by Dean Murray
All by itself that would have been enough to give me pause, but it was the blood smeared across his face that really threw me for a loop. The sight of Donovan with his hair in disarray and a massive rifle in his left hand was nothing in comparison to visible proof that he'd just killed the sniper using nothing more than his fangs.
I tried not to be obvious about my shock, but Donovan noticed my lingering gaze and bowed his head slightly in apology.
"I profoundly regret my appearance, Miss Paige, but I'm afraid there simply isn't time for me to do anything about it. Please, we must hurry back into the RV if I'm going to be able to save Master Alec."
I shook myself out of my stupor and hurried back towards the RV. I would have insisted that Donovan go before me since he was the one we needed to get to Alec's side, but I wasn't sure that he would bend protocol that much, even with Alec's life on the line. It was easier and quicker to just move as fast as I was able.
A few seconds later we reached my room at the back of the RV and Donovan was pouring rubbing alcohol over his hands as Mallory used her free hand to finish laying out the supplies from the medical kit stored in the front of the RV.
Donovan fished out a pair of tiny clamps and then moved Mallory's hand out of the way. He talked as he inserted both clamps into the hole in Alec's chest and then went back for more.
"We're expecting one more car, but the fact that it hasn't arrived yet means that they are probably already dead. Every minute we stay here increases the odds that we're not going to be leaving. Mallory, someone has to get the convoy moving. Please see to it. Out of all of the people we have left, you have the most derived authority given your close association to Alec."
For a second I thought Mallory was going to argue that I needed to be the one to organize our remaining forces. She'd known Alec for longer than I had and obviously wanted to be there at his side if these were his last minutes on earth.
Donovan looked away from the needle he was threading through the ruin of Alec's chest for just long enough to shoot Mallory a stern look. "It has to be you. I need Miss Paige here to communicate with our IT assets. Some of them refuse to use a phone and you don't even know how to type."
Mallory would have been less incensed if Donovan had physically slapped her. The expression on her face said that he would pay for that comment later on when there weren't any witnesses around, but she spun on her heels and headed out of the room without saying another word.
"Miss Paige, I need an assistant, but don't waste time trying to find the perfect candidate. Please grab the nearest submissive you can find, and bring them back here. I should have thought that particular need through minutes ago. You're going to need both of your hands to fulfill your task. It will do us no good for me to save Alec's life only so that all of us can die in prison cells, assassinated by Coun'hij agents a month from now."
I nodded and ran to the front of the RV. Mallory was already giving orders and apparently Donovan had been right about the amount of authority Alec had invested her with because nobody was arguing with her.
I spent less than a second looking over the crowd of people starting to disperse to the various tasks that Mallory had assigned them. My time with the pack had taught me a lot about body language and the short brunette on my side of the group had submissive written all over her.
It would have been a very bad idea to grab the arm of most shape shifters, but I grabbed her arm and didn't even think about the possible consequences until later. Apparently she was even more submissive than most, that or my status as Alec's fiancé gave me even more weight to throw around than I'd thought.
"I need you to come with me. What's your name?"
"But Mallory just told me to…"
I looked over at Mallory. "I need this one—find someone to fill in for her."
Mallory didn't look happy to be taking yet another set of orders, but I didn't give her a chance to argue with me. I stepped into the RV, still pulling Donovan's newest assistant forward by one arm.
"What is your name?"
"Ruby, your highness. My name is Ruby."
"Good. Do you have any first-aid training, Ruby?"
"A little. Louis made all of us take some classes, but I really don't know very much."
"That's okay, you don't need to know much. Mostly you just need to be able to follow directions. Donovan, this is Ruby—Ruby, meet Donovan. Help him with whatever he needs. Alec's life depends on it."
Ruby turned so white that I thought for a moment that she was going to pass out, but either she was made out of sterner stuff than I would have originally guessed or the habit of obedience was just too ingrained to allow her to do anything other than follow orders. She nodded and then stepped towards the bottle of rubbing alcohol.
I brushed a lock of hair out of the way as I forced myself to look away from Alec's bleeding form. "Okay, Donovan, what do you need me to do?"
"Please get my laptop, it has all of the necessary protocol installed on it."
The next two hours passed in erratic stops and starts. When I was deep in the middle of communicating with one of Donovan's hackers I was temporarily able to forget that Alec was bleeding to death less than four feet away from me. When that was the case time flowed by at a normal speed. The rest of the time it felt like I was balanced on the edge of a cliff, like I'd already slipped and had started to fall and only the fact that time was holding still had stopped me from plummeting to my death.
Donovan steadfastly refused to answer any of my questions about how the surgery was going. Initially he simply didn't acknowledge that I'd even asked them. It took several attempts before he finally looked up from Alec's chest and frowned at me.
"With all due respect, Mistress Adriana, I'm at the limits of my capability. I can operate on Master Alec and I can probably direct you with sufficient skill to get us away safely, but my attempting anything more than that will simply guarantee that I'll fail at one or both of those other tasks."
