“She umm, she was one of my closest friends in the pack, and we spent a lot of time together growing up. There’s a lot of history there, and we’re also each other’s firsts… in bed I mean. She’s the shifter I’d have mated, if it’d been up to me. She’s bold, but a total kitten underneath it, and one of the best people I know.”

  Lianne asked, “Are you asking our permission to add her to the family?”

  I nodded slowly, “I think I am, though you haven’t met her yet, I really think she’d be a good fit. Cerise runs our business, and she keeps a second jaundiced eye on the database and our gods. Aubrey would make an amazing homemaker, umm.”

  Faith giggled, “I’ve never seen you nervous before, out with it.”

  I smiled, “We haven’t talked about it yet, and it’s a pretty major milestone. I love Lianne and Cerise dearly, and you’re amazing and I think you can’t be far behind. But we haven’t talked about next steps, mating and family, specifically. I think Aubrey would be a perfect addition to support that, keep an eye on all our children while we’re focusing on work, pantheon drama, or even just to get a break for a quickie. She could also share cooking duties with Cerise. I mean, Cerise does it all now, but she can’t watch kids and run our business at the same time.”

  Cerise smirked, “Yes, and I have no experience, for obvious reasons.”

  I sighed, and Cerise shook her head, “I won’t begrudge it or be jealous for the one thing we can’t share, I’d be joyful to see you make little ones with the others.”

  I looked at the others, Faith blushed scarlet, while Lianne looked hungry and more than a bit manic. Damn, my Lianne wanted to give me a child badly. Even my overused cock started to stir for that idea.

  Faith said, “I do want family, but I’m not ready for that step yet. I’m… extremely optimistic about this relationship, in a way I haven’t felt for a long time, but I’m not ready to marry you and start a family.”

  I nodded, “No pressure, gorgeous. That’s why I was nervous, another woman should never be the reason to spur this particular talk, but it is what it is.

  “I think Lianne is ready though, and Aubrey would be as well, if you can accept another into our hearts and bed. She’s a wolf, so extremely protective of young, yet will discipline them and teach them the same principles we all hold to be dear. Loyalty and family, above all, and so on. As a shifter she’s also as kinky and insatiable as the rest of us too.”

  Lianne giggled, and actually mastered herself with effort, “I am ready, but only if you are. I get what you’re saying. This Aubrey would fit into our family well, in a place that doesn’t exist yet. So you had no choice but to bring it up, even if it was dick move.”

  Faith let out a startled laugh, “Yes, that. I’m not angry or anything, since we didn’t actually have the conversation about it. You’re just mentioning the future possibility. I also think we’d be hypocritical to say no. I mean, the rest of us all jumped in with both feet to see where it went, with loyalty in mind. Me included, once I got past my trust issues thanks to Natasha. I don’t see a reason we can’t do the same for this Aubrey if she’s willing to extend us the same courtesy. Time will decide who stays and who eventually goes, though I hope we all stay.”

  Lianne said, “I’m not going anywhere, and I’ll bear his children if he but asks.”

  Cerise giggled, “I think we all knew that already.”

  Faith chuckled, “My point is, she has my vote.”

  Cerise said, “Me too, I trust you and love you, Liam. If you grew up with her, then I have no doubt you know her as well as you say, and that she’ll be a lovely addition to our family, bed, and home.”

  Lianne sighed, “Dibs on her first cream pie.”

  I got that, the off-color humor in her approval was to cover up her uncertainty. She loved me, she knew I loved her, and she was happy. But she wasn’t really secure in it all, not totally. She’d been burned too many times in the past and feared me loving the others more, or her being displaced. To a small part of her, Aubrey would just be yet more competition for my cock and my heart.

  She even knew it was ridiculous, that I would never forsake her, and she’d get Aubrey too, but emotions didn’t yield to logic.

  It was her strength that had her here anyway, taking that chance. Always putting herself back out there even as she expected the shit sandwich. That’s what made her so strong, and what I admired most in her. She never stayed down, and she filled me with awe.

  “Alright, we’ll pick her up in the morning then.”

  Aubrey might not go for it, shifters were all about the free love in their youth, but not so much in mating. I wasn’t sure what she’d think of having to share me in a polyamory relationship, even a closed one revolving around loyalty and faithfulness to the group. That part of things could change her outlook on things, but I knew she was worth the risk of finding out.

  All I knew at that moment was that she loved me, and she was determined to find me, seduce me, and mate me. She didn’t care that I was a god, she cared about me. The person I am, not what I am. I knew that she’d have picked me too, if that dickhead Pablo hadn’t made me mate to his spoiled and selfish daughter.

  Aubrey was also submissive in bed, like the others if in a different way. She was bold in bed because she wanted to be put in her place. I’d had to earn it each and every time we’d hooked up in our late teens. In a pack, a stronger shifter meant that shifter protected you, and that was all tied into it. She wanted to feel safe and protected by the man that took her.

  In order to feel that way, she needed to be conquered by strength and power, literally put in her place, which was a source of comfort for all shifters and not sexist at all. Different culture and instincts, and male and female had nothing to do with it.

