Sun
“Unfortunately we’re long on questions and short on answers,” Basile said, confirming what the ten Archai in the conference room already knew.
I nodded at my second in command’s assessment of the situation as if I wasn’t seething inside. Kat was incredibly valuable, precious, the first known female Archai outside of the limited births among the clans in centuries. And she’d been snatched from beneath our noses by a male I couldn’t, wouldn’t trust.
A murderer had returned to our midst. Whether that murderer was Arik or Maddox, I still wasn’t certain. Both had been my childhood friends. I’d mourned Maddox right along with Anna and Rivalen, the Archai general I’d known all my life. Wrapping my head around the fact that the werewolf still lived was proving even harder than letting go of Arik’s guilt.
That was why I’d gathered the Warrior’s Council, that and the Anigma threat. An attack from an Anigma army twice our size—or more—could be disastrous if my people weren’t prepared. I wanted every voice under my command to weigh in on our options. For the first time since the Dark Ages, we were facing the enemy, but most of what we knew was how much we didn’t know.
“Where is Arik now?” Cale asked, his voice raspy evidence of his animal’s disquiet, his eagle eyes burning with amber fire. The overhead light glinted off his shoulder-length hair, a motley mix of every shade of blond under the sun. A griffin like Arik; his cousin, in fact, born many years after Rivalen and Anna had been murdered. Left with the aftermath of the tragedy and its scars on their family’s legacy, Cale was battling both the news of his long-lost cousin’s return and the memories it dredged up.
At Cale’s question, I threw a smoldering glance toward the end of the long table where Grim sat, hands folded as if in prayer, eyes cloaked by his black hood. “We don’t know. He snuck her out right under our noses.”
Cale grimaced in disgust. “You mean he poisoned you and left you for dead.”
True, even if poisoned was a bit strong. I sighed, trying hard to blow away the anger and focus. “Just a little something to help us sleep, Cale. It must’ve been in the food.” And the lair must’ve had a hidden escape tunnel, because even with the short-lived influence of Arik’s herbal supplement, neither I nor Grim could have missed the male carrying Kat through that tiny front room.
“The fault was ours,” Grim said quietly. “We trusted too easily.”
“We were too distracted,” I countered. Keeping Kat alive had been our sole focus.
Lyris spoke for the first time, interrupting my train of thought. “How powerful is she?”
The only female member of the council, Lyris, like the others, was dressed in battle gear, but unlike them, it didn’t help her look more of a threat. She was average height and weight in a world where males were bigger than life, sometimes literally. Also unlike them, she was one of only a few of her kind, a female Archai, fully born, and the oldest known psych warrior. She and her brother, Demetri, sitting beside her, had served the council almost as long as Solomon had been king, and as a warrior Lyris out of all of them would understand best the danger Kat might pose.
“Very,” Grim said. “More so than any female I’ve triggered, ever.” At Lyris’s shock, a thin smile curved his lips. “She is exceptional—and exceptionally volatile.”
“Can Arik contain her?” Jacob asked. A normal, his pale-as-death skin looked nearly translucent under the overhead lights.
“That remains to be seen,” I said. “I’m even more concerned about what plans he has for her, and what we can learn once we find her again.” Her very existence raised questions we’d never considered, and finding the answers would be a lot more difficult without the source.
“Will he harm her?” Demetri asked. The warrior was known for his protective stance toward females, seen first and foremost with his sister.
I considered the possibilities for a moment. “I don’t know. Arik is a question mark we simply can’t answer right now. Before the revelation about Maddox, I’d have said yes, unequivocally, but now… This Arik had been shaped in ways I don’t fully understand. Anything is possible.”
“The female isn’t all we have to worry about,” Thomas said. Tension thrummed through the room at the werewolf’s words.
“We’re in the dark,” I admitted. “Arik eliminated most of the team he encountered—”
“If he actually encountered them,” Cale growled. “How can we even know if what he told you is true?” He shook his head, the stubby ponytail at the base of his neck thumping lightly against his leather vest. “We can’t.”
I ignored the griffin’s distrust for now. “I want additional patrols set up through—”
“No.”
