I looked at Nichs, who just nodded. “We’re not just going to LOOK at the water, Vicki,” he said. “I’m sure you can dive off this yacht too.”


    “I want it,” I said. Ian called back, saying his brother and his mate would do it, and I made one more call. “Linda, it’s Vicki. What’s your n after Matt retires?” Nichs and I had tickets to Perth tonight. We would film me diving and training with Matt’s unit, and then we’d stick around for his retirement ceremony.


    “I have to go back to Los Angeles to close out my apartment and prepare my stuff for shipping,” she said. “We’ll do some traveling, I hope.”


    “Do you know where you’re going?”


    “Adide area,” she said. “Matt’s open to anywhere, and I figure Sharkbait Productions is moving there soon.”


    She was right. “Have I got a deal for you,” I told her. They’d have a stateroom on my yacht, get to travel, and there was plenty of room for her stuff. She could even set her editing equipment up and keep working on the episodes in between ports.


    “We’ll do it,” Matt said. “Imanded a Minesweeper years ago, and I can handle myself on a bridge. With three of us to split the bridge time, it will be easy.”


    “OOOH!” Linda was practically bouncing in her seat. “What if you talked to Admiral Kirk and your SEAL team friends in Coronado and got us permission to film a day there with the other girls? We could make a whole episode showing you with the Aussies and the twins and Amy with the Americans!”


    It was genius, and we made it happen.


    Linda taped a day in Perth at HMAS Stirling as I spent a day with the dive team. We started with calisthenics and a beach run. For some reason, they insisted I run in front of the group with the Commander and Master Chief. After that, we boarded a rigid-hull intable and headed out to a training exercise just offshore. Linda and some volunteers filmed me as we walked through disarming a mine on the seafloor. In the next dive, we used rebreathers (think scuba without bubbles) to infiltrate the harbor and nt a limpet charge on the keel of a warship. It was fun, as was the retirement party on the beach they threw for Commander Rooney. The next day he was relieved ofmand, and they started the multi-flight trip to Los Angeles a few hourster.


    Nichs and I returned to the resort overlooking our new beach and didn’te out for three days.


    After our ‘retreat,’ it was back to work. I’d continued the morning calls with Leo, Adrienne, Mom, and Dad because there was so much going on, and my family was involved in the Sharkbait Foundation and other activities. My current frustrations dealt with mating meetups. “There’s no way to make the Scratch ‘n Sniff into an international meetup, is there,” I said as I looked at the camera.


    “It won’t happen at the North American Alpha Summit,” Leo said. “I tried, but it’s toote.”


    Adrienne slowly nodded. “The Council Chairman is dead, the Midwest Chairman is retiring, and the Pacific Northwest chairman’s term is up. No one is willing to change anything until a new Council gets voted in, Vicki. That won’t happen until the Summit.”


    “Who is going to rece Chairman Wolfe in your region? Unky?”


    He justughed. “Can you imagine Volkov School of Diplomacy in the Council?” We allughed; he’d be a bull in a china shop. “No, I’ve been lobbying for Larry Winters.”


    “Good choice,” I said. Larry and Donna were former Alphas, turning over the Winona Pack to Doug and Jenny Winters two decades ago. Larry had been Leo’s father-inw after his first mating, and the Winona Pack remained close allies to the Miesville Pack. “How’d you get him to agree toe out of retirement?” Regional chairs were not allowed to be active Alphas, so the pool of candidates was small.


    “Given the alternative, he agreed to be drafted.”


    That didn’t sound good. “Who else has a hat in the ring?”


    “Carl Owens,” Leo said. I shivered; Alpha Owens tried to get control of me twice when I was five, once at the Mall of America and once at the Alpha Summit. He’d also been the one filing charges against Leo that got him arrested, and me silvered, when we arrived for the Summit. “They have an heir that is of age now, and he’s a power-hungry bastard.”


    He never got his mantle, but he did mate an Alpha-blooded widow and adopted her ten-year-old son shortly after he failed with me. “That would be bad. He’d set our kind back a century.”


    “Agreed,” Adrienne said. “There is a divide in our people between the traditionalists and the modernists. The reformers are the ones willing to consider working with vampires and recognizing the Australian Council. The Alphas are split, so a lot depends on how the Council shakes out after the new votes.”


    “And who the new Council Chairman is.” It was a lot of political maneuvering, a game Leo and I didn’t like, but Adrienne excelled. Luna did well pairing those two as second-chance mates. “How is Dorothy doing?”


    “Settling in. Dorothy hasn’t met her mate yet, and since she’s an Omega, she can’t attend the Scratch ‘n Sniff,” Mom said. “It will be the four of us since no new Betas havee of age.”


