Into the Light (25 page)

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 poured a fifth glass of wine, although he did not drink it. Instead, he paced in front of the windows and 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. He heard Sander mutter that he felt trapped—“Just like the wild animal
he
is.”

He also mumbled about Olivia’s near-death experience and how it had given him quite a fright. Tanner heard him complain that 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 coffers to pay for that one party, let alone the normal cost of living for the king’s family.

“You’re going to have to demand your subjects start fending for themselves. They are going to have to grow their own crops, raise their own cattle or pigs and sheep. They’re going to have to learn, and they won’t have a choice, because you’re going to tell them they have to. You’re their king. They have to listen to you.”

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 hissed.

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.”

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 whys and whats of their admonishments. She was just 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.”

Undoubtedly it was at least partially due to this brainwashing that Sofia was so fascinated by the lightbearers with whom she’d come to live. Probably, the glow they wore like elegant jewelry was part of it too. 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 she 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 Cecilia. 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 great 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 great 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 just as nice as Olivia and Dane and Cecilia. 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 in a few hours, 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 quickly 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 cherry and spit out the pit. She didn’t need to wait for her momma to wake up to have a taste of fresh cherries, plucked right from the tree.

She slipped through the door and ran through the garden toward the trees. She could hear voices, kid voices, indicating that she wasn’t the only one who thought that cherries were delicious. When she came upon the small group of lightbearer children, they all had cherry juice smudged on their faces and the front of their shirts, and their fingers were stained 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 Cecilia 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, feeling frightened by the menacing look in their eyes. The girls stepped up, and Sofia suddenly found herself surrounded by lightbearer children.

She sensed she would regret her decision to help herself to cherries straight 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 the babe from its mother’s body. 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.

Genevieve, despite her very best efforts, was never able to conceive again. She was never able to give her mate a son, an heir. By the time Olivia had passed ten summers, her mother had fallen into such a deep depression that Sander was desperate to find anything, to do anything to pull her through.

Party planning, as it turned out, was the answer. Genevieve loved parties. She loved to plan them. She loved to gather lightbearers together, to show off her chef’s fabulous creations, to flutter about the crowd like a butterfly, ensuring everyone was happy and pleased with the event.

Initially, the need to plan parties was a substitute for her need to bear more children. Soon, however, party planning became her outlet for anything and everything. Every time she felt stress about something, anything, she planned a party.

There had been a great deal of stress in Genevieve’s life over the course of just the last few days. Shifters in the coterie. Her daughter nearly dying due to some freak accident that involved guards and arrows. Sander’s stress spilled over to her as well. They’d been mated a very long time, and over time, Genevieve had fallen in love with the man. She sensed it when he was unhappy, unsatisfied, worried, frustrated.

Sander was certainly stressed if he was drunk on faery wine before noon. He’d burst into their chamber a short time ago and insisted that she put on a dinner party
today
. Genevieve had been so excited—two parties over the course of three days!—that she hadn’t even asked for a reason. She’d simply donned a dress and rushed down to the kitchens to discuss the menu with Carley.

She then tracked down her niece, Cecilia—that child was
always
at the beach house—and gave her the list of invitees, and then sent her to inform them of the start time of the party. That was when it occurred to her that a side of fresh green beans, sautéed with tiny sweet onions, fresh garlic, and chunks of sausage would be quite divine with the main entrée she’d selected. She immediately changed direction and headed to the garden, to see for herself that there were enough ripe beans, before making her way to the kitchen to inform Carley that she’d slightly altered the menu.

Before she made her way to the patch of bean plants, she heard the voices, and recognized them as children’s voices. Curious as to who had slipped into the royal gardens this time, Genevieve made her way toward the sound. The closer she drew, the more apparent it became that the children were not playing nicely together. In fact, she distinctly heard someone crying. Feeling alarmed, Genevieve lifted her skirts and hurried to interfere.

She discovered a small group of lightbearer children—she recognized every single one of them—surrounding another child, a tiny thing with dark hair and big, pale blue eyes. Those eyes were full of tears, and she was sobbing, flinching every now and then as another child hurled an insult at her.

Genevieve had not yet seen the shifters that she’d heard had infiltrated the coterie. Sander hadn’t wanted to cause her undue stress by subjecting her to the experience. As she looked upon the poor, helpless dark-headed child, she wondered what in the world her mate was thinking. Other than the fact that she had darker hair and a slightly darker complexion than most lightbearers, and that she did not carry a faint glow of magic about her, this child looked as harmless as any of the hundreds of other children within the coterie.

“Children,” she barked, and all six of them jumped and turned toward the sound of her voice. “What do you think you are doing?” she asked sternly, giving each of the young lightbearers a good glare.

“She’s a shifter,” one of them said, as he pointed at the crying child.

“And you are very mean to our guests,” Genevieve admonished.

The boy’s eyes grew large. Genevieve motioned at the little shifter. “This child is a guest of your king. You are insulting your king by insulting this child. You should be treating her with the utmost respect. I am highly disappointed in each and every one of you.”

All five looked abashed.

“Run along,” she commanded. “And inform your parents that the queen caught you doing something bad and that they should punish you. If you do not, I shall tell them myself and instruct them to punish you twice as much as they would otherwise.”