by Dean Murray
I shook my head. "I've never once begrudged anything I had to do to keep you safe, Rachel. That bit about us living in two different realities is crap. I should have thought to ask you about your hobbies. I should have made more time for the two of us to be together without worrying about all of the craziness inherent in living here."
Rachel walked over and gave me a hug. "You never thought to ask because you've never had any hobbies of your own, Alec. Every time you started to develop an interest in anything other than fighting, Kaleb has done his very best to run you to the ground until you forgot about whatever it was that had caught your interest."
I opened my mouth to disagree with her, but she was right. I'd never seen it before, but Kaleb had stopped me from dabbling in anything that might have interfered with his vision of me as a weapon to be pulled out whenever he needed it and then safely locked back up once he was done with me.
"You're a pretty smart kid, Rach. Maybe we would have all been better off if you'd been born a shape shifter rather than me."
Rachel shook her head and tapped my chest over my heart. "I couldn't have done some of the things you've done already, Alec. There's something about you that draws people to you almost despite themselves. I think it's because you have such a good heart. That's your greatest asset—don't let anyone take it away from you."
"Kaleb thinks it's a weakness. He thinks people who are drawn to me out of loyalty are useless and that I should be creating a coalition out of people who bind themselves to me out of fear or greed."
"That's because Dad lost his heart a long time ago. I've spent a lot of time talking to Donovan about what things used to be like, and I think that Dad used to draw people the same way that you do, but somewhere along the way he let that be taken away and now he doesn't view it as a legitimate tool because it's not one that he can use anymore."
Regret filled me at the prospect of taking away the last little bit of innocence that Rachel had maintained despite having spent her life in this cesspool. The emotion seemed to rise up through my chest and neck bringing the threat of tears with it.
"Rachel, he can't be redeemed."
"I know that you and Mom say that a lot, Alec, but you didn't get to see the same side of him that I did. Maybe it was because I was a daughter instead of a son, or maybe it was because he always suspected that I wouldn't ever manifest a second shape, but he's shown incredible kindness to me at different points of my life."
I guided Rachel over to her bed and pulled her down so that she was sitting next to me.
"He's having Brandon and Vincent kill innocent people and framing the cats for it. He's hoping to create enough outrage among all of the other packs to keep his operations down there staffed with other people so that he can pull our pack out without negatively impacting his war."
Rachel looked like she was going to be sick.
"You're sure?"
"I saw Vincent and his guys kill dozens of people with my own eyes. They didn't know I was there or they would have killed me too to keep their secret, but I know that Brandon ordered them to do it and this whole war with the cats has always been Kaleb's idea."
"You didn't hear Dad order it though? That means that it's possible that he doesn't know about it."
"Mother is convinced that he's the one behind it. That's what she was hiding from us. She'd heard rumors that some of the deaths down on the border weren't actually the result of the cats, but she didn't know for sure until I confirmed it just now."
Rachel stood up like she was going to go find Kaleb and confront him, but I grabbed her hand and refused to let her go.
"Rach, you can't do that. Kaleb will know that you had to have heard it from Mother or me. He'll kill you to keep the word from getting out. This is the kind of thing that could ignite a spark of rebellion in all of the independent packs."
Rachel dropped back down onto her bed, but she was still shaking her head. "There has to be another way, Alec. I know it looks bad, but you don't know for sure. It's still possible that he isn't behind those deaths."
She looked like she was about to burst into tears, which made what I was going to have to say next all the harder. I put my hands on either side of her face and gently forced her to look at me.
"Rach, I just talked to Kaleb and he told me that he's giving you to Vincent. Brandon demanded you as part of continuing to support him and Kaleb agreed. Brandon and Vincent are flying up from Arizona this evening."
It was like I'd just cut the strings that moved Rachel around. She was still sitting upright on the bed next to me, but the liveliness and energy that I'd always associated with her had vanished in the instant that I'd told her the full range of her father's betrayal. When she did finally speak the words came out sounding cold and dead.
