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clothing and revert to my werewolf shape, just to escape the scent of Sage clinging to my skin. Why did I give in and sleep with him? I’m so weak, he makes me so. If I can’t say no to such a base urge with someone I shouldn’t be with in the first place, how will I ever survive as queen of the werewolves?
    I pause at the driveway, bend in half, hiding in the shadows of Syd’s shrubbery as, for the first time, I curse my friend for waking my emotions. Where they’d been welcome earlier, surrounded by my witch family, I now long for the silence of my conditioning, the walls and locked doors of the training that used to keep me safe from what I felt.
    I could rebuild those walls, find ways to cut myself off again. My body shudders as I straighten, wiping my sweating face with both hands, perspiring not from the run, but the control it takes to keep from going back to Sage. My wolf prowls inside me, unhappy, restless. I have to get out of here and away from any chance of seeing him again.
    Focus. I have to focus. And, as with every other time I’ve done my best to pull myself into cold calm, I think of my mother. But unlike earlier, when Miriam’s embrace made me long for love lost to me, this time it’s her firm hand and self-possession I miss. It had been so long since I saw her, since the night she died at the hands of the Black Souls as punishment for her rebellion. I shouldn’t be able to call up her face. But there she is with me, as clear and crisp as ever, smiling kindly at me in my mind, though with her own hardness I’ve always done my best to emulate.
    “Never show them,” Olena Moreau told my brother and me from the moment we could understand. “Never let them see you are hurt. That you feel anything. Or they will use it against you.” She meant the Black Souls. But it applies now.
    I’ve shown Sage too much. I gave too much. I’m done giving.
    That’s better. Hard edges form around the pain, quieting my pounding heart, slowing my pulse. The sweat dries on my skin in the soft breeze of the cool fall night, my jaw setting. I feel the meditative stillness I used to practice so easily return to me, though I am aware it will take some time to solidify it again.
    I have time. And I am willing to use it. Especially if it will keep my heart safe from now on. I’m kidding myself, thinking I will find what I need among my people. That I can gain what Syd and Meira have with a werewolf. We are a hard and savage race, our centuries of servitude showing beneath the bare veneer of civility my grandfather insists we cling to. I may find a partner who can rule next to me and be the prince consort I need him to be, but I need to shake off the illusions I’ve created any werewolf I mate with will be as willing as I am to submit to emotions like love and caring.
    More likely, I will mate for power and position and will simply have to make the most of it.
    My mind returns to my mother, to the last moment I saw her, my final memory. She screams at me as the Black Souls drag her away, the first night my heart really hardened. The slam of a huge door, cutting her from my sight. The howl of her wolf. And silence. Anger rises in place of pain, simmering and old, feeding the walls.
    Do I want to return to the girl I had been, resentful and bitter? Hopeless, caught in an endless loop of despair dulling everything but duty? Using my abilities only to survive, not to thrive and grow? I have little choice. I think again of my mother, how my father and grandfather refused to show me her body, what the sorcerers had done to her. Merely telling me she was dead and to show no one weakness at her loss. My brother was better at it than I, at least at first. He taught me to be strong as much as she did. And when Danilo died, the Czar sending me his bones, I leaned on the memory of my brother’s strength to keep from falling apart.
    Even the air around me chills as I draw my anger to me again, an old, welcome friend. Very well then.