by Dean Murray
I shook my head gently, sending tiny waves out from my face to touch her. "No, more and more I think you were right. I just can't seem to find a way to get back on the path I was on before Agony visited us. I want to, but I'm just not sure how to do it."
Adri got a faraway look on her face. "Have we had this conversation before? It feels familiar too."
"Maybe. I don't remember, but I know I've had it inside my own head countless times since you left."
"How do we know this is for real?"
I shrugged, sending out more ripples. "I'm not sure it is. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter. I don't have much time left, Adri."
She abruptly stood, pulling me around so I had to stand and look at her. "What is going on, Alec?"
"I'm not sure. The new girl in the pack had a vision. Agony killed me in it. She's never predicted anything more than a day or so in advance though, so I can't have long until it comes to pass."
I'd started looking away from her as I'd talked, unable to bear seeing what I was about to lose, but she put her hands on either side of my face and brought it back around so I had to meet her eyes.
"We have to stop it from happening."
"There's no way, Adri. Agony always charges too high a price for survival. My father knew that, but it's taken me longer than it should have to understand that."
I could see the tears starting to form at the corners of her eyes, but I gave her my best smile as I pulled her hands down to my chest and then reached up and wiped her tears away. Adri buried her head in my chest, I think more to save me from having to watch her cry than out of any weakness. She was so much stronger than I'd realized back when we'd been dating.
"I don't care whether or not this is just a dream, Alec. If I remember this when I wake up, then I'm coming straight out to Utah. I'll swallow my pride and beg for your forgiveness. I'll plead for you to love me again and then I'll do whatever I have to do to earn my way back into your heart."
It was my turn to gently pull her face up so I could see her eyes.
"You don't need to ask for forgiveness, Adri. I haven't stopped loving you, and my heart has been yours almost from the first day we met. I forgave you a long time ago."
I could feel my voice getting rougher as tears started threatening to undo my composure.
"I'm...glad we had our time together. I'm thankful that I got to tell you how I felt one last time, Adri. I guess I hope that this is real, that you aren't a figment of my imagination, but I hope you don't remember any of this when you wake up. Seeing you again would just make it harder to do what I'm going to have to do."
The dream started to dissolve around me, but I locked gazes with Adri until the very last of the dream was gone. My memories of the last few minutes started disappearing only a few moments after the blackness came for me. I couldn't have come up with a better last request myself. Not if I'd had weeks to think of it rather than just a few hours.
Chapter 16
Adriana Paige
Upper East Side
Manhattan, New York
We'd seen Russ out and then Dom had escorted me back to her place. It had been obvious that I was just in the way, so I'd gone back to my bedroom in the hopes that once I was out of sight that she'd be able to just get on with the business of saving Ben and making sure Mom and I didn't end up with some kind of vampire hit squad knocking on our door at some point in the next few weeks.
I fell asleep a few minutes after I flopped onto my bed and didn't wake up until Jasmin barged into my room.
"Sorry, Adri. I know you're tired, but can we talk? I've heard Dom's version of things, but I'd really like to hear your side of things while it's still fresh in your mind."
As I looked up at Jasmin I saw her expression change and then realized a few seconds later that I was crying.
"What's wrong, Adri?"
I wiped my tears away and tried to get control of myself, but I was finding it surprisingly hard to stop new tears from replacing the ones I'd wiped away.
"I don't know. I thought maybe I was just really glad to finally see you again, but I don't think that's it. It almost feels like something really sad happened in my dream, but I can't remember anything about it."
"Nothing?"
"I think maybe I was happy and I felt really safe before the bad thing."
An idea floated up from the deepest recesses of my psyche and I almost couldn't bring myself to ask the question.
"Jasmin, is Alec okay? I can't explain it, but I feel like something bad happened to him."
The snort I got in response was hardly the kind of thing you'd expect out of someone who looked like a supermodel, but Jasmin pulled it off.
"Alec is the best he's ever been. I saw him only a few hours ago with that slut Tasha. He's got two of the bruisers from her pack standing by to pummel any challenger who might show up, and right now the biggest danger he's in is that he might stumble into Tasha and bruise his lips against her face."
I let out a gasp. I almost attributed it to my normal difficulty hearing Alec's name, but there was something else there, something that didn't feel right. I was blindly reaching for the answer but Jasmin was my only clue.
"That's not like you, Jasmin. What's really going on?"
She looked at me for a second and for the first time in ages, I could see the frustration at her core. Her incredible beauty was so blinding that sometimes it was hard to see past it to the person underneath everything.
Jasmin put her head in her hands for a couple of seconds and then stood up and closed the door.
"Do you have a privacy box in here?"
"I think that's it over on the dresser."
Dom would have sat down next to me on the bed. Jasmin turned the white noise generator on and then paced the full length of the room as she was talking.
"You know how I've been able to beat James and even Isaac sometimes? Well, that shouldn't be possible. The only reason I even had a chance against them is because one of my ancestors cheated."
"What do you mean?"