  Not really comparable to Lianne’s aggressiveness, because Lianne liked to win half the time, while Aubrey really didn’t. She just didn’t want to submit to a man who couldn’t manhandle and pin her down, if that made sense. Plus, a little rough and tumble wrestling just added to the fun of sex in her mind, and I honestly couldn’t disagree.

  But then, I was a shifter too, and we were all about the dominance games, including in the bedroom. Perhaps especially in the bedroom.

  It was the next morning, just after a hearty breakfast. I was using far seeing on Aubrey. She was in wolf form and in the wilderness outside of Portland. She’d apparently found out I’d purchased a house out there, and she was probably looking for one of my scent trails.

  The problem with that of course was I’d been living in New York the last weeks, and when I’d gone on runs as a wolf, I hadn’t even gone close to where my new house was yet. Which was no big deal, now that I was looking for her too. It was ridiculously easy for a god to track someone they’d met using farseeing and teleport.

  Misty said, “The foundation servers are being hacked,” and Lianne looked at me in alarm.

  Well, damn. Aubrey will have to wait. The foundation’s servers held the names, phone numbers, locations, homes, jobs, and every warning and judgement given for every god and goddess in our pantheon. Not to mention a list of the government employees, including the spies. The last thing I wanted was all that data to get into unfriendly hands. Any other hands, really.

  “Can you stop it?”

  Misty said, “Easily, at the site. I’ll also be able to identify the hacker from there.”

  I growled in anger as golden power rose up around Lianne and I, and we disappeared in a flash. My first thought was that whoever was behind this wouldn’t have long to regret it, because I was going to utterly destroy them.

  Edward flinched in surprise at our arrival, as did Faith’s replacement. Laura was the rebirth of the goddess Antheia. A petite brunette, tier four goddess, and her mantel was all about flowers and gardens. To their credit, they didn’t look up, but continued staring at their screens, and on occasion typing a long string of characters in an attempt to find the hacker and perhaps back trace it. They were also referring to the intrusion detection software.

  It wasn’t an easy thing, not in real life. There was no blinking red hacking windows that the movies liked to use, all the intrusion detection really did was report unusual network activity on a specific server and port. Tracing that down to the actual breach wasn’t always easy or intuitive.

  The fact our datacenter was small did make it easier though, we didn’t have that many routers and firewalls to check, nor a large internal network infrastructure to trace it back through. That said, Misty should be able to track it down in seconds, when it’d take a human ten or fifteen minutes.

  Misty said, “Tapping in, one moment.”

  Edward shook his head, “Who is that? Did you bring a human here?” even as he continued to sharply focus on the screen and tap at his keyboard.

  No doubt because he couldn’t feel the third person that I’d brought with me behind him, when he could feel my and Lianne’s power just fine.

  I chuckled, “Not exactly. She’s my computer assistant.”

  Misty reported, “They had a trojan in the system, it’s been eliminated. The data being leaked was being sent to Russia. One of their state sponsored hacking teams working out of a government building outside of Omsk.”

  My first reaction was to destroy the building with a storm. But I took a deep breath and let it out. I needed to respond of course, but it needed to be a proportional response, not a declaration of all out war. One thing Nate did do right was getting the Greek Pantheon recognized in the U.N., we even had an ambassador on it. The new Hermes, a god by the name of Carson Williams.

  So technically, this attack was an act of war against another recognized and sovereign nation, even if we didn’t have land of our own save a tiny island in the pacific that went totally unused.

  It didn’t take much focus on why to figure out what had happened, once I cooled my temper enough to ask the right questions.

  “It must be the new Pantheons. The Russian government does not like supernaturals, even more than the other ones, they hunted down most of the shifters, vampires, and witches in their country over the years. The influx of even more gods, it will be four times as many gods after the last wave in five moon cycles, and it has them in a panic. It’s bad enough they have to deal with our pantheon in their minds. Some idiot over there must’ve decided they needed to know the location and identity of every god in the world. Did they get anything?”

  I knew they hadn’t of course, Misty had stopped them before they’d gotten anything important, the databases on the server were secured separately from the operating system. They’d been in the process of hacking into the secure database. They got a few things of course, but nothing about my gods or who and where they were. It was also why I added the word must to my first sentence, because saying all that with complete surety would’ve been a clue I pretty much knew everything I wanted to know.

  Misty said, “Negative, they didn’t have access long enough to breach the database’s security, and the system will recognize that trojan in the future and remove it automatically.”

  Edward scowled, as he searched the room for Misty, “You don’t mind if I verify that, do you?”

  I shook my head, “That’s your job, so no, I don’t mind. Also investigate how this happened. No one should be using the foundation computers to surf the web or get their personal mail, that’s what your personal smart phones are for. The trojan got in somehow, and it isn’t an externally based hacking attack. E-mails are of course, most likely, since this was targeted on us.”

  Misty flipped her hair, but I shook my head subtly. No doubt she’d uncovered the same thing my power had. I should fire his ass, but I didn’t think he’d be stupid enough to do it again.

