A Guardians Passion (33 page)

“I think,” Gaea said, “that there may be a costly price. There always is with
your
kind.”

Dona snickered, rubbing his hands together as if they might have been cold. Rayne recognized the sign as a calming technique his father used whenever his anger started to build.

His father turned and looked at Rayne, a serenity coming over his features. “No,” he said. “My help is for my son and his family. My price is nothing more than his love.”

Rayne looked away, not wanting to jeopardize the help that Dona was offering, even if the reasoning behind it made him ill.

“I’ll need high-level scans, satellite images of every suspected coven location, major cities. As I hear, the auctions involved some very wealthy clientele. You’ll want to start with them. Then of course you’ll want to work outward. If they have safe houses, then they will be somewhere in the vicinity of the main coven. The systematic approach will be best, but I could use photographs.”

Vaegar nodded, seeming to like the solutions. “No crystal balls, scrying pools, bones?”

“You all don’t have that sort of time, or
do
you?” Dona posed.

Freya was the first one to speak up and the most insistent, although everyone else was in full agreement. “We don’t.”

“I didn’t think so.” Dona’s face seemed to light up as he laid eyes on Freya.

His Freya, Rayne thought possessively.

“You have Hugov contacts, right?” Cole asked the question of Vaegar. While Rayne wasn’t the biggest fan of the Irishman, his jealousy of Freya’s former beta had more to do with the amount of history between Freya and Cole than any particular affront.

Vaegar waved over one of his many men standing at the ready at the side of the room. “Better than the human government. I have holdings in three telecommunications companies. I can get you the images that you need. And you can spot these doors on photographs?”

“I can.”

“How about computer images?”

“Yes,” Dona sighed.

“Very well then.” Vaegar issued orders while the others shot Dona hopeful looks. Even Rayne could detect the thunder of eager hearts. The gathering of information would probably take less than an hour at the most, Vaegar promised. Plans to inform the waiting strike teams, to get the weaponry and transportation that they would need, began to fill the room, but Rayne’s mind was stuck on payments.

Of course his father was beaming like a hero, the masses substantially roused, but he couldn’t shake the notion of price. There was one. With his father, there always was a tit for tat.

Freya stayed at the table with the others as the bounty hunters, warriors, and feverish relatives of the kidnapped strategized, but when Dona moved to the outside of the room, Rayne had to go to him. He stood up from the table, catching Freya’s questioning glance.

“I’ll be right back.”

Her gaze went from him to Dona, a suspicious glint in her eye. “Something wrong?”

Fenris looked over as well, but rather than a question, Fenris’s dark eyes held a silent command that Rayne was already aware of:
Find out what he wants.

“No. Everything is all right. Everything will be fine,” Rayne assured her, knowing that she was already anxious about their upcoming separation.

He too was on edge, not that the price of his father’s help wouldn’t have been worth it, he told himself, but if it could be negotiated—that was what he needed to know.

Dona walked before Rayne, leading him out of the meeting room, down the connecting hall, and over to a terrace. It was certainly out of earshot of werewolves with keen hearing, which Rayne most of all was grateful for.

It was not yet morning, but already the sky had begun to bleed out, abandoning deep blue and purple hues for a silver and pink of the coming dawn. Rayne looked out at the gardens of the mansion’s estate, with their fancy topiaries and brilliantly blooming flowers. He couldn’t help but appreciate the taste of creatures who could only enjoy the beauty of well-manicured lawns and expressive statues only in the shadows of night. The wolf in him imagined running through grass, lapping at the water within the fountains, and sniffing flowers. They were all things that he hadn’t really done as much as he wanted.

His father’s world was complex. There were too many labyrinths, schemes, and mysteries, and Rayne knew that to seek true power came with the risk of losing himself. Dona looked back at him with eyes that saw too much and beckoned him forward. He joined his father at the balcony’s stone rail but maintained a good foot and a half of space from him.

Dona didn’t address him immediately, apparently taken with the beauty surrounding him as well.

