Into the Light (12 page)

Olivia emitted a pained sound and Tanner shot through the door, across the room, placing his hands on her shoulders before he remembered he wasn’t supposed to touch her. As soon as he made contact, he felt that already familiar sexual desire course through his system, but he did not have to fight it off this time, because she slumped back against him, unconscious. He eased her into his arms and turned around and gently placed her on the bed next to his mother, ignoring his body’s protest as he did so.

He did not want to let her go. He wanted to hold her tightly while she slept, and then he wanted her to wake up and kiss him like she had when they’d been on the balcony earlier.

“Oh my,” his mother gasped, and Tanner turned away from the lightbearer to focus on Ariana.

“What’s wrong?” he demanded.

Ariana smiled. “Nothing. Well, not as much, at any rate. I feel better than I have in years. Possibly even a decade. That woman has amazing magical abilities.” She wiggled her toes. “I think I might even be able to walk myself to the bathroom.”

“Let’s not get crazy now,” Tanner said drily.

Ariana smiled impishly. “I’ll take it slow.” But then her smile faded. “Tanner, she doesn’t look so well.”

Tanner looked down at Olivia. She was curled into a ball on the bed, her eyes tightly closed, her entire body racked with shivers. Tanner reached down and tugged the comforter and sheets out from under her body. As he tucked the blanket around her, his hand skimmed over her bare shoulder. She turned into his touch, her face nuzzling at his hand. He froze, staring at her, until his mother spoke again.

“When you touch her, she stops shivering.”

“It’s because I covered her with the blankets,” Tanner replied, and he pulled his hand away to prove his point.

She immediately began shivering. He silently cursed.

“Touch her again, Tanner,” his mother commanded, and he obediently did so. Olivia stopped shivering.

“You have some sort of connection,” Ariana murmured. “Get in the bed,” she commanded.

“I’m not going to sleep with her,” Tanner ground out even as he continued to stare at the sleeping lightbearer.

“Look at her. She looks almost as sick as I did before she healed me.”

Ariana was right. The poor lightbearer’s face was chalk white. Her blonde locks had gone lank and veins protruded from her hands, giving them an aged look.

“Get into the bed with her, Tanner.”

Damn it. How the hell was he supposed to keep himself from attacking her if he shared a freaking bed with her?

As it turned out, it was easy. While she melted into his body just as soon as he crawled into the bed, she was utterly unconscious as she did it. If the raging erection that was wedged between them did not wake her, Tanner knew any hopes for real action were a waste of time. He should be grateful for it, but instead he found himself more frustrated than when he forced himself not to touch her at all.

It was going to be a very long night.

“We need to move.” Those gruffly spoken words, coming from Tanner’s mouth, were what greeted Olivia when she surfaced from sleep the next morning. When she blinked her eyes open, she saw he was standing next to the bed in which she’d apparently slept last night.

She stretched and was amazed to discover that she felt…
good
. Not one hundred percent, by any means, but certainly significantly better than she expected to feel after healing Ariana until she’d passed out the day before.

Despite her father’s insistence that she not, Olivia still practiced healing behind his back, in the coterie, so she was well aware of the consequences of healing wounds as extensive as Ariana’s. Healing Ariana had been harder than healing a lightbearer, as well, because her shifter body was foreign to Olivia, so it took more effort to figure out how to heal her in the first place.

“Are you able to walk?”

Olivia realized he was speaking to her. His tone was still gruff. The man was clearly angry about something.

She frowned. “Of course.” She turned her head and saw that Ariana was sitting in a chair near the window. She smiled at the older woman. “You look well.”

Ariana smiled back. “I feel well. Remarkable. Truly remarkable. Thank you.”

“Give me a few hours of sunlight and I will heal you more. You still have a ways to go to perfect health. You are lucky we found each other when we did. I do not think you would have made it another few weeks.”

“Enough with the chitchat,” Tanner said crossly. “Get up and get moving. We’re sitting ducks here. Now that everyone’s reasonably healthy enough, it’s time to leave.”

“Lisa,” Olivia said. “She just birthed her babe yesterday.”