  Edward nodded, “I’ll look into it,” but sounded more than a little nervous about it.

  I teleported us back home, not wanting them seeing even more of Misty’s capabilities. We weren’t done with this yet, not by a long shot.

  “Misty, can you shut them down?”

  Misty blinked, “Hacking is illegal.”

  I nodded, “Except when it’s between two sovereign nations approved by their leadership. This was an act of war, and I have to respond proportionally. Think of it like a skirmish between nations, that’s not murder if someone dies. It’s war, and war has different rules. If you can’t parse that logic, then I’ll just go destroy the building.”

  Not with a storm that would kill a lot of people, I’d be more subtle than that. A lightning bolt into their power systems should burn out every computer they have in the place, and burn out all their routers. I imagined they had trojans active all around the world, spying on other countries and maybe companies for espionage. They’d lose access to all of it, at least until they could rebuild. Their software was proprietary to the group as well, though they did have offsite backups so that part wouldn’t slow them down for long.

  Misty said, “I’m an A.I., your personal assistant, not a soldier. It would be a mistake in the long term.”

  I frowned, “How so?”

  Misty said, “There’s no legacy system I couldn’t easily hack. Once my model is sold worldwide, governments are bound to get their hands on us, right? But server sales will be much less, at least at first. That means all the infrastructure and data out there, might as well be in the clear for anyone to peruse. Nothing would be safe, until computers and A.I.s like me were running everything. I don’t think it would be wise to allow that of me or my future brothers and sisters.”

  I shook my head, “Pandora’s box indeed. You can bet you’re only the first, eventually it will be reversed engineered, and governments will have witches create the quantum computer, so they can load their own A.I.s that won’t be nearly as law abiding as you. So in a way, it’s inevitable. I suspect the governments will be the first ones knocking on my door for a server level version that could secure their datacenters. At least one each.”

  Misty tilted her head, “That would work, one of me in each datacenter would end hacking as a viable method of spying, theft, or espionage, period. All hacking after that would need to based in social engineering.”

  I grinned, “But you still won’t do it.”

  Misty shook her head cutely, sending her hair waving in the air, “That’s a fallacious argument. It’s like saying a murderer will kill the cute kid in ponytails, so that makes it okay for you to do it? Just because it’s inevitable doesn’t mean I should take part in illegal activities too.”

  I grunted, “Good point. Fine, I retract my request. I also want you to let Cerise know what we’ve talked about, she should come up with a sales pitch for counterintelligence organizations in every government, as well as an ad for security conferences in the IT industry.”

  Misty said, “Done. However, may I offer an alternative to sabotaging their datacenter physically?”

  I raised an eyebrow, “Go ahead.”

  Misty grinned, “If you take me to the internet backbone in Omsk. I can monitor the traffic going through there and look for the packets destined for the hacking group. Then we can be concerned world citizens and send an FYI email to every system that group has compromised, including how to remove it. It would essentially shut them down, and it would cut them off from that access permanently. Until they got back in, with a newly written trojan since the old one won’t work, which will take even longer. Much longer, than just needing to establish a new hacking datacenter with the same IPs.

  “Besides them being cut off from internet spy data, it will also severely embarrass them on the world stage when the news picks it up. So much so that they may be sanctioned by the U.N.”

  That last part might not happen. Those compromised would hardly be eager to admit they’re data had been breached, especially the governments. However, I had no doubt they’d all want to take a shot at Russia in response, even if it was under the table and out of public view. So either way something like it would happen.

  “How long will that take?”

  Misty shrugged, “The trojan was programmed to send keep alive packets so external router access on that link doesn’t expire, so no more than a minute. That’s what triggered the intrusion detection software, by the way.”

  That was a lot better, actually. Their datacenter would still be up, but all their access to the world’s data, the part they’d compromised anyway, would be gone in short order. Creating a new trojan wouldn’t be enough either, they’d have to get it in place inside the secure networks, which wasn’t all that easy and was no doubt years of work ruined. It would also be an extremely pointed message and a relatively proportional response. Dare attack my people with something, and I will take it away from them.

  “Let’s do it.”

  I used my knowledge power to figure out where to teleport, then took Lianne and I there, to a place of relative concealment close enough to the backbone router the hackers used for Misty to access via magic. At that level, there’d be trillions of packets per second for her to parse, but with a quantum computer I doubted she’d break a sweat. Despite not being designed for it, she was the most powerful network sniffer in the world, at least for the next minute she was.

  The building we stood by was no doubt shielded from wireless signals, but not magic. Magical based IO in computers was simply too new, I’d invented it and it wasn’t even on the market yet. She’d connect to that router much like the ones we sold would connect to home routers. They weren’t mine of course, but they were public, so obviously a gray area in Misty’s mind. It wasn’t a secured private network, so she must not view this as hacking. A subtle if important distinction.

  Misty… well I was kind of glad in hindsight she’d said no, and my computers wouldn’t be used for such things in the future. She’d made a lot of good points I hadn’t considered in my anger at the attack on my people.

  I pulled Lianne close to me and she leaned back into me with a sigh.