by Dean Murray
He gave me a sad smile and then turned back to his phone. "Donovan, I'd like you to take the Hummer and go get Mallory. Don't worry about leaving a trail, it's time for her to come home."
Chapter 22
Donovan Harringsford
Highway 112
Sanctuary, Utah
The night had taken on an undeniably surreal feeling. First Master Alec had informed me that Mistress Rachel had disappeared and then he'd ordered me into one of the vehicles and granted me the deepest desire of my heart.
It was nothing less than ridiculous, but I couldn't stop from feeling slightly guilty. The byzantine pathways in my mind seemed to have linked the two events. I knew they were unrelated, but what if I was wrong, what if my joy had only been possible because it was balanced by the tragedy of Mistress Rachel abandoning us?
On any other day my attention would have been wholly focused on the road. I did so little driving that each time I manned the wheel of one of the fantastical beasts that filled the garage it felt as though I was taking my life into my own hands. Tonight was different, almost as though my mind was flittering about in an effort to not focus on my purpose. It was like one of those dreams where you approached your destination slowly because you knew that once you arrived you'd wake up and you couldn't bear to have the dream end any sooner than it had to.
I took myself to task once again and brought the vehicle's speed back up to something that would allow me to return home to the estate sometime before sunrise. This might be the moment that I'd yearned for countless times over the last two decades, but that didn't excuse me from my duties. Master Alec would doubtless require my assistance with the effort to find his sister.
Just ahead, barely visible because of the Hummer's powerful headlights, was the shed where Alec stored his motorcycle when he came for a visit. I slowed the vehicle and then turned to the right, bringing it gently off of the road and onto the barren land that concealed more than any casual observer would have realized.
My progress was painfully slow, but still much better than I could have managed by foot. Alec had selected the vehicle most able to make the journey, but even so nearly half an hour passed before I finally saw the entrance to the shallow cave that contained Mallory's home.
I brought the vehicle to a halt and turned it off without any conscious memory of having done so, and then found myself standing less than a pace from Mallory's door. Part of me still wished to prolong the moment, but I knew that she would be worried. Alec never would have arrived in such a fashion, so she likely assumed that our enemies had finally found her. I tugged my suit jacket into place and knocked on the door.
I schooled my features into a shadow of their normal proper expression and then waited as she crossed the distance between us and then opened the door.
"D...Donovan. Is it really you or am I caught up in a dream again?"
"If it's a dream then I'm trapped in the same one. I say trapped, but I mean favored. Master Alec instructed me to come retrieve you. He believes that it is past time for you to come out of the shadows and take your rightful place at his side."
Her fragile body, wrapped as it was in a simple dress, was a pale reflection of what it had been before Agony had crippled it, but it was a beautiful improvement over what she'd been like when I'd left her here so many years ago. Then she'd been bloodied and a bare couple of steps from death.
She looked at me out of the corner of her eye with the doubtful look I remembered from the time before Agony's first visit. "Alec didn't really say that, did he?"
"It was implied. Master Alec didn't actually need to say the words for me to know how he felt in this instance."
"I asked him to give me some time to think about his proposal, but I didn't expect him to be gone for so long. I've spent the last several weeks alternately hoping for and dreading his next visit. The last thing I expected was that he would send you here and take my choice away."
"Master Alec is coming into his inheritance. It is his to command and ours to obey, but you still have a choice, that is never really taken from you."
She smiled at me. "As you say. It would have been better for me to have said that he knows my heart as well as he knows yours. If he commands then I'll obey out of love for him. It's my heart that leaves me no choice."
I struggled to keep the hope out of my voice. "You'll come then?"
"I'm scared, Donovan. I'm not what I once was. The last twenty years have taken more from me than I ever would have believed possible. What if I fail Alec just like I failed his father?"
"Master Kaleb would never have agreed that you failed him."
"Wouldn't he? He made a choice to trade his life for yours, but I wasn't ready to see him go so I pulled nearly the entire pack into a fight that we couldn't win. It's taken me a lot of years to realize it, but I did fail Kaleb."
I shook my head at her but she wasn't done.
"As sorry as I am for that, as much as I don't want to fail, Alec, I'm more worried that I'll fail you, Donovan. We've spent so long like this, a world apart. Are we really going to be able to make things work when we see each other every day?"
I gently took her hand and put it on my arm. She didn't resist as I slowly led her back towards the Hummer.
"I don't have any answers about the future, but I do know that the question is one that is entirely within your control. I loved you for more than two decades before Master Kaleb's death. I will continue to love you regardless of our circumstances."
Chapter 23
Alec Graves
Graves Estate
Sanctuary, Utah
I felt like I was going to lose my mind. Adri's presence was the only thing keeping me from going over the edge.
Nobody had seen any sign of Rachel and there wasn't anything else I could realistically do to find her at this point. We didn't have enough spare manpower right now to conduct some kind of massive search, not without leaving the estate completely exposed, and it probably wouldn't have helped even if we had a thousand people to send out in cars looking for her.
