The Lost Lycan Princes: A Journey Home

Changes, Stories, And Pictures

  Jameson POV

  After we spent a little while racing around the fields, it was time to go back to patrolling. I was astounded by the speed Jonathan and I were both capable of. It made me curious as to what other abilities Lycans possessed. I had already seen the fast healing power we had. I knew there had to be more. 

  'Superior strength,' Donovan told me. 

  'Really?' I was intrigued.

  'Really,' he replied. 'We could bench press ole Dave over there with our pinky finger if we wanted to. Haven't you noticed how much easier it is to lift things?' 

  I thought back to the cracked window on Jonathan's car, and him claiming I'd nearly broken his ribs by patting his back. Plus there'd been other small things I'd noticed over the last couple weeks or so. And I remembered that Dave and Linda had both mentioned to us that we should be feeling much stronger now that we had our Lycans. 

  'Exactly what I meant,' Donovan said, reading my thoughts. That was another thing I was still getting used to - the fact that my thoughts were no longer private. 'There are ways to block that, you know.' 

  While we patrolled with the others, Donovan started teaching me about how to build mental wall, to where he and I each had our own private thoughts. 

  'But it can be exhausting to keep the wall up all the time,' he warned me. 'So most Lycans only do so when absolutely necessary. They just get used to sharing thoughts with each other.'

  'That makes sense,' I replied. 

  After a little while, it was time to take a break for dinner. Linda had packed dinners for all of us, and the others had meals they'd brought along as well. There were a few picnic tables in the area we stopped to eat, so we used a couple of those. The tables were all covered under a pavilion, so it was nice and shady. It seemed to me that the tables had been placed in exactly the right place - right in the middle of the patrol route - and I remarked that it must be convenient to have them right there. 

  Dave smiled at that. "That's not a coincidence," he told me. "Alpha Anthony - that's Alpha Terrance's dad - had them put here several years back. Before that, we'd either eat standing up or we'd have a few blankets spread out on the ground. He said that he used to hate to doing that when he was on patrol, so he bought all these tables and had the pavilion built."

  "That was nice of him," I commented.

  Barry spoke up. "He was really good about taking care of us warriors, and Alpha Terrance is no different. We're lucky to have them. I've heard some Alphas couldn't care less about their warriors."

  I made a mental note of that. If indeed Jonathan and I were the heirs to some throne, maybe we'd have the power to make sure all the warriors had access to basic necessities like this. 

  I asked Dave if there were any port-a-potties or anything like that along the patrol route, and he said that was something Alpha Terrance had recently started working on. I made another mental note about making sure that happened - that is, if in fact we did end up being the lost princes, which I was beginning to believe more and more we probably were. 

  After spending a few more hours on patrol, we went back to Dave and Linda's house, where Linda had made 4 huge homemade pizzas. She had them loaded down with pepperoni, sausage, and bacon, and, having called Dave ahead of time and having him ask, she'd put mushrooms and green olives on mine and black olives and bell peppers on Jonathan's.

  We were all starving after a long afternoon/evening of patrolling, so we polished the pizzas off pretty quick. As we ate, we talked. Linda ended up telling us the story of the time Luna Ana was kidnapped by Alpha Terrance's psychotic ex, Aliana and her mate, Thomas. She told us how they'd held her at Ana's grandfather's unused fishing cabin for several days, and how Terrance and his warriors had finally located and rescued her. She also told us how, in the midst of searching for her, they found out that she had a half brother that she didn't know about, who had apparently been keeping an eye on her from afar. She also told us how he'd brought in a warlock friend of his who helped them get past the shield that was initially blocking the entrance to the cabin. 

  "It was really something to see," Dave chimed in. "Luna Ana is the Sugilite Wolf, but she was just beginning to train with her powers at that point, so she'd been unable to do a lot to help herself much. She did manage to mindlink through a block, and she did kill Aliana at the end,  She's gotten much stronger with her powers now though."

  "Really? Do you think she'd show us something?" Jonathan asked.

  "I'm sure she wouldn't mind a bit. Just ask her next time you see her," Linda told us. 

  We talked a little more, then Jonathan and I excused ourselves to go take showers. We'd washed off a little before eating, but still needed a full shower. 

  After our showers, we sat in the bedroom, just talking, comparing notes on things we'd learned and discussing our feelings about it all. Basically, we thought the same about most of it. We were amazed at all the changes. 

  We decided we would spend the next day at the library, researching. We wanted to see if we could find any pictures of the royal princes before they disappeared, to see if they looked anything like us when we were little - in other words, we wanted to see if they were us. 

  Eventually, we went back out into the living room, where Dave and Linda were still up and were having a cup of tea before going to bed for the night. We told them what we were wanting to do the next day, and Linda offered to show us where the library was. We politely declined, since Dave had already shown it to us. She told us that she had some articles we could look at, and said that a few of them had pictures. 

  She went and pulled the articles out, and we realized she had them all organized into an album. They were even in chronological order, from the first article published when the kidnapping first happened, to the most recent one, on the twins' 18th birthday. The first thing that we immediately noticed was that the twins had the same birthday as us - August 7th. And we both studied the pictures that had been posted along with the articles.

  I held the album in my hands, staring in shock at the two boys smiling back at me from the picture. It was one thing to be told we might be, even probably were, these missing princes. It was quite another to look at a picture of them and realize you were staring into your own face. I could even tell which one was me in the picture, because I could see the mole on the left side of my neck.

  Jonathan was looking over my shoulder at the picture, and both of us said the same thing at the same time. "Holy cr*p. That's us."