by Dean Murray
The call quality was good enough for me to hear Shawn pacing. He'd started about the time I'd brought up my power, but as he stopped moving around, I knew he'd made his decision.
"I'm sorry, Alec, but me sending down some of our people will just get a lot of people I care about killed and it won't buy you the kind of time you need. It would be like throwing a bucket full of ice into hell."
I felt my beast surge up nearly to the surface, felt my vocal cords lengthening slightly, but I stopped the transformation before it could go any further.
"You can't know that, Shawn. A few days might make the difference."
"I'm sorry, but I do know it, Alec. I know that sounds crazy to you, but it's the truth. Even if you're right and your power isn't as developed as it's going to get, even if it comes whenever you call for it, you're still not going to be a match for the Coun'hij, not with Puppeteer in the mix. You'd need something else, someone else that could offset the army he'll bring to the table."
I took another deep breath, trying to keep myself under control, but it was getting harder and harder.
"That's not the only reason. What aren't you telling me, Shawn?"
Shawn paused for several seconds and then sighed. "Truth be told, Alec, nobody is going to be willing to go help you, even if my dad was willing to take the risks. Your family has always enjoyed a lot of support among the rank and file, but after Agony's last visit people are wondering if you sacrificed a third of your pack just so you could keep your own skin intact. People are already doing a compare and contrast between what you did and what your dad did. You're not coming off very good."
My phone creaked as my grip tightened to dangerous levels, and I had to consciously force myself to relax at least the hand that was holding my phone.
"So you're not going to do a damn thing for me?"
"There might be one thing, but I don't even know if it will work. That girl I heard talk of a while back, is she still in the picture?"
It was more than I could take. I retained just enough presence of mind to cover the mic on my phone before I put my hand through another section of the wall. I forced my hand back to normal, shrinking it down and losing the claws, and then put my phone back up to my ear.
"No, she left just after Agony came by."
"I'm sorry to hear that, man. That's rough."
"It's okay, I'll get over it."
I could almost hear the exhaustion creeping into Shawn's voice. It made no sense, but I could tell that he was suddenly all but dead on his feet.
"Like I said, I'm sorry. That might give me something to work with. I'll see what I can do."
I tried one last time. Even as I opened my mouth I knew it was the wrong thing to do. Shawn wasn't going to change his mind now, but I couldn't stop myself.
"Shawn, I need tangible help, not some nebulous promise. I'll go to your father directly if I have to."
"That won't get you what you want, Alec, and it will just back Dad into a corner. He doesn't do very well with changing his position once he's made up his mind. Look, I've got to go. Hopefully I'll get a chance to talk to you again."
He hung up on me before I could get anything out, and the sound of dead air ripped away the last of my control. My transformation shredded my clothes and then I cut through a large chunk of the wall with my claws before Adri's scent hit me. I'd somehow become accustomed to it even during just the few minutes I'd been there, but my hybrid form had sharper senses than my human body.
I collapsed onto the floor, surrounded by the smell of Adri and the destruction I'd just wreaked on the one link I still had to her.
Chapter 5
Adriana Paige
Brathingford High School
Manhattan, New York
Things with Mom were still strained, but it hardly mattered because I still only saw her a couple of times a week. If that had been the only problem in my life, things actually would have been pretty good.
Isaac had made even more of a ripple at Brathingford than I'd expected him to. He was undeniably good-looking and the definite scent of Alec's money had to help, but at least part of his appeal was the way that he'd kept himself so aloof from the girls who were slowly lining up to throw themselves at him.
It would have been humorous if not for the fact that I knew some of the girls really were interested in him. Isaac was unfailingly polite, but he never initiated a conversation with anyone but me, and he generally made an excuse about needing to study a few minutes after any girl approached him.
Isaac spent way more time with his nose in one of his books than he did talking to me, but the grapevine seemed convinced that the two of us were dating. Rather than making the rest of the girls just throw their hands up, that information actually seemed to anger some of them. I knew that Isaac was shooting them down because of Jess, but there didn't seem to be any way to get Lexus and her friends to believe that it wasn't me that was stopping them from completing their latest conquest.
Honestly, I was starting to get tired of it all. These girls had everything: money, looks, popularity, you name it. I knew I wasn't in their league, but that didn't mean I particularly liked being reminded of how much they outclassed me. Mom was making more money in a month than Dad had made in a year, but we still couldn't compete financially with Lexus and her friends. I knew that trying to compete was stupid, but I'd recognized one of the sweaters that Rachel had sent in her care package. It was the kind of thing I'd never have worn six months ago, designer and decadent in a way that almost defied reason. I'd done a quick check online and confirmed my suspicion. Rachel had bought me a two-thousand-dollar article of clothing.
When we'd had our school pictures a few days ago I hadn't been able to resist wearing the sweater. I told myself I was wearing it because I wanted to look really, really nice for my picture, but a small part of me had known that Lexus would probably recognize my little piece of near haute couture, and I'd taken just the tiniest bit of satisfaction over the fact that it would bother her.
