by Dean Murray
Jack was sitting cross-legged on one of the deck chairs that was positioned only a few feet away from a tiny fountain. He didn't open his eyes, but he no doubt smelled me coming as soon as I stepped into the pool area.
"You're up sooner than I expected, Alec."
"Then I must have been even more injured than I realized. I expected to be back up and moving around way before now."
He opened one eye and arched his eyebrow at me. "You've been out for less than a day. It was just last night that you were injured."
He'd shocked me enough that I dropped down onto the chair next to him hard enough to make it creak in protest.
"I've never come back so quickly from something like that before."
"Yeah, I was planning on asking you about that. How long have you been able to shift just your hand like that?"
"About twenty-four hours."
Jack uncrossed his legs, straightening the loose workout pants he was wearing, and leaned back in his chair. "So what is your next step now that you've joined the select group of hybrids who can partially transform? Are you going to run back to Sanctuary and show it off to anyone who will stand still long enough to see it?"
I shook my head. "I actually was hoping to get a few minutes to talk to you before we left so I could ask you not to spread that particular development around."
Jack pursed his lips. "Frankly that's about the last thing I expected out of Kaleb's son. He's been angling to hand you a pack ever since you turned. You outing the fact that you've got that level of control would make his job a lot easier. You could probably be calling the shots with your own little group before the year is out."
"I don't want to run a pack, at least not on Kaleb's sufferance. Besides, this is nothing more than a parlor trick. It doesn't make me any kind of a better fighter, it just paints a bigger target on my back."
"You're wrong there, Alec. It may not improve your technique any, but you've got a level of support from your beast that most of our kind won't ever experience. It doesn't necessarily mean that you'll develop any kind of special ability or anything, but you're going to find that you hit harder, take more damage, and recover faster than you did before."
He wasn't talking like someone who knew these things secondhand, he was talking like he knew them from personal experience. Suddenly a bunch of seemingly unrelated facts snapped together for me in a way that they never had before.
"You can do it too, can't you?"
Jack nodded, looked around to make sure that we were alone, and then shifted just his right hand in a cool wash of power that was somehow too calm for such a demonstration.
"I've never heard even the slightest rumor that you might be able to do that. How long have you been able to partially shift?"
"Years, decades maybe. You've never heard any rumors to that effect because you're the first person I've ever shown."
My head was spinning. "Why didn't you capitalize on it? There's only what, Kaleb and two other people who can do that out of our entire pack?"
"I was already towards the top of the food chain and I always figured that it would be better to have an ace up my sleeve. A bit, I think, like you're figuring."
I cast back over what had happened right after we'd landed in St. Louis and tried to make sense of everything.
"Why did you back down at the airport? I thought that I just surprised you with my partial transformation and that it shook you up enough that you decided not to mix it up with me."
Jack nodded. "That's actually about right, just not in the way you're thinking. You did surprise me, not just with your new trick there, but the fact that you were trying so hard to keep it from turning into a dominance issue."
"You were trying just as hard."
"I was actually trying a lot harder. I've spent most of my time out here over the last two years trying to master my beast, to calm it down to the point where I don't have to deal with dominance fights every single time your dad sends in a new group of bruisers to help bust up a nest of vampires. You said that your beast was unusually calm when you arrived. I was the reason for that. Usually I can keep things from boiling over, but seeing you there looking so much like your dad made my control shakier than it normally is."
"You hate him, don't you?"
"Of course I do. He's the reason that my son is dead. He didn't kill my son with his own hands but he's kept the pack together for far too long. Having half of the pack deployed out on combat missions to places like here helps, but there's still too much internal pressure. I haven't been back to Sanctuary in a while now, but last time I was there it seemed like the dominance structure was in a constant state of flux."
I nodded. "It hasn't changed at all for the better over the last couple of years. There are just too many bodies there. Nobody has fought everybody, so dominance is mostly done by inference. When you encounter someone it's like you have to sit down and compare notes on who you've both fought and try to figure out who's got the best record."
"Yeah, that's about like I remember. I remember when Kaleb was young. He had a way of talking about the future that made you want to help him bring about the big dreams he had. Turns out that the dreams all just involved him horning into the Coun'hij all along. I blame Kaleb for Jack dying, but I also blame myself."
"How come?"
"I had a pet theory for a lot of years. It was something that Kaleb and I used to talk about late at night after your mom had given up on waiting for us and gone off to bed by herself. I thought that need and natural aggression were a key part of just how powerful any particular wolf could become. It seemed to me like my beast was somehow limiting the amount of power I could access and it wasn't until I really needed that power and demonstrated that I could control it that my beast let me access it."
I almost interrupted to tell him just how similar his experience was to what I'd felt last night, but I hesitated and he kept talking.
"My son, Jack, was my guinea pig. He had a natural aggression that reminded me a lot of myself at that age, but I pushed him to be more. I tried to get him to harness that aggression in the hopes that it would let him be more powerful. I knew that there were risks, but I told myself that it would be okay. I planned on being around to make sure that none of the dominance fights got out of hand."
