Allegiance of Honor (21 page)

“Ocelots were unbalanced.” Dorian’s eyes turned into chips of ice. “SkyElm had too many elders and children, not enough aggressive dominants physically able to defend the pack.”

Claws pushing at his skin, Lucas had to make a conscious effort not to snarl.

He tried not to judge other alphas, but the situation Dorian was describing should’ve
never
happened. It was an alpha’s responsibility to ensure his pack had a balanced complement of dominants in the prime of their life. Sometimes that meant putting out the call to friendly packs for intrepid young men and women who wanted to take up higher-level positions than they could hope for in their own packs at the same age. Other times, it meant making the tough decision to dissolve the pack by requesting integration with a bigger pack.

“Even if the ocelots had no one they could amalgamate with,” Lucas said, “they could’ve asked for recruits from other feline packs.” Fellow alphas like Lucas would’ve even authorized temporary transfers to support SkyElm until the faltering pack had enough permanent packmates. “Why didn’t they?”

“They did put out the call,” Dorian said, to Lucas’s surprise. “Catch was they only wanted ocelots, no other cats. That’s why we never got a request for help.” A tight shrug. “There aren’t many ocelots in the country
and while the other packs are healthy, they’re also small, can’t afford to lose members. But”—Dorian’s clipped tone grew harsh—“they all,
each and every one
, offered to accept an amalgamation request if it was made. SkyElm said it wasn’t interested.”

That was flat-out arrogance, and it had led to the decimation of almost an entire pack. “The survivors, who’s left?”

“Two of them are children,” Dorian began. “Alive because a submissive grabbed them in the middle of the carnage, threw them in a room, then barricaded himself inside with them, hacking off the hands of anyone who tried to get through.”

Lucas growled in approval. That was exactly what a submissive packmate was meant to do in such circumstances—take any children in his or her vicinity and
keep them safe
. At least one member of SkyElm knew his duty.

“Only two soldiers,” Dorian continued. “Both were badly injured in the fighting but are now up and walking. The pack healer is alive; she was on the front line, but the alpha pulled her back before she was too badly wounded. One of the only good decisions he seems to have made.”

“The alpha’s alive?”

Expression flat, Dorian nodded. “I spoke to a friend in the area—he says according to a few humans who were trapped in buildings near the Psy enclave/SkyElm border and watched the fighting go down, the pack’s dominants protected the alpha above all others.”

That wasn’t necessarily the wrong move—a dead alpha could collapse a pack’s cohesion, especially if it was a weak pack to begin with. However, in a situation where cubs were being killed, protecting those vulnerable lives should’ve been the dominants’—and the alpha’s—
only
focus. In DarkRiver, should it ever come down to such a horrible situation, even the most frail elders would take up arms and form a line of defense.

Then Dorian said the most unbelievable thing. “He lost his own cub and mate.”

Blinking, Lucas stared at his sentinel. “How is that possible?” In a
battle where Sascha and Naya were under threat, Lucas would fight to the death to protect them. No one would get through him except by tearing him to fucking pieces.

“I don’t think it was on purpose,” Dorian said, though anger vibrated in his voice. “Far as I can piece together, SkyElm left one side of their settlement unprotected, believing the danger to be only on the border.”

A crack of sound, coffee spilling to the forest floor.

“Shit.” Putting the cracked mug on the ground, Dorian shook off the coffee that had spilled on his fingers. “You can figure out the rest.”

Lucas could and it wasn’t pretty. “It doesn’t sound like SkyElm would have the capacity to organize a kidnapping of any kind, much less hire a mercenary group. And why the hell would they want to attack DarkRiver when they could’ve reached out to us for help?”

Lucas would’ve accepted the refugees without question, DarkRiver more than big and stable enough to integrate the seven survivors and provide them any help they needed. While leopard changelings formed the vast majority of DarkRiver, the pack included Psy, human, one jaguar, and several lynx packmates. It was, in fact, the best pack for SkyElm to have approached in the aftermath of the massacre.

Especially since, unlike the alphas of smaller packs, Lucas wouldn’t have worried about a dominance challenge from the SkyElm alpha. He was too strong, had held power too long, and his sentinels were loyal beyond any question.

“Here’s the thing.” Dorian ran his fingers through his hair. “SkyElm was small but they have a couple of patents, courtesy of two elderly packmates who’d invented things and signed over the patents to the pack as a whole. Bastien tracked the money generated by those patents and he says that a month ago, someone transferred two million dollars of it to an offshore bank where the trail goes cold.”

