by Dean Murray
"How would you know?"
"Because you never in a million years would have agreed to sit there while Juan and the others were standing all of the way over there if you had any other choice."
She harrumphed like an old woman, but she stopped complaining as I carried her over to our SUV. In human form I'd always expected her to be light, but now that I actually had her in my arms I was surprised at just how little there seemed to be to her.
She was still the fiery, deadly young woman that she'd been yesterday, but she was also woefully frail and I was more conscious than ever of just how little it took for one of us to be killed even with all of the benefits inherent in being a shape shifter.
I set Alison inside of our vehicle and went to help buckle her up, but she swatted my hands away and told me to stop being such an old woman. I smiled as I backed away from the car with my hands up in mock surrender, and then felt all levity drain from my face as I turned and found myself face to face with Jaclyn.
"You're an interesting problem, Alec Graves."
"I'd like to be something other than a problem to you."
"I know. That's actually what makes you such a problem. If I really believed that you didn't mean a word of what you said to me last night then you wouldn't be a problem, you'd just be another name waiting to be crossed off of my list when the Coun'hij finally loses control of everything."
"So you do believe me!"
"Calm down, Graves. Yes, I believe you, at least that you've got good intentions, but that doesn't change an awful lot. The situation is too complex and you're just not ready."
I felt like I was banging my head against a wall.
"So help me get ready."
"Even assuming I was willing to help you out, it's not that easy. There would be significant risks to you."
"I'm prepared to run risks."
Jaclyn shook her head. "I'm not. Thanks again though for helping bail us out last night. I lost a couple of good people in that fight, but I probably would have lost everyone if not for your help. You've got a respectable amount of power at your beck and call by the way. Did you notice the way your beast ponied up extra energy when the fight was against a werewolf?"
I had to consciously force myself to close my mouth. "You mean that's normal?"
"Not for everyone, no, but for some of us it is. There's something about going up against werewolves that makes the truly dominant among us fight harder. It's like even our beasts know that the werewolves are wrong on every level, that they need to be wiped off of the face of the earth."
"That's why you fight them even though it's been prohibited."
Jaclyn nodded. "That's part of the reason. Nobody in their right mind would hold a rattlesnake to their chest, but that's exactly what the Coun'hij is trying to do. They want us to protect the werewolves when the more sensible course would be to make sure that we don't let them grow in numbers to the point where they can turn on us."
I nodded. There were definitely some valid points behind her argument. The piece about our beasts providing more power for fights against werewolves was interesting too. It meant that the full degree of my power was still a secret. She thought that when she'd yelled at me during the fight the night before that she'd seen my full power plus an increase due to the fact that we were fighting a werewolf.
Instead what she'd seen was slightly less even than what I'd displayed to Jack, because some of my power had been somewhere else.
"Okay, well, if you change your mind please let me know. I need to get my footing, I need to know the things you're worried about telling me. It doesn't matter how dangerous the process of learning them is."
Jaclyn shook her head, but she held out her hand to offer the handshake she'd refused to give me the night before.
"I don't change my views on those kinds of things, Graves, but just in case, I'll keep you in mind."
The words were exactly what you'd expect out of someone who was worried that she was being spied on, but hidden in her palm was a scrap of paper. I did my absolute best to keep my surprise off of my face, and based on the fact that her face didn't even flicker as I took the paper and casually stuffed it into my pocket, I was pretty sure that I'd succeeded.
Jaclyn had something to tell me after all.
Chapter 15
Alec Graves
Bisbee Municipal Airport
Bisbee, Arizona
Jaclyn's paper had contained today's date, an address on the outskirts of a town called Naco, and an injunction to be there at four p.m. sharp. Convincing James to come with me had been the easy part. Convincing Jasmin and Jessica to stay at the hotel and cover for the fact that the two of us were gone was much harder. Getting out of the hotel without anyone seeing us was somewhere between the two extremes of difficulty.
James was looking a lot better with another day of rest under his belt, but I was sincerely hoping that we'd be able to avoid a fight today. I wasn't sure that either of us was in good enough shape to get in a fight this afternoon and then turn around and run an op for Brandon tonight.
Actually, getting out of the hotel was a lot easier than I suspected getting back in would be. The Rest Easy apparently did most of its laundering onsite, but that was during normal times when the hotel was running with a significant number of empty rooms. Brandon's decision to make the Rest Easy the base for all operations against the cats meant that the hotel was nearly one hundred percent booked and had been for weeks.
The owners were doubtlessly turning handsprings of joy, but it had caused the hotel manager some difficulties. For instance, keeping all of the linens clean had required ferrying a load of laundry over to another hotel in town at least twice a week.
Jasmin had hit on the idea of smuggling us out in the laundry trucks and it had worked like a charm. She and Jess had grabbed a couple of the large carts that the hotel staff used to transport dirty linens and brought one to each of our rooms.
