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  "I know, I had the same thought, but I don't love the implication. Will the reservoir gradually empty back out or have I already pretty much shot my bolt?"

  Mallory's smile and shrug were sympathetic, but she obviously didn't know any more at this point than I did.

  "I would tend to doubt that to be the case, Alec. Our abilities are still governed by natural rules and laws, they just sometimes exploit them in ways that modern science still can't explain. My suspicion would be that the power you're sending will tend to dissipate out of whatever container it is housed in. Things tend to move from high concentration to low concentration, so the simple passage of time should help empty your 'reservoir' out."

  I breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn't a guarantee, but at least it offered some hope that I'd still be able to protect my friends and family.

  Mallory looked like she wanted to get up and pace, but she forced her hands still and then looked back up at me. "I can offer only two other pieces of advice. Until you know more, don't use your power cavalierly, but at the same time don't hoard your power when you are in danger. The ability to drop four people at once does you no good if you let one person kill you because you were trying to protect yourself against that future four-person threat."

  "That makes sense. I need to bind some of the other packs to me sooner rather than later so that I've got resources to stave off minor threats or I could find myself always depleting my ability in order to deal with penny-ante stuff. What was the other bit of counsel?"

  She was debating on what to tell me again. She was trying to keep her uncertainty off of her face, but I'd spent too much time with her and she'd spent too much time by herself for her to fool me.

  "Keep an open mind about your power. With active powers like the one you have, it is possible sometimes that it isn't the power that comes up short, it's your own belief in what the power can do that stops you from achieving what you otherwise might."

  I'd never heard anything like that before, at least not in so many words. It did, however, make me think of the one time I'd met Tasha's mother.

  "Jaclyn Annikov once said that she believed her power was triggered by need, that it didn't appear until she had something really important on the line."

  Mallory's smile was sad. "That's fitting. Jaclyn is an example of someone who limited herself. The last time I saw her she was using her ability at much less than half of her potential but she was so convinced that she was operating at the very edges of her capability that there wasn't anything I could do to convince her otherwise."

  I swallowed a couple of times while I processed what Mallory had just said. "She's already incredibly powerful."

  "Yes, she is. I suspect that she's hitting with a larger charge now than she was twenty years ago, but she has the potential to strike with power much more akin to a lightning strike than a Taser. She could quite literally kill with a touch if she just believed herself capable of doing so."

  It was a sobering picture. Not just the idea of Jaclyn killing other hybrids with a discharge several times what she was currently capable of, but the thought that she'd limited herself in such an arbitrary fashion. How many times over the years had she lost a pack member because she hadn't been able to recruit the full measure of her ability? If she'd hit Anton with that kind of power he might not have shrugged it off quite so easily. Ash and Kristin would never have met and Jaclyn's pack wouldn't have lost all of the wolves that Anton had killed. I pulled my focus back to the present and speared Mallory with my gaze.

  "What aren't you telling me, Mallory? I'm better off knowing it rather than guessing."

  Mallory sighed and put her hands up in surrender. "It's more of the same. I can't see the specifics of your ability, but you glow more powerfully than anyone else I've ever seen, even your father."

  I shrugged. "Dad made good use of his ability, but it was hardly game-changing."

  Mallory shook her head. "Your father's death was one of the greatest tragedies since the fall of the monarchy. His primary power was his ability to heal, but he actually had a secondary power."

  "I didn't even know that was possible!"

  "Neither did I until I scanned him myself. He didn't even develop it until a couple of years before you were born."

  "What was it?"

  "Your father's healing ability came from a natural affinity to life. He had the ability to bring a similar kind of affinity out in others."

  She was dancing around the answer, but it was the missing piece of something that I'd never been able to explain.

  "The population explosion in the pack. He caused it, didn't he?"

  "Yes, yes, he did. It was statistically impossible and I suspect it was part of what brought things to a head with the Coun'hij. Nearly every mated pair in the pack had a child within a few months of each other despite the fact that most of our kind will try for years before actually having a child."

  It was almost too amazing for words. No wonder Mallory had been struggling to just come right out and say it.

  "If he'd had another fifteen years the pack would have been unstoppable. Who else knew?"

  "Just me. We tried to keep the births quiet, tried to dismiss them as nothing more than an odd fluke, but the Coun'hij could read the writing on the wall as well as you just did. The pack would have increased by fifteen or sixteen moonborn within the next decade and a half, which would have been a significant increase to our combat power, and there would probably have been another crop of children born within the next three to five years."

  I wanted to yell or throw things, but nothing I could do now could change the past. We were a tiny race that, even in the best of times, grew incredibly slowly. Every time we had a solid push from south of the border we risked being destroyed as a species. Dad had represented a chance to change all of that. He could have triggered a population boom that would have finally put us in a position to bring order to South America, or to end the vampire scourge that was bleeding the East Coast practically dry. When Agony had killed my father he truly had robbed our people of a great treasure.

  "I...I guess I understand why you haven't told me any of that before, but why now?"

