by Dean Murray
I tore my eyes away from the carnage below and checked the watch that I'd carried in my mouth the entire way from the grocery store. It seemed like hours had passed but the whole thing had taken less than half an hour.
James tried to protest when I ordered him to follow me back to the car, but he knew as well as I did that there wasn't anything we could do here to make a difference.
We slipped over the top of the hill and raced back towards the grocery store where we'd left the car. As I ran I wondered how long it would be before the cold, numb feeling inside of me would disappear. A part of me thought that if it ever disappeared I'd have somehow failed a basic test of humanity. The people who had just been murdered back in Naco deserved more than for me to just go back to my life and pretend that nothing had happened.
Chapter 16
Alec Graves
Rest Easy Hotel
Rio Rico, Arizona
We made it back to the car and then to the airport without any problems, but I could tell that James was angry at me. He was practically leaking power the entire helicopter ride back west, but he managed to keep himself under control with what was probably a herculean act of will. I was especially grateful for that considering that if he'd said all of the things he'd wanted to say then the pilot would have overheard and we would have had even bigger problems.
I'd had a couple of over-complicated plans that might have offered a chance for us to get back into the hotel without being seen, but in the end I discarded them all and James and I just dropped off the car and jogged back the last mile or two between the dealership and the Rest Easy.
It was foolish to take chances, especially given what James and I now knew, but I felt like I was going to explode. I wanted to do something completely reckless like publically denounce Brandon at the next big briefing, but I knew that would just result in the death of me and my friends as well as all of the independents down here. Brandon would just stage another battlefield and tell the rest of the world that he'd been attacked by a numerically superior group of cats and some losses had been unfortunate but unavoidable.
I couldn't do that, but it felt like I had to do something at least a little risky so I settled for us jogging back to the hotel rather than sneaking in as I knew we should.
Juan intercepted us at the side entryway. "Where have you guys been? I've been putting Brandon off all day. If you'd been five minutes later you'd be in some serious hot water. Brandon has called an emergency briefing. Come on."
I practically saw red, but I let Juan all but drag me through the hotel to the conference room reserved for our use. We were the last ones to arrive. Brandon was even there already, and we got a frown in response to our tardiness. Jasmin and Jess both looked at James and me with concerned expressions so I managed a smile to try and reassure them. The expression felt wrong on my face, but I knew the girls needed to calm down or we'd be giving Brandon one more reason to suspect that something was wrong.
Brandon surveyed the group one more time as though confirming that everyone he was expecting had arrived, and then cleared his throat. "I'm afraid that a complication has come up. The Brain Box has just informed me that there has been some kind of incident on the southern end of the Tucson pack's territory. Jaclyn is still not taking my calls, so it's looking like we're going to be forced to send another team down to investigate."
One of the other team leaders raised a hand and Brandon nodded for him to ask his question.
"Does this mean that we're going to reschedule the op that was supposed to go down tonight? Vincent's team has been gone all day, so we could be as much as two teams down."
Brandon shook his head. "You're correct that Vincent's guys have been gone all day. I dispatched them to the west on a critical mission this morning myself, but I got off of the phone with Vincent a few minutes ago and he's confirmed that he'll be back in plenty of time to still hit our original timetable for the deployment."
I wanted to scream out that Brandon was a liar, but he'd picked his words carefully. He probably had sent Vincent west this morning, but driving west for an hour before looping around back to the east to kill a bunch of innocents wasn't quite the same as being sent on a mission to the west. Brandon's pulse hadn't ever even hiccupped and every other person in the room would leave thinking that Brandon had just told them that Vincent's mission was to the west.
Brandon continued without missing a beat. "Given that we'll only be down by one team, I'd like to proceed with the original op. I have, however, given some thought to who best to send east and I think that since this recent incident has all the earmarks of a low-risk assignment I'd like to send Juan's team. You guys just finished a rather brutal deployment less than twenty-four hours ago and it just makes sense to give you the easier mission rather than sending you into the fire again already."
Juan was nodding in appreciation, but I found myself interrupting.
"No. I mean thank you, sir, but we'd really rather help with the main operation. Alison is obviously going to have to sit things out no matter what else happens, but the rest of us are in fighting shape and raring to go."
Juan turned towards me with a surge of power. I'd just effectively challenged his authority in front of every single person in the briefing, and neither he nor his beast appreciated my brashness. Maybe it was more of the substitute recklessness that I'd shown earlier, but I responded back with a wave of power that was greater than anything else Juan had ever felt out of me. It wasn't quite my full strength, but it was enough to make everyone around us step backwards a couple of feet. In another time and place we would have been at each other's throats already, but Brandon's prohibition against fighting in public was still in effect, and James had stepped up to my side with his own flare of power as Jasmin and Jessica had moved around so that they were at my back.
