Malachi could only stare back dispassionately. It was nothing he hadn’t heard ten times a day for most of his life, after all, and whether or not there was anything to it, he found that about this, as with most things anymore, he just didn’t give a damn. Weak. Just like his father. As the years had passed, though, Malachi had reassessed his view of the man who had given him life and then stolen away without a word. Weak he may have been, though all in their circle were forbidden to speak of him and so he couldn’t truly say. On one count, though, the count of having had the balls to turn his back on Moriah … well, Malachi supposed that was a braver man than he’d ever be.

But then, if the whispers he’d heard were true, it was entirely possible that Benjamin Douglas hadn’t left of his own free will at all.

He thought of this, the hate twisting just a bit deeper into his gut, before answering in a voice just as dead as his mother’s eyes. “You haven’t let me finish, Mother. Unlikely as it would seem, we still have the advantage. There’s been a storm. Gideon won’t be going anywhere just yet.”

He watched Moriah digest this, watched her eyes slowly return to what passed for normal as she released her grip on the desk and relaxed back into her chair. Splaying her fingers out before her, she studied them a moment, then responded.

“And are you certain that we can finish this effectively? Because you know he’ll be warning his good-for-nothing brother and his pathetic sap of a father. They’ll be looking within to find the culprit.”

Malachi laughed softly, a thin, cold sound. “You know as well as I that Jonas, Morgan, Jamie, even your beloved Marcus,” he sneered, not bothering to hide his feelings for the lover his mother had made, and then made such a fool of herself over, “do not exist in the eyes of the Pack. No one even knows of their existence. And you know that no one would suspect, given the, mmm, difficulty of the process. Gideon might, but he also knows well that without proof, nothing can be done.” Malachi smiled, a true one now, as a rare spark of real pleasure kindled within him at the memory of Gideon nearly having his eye removed.

He would have finished the job, of course, but in Pack matters, one did have to have a bit of discretion.

Malachi’s smile earned him one from his mother, although there was something about hers that made one want to crawl away screaming. He always got the feeling that there was madness there, behind the bared teeth, waiting for the right time to bloom.

Her eyes shone now with one of her favorite memories. “I’ll never forget the night Laura died. She’d wanted Duncan’s bite so badly, begging and begging, and then died writhing in pain when her body rejected the Change.” Moriah practically purred with pleasure when she added, “I really don’t know how Duncan lives with the guilt, seeing that he told me not two days before that he’d never try to convert his poor little wife, that he knew she’d never make it because she didn’t have enough of the wolf in her nature to survive it. Poor, poor Duncan. I’m sure, deep down, that he wishes someone would simply put him out of his misery.”

“How fortunate, then, that he has such a caring sister,” Malachi replied sarcastically, although, with Moriah lost in her usual delusions of grandeur, his comment fell on deaf ears. He sighed. Truly, he would have had the old bitch either locked up or hunted down long ago were it not for the fact that he needed her help, once his cousins were out of the way, to cement his position as Alpha. Simply because he would then be the last of the Guardianship blood didn’t, he knew, guarantee his ascension to power. He’d been suspected of too much, been tied to too many schemes in his stupid youth to be at all popular with the Pack now. But Moriah, he knew, had the ties to pave the way.

And oh, how he longed for it, Malachi thought with a glance out the window at the city that surrounded him. He had chosen the Old Town of Edinburgh because the close streets and medieval buildings satisfied his longing for tradition, for the darker days before humanity had forgotten how to fear his kind. Before his kind had utterly forgotten themselves.

But his dreams were haunted by the Hunting Grounds, the land of his people. His days might have been spent constrained by duty, by business, by millions of tiny demands that shackled him to this office. But at night he ran wild across meadows full of long grass and the tightly furled buds of wildflowers whose scent lingered in the soft Highland air, padding beneath the gnarled branches of the oaks of the forest, silent as the trees themselves, as he stalked a lone red deer.

He’d had to exile himself, Malachi tried to remember. Had to leave what he loved to get it back. But the knowledge didn’t prevent his well-manicured fingernails from slicing into his palms as he clenched his fists, creating perfect crescents that welled with blood.

To calm himself, Malachi riffled idly through some papers, breathing deeply. Letting the sting of the wounds he had given himself bury the violent anger he had to work ever harder to control. But no matter how he tried, his mind was already turning back to the increasingly irritating problem of Gideon. Soon his own claws would grip the source of power his clan had protected for well over a thousand years. And while that was going to happen, infuriating cousins or no, it would help a great deal to not have to kill the very Pack he was set to lead.

