of…beacon that lures the Consumed to your home?"

  "Yes, and no.
Sun people make hiding difficult. Lure the Consumed to enclave, not home. You are special case, nearly ready to expand, bigger…lure."

  I couldn't decide if he was saying that my shifting shapes was what was causing the problems or if he was trying to reference something else. I started to ask another question, but Set waved me back into the center of the circle.

  Apparently he was done answering questions.

  Chapter 19

  Isaac Nazir

  The Lamia Enclave

  The next fight was a real doozy. I was starting to suspect that Set waited for me to heal from the last fight before throwing me back in the ring. If that was the case, then the sheer amount of punishment I took training with him bought me an extra day or so.

  My next opponent was another worker, roughly the same size as my previous challenger, but faster on his feet than anyone I'd faced up to that point. I tried every trick I knew and still thought several times that I wasn't going to beat him.

  Despite my best efforts, I couldn't manage to control the tempo and terms of the fight. He was just too good for that. He came in close and went to town on me. He wasn't using the style of fighting that Set had been teaching me though. It was more just the result of him being slightly shorter than me. It was only natural for him to close and try to get inside of my reach.

  The fight turned into the kind of battering match that I knew at the start I wasn't likely to win. Neither of us was getting anything vital with the blows that we were landing, but we were still each bleeding from a couple of dozen spots within seconds.

  I kept trying to back away and get myself room to maneuver, but he stayed right inside of my reach and kept landing blows on me at the rate of three for every two hits I managed. He landed a particularly vicious blow to the right side of my chest towards the end of the second minute and something snapped inside of me.

  The lamia I was fighting pulled his hand out of my chest and then threw a short, hooking slash at my neck. All of the hours of training with Set hadn't been enough to wire enough reflexes to go toe-to-toe with a consort using nothing but their preferred fighting style, but it had been enough to make a couple of very elementary blocks reflexive.