The concept of riding around in a basket full of other people's dirty sheets was mildly gross, even despite the fact that as a shape shifter I was immune to pretty much any disease you could think of. I compensated by stripping the sheets off of my own bed and laying one down on top of the rest of the laundry and then using the other one to cover myself with. The last thing I saw before Jasmin covered me up with some clean towels from my bathroom was Jasmin rolling her eyes at me.
It was more than a little unnerving to sit quietly in the basket and just hope that the plan went off without a hitch. In theory we should be okay. We couldn't completely mask our scent, but nobody would think twice if they caught a whiff of James or me around the baskets or along the trail that they were taken between our rooms and the truck. The logical answer, that they were just smelling the sheets that we'd slept in, was the right answer, just not the complete answer.
The real risk was that one of the other shape shifters would get close enough to the carts to hear our heartbeats. All of the material packed in around us should go a long ways towards muffling the sound of our pulse, but it was the one part of the plan that had given me the most concern from the start.
Luck was with us though and half an hour after I climbed into the cart I felt the unmistakable movement of a vehicle in motion. James came out of his pile of laundry at the same time that I climbed out of mine and then we just waited quietly for the truck to arrive at the other hotel. Once we were there we watched until the driver was distracted chatting up one of the girls who worked on the housekeeping staff and then snuck out of the truck.
The next phase of my plan relied on the fact that Donovan had been siphoning money off from Kaleb's investments for the last two decades. Most of the embezzled funds went to an account under one of my mother's aliases, but Rachel and I both had significant balances with several national banks under pseudonyms of our own.
James and I walked into one of the banks in question and walked out twenty minutes later with twenty thousand dollars which we used to first rent a car from the local vehicle dealership and the
n charter a helicopter to take us from Nogales International Airport to Bisbee Municipal Airport. James had thought that chartering a flight was excessive, but it was a lot faster than driving all of the way to Naco and it had the benefit of meaning that if we wanted to we could return a different way than we'd come.
We rented another car in Bisbee and made it to Naco twenty minutes before four. I didn't really know what to expect. It was possible that Jaclyn just wanted to meet up somewhere she knew would be safe from any kind of spies, but her manner when she'd handed me the note hadn't matched up with that. She'd been convinced that she was putting me in danger and I'd decided before James and I even left that we'd be very careful about how we approached the meet.
We left the rental car in a grocery store parking lot four miles away from the address Jaclyn had given me, and then we walked out into the wilderness that butted up against the edge of town. It took less than two minutes to lose ourselves in the underbrush and hills enough that we could strip out of our clothes and shift to four legs.
I'd scouted the address as extensively as I could using the satellite maps available on my phone. That had allowed me to plan a route for us from the grocery store to the meet without crossing through town.
There were still risks even after everything I'd done to try and minimize them. Everything from the possibility that we were walking directly into a trap to the slim chance that we'd be seen in our wolf forms and someone would start asking the kinds of questions that I'd just spent the night helping Oblivion erase. From a distance we could be mistaken for the wolves that had once roamed freely through various parts of the United States, but anyone who got a good look at us up close would know that we were much too big to be normal wolves.
The air was remarkably still, which was good because it meant that we didn't have to worry about factoring the prevailing wind into our approach route, but it left me feeling curiously blind. I'd been outside in all kinds of weather in Utah, but this was the first time that I'd experienced a day where the air was this still. For people who were used to getting more than half of their situational awareness via their nose it was a worryingly vulnerable environment to be in.
We felt exposed enough that we traveled through the scrubby, brown desert underbrush a lot slower than we usually did, but we still managed to arrive at the meeting place more than ten minutes before four. The location was part of Naco, but it was set off from the rest of the city. A ring of low hills completely blocked the rest of the town from view and made it difficult to find a good observation point, but I'd found a likely-looking spot via my orbital recon earlier.
Working from nothing more than memory I managed to bring us to within fifty feet of the spot I'd picked out, which was good because it meant that we wouldn't be leaving a scent trail all over the hills. Even better, the spot exceeded my hopes. Not only was it big enough to house James and me semi-comfortably for an hour or two if necessary, it had plenty of low scrub brush that would break up our outlines and help keep us hidden from anyone conducting a visual scan of the hillside.
James and I settled down and waited to see what would happen. Four p.m. came and went and by the time four-thirty arrived James was clearly antsy and I was starting to get a little nervous myself. If something didn't happen soon we were going to run out of time. As it was, we were already cutting our margin of error for getting back before leaving for Brandon's op thinner than I wanted to. Brandon was supposed to brief Juan who would then brief the rest of us minus Alison, but even so there was a limit to how long we could go without making an appearance back at the hotel.
Five more minutes crawled by with excruciating slowness and then a pair of SUVs came around the bend in the road that led between the main town and our little cul-de-sac. James shifted as though preparing to head down, but I stopped him with a low growl. These SUVs were black rather than white. It was looking like this wasn't a simple meet with Jaclyn after all.
One of the SUVs stopped just on our side of the hill that separated the two sections of town, but it parked oddly in the middle of the road almost like it had undergone some kind of mechanical failure and been forced to make an emergency stop. Two guys that looked strangely familiar despite the distance got out and moved around so that the SUV was between them and us.
