I was more than even what I had first suspected. I was a Monère Queen, the newest one crowned. The first Mixed Blood Queen to ever exist in their long and bloody history. Unfortunately, I was doing more than my share of adding to the bloodiness of that history. I’d just returned from High Queen’s Court, called before the Council to explain my role in Mona Louisa’s death, the Queen who’d ruled here before me in Louisiana.

Mona Louisa of Louisiana. Had a ring to it now that I rolled the words together, didn’t it? No longer. She was dead. Not by my hand, though I’d done my best to kill her after she’d torn my lover’s heart out from his chest and killed him. When Gryphon died, I had wanted to die, too. But not before ensuring that Mona Louisa departed this Earth first. After I’d seen that goal accomplished, I’d been grief-maddened and had submersed myself in my Bengal tiger form—something I’d suppressed, ran from all my life, that dark, dangerous beast chained inside me. In my grief-storm of pain and loss, I’d finally embraced that animal part of me. Lost myself wholly, mindlessly, in my other self, roaming the forests for a fortnight until my human and animal minds had merged, come one into the other, and I found myself once more aware of who and what I am—a part-human Monère Queen who had abandoned her people for half a month.

One of my people ran beside me now. An enormous wolf with a beautiful, lush pelt of silver-gray, and autumn brown eyes that gleamed as if a light shone within him. And it did. Lunar light. He was not a true wolf but a Full Blood Monère warrior shifted into his animal form.