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limited.”
    “Well, yes—no!” He jiggled from foot to foot, wilting under her gaze. She might only be small, but no one did intimidation like Luce. “It’s my best spell. Not many mages can manage a spell of this intricacy, you know.”
    I took pity on him and sent him away soon after. Months later I’d heard he left his clan.
    “Didn’t he skip out on a wedding or something?”
    Garth nodded. “He was supposed to marry the clan chief’s daughter. He wasn’t too keen on the idea, so he went into hiding.”
    “I remember that!” Steve grinned, teeth very white against his dark skin. “Blue the Reluctant Bridegroom, they called him. Apparently the bride had a face like the back of a bus.”
    “I think the problem was more that he didn’t want to be under the thumb of the chieftain’s family,” Ben said. “Any more than he already was, that is.”
    Some clans treated their mages like princes. Others acted as if they were no more than performing monkeys, a resource to be used up by the clan rather than a person. From memory Blue’s clan had been one of the latter.
    “So how did you find him?” I asked Garth.
    He shrugged and looked down at his feet. “Got lucky. I knew him from before.”
    The way he said “before”, I knew he meant before he became a wolf. Interesting. Garth hated talking about his past.
    “You think you could find him again?”
    Another shrug.
    “How much use is he going to be, even if you do find him?” Ben asked. He ran a hand through his already tousled curls. “Getting something he could use in a seeming would be almost impossible. And if we can get that close to Alicia in the first place, why do we need the seeming?”
    “You got any better ideas?” Garth growled.
    “What about Trevor and the pack? They worked with Leandra before.”
    Right. Being in hospital, he hadn’t caught up on all our adventures. Garth and I exchanged a look. “We tried to get him on-side last week. No deal.”
    “Although that was before he knew about Leandra,” Garth pointed out, forgetting to glare at Ben as the thought struck him. Poor Garth probably missed Luce even more than I did. He made a great second, but he didn’t like being in command.
    Well, we were all in unfamiliar territory here.
    “True.” Blue seemed a dodgy option at best: if we could find him, if he could work any useful magic for us. “Set up a meeting,” I told Steve. No point antagonising the pack leader by having Garth do it. Even if he hadn’t been exiled from the pack, he would never win any awards for diplomacy. “Tell him Leandra’s back and wants to see him.”
    Ben shifted uneasily in his chair. “But she’s not … You’re not—”
    I sighed. How many times were we going to have this discussion? “Yes, I am.” The fact he didn’t like it didn’t make it any less true. I hadn’t exactly asked to be in this situation myself, but there was no point pretending I was the same person I’d always been. Hell, I doubted I even qualified as human now. “I’m not the same old Kate O’Connor any more. There’s no going back.”

CHAPTER FIVE
    Nevertheless, there were times I felt a lot more Kate than Leandra. Leandra would have run screaming from the scene at the breakfast table next morning. Dragons just didn’t do family. Case in point: my lying scum of an ex-husband. However lousy he’d been as a husband and father—and trust me, he defined a new low in lousy—he’d probably done the best he could given the staggering self-centredness of most dragons.
    Lachie was shovelling Coco Pops like there was no tomorrow when I entered the kitchen. A chocolate-brown milk moustache was smeared across his upper lip, and the guilty look on his face said he knew full well he should have been eating something healthier. Judging by the speed at which he was chomping through the bowl, he’d probably figured on destroying the evidence before I came downstairs. Or maybe he thought that if Garth could get away with