Riven

by Dean Murray

  Isaac wasn't the controlled pillar he'd been in years past, but even at his best he'd never been like this. Grayson hadn't just been controlled, he'd been a blank slate. I couldn't think of anything more unnatural, not for a shape shifter. Emotion was what drove us. Intellect might direct our routes, but it was emotion that kept us going in the face of odds that would make most humans give up and die.

  I still didn't know what Grayson's deal was, but there was something very off about him.

  Somebody was making a bunch of noise over by the main entrance. I didn't have to check and recheck my gear like Ash and a couple of the others, so I drifted over to see what all of the excitement was about. I was beyond bored. Once we hit the ground and the fur and fangs were flying then I'd be missing the boredom, but right now I was even willing to listen to some of the ridiculous drama going on in the pack lately if it would break up the monotony.

  Wyatt was standing in the doorway arguing with Carson. Grayson was watching impassively from a few feet away, which was yet another oddity. No dominant hybrid should watch quite so calmly when one of his guys was defying orders, even if the orders weren't actually his orders.

  "Rex agreed to stay and watch Rachel, so there isn't any good reason for me to sit this one out."

  "You know very well why you should be sitting this fight out. You have responsibilities that you shouldn't be forgetting."

  "That's crap and you know it. I could get offed tomorrow and it wouldn't make one damn bit of difference."

  "You agreed to obey Alec's orders. He told you to stay at the estate."

  "I already know that Alec assigned me as a babysitter specifically because you asked him to keep me out of the exciting stuff. I just told him that Rex would watch the kids and he told me it was up to you two, so here I am."

  Carson didn't look happy, but he also didn't seem willing to lay all of his cards on the table, not with everyone else around at least.

  "Think of what your grandfather would say."

  "He'd say that our line should have died out centuries ago."

  Wyatt pushed past Carson as he spoke and apparently his shot succeeded because neither Carson or Grayson made any motion to stop him.

  It was pretty apparent that the show was over, so I drifted back to the far corner of the hangar where I'd been sitting before Wyatt showed up. It had the benefit of being far enough out of the way that most people had been leaving me alone.

  My thoughts lapsed back into their normal, well-worn grooves once I was back by myself. I already knew that there wasn't a single thing I could do to help Ben at this point, but that didn't stop me from banging my head against that particular wall over and over again.

  It was darkly funny when you got right down to it. Ben had left town because I'd addicted him to my touch. It hadn't been on purpose, and I hadn't had any other choice, at least not one that kept him alive, but he hadn't been able to deal with it.

  What he hadn't realized was that he'd addicted me years before any of that had happened. I'd spent years trying to get him to just stop moving around so that I could sit him down and get him to listen to me, and now he was finally stuck in one place and I still couldn't talk to him. Rather I could talk to him, but it wasn't doing any good.

  I was mentally reviewing the results of his last test when I heard someone behind me. I spun around and had Rachel up against the wall with my hand on her throat before I realized who I was dealing with.

  "Rach, how did you even get here?"

  The question was pure habit. I didn't really expect an answer out of her. These days she mostly just ignored all of us.

  "Rex is nice, but he's not the brightest cookie out there. I lost him twenty minutes ago. Once he was out of the picture it was easy to steal the keys to my car and the key to the back door here."

  "Don't you mean brightest lightbulb?"

  Her shrug didn't fool me. She was smiling because she was yanking my chain.

  "I don't have much longer, Jasmin. Alec's looking for me already."

  "You're right, he's probably freaking out by now. We should call him and tell him that you're okay."

  I'd let go of her as soon as I'd realized I wasn't being attacked, but suddenly I wasn't so sure. Rachel stepped into me with a hiss of frustration. "You're not listening to me, Jas. I need you to listen because you're important to me. This is important."

  My beast awakened with a flare of power. She knew Rach, but she'd been acting up a lot lately and she apparently felt like Alec's little sister was suddenly a big threat.

  "Okay, Rach. I'm listening."

  "You need to find someone named Geoffrey and you'll need to find him soon. Ben doesn't have much longer."

  "Wait, this Geoffrey guy can help Ben?"

  "Yes, but you're not going to like it."

  "How do I find him?"

  Her odd smile was back, the one that usually meant that she was inhabiting a different place or time than the rest of us.

  "Don't worry about that, it will happen; you just need to be ready when he does."

  It was all I could do not to reach out and shake Rachel. There was no reason to believe that she knew any more about how to save Ben than I did, but I needed it to be true and I needed her to keep things together long enough to tell me whatever it was that she knew.

  "Mind the smell, Jas. Mind the smell."

  There were footsteps behind us now, but I ignored them right up until someone put a hand on my shoulder and started pulling me back away from Rachel. Somehow I'd ended up with my hand back around her throat.

  "Just let go of her, Jasmin."

  It was James and he was talking with unusual calm, but that didn't matter.

  "Tell me what you know, Rachel!"

  "I can't tell you, I'd have to show you and if I did that you wouldn't thank me, nobody would."