“She’s fine. Dane said she was perfectly capable of traveling, so long as we stop every few hours so she can nurse the pup. Let’s go.”

Olivia frowned and tried to figure out why he was acting so gruff. Yesterday after their kiss, he’d simply done his damnedest to stay as far away from her as possible. Today, he was determined to bite her head off. What had happened to change his attitude in this way?

After they checked out of the hotel, they had breakfast at a nearby diner, and then were on the road. That was when the group had their first full-blown argument of the day.

“We’re going to Tennessee,” Tanner announced.

“That isn’t where the coterie is located,” Cecilia pointed out.

“There are several shifter packs in Tennessee. I’m going to scope them out, figure out the best one to absorb my mother and Lisa and her pups.”

“You aren’t leaving me with some random shifter pack,” Lisa cried out from the backseat.

“I’m with Lisa on this one,” Ariana said. “I’ve only just healed, and I haven’t seen you in ten long years. I don’t want to start over in some strange place without my son.”

Tanner gritted his teeth and continued to head east. “I’m just going to take the lightbearers to their coterie and then I’ll be back,” he said. “A few days. A week tops.” He slid Olivia a look. “Depending on where the coterie is located, which I have yet to figure out.”

“No,” Lisa said, more firmly this time. “You are not dumping me off so you can play hero. We’re going with you. We’re a pack.
All
of us.”

Olivia deliberately did not look at Tanner, but she could tell nonetheless that he was annoyed and frustrated that Lisa was disrupting his plan. It didn’t help matters that his mother jumped on that bandwagon as well.

“That includes me,” Ariana added. “Olivia says she still needs to heal me before I am one hundred percent. And I am just not quite ready to let you go again.” She thrust out her chin and Olivia thought,
Oh my lights, I do that same thing
.

“That bad pack master will find us,” little Sofia piped up from the backseat. “Daddy said the world isn’t a big enough place,” she added, speaking far too intelligently than she should, given she was only four.

Tanner squeezed the steering wheel. “Well?” he ground out, speaking to Olivia, who was seated in the passenger seat. “It’s your coterie.”

She did not need him to voice his opinion that he thought this was a lousy idea. It was plainly obvious by the rigidness of his posture, the way he gripped the steering wheel, the tick in his cheek, which was a result of his clenched teeth. They’d spent less than a week in one another’s company, and already she knew him well.

What would it be like to get to know him even better?

That errant thought drifted through her head just as Dane added his opinion from the backseat.

“Lisa and her babe are my patients,” he said. “They need to still be under my care, at least for a few more days. So either we hole up in a hotel somewhere, or they come to the coterie with us. My vote is for the coterie.”

Tanner slanted another glance at Olivia. “Your call,” he said, and she did not have time to appreciate that he was leaving the decision up to her, because she was too busy thinking,
What will my father think? What will the rest of the coterie think
?

“We can hide them,” Dane suggested before she could even ask the question. “They can stay with me. When Lisa is well enough, they can all go on to their new pack together.”

There were no protests to his plan. Feeling trapped, because she really didn’t want to say goodbye to Tanner, yet she knew that it would be impossible to hide the small group of shifters within the coterie for more than a few days, Olivia finally threw up her hands in surrender.

“Fine,” she said. “They can come to the coterie.”

Tanner looked resigned. Lisa looked triumphant. Ariana and Dane looked relieved. Cecilia simply looked serene. Olivia wondered what she looked like. Confused? Torn?

* * * *

They left the old maroon sedan Freddy had procured for them in the hotel parking lot. Lisa’s SUV had plenty of room to fit everyone, and Tanner informed them he felt more comfortable with the group secured in one vehicle. Olivia foolishly complimented his pack-master skills, and he growled at her like an angry dog.

They stopped for the night in the middle of Iowa. Everyone was exhausted. It had been a long drive, especially because they stopped every two or three hours so Lisa could feed her newborn pup. Ariana was weakening as well, and Tanner had refused to let Olivia heal her while they were driving. Cecilia and Sofia were cranky because they were both bored and tired of sitting in the car. Dane fretted over Lisa and her pup like he was the new mother, not her.