Shit.
The king’s deep tone resonated through my bones, stiffening my spine until it was ramrod hard. I bowed from the waist, the other warriors standing and following suit as they waited for Solomon to make his way across the room. The king proceeded at a measured pace, a strategy I knew my father intended as a reminder to the warriors that they depended on his authority in all matters. I crossed my arms over my chest and waited, refusing to be intimidated.
“Father.”
“My son,” the king said. “Warriors.”
The council sat as one but remained silent.
Solomon leveled brilliant eyes on me. “No additional patrols.”
I searched my father’s closed face, trying to determine where this decree was coming from. As king, Solomon knew better than any of us the threat a rising Anigma force presented—he’d lived it, after all, during the Great War. We couldn’t afford to ignore even the possibility. “We already have regular patrols of the city. It would be simple enough to expand them, keep an eye out for anything irregular. If we—”
“No. We will not waste resources on this.”
Lyris stood. Her formidable prowess and long life—and the take-no-shit attitude hiding behind her gentle facade—gave her the ability to speak where others would not dare. “With all due respect, sir, we must. If there is even the remotest possibility of more females out there, we have no choice but to try to find them. The Anigma may very well be doing the same, as we speak. What if they hold some of our women even now? How can we know if we don’t look for them? Search out the enemy?” She leaned forward, fervor tightening her body, fists pressing hard into the tabletop. “Turning our back on the enemy’s presence is unwise. We must go.”
“And what will you tell our males, Lyris, the ones you are so eager to send on the hunt?” the king asked. “Will you tell them what they are looking for or keep them in the dark? Raise their hopes? Rile them up for war? No.” He rocked back on his heels. “We cannot afford chaos when we have finally achieved peace, stability.”
I cursed silently. Peace at any cost, wasn’t that what Arik had said? I had a feeling the griffin knew his old clan better than we would’ve liked.
“Neither can we afford to ignore the possibilities,” I said vehemently, digging the talons peeking from my fingertips into my biceps to contain my frustration.
“What possibilities?” Solomon crossed his arms, mimicking my posture. “We have a single shifter, a murdering rogue, telling us our enemy has returned. He has no proof. We have no proof he did not indeed do this himself.”
“He did not.” Grim stood from his place at the foot of the table. “I saw into her mind, my king. Arik did not trigger her, nor is she a fake. She is truly an Archai female, of that there is no doubt.” Grim’s position as the Aomai guaranteed the truth of his words, even had he not been my closest friend. Even had I not been privy to his greatest secret. I prayed Solomon would heed the male’s council. We could not stand idle.
And yet Solomon refused to relent. “He could have tricked her just as he tricked the two of you.”
I disregarded the derision coating my father’s words—barely. “And what of Maddox? How is it that he still lives?”
The king’s eyes narrowed. “You are mistaken.”
“No, he isn’t.” Grim was polite but adamant. “I saw him in her memories.”
“Which means Arik isn’t the killer we thought he was.”
“No,” Solomon countered. “It means Maddox wasn’t murdered. Arik managed to stay hidden all these years; perhaps Maddox did the same.”
And given Solomon’s hatred of Arik, he wouldn’t accept any other explanation. He might even be right.
Nor was the king willing to discuss the subject any longer, apparently. “What of her triggering?” Solomon demanded of Grim. “Who was it?”
Grim’s mouth tightened as if tasting something bitter. “Not Arik; that’s all I know for certain. She didn’t retain clear pictures of her attackers. There were blurred impressions of more than one—male, presumably, considering the way they were handling her. Definitely shifter. And then, of course, the bite.” He frowned, his anger sweeping through the room like a physical wave. “Brutal. There was no care taken of her at all. She remembers nothing after that.”
The king acknowledged Grim’s words with a nod but clarified, “Then we do not know if they were, indeed, Anigma.”
“So this was one of our own?” Basile asked, his s’s slurring from one word to the next in displeasure. “An Archai would hurt a female in this way?”
“No, they wouldn’t,” I assured my second before the king’s wrath could land on the basilisk’s hot head, “which is why we need to find the ones who did this.”
“No,” Solomon said.