It was a clear vote of no confidence in Juan as the leader of our team and it had probably just burned up a ton of the goodwill I'd garnered so far among the independents, but I was not going to be put in a position where I had to come back and tell everyone that cats had massacred those people. I couldn't because I'd know that it was a lie and everyone would be able to tell that I was lying even if I tried.
Brandon sent out a blow of power that exceeded anything Juan or I were capable of generating. "That's enough! There will be no challenge match right now. Alec, I know you're new here, but even if you somehow managed to beat Juan you wouldn't become the team leader, it would just mean that you'd be assigned to a new team."
I shook my head, but my eyes never left Juan's face. "I don't want to challenge Juan. I think he's a great leader and I'd vastly prefer to stay in his team. I just really want to be involved in the main operation tonight."
Like so much of the communication between our kind, every word I'd just said was the truth, just not the truth in its entirety. Even so, everyone nearby could tell that I was sincere in my admiration for Juan and I could see that my comments had even put Juan off balance a little bit.
"We're going to have words later on, Alec, but I'm not necessarily against helping with the main operation if Brandon has a spot that only needs five of us, since Alison is out."
Juan's words seemed to satisfy Brandon, and this time when he asked for volunteers he had several teams offer to take the job that everyone was sure would be a milk run. Brandon quickly reviewed the main op and then dismissed us all to meet with our individual teams.
Juan didn't even wait for the conference room to clear out before getting in my face. "What do you think you're doing, Graves?"
"I'm sorry, Juan. I can explain, but do you have somewhere private we can go first?"
He'd hit me with a lash of power, but my complete lack of response on the metaphysical plane seemed to be puzzling him. After a couple of seconds he nodded and led the way out of the conference room and down the hall. We detoured to pick up a wheelchair for Alison, who started to protest that she could walk just fine on her own right up until she noticed the tenseness betw
een Juan and me.
By the time we arrived at Reina's shop and were conducted up to the solarium, twilight had fallen. Juan kicked on the swamp cooler while the rest of us opened up a couple of windows and arranged a couple of anti-snooping devices.
"Okay, Alec, spill it."
"James and I snuck out of town today. You'd probably already figured that out, but what you didn't know is that when Jaclyn shook my hand this morning she slipped a note into it. It had a time and a place on it along with today's date. That's where we went."
Juan threw his hands in the air. "Do you have any idea how much danger you put yourselves in? Jaclyn can get away with flipping off the entire Coun'hij, but neither of you have anywhere near that level of power. I know I put your feet on this path by telling you that your mother and Donovan were keeping stuff from you, but you've gone too far the other way now. You're going to get yourselves killed."
I nodded. "You may very well be right, but I can't change what I saw this afternoon."
Something in my tone must have given away more than I'd realized. Juan looked back and forth between James and me with an odd expression on his face.
"What are you talking about? What did you see at the meet with Jaclyn?"
"Brandon's having humans killed and staging it to look like it was some kind of raid from south of the border."
James' words came out sounding dead and monotone, but they still put a charge into the air that was all beyond anything I'd ever experienced previously. All three of the girls looked like they wanted to ask questions, but the dominance chain was simply too strong for them to interject a comment into a discussion between two dominants when the matter was as serious as this one was.
"You're crazy!"
I shook my head. "No, Juan, we both saw it. That's where Vincent and his guys have been all day and that's why Brandon is sending a team to Naco. Vincent's guys strapped some kind of clawed weapons onto their hands so that the wounds they inflicted would look like they were done by jaguars and then they killed dozens of people."
Juan slumped down in his chair. I could tell that he wanted to disbelieve what James and I were telling him, but the pieces fit together much too well for that. This was exactly the kind of thing that Brandon needed right now, and hard as it was to believe that anyone would order the death of so many people solely in the hopes that it would bring more troops down from the north, Brandon really was capable of doing it if anyone was.
"What have I done?"
It was a time for brutal honesty. "You've supported Brandon by killing jaguars, but more importantly you've helped put in place all of the controls that make independents willing to come down here and fight for Brandon and Kaleb. We need to stop that. The best thing in the world is for Brandon and Kaleb to spend all of their time fighting the cats because while they waste their strength against each other it allows us to start preparing to stop them."
"You're talking about some kind of coup? Do you have any idea how impossible that is?"
I nodded. "I do. Maybe not as much as you, but I know that our odds of winning are so close to zero that for all practical purposes anything we do probably isn't going to make a difference. I can't continue to support Brandon and Kaleb though. There are people resisting them—look at Agony and Dream Stealer. Those two haven't let the odds stop them from fighting and there is always a possibility that we can convince others. You said it yourself that Jaclyn has pretty much already told the Coun'hij to go screw themselves. Just the fact that she sent me to watch that massacre says that she's passively working against Kaleb. How much more would it really take to bring her over to the point where she's actively working against them?"
"A lot, Alec, it would take a lot. All three of the people you just mentioned are major powers in our world, but Agony and Dream Stealer can afford to actively work against the Coun'hij precisely because they don't have any friends or family that the Coun'hij can use against them. Jaclyn has an entire pack and a daughter to worry about. She'll never do anything that will put her daughter truly at risk."
