Marked

by Dean Murray

  "I'll go get a couple of burner phones and wait for you out with everyone else."

  I turned to go, but Alec was suddenly blocking my way and his arms had wrapped themselves around me so fast that I didn't even see them coming.

  "I'm sorry we aren't going to have more time to just be together without all of the rest of this craziness right now, Adri."

  I wiped a tear away from the corner of one of my eyes, hoping that I'd managed to catch it before he noticed. "No, it's okay. I understand—I really do. Maybe if I hadn't made such a mess of things it would be different, but I did, so it's not."

  "You can't say that, Adri. You've done an amazing job. You provided the direction needed to keep our people from splintering into a dozen different pieces. Not only that, you did battle with Dream Stealer himself and brought me back. You've been incredible in every way."

  "It doesn't feel like I've been incredible. It feels like I started out decently and then cracked under the pressure after I nearly got one of my best friends killed. You would have done a lot better if you'd been in my shoes."

  "I was in your shoes not too long ago, Adri. You were gone and I made an absolute mess of things. You've managed to keep a group of complete strangers headed in the same direction—I nearly alienated my closest friends, people who were ready to give me the benefit of the doubt over and over again. You've exceeded anything I could have hoped for and I wouldn't be here if not for you. You're the most amazing person I could have hoped to end up with. I'm so sorry about your arm."

  He kissed me, one, long glorious kiss that seemed to transport me to somewhere else, to a location where we didn't have to worry about Dream Stealer or the rest of the Coun'hij. I wanted to stay there in his arms, pressed up against the bare skin of his chest, forever, but in the end, I was the one who broke the contact.

  "You're right, we need to get moving. I'll be waiting for you as soon as you finish changing."

  Donovan had just finished lifting Alec's mom into one of the bunks as I pulled the bedroom door shut behind me.

  "How is she?"

  "Resting. I fear that Master Alec is right and she's slipped back into a coma, but I'm most worried about Master Alec."

  "You're going to have to see it for yourself, but it looks like his hybrid healing has finally kicked in. His chest is almost completely healed."

  Donovan had to reach for the wall to steady himself. "How is that possible?"

  "I don't know, but it couldn't have come at a better time. I need to grab some burner phones so Alec can call Mallory. I suspect that he's going to want to make some calls to the rest of our people, which means that we need a city, something big enough that we have a chance of losing ourselves in the crowds while Alec makes calls to numbers that are almost certainly being tracked."

  Donovan nodded. "Of course. I think that we're within an hour or so of St Louis. I'll get on with our IT assets now and ask them to start encrypting random calls going out of the city. It won't do anything to hide the fact that there is something going on in the city, and it won't stop someone from triangulating the calls if they know what numbers we are calling from, but it will keep the Coun'hij from listening in on our conversations at least."

  Alec came out of the bedroom wearing designer jeans and a long-sleeved shirt that he hadn't bothered to button up. I handed him one of the three burner phones I'd grabbed out of the supply we'd picked up in Denver and he smiled his thanks as he turned towards Donovan, already sitting at the desk typing.

  "Donovan, I grabbed my phone off of the table next to my bed, but it's missing my sim card. Did you guys get that out of the communications equipment before you changed vehicles?"

  Donovan went white. "No, Master Alec, I should have remembered—I knew that your sim card was at the heart of the equipment that we left behind, but I failed to instruct our people to remove it from the device before setting the RV on fire…"

  "It's okay, Donovan, you come pretty close, but nobody is perfect. You and Adri have picked up quite the load since I was injured. I'm no Isaac, but I can probably manage to clone my sim card before we get to the closest city. I know I can't use this phone until we're almost ready to leave, not without bringing Coun'hij kill teams down on our heads, but by now I've probably got a hundred messages that need to be gone through. The people with Tasha will have known not to call this phone, but we'll have other people who are more out of the loop than that and I need to get back to them as soon as possible."

  The next twenty minutes went by in a blur. Alec called Mallory and let her know that he wanted to stop in St Louis so that she could handle all of the logistics of finding a safe spot to stop inside of the city and making sure that we didn't lose anyone along the way. From there Alec hooked his phone and a new sim card up to his laptop and began trying to get his phone cloned.

  I ate and then kept myself busy with whatever small tasks I could find to help with that didn't require two hands. I handed Dom medical supplies as she finished taping up James, I helped Ruby carry Andrew to and from the couch, and I fetched extra burner phones for Alec and Donovan as needed, but mostly I watched the pack watch Alec.

  There was a sense of reverence to the way that they all looked at him. It was obvious that on some level each of them had been convinced that he wouldn't be coming back, that they would never see him again and that our cause was doomed. That belief seemed to require that they touch him and exchange a few words with him before they could really accept that they'd been wrong, that they still had a chance of surviving.

  Even James, who I was pretty sure didn't always like Alec very much, and Donovan, who I'd thought had more faith than me, stopped Alec on some pretext or another and spent a couple of seconds making sure that it was really him, that he'd really come back to us healed and ready for another round of fights.

