Dark Lycan (18 page)

Fen frowned. Dimitri had shared that the Carpathian ranks had fallen well below safe numbers. The fear of extinction was always present, but he hadn’t described the problem. Most likely, Dimitri feared if he told Fen that finding a lifemate was nearly impossible, Fen would give up and choose to meet the dawn.

Mikhail continued in a low, even voice, almost musical, a very powerful weapon should he choose to use it as such. “We have discovered, over time and with a great deal of blood-spill, heartache and tears, that Xavier, our greatest mage, had secretly and over centuries worked to bring about our downfall. He even went so far as to introduce microbes into our soil to contaminate it and kill our women and children before they were born. Each time we find one threat and destroy it, another has arisen.”

“I had no idea this was happening,” Fen admitted. “I have been gone from these lands for centuries. My only contact has been my brother, and then only when I sought a safe haven in the refuges he created for my wolf brethren when I needed to rest.”

Mikhail inclined his head. “Your brother’s wounds are healing?”

Fen couldn’t stop himself from glancing at Tatijana. For comfort? He didn’t know the answer to that question—only that having her with him made it easier to bear the idea of Dimitri’s pain and suffering. “We have hope.” There was nothing else to say.

Mikhail leaned toward Fen suddenly, his dark eyes penetrating deep. “We’ve had a period of relative peace after the De La Cruz brothers and Dominic defeated the vampires in South America. The vampires scattered with few leaders to direct them. I’m certain they will rise again, or perhaps they have been waiting to see if our children survived beyond their first year.”

Silence filled the room and with it came tension, stretching nerves tight. Fen could feel his every Lycan sense activating. His muscles ached. His jaw. He felt threatened in some primal way, but wasn’t certain what they expected of him.

“I don’t understand.” He made the statement without a hint of fear, but he was beginning to wish Tatijana had remained outside the four walls where he knew she had a chance of being safe. They weren’t safe locked in a relatively small space with four lethal predators.

“My son is now two years of age. And my brother, Jacques’s boy is growing and thriving at three. Gregori’s twins survived those critical first years. Gregori’s brother Darius has twins, a boy and girl, both healthy and past the two-year mark. I am certain you must have grown up with Gabriel and Lucian, two other of Gregori’s brothers. Gabriel has a little daughter, again, she is healthy.”

“This is the first time in centuries such a thing has happened,” Gregori added.

Mikhail gestured toward Falcon. “You crossed paths as children with Falcon. His lifemate, Sara, has announced she is once again pregnant and the pregnancy appears to be a healthy one. There are others and perhaps ones not yet known. The point is that in over five hundred years we have never had it so good.” His eyes went steely, pupils dilated and pitch-black. “And now, at this time when all is beginning to look up, the Lycans have shown up in my backyard. I would like you to tell me what that means.”

Fen could see the damning arrow. How could he not? Carpathians finally beginning to recover and suddenly they are overrun with a species so elusive one nearly forgot their existence. Had it been just coincidence that the rogue pack had run this way? Led by Bardolf, Fen might have believed the choice had been a random one. But Abel, not Bardolf, really led the pack.

“Fen?” Mikhail prompted.

“I don’t honestly have an answer for you. I ran across werewolves committing murder and knew I’d discovered a rogue pack. A single hunter can’t take on a small pack by himself, let alone a large pack. And this is a very large pack. I followed them and began picking them off one at a time. It’s dangerous and time-consuming, but believe me, it’s the only way if you want to survive.”

Fen sighed, shaking his head slowly. “I traveled this way only to be close to my brother once again. I felt drawn here. In doing so, I ran across the kills.” He looked at Tatijana. “I had resisted for well over eighteen months. I found I had to come, although I felt it dangerous to do so.”

“Did you think we wouldn’t welcome you? Gregori tells me you are of mixed blood. You thought this would matter to us in some way?” Mikhail inquired, his tone deceptively mild.