  "Like I said, Alec. You're more powerful than your father. It's possible that something about the way your gift works requires much more power to produce even a slight impact to the world around you, but I'm not convinced that your gift has revealed everything that it can do. It would be hard to really explain just how much power went into increasing the fertility of the pack back in your father's day."

  I took a deep breath and then pushed all of the things that Mallory had just told me to one side. "I'll need to think about all of that some more later, but that's not the only reason that I came by this morning. I'd like to invite you to come live at the house with us again."

  Mallory couldn't have been more floored if I'd knocked her into a wall. She considered my invitation and then pulled her legs up onto her chair so that she was huddled into a ball. "Have you mentioned this to Donovan?"

  "Not yet, but he's no idiot. Once he really gets his mind around the fact that we've pissed the Coun'hij off as much as we're going to, it logically follows that there isn't any reason to keep you hidden anymore."

  "You're right, but he may suffer from some of the same blind spots as me. I'm not sure I would have ever thought of leaving here. It's been my home for so long now that I'd stopped even imagining a day when I might be free to come and go as I please."

  "Well, now that I've brought it up, what do you think?"

  "I'd like to, Alec, I really would. It might be best though to leave me as a hidden asset for now. You can always bring me out at a later point, but once it becomes general knowledge that I'm still alive, that isn't something that we can take back."

  I pursed my lips and nodded, but I wasn't convinced. "You're right that this isn't a step we can undo, but you'd be a much greater asset back at the estate than you are here. Your analysis of events will be much better if you're witnes
sing them firsthand."

  "I know I seem like a scared old woman, Alec, but I need some time to think it over. It's a big change. My head says that you're right, that I may as well be there with you and Donovan, but my heart isn't so sure. The last time my world changed in such a fundamental way was when Agony came through town the first time. Can I have a few days before you mention the possibility to Donovan?"

  "Of course you can have some time. I'm anxious to bring you in out of the cold though. We've got a lot more moonborn running around the mansion these days now than we used to. If we leave you here long enough someone is going to get adventurous and stumble onto this place."

  Chapter 6

  Adriana Paige

  Graves Estate

  Sanctuary, Utah

  "What do you think, Adri? I think this shade of blue would be perfect."

  Rachel was a wedding planning machine. We'd spent the morning trying about fifty different cake samples and then she'd jumped right into colors. I appreciated her help, I just hadn't realized things were going to get quite this crazy. Every time I felt like I had a handle on everything that was going to be involved, Rachel came up with another set of decisions that hadn't even crossed my mind.

  It was like being washed away in a tsunami of flowers and fabric swatches. Rachel was dead set on me needing a big-name designer for my dress, but I didn't even recognize any of the names she was throwing around. Rach was more than happy to pull together pictures, lots and lots of pictures, of each of their work, but I suspected that deciding on a designer was still going to take up most of tomorrow.

  I wanted to marry Alec more than anything, but more and more I wished that we could just be two normal people who didn't have to worry about anything more than keeping our families from fighting with each other at the practice dinner.

  I was looking for an excuse to take a break from all of the wedding planning when Ash stuck his head in Rachel's room.

  "Can I disturb the two of you for a few minutes?"

  Rach bounced up off of her bed and spun through a pirouette with multicolored swatches of fabric in each hand.

  "Sure, Ash. What do you need?"

  It was amazing how much different Rachel was now from the exhausted, barely functioning girl that Dom had described to me while I'd been in New York. If anything Rachel was actually more energetic and exuberant than I remembered her being from before. It was like she was making up for lost time. Ash shook his head, not in disapproval necessarily, more like he was just as astonished as I was at Rachel's excitement.

  "Actually, Alec asked me to steal Adri for a couple of hours."

  Rachel sighed, but perked up again only a moment later. "That's okay. I need to catch up on some homework anyways. Alec agreeing to homeschool me for two months while we prep for the wedding was a stroke of genius, but I still have to spend some time doing homework. Besides, this will give me a chance to start pulling together some of those portfolios we talked about."

  I followed Ash down the hall in silence. I still didn't know Ash very well. He'd joined the pack while I'd been away so I didn't have the same kind of bond with him that I had with the others. Alec seemed to trust him completely though, so I figured that he was both dependable and incredibly deadly with the weapons he routinely wore.

  "Did Alec say what he wanted, Ash?"

  "Not exactly. I get the feeling that I'm not supposed to know what's going on. Alec implied a bunch of things but didn't confirm anything."

  "Does that bother you?"

  "A little, but not as much as you might think. Not as much as I expected it to. I didn't press him on it at least, so it must not be too big of a problem for me. I guess I trust that Alec is smart enough not to keep anything from me that I'll need to do my job. Beyond that, I understand the concept of need-to-know."

  I chewed on that for several seconds as Ash led me through the house. He slowed momentarily as we turned a corner. "Truth be told, Adri, there's only one thing that is bothering me and that is the way that Alec is refusing to be pinned down on when he's going to help me resolve things with my old pack."

  It took me a second to fit all of the memories together. "Weren't those the ones Alec put in cages on the day that...well, the day that he proposed to me?"