From there, Lucas realized, it could’ve been funneled to the mercenaries. “I need to talk to the SkyElm alpha face-to-face.” No matter his disdain for the other man’s decisions, Lucas wouldn’t judge him guilty of
Naya’s attempted kidnapping without firm evidence. The Consortium was too good at setting friend against friend, at creating fractures where none had previously existed.

“You planning to leave DarkRiver territory?” Dorian straightened, his leopard a wild green presence in his eyes. “Luc, you know that’s not a good idea.”

“I can’t ask him to come here, not when he must be all but broken.” The other alpha had lost his pack, his mate, and his child in a single horrifying day. Lucas wouldn’t wish such hell on anyone. “I have to go to him.”

From the private diaries of Father Xavier Perez

April 30, 2074

Nina,

The villagers are safe.

The Psy assassins have given up and gone away, and the people we saved know to stay in their hidden new home until things change on a far wider scale.

Today, for the first time since I lost you, since our people were butchered, I felt God in my heart again. And in the ray of dawn sunlight as it touched a child’s peacefully sleeping face, I saw hope.

The Psy soldier with whom I work in the darkness to thwart his fellow assassins shows no one his face, but these villagers know mine, trust mine. I am one of them after all, my skin the same dark shade, my features familiar, my language theirs, my race human.

Now, however, it seems I’m also a rebel in a sense I could’ve never predicted only months earlier. I fight alongside a man I would’ve once murdered for the simple fact he is Psy and it was Psy who so viciously stole everything from me. That shames me and yet I write it here because I want you to know who I’ve become since I lost you. The good and the bad.

Nina . . . I miss you.

Xavier

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AFTER
Dorian told Lucas about SkyElm, Lucas’s sentinels and mate worked together to cover his absence while he moved alone out of the territory. It was the fact that he was on his own that had most worried his people, but a single panther moving alone in the night was a shadow. If he could’ve made the trip overland, there would’ve been zero risk of detection, even from other predatory changelings, but that would’ve taken too long, so Lucas had called on a party he’d never expected to need: Nikita Duncan.

Sascha’s mother owned more than one airline as well as a fleet of private craft. She’d got him on an unlogged flight on a small plane piloted by a man she assured Lucas wouldn’t betray him, even under threat of torture. Sounded good, but Lucas wasn’t about to trust anyone in her employ. Had Dorian not been out of commission, the sentinel would’ve been his pilot of choice. Still, since Nikita considered Lucas integral to Sascha’s continued security, he was probably safe.

Getting into the already-warmed-up and ready-to-go plane on an isolated runway outside the city, he chucked his small pack inside, hauled himself in . . . and recognized the scent of the pilot. “When the fuck did you get a pilot’s license?”

Max Shannon put his arm on the back of his chair and grinned over his white-shirted shoulder, his features a handsome mix of Caucasian and Asian and his black hair neatly cut. The dimple in his left cheek had fascinated Naya the last time Max and Sophie visited DarkRiver territory.
Lucas’s cub had kept touching it, as if trying to figure out how it was made.

“Seemed a good skill for a security chief to have,” Max said in answer to Lucas’s question. “Especially when the woman I’m meant to protect is constantly on planes.” He lightly tapped the control panel in front of him. “Preflight check’s done.” The other man began to get up. “I just need to close and lock the door.”

“I’ll do it.” Thanks to Dorian, Lucas was experienced at the process, but he made sure Max had a clear line of sight to his actions. “Pass the pilot test?”

Giving him a thumbs-up, Max angled his head forward. “You want to sit in the copilot chair?”

“Nowhere else,” Lucas said before sliding into the seat. He’d forgotten there were two people in Nikita’s organization he
did
trust: Max Shannon and his wife Sophia Russo.

Max had helped DarkRiver more than once, plus, since Sascha and Sophia were friends, Max was often in Sascha’s orbit. And Lucas’s empathic and intuitive mate had never once caught anything bad about the ex-cop. Neither had Lucas. Most importantly, the cubs adored Max.

He was one of the good guys.

“You do realize your current taste in employers is inexplicable, right?” Lucas commented after picking up the headset Max pointed out to him.

The other man shrugged and put on his own headset. “Sophie and I live in hope that we’ll drag Nikita over to the side of light.” A sudden grin that once again revealed that dimple in his left cheek.

Linked as the sight was to memories of his cub, it had Lucas’s panther prowling to the surface of his skin.

“It might even happen this century, now that Anthony’s in the picture,” Max said.

Snorting, Lucas nodded at the lights of the control panel. “How long you been flying?”

“Don’t worry. This is my first real flight, but my instructor said it’ll be just like in the simulator.”

“Funny, Shannon. You tell Nikita that one, too?”

