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“Yes,” Richard said patiently. “Just like my blood healed your ribs. ”
Kevin moaned and closed his eyes. “I’ve got to be dreaming all this. Or else I’ve totally lost my mind. ”
Gavin spoke up gently. “Just take your time. It took Tucker a while to get used to it too. You see now why he couldn’t tell you. You wouldn’t have believed him. Tucker wanted to put me in a mental hospital up until the time I shifted in front of him. ”
Kevin nodded. “I remember he told me. About the hospital, anyway. ”
“There’s something else you need to know, Kevin,” Richard said. “Tucker and I…we have a close relationship. ”
“I know,” Kevin said sharply. “Don’t tell me I was right all along, and you’re in some kind of three-way. ”
“No,” Richard said firmly. “Don’t be silly. Tucker is…Tucker is my son. ”
Kevin cocked his head to one side, a smile tilting up the corners of his mouth. “Your what? Come on, Richard, you can’t be much more than five or six years older than Tucker. How is that even possible?”
“I’m a wolf-shifter, Kevin. We stop aging around thirty and don’t age again until we get really, really old. Some don’t even live that long, though we…we live a very long time. ”
“H-how long?”
“Around two hundred years, give or take. ”
Kevin laughed. Out of all the craziness he’d witnessed in the last few hours, he didn’t know why he should even think this was odd at all. “And you? How old are you, Richard?”
A little smile appeared on Richard’s face. “I’m seventy-four. ”
Kevin opened his mouth to say something but nothing came out. Richard took him by the shoulders and shook him gently. “Kevin, take a breath. ”
He inhaled sharply and his sight began to clear a bit, as the little black stars stopped dancing in his peripheral vision. “I-I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know why that should surprise me so much, or hit me so hard. ”
“You’ve had a lot to take in,” Gavin said. “Give it all some time. In the meantime, Richard, I need to talk to you about what we found when we searched Todd’s room. ” He glanced over at Kevin and hesitated, but Kevin sat forward.
“No, go ahead. I want to hear this. I think I have a right. ”
Gavin nodded. “First, let me tell you two of the other members of my personal guard are missing this morning, Marissa and Benjamin. ”
“What?” Richard hissed in a breath sharply. “And Christian?”
“Christian has been cooperating. He seems pretty scared, and rightly so. He knew their plans but he claims he had no part in any of it, and he was too frightened of the others to come to me. ”
“Do you believe him?” Richard’s voice had turned hard and grim.
“I’m not sure yet. There’s no excuse for his disloyalty. He’s being held downstairs until I can question him further. ” Kevin remembered Tucker telling him the basement held prison cells. He remembered something else Tucker had told him.
“Tucker had a bad feeling about the guard. Especially that one woman, Marissa. ”
“I know,” Gavin said, his voice sounding tired. Kevin wondered if he’d been awake all night and figured he had been. “Tucker has been right about Marissa all along, it seems. I should have listened to him. ”
“Tucker has good instincts,” Kevin said. “What did you find in Todd’s room?”
“Crazy ramblings, mostly, in a book he was writing, a kind of manual for what looks like a military style coup. ”
“A coup? Like a takeover?” Richard’s voice was unbelieving. “Are any of them alpha?”
“No, and that makes it even more strang
e. It looks like his father put a lot of this in his head from what I read. ” He turned toward Kevin. “Todd’s father was alpha and our previous alpha’s battle commander for many years. He was killed a few years ago fighting the Hunters. Todd’s writings implied that in his opinion, all the natural pets, like Tucker, for example, are defectives, every one of them, both physically and mentally. At puberty, when the change came over the rest of the pack, turning them into wolf shifters, the ones who weren’t able to shift should be, in his opinion, put out of their misery. They should be mercifully destroyed, and not left to suck the life out of the rest of the pack, their useless lives a drain on the pack’s resources…his words, by the way, not mine. ”
“That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of,” Richard interrupted, his face furious.