After that I shut up and other than asking questions directly related to what he needed me to communicate to his hackers, I let him focus on sewing up Alec.
The first two hours were more intense than I would have guessed they would be. I had multiple chat windows open and was trying to answer four or five hackers at the same time at any given moment. I couldn't even keep straight who was asking what, but Donovan kept track of all the personalities and what they were asking without even seeming to break a sweat. There were even several times where he anticipated a question before it was asked.
Up to that point in my life there hadn't been very many chances to watch a true master practice their chosen vocation. My mom had probably been the first. She'd started out as a terrible photographer, but the last shoot I'd gone to with her in New York had been nothing less than amazing. That was probably the first time that I'd really understood why she'd turned our lives upside down twice in an effort to follow her dreams.
Mom had owned the entire location. She'd kept the shooting schedule in her head at the same time that she'd worked with one model and monitored the progress of three others who'd been in various stages of getting into wardrobe or having their makeup done. The level of respect that everyone there had accorded her had bordered on awe—and I'd completely understood why they'd felt that way.
As good as Mom had been, Donovan was even more impressive. I don't know if anyone else in the world could have accomplished that kind of surgery in a moving vehicle, bags of blood swaying in the air next to them, while working with an untrained assistant, and directing counterintelligence operations against the best cyber-talent the Coun'hij had managed to bring to the event.
At one point I couldn't help but stop what I was doing and just sit there and watch Donovan's sure, deft movements. He was in his element in a way that I'd never experienced before because I didn't have an element. All I could do was continue relaying his instructions and hope that his skills were sufficient to save Alec.
Mallory got the RV moving a
nd back on the interstate within minutes of me arriving back in the bedroom with Ruby. She even sent someone back to the bedroom to ask for the number to the last car, the one that had been supposed to meet us back at the amphitheater but which never showed.
I didn't find out until later that the driver of that last vehicle never answered his phone. All we could assume was that Donovan's fears had come to pass and the Coun'hij's people had managed to run him off of the road sometime before he could make it to the rendezvous point.
Somewhere along the way Donovan instructed me to go out into the main section of the RV and get Vik back on the phones so we could resume relaying instructions to the rest of our people.
The data that started flowing in once the switchboard was manned wasn't pretty. The initial ambushes had gone well, but once the Coun'hij had figured out that Alec and Donovan were luring them into traps things had gotten ugly. Our people went from having slight numerical advantages to fighting outnumbered.
We'd had a few surprise upsets—hybrids who outfought some of the Coun'hij's best or wolves who bailed out of their cars and then proceeded to outrun their pursuers on four legs—but we'd lost a lot more people, people we couldn't afford to lose.
The only truly bright spot was the fact that throwing those kinds of numbers at us required time for the enforcers to reposition. Occasionally they guessed wrong with regards to where we were trying to set up our ambush, so whoever was running their side of the operation wasn't infallible.
Even when they guessed right sometimes they weren't able to get people shifted to the location in time, and even when they did, that meant whoever they had been following before being ordered to redeploy to the supposed ambush site was then free and clear.
When it became clear that we couldn't continue to count on winning our ambushes, Donovan and I started instructing our people to start trying to lose whoever was tailing them. I would have given almost anything right then to have access to Ash, but he steadfastly refused to pick up his phone.
Donovan indicated that Alec had talked to Isaac earlier in the day, but Isaac and Kristin had gone completely dark too, which meant that we had to use the next best resource we had. I hated calling Dominic more than almost anything. Calling her meant that I was putting her, James, Andrew, Addison and Alec's mom all in danger, but I couldn't come up with any other way of giving the rest of our people who were still being chased a chance of surviving the next few hours.
Dominic was the one who seemed to have picked up the most tradecraft from Ash in the weeks and months leading up to the attack on the estate. That was probably part of why Alec had chosen Dom and James to guard the pack's noncombatants. So far Alec's trust in Dom's skills was being vindicated, but after the way that the Coun'hij had managed to track down such a large percentage of our people, I wasn't sure how long even her luck could last.
Donovan seemed to be focusing on the idea that we'd been outmaneuvered by the Coun'hij's cyber-assets, but I wasn't so sure of that. We'd go ahead and take all of the precautions Donovan wanted to implement now that we couldn't be positive that we had the edge when it came to hacker talent, but I didn't really think that we were being tracked by way of our phones. I was pretty sure that the Coun'hij had just unveiled one of their secret members, one of the ones Alec had been worrying about earlier that morning.
Dominic graciously agreed to do whatever she could to talk the rest of our people through trying to lose their tails, but I could hear the doubt in her voice even as she agreed to my request and I handed her off to Vik to route her to whoever was the closest to running out of gas.
I didn't say anything to try and reassure her because I knew she was right. It isn't easy to lose someone who is determined to follow you. It's possible, but only if you knew what to look for. Dominic could explain the principles over the phone, but the chances of someone correctly implementing them on their first try in a real-world situation were not very good.