"Thanatas was the second king over the northern shape shifters. His father, Jaldul, created the monarchy through little more than brute force of personality. He created a web of alliances that ultimately united every pack under his rule and then broke the back of the southern invasion. What the histories tend to gloss over is that the war took decades. Thanatas grew up knowing nothing but war."
My eyes were as wide as they'd ever been. This was exactly the kind of information I'd wanted to know when I'd been in Sanctuary, but which Alec had been reluctant to tell me.
"Thanatas seemed to think of peace as some kind of mythical thing. He made some very bad decisions that ultimately cost him the monarchy, but before that happened, he had four sons and he passed on a measure of his gift to them."
"What does that mean?"
Jasmin smiled bitterly. "It means his descendants have an unfair advantage. Thanatas' power was the ability to make small, gradual changes to his body that made him faster and stronger than even any hybrid should have been. Some of those changes apparently were dominant genetic traits. Any descendant of the royal line has a chance to manifest a kind of juiced-up version of the normal wolf or hybrid form. Think faster, stronger, harder to kill."
Bits of information were starting to click into place for me. "That's how Alec was able to be so clearly dominant to Isaac and James."
"Bingo. The thing is, you only get one souped-up form, either wolf or hybrid. I manifested my 'royal' hybrid form back before anyone else in either pack had become hybrids, so for a little while there, Alec and I traded off on who was top dog. Once Alec became a hybrid then he got all of the royal goodies. I think Donovan suspects some of the truth. He spends too much time fixing Alec and me up to not get at least a clue here and there when Alec's circulatory system doesn't look right, even for a hybrid, but as far as I know you're the first person outside of the royal line to have ever been told that we get extra advantages the rest of the shape shifte
rs don't get."
Jasmin was still pacing, but if anything, she was more worked up now rather than less. My hope that the movement would burn off the edge of whatever was bothering her was obviously vain.
"I've lost my royal traits, Adri. I'm not better than any other wolf, in fact in some ways I'm worse. I keep acting like I still have extra speed that just isn't there. It almost got me killed a little while ago."
"Are you sure? It's not just the effects of whatever has been bothering you, Dom and Rachel?"
"I'm sure. It all just fits too nicely together."
Her words didn't match with her expression or tone. My chest went tight as I realized that, for Jasmin at least, losing the extra vitality that had seen her through so much danger somehow wasn't the worst part of what she had to tell me.
"It's Alec. He's the reason. Who are the three members of the pack who are the most loyal to him? Rachel would lie across a railroad track and wait for a train to hit her if Alec told her to. Dom's nearly as bad, and I'm obviously worse than I thought."
"What do you mean?"
"I know that he's feeding on me somehow. His power is actually working, it just works all the time rather than in a sudden burst like what took Brandon's pack down. I know it, but I haven't left yet. I've dropped all kinds of hints, but he's never reacted in the slightest. He can lie when he needs to, but not like this. He's consuming all three of us, and I still can't bring myself to just leave him to die all by himself."
A couple more pieces dropped in place inside my head. "That's why Dom has been feeling better when she's all the way out here. His power must not work when the...victims aren't close by."
Jasmin nodded and finally collapsed onto the bed next to me. "Yeah. That was the bit that finally put it all together for me. That and the fact that I think Alec is getting physically stronger. I saw him do something the other day that shouldn't have been possible. He's turned into some kind of metaphysical vampire."
I wrapped my arms around Jasmin and put my head on her shoulder. "We'll figure something out."
"I hope so, Adri, but I just can't see any options. We're getting ringed in at every turn and I just can't see a way out of this. Not one that I'd be able to take and then still live with myself after it was all over."
Chapter 17
Jasmin Bianchi
Outside of Up Town Customs
Brooklyn, New York
I looked out the van window at the mostly darkened street and found myself tapping my fingers on the dashboard. We weren't far enough out for Brooklyn to have turned into something very rural, but at least there weren't as many neon signs around.
Adri had been fighting a severe headache ever since the night Ben called. It wasn't bad enough to go to a doctor over, but I was starting to worry about her.
She'd told me everything she could remember about Ben's call, the night they'd seen him at the book signing, and the time he'd texted while she'd been on a date with Albert. I'd filed everything she'd said away and then left so she could go back to sleep. I was pretty sure she'd spent at least the next few hours worrying about my latest set of Alec revelations, but there wasn't anything I could do to take it all back now.
Usually I was smarter than that. Adri wasn't the kind of person you could drop a bomb like that on and then expect them to shrug it off like nothing had happened. It was one of the reasons she was so likable.
She hadn't been sleeping well the last couple of days. There was a definite pattern where the headaches were their worst early in the morning, and then they seemed to taper off in the evening. Assuming Isaac and I made it through the next couple of hours, I was going to suggest we give her something to really knock her out tonight and see if that made things better. Alec could have Dr. Samuels call a prescription out here pretty much on the drop of a hat.
Isaac snapped his fingers to get my attention and I nodded. He was right. A few minutes before we launched an operation that could get us killed wasn't the time to be woolgathering.