It had taken a tremendous act of will, but I'd done all that I could and then I forced Rachel's situation out of my mind and went back to my room. Adri had come with me and we'd spent the last two hours cuddled together on my bed while I waited for updates from Grayson's team or some kind of response out of the IT guys that Donovan had been chasing before I'd sent him to go get Mallory.
"Alec, what's going to happen after we get married? We can't really leave for a honeymoon or anything, can we?"
"It wouldn't be a very good idea. We'd be leaving everyone here exposed and we'd be in more than a little danger if we were off in some tropical paradise without any bodyguards."
Adri turned around so that she was facing me. "So what are we doing instead?"
"Who says that we're doing anything after the wedding?"
She rolled her eyes at me. "Please. I know you much too well to believe that for a moment. You've got something planned and I want to know what it is."
"You don't want to be surprised?"
"No, surprises aren't what everyone makes them out to be. I'd rather know what's coming."
I gave her a moment to reconsider and then nodded. "You're right, I have something planned. You haven't noticed, not with all of the craziness of getting the wedding ready to go, but there's been another construction project underway since just after we flew back from Chicago. Everything is on schedule for us to spend our first night as man and wife together in a small cabin that I've been wanting to have built for a few months now. The original it's based on was located in much colder environs, but I'm still very happy with how things are turning out."
Adri smiled and then buried her face in my chest. "That's perfect, Alec. A tiny little house where we can pretend for at least a few days that we're just two newlyweds, two normal, poor newlyweds."
"Maybe I should clarify what I meant by small..."
Adri didn't look entirely happy, but her response was pre
empted by a chirp from my phone which was followed by another message a couple of seconds later. The first one was from Grayson to inform me that they'd touched down in Sanctuary. Grayson had already indicated that he hadn't lost anyone and I'd been enjoying being alone with Adri so much that I'd resisted the urge to call and get a report on their operation, but it looked like our peaceful interlude was about to come to an end.
I was just about to call Grayson when I saw the second message. It was just a phone number, but the numeric code behind it told me that it was from the hacker who'd been so unreliable lately.
I took a deep breath and then dialed the number. The voice on the other end was being run through some kind of filter to make it unrecognizable.
"This is Alec, where have you been for the last six hours?"
"What do you mean where have I been? I've been doing exactly what you told me to do, I've been sitting inside the NSA's systems and doing everything I could to foil whoever is trying to hack in right now. By the way, everything I've been doing lately is way over what we agreed on two years ago when you hired me. I'm on the ragged edge of being caught here and you're going to get one hell of a bill when I actually have a few minutes to draw one up."
A shiver worked its way up my back. "I never told you to protect the NSA. I've had every other available resource trying to hack in so I could get access to their satellite feeds."
There was complete silence on the other end of the line for several seconds. "I got a message in the usual way four weeks ago telling me to hack in and shred all of the satellite feeds for a six-hour window that just ended. That data is gone, not even I could get it back at this point."
I felt a headache coming on. "Was there anything in the message that would have tipped you off to the fact that it wasn't coming from me?"
"No, the headers all originated from your network and you had all of the agreed-on codes and encryption in place. Given all of that, how was I supposed to know that it wasn't you? Even the odd bit at the end of the message didn't matter, not against all of the other proofs I had that it was you."
"What was at the end of the message?"
"I don't know, not exactly, I'd have to go dig it back up. Something about this secret remaining in the dark still."
I closed my eyes for a moment as I tried to keep my temper from getting away from me. "Please dig the message up and send it to me. Once you've done that go ahead and start reversing your efforts from the last couple of days. I need access to the NSA's satellites."
I hung up the phone and then turned back to Adri who was watching me with a frown on her face. "It was Rachel, wasn't it?"
"I suspect so. I don't know how she managed it, but I'm almost sure it was her."
Whatever Adri was about to say in response was cut off by Jasmin stomping into my room. "We need to talk."
My beast didn't like her tone, and I was inclined to agree with him. I opened my mouth to tear into her, but the memory of Rachel's note stopped me. Rachel had said that I needed to go easy on Jasmin, and while Rach wasn't omniscient, she knew our pack dynamic as well as anyone else and the fact that she stood outside of the power struggles meant that sometimes she saw things that I missed. Instead of dressing Jasmin down I waved her to a chair.
"Report."
"Isn't that Grayson's job?"
"Yes, yes, it is. He's not here yet though and you are, so you get to be debriefed in his place."
She was still mad, but she'd come expecting a fight and my response had thrown her off balance.
"It was the scariest thing I've ever seen. We got inside the building without any problems. Ash shot both of the desk guards with a tranquilizer gun before they could react and then we searched the place floor by floor. There was a basement five levels underground that had almost two dozen caged werewolves in it."
"They changed when they saw you?"