"Vincent caught me off by myself a few months ago. He said things, made threats, but I told him if he touched me that Kaleb would kill him. It made him back off, but he said that I wouldn't always have you and Kaleb to hide behind. I thought he was threatening Kaleb. I didn't realize that he was capable of making Dad just hand me over to him without a fight."
"You should have told me when it happened, Rach. I would have killed Vincent back then and none of this would have happened."
She shook her head, but the motion was too listless for the person I was looking at to be my little sister.
"No, Alec. If I'd told you then you would have tried to kill him. Even if you'd have won, you still would have paid too high a price. Everyone thinks that Kaleb goes easy on you, but he doesn't, not when it actually matters. He would have hurt you really, really bad. I couldn't have that on my conscience."
Rachel looked around her room and the first tears finally trickled down her cheeks. Someone else might have thought that she was crying over the things that she was going to be leaving behind, but I knew better. She wasn't crying for the things she would be losing but rather the dreams that she now knew would never be realized. She was mourning a world of possibility that had just been ripped away from her and replaced with one of the darkest futures imaginable.
I could see that she was already starting to retreat inside of herself, leaving behind everything that she could possibly sacrifice in an effort to preserve the most important bits of her identity for as long as possible. I left the bed and kneeled down in front of her so that she had to look at me.
"I'm not letting this happen, Rach. I have a plan, the beginnings of one at least. I'm going to get you out of here and we're going to go somewhere better than this. We'll find a place where we won't always be in danger of surrendering our humanity just to survive."
"No, Alec. I can't let you do that. It's just too dangerous."
"You don't have a choice, Rachel. I'm going to do whatever I have to do to stop this. You can go along and make it easier on me or you can refuse to help and stack the odds even further against me than they already are, but I'm going to do this."
"You'll die, Alec."
"Maybe, but I'd rather be dead than continue to live knowing that I've become just as guilty in my own way as Kaleb, Brandon and Vincent."
"I won't fight you, but if you change your mind and back out before Vincent comes to collect me I won't hold it against you."
"Okay, wear some sturdy clothes, some good shoes and pack light—really, really light. We'll buy whatever we need once we make it someplace safe."
Chapter 21
James Wright
Graves Estate
Sanctuary, Utah
Alec had called a meeting of the Fab Four, as Jasmin sometimes called us, but even just talking to him on the phone I'd been able to tell that this wasn't a normal meeting. I knew it probably had something to do with Brandon and Vincent flying up from the border, but beyond that I had no idea other than to hope that he'd come up with some way to break the story about the murders along the border without getting us and everyone we cared about killed.
I'd been home for three days and I'd spent all of four hours with my mom. There wasn't
any way to hide the fact that I'd been ducking her, but I couldn't afford to have her figure out what I'd seen with Alec in Naco. Mom has had a mouth on her for as long as I can remember, but that doesn't change the fact that she's submissive to practically everyone else in the pack, it just means that she gets into more trouble than she should.
I could trust her not to spill the beans if I told her what was going on and asked her not to say anything, but it was just a whole lot safer for her if she didn't know anything about what we'd seen down there.
There wasn't any way for me to un-see what Vincent and the others had done to those people, and I wasn't sure I'd choose to un-see it even if it was a possibility, but I was going to try very hard not to take down my mom as a result of the stuff that Alec and I were tangled up in.
We were meeting in a cave that we'd found years ago on the extreme west end of the estate. It creeped Jess out a little, so it wasn't somewhere that we came often, but it was a good place to go if you didn't want anyone to overhear you. All we had to do was go in a hundred yards or so to the end of the cave and then put up three privacy boxes twenty yards before we got to our destination. The cave was straight enough that we could keep an eye on the boxes and it was narrow enough that the white noise generators completely masked the sound of us talking. The fact that we could sit a little ways away from the noise generators meant that the conversations were less strained than what you otherwise got when you crammed two or more shape shifters inside of a small room and made them talk to each other while listening to the constant hiss and pop of privacy boxes. We could still hear the background hum, but it was much less overpowering with some distance between us and the boxes, which meant that everyone tended to be much less on edge.