“I only tell your mother-in-law knock-knock jokes,” Max responded with a straight face before he began to taxi down the private runway marked by small glowing beacons. “For some reason, she never says ‘who’s there,’ so the whole process comes to a premature end at ‘knock, knock.’ I’m constantly dejected.”

Chuckling, Lucas didn’t speak again until they were in the air after a smooth takeoff, San Francisco a glittering sprawl to their left. “You have the brief?”

Max nodded. “Plan was I stay with the plane, while you prowl off into the dark.”

“Plan was?”

“I’m offering to go with you if you need backup.”

Lucas considered it. Max was as well trained as his own sentinels, and taking him along would have no impact on the security in pack territory. However, his original reasoning for going alone still applied—if this was about stealth, a panther alone stood the best chance of skating under the radar.

There was also another consideration.

“No,” he said to the other man. “I need to know the plane is ready to go the instant I hit the runway. Can’t take the risk of someone sabotaging it.” Lucas couldn’t afford to be away from DarkRiver for long, not given how visible he’d been lately, courtesy of his role with Trinity. Someone would notice his absence. “The man I’m going to see, he’s physically far weaker than I am, so the security issue is minimal.”

“Could be an ambush,” Max said with the grim clarity of a security chief for a woman a lot of people wanted to kill. “You prepared for that? And don’t predatory packs have rules about entry into another’s territory?”

“I’m going over land unclaimed by changelings until I hit SkyElm’s borders.” Warning them of his arrival wasn’t on the agenda. “As for a possible ambush, I’ll see them before they ever spot me.” Being jet-black had significant advantages—advantages Lucas intended to teach his daughter as soon as she got a little older.

Of course, it would make it a devil of a thing to find her when she was being cheeky, but Lucas would rather have that than not teach her skills she could use to protect herself should she ever be trapped alone and far from help. She was fierce, his cub, but while she was small, he would teach her to hide and wait. Hide and wait.

A child panther couldn’t win against adult combatants.

Lucas knew that firsthand.

“Panther in the dark.” Max whistled. “Yeah, okay, good plan. What’re you going to do about clothes when you arrive?”

Lips tugging up, Lucas said, “Humans are so hung up on clothing.”

“Don’t give me that bullshit.” The ex-cop pointed a finger at him. “You’re not going to confront some other man while he’s clothed and you’re not.”

In truth, Lucas would have no problem doing that, especially since he knew his dominance far exceeded that of the ocelot alpha. But, in this case, he likely wouldn’t have to. “Someone always forgets their washing outside. I’ll grab what I need.” If not, he’d do the confrontation in his skin—which, unbeknownst to Max, would probably unnerve the other alpha even more.

Civilized manners, including wearing clothing, came from the human part of a changeling’s nature. Comfort with their bodies, whether furred or the human skin, came from the primal core of their animal. An enemy might be able to negotiate with the civilized half, but the animal reacted on pure, undiluted instinct. And an alpha panther driven by violent protective urges was not a predator anyone wanted to face.

“There’s a duffel back there with some weapons.” Max jerked his thumb to the back of the plane. “I packed them just in case, but I guess you can’t carry anything?”

“No, not without losing my speed and camouflage.” He’d run with a small pack as a panther before, but it changed the sleek lines of his body, made him stand out. “I don’t think this will be that kind of a confrontation.” Because if the ocelots had actually had anything to do with the attack on Naya and weren’t just being set up, they could have no reason to believe they’d been discovered.

Dorian had undertaken his data mining with extreme care, while the people he’d spoken to in the region were all allied with DarkRiver. Two had been born as part of Lucas’s pack, moved out when they mated, still had plenty of family in DarkRiver. The other was a SnowDancer wolf temporarily based in the region while he completed advanced technical training in an unusual specialty.

No, the ocelots had no reason to watch for a panther coming for them.

•   •   •

IT
took Lucas two hours to run to SkyElm’s home base after Max landed the plane at a private airstrip that belonged to Nikita. It was hidden in the center of a sprawling spread, the landing strip concealed from casual view by the lay of the land, and even had anyone been curious, the strip was officially used for ranching operations and for the transport needs of the people who ran it.

There were no buildings anywhere within a visual line of sight.

Max had initiated the landing-strip lights by remote control, once he got close enough. The instant he had the plane on the ground and parked, he switched those lights off, plunging the area back into pitch darkness, the moon hidden behind clouds.

The quietness of that strip, however, was nothing compared to the screaming silence that surrounded the ocelot aeries. Though he’d shifted by that point, grabbing a pair of jeans off a line a mile back, Lucas’s steps remained panther quiet, causing not so much as a whisper to fracture the disturbing quiet.