Jack was silent for several seconds as he relived painful memories. "I figured that I was dominant to nearly everyone other than Kaleb, so I could make sure that nobody really took him to the cleaners. Besides, Kaleb had promised to help keep an eye on him."
The calm mien that had almost seemed to be Jack's trademark was gone now. His fists were knotted up and I could feel power lashing outward as his beast tried to do something about the feelings raging through him. The beast dealt with blacks and whites, it didn't know what to do with a problem that it couldn't fight into submission.
"I knew that things were heating up between him and Brandon's contingent, but I was only supposed to be gone for one day, only one day turned into three and Jack shot his mouth off to the wrong person. When I got back and found out that Jack was dead Kaleb refused to tell me who'd done it. To this day I still don't know."
I shook my head at him. "I wish I could tell you, but I don't know either. It happened out on the far end of town. I'm not sure that anyone really knows what happened. I mean other than Brandon's people."
"Yeah. I would have beaten an answer out of Brandon back then, but Kaleb refused to let me challenge any of those kids. He told me that I wasn't thinking clearly, and that he'd kill me himself if I tore into any of them."
I shook my head in astonishment. It wasn't necessarily any worse than some of the other stories I'd heard about how Kaleb had screwed people over, but it was remarkable that Jack's story hadn't been more talked about when it happened.
"I'm surprised that you stayed around."
"I didn't, not really. Your dad kept me deployed down to the border pretty much constantly until I volunteered for this assignment."
"Why di
d you volunteer to help out here? It's about the worst assignment imaginable. You've got a near-constant stream of hybrids coming through town who are going to want to challenge you to prove their dominance."
Jack shrugged. "It's actually not that bad of a gig. I've gotten pretty good at sidestepping the issue of who's the biggest, baddest wolf on the block, so I can usually avoid fighting the people that Kaleb sends to help. It really comes down to the fact that I can make a difference here. The vampires need stopped."
"You could say the same thing about the cats on the southern border, or maybe even some of the worst of the dispossessed."
"No, I'm not sure you can. I'm tired of killing my own kind. Most of the dispossessed are nothing more than round pegs in square holes. They aren't all that different than me, they just didn't luck into an assignment that let them nominally stay part of the pack while keeping enough independence to not go crazy. As for the cats, I just keep wondering how much of the snake pit down there is directly a result of the monarchy going in and assassinating most of the leadership in South America. Once you create that kind of a power vacuum it's almost guaranteed that you'll end up with a bunch of petty warlords who spend most of their time trying to kill each other."
"Which is exactly what we've got, isn't it?"
"Yeah, pretty much. At least that's what we had until your dad got us started fighting with them again. Now they've got a common enemy and that's done more to unite them than anything else possibly could have."
"It's them or us now. If we can't break them, then they'll eventually come up into our heartland and destroy everyone."
"That's the official party line."
Jack didn't look convinced, but I didn't want to press him on it, at least not considering some of the other questions I wanted to ask. He was astonishingly easy to talk to considering that the question of who was dominant hadn't ever been settled between us, but there was still a distinct chance that things could degenerate into posturing and a fight at any moment.
"Have you thought about really leaving? With your skills and experience, not to mention your insight into how Kaleb's operation works, you could be a real asset to the dispossessed. It's even possible that you could mold a group of them into a proper pack."
"That's kind of a seditious suggestion to be coming from Kaleb's son."
There it was. We'd come to the very end of how far he felt he could trust me. All of the things he'd said so far were either common knowledge or would merit nothing more than a slap on the wrist, but I'd just taken the conversation in a direction that could get somebody killed.
"The truth is that I've thought about leaving a lot myself lately. Mentally I keep coming back to the fact that I have to stay to protect the people I care about, but if it wasn't for them I'd have left a long time ago."
As assurances went it wasn't particularly strong. If I was working with Kaleb in an effort to frame him then it wouldn't matter what I said because I wouldn't be punished for it. It had been the truth though and my respiration and heartbeat hadn't fluttered even a little when I'd been speaking.
It was back on him to decide whether or not he thought I was a good enough liar to lure him into some kind of trap.
"Yeah, kid. I've thought about leaving hundreds of times. My wife and son are both long gone, but I'm staying for the same reason you are. I've got people who depend on me here. My boys and girls out there in the city need a strong, experienced hand holding the reins or eventually they're going to get blindsided and most of them are going to get killed."
It had been a really long time since I'd felt like I had someone who understood the situation I was in. Mom understood to a degree, but she was working from a position of weakness and probably always would be.
Jack knew what it was to find his choices circumscribed by his loyalty to his friends. I'd found a kind of kindred spirit without even looking for one.
"Are we making the right decision?"
Jack's snort was eloquent. "Hell, kid, I ask myself that question every day and I'm no closer to answering it now than when I first came out here."
"I keep wondering how many people are like you and me, unhappy with the way things are going, but unwilling to stand up and be a target in an attempt to change things."
