He hadn’t mentioned it again, but she hadn’t asked. She’d been hoping for a prophecy and here it was.
As usual, it didn’t make a lot of sense to her right away. She’d show it to Quinn when he came in from his studio. She didn’t want to interrupt his work, since it was urgent that he finish the gloves for his fellow Pyr as quickly as possible. She guessed that he’d work late and glanced down at the book again.
It looked like a fairy tale.
It had to be important, maybe relevant to the firestorm, since the prophecy had been within it.
She sat down, sipped her tea, and started to read.
Once upon a time, there was a king who dearly loved his wife. Their marriage had been arranged to further the fortunes of both families, but they had fallen in love immediately and, each day, their love grew only deeper. The king’s realm was in the distant north, an empire of ice and wind and stone, but his beloved wife filled his palace with light, joy and warmth. The queen loved swans and the king admired her gentleness with them. She fed the birds as they migrated and he would often awaken and look out the palace window to see his wife, the wind in her hair, feeding wild swans by hand in the courtyard. During their courtship, he had changed his standard to that of a white swan in flight. Once she’d become his wife, he delighted in adding swans to every corner of the palace. The canopy over their bed was crested with a carved swan in flight. There were swans carved in stone and in wood, woven in tapestries and created in tiles on the floor. The queen was surrounded by swans and this gave her tremendous joy...
Herding cats had nothing on trying to build consensus amongst Others. Caleb, leader of the New York wolf shifters was nearly at his wits’ end. The bar, Bones, where the Others met was closed for the night, but it was packed with furious shape shifters, each one determined to have his or her say. Pandemonium reigned, no matter what Caleb said or did.
He understood that the sudden slaughter of so many of their fellows had spooked even those shifters most determined to fight against Maeve—and those who had their doubts were ready to surrender.
Caleb had to wonder whether any of them had tried to make a deal with the Dark Queen already.
The Pyr were comparatively quiet, even though a large group of them were in attendance. Caleb had met Arach, Drake, Theo and Rhys before, and on this night, he’d also been introduced to Thorolf and Niall. Rhys’ mate, Lila, was with them, as well, and Caleb could smell that she was expecting a child. More of her sister selkies had come with Nyssa, and at least two of them were pregnant as was Nyssa herself. The scent of hormones was a distraction Caleb didn’t particularly need. The soft femininity of the selkies provoked his protectiveness and he hoped he didn’t lose his temper as a result. At least the selkies and Pyr sat together, watching instead of arguing.
Caleb was becoming a fan of those who kept quiet and listened.
The bartender, Mel, was back, much to Murray’s obvious relief, and bossing the owner of the bar as if she’d never been gone. Caleb knew he hadn’t imagined the way she’d turned immediately when the Pyr arrived, or how her gaze had clung to Theo. That Pyr nodded once in her direction, a brief acknowledgement considering that they’d been trapped in Fae together, but she’d turned away so quickly that she spilled a beer. Caleb didn’t like that Mel still had a red string on her wrist. It suggested to him that she might be drawn back into Fae again, and to his thinking, the fewer times anyone visited that realm, the better.
“Let’s call this meeting to order!” Murray shouted, but the din only diminished a little. The dwarf got up to stand on the bar and shouted from there. “Order, already! Let’s talk, not argue!”
“I need another beer,” a bear-shifter said. “With a shooter.”
“Make that two,” another bear-shifter said beside him. “It’s just wrong what happened to Ivan and Natasha. I never want to see anything like that again.”
“I can’t stop seeing it,” the first bear-shifter agreed and they threw back their shooters in unison.
“Booze isn’t going to help a single thing,” said a woman from