At least not many of them.

Malachi felt the bloodlust, the creeping madness he had to work harder and harder of late to keep at bay, rise in his blood. Focus, he commanded himself. Breathe.

The Stone of Destiny, the fabled Lia Fαil, would be his, and with it all the magic it contained. Brought to Ireland, then to Scotland from Egypt, where it had been Jacob’s pillow on the night he’d dreamed of his ladder, the Stone was a mystical thing, its origins shrouded in mystery. Even from those who Saint Columba had sworn to protect it.

Had it truly been the pedestal of the Ark of the Covenant? The stone from which Excalibur had been pulled? He hardly knew, nor did he especially care. What he did know, Malachi thought with deep satisfaction, was that the famous symbol of Scotland’s sovereignty did not rest in Edinburgh Castle, returned by the benevolent English (on loan, of course) who had stolen it. No, the Stone upon which the Scottish kings had been crowned since time immemorial rested in an entirely different place. And soon … soon he would have the key to unlock the power that was not even whispered about in legend. His Pack had done their job well.

Old Edward I, Hammer of the Scots, had never bothered to wonder why the Stone’s keepers had given it up so easily. And now it would never matter again. Even most of the Pack didn’t know what that Stone was truly capable of—which was, Malachi had recently discovered, a hell of a lot more than just symbolically making someone king. Once he had the Stone of Destiny, he would be in possession of a power great enough to rule more than just a pack of pacifist werewolves that had long since outlived its purpose. Shadows, Malachi thought with disgust. The lot of them, pale shadows of what they had once been, their leaders too mired in archaic and useless concepts to wield what power they had even if they’d known.

Honor. Duty. Responsibility.

Utter bullshit.

With an army of beasts at his back, Malachi MacInnes would be a king such as none had seen before.

And he would have allies that even his clawing, striving mother would never have imagined … though they might be the last things she’d ever see. How he dreamed of the day he would finally stand before the Andrakkar, the Drakkyn lord who had promised him all that could be had in the darkness from which his foolish clan had fled so, so long ago. He would relearn the ways his people had turned from, had forgotten. And he would remind them of what it was to serve a worthy master. His entire future would open up along with a single door.

Such a small thing, really, to turn the key.

The thought warmed his dark, cold heart.

Moriah stood and gathered up her purse and coat. Apparently, Malachi decided, she’d had enough fun gracing him with her presence for one morning. When she looked at him again, her gaze was piercing.

“Finish it tonight,” she instructed. “He’s not our only obstacle, but he is the key. When he falls, we can act quickly. And if your boys can’t handle it, well, I can always send a man.” Her lips curved cruelly.

Malachi had to fight back his grimace. To let his mother see it would only have increased her pleasure. She knew, of course, how he felt about Marcus, a simpering, sniveling sex toy she’d found God-knowswhere going on three years ago now. The man apparently had the fortitude to withstand his first Change, true, but other than that, Malachi had always found him to be more weasel than wolf. With his long blond hair and a body he spent most of his time perfecting (when he wasn’t pleasuring Moriah, that was), anyone could see that he fancied himself some sort of supernatural god of lust. But to Malachi, Marcus was by far the most emasculated creature he’d ever seen, existing only by the leave of a woman who had always paraded her lovers before her son and who would, at some point, devour this one whole and find another pretty toy to play with.

And recalling the feast Moriah had, literally, made out of her last conquest did make it quite a bit easier to keep from retching each time Malachi had tales of Marcus’s virility shoved down his throat.

“It will be done,” Malachi replied, “when the time is right, and not before. But it will be done, and soon.” Malachi turned away from Moriah’s outraged expression deliberately, his patience for her orders nearly at an end. As he always did these days, when just the sight of her threatened to throw him into a snarling rage, he concentrated on the thought that one day, very, very soon, when her usefulness was at an end, he would allow himself the singular and indescribable pleasure of hunting her down and tearing her throat out with his own fangs. Hers … and then, if he was still around polluting the Hunting Grounds with his stench, that of the ass she was keeping in her bed.

As Malachi pictured his fondest dream, his tension flowed from him like water. Moriah, on the other hand, now looked as though she might erupt in flames and go shooting through the roof. He knew she was unaccustomed to this new defiance in her son, whom she had always been able to bend to her will, and the hint of fear that showed in her furious eyes pleased him more than he had anticipated. Good, he thought, the image of her mangled body still dancing in his mind like a treat held just out of reach. I’ll let you worry about whether your days are numbered.