  My beast felt like she was being made fun of and she didn't like the experience. She tried to break free and it was all I could do to keep her from shedding my normal form in favor of the four-legged one.

  I was so caught up with aborting the transformation that I didn't realize I was hurting Rachel until she cried out and James had thrown me against one of the metal struts that supported the structure.

  Tears of pain were running down Rachel's face and she had vivid purple bruises on her shoulder and neck, but she was laughing hysterically. "That's the ticket, Jas. Give into the rage, use it. You're going to need it, all of it, before this is all over."

  Chapter 21

  Adriana Paige

  Graves Estate

  Sanctuary, Utah

  I knew that I shouldn't be bothering Alec, not with everything else he had going on right now, but that didn't stop me from walking to his office. The wedding was just next week and the work involved in getting ready for it was growing in step with the passage of time. Kami was amazing, but a thousand things still went wrong every day. It meant that we were in a perpetual firefighting mode as we tried to come up with ways to compensate.

  Things would have been much easier if I hadn't tried to cram six months of planning and work into such a short period of time, but it was still starting to wear on me. Alec and I usually at least had breakfast and dinner together each day, but today I was feeling the need for a little more Alec time.

  I looked back at one of Rebekka's wolves, a quiet guy named Jed who was currently serving as my bodyguard, and then shrugged. "I guess I should just knock. It's not like he's going to turn me away."

  Jed smiled slightly. "I suspect he'll be as relieved to see you as you will be to see him."

  I rolled my eyes and then knocked on the door. Alec answered it a moment later with a frown on his face that turned to a smile as soon as he saw that it was me who was interrupting his work.

  "You have no idea how good it is to see you right now."

  "I don't know, I think I'm feeling about the same way."

  He pulled me into a hug and then looked over at Jed. "You can go ahead and take a break. I'll give you
a call when Adri is ready to leave."

  "Yes, sir."

  Alec pulled me into his office and swung the door shut. "You're never going to guess who ditched her minder and snuck off the estate."

  "When you put it that way, it's not hard to figure it out. Your mom and Rachel are the only two besides me who have constant bodyguards. Have you found Rachel yet?"

  I wondered briefly if I should have been more worried, but Alec seemed more annoyed than upset, so I figured that meant that they'd already found her.

  "Yeah, but only because she went to the airstrip where our people were assembling for the attack on the werewolves in Salt Lake. If she'd just chosen to keep driving we might not have ever found her. Tracking a vehicle is tough because it doesn't have a very distinctive scent trail, and we've lost our satellite feeds for this area."

  I rubbed my arms. "That sounds serious. Not just the Rachel thing, but the satellite feeds. Do you think it's the precursor of an attack?"

  Alec's frown told me that he'd already spent the odd hour or two worrying about that very thing. "I don't know. We don't have our own satellites, so we've relied on hacks into the NSA and others to get the surveillance that we need. Every so often they scrub their systems enough to deny us access, so this happens from time to time, but frankly the timing isn't good. Especially not with how odd one of our cyber consultants has been behaving lately."

  "What do you mean?"

  "It's hard to really pin these guys down sometimes, but he seems to be racking up a lot of extra hours recently and he's been late delivering his normal stuff, like he's working on something high priority for someone else despite the fact that he's only supposed to be working for me."

  I smiled as he pulled me down onto the loveseat next to him. "The joys of running a multibillion-dollar empire that happens to be in the middle of overthrowing the Coun'hij."

  Alec snorted and took my hand in his own. "At least Rachel is on her way back here. She should be here within the next ten minutes or so."

  "Traffic permitting, of course."

  I got another eye roll and then Alec used his free hand to bring my chin up ever so slightly.

  "I've missed you today."

  "You saw me just a few hours ago."

  His smile was sad. "I know, but somehow that feels like days ago. On days like this it's the thought of seeing you at breakfast that convinces me to push through the night and get the work done. I hate having something unfinished hanging over my head when I'm trying to enjoy your company."

  "If it helps any, I've missed you terribly tonight too. I'd give anything to have all of this craziness behind us. I wish the wedding were tomorrow, but if I really had less than twenty-four hours to pull everything else together then I'd probably steal one of Ash's guns and shoot myself."

  "We could try and push the date back a month or two if that would help."

  I shuddered in terror that was only half feigned. "I've seen the guest list, Alec. We've invited three different state governors, six senators and something like two dozen other people who plan out their schedules four months in advance. Besides, changing the date at this point would be a lot of work. Kami has shipments queued up to arrive according to a very precise schedule every day between now and the actual wedding. The only thing that a delay would actually do is give us more time to get the park ready to go."

  "If all you're worried about at this point is the park then you can stop worrying. I snuck out there yesterday and it is perfect. You guys have created something that's almost too good to survive in this world. The flowers are especially incredible. Carson has a true gift, both for the visuals and for the scents."

  I shook my head. "I can't take any credit for the park. I haven't actually done any work anywhere since this whole nightmare started."