    “I don’t understand why the Alphas don’t bring ALL their unmated along. It’s not efficient,” Nichs said.


    “Tradition,” Adrienne answered. “In the old days, it was expensive and hazardous to travel to the Summit, so they focused on the Pack leaders.”


    I rolled my eyes. “It didn’t take much money or time to bring the Mermaids together, and it was a big sess. They are doing another meetup in Florida over spring break, and a dozen Aussies are flying up for it. You don’t have to look past the number of unmated to figure out how inefficient the current practice is.”


    Leo nodded. “There’s a selfish reason, Vicki. In almost all cases, the female goes to the male’s Pack and often a lower rank. Some Packs have fewer males than females, based on wars or other factors. Alphas hate losing members, so some prefer their members stay in-house, so to speak, with choice mates. The best way to get that is to let them go years without finding their true mate.”


    “I guess I’ll need to push this on my own then,” I said. “I’ll get the European Council on board and ask them to host. The Australian and European Councils can extend the invitation to the North American Alphas next week at the Summit.”


    “The Council may not approve it,” Leo said.


    “The Council cannot prevent interested wolves from traveling,” I replied. “Look, I’ve got a poption of DOZENS of unmated wolves who have never attended a meetup. Add in those newly freed after choice matings, and we’ll have multiple second-chance mates avable. I can’t afford to send my people on a tour of America. You guys p some sense into them because our people NEED this.”N?velDrama.Org holds this content.


    “I almost wish you were still in the North American Council. You said it better than I could,” Leo replied.


    I wasn’t going to their meeting; I was on the Australian Council, and we dered independence from the North American Council. We finished our call, and I called up Lars Svensson, the European Council Chairman. I exined the issue and asked if he would co-sponsor the meetup there. He readily agreed, and after some discussion, we decided to hold it in Dublin, Irnd. The location worked for Lars because there was a major airport and two Packs nearby, and for me because I wanted Philip Corcoran’s descendants to see where they came from in the Wicklow Mountains. Checking my schedule for the Sea Scout filming, we picked a week in June between filming sessions.


    I checked in with Linda; they had closed out her apartment and packed most of her stuff onto the Good Times. She brought her editing equipment along but shipped her other gear to New Orleans and the Sea Scout. They’d be leaving for Australia tomorrow, stopping in Hawaii, French Polynesia, Fiji, New Zend, and Tasmania.


    My next call was to the Sea Scout Captain Lte Dauntless and Engineer Patty Holmes. We caught up on readiness for the first two scientific cruises the Scout would be taking. Our Foundation needed to keep the Scout busy, but we weren’t nning to start filming until mid-March, so the girls and I wouldn’t be along.


    When the Sharkbait Foundation publicized the Sea Scout’s avability for short-term research cruises at minimal cost, we got a lot of interest. The ones featuring female scientists and sharks got scheduled with our film crew, while other expeditions filled in around it. Thebination kept the Scout’s staff employed and was in keeping with the Foundation’s research focus. It also would shake down the ship before adding the pressures of reality television. Captain Lte was on top of everything, and I looked forward to her updates.


    Nichs cooked me breakfast while I was on the phone. When we finished eating, we dressed in work clothes and waited for our guests to arrive. We weren’t waiting long. Three vehicles arrived right on time, pulling into parking spaces at our home in the former resort. “Jennifer,” I said as I smiled at our architect. Another six people got out, one being our General Contractor, Zach Perkins. Mrs. Hawthorne introduced us to the five-member Coastal Zoning Commission.


    She’d been working overtime to get drawings ready, andst week we’d presented it and our variance requests to the Commission. Due to theplexity of the ns and the variances requested, the Commission wanted a site visit. “This doesn’t fit in at all,” one Commissioner said as she looked at the former resort and its spaceship-like outbuilding.


    “Not at all,” I said. I walked the group to the edge of the cliffs in front of our home. Looking back, they could see the buildings we promised to demolish, restoring thend to its original condition. They could look across to the point on the other side of the cove that was our building site. Zach hadid out the outline of the home and attached pool and cottage using stakes and orange tape; wooden poles and yellow rope showed the height of the walls and roof. “That’s a dominating building,” one of themissionersined.


    “Only when viewed from either side, both of which are privatend,” Jennifer replied. “With the shape of the point, the building is long and thin. From out on the ocean, it isn’t as conspicuous as the building beside us. It also helps that the point is at a lower elevation than this section or the adjacent. You’ll see that the surrounding topography reduces the visual impact, especially with our use of native stones that will blend in with the cliffs.” One design decision had been to use the same type of rock on visible portions of the home that made up the bedrock underneath us.


    We walked around the cove and onto the point, spending time looking at theyout. “This is a big home, almost a castle,” another said.


    **Author’s Note:**


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