Once everything else had been dealt with, I finally turned my attention to piecing together what had happened in Nephi. I'd already caught bits and pieces of information as Vik and whoever was helping him updated our database. It didn't sound good, but I'd told him to put the highest-ranked individual we had on the ground there in charge and then I'd buried myself in everything else that needed to be done.
I knew it was a questionable decision. All of those other people I'd chosen to put at the front of the queue were important too, but Nephi was our biggest single concentration of assets and it was hard to legitimately value anything ahead of that.
I could tell that Donovan had picked up on my hesitation to pursue the situation in Nephi, but he didn't press, either because he was too focused on trying to keep Alec alive, or because he didn't want me to lose face in front of Ruby. I didn't analyze it too much because that would have pulled my own feelings out into the open where I couldn't continue to ignore them.
The situation came to a head when my screen flashed with an incoming call that I hadn't asked Vik to put through to me.
"What in the hell were you thinking, Alec?"
I'd exchanged maybe ten words with Natasha Annikov since I got back from New York and found out that she and Alec had been days away from sealing an alliance between the Tucson and Sanctuary packs by getting married like a couple of feudal nobles. Despite not having heard her voice more than two or three times, I recognized it instantly. Call me jealous, but everything about Tasha was burned into my memory. She'd come very, very close to taking Alec away from me forever and the worst part was the nagging little voice in the back of my mind that kept telling me I couldn't hate her because it had all been my fault for having walked out on Alec in the first place.
"I'm sorry, but Alec isn't available to talk to you right now, Tasha. Perhaps I can help you in some way or another."
"Adri Paige. It will be a cold day in hell when that's the case. Put Alec on the phone."
"This may surprise you, but I'm not in the habit of repeating myself. Alec isn't available right now. If you legitimately need something then tell me and I'll make sure it gets taken care of. Otherwise get off of the phone line so I can get back to helping people who aren't so poisoned by jealousy that they can't even see straight."
I thought for a second that Tasha was going to choke on her own spit, but after a couple of seconds of strained near-silence she got to the point. "I don't know what Alec was thinking leaving everything up to a voicemail like that, but Grayson and I managed to get to Nephi just before our people started rolling into town."
"Good, I'm glad you were able to make it in time. What happened after that?"
"The enforcers timed their arrival so that they all showed up at once. There were a lot more of them than anyone told me to expect."
"I see. And did you call back into headquarters once you got Alec's message or were you too busy fuming to realize that the prudent thing would have been to find out if we had any kind of revised force estimate for you?"
She didn't like that. I didn't have to be there in person—or even know her very well—to know that she was probably bleeding off metaphysical energy like a sun on the point of going supernova.
"Grayson and I were focused on trying to make Alec's little deadline. We didn't have time to waste calling in to plead for updates that you should have been sending us."
"And ironically, Alec and the rest of our people were too focused on trying to save dozens of people scattered across nine different states to waste time repeatedly calling an operative who hadn't even bothered to let us know that she'd received her orders and was on the way to try and fulfill her mission. You didn't call in, so we wrote you off and Alec made other arrangements."
"You mean that whore from Del Rio."
"If you're referring to Lori, then yes, I believe that Alec made arrangements for her to be in Nephi in case you and Grayson couldn't be bothered to follow orders. If you have a problem with that then you'll have to wait to take that up with Alec when he's got a few minutes t
o waste. I fully agree with his decision."
That wasn't even a little white lie. If there hadn't been so much else going on when I'd overheard Alec make the call to Del Rio—and if there had been a way to talk to him without undercutting his authority with everyone within earshot—I would have had a thing or two to say to Alec about the idea of recruiting the slut who'd tried to use her lust-creating power to steal him away from me.
Saying that I fully supported Lori being on the ground with our people was about as big a lie as it was possible for me to tell, but I figured I was angry enough right then that Tasha wouldn't be able to tell for sure that I was lying.
Actually, it was too bad. Hating Lori was probably the only thing that both Tasha and I could really get behind. Still, I wasn't going to give away the upper hand now that I had it, not against Tasha Annikov.
"Do you have any idea what she did?"
"Why don't you just go ahead and tell me your version of events. I'll be calling her shortly to get her version."
"Grayson had the situation under control. The enforcers were on the ground convulsing and our side was executing them. Everything was fine until she arrived and short-circuited his ability. One minute we had everything under control and then a wave of lust washes over everyone on both sides and Grayson's eyes roll back in his head. I thought for a second that all of the guys and half of the females here were going to rip her apart in their effort to be the first to get to her."
"I take it that she survived?"
"Yeah. It was the eeriest thing I've ever seen. She asked for silence and no sooner had the words left her mouth than you could have heard a pin drop. Then everyone lined up in two lines just like she asked them to, and she told the enforcers that she wanted them dead, that it was the sacrifice she needed out of them if they were going to please her."
I wanted to say that was terrible, but I wasn't sure how well that would fit with my current persona, the act that so far had done the impossible and made Tasha toe the line. Tasha continued before I could decide what the appropriate response was.