Rayne could sense the fallacy, even before Dona turned his pearl-eyed glare upon him. Rayne could still remember the first time he had ever met his sire. He had thought that perhaps his father was blind. Dona had not only answered Rayne’s unspoken question, he had also given details of the room they were in. He provided information on the occupants of several of the adjoining rooms.

Tilting his head back, Dona inhaled greatly, taking in the multitude of scents in the surrounding greenery. “To be around wolves again.” He sighed. “Such delicious energy. I have missed it.”

“You can stay among us as long as you like,” Rayne offered, knowing that his decision could be easily overridden by his alphas or any of the others. It was a hollow offer he had entertained when he was younger, but that was before the poison of his mother’s death had had time enough to dissolve his compassion.

“I don’t believe so.”

“They just need the portals, the locations. They will be grateful, as will I.”

Dona could assume the embodiment of sarcasm with every muscle group in his body, from his face to his shoulders to even the cant of his hips. “You know, there is the possibility that you could create one of your own. You could have the potential, but since we don’t know what your potential is…” His voice trailed off with irritation.

So it was beginning. Anew.

Rayne thought back to the day he declined his father’s custody. Having just learned of his ability to heal his best friend, his alpha Fenris, Rayne would never have considered the cold teachings of magic over the warmth of the pack that had raised him, that loved and needed him. “I don’t know where their hive is.”

“You could have known.”

It was not the discussion he wanted to have, but it was an old grievance, and Rayne was not unaccustomed to it. “But I don’t, so we can skip all that,” he snapped.

“All that? Now, Rayne. All of
that
is very important. Freya will need a thorough beta, not a lazy one. Submission is one thing, but uselessness is quite another. Even omegas have use.”

Rayne felt a lump of pure aggression heavy within his throat at the mention of his alpha. “What did you say to her?”

“Your dark goddess?”

“I don’t need coy right now,” Rayne snarled.

“No, you really don’t.” Dona braced his hand on the railing and looked out. “Rayne. An untrained wytchen is still a wytchen, whelp. Even if he is a halfling. You healed her, and yet you look at me as if
I
am the one weaving some basket of conspiracy. Ha!”

Rayne braced himself for defense, moving over to his father’s side. He tensed, wanting to argue that Dona didn’t know a damned thing, but the truth was his father probably did. Rayne didn’t prepare himself for blame, but he wasn’t ready to be cowed by his father either.

“What did
I
say to her?” Dona turned and considered Rayne for a long moment. “No, the question you should have just asked me is how much of you, as opposed to Fenris, resides within the child. You healed her of course. She couldn’t have children. You wanted to be sure that Fenris got a cub and that Freya was truly made yours and his, but your abilities are nowhere near strong enough to control how that cub was shaped.”

Rayne had served as a midwife when needed. He was sure of his abilities to mend and restore. Freya’s womb was sound, and their child was healthy. “There is nothing wrong with the cub.”

“Of course there isn’t. Other than the fact that it won’t communicate with you, not even to give you some empathic inkling as to its true sex. What did you think it would be? Mundane? Just a wolf?”

Rayne looked to the fountain down in the garden. It possessed three cherubs, angelic children frolicking and spitting water. They were happy stone children. Happiness was all that should have ever mattered.

Mundane
. It was a word that only his father used to mean a child with no magical aptitude.

“The cub is only six months.”

“And?”

“And you should have at least known the sex of the child, Rayne. You do know, don’t you?”

It was a girl. He was nearly certain…except for times when she gave off more male energy, Rayne thought. Sometimes he discovered a girl and others a male. Why he had ever thought that Fenris and Freya would produce an ordinary were, Rayne didn’t know, but the cub was far from just a werewolf, and Rayne was afraid. He had told himself that whatever their child was, he could handle it in the same way that he had helped Fenris. Everything would be all right, he thought, but hearing Dona speak gave him chills.

“She will be a powerhouse, Rayne, an enigma. In as much as you were.”

Dona was full of shit. His father was defeating his own argument; there was no way he could accuse Rayne of not knowing something that he himself didn’t know. “You didn’t suspect that
I
had any power.”

“I knew you were a male. I knew you had potential. Alas, how much you possessed I didn’t know. But you did sing to me from the womb, and I did answer.”