We'd all staked out rocks that were more or less comfortable over the years, so once everyone was seated, Alec cleared his throat and then got right to it.
"Kaleb has agreed to give Rachel to Vincent in return for Brandon's continued support. Brandon and Vincent will be here tonight to collect her and take her back down to Arizona."
I wasn't sure how many more shocks I could take without some serious time in between them. First Naco and now this. It defied belief. I'd always known that Kaleb wasn't a very nice guy, but unlike Alec I wasn't in line to inherit any money, and according to Mallory I wasn't ever going to develop any kind of power either. That meant that worrying about the fact that Kaleb was a real jerk didn't really do any good. It was like worrying about the weather. You could spend a lot of time thinking and fretting about it, but at the end of the day nothing you did was going to actually change anything.
That had bothered me for as long as I could remember, but I'd kind of grown resigned to it. This was different. Rachel was too nice and good to deserve this kind of treatment.
"What's your plan, Alec?"
He looked surprised, but he shouldn't have been. I knew him well enough to know that he wouldn't just sit by and let Rachel be turned into some kind of sex slave.
"I'm going to try and get her out. I have a couple of different plans depending on how involved you guys are willing to get. There are risks obviously and I can respect the fact that you might not be willing to go all the way on this thing with me."
Jessica looked like she was scared out of her mind, but her voice came out remarkably even given how much her submissive instincts must be screaming at her to stay out of any kind of showdown between Alec and his dad.
"I'm in, Alec. We submissives take a lot of crap, but this is a whole new level of terrible. As scary as whatever you have planned is probably going to turn out to be, I'm in all the way. I'd rather be in a tiny pack with you at the helm than stay here."
Jasmin nodded. "Me too. I'd rather be one of the dispossessed like Isaac than end up in Brandon or Vincent's bed."
All three of them were looking at me now, but they were in a completely different position than I was in. Jasmin and Jess hadn't had any family for years. The pack had been in enough fights that a lot of people had died a little while after we all were born, and then even more had died over the last couple of years with Kaleb's two-front war against the cats and the vampires.
Alec had a family, or at least half of a family, but he could afford to burn all of his bridges. He would be taking Rachel with him and his mother would be fine no matter what else happened. The relationship between her and Kaleb was downright weird, but Kaleb let her get away with stuff that nobody else in the pack would have been able to do.
Jasmin, Jess and Alec could all walk away tomorrow without worrying what would happen to anyone they were leaving behind, but I couldn't do that. There was a chance that Alec's mom could keep my mom safe like she had before I'd finally shifted for the first time, but it was a long shot. Even back then there hadn't been a lot that Samantha had been able to do, and her efforts would be even less effective if Kaleb decided that he needed someone to make an example out of.
"I want to help out, Alec. I really do, but I'm worried about my mother."
Alec nodded. "I understand, James. I would be lying if I said that I wasn't at least a little worried about mine as well, but unlike yours, mine probably deserves whatever happens to her."
It was the harshest thing I'd ever heard him say about the woman who'd given birth to him. Jess and I actually gasped in shock, but there was no apology in his eyes. I'd known that Jack and Juan had told him things that had shaken his confidence in her, but I hadn't expected him to turn so far against her so quickly.
"Are you sure about that, Alec? I'm not saying that we shouldn't do everything we can to save Rachel, but are you sure you want to abandon your mother like that? I'd hate for you to make a rash decision in anger and then regret it later on."
"She was prepared to let Rachel be taken away without doing a single thing to try and stop it, James. How can I ever trust a woman who would give up one of her children like that? She won't be coming with us. I didn't even make the offer."
