Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 603

Chapter 603

ARIA

The meeting had been called for three in the afternoon.

I knew this because Kael had said so at lunch, in the specific tone of someone who had a precise thing to accomplish and had allocated appropriate time for it. A border monitoring update. One of the specific Marcus's he'd assigned to the northeast post three weeks ago had information that needed delivering in person rather than through the walkie system or the written report format. Standard operational meeting. Thirty minutes maximum.

This was not how it went.

I was in the office when Kael sent the order through the link.

The link was — it was still new, was the thing. Two days of full pack activation and the pack was still learning its parameters, still discovering what the connection could do and what it shouldn't do and where the edges were between a directed thought and a broadcast. These were things you learned through the mindlink by doing them, which meant you also learned them by doing them wrong first and then adjusting.

Kael sent: *Marcus. My office. Now.*

He sent it the way you'd say a name in a room — clearly, with intention, not thinking about the fact that the room now contained two hundred and fourteen people and the name Marcus was not as specific an identifier as he'd assumed.

I was sitting at the side table going through Jordan's intelligence briefing on the network's current capacity. I felt the order go through the link. I felt it land.

In multiple places.

I counted, briefly, before I understood what was happening. The order touched — one, two, four, seven — it kept landing, the specific quality of a message finding every recipient with the relevant identifier and delivering itself to all of them simultaneously.

"Kael," I said.

"One moment," he said, not looking up from the territorial map he was reviewing with Elite.

"How many people in this pack are named Marcus," I said.

He looked up.

His expression went through a journey.

"I—" he started.

The door opened.

The first Marcus walked in. Dark hair, mid-thirties, the specific bearing of a border watch operative — upright, alert, the eyes doing the assessment sweep of a room that was his training. He looked at Kael.

"You called," he said.

"Yes," Kael said. "Wait a moment—"

The door opened again.

The second Marcus walked in. Older, stockier, from the western residential section — I'd seen him around the pack grounds, he lived near the communal gardens. He looked at the first Marcus. He looked at Kael.

"You called," he said.

"Yes," Kael said. "Both of you, one moment—"

"Both of us," said the first Marcus, looking at the second.

"I'm Marcus," said the second.

"I'm also Marcus," said the first.

Six more.

They came in as a cluster — not organized, just the specific timing of people who'd all been in roughly the same part of the pack grounds when the order arrived and had traveled the same route to get here. They ranged in age from somewhere around nineteen to somewhere around fifty and they all had the specific quality of people who'd received a direct order from the Alpha through a new and exciting communication channel and had responded to it immediately because that was what you did.

The office was now containing ten Marcuses.

"Wait," Kael said, to the room. "Everyone wait."

Ten Marcuses waited.

Kael looked at the link.

Then he looked at me.

"How many," he said.

"I'm not sure," I said. "The order landed a lot."

"How many is a lot," he said.

"I stopped counting at seven," I said.

He looked at the ten Marcuses in his office with the expression of someone recalculating the scope of a problem.

Then the door opened again.

The children were six and eight years old. The six-year-old I recognized — he'd been in the clearing during the wolf restoration, one of the small pups who'd been chasing butterflies and each other. His name, it turned out, was Marcus. The eight-year-old was from the northern residential section, quieter, with the specific expression of a child who'd received an order and was treating it with the seriousness it deserved.