The second SUV pulled right into the center of the little suburb and five guys exited with a swagger that would have told me who we were watching even if I hadn't recognized Vincent.
My mind flitted back to the briefing when we'd volunteered to go down to Hereford. Vincent had said that he couldn't make the trip down to the border and guarantee that he'd be able to be back in time to execute some other mystery op for Brandon. This had to be the op, but it didn't make any sense. I'd been watching the local news recently as a way to anticipate where we might be deployed and there hadn't been even a whisper of any kind of violence in Naco.
There hadn't been any power outages to signal that they had werewolves in the area, there hadn't been any blood bank thefts to indicate there were vampires moving in, there was no legitimate reason for Brandon to be deploying Vincent's team this deeply into the Tucson pack's area.
Once everyone was out of the SUV, two of Vincent's guys unloaded two crates out of the back of the vehicle. It took them only a couple of moments to assemble what looked like a miniature cell tower and then I got the biggest shock of the day.
Vincent shifted. One second he was his normal, arrogant human self and then the next he was a hybrid. It was full daylight and there was nothing to prevent anyone looking out their windows from seeing him walking around bigger than life. It went against thousands of years of tradition and everything that the Coun'hij supposedly stood for.
Despite everything I still half expected Vincent to go charging off towards some threat that I hadn't seen yet, but instead he simply held out his hands and waited while one of his guys pulled an odd contraption out of the second crate and started strapping it onto Vincent's left hand. When Vincent's guy finally stepped away Vincent had large metal gloves strapped to his hands.
It was another violation of the laws that the Coun'hij had set forth after overthrowing the monarchy. Hybrid-usable weapons had reached their pinnacle under the last king and then had disappeared almost overnight once the king vanished, but even then it had been swords that had been used, not odd clawed gloves that didn't seem to actually extend the reach of the wearer.
Something similar might make sense for a human as it would transform their hands into claw-tipped weapons, but hybrids already had claws.
One by one Vincent's men all shifted into their hybrid forms and then were equipped with the gloves from the crate. Finally there were just two guys left who walked over to one of the houses and kicked the door in.
It took only seconds for the screams to start, at which point I shifted back to human form and grabbed ahold of James to stop him from rushing down there. It wasn't what I wanted to do. I wanted to change over to a hybrid and run down and start killing Vincent's guys, but the only thing that would accomplish would be to add James and me to the body count.
The screams as the two guys still in human form pulled people out of the first house caused the rest of the neighborhood to look out their windows. Once people realized that their phones weren't working and saw that they wouldn't be safe inside of their homes, there was an exodus as people rushed outside in an effort to either get away or to go help the first few victims. They were being killed by hybrids wearing the weapons that I now realized were solely to make the kills look like they'd been done with the curved claws of a jaguar rather than with the straight claws of a hybrid.
Brandon had hoped that a victory would bring down more recruits, but when that hadn't worked he'd set about creating an atrocity to see if that would serve as a better motivator for the wolves and hybrids in the unaligned packs.
None of the humans ever had even the slightest chance. Once the people were outside of the protection of their houses, Vincent and the other hybri
ds tore through them like they were nothing more than paper dolls.
Some of the residents brought out guns, but they were simply outmatched. Vincent's guys could smell the gun oil and powder residue on the weapons as soon as they exited the house and no mere human was the equal to the speed of a hybrid.
Several of the gun owners were cut down before they could even get their guns in play and, for the rest, the hybrids simply ducked behind buildings and continued their rampage while one or two of their number stalked the gun owners. As long as the gunmen didn't move they didn't have any targets, but as soon as they started moving around they were taken out by enemies who could smell them and hear their heartbeat from a dozen feet away.
It was the most one-sided battle I'd ever seen, but my heart went out to those who were trying to fight back. They were in a bad situation, but at least they were trying and that was more than I was doing.
A few people made it into their cars and partway down the road, but instead of trying to ram the SUV blocking the road they tried to go around it which slowed them down. Even worse, they were then faced with two more hybrids who were more than capable of driving a fist through the driver's-side window and breaking their necks as they went flying by.
Some of the fleeing humans had made it to the base of the hills by that point, but the two shape shifters who'd been going door to door and pulling people out into the street simply shifted to wolf form and chased them down.
The tiny sliver of my mind that wasn't paralyzed by a roiling combination of anger and outrage wondered whether jaguar and wolf fangs were similar enough that those last few kills wouldn't break the illusion that this had been done by a group of cats.
It felt like the attack lasted hours, but I made myself sit there and watch the entire thing. By the end the humans who remained had realized that fighting and fleeing were both equally futile and some of them simply dropped to the ground and waited for one of the monsters down there to come by and kill them.
Once there wasn't anyone living visible anywhere in the neighborhood, Vincent ordered some of his guys to begin gathering up the corpses that had been killed by the wolves while others went door to door, looking for survivors, no doubt simply by listening for heartbeats.
