Claiming Valeria by Rebecca Rivard

party.”
    Valeria shook her head. “Not us. Lord Dion.”
    “Us, too,” the little girl insisted.
    “She’s right,” said Sabela. “The entire clan is invited to the
midsummer ritual—and the festival, too. Rui and the tenentes are conferring
with the elders right now.” The sun fae’s midsummer festival was a three-day celebration
famous throughout the fae and fada worlds.
    “Why would she want us there? Unless she wants another chance
at our men,” she added a little bitterly.
    “She says it’s to show there are no hard feelings between the
sun fae and Rock Run.”
    Valeria pursed her lips. “And we’re going to go.”
    “It looks that way, sim . You can always decline. But if
you’re worried about Lord Adric, only Rock Run and the sun fae are invited to the
ritual.”
    They both looked at Merry’s excited face. It would break her
heart to stay home, and there was no way Valeria was letting her leave the base
without her .
    She blew out a breath. “No,” she said. “We’ll go.”
    * * *
    Goddamn fucking fae.
    Adric lifted the quartz that dangled from a leather cord around
his neck and stared at the screen in disbelief. All the data they’d gathered about
the Rock Run base was gone, wiped out as if it had never been, his quartz still
vibrating as it did after an energy surge.
    “Hang on.” Adric looked around at his four lieutenants—his sister
Marjani and three young but battle-hardened men who’d earned his absolute trust
during the Darktime: Lucas, Jace and Zuri. The five of them were seated at a circular
table in his den twenty feet below Baltimore.
    “Something’s happened,” he told them. A few quick taps on the
screen contacted the clan’s head surveyor. “Mason. Do you still have the data on
the Rock Run base?”
    Mason was one of the few older men who’d accepted Adric as alpha—which
was why he was still alive. Now he was silent for a long moment before shaking his
head. “The file’s empty. Damn it, that’s impossible. I encrypted that file myself—three
times over. Nobody but you, me or Jace should’ve been able to access it.”
    “Nobody but a fae.” Adric let out a vicious curse. It had to
be the sun fae. They could do things with energy that would make an electric eel
green with envy. “Dion got to their queen. Hell, you’d have thought the woman didn’t
want to be rescued.” When he’d arrived with the sun fae, Cleia had been naked and
on her knees, about to be fucked by the Rock Run alpha.
    “I’ll do my best to retrieve the information,” Mason said. “But
I can’t make any promises.”
    “Don’t waste your time. The sun fae are forgetting one thing;
I was at Rock Run. I know where the entrances are.” Including the single entrance
that could be reached from land.
    Adric was a Gifted tracker. He only had to be somewhere once
for the location to be imprinted in his memory.
    Except—his hand clenched on the quartz. “I don’t fucking believe
this,” he breathed. “They messed with my mind as well. I remember being there, but
everything else is gone—its location, what it looked like. All I can remember is
its scent.”
    He frantically searched his memory, but all that remained was
the odor of Rock Run Creek: lush, moist, organic. Which probably applied to every
damn river in the world.
    He growled. “How the hell did they do that—get in my mind like
that?”
    “I’m sorry,” Mason said. “I’ll keep trying, but it looks like
it’s been wiped clean.”
    Adric expelled a breath. “Not your fault.”
    He cut the connection and looked around at the others. The four
lieutenants stared back with varying degrees of shock and anger—except for his sister,
whose expression was carefully blank. He knew damn well she was pleased, though.
Marjani had been against invading Rock Run from the start.
    Lucas spoke first. He was Adric’s right-hand man and a shifter
with his animal so close to the surface, he was basically a human wolf. “I’ll tell
the