  Ash nodded. "Yeah, those four were from my old pack, but I need help if I'm going to go in and get my sister out from under Onyx's thumb. Just mention to Alec that we talked about it when you have a few minutes."

  "Okay, I can do that. I don't know that it will do any good, but I can let him know."

  Ash gave me a tired smile. "You're going to get a lot more of that now that you are engaged to Alec. It's proof that he trusts you and values your opinion. More and more of the shape shifters that we've got arriving every day are going to try and use you as a way to get Alec's ear."

  It had never even crossed my mind, but it made sense. "Thanks for the warning, Ash. I'll definitely keep my guard up, after I help you out of course."

  The grin I got this time was surprisingly boyish and unrestrained. I could see why Kristin found him so irresistible.

  Ash came to a stop and pointed at a door. "This is it. I dropped off a certain VIP here a few minutes ago. They'll be waiting for you inside."

  I nodded and opened the door as Ash turned and walked away. This wasn't a part of the house that I'd been to before, so I had no idea what to expect, but I still somehow ended up being taken off guard when I found myself inside a tiny little room with no windows. The only other features were a heavy door on the far wall and a video camera and a speaker up close to the ceiling.

  I tried the far door, but it was locked. I was about to turn around and leave when the speaker hummed to life.

  "Try the door again, Adri. I think I found the release button."

  I'd been starting to get worried until I heard the voice, which was unmistakably Shawn's. A few seconds later I was inside a slightly larger room that had several monitors and a pair of chairs. Shawn looked up at me from one of the chairs as he waved me over to the other one.

  "I hear that this little exercise was your idea. It's the logical solution to your problem, but it means that I'm going to be commuting from Chicago every couple of days so I thought it only fair that you be the one to help me out."

  "With what?"

  Shawn gestured at the monitors and then pushed a button and the tiny room was full of noise. It took me a second to realize that the monitors were showing Alec and a slew of other people from several different angles and the 'noise' was the audio from the room.

  "We get to watch the first royal court in centuries. Alec is going to parade everyone who's come to town so far through that room, which incidentally is only a dozen or so feet away from this room. Each of your guests will then either provide Alec with an oath of fealty or at the very least a promise that they'll behave and live up to the traditional duties of a guest. You and I get to watch it all so that I can tell Alec which ones are really planning on living up to their oaths."

  "Why me?"

  "Nobody is supposed to know that I'm here. Ash knows now, but even he doesn't know about my power. You're here because I need a pretext for being here that doesn't involve being the world's first living lie detector. Alec gave Ash the impression that I'm educating you on the various shape shifters who will be coming through the room over the next couple of hours."

  I nodded. It was kind of a threadbare pretext, but Ash didn't seem inclined to pick at it so it should be enough. Shawn waited to see if I had any questions and then handed me a radio.

  "Ash is wearing an earpiece so if we have any questions you can ask him, just push that button and you're live. Everyone is going to be announced though so hopefully we won't have to bug him too much."

  Shawn and I quickly settled into a division of duties. He did a screen capture of each of the shape shifters who came before Alec and printed it out while the small talk occurred. I wrote the name of the shape shifters at the bottom of the picture and then flipped the
page over and took notes on Shawn's impression of our visitors.

  Alec seemed to generally be working from least trustworthy to more dependable. The first few were uneventful but disgusting. The pack leaders practically tied themselves in knots trying to avoid giving Alec a straight answer while their daughters all but threw themselves at Alec.

  I could tell that Alec was starting to lose patience by the time the fifth delegation was led away. He kept having to pointedly remind the girls that he was engaged to me and even without Shawn's power it would have been apparent that none of these alphas were planning on throwing their lot in with Alec unless they thought they could come out on top in the negotiations.

  A capable-looking woman named Rebekka was the first real surprise. She entered the room looking resigned, but not necessarily unhappy. Alec, Ash at his shoulder, watched her approach to within five feet of him and then welcomed her and thanked her for making time in her schedule for a formal reception.

  The room was large enough to hold everyone who had come before and most of them had stayed after being presented to Alec. I saw boredom on more than one face right up until Rebekka dropped to one knee.

  "It's not in me to play games, Alec. The Tonopah pack has fallen on rough times and everyone here knows it. I came here hoping that my Vivian would catch your eye, but I'm not going to try and come between two people who love each other, not when there are other options. If you'll have me, I'll swear fealty to you. Your father was an honorable man and you seem to be cut from the same cloth."

  Alec took a deep breath and nodded. "I welcome you into my service, Rebekka. You may proceed."

  "I swear my claws and fangs to your service, both those of this body and those sworn to me. In return for your protection I will obey your command and never betray your trust as long as you're true to your oath."

  Alec stood and walked forward so that he could place a hand on Rebekka's shoulder. "I accept your oath and place myself as a shield between your pack and those who would harm it. I promise justice tempered with mercy and for as long as you are true to your oath I promise to treat you as one of my pack with all of the rights and privileges of family."