Fen spread his hands out in front of him, fingers wide. “People like me are called
Sange Rau,
literally
bad blood
in the Lycan world. We are hated and hunted the instant it is known we exist.” He shrugged. “I could live with that from the Lycans. I understand their reasoning. The only mixed bloods they have known have been vampire-Lycan. To them, that is what I am should I be discovered. The idea of my own people condemning what I’ve become did not sit with me so easily.”

Gregori turned his head, those pale silver eyes moving over Fen in a careful study. “You are not so easily killed, even by one of us.”

Fen gave him a slight nod in response to the compliment. Gregori only stated the truth, he wasn’t out to flatter Fen. Clearly Gregori had made a show of Jacques and Falcon’s presence because he knew they would need more than one hunter to try to kill him. And then whose side would Tatijana come down on? She had sworn her allegiance to the prince, and no Dragonseeker would ever break their word after giving it.

He took another slow look around the room. There were others. There had to be more than just these three warriors protecting the prince. He had allowed the house to confuse his senses while they distracted him with talk. He was happier to be in his homeland, surrounded by his own people, than he’d let himself believe. That had also thrown his guard off a bit. And then there was Tatijana . . .

He sighed. “You may as well tell the insect in the rafters to come on down. The mouse in that tiny hole over there”—he indicated his left—“and the knot directly behind me is concealing a beetle of some sort. If there are others, they certainly are adept at hiding, but being in the body of something so small for so long, makes for slow fighters.”

The flying insect in the rafters responded first, shimmering into the form of a tall, broad-shouldered male with strange-colored, nearly aquamarine eyes. His hair was very long, nearly to his waist, thick and tethered with a single long leather cord winding all the way down to secure even the ends, a typical way to bind hair for battle. Fen recognized him immediately and to his shock, relief spread through him. Mataias had been a childhood friend.

Fen had known Falcon, but he’d grown up close to Mataias and his brothers. They’d run wild together in the mountains, learned battle skills and shifting on the run. They’d been like family, and he’d lost track of them. He came to his feet and clasped Mataias’s forearms in the age-old traditional welcome between two warriors.

“
Arwa-arvo olen isäntä, ekäm
—honor keep you, my brother,” Fen greeted.

Mataias’s answering grip was strong. “
Arwa-arvo pile sívadet
—may honor light your heart.”

“It’s good to see you,” Fen said, meaning it. He truly felt as if he had come home, seeing Mataias, knowing he hadn’t succumbed to the ever-present darkness.

The fact that Mataias was there meant the other two guarding the prince had to be his brothers. The siblings were never far from one another. Coming from a long line of respected warriors, they had traveled together to see each other through darker times. They were lethal hunters, calm, experienced, and coordinated their attacks with expertise, much like the packs of Lycans. A master vampire had killed their parents when their mother was pregnant and they’d hunted the vampire across two continents, with a ruthless, implacable purpose, never stopping until they had found and destroyed him.

“Lojos and Tomas may as well show themselves,” Fen added.

“Did you smell them?” Gregori asked.

Fen glanced over at him. Clearly he’d been testing something new. He shook his head. “No, not even with my Lycan senses heightened.”

Gregori nodded. “Good. We’ve got a couple of brilliant researchers working for us, and this was one product I thought would be good to use if the Lycans are invading.”

Fen shook his head. “They aren’t like that. They’ve never been like that. They remain in the background, working quietly to keep their packs as strong as possible, but they’ve integrated into human society well. I can’t see them making a decision out of the blue to suddenly go to war with Carpathians.”

The small mouse grew and kept growing fast, until another Carpathian male, looking very much like a clone of the first one, came forward to greet Fen with the traditional forearm clasp. His eyes were as brilliant aquamarine as his brother’s. His hair was identical as well as body frame, but Lojos had a web of scarring running down his left shoulder and arm, all the way to his hand. It was very unusual for any Carpathian to scar. The wounds had to be near fatal, the suffering great.

“Well met, brother,” Fen said, meaning it. “
Veri olen piros, ekäm
.” Literally the greeting translated to blood be red, my brother, but figuratively, it meant “find your lifemate.”

They stood eye to eye, staring into each other’s pasts. Fen knew what it was like to struggle against the darkness, to be alone in the midst of others—even those you could only cling to the memory of loving.