A knot formed in my stomach. With everything else that had happened recently I hadn't thought about Rachel. Mother was a consideration too, but lately I wasn't sure how much she was really on my side or not.
Juan was right. It was one thing to throw yourself into a fight against the Coun'hij knowing that they'd do terrible things if they caught you, it was quite a different prospect to put people you cared about into harm's way.
"We've got to do something, Juan."
"For now I can start quietly letting the other independents know that Brandon staged the murder scene at Naco to make it look like it was cats instead of Vincent. That should cause the word to slowly percolate up to the various packs and make sure that Brandon doesn't get the influx of recruits that he was hoping for."
"How do we get the independents out of here? Every independent we lose down here is one more person who won't be able to stand against Kaleb if the opportunity arises."
"I don't know, Alec. It's not like every independent down here could just pack up and leave all at once without causing Kaleb to ask a lot of questions. I think the best we can hope for is to stop the flow of recruits in and then those who are here will have to gradually leave as they can come up with good reasons why they have to go back home."
"As the number of independents starts to drop, whoever is still here is going to be in a lot more danger."
"I know. It's the exact opposite problem from what we had when we started operations with Brandon, but it's exacerbated because at least then Brandon had a compelling reason to treat us well so as not to preclude the possibility of additional reinforcements arriving."
Chapter 17
Alec Graves
Three miles south of Lochiel, Arizona
Northern Mexico
I could tell that Jasmin and Jessica were still in shock from the revelation James and I had shared, but I couldn't do anything at this point but hope that they'd be able to shake it off enough not to have it interfere with their ability to fight.
Juan seemed to be handling the news better, but I could tell that he was still a little off of his game. He'd finished briefing us on the latest version of the operation and then we'd made it back just in time to form up with the rest of the teams for transport down to the ambush location.
This was an operation that had been solely put together by the Brain Box rather than originating from Brandon's anonymous source and then being vetted by the Brain Box. I wasn't sure that it should make any kind of difference either way, but for whatever reason I was more nervous about this deployment than either of the last two.
The Brain Box had apparently identified a shipment of drugs that was being run up into the United States by one of the drug cartels that had especially heavy backing from a group of fifteen jaguars who'd spent the last decade or so kicking out all of the competition from their home city of Zacatecas. I was unclear on whether or not the authorities even realized that Zacatecas was where ten percent of the cocaine in the United States originated, but apparently the cartel had been having problems with a couple of the other regional drug gangs and as a result they were especially worried about making sure this particular shipment made it across the border.
The Brain Box had a long list of hacked email accounts that indicated that the Zacatecas crew had turned to their usual MO and escalated by including nearly a dozen jaguars to serve as guards for the shipment as it made its way north. If they continued with their normal procedure those guards would then pay a visit to the competing cartels and kill everyone they could find, but thanks to some more fancy hacking the Brain Box had a complete roster of who was going to be along for the ride as well as the route and schedule for the caravan.
Brandon had decided that we would intercept the convoy just short of the United States border, all of which explained why we'd spent the last hour in the darkness alongside the road setting up a series of tire shredders and vehicles such that we could block off the r
oad in seconds.
The Brain Box apparently had aerial eyes on the convoy, and about the time that we all left Rio Rico they confirmed that the number of guards still matched up exactly with the count from the emails that had tipped us off about the operation in the first place.
A couple of minutes before three a.m. we got the signal that the convoy was only ten minutes out and that there were no other vehicles between us and them, so we sprang into action. The tire shredders were flipped to the 'shred' position and the SUV blockade was rolled into place.
Our team was on the north side of the road along with some other people from various teams while Vincent's team and Brandon were on the south side. The thinking was that the terrain to the south was less rugged and therefore we could reasonably expect that most of the bad guys would try to flee south once they realized how much trouble they were in.
Brandon had also positioned a few wolves around the ambush site in a rough circle a hundred yards or so from the road. Jaguars are usually faster than wolves, so the hope was that the wolves would be able to intercept and at least slow down any of the cats who broke free of the main fight and made a run for it. If everything went according to plan then we'd be facing an outnumbered group of cats with a few humans thrown in and we'd have the element of surprise on our side.
My shoulders tensed up as I saw the first SUV appear around a bend in the road. A second SUV followed less than twenty yards from the first, and then a large semi came into view next. Two more black SUVs rounded out the convoy and the next couple of minutes passed agonizingly slowly as we waited for the vehicles to enter our trap.
Brandon had positioned our team on the extreme western edge of the ambush site, so I was able to see our targets well before they had any possibility of seeing our roadblock. The rest of our teams were pretty well hidden, but still visible if you knew where to look. I watched as the same ripple of anxiety that I was feeling slowly swept down both sides of the road as each new wolf or hybrid was able to finally see the approaching group of cars.