Alec pulled two thick rolls of hundred-dollar bills from his pocket and then tossed me one of the wads.
"That's for your mom, whether you're willing to help or not. It's entirely her decision whether she stays or goes, but I think that it's past time for everyone who can to get out of Sanctuary. There's enough cash there for her to book a pair of charter flights, one west and one east. If she's careful about her scent trail and she gets one of them to lie and say that he has a passenger, nobody will know for sure which direction she went. With all of the craziness that is bound to ensue when I try to get Rachel out, she should have hours before anyone even realizes she's gone. She can buy a car once she lands and disappear into a suburb somewhere."
I shook my head in astonishment. There had to be at least twenty thousand dollars in the tightly rolled cylinder he'd just casually given me.
"I'll have to talk to her first, Alec. If it was just me then I'd say yes in a heartbeat, but I can't make that kind of decision without at least asking her whether or not she's willing to leave."
"I understand, James, I really do. If you promise not to let my plan slip even if you decide not to help me, then I'd like to bring you up to speed on what I'm going to do. We're not going to have a chance to all meet someplace private like this again."
"I won't be able to lie to Kaleb. I wish I could, but he'll see through me in a second."
Alec gave me a tired, almost resigned smile, and I suddenly realized that he didn't expect to survive this escape attempt. The knowledge should have had him in a panic, but he was strangely calm. It was like knowing what was going to happen had somehow freed him from worry.
"You're right, which is why you're going to have to trust me when it comes to how the plan unfolds. You're only going to know a tiny part of what is going down, not because I don't trust you guys to keep your mouths shut, but because if everything goes badly I want you to have the absolute most deniability possible."
Alec sighed and then tossed the other roll of bills to Jasmin. "If I'm going to be totally honest with y
ou all, the smartest thing for you to do would be just to head for the hills rather than helping me. Jess, Jas, if the two of you stick together you'll have a much better chance in case you end up running into a vampire or something a couple of years down the road, but either way there's enough cash there to give you a start. I've got some more money back in a safe in my room. It's not an infinite supply and I'll need some of it in case Rachel and I actually make it out somehow, but if you need another hundred thousand dollars or so before you'd feel like you could do what you really want, which is to just make a break for it, then it's yours. Don't get yourselves killed because you don't think you can make it very far with the cash you've got there. Same for you, James."
Jasmin was the first to speak up. "If you had access to this kind of money why didn't you leave a long time ago, Alec?"
"Because I never felt like it was my money. It came at great sacrifice from others, but I've realized in the last little while that I'm not sure that they were really sacrificing for me. I think they were sacrificing to set themselves up, and that they just gave me a portion of it to salve their own consciences. Besides, even if their motives were completely pure it wouldn't change the obligation I have to use every resource at my disposal in an attempt to do the right thing."
Jess cleared her throat. "I'm still in. I'll take whatever you want to give me in case you don't make it, but if you do make it out, then it's yours again."
Jasmin nodded. "Same here. I'm in. I couldn't live with myself if I bailed on you and Rachel and then the two of you didn't make it."
Alec gave me an understanding look that seemed to say he knew he already had my answer, inasmuch as I was able to give it to him without talking to my mom, and then he pulled out a fistful of what turned out to be sim cards.
"I've been buying a couple of sim cards every month for the last few years. They are all prepaid and they were all bought with cash. The ones packaged in green were purchased in St. Louis and the red ones were purchased down in Arizona. They are the ones that will be least likely to be traceable, so use the others while you're still in this area. Once we all get together we'll ditch the ones I bought here and then once we're clear we'll put in a clean set of sim cards. Remember, Kaleb is using the Brain Box to hack into all kinds of government and corporate networks. Once he realizes what we've done he's almost certain to use them to try and track us down. If your phone is powered on and he knows the phone number associated with the sim card in your phone, then there is a chance that he can find you."