Rayne rolled his eyes. “Not loudly.”

“Perhaps. I was distracted.”

“Yeah, you were busy seducing other women, busy in some other universe or on some other plane.”

Dona looked at Rayne from the corner of his eye but didn’t deny anything. “Our power grows with us. When I saw that you had potential, I did reach out to you. I was willing to help you, and I still am. Your child is only one-third wytchen—and yes, she does have the chimera’s blood.”

“Good,” Rayne said. “She will be Fenris’s and mine.”

“Yes, wytchen and Luna.”

“Lunas aren’t hereditary.” It was more of a prayer than a statement as Rayne looked at his father, wildly curious. It would have been nice to have had a father when he needed one, and some bitterness did still exist, but it was the lack of knowledge that truly hurt the most, both the vacancy and the self-acknowledgment of it.

“And I repeat myself: you did not know all that you were capable of when you healed your female.”

Rayne felt ill. “So you’re saying that she will be a Luna?”

“I’m saying that she is giving off wild magic, powerful waves. She seems to have her mother’s temperament, however. I can speak to her, but she pushes me away. Little elitist, that one. She needs her father, not a selfish pup only interested in her mother’s milk.”

Rayne faltered, his anger waning under the weight of his shame. He didn’t want to say the words he knew needed to be said, but his father was right. As much as Rayne hated it, Dona was right.

Dona had never expressed any true love toward him or his mother, and for that Rayne had despised the wytchen. Manipulation had always been part of Dona’s game, but Rayne was no longer averse to playing it, not if Freya and their cub required it. He had no choice but to put his pride aside, knowing that his father was finally getting what he had so long ago asked for. “Will you help me?” Rayne asked, pained.

“Of course, son.” Turning about, Dona rested his back against the rail. Examining his fingers as if judging his need for a manicure, he replied, “The asprega, the vampires… One could almost applaud their ambition. However, I do not envy what is about to befall them. It is a shame that most vampires are so ignorant about Lunas. I mean, I understand them wanting to have brute-level protection, and asprega are good matches against most weres, but—”

“Will you help
me
?” Rayne clarified to feed his father’s pride. “I will need your help.”

“To be the best beta you can be?”

It was more than that. Fenris had the might, and Freya, she would have her will and courage once more. Their cub would an amalgamation of all the best and maybe even possessing the worst of her parents’ qualities. He needed to be capable of supporting them all. He should have been strong enough to drain Birathan dry, strong enough to calm Fenris down, and certainly strong enough to earn the communication and respect of his cub. “Yeah. And to be the best father and guardian for my loves.”

Dona pushed up off the rail. “You
do
know what that will entail?”

“I know,” Rayne replied, dreading how he would tell Freya about his upcoming trip. He cursed himself, wishing that he had made the decision earlier, prepared before Freya and the others had come to harm. He could have prevented any danger. The Sohon affair was just as much his fault as it was Di’Amanda’s and her pets’.

There wouldn’t be another instance, he swore.

When they finally started back into the hallway that would lead them to the boardroom, Rayne couldn’t help wondering aloud, “How long will it take?”

“Time moves differently in our dimension. You know that.”

“How long?” Rayne demanded to know before they passed the threshold of the room. Rayne kept his voice low, seeing everyone surrounding Vaegar at the head of the table. There was already a stack of large photos before him. Freya met his gaze, neediness she would normally have hidden apparent.

Dona didn’t even look at him as he replied, “Not long at all. The first time.”

Chapter Nineteen

Freya was swearing a blue streak in her mind, cursing the dread in her heart, whispering as it was that she should be accompanying her mates. The last thing she wanted to do was undermine her lovers, but Fenris could easily get out of control, and what if Rayne weakened again? She wanted to have their backs, put her experience to use. Sure, Dona was accompanying them. But not even his rumored skill meant a damn to her.

She could only trust herself to give every last ounce of resolve in the protection of Fenris and Rayne, but then that was the problem—she simply could not sacrifice the well-being of her cub. And she would have been a fool to believe that Bun and she would not be easy distractions to Birathan. She would be in the way.