  Alec handled each interruption with the regal bearing that he'd started demonstrating more and more lately. He'd always been polite and understanding, but it seemed like he'd come to understand his people on a whole new level recently. He didn't resent the interruptions because he knew it was the price that had to be paid if he was going to keep everyone motivated and pulling towards the goals we needed to achieve.

  Mallory outdid herself when it came to selecting our stopping place. Rather than the dark parking garage that I'd been expecting, she directed everyone to the largest music festival I'd ever seen. It was brilliant because all of the musicians and a surprising number of the fans had arrived in motorhomes and tour buses similar to what we were driving.

  Even better, the festival was due to run for nearly a week—with different musical styles each day—so I was guessing that there would be a steady stream of RV's coming and going each day. Against that kind of backdrop we would blend into the noise so well that it would take a miracle for the Coun'hij to find us.

  We pulled into the massive parking lot a few minutes behind Mallory and then, after turning around, parked close enough that our canopies nearly touched once they were extended. We were safe from aerial observation as well as being watched from two directions, which was about as much as we could ask for without drawing an inordinate amount of attention to ourselves, but Donovan still handed out sun glasses and hats as we exited the RV.

  Alec took the accessories with a smile as he put his phone in his pocket, but he didn't put them on. "I know it's a risk, Donovan, but they need to see me. I'll put them on before we go into the city to make the rest of the phone calls."

  "Very good, Master Alec."

  Mallory was waiting just outside of our vehicle as if worried that going inside would break some kind of spell and return Alec to his injured and helpless state. Alec carefully hugged her as soon as his feet hit the blacktop.

  "Thank you for supporting Adri. I knew I could count on you."

  "Apparently she hasn't told you the full story."

  He looked back at me with a raised eyebrow, but I wasn't about to go into that particular tale with so many other ears around.
/>   "Things got a little tense at one point, but I was able to bring Mallory around to my point of view. The negotiations were understandably…energetic."

  Mallory snorted. "I underestimated this one, Alec. I was feeling my oats and started thinking that maybe I should be calling the shots like I used to do when I was your dad's enforcer. I'm glad she was here to remind me that I'm nothing more than a tired old lady these days."

  "Well, however it happened I'm glad that the two of you were able to work together with Donovan. How much longer before all of our people will have arrived?"

  Mallory shrugged. "It's hard to say for sure. The last car is supposed to be a good five or ten minutes behind you, but given the reason we're stopping it wouldn't surprise me to find out that they've been crowding up closer than that. I can read them the riot act if you want, but honestly I can't blame them too much for wanting to see you with their own eyes."

  "No, you're right. We'll have to hope they don't draw any extra attention our way, but I can't really blame them. Besides, given how short we are on time it's probably for the best anyway."

  "Is something going on that I should know about?"

  "Nothing so urgent that we need to get into it out here. Don't worry, I'll make sure you're fully briefed on everything before too much longer."

  Mallory looked like she wanted to press Alec, but she knew as well as I did that anything we said right now would end up making the rounds among our people. After everything that had happened so far today, the gossipers among our people were going to be putting in overtime.

  "Did you serve as the heavy for my dad a lot back in the day?"

  "Yeah. That's something you should keep in mind, actually. It's something that you see a lot on navy ships. The first mate is the one who deals with most of the punishments and the like, which means that the captain can remain above that and retain the crew's loyalty even through very trying circumstances. I'm not saying that I'm the ideal person to take that role any more, but you ought to have someone who can throw their weight around from time to time when the circumstances call for it."

  I gave Mallory a surprised look. "Isn't it a bad idea to talk about something like that out here where everyone can hear you?"

  "Maybe, but the best strategies often work on people at a subconscious level. You can know that I'm playing a role to a certain extent, but that's probably not going to change the fact that you won't like me if I come down on you. By the same extent, you'll always be inclined to think that some of my enthusiasm is beyond what Alec would strictly want to take place, which means that you'll be predisposed to like him even though you know he's the one who put me in charge of disciplining you."

  Alec stifled a yawn. "Sorry, it's not the subject matter. Resting while injured this time around was surprisingly unrestful. The old-time captains learned a lot of lessons over the years and their situation wasn't all that different than what we're up against.

  "Out on your own, cut off from any kind of communication, and in charge of a bunch of trained killers, some of whom were there only because they didn't have any better options open to them, some of whom you could count on to stand with you no matter what. I'm open to any suggestions you might have where that kind of thing is concerned, Mallory, but it looks like most of our people are here now."

  Mallory surveyed the group of people standing a respectful distance away from us and then looked over at a silver SUV that had just parked forty feet away from us. "Yeah, that Escalade is the last of them. You can start with whatever you want to say as soon as they get here."

  Shape shifters were normally capable of carrying on a conversation in what was the sub-audible range for humans, but maybe the background noise from the nearby performance made that impossible—that or maybe Alec just wanted me to be able to hear what was said. Either way, he spoke loud enough for his voice to easily carry to the farthest member of our group.

