Page 1 of Consort's Glory
February 2045 - San Francisco, the Elvish Protectorate
Margot Goode wasa practical sort of person — particularly when it came to her death.
Healers were no strangers to Grim’s tithe, nor to suffering. The clasped hands of life and death belonged to the same being, after all, and healers could no more separate the two than they could change the inexorable current of time.
Even so, Margot’s death took her by surprise.
It didn’t come for her in the shape she always feared it would. It didn’t come for her in the smothering dark, reeking of madness, piercing with claws and teeth. It came slowly, first through the tips of her fingers and then upward, over slopes of muscle and rigid bone, to steal her life before she got the chance to live it.
Burn out. The affliction all witches of her caliber suffered late in life, when the magic coursing through their veins began to damage its host beyond its ability to repair itself. It came for her too soon, and every day it got harder and harder to hide the symptoms.
What began as fine tremors after a long healing session became hard shakes and frequent migraines. Fatigue. Lack of appetite. A peculiar sense of vertigo, like the world was slipping out from under her feet at a steep angle.
Cold practicality finally pushed her to leave the Coven. It compelled her to put in the transfer request to the Healing House in a sleepy, well-to-do San Francisco neighbourhood. That clear knowledge that her death pressed closer every day and a compulsion she just couldn’t shake brought her to San Francisco to look for the person who could save her life.
And it pushed her to accept the dinner invitation from the alpha of the local shifter pack, the risks be damned.
The Merced coyote pack was not the largest in California, but it was the most powerful pack in the Bay Area. They had to be both smart and ruthless to win any sort of autonomy under those who ruled the Protectorate, the swath of tightly controlled land running from Arizona to the top of Oregon.
After several healing sessions with their trouble-making teenagers, Margot knew many of the Merced pack well. Even so, the risk of stepping into shifter territory was enormous. It always was when she dealt with predator races. Not because she couldn’t take care of herself — healers were the people with the most intimate knowledge of the body and how to break it, after all — but because one slip-up, one good whiff of the scent buried beneath the layers of protection she slathered on every day, and her closely-guarded secrets would be exposed.
Margot dealt with Viktor Hamiliton and his pack enough to trust them not to hurt her, but there were breathtakingly few she would ever trust with all of herself.
So it was a risk to join the pack for dinner at the edge of marshy Lake Merced, but even the familiar anxiety of discovery wouldn’t stop Margot from going. She wanted to go. She liked Viktor, she liked the pack members who had taken to dropping by her house on a weekly basis, and she missed the familiar chaos of a family dinner.
And Margot was desperate.
Of course I’m desperate, she thought, tightening her hands on the steering wheel of her car. I’m dying.
Margot drove down darkened streets, back to the Healing House with a full stomach and covered in the scents of a dozen young, single coyote shifters eager to see if she’d feel any magical tickle, any chemistry at all, when they touched. They were eager in a way that might have made her uncomfortable if she weren’t currently suspended over the knife’s edge of her own mortality.
Besides, she couldn’t blame them. Bonding with a Goode witch, a real gloriana? The curiosity of it was like an aphrodisiac to the quicksilver minds of the coyotes.
Rolling her shoulders back to relieve some of her tension, Margot decided she needed another shower. The coyotes didn’t smell bad, but they weren’t right, and it grated against her nerves to have the scents of so many strange men in her pores, rubbing that niggling compulsion in the back of her mind the wrong way.
None of them were the reason she felt so compelled to step out of the safe stranglehold of the Coven to move to San Francisco. She knew it in her bones. She knew he was out there somewhere, but not in the Merced pack.
They were attractive, certainly, with their wide coyote grins and lean, powerful bodies. They generally leaned toward cheerful humor and quick to ignite and even quicker to die tempers. But not even the alpha of the pack, the razor-sharp Viktor, who’d managed, against her best efforts, to become a friend, inspired so much as a twitch in her magical or romantic instincts.
Viktor was gorgeous, intelligent, and clearly a man who cared about the people under his charge more than he cared about personal power. Even if he didn’t have lush, sandy blond hair, skin of burnished copper, or baby blue eyes, she would have been drawn to his air of responsibility, his quick tongue, that easy smile.
She liked him. They were friends — could have even been more if only her damn magic would cooperate.
Why? Why can’t it be one of them? Any of them?
Margot unclenched her hands on the steering wheel, fighting the tremors that came with so much more force when she was alone.
No one else has this problem. No one else needs to be so selective. Why can’t I just choose?
But no one else hit burn out so young, either. And no one was what she was; could explain how the differences would change things, how her body might react if it didn’t get what it needed. She was a witch, but she was also more.
That more was killing her.
She was supposed to have time.Years to figure herself out. Decades, maybe even a century. Years to settle down, date, find the right one in her own time, just like every other gloriana.
Her own grandmother didn’t start feeling the symptoms until she was nearly one hundred and fifty, and by then, Sophie already had Noni Tula, so there was no question about who she would bond to, nor who would carry the weight of Sophie Goode's considerable magic when it turned on her.
It fell in line with Margot’s consistently shitty luck that she barely made it past twenty-five before her body turned against her.
