A Dangerous Legacy Pt. 08

"I'll explain later," I merely said, sighing. I was mentally exhausted, and by the gods, I didn't want to be Valerius' whore. I wanted to go back to my room, crawl into bed, and love each man passionately until he could no longer doubt the veracity of my feelings.

We found a door marked PRIVATE and when I raised my hand to knock it swung open to reveal Sebastian.

"Anna. Gentlemen," he nodded to my pack. "Please, come in."

It was a conference room with a large table. On one side a buffet sported drinks and small bits of food. There was a crowd and I counted five witches with packs. Most of the female wolf packs seemed to be two, the male three. The witches were drinking, the wolves nibbled at the food, always hungry.

"Can I get you anything to drink?"

"No, thank you. Sebastian, it's been a long day and I am quite tired. Why have you asked us here?"

Sebastian nodded, turned to the room and clapped his hands together once, loudly. "Would the witches and alphas take a seat at the table? I am sorry for the small room, so the rest of your packs may sit at the chairs on the wall."

I turned to my pack and Pierre and Julian nodded. Kissing my cheek each went to the wall with the other lower wolves. Andre took my arm and lead me to the seat while Sebastian seemed to be holding at the head of the table. He seated me and slid to my right. Sebastian walked down and took the foot, a stunning blonde female wolf at his side.

"Welcome, one and all. For the moment let us forgo giving names, for names have power. Instead, we indeed have seven new members. For those of you who are new, we are an organization of forward-thinking witches. Our goal is to overturn the original binding agreement between wolves and witches. We seek equality for all."

Andre seemed as surprised as I was. I'd guessed, but to hear it spoken out loud was something different.

"We've never had the means to do this before aside from grass roots movement, but now we have a chance. Our queen has returned!"

There was a call of "Here here!" from the table and my heart thundered. Beneath the table I sought Andre's hand nervously, and his touch calmed me. Glancing back at my other men I saw they were wary.

"Now, we all know our queen was raised outside the system. We will never know why her mother sought to have her raised so, but if I may hazard a guess, she wished our queen to be protected from the many dark things of our world, including this outdated caste system!

"The war is at a stalemate for all intents and purposes, dragons can no longer fly the skies. We have no reason to keep wolves shackled. The pretense of readiness for battle is past."

"Er, Sebastian?" I called out, resisting the urge to raise my hand. It was such an impassioned speech, but I found myself torn. Slavery and indentured servitude was wrong, but readiness for battle in a war was important. Since I didn't know anything at all about this war, I wanted to learn more before I committed myself to pacifism.

He looked at me, clearly nervous. "Yes?"

"I apologize if this is rude, but I'm going to guess every witch here is less than one hundred years old."

They looked at one another with the kind of wonderment usually reserved for a good magic show, and I laughed. "I'm not psychic, I'm just smart. We're all young enough and it seems most of us are Caucasoid, so it's easy to guess we all grew up in a world without slavery, taught it was wrong."

"So?" a female witch asked politely, confused.

"So, the council is comprised of relics over a thousand years old. Valerius, for example, comes from Rome, a civilization that only grew to its lofty heights on the backbone of slavery."

"So?" another female wolf asked.

"So, the powers that be were raised with the conviction it is right every bit as much as we were raised to believe it wrong. We have as much a shot of convincing them to change their minds as they have changing ours. At least we cannot change millennia of convictions in a single day. It will take time."

Sebastian sat at last, smiling. "I see Valerius is up to his old tricks. Anna, we seek only your ear, not to control you as he would. Of course he has not explained your true power. He wishes to be the power behind the throne, as it were."

I rolled my neck, frustrated. "Do you people have some kind of guide book, maybe a DVD? So far I'm only getting what people say, and humans, which we all are in some fashion, are prone to forgetfulness and opinions." Of course Valerius had promised me such a book, but I was willing to bet one from this group would be different and I wanted both.

A male witch leaned forward, smiling. He was pretty in a delicate way, exuding much less masculinity than the other witches seemed to have gone for. "My queen, soon you will learn how to traverse time, and then you may go back and speak with your ancestors for the truth. Until then...Sebastian, may I?"

Sebastian nodded.

With flourish the pretty young man conjured up a book which floated to me. "It is a copy of all the rules handed down by every queen, agreed upon by the council, adopted as law. Once you can travel, you will hear for yourself the veracity of the text."

A timeline was a great thing to have and my smile was genuine. "Thank you," I said and pulled from Andre's grasp to grip the tome with both hands. I opened it and indeed it was written as in handwritten script in varying tongues, but beneath each line was a translation to modern English, and it was organized as a timelime.

"I will need time to study this. So for the moment, to what end have you brought me here?"

Sebastian stood. "It is enough for now that you know we exist. There are less than five percent of us present on this island of all witches though we number far more in the world at large. Know our organization is much stronger that what you see here. You have the power to change our world, and we will stand behind you."

I stood and so did every man in the room. Such manners made me blink for a moment, surprised. "So long as I champion your cause. I may be new to magic, but not to power games. I bid you all good night. Please, do not contact me again unless it's an emergency." I raised the book. "I have heavy reading to go through, and if I decide it is right, I will contact you."

"Then good night, your highness."

"Anna," I said automatically, and took Andre's arm as Pierre and Julian fell into step behind us. He led us from the room and once outside I shook my head and pulled free.

"Tell me, did you all bring us here for this?"

"What do you mean?" Pierre asked.

"Was this your way of telling me I'd 'won' the genetic lottery and have some heavy shit coming down the pipe?"

I saw guilt in their eyes as silence stretched between us.

"I suppose so," Julian finally said quietly.

Andre turned to face me, placing his large hands on my arms. "Anna, understand, we're almost a thousand years old. We've known you not even two weeks. Before you came along we were slaves. It was not our place to direct anything, to upset the powers that be. It's nearly impossible to shrug off a millennium of oppression."

Sadly, I knew I could never fully understand, not until I reached such an age. It struck me, had I been judging them too harshly? What I had taken as lack of faith in me as a person could have just been fighting against a thousand years of training. This couldn't be any easier for them than it was for me.

"I'm sorry. I've been unfair," I said, and turned so I met all their eyes. "Sometimes it's so hard to remember how old you are. You all seem so young I think I've been making the error of believing you see the world as I do."

Surprise filled their eyes, and I wanted to say more but could not on that subject. So I clasped the book in front of me and sighed, working up a small smile. "So let's return to our bungalow. I find I tire easily of this world. I just want to be with you and pretend for a night it does not exist."

I didn't wait for them but turned and walked out a door to the beach. I would walk around the building, hoping to avoid the rest of the hoi polloi. However, I'd miscalculated and found myself viewing the wolf chess down by the ocean.

And just like that I felt a strange tang of magic and knew something momentous was happening. If I'd mastered my magic or knew more, I would be able to say for certain, but as it was, I could only guess some path of fate of had just locked in.