Perhaps the crushing power of it was because he knew that a community meant to house near to a hundred people now held only seven. While, like leopards, ocelots were solitary by nature, this pack had a long history of living in close proximity to one another, probably because of the small size of their pack.

The survivors had to be shell-shocked.

Pushing aside the surge of pity that came from both parts of his nature, he reminded himself that SkyElm could have Consortium help. Even if
not, wild ocelots were nocturnal for the most part and that tendency showed up in changelings as well, though to a lesser extent. He couldn’t count on the pack being asleep, even this deep into the night.

Guard up, he took to the trees and stayed high while he made his way toward the only two aeries where he could detect fresh scents rather than the dusty loneliness of homes left uninhabited for months. The first one he reached proved to house the children. He could just see their small bodies through the locked window: both were in ocelot form and curled up tightly together, while an adult male lay on a bed right in front of the aerie door.

Blocking it. Keeping the children safe.

The submissive.

Lucas would readily accept such courage into his own pack.

Aware he was missing the healer, the alpha, and the two soldiers, he took extreme care as he moved on. He had no doubts that he could take on all three of the dominants, but he didn’t want to turn this into a bloodbath when this devastated pack might’ve had nothing to do with the attack on Naya.

Instead of moving on to the other aerie, within which he could now see a soft glow of light, he went dead still and
listened
. His patience was rewarded ten minutes later. The soldiers were below, running a tight perimeter as they sought to protect the remnants of their broken pack. Those two had to be hurting bad—dominants weren’t supposed to outlive their vulnerable. They were built to fight to the death.

If the ocelot alpha wasn’t careful, he could lose both to their own demons.

Having gained a fix on them, Lucas padded silently along the tree road until he came to a halt directly outside the large open window of the aerie where two people were talking. The window itself offered a view into an empty kitchen, the speakers most likely in the room beyond.

“You have to sleep, Monroe,” a female voice pleaded. “You’ve been up for five days straight except for a few snatches here and there.”

“No, I have to stay awake. Have to protect.” The tone of the male voice was wrong, the words a little off.

Jagged. Broken.

“You’re our alpha.” The woman sounded on the verge of tears. “We need your guidance now more than ever, but the lack of sleep is making you erratic.”

Growls sounded from within, along with the slap of feet moving back and forth across the floor, back and forth.

“Monroe.”
The woman, who must have been the healer, tried again. She’d managed to get her incipient tears under control, sounded gentle and coaxing as she said, “I’ve made you a cup of tea. It’ll relax—”

The sound of china crashing to the earth, liquid splashing on wood. “I don’t need any fucking tea!” It was a roar.

Concerned for the healer and aware the two soldiers probably couldn’t hear the commotion from their watch positions, Lucas flowed into the aerie through the window. His eyes had already adapted to the light so he padded through the kitchen straight into the living area. The alpha was looming over his healer, his brown hair streaked with gray and sticking up in tufts and the pale skin of his face blotchy red, his fists clenched.

The healer was a fragile-looking woman, maybe eighty years of age. To her credit, she wasn’t flinching, was in fact still attempting to reason with her alpha.

“Monroe Halliston.” Lucas leaned against a wall, his posture deliberately unthreatening. “We need to talk.”

Spinning around with a snarl, the ocelot alpha came at him like a hurricane. Lucas had expected the violent instinctive reaction, had the other alpha on the floor in seconds, the older man’s wrists locked behind his back. When the healer went as if to cry out for help, he shook his head. “I’ve come to talk,” he said quietly. “You call the soldiers inside and this could end in blood.”

The ebony-skinned woman swallowed, looked at his face, her brown eyes on the lines that had marked him from birth. “Lucas Hunter. DarkRiver.”

Enraged by the sound of those words, Monroe Halliston attempted to flip Lucas off him. Lucas held him in place with increased pressure. “I came to talk,” he reiterated.

“I don’t want to talk to the bastard who helped the Psy murder us!”

Lucas’s blood ran cold.

Making a snap decision, he returned his attention to the healer. “Call your soldiers,” he ordered. “Tell them I’m not here to spill blood, but I will if they don’t both come through the door in the next two minutes.” Lucas had done a full reconnaissance before he approached the aeries, knew there was no threat out there that could prove a danger while the dominants were away from their watch.

“Don’t follow his orders!” the alpha yelled, but the healer seemed to realize Lucas was dead serious.

Running to the door, she called out to the two dominants. They appeared breathless in the doorway within the allotted two minutes, during which time, Monroe raved and ranted. Lucas hauled the other alpha to his feet, but kept his eyes on the soldiers, taking in their ragged condition, the bags under their eyes. “Keep your hands in plain view,” he said in a tone that brooked no disobedience. “I’ve got no fight with you.”