Jack looked off into the distance and shrugged. "There are lots of people who are unhappy with how things are right now, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they view the world through the same lens as you do. If you could change things, what would you change?"
"I…well, I guess I don't really know. The Coun'hij for one. I don't think that it's right that they've got every single pack in North America under threat of death."
"We're at war, kid. That requires a strong central authority if you're not going to be steamrolled by the other side."
"We're at war because Kaleb and the rest of the Coun'hij put us there."
"Fair point, but how are you going to change that? Are you going to make peace with the vampires? What about the cats down south? Do you really think that they'll agree to stop fighting us now that they've started to win the war?"
There didn't seem to be much else to say. Jack was right. The position we were in was a terrible one, but the Coun'hij pretty much had us backed into a corner. The silence between us stretched out almost for a full minute before Jack sighed.
"I've run through thousands of scenarios over the last couple of years. We can't use the humans to help contain the cats. They are already struggling to deal with just the little bit of violence that leaks over into their area as part of their war on drugs. I was around to see this nation founded and I never even imagined it could become as powerful as it has, but I also never would have guessed that it could fall so far. It's little more than a Third World government teetering on the edge of bankruptcy these days."
I opened my mouth to protest, to defend the country of my birth, but Jack pinned me to my chair with a glare.
"Don't try to tell me otherwise. We've fought our last few wars using other people's money. The humans and this country can't handle another war right now, at least not unless a whole lot of people are willing to get their hands out of their neighbors' pockets. The humans are useless in this fight unless we're prepared to tell them everything that we've been hiding from them for millennia and let them fight informed."
I cleared my throat. "I'm not sure that would be a good idea. We could just as easily end up on the bad guy list from their perspective as the vampires."
"Yeah, I had the same thought. The way I see it, me staying here has the biggest benefit for the largest number of people. It protects my boys and girls and it helps millions of humans who otherwise would be at risk from vampires. It's a crappy decision when it comes to looking out to the interest of my species, but it helps just about everyone else."
"The greatest good for the greatest number. I guess it works out pretty well for ants."
"Yeah, well people aren't ants. Ants don't spend most of their time figuring out how they can screw the system, they're just happy to let the system screw them. It's a terrible way to make decisions and it is one eventually doomed to failure, but it's all I've got right now. What we need is a serious disruption to the status quo."
"Like what?"
"Like somebody manifesting a new power that changes up the playing field, someone who has the guts to stay out of the Coun'hij and who's smart and strong enough to survive when Kaleb and the rest try to kill him as a result."
I pursed my lips and nodded. "It's happened before. Puppeteer to name just one. You could even say with the way that the population of our pack is exploding that it's only a matter of time until we see one or more game-changing abilities manifest."
"You mean assuming that our young hybrids don't get killed off in the fighting before they have a chance to realize their potential? Oh, and assuming that Mallory doesn't have every single hybrid with the potential to manifest a powerful ability already scouted out and wrapped around Kaleb's finger?"
; My breath caught. He was right, Mallory and Kaleb were so many steps ahead of me that it wasn't even funny. Everywhere I turned Kaleb had already been there and made contingency plans to make sure that things went down exactly the way he wanted.
Jack looked over and gave me a sad smile. "Don't feel too bad, kid. Like I said, I've been thinking about this for years. If we had a viable standard to rally around then things would be different, but until then I'm just going to do the best I can to keep hunting down vampires while keeping my skin in one piece."
We sat there in silence for several seconds before Jack shrugged and took in the hotel with a broad sweeping gesture.
"For now you should just enjoy the hotel. I bought you guys forty-eight hours. Once we made it back here and I'd seen to the rest of the injured, I called up Kaleb and told him that you and James were both injured. He wanted me to send all four of you back so that he could at least ship the girls down to the front, but I figured that you wouldn't want to get split up like that, so I told him that I needed Jessica and Jasmin here to help me cover the holes left by two of my people getting roasted by that vampire last night."
"I appreciate that, I expect it probably wasn't a very pleasant conversation."
"Yeah, well, I try to avoid talking to Kaleb whenever possible, but I make an exception for worthy causes."
Feeling like an idiot, I asked the question that should have been the first thing out of my mouth when I saw him.
"How is everyone doing? Your two wolves who got burned are going to pull through then?"
"Yeah. I wouldn't be here peacefully meditating if things were looking at all touch and go. They're both drugged to the gills in their rooms sleeping. Their eyes seem to be undamaged and everything else will heal in the next week or two. Your people are all okay too. Jasmin and Jess came through with nothing more than flesh wounds and James should be up and moving around late today or early tomorrow."
His manner implied that I'd already subconsciously realized that everything was okay and that was the reason that I hadn't asked sooner. It was nice of him to give me the benefit of the doubt like that, but I wasn't as convinced. It felt more to me like I'd just forgotten my friends and his comrades in my rush to pick his brain for information about everything else under the sun.