“This is your lifemate? A Dragonseeker?” Lojos shook his head. “You are a very lucky man, Fen. This Lycan hunter you call Zev, the one so badly wounded, with his belly ripped open. I have watched him, and he is healing at a remarkable rate for the extent of his injuries.”

Fen knew they all were listening for every detail. “Lycans regenerate very quickly, which is one of the reasons, when you take them on, you have to know how to properly kill them. They aren’t easy. Zev is an elite fighter, one of the best I’ve ever seen. He was willing to take on the rogue pack alone in order to allow me to get Tatijana out of harm’s way.”

The men looked at one another, secretly amused that a Lycan thought to protect a Carpathian, especially one who was Dragonseeker.

“Obviously he didn’t know what, or who she was,” Fen said.

“You admire this man.” Gregori made it a statement.

“Yes, very much. You don’t get to his position without seeing hundreds, if not thousands of battles with packs. The moment he and Dimitri realized the one leading the rogues was one of the
Sange rau
, they held off the pack in order to allow me the opportunity to destroy the demon. Zev didn’t hesitate to put himself in a very dangerous situation. He knew he could die, but he didn’t back down.”

The small beetle fit snugly in the knot landed on the floor and grew with alarming speed into the shape of the first two brothers. When he clasped Fen’s forearms in the warrior’s greeting, Fen could see the droplets of scars down the right side of his face, almost like tears, all the way to his jaw. The same strange scars ran up his temple and disappeared into his hairline.

“
Bur tule ekämet kuntamak
—well met, brother-kin,” the third brother greeted Fen. “It is good you found your lifemate. I have thought often of you over the last centuries, and hoped I would never have to meet you in battle.”

“I felt the same, Tomas,” Fen admitted honestly. “So many of us have been lost to the darkness.”

He took another careful look around. The prince had these three experienced warriors, Gregori, Falcon and Jacques to protect him against an unknown Lycan/Carpathian combination.
In his house.
Close quarters. Gregori had an inkling of what he could do. There was another somewhere. Someone extraordinary, their ace in the hole. There was one other from his childhood. A little older, only by a decade or so, which was nothing in the years of Carpathians. He’d always been a little odd, but he’d been a source of vast knowledge. Andre. Some called him the ghost. He often passed through, wiped out any vampires in an area and was never seen or heard from. But he left his mark, and Fen had tried to keep track of him. He’d heard that he often was near the triplets, banding to hold on in order to keep the darkness at bay.

The Carpathians had prepared for a war. They’d spent the last two years of peacetime getting ready for anything that might threaten them as a species. He was just seeing the tip of the iceberg.

“Fen.” Mikhail’s cool voice brought him back to the business at hand. “The Carpathian people know the difference between a Carpathian and a vampire. You are no threat to us. In fact, your added speed and abilities as a Lycan only serve to aid our cause.”

Fen frowned and sank back into the comfortable chair. “The Lycans’ fear of the combination of blood is so deep that they would go to war should they find you are giving aid and harboring one of us. My presence here puts you all in jeopardy.”

He dropped the bombshell quietly, knowing he didn’t need to embellish. The stark truth was enough. Mikhail Dubrinsky was no one’s fool. He would grasp instantly the enormity of what Fen was telling him. He would hear the ring of truth and know Fen had brought a problem of an alarming magnitude to him.

“I see,” Mikhail said, steepling his fingers. “We’re going to need to know everything you know about the Lycans. Everything. The smallest detail.”

“There are very few like me,” Fen cautioned. He certainly didn’t want to be the cause of a war. “The Lycans are essentially good people,” he added. “I like them and respect them. As fighters there are few who could surpass them. They don’t look for power or glory as a rule. They live their lives within their small packs, happy with their families.”

“I am certain they are good people,” Mikhail agreed. “However, they have come to my lands without contacting me, a general courtesy, which I find unusual. A rogue pack with two of these creatures you refer to as
Sange rau
have also come when it simply has not happened before. We have several children who have survived into their second year. Are these coincidences? I am not such a fool as to believe that. I cannot afford to be that foolish.”