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an at
length conversation with you on the subject.” He smiled, like this
meant a lot to him. “And since when did I start caring what anyone
else thought?”
    “ Then why did you do what your Leader wanted you to do in the
first place? You normally aren’t so compliant.”
    “ I’ve been friends with Gregory his entire life. I was there
the day he was born, and he hasn’t done me wrong in all of his two
hundred years. If I have to put myself out to appease my Leader’s
extensive need to appear human as an example to those under our
wing, then I will. If by wining and dining a few of our most
beautiful women would further that goal, I will find a way to…deal,
or so you would say.”
    I
sputtered with laughter. He was a funny man when he wanted to be.
But there was one question I was burning to ask.
    He sighed. “Just ask it already. Didn’t you demand that of
me? Now, it’s your turn.”
    It only
took a heartbeat for me to respond. “Why haven’t you ever found a
mate? Haven’t you ever trusted someone enough to give them that
power over you?”
    “ I did have a mate once, a few centuries ago. She was a
convert like you are,” he said evenly. “She didn’t belong to this
life, and I never should’ve turned her. Though she wanted it, even
if she didn’t understand what it was she asked for. She hadn’t been
able to come to grips with the situation after her
conversion.
    “ But I was in love with her, and eventually she overtook my
better judgment with her persuasive and sometimes prickly ways. She
caught me at a particularly weak moment when I needed her to be
with me.” He stopped, and I kept my silence. He blinked, trapped in
a past that shone in the twist of his lips. “It wasn’t even a week
after her conversion and registration that the Council called me
out of my isolation, on a mission ‘no one else could do’. They
wouldn’t allow a young fledging of her...nature to come with me on
a hunt, not that I would have wanted her to.”
    “ Where was Gregory then?” I replied in a controlled
voice.
    He looked away again. “I was on my own then, without a Coven,
and rarely bothered by the Council. I found her in a far away land
that doesn’t even exist by today’s standards. The closest group of
people was a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, but they
allowed me peace while I grew up.”
    “ You were young?”
    “ I was about sixty or so when I left my family home. I met…”
He swallowed, and his eyes widened just a little. It was panic or
Loren’s version of it anyway. “Abellana. It is hard to say her
name, even now. There is just too much there…”
    My heart literally melted. Not the mushy girly crap I was
intolerant of in anyone other than Kelly—my best friend in the
entire world—but a glacier baking in the sun kind of
way.
    “ It’s okay, babe.” My fingers danced up his back.
    I hated that I'd ripped open a wound that had been long
closed—something I couldn’t bear to see.
    “ I ensured she was properly fed before I left, and bade her to
stay in the house until my return. I gave her every caution I could
think of, but in the end it didn’t matter.”
    My breath caught. “She didn’t stay inside, did
she?”
    “ Mostly, yes she did. The people around my land had never seen
her, save that one instance.” Loren sighed. “I’m unclear on some of
it, but from what I gathered, she went into the garden. Human
hunters had been walking through the forest around our home, not
knowing they were on my land when they came across her. She’d been
practicing some very basic natural spells I taught her, nothing
harmful or bad. It was meant to bring life to a practically dead
stick. She had an affinity for plants, and her new magic was
strong, her curiosity vast.”
    “ Of course, you’re pure.”
    One of my brothers in arms, Holly, had once told me that was
why I possessed so much power as a convert. My Maker had been older
and had higher blood-status, even for a