Lord's Fall (Elder Races #5)(3)

No, she was a fugitive from some other demesne, because Dragos wasn’t the only one she had stolen from.

Or, she didn’t bother to reveal what kind of Wyr she was, because she was one of the antisocial ones, and she didn’t care if she made friends or fit into any of the packs, herds or prides.

She was stuck in a box, her options limited. She couldn’t just pretend she was a horse or a deer and dismiss the subject. Nobody would believe her if she tried, because her scent was too strange.

For the Wyr, it was hard to warm up to someone who kept something so fundamental to their nature hidden from everybody else. Knowing that and understanding the reasons why it was there weren’t much help. The low-level resentment and subtle ostracization still felt sucky.

Over half a year later, Pia still felt like an uneasy guest in what was supposed to be her own home. The only real friends she felt like she had were Graydon, who knew everything; the new Dark Fae Queen, Niniane, with whom she steadily corresponded; and a few people from her old job working as a bartender at Elfie’s.

Quentin, the bar owner, didn’t need to know all of her secrets, and she didn’t need to know all of his. And of course there was Preston, the half-troll barfly, who liked to describe himself as an eight-foot hunka burnin’ love, and who really was a sweetie through and through. Preston didn’t care if anyone had any stinking secrets. If you were willing to share a dozen orders of baked potato skins, lathered with cheese, bacon, sour cream and chives, and drink beer while watching the NBA playoffs, you were all right by him.

But Graydon was increasingly busy, and letters from Niniane, while fascinating and wonderful to receive, weren’t enough to satisfy her social needs. Quentin was absent more and more from Elfie’s these days, and anyway Pia couldn’t hide out at the bar twenty-four/seven. She could only visit a couple of times a week.

As far as she was concerned, there were only two things that made living in Cuelebre Tower worth it. One of them was the peanut—and she really had to stop calling him that, because the little fetus was already so smart, she could tell he thought his name actually was Peanut.

The other was Dragos, who was primitive, powerful, domineering, calculating, manipulative, infernally clever and tactless, and who she adored with all of her heart. Dragos, who created as many problems as he solved, and who loved her too, fiercely, so much so he had mated with her. Their lives had become inextricably entwined, and they had to work together for things now.

Which meant they needed to figure out how to be partners in more places than just the bedroom. (Because Pia was pretty damn sure they had nailed that part the first time they had made love.) And which also meant coming to an agreement about what they worked toward, even if reaching that agreement took months and sometimes felt like pulling giant, dragon-sized teeth.

The Wyr demesne and Dragos himself were facing too many challenges at once to deal with any one of them effectively. Dragos had broken several treaties with the Elves in his pursuit of Pia last May, and those treaties had not been repaired. Border strife continued with the Elven demesne, along with an ongoing trade embargo that had put several New York businesses under and was seriously hurting several more. Dragos’s multinational corporation, Cuelebre Enterprises, had bailed out several floundering companies and provided low-interest, long-term business loans to help out others, but they were all stopgap measures that didn’t really resolve the core issue.

In the meantime, Dragos’s corporation, along with the rest of the world, had taken its own hits in an ongoing global recession. Diversification, along with aggressive streamlining and retrenching, had kept the corporation leaner but running strong, but that had taken harder work and more top-heavy manpower at a time when Dragos could ill afford to expend the energy.

Then there was the problem of being critically short staffed. Dragos had lost two of his seven sentinels in quick succession last summer. The first one to go was his warlord sentinel, Tiago Black Eagle, who had mated with the new Dark Fae Queen, Niniane Lorelle. Then Dragos lost his First sentinel, Rune Ainissesthai, who had mated with the Vampyre sorceress Carling Severan. Dragos and Rune had parted badly, and Dragos still refused to talk about it. He had moved two people into sentinel positions as a temporary stopgap, but now he had to go through the process of setting new sentinels into place.

To top it all off, there was the amorphous Freaky Deaky Something that hung on the horizon, the strange voice that Dragos had heard through an impromptu prophesy given by the Oracle of Louisville, Grace Andreas. The Oracle and her family had since relocated to Miami, where Pia and Dragos had traveled to meet with her in a follow-up consultation last autumn. Unfortunately, Grace couldn’t add much to the original vision since, as she said, specific prophecies did not repeat themselves.

Grace did offer them a piece of advice, while they sat at her kitchen table and two young children played outside with, of all things, a very large, indulgent and good-looking Djinn. “The person or Power behind the voice from the vision is either already in your lives, or it will be,” Grace told Pia and Dragos. “Don’t let that knowledge weaken you. There’s no point in trying to avoid it, because the actions you take might actually cause you to come into contact with it sooner than you would otherwise. Act from your strengths, and live your lives in a state of readiness. You were lucky. You were given a warning. Most people don’t get that.”

The memory of that conversation played through Pia’s mind as she exited the bathroom stall and washed her hands. She also thought of all the other issues, along with the added stressor of having just left her mate. Eva’s antagonism shouldn’t even be on the list of challenges she had to face.