“Well, that day is never going to come.” I gave her a halting smile. It reassured me a little that she managed to return it. I groped for another topic of conversation. “What do you think of our dragon shifter?”
“Oh, she’s a fiery one, isn’t she?” Her smile grew, but it looked bittersweet. “Saying she’ll put an end to the rogues. Is she really prepared for the battle ahead?”
As much as I valued Yvonne, my hackles rose at the question. “Ren has faced more troubles in the last few weeks than most of us have to deal with in a lifetime. I’d say she’s handled herself well.”
“There now.” The horse shifter patted my arm. “I didn’t mean anything by it. Of course you’ll stand by your mate. I simply meant that it seems the pressure on her is only going to keep growing. She’s had no training, no time to even ready her mind for what’s ahead. I hope she can stay steady, but it would be hard for any of us.”
“Exactly,” I said. A little heat crept into my tone, remembering some of the standoffish reactions my guards had given Ren. “It isn’t fair to her, being brought into our world when the community is in more chaos than it’s ever been. But we’ll figure it out, the five of us, together. It’s what the rest of us trained for. No one should question that.”
Yvonne looked up at me with her clear, sad eyes. “Sometimes I think we have human minds just so that we can question things. Even the people trying to show us the way.”
*
Ren
“Your guests are starting to arrive,” Alice announced. “Do you want to go check them out?”
I paused where I’d been wandering my sitting room, trying to think if there was anything I’d missed with Orion, some way I could have better won him over.
Some way to feel completely confident I’d won him over at all.
The view out the window told me the sun was still over the trees. “I thought the welcoming party was happening tonight.”
Alice shrugged. “Apparently the disparate kin also have a disparate sense of time.” Her lips curled up at the joke. “I just figured maybe you could use a distraction.”
Yeah, I probably could. I sighed and rolled my shoulders, not sure meeting a bunch more strangers—stranger shifters who weren’t half as impressed by me as the other kin-groups I’d met—was the kind of distraction I wanted. But it was the kind I had.
“I guess I’d better change into something a little fancier,” I said, looking at the jeans and tee I’d pulled on this morning. I’d already checked out all the wardrobes in the dragon shifter suite. There’d been one with casual clothes, thank God, but most were full of the posh formal wear the regular kin apparently liked to see me and their alphas decked out in.
I’d had my eye on one dress already: an ankle-length satin gown in an indigo shade so deep it was almost black. This didn’t seem like the right time for anything flashy. I pawed through the hangers for it and chucked off my clothes to put it on.
“Any news from Aaron?” I asked his sister as I adjusted the fall of the fabric. Even if Nate’s kin didn’t totally buy into me as leader of the shifters yet, they’d have to admit I at least looked the part.
Alice grimaced. “Nothing so far. But he’s got a few hours left before I’ll be ready to bite his head off. He should have let me go too. Not that I mind hanging out with you, but from what I’ve seen you can handle yourself around here just fine.”
“Hey, I agree with you,” I said. “I guess two golden eagles soaring around together might have looked a little conspicuous, though.”
Alice grinned. “Not half as conspicuous as if he’d had a dragon keeping pace with him.”
“Okay, okay, that was a dumb idea. I fully admit it. But I have a much better one now.” I sniffed the air. “Someone’s roasting chicken. Really, really tasty chicken. What do you say we go find some of that?”
“I’m in.”
My heart started thumping a little faster as we headed toward the house’s main doors. I wanted to peek outside before I walked right out, just to see what I was getting into, but that didn’t seem leaderly at all. Squaring my shoulders, I pushed open the door and strode down to the courtyard as if nothing about the people down there could faze me.
Alice had been right. Several dozen shifters were already gathered on the clay tiles of the courtyard, most of them ones I didn’t think I’d seen in the estate earlier. And all their heads turned toward me as I came down the steps. Quite a few faces brightened up. That made up for the ones that only looked thoughtful.
The atmosphere didn’t feel all that celebratory, I had to say. I guessed it was hard to really party when four deaths and several injuries hung over the estate.
“Hi,” I said, going up to a small cluster of bear shifters who appeared to be happy to see me. “I’m Ren. Um, I think this whole get-together is for you to meet me, so... here I am!”
One of the women touched my arm. Her hand trembled a little. “You’ve been through a lot to make it here,” she said. “I’m glad we could make it here to greet you properly.”
The guy beside her leaned close as if to share a secret. “People are saying you have more fire than the dragons before. A different kind.”
“That’s true,” I started to say. Another of the women laughed with pleasure.
“We can burn all those rogues back to the darkness where they belong,” she crowed.
Okay, that was a more violent turn than I really wanted this conversation to take. “I’ll deal with them as well as I can,” I said, and swiveled to look for someone else to introduce myself to.
By the time Alice and I made it to the refreshments table, I’d endured a multitude of questions about my special fire-breathing, more skeptical looks than I could count, and a few outright glowers. At least I had lots of practice with those thanks to West. I didn’t feel all that hungry anymore, but I grabbed a glass of wine.
Where were my alphas anyway? Nate probably had more estate business to tend to, and Aaron was off on his reconnaissance mission, but the other two should be around somewhere.
It didn’t really matter. I just wanted an excuse to take a breather. I meandered off around the side of the house with Alice in tow.
The gardens on the disparate estate were mostly prickly hedges dotted with flowers interspersed with even pricklier cacti. The vegetation was pretty in its own right, with a pungent perfume, but I was careful not to touch any of it.
“Not the friendliest flowers, are they?” Alice remarked, jabbing the chicken leg she’d grabbed toward one cactus.
“At least people know better than to mess with them,” I said.
Voices carried across the grounds from up ahead. I slowed, my ears perking.
A wall of the same adobe bricks that made up the house stretched partway into the gardens. The voices were coming from beyond its arched doorway. I crept over and peeked inside.