  "I'm sure some of you probably doubted Adri when she took over command and told all of you that I was going to recover. I'm here to tell you that while I understand your doubts, they were misplaced."

  Alec hadn't ever buttoned up his shirt and now he slipped out of it, making it so that everyone could see his unblemished shoulder and the mass of white scar tissue next to his heart.

  "I appear to have made a full recovery, and I vindicate Adri's decision to take over while I was unable to perform my usual duties, but that's not the most important thing I called you all here to hear. I made a full-scale rebellion possible because I'm more powerful than any of you."

  Alec lifted his hands to shoulder level and then closed his fists. This was a demonstration of power like I'd never seen from Alec before. I was standing less than a foot from him, safely out of the zone he was impacting with his ability, and this time I was able to feel something happening as the people in front of us all dropped down to their knees. It felt more than a little like the metaphysical wind I often felt from Alec and the others during dominance displays, but rather than flowing out away from Alec it was flowing to him.

  I didn't even begin to have an idea how much power Alec was pulling away from the thirty-plus shape shifters in front of us, but I once again got the impression that Alec's power had increased. Unlike in Chicago when dropping Agony's enforcers had strained Alec's ability nearly to its limit, this time he didn't evidence any kind of strain from the amount of energy that was passing through him.

  Alec dropped his arms and the gale I'd been on the fringes of disappeared between one second and the next.

  "I was the reason that the rebellion was able to make it this far, and in some ways I'm more powerful than all of you together, but in other ways you're more powerful than me. I can only be in one place at a time, you can be in many. It only took one man with a single rifle to nearly kill me, but Donovan easily dispatched the sniper. The way ahead of us will be difficult, you must not forget your power, you must not forget that it is only when we are together that the Coun'hij fear us, but they fear you as much or more than they fear me."

  Alec looked around the gathered shape shifters, all of whom had pulled themselves back up onto their feet. "We have a lot of work that needs to be done in the next hour or two. Donovan is working on obtaining the communications equipment we need, but it will do us no good until the three antennae have been installed.

  "Mallory will be organizing a team to handle the installation of that hardware, other teams will be in charge of purchasing supplies, and I'll need a group to come with me into the city so I can make calls to Natasha and the rest of our people currently carrying out other necessary tasks. Remember, if an order comes from Adri, Donovan, or Mallory then it comes from me."

  Alec shrugged his shirt back on and then motioned for Mallory to take center stage. The next hour was incredibly hectic. Just organizing everyone took a full half hour and even then it wouldn't have been possible without Mallory and Donovan's help. Once those plans were laid I found myself in one of the SUV's with James, Dominic and Alec.

  By any logical measure neither James nor Dom should have been on bodyguard duty. James was walking with a slight limp and while Dom no longer looked prematurely old, she was still obviously exhausted and functioning on little more than sheer willpower. Alec would have probably left them back with the RV to watch over everything there, but they'd both insisted and there was no denying the fact that we needed people we could trust with us.

  The thought of James or Dominic taking a bullet for Alec was enough to make me feel sick to my stomach. Alec apparently believed every word he'd just told our people about them being as important as he was. Maybe he was even right, but for now—at least until everyone else believed it—James, Dom and I all knew he was more important than any of the rest of us.

  I didn't want to see James or Dom die, but I couldn't deny them the privilege of possibly dying, not when I was also perfectly willing to take a bullet for Alec.

  We spent the drive into downtown St Louis with me trying to get Alec up to speed on e
verything else that had happened while he'd been unconscious. I wracked my brain trying to make sure that I got it all out there for Alec to judge and either approve or disapprove.

  My consolidation of power into Tasha's hand was met with a nod, as was my decision to use Lori as backup security along with Grayson. Really Alec seemed happy with nearly all of the measures that Donovan, Mallory and I had come up with. The sole exception to that was our not having been able to get the communications equipment back up and running.

  I finished up with my summary just before we pulled into the parking garage underneath the mall, and the first thing that Alec did once he got out of the car was call Donovan.

  "You've got to get some kind of solution up as far as communications go, Donovan. We simply can't fight a war like this. I know you've got limits, but call back our hackers and push them on this. Something is better than nothing. We need to understand exactly what the issue is."

  A few seconds later we met up with the two hybrids Mallory had detached to back up James and Dom as bodyguards. I hadn't caught either of their names before we left and was too embarrassed to ask once they were within earshot. I kept thinking that James, Dom or Alec would let their names drop at some point during the outing, but the new bodyguards were so competent that nobody ever had to address them directly.

  We made a slow, meandering trip through the airy, sunlit mall, Alec and I holding hands as though we were just like any other couple, Dom and James a few feet to either side of us, and the two new guys following a dozen feet behind.

  Alec spent the whole time on the phone. I lost count of the number of calls he made. Most of them were short, designed primarily to make sure whoever he was talking to knew that he was still alive, that he had a plan, and that he might be using me to interface with them from time to time.