"You still sure you want to do this tonight, Jas? Even another couple of days of surveillance could make a big difference."
"Unless you tell me that you won't go in tonight, I want to do it now. I don't trust those parasites. If they've realized that Ben called us, they may have already done something drastic to him. Even if they haven't, he has to be getting antsy. I don't want him doing something stupid because he thinks we're not coming for him."
Isaac nodded and I worried again at how morose he was getting. Isaac and I weren't close enough for girl talk, but it was obvious he still hadn't worked through his crap where Alec and the rest of the pack were concerned. There was a lot of that going around.
"Okay, tonight it is. It looks like three a.m. is the best time from what we've seen so far. You want to get some sleep before we roll?"
"No, I slept before I came out here to relieve you. Why don't you go ahead and crash in the back of the van. I'll just run through the building blueprints again."
"Sounds good. Just don't get too fixated on them. A place like that could have all kinds of modifications to the floor plan since it was built."
"Yeah, I know. Dealing with mind readers makes everything tougher. If this were just a regular bunch of drug runners, we could at least get someone inside to look around and tell us what the public areas look like."
"Woulda, coulda, shoulda. We'll just have to do the best we can. In and out quick and hope they left Ben there by himself."
"You think we'll actually get that lucky?"
"Everything points that way, but no, I don't. Nothing's gone our way since Agony showed up in town the last time. We'll end up having to fight our way in."
"You're turning into a pessimist."
"School of hard knocks and all that."
Isaac worked his way to the back of the van and then lay down in the aisle between the two banks of equipment. He dropped off to sleep almost instantly, and I was left to face the next couple of hours of waiting by myself.
The shop where they were holding Ben had been quiet since about ten, and nothing particularly exciting happened while I waited except for a recurring feeling that I was being watched. Under other circumstances, it would have been enough to make me call off the op, but I wasn't leaving Ben in there for any longer than I absolutely had to. I woke Isaac up twenty minutes before go time and we stripped down to our ha'bits.
I gave the word to Ash's hacker over an encrypted messaging line, and thirty seconds later, every light for three city blocks went out. We were less conspicuous on two legs, so we jogged up the street toward the shop. My shoulders itched the whole way.
The yard where they stored the vehicles they'd been paid to modify was secured with a giant chain and a padlock. Isaac transformed his hand to the wicked, semi-retractable claws of his hybrid form and sheared through the lock without breaking stride.
The phone relay for the alarm system had taken some work to track down, but it turned out that some idiot had run it from the roof up to the nearest telephone pole. Apparently your garden-variety vampires weren't very good with technology, and their contractor had pulled a fast one on them.
I positioned myself against the exterior wall of the building and braced myself as Isaac ran toward me. I made a stirrup out of my hands and launched him as high as I could. Just as I'd expected, the impact pretty much leveled me. Isaac was a big boy, but I managed to help get him an extra six or seven feet of vertical. He sank both clawed hands into the side of the building and then reached up and grabbed the eaves of the second story that his jump hadn't quite made it to. A few seconds later, he'd cut through the security phone line and he was sliding back down.
Odds were decent that whoever was inside had heard something, but hopefully they thought it was some kind of big rat or something. We sprinted around the corner of the building and then Isaac dropped his shoulder and hit the door so hard that it didn't even slow him down.
I followed him through the door expecting to find one of the big, open
bays where they worked on vehicles. I didn't expect to find half a dozen individuals, none of whom looked happy to see us.
Isaac dodged left as I dodged right. We almost weren't fast enough; I actually felt the first couple of bullets whistle past me as four of the six opened up with handguns. Unlike recently, my beast didn't need any coaxing to complete a transformation. She ripped up out of me with a fury that took my breath away.
There were plenty of tools and equipment scattered around the outside edge of the room. I ghosted along behind the clutter as I heard two of our opponents moving slowly toward the door Isaac and I had used to enter the building.
The smart thing would have been for Isaac and me to beat a hasty retreat, but I wasn't interested in smart right now. I waited until the one on my side was almost to the door and then I sailed over a large tool chest and hit him with all the force my nearly two hundred pound wolf body could muster.
The jump was a thing of beauty. I knocked him over and sent both of us rolling behind another set of machinery. He was still trying to figure out what had happened when I killed him.
If his scent hadn't confirmed that he was just a human, his reflexes would have. It smelled like there were seven or eight different vampires who regularly came through here, but we were only facing two vampires. The other three were humans.
Something went spinning through the air with a buzz and then a meaty thunk told me Isaac hadn't shifted yet. He was using improvised tools for now. Not a bad idea. He'd have an even harder time keeping his hybrid body concealed than he was going to have with his normal form.
"You two work your way towards them. We'll be right behind you."
That had to be one of the vampires. They weren't likely to be taking orders from humans, and I couldn't see very many circumstances where a vampire would be willing to let an armed human get behind them.
The humans were at a disadvantage. The shop was too dark for them to see very well. The vampires were probably in better shape though. The smart money would be on them trying to use the humans to flush us out.