It was definitely time to take a break.

Unfortunately, Tanner was not quite comfortable enough to rent two hotel rooms, so they still were forced to pile into one suite together. On the bright side, there was significantly more space than in the SUV.

Once they were settled in the room, Lisa, Dane, and the newborn pup retired to one of the bedrooms. Ariana relaxed in front of the television and Sofia and Cecilia lay on the floor and colored in one of the many coloring books that they’d purchased along the way in an effort to keep the four-year-old entertained while in the vehicle.

“I’ll go find the nearest grocery store, get some supplies for dinner,” Tanner said, once they were settled inside. “You,” he said, jabbing his finger at Olivia. “Do not heal my mother until I return. And make sure this room is warded against shifters. I’ll call when I’m two minutes away.”

When he was done issuing commands, Olivia politely asked, “May I go with you?” She thought perhaps if they had a few moments alone, she could talk to him, ask him what was wrong, why was he in such a prickly mood. She did not want to offend him—he had saved her life, after all—and if she was doing something that he didn’t like, she would like to know.

“No.” He stabbed his finger at her shoulder. “And don’t you dare heal my mother until I return,” he reiterated, and Olivia felt an urge to throw something. Preferably something heavy and hard. At his head.

She watched as he stormed out of the hotel suite, leaving Olivia to stare at the closed door and wonder what in the name of the lights she’d done this time.

“He’s frustrated, dear,” Ariana said, coming up behind Olivia and placing her hand on Olivia’s shoulder. “And he’s been out of touch just long enough to have forgotten how to treat people, it would seem.”

“Why is he so frustrated?” Olivia asked.

“Oh, lots of reasons, I suspect,” Ariana mused. “He’s worried, I’m sure, that he’s put Lisa and I and the pups into danger by taking us with him. That’s the reason he left alone when he left ten years ago. I’m the one who actually pointed it out to him back then. I told him that if he took anyone with him, Quentin would hunt them down and kill them. But if he left on his own, Quentin would let him go, because my mate is just egotistical enough to believe that his legitimate, natural-born son would, at some point, return to the pack to take his rightful place as the future leader.”

“But he never did,” Olivia guessed.

“Not yet.”

“What happens when a pack leader dies and there is no son to take over?”

Ariana gestured at the small balcony across the room, and Olivia followed her over there, so that the two women could stand in the waning sunlight.

“It doesn’t have to be a son,” Ariana explained. “Male or female, it doesn’t matter, so long as it is the pack master’s child. Typically it’s the firstborn, although there has been occasion over the years of a pack master declaring one of his other children as heir, if they are smarter or stronger or seem better equipped for the position. It doesn’t even have to be a legitimate child, although Quentin has always maintained the blood is purest if it is legitimate. I’ve seen enough pups running around that pack who bear a remarkable resemblance to my mate to know that if he were so inclined, Quentin would have plenty of illegitimate prodigy to choose from.” She gave a small shudder before continuing.

“To answer your question, if there is no declared heir when the pack master dies, the position is up for grabs. Unfortunately, we shifters are a bloody, violent bunch, so the way to win the position is to fight for it, literally. Some packs fight to the death, some only until one cries mercy. The one who wins each fight must continue to fight each contender until no more step forward. The process has been known to go on for days, weeks, sometimes a month or longer. The longest battle for dominance on record was several hundred years ago, and lasted for half a year. By the time the winner was declared, there was hardly a pack left to lead.”

Olivia shook her head in amazement. “I don’t even know what to say to that.”

Ariana smiled. “You can say nothing at all, if you’d like. I did not say our way is right, only that it is our way. How does your kind handle the transition of leaders? Or do you too live for eternity, as the fae do?”

“We are mortal, just like you, although we live significantly longer than humans. My fa—there is a king, and if he bears a son, his son automatically takes over as king when he retires or dies.”

“And if there is no son?”

“He can declare his daughter’s mate as the future king. Or, he can skip that generation altogether and wait for his daughter and her mate to have a son, and the grandson would be declared as future king.”