"Yeah, they changed and then went at their cages like there was no tomorrow. Killing them inside of the cages was tricky. Ash burned through two whole clips from his assault rifle killing just one of them so the hybrids started surrounding a few cages at a time and bleeding them out through the bars."
Jasmin took a deep breath and then lifted her shirt up far enough for me to see the huge swaths of gauze and tape that had been used to keep her from bleeding to death.
"Everything was going pretty well right up until all of the cages opened up automatically and the remaining vacuums tried to swarm us under."
"Grayson said that you guys didn't lose anyone."
She looked away for a moment and when she turned back to me her eyes were full of challenge once again.
"We didn't lose anyone, but it was a close thing. Almost everyone took at least one serious wound and I nearly didn't make it out of there alive."
This was what was bothering her, but I knew Jasmin well enough to be certain that she wasn't pissed about something as trivial as a fight that just hadn't gone as well as she would have liked.
"What happened, Jas?"
"I reached out for my beast and tried to transform and she didn't react. I jumped away, still on two legs, and took almost enough damage to kill me. It wasn't until I was bleeding on the floor that my beast finally responded and transformed."
"I'm glad you survived the fight, Jasmin, but those wounds don't look as bad as you're indicating that they were."
"They healed when I transformed. Not the normal amount either, they healed a lot."
"Interesting, that doesn't seem to gel with your problem transforming."
"No, no, it doesn't. I don't know what's going on, Alec, but I suspect that you're the cause of all of this and I don't appreciate it."
She'd gone from calm and rational to angry and moving into my personal space like someone had flipped a switch inside of her. I put a hand up and stopped her from getting any closer.
"Is that your beast driving things now, Jas?"
She suddenly looked lost. "Yes, she just surged up when I thought about the fact that you're sucking me dry, that this is all your fault and you don't even seem sorry."
My beast didn't like how aggressive she was being but I forced him down and gave her a sad smile.
"I'm sorry that you're suffering. I'll keep you out of combat ops until we figure all of this out. I'm keeping a tight leash on my ability right now, I have been keeping it under control for weeks now, but you're right. Anything odd with your beast right now is probably a side effect from before when I was unconsciously draining you. I'm sorry, Jas. I wish I could go back and do a lot of things differently."
She'd been expecting a fight and she didn't know how to handle an apology. I breathed a sigh of relief that I wasn't going to have to beat Jasmin down while Adri watched. My sigh made Jasmin cock her head slightly to the side in puzzlement, but before she could say anything a series of loud beeps sounded from underneath my bed.
It was a digital recorder of some kind and it clicked over to Rachel's voice as I was still fishing it out from under my bed.
"I'm glad that I get one more chance to speak to the three of you. You're three of the most important people in my life and it's only fitting that you're all in one place right now. Your attack on his werewolves in Salt Lake forced Puppeteer's hand. He originally had two forces, which would have been more than enough to kill us all, but you have a chance against what is left. They'll hit the estate sometime in the next few seconds and they'll start with the corner nearest to Ben's room."
I looked up, but Jasmin was already disappearing into the hall. I grabbed the radio sitting on the desk with my computer and depressed the transmit button.
"We're about to be attacked. I want everyone at the garages right now."
My order was just short enough to fit perfectly in the pause that Rachel had left in the recording.
"You're not ready to go head to head with Puppeteer, Alec. You're going to need to split up your people, whoever survives this attack. Jasmin, Jess, Ash, they all have things that they need to go do. The three w
ill go their separate ways, two by their own decision, one because he no longer has a choice."
There was a pause for several seconds. I half thought that Rachel's message was over, but there was a quiet hum in the background of the recording that told me she had something else to say.
"I'm really going to miss the two of you. The light burns my eyes, but the darkness is growing."
There was a sing-song quality to the last bit of what she'd said. I turned to ask Adri what she thought when the first werewolf came crashing through my window.
Chapter 24
Jasmin Bianchi
Graves Estate
Sanctuary, Utah
I raced through the house with every ounce of speed I could muster until I reached the other wing, at which point I was forced to dodge the flow of people headed the other direction. I was only a dozen feet from Ben's room when I heard the first impact as a werewolf crashed through one of the huge, floor-to-ceiling windows that almost every room in this wing sported.
I made it into Ben's room as a second werewolf crashed into the house, this one taking out another window and part of the wall less than twenty feet away from Ben. The lights went out and the machinery around Ben's bed instantly started beeping to alert whoever was listening to the fact that they'd lost power.
Adrenaline already had my heart racing, but I felt another wave hit as I realized how hopeless our situation was. There was a chance that I could outrun the creature, but I wasn't going to abandon Ben to it, which meant that I wasn't going to make it out of the room alive.
A part of me wanted to despair, but mostly I was just mad. I'd spent years trying to get Ben to open up to me. I'd been thwarted at every turn, but up until now I'd always felt like there was still a chance for things to work out.
It was a minor thing compared to everything else the Coun'hij had done, but I was about to lose everything on the altar of their ambition.