Today I was wearing my own boring, old clothes, which had never impressed anyone, but they'd never occasioned amused glances like I was getting right now. It took me a couple of hours before I noticed the hot pink flyer making its way from one girl to another. I wouldn't have thought anything of it, but the giggling and nasty looks seemed to follow the flyer.
I finally got up and moved away from my usual study spot. Isaac faithfully followed along behind me as I headed towards the stairs. We were nearly there when I suddenly realized that there wasn't any reason for me to guess at what was being said. I had my own personal super spy.
"Isaac, what were those girls saying?"
"I'm not sure you really want to know. Maybe you should just ignore them and let it all blow over."
If he'd actually wanted to keep me from knowing he should have told me they weren't saying anything.
"Please, just tell me."
Isaac sighed and then pointed down the hall. "Maybe I should just show you."
There was a large bulletin board hanging between the elevators. Normally I just ignored it, but Isaac walked straight to it, pulled down a hot pink flyer, and handed it to me. It was a picture of me, but not just any picture. Somehow someone had gotten ahold of the picture I'd had taken just a couple of days ago, the one with the ridiculously expensive sweater that Rachel had bought me. Below the picture was the caption, 'Will Slut for Sweaters.'
I literally saw red for a few seconds. I closed my eyes, counted to ten, and then turned to Isaac. "Who was it? I know you'll have overheard enough to know which of those spoiled brats did this."
It was obvious that Isaac didn't want to come clean.
"Adri, this kind of thing never goes down like you think it will. If you let her pull you into a mudslinging contest you're just going to regret it in the end."
He was right. It really, really pissed me off, but he was right. There was absolutely nothing that I could do that would punish her like she needed to be punished. I could st
art nasty counter-rumors or convince Isaac to hack into her tablet, but that would just invite more problems and another round of retaliations.
"Just tell me who it was."
"It was Lexus."
I took a couple of deep, calming breaths, pulled the flyer out of Isaac's hand, and hit the elevator call button.
"Can I ask where we're going?"
"We're going to tell the administration about these flyers and then we're going to go from floor to floor and pull the rest of them down."
The office secretary promised to quietly get the staff and faculty to confiscate any flyers they saw, which I knew was probably still a losing battle, but at least it would force Lexus and her friends to be more circumspect.
I thanked the secretary and then headed to the top floor of the school and started working my way down. Isaac tromped along behind me, obviously hoping that I wasn't going to try and push him into helping with some kind of scheme to get even with Lexus and her friends.
The second floor was the worst; the bulletin board there was completely covered with the hateful hot pink abominations. By the time we got down to the first floor, I had a stack a quarter of an inch thick, and I was even angrier than I'd been when we left the office.
As I pulled down the last flyer and threw the stack into the trash, I saw a green poster off on one side of the front door. There was something about it that caught my eye, but I couldn't place it until I was standing right in front of the poster. It was for a band called Fatal Angst and featured a list of show dates and locations, but that wasn't what was tickling the back of my mind.
There was a picture of the lead singer down one side and he looked alarmingly familiar. I tugged on Isaac's arm, causing him to look up from the book he'd opened up almost as soon as we'd stopped moving.
"Isaac, does the guy on this poster look familiar to you?"
"Hmm? Yeah, I guess he does. He looks kind of like Albert from back home."
I was suddenly sure that it really was Albert. I'd almost forgotten that he was in a band. He'd said they were starting to get some heat down in Vegas, but I never would have guessed that they were going to blow up like this.
"We're going to this show, Isaac. I mean I'm going. You can come if you want, but I'm definitely going."
"Okay. I'll go online and check for tickets tonight. Alec may as well pay for that, too."
It wasn't until we were back in the elevator and headed upstairs that Isaac looked up from his book and gave me a questioning glance.
"Does this mean you're over Lexus and her friends?"
"No. Right now I'd happily push all three of them off the top of a building, but there's nothing I can do about them, not really. I'm going to keep telling myself that this school is just a tiny little pond and that once I graduate I'm never going to see any of these people again. And then I'm going to go to a concert."
**
I went to the rock show figuring I'd blow off some steam at the very least, but secretly hoping I'd get a chance to see Albert. I had no idea whether or not I'd even like the music that his band played, but I was ready to brave the crowds in the hope that I'd get to spend a little bit of time with him and get another taste of home.
The venue wasn't huge, but it was bigger than I'd been expecting. There were at least a thousand people there and Fatal Angst put on quite a show. They ranged from lyrical, haunting stuff that leaned heavily on Albert, to aggressive, high-energy, electronic sounds that got the whole crowd jumping up and down. The band was good, but the thing that kept blowing my mind was how different Albert looked.
The geeky math tutor who had been working the tutor lab with me a few months before had been replaced by a confident rock star, complete with a tattoo and a couple of piercings. Albert had always had a slender build, but sometime since I'd seen him last it had morphed into the kind of too-skinny frame that some performing artists seemed to get while on the road because they weren't taking good enough care of themselves.
