Sable called at nine in the evening.
Not a message — a call, which meant something was urgent or something was too large for a message to hold. Damon took it in the hallway and Lena stayed in the sitting room and felt, through the field, the quality of the conversation — the urgency of it, yes, but underneath the urgency something else. Something that was not alarm.
Something that was — release.
The specific quality of something long-held releasing its tension.
She felt it in the field from forty miles away.
Damon came back into the sitting room.
She looked at him.
"Tell me," she said.
He sat down.
He looked at his hands.
"He called them together," he said. "The nine Alphas. All nine, in the estate's main room. At six this evening."
She held very still.
"What did he say?" she s