  I'd looked down in unhappiness while we'd been talking, but Alec tipped my chin back up so that I'd meet his eyes.

  "In some ways you and Kami have the hardest jobs of all. You have the ultimate responsibility if things go wrong. Besides, you should give yourself credit for agreeing to let Carson do the flowers. You recognized talent and gave him his head. Not only that, I have it on very good authority that you were the one who gave him the idea of using Lagrimas so liberally throughout the park."

  "I don't know. That doesn't seem like a very big accomplishment. Besides, if we're giving out credit for putting the right person in the right time and place, you need a healthy dose of applause. Carson has been perfect, and not just with the flowers. I didn't realize just how much of an adjustment it was going to be to have a bodyguard all of the time rather than just a few hours a day. I know it's only been a couple of months, but Carson has almost become like an adopted father."

  I knew Alec's sigh wasn't because of the bond Carson and I had developed, but it took several seconds before he nodded and elaborated on the gesture.

  "I'm glad that things have worked out so well there, but that's one more bit of unfinished business. Carson and the other two are almost to the end of their sworn period of service and I haven't managed to tease anything important out of any of them. If I can't get through to them soon they are going to disappear again and then I'll be looking at trying to replace not only Carson as your bodyguard, but Grayson as well."

  "It will leave us a lot weaker, won't it?"

  "Yes. It's not like it's the end of the world. We've got several packs that have sworn to us now, so we've got more manpower than we had before, but he's still going to leave a hole around here when he leaves."

  I'd nearly forgotten about the time limit on Carson's oath to Alec, and I felt a sudden flare of sadness at the thought of him disappearing from my life. "I'll do what I can to see if he'll open up to me. I don't want him and the others to leave any more than you do."

  I opened my mouth to ask him how things were looking with some of the packs that we hoped would swear to us next, but shut it when I realized that the sliver of white that I could see under the corner of Alec's desk was a note, and that it had my name on it.

  "You're leaving me notes in unlikely places now?"

  Alec followed my gaze and then shook his head as he walked over and picked it up. "No, this isn't from me and it has my name on the other side of the envelope."

  "So it's for both of us. Go ahead and open it—the suspense is killing me."

  Alec tore the envelope open and scanned down the page. By the time he got to the bottom of the note he was white. He pulled his cell phone out as he tossed the note to me.

  I read it as he paced back and forth, muttering under his breath as he waited for whoever he was calling to pick up.

  Alec, Adri,

  I'm sorry that you're going to find out like this, but I think it's best, all things considered. Don't follow me, and don't be too hard on Rex, there really isn't any way he could have seen this coming.

  "Donovan, I need you to call the police. Have them put out an APB for whatever Rachel drove out to the hangar and whatever Rex used to go get her, and then get in contact with our IT assets. I need satellite feeds from the last two hours and I need them right now."

  Speaking of Rex, you should probably send someone to pick him up. He's on the side of the road about ten minutes outside of town. I shot him up with Etorphine, so if you give him some Revivon he'll be back on his feet by the time you need him.

  Jasmin is going to be pissed when she gets back, but you need to go easy on her. She's having a hard time of things right now, but you're going to need her.

  I think it's past time to bring certain secrets, certain people, out into the open, Alec. Adri, I'm sorry I haven't been able to help with the wedding. You two take care of each other, the worst is still to come.

  By the time I made it to the end of Rachel's note, Alec had hung up on Donovan and was talking into one of the radios that was hooked into the net the bodyguards were using.

  "...no, not everyone, we still have to make sure that we've got adequate protection for everyone else here. Detach four guys in t
wo cars. She said that she'd leave Rex ten minutes outside of town, but she didn't say on which side and there's no guarantee that things went according to her plan. With any luck he overpowered her and his radio got turned off in the struggle. No, I don't think it's likely either, but I'd kill for a little bit of luck right now. Get ahold of Grayson for me too. I don't want them to do anything stupid, but tell them we're going to need them back here as soon as possible."

  Alec set the radio down and walked back over to me. I held out the note and let him read it again.

  "Do you think she's really gone?"

  "Probably. There's always a chance that it's some kind of elaborate joke, but I doubt it."

  "What do you think she meant about bringing secrets out into the open?"

  "She's talking about something that she can't possibly know about, something that I should have done a long time ago."

  I would have asked him what he meant, but he'd already turned away, absently pulling his phone back out of his pocket. He stared at it for several seconds and then hit Donovan's speed dial.

  "Can you please let the police know to contact me directly with any updates? The same with the cyber guys...no, no problems, I just have another job for you to do. Hold on a sec, I need to tell Adri."

  Alec looked over at me. "The police just found Rex. He was unconscious on the side of the road, just like Rachel's note said he would be. She's definitely gone."

  It was like I'd been struck. I'd known that this was a possibility, but even with the note I'd still had a hard time believing that Rachel—even the new, unpredictable Rachel—could have really left like that. I crossed over to Alec and took his hand.