I let Isaac convince me to stay in the back of the crowd where he could keep an eye on me for the first hour or so in return for him promising to get me right up to the stage by the end of the show.
He hadn't liked it, but he lived up to his part of the bargain and I was center stage, almost close enough to reach out and touch Albert, as he started into the last song, another of the aggressive numbers that had people crowd surfing and generally rocking out.
Isaac was obviously uncomfortable, but I let the music take me over and joined in the fun with everyone else. I looked up at one point about halfway through and saw Albert looking at me. I smiled and thought that I got a bit of a smile in return, and then almost before I knew it, the band was taking their bows and filing off the back of the stage.
I followed Isaac over to one of the walls as the lights came up and the rest of the crowd started breaking up.
"Sorry, Isaac. I know you've probably got a ton of other things you'd rather be doing, but can we wait for a little while and see if Albert comes back out?"
"Yeah, no problem. I wouldn't mind seeing him myself. I noticed he wasn't in school anymore a few weeks ago, but I didn't realize that this was where he'd gone."
We sat for several seconds in companionable silence, both playing on our phones. About twenty minutes after the show had ended I heard someone walking in our direction and looked up to find Albert standing in front of us with a big smile on his face.
I threw my arms around him so fast that I nearly knocked him over.
"You have no idea how good it is to see you. New York sucks."
Albert gave Isaac a nod as he wrapped an arm around me. "I thought about you when we booked the tour dates out here, but I figured there was zero chance we'd actually run into each other, and I had no way to get ahold of you after you left."
I blushed. I'd never been real big into the social media scene, but I'd cut even my limited interactions down to nothing after I left Sanctuary. It hadn't seemed fair to Alec to leave but then keep up contact with everyone else in Sanctuary other than him.
"Yeah, things kind of happened fast. I left without really having a chance to say goodbye to anyone."
Albert gave me a considering look, one that said he'd heard all of the rumors that had probably circulated after I'd left and that he was pretty sure I wasn't telling him the full truth. I did my best to move the conversation along so that he wouldn't get a chance to grill me.
"Your show was really, really good. When did you guys become famous?"
His chuckle was just as self-deprecating as always. "I'm pretty sure we're still not famous, but things started moving along pretty well a little while ago. We put some of our stuff up where people could buy it, and the next thing we knew, we started getting monthly royalty checks. It's not enough for all of us to retire in comfort on yet, but it was enough to support us on a six-month tour. My parents freaked out when I told them I wanted to drop out of school and really try to make a go of things with the band, but I managed to get them to meet me halfway."
"Meaning you're touring but still doing homework so you can graduate?"
His smile was just as cute as I remembered it being.
"Pretty much. That and I've got a two-year window before I need to be making obscene amounts of money or I'm supposed to go to college. The fact that I was already eighteen and making enough money to support myself was probably the only reason I managed to get even two years out of them."
I was still reeling from the idea of Albert, of all people, telling his parents that he wanted to drop out of school and become a rock star.
"So, can Isaac and I buy a big-time rock star something to eat?"
Albert shrugged. "I don't know about a big-time rock star, but you can buy Albert the high-school dropout something to eat. I haven't eaten since last night."
Isaac suggested an all-you-can-eat buffet, which I thought was a really good idea considering how skinny Albert was looking these days. We jumped on the subway and half an hour later we were sit
ting inside a modest-looking restaurant. The conversation on the way there had been pretty light, but a few seconds after we all made it back to our table with our food, Isaac looked down at his phone and sighed.
"Sorry, guys, I need to take this. I'll just be right outside."
Albert watched Isaac leave and then took a long pull of his Mountain Dew.
"So...you and Alec?"
"Wow, you don't waste any time, do you?"
His smile had hints of the shy math geek I'd known before, but he managed a breezy wave.
"I'm a big-time rock star and we can get away with that kind of thing. At least that's what the rest of the band keeps telling me."
Something about Albert's presence dulled the sting that Alec's name usually inflicted on me.
"Alec is in Sanctuary, and I'm here. That kind of says everything that needs to be said."
Albert shook his head. "Come on. I'm a geek at heart, but even I know better than that. Girls only simplify relationships as a way of confusing the issue. You guys aren't in the same city, but that doesn't necessarily mean you aren't talking to each other."
"In our case it does. I haven't talked to anyone from Sanctuary since I left. Other than Isaac, I mean, and him showing up here was a complete surprise."
"So you guys not talking, was that your idea or his?"
I was starting to get less and less comfortable with the direction he was guiding the conversation, but I managed to keep my voice pretty normal when I finally sighed and responded.
"It was my idea."
"Your idea, but you're not sure it was the right thing to have done?"
Maybe I hadn't done as good of a job keeping my unhappiness out of my tone after all. I picked up a piece of garlic bread and bit off a corner as a way of buying myself time.
"I'm conflicted about a lot of things where Alec is concerned, but I made the only decision I could at the time."
Apparently I'd finally given Albert the answer he wanted to hear. He dipped a shrimp in some marinara sauce and popped it in his mouth.