“Fathe—”
“I will not authorize full-scale patrols.” The king’s voice overrode mine, rising with each word until he was almost shouting. “I will not risk our hard-won peace. This information will not go beyond this room.”
A swell of emotion filled the room as each Archai spilled frustration and anger from their mind. A quick lift of my hand forestalled what was sure to be an equally heated outcry from my council. I, too, fought the urge to argue, to rip the blinders from my father’s stubborn eyes—but those eyes were what convinced me. There would be no give in Solomon’s will.
Instead, I felt a sudden stillness deep in my core. This was it, the fork in the road that I knew had been coming for a while now. The moment was at hand, and without taking a breath of time to consider, I knew my decision had already been made.
That calm allowed me to lower my head to my king, keeping my face impassive. “Yes, Father.”
Solomon narrowed his eyes on me for a long, tense moment. Finally he turned and made his way to the door. “As you were, warriors.”
When the door closed behind the king, the room erupted. I silenced them all with a look. “Wait! Quiet.” When a minute had passed without the king’s return, I signaled Vanessa, Lyris’s young—by Archai standards at least—assistant. “Barriers, please.”
Vanessa raised her hands, and a sudden sense of envelopment rose with them. It was like being inside a bubble, one you couldn’t see but could nonetheless feel. Urgency built in my gut, and when the female lowered her hands, I let that urgency color my orders.
“Full-scale patrols might be out, but that isn’t the only way to get what we need.”
“But—”
I cut off the dissent without noting who spoke. “Basile, organize patrols of the council only, two at a time, citywide. We don’t know how to find the females yet, or even if the choice of Kat was mere coincidence, but we have to be certain who her attackers were and whether they stuck around.”
“Or brought in reinforcements,” James, the oldest member of the council, added, voice rough with age and wisdom.
“Agreed.”
Silence filled the room as each council member considered that scenario.
“Five sets of patrols won’t get us far. Surely there’s a faster way to do this,” Lyris said.
I paced up one side of the table and back as I waited for the others to weigh in.
“Is there a satellite or something we can tap into? There has to be some way we can find these bastards!” Basile thumped a massive fist down on the table, but it was the hiss of his words that caused the Archai seated around him to wince. The male’s animal, a basilisk, could kill with his voice while in animal form, and the phrase “swift as a snake” was made for him. He was also a great strategist, which was how he’d become a general in the Archai army.
Cale cleared his throat. “I have a contact I think might help us in that area.”
“This isn’t one of your women, now is it, Cale?” Jacob asked with a groan, his words finally forming a crack in the tension gripping all our throats. Doran, sitting next to him, relaxed enough to roll his red-tinged eyes.
Cale gave the males a cocky grin. “None other. Hooked up with her a few months ago. She can hack anything—and I do mean anything,” he assured us, his tone a caramel drawl that said he meant sex, not computers. “The city grid has cameras all over; if there are Anigma roaming Nashville, we’ll know it.”
I considered the risks. Cale might be a playboy, but when it came to the safety of our people, he would no more put us at risk than I would. “Make it happen.” Turning to James, I asked, “Where do we stand on supplies?” The clan had to be able to sustain itself in the event of a siege—weapons, food, all of it needed to be available long-term. The absence of an Anigma threat had made us complacent in many ways, though not with training, fortunately.
James smoothed a hand over his still-chiseled jaw. “I can get with Drake and see, though he’ll want to know why if I order him to start stockpiling. Thomas and I can check weaponry and equipment.”
Thomas nodded, already busy typing notes on his electronic tablet.
“Tell Drake whatever you need to, James, but get him going pronto—and quietly. I don’t need to tell you what could happen if Solomon gets wind of this.”
Basile snorted his opinion of that. The faces staring back at me seemed to share my general’s scorn.
“Cale, set up a meeting: you, me, and your contact. Everyone else, get with Basile. We will find what we need, no matter what. Our peace will be protected. At any cost.” Just not the way Solomon intended.
Resolve settled, heavy with responsibility, on my shoulders. God help me, but that cost would likely be mine—my life, if the king discovered my defiance of his direct orders.