Marked

by Dean Murray

  "The best outcome for who?"

  "I'm not sure. Will you go with Adri?"

  "In the future you could see before everything went dark, did I survive what comes next?"

  Rachel's voice was strangely gentle when she answered. "It doesn't matter, James. The future isn't set in stone. The real question is whether or not you trust me when I say that you need to go with them or things will go much worse for everyone you care about."

  Addison apparently felt like the conversation had gone far enough. "Nobody is going anywhere. Alec is staying here, as is my son. If you really think you can…"

  "Be quiet, Mother. I'm going with them. Ruby, get this bus pulled over. Adri, call up Mallory and get us a car. You heard Rachel, we're getting further and further away from the future she's trying to guide us down."

  Chapter 20

  Adriana Paige

  Interstate 64

  Western Kentucky

  Donovan and Addison weren't any happier about the fact that I was leaving and taking Alec with me, but now that I had James backing me up there wasn't anything they could do about it. We'd been all getting along and living by the rule of law for so long that I think we'd nearly forgotten that James was the only healthy hybrid left among the core leadership group. Now that his mind was made up, even Addison could see the futility of trying to argue with him.

  My call with Mallory was short and to the point. I asked her to detach a single SUV and have it stop behind our RV while the rest of the convoy went on ahead, albeit at a much reduced speed. The vehicle exchange went without any problems, and five minutes after James had decided to throw in with me, the SUV's previous occupants were safely inside of the RV with Donovan and the rest, and James, Alec and I were driving cross-country with the SUV's lights off.

  We drove the first half hour in silence, James because he was concentrating on picking a path through the terrain that wouldn't leave us with a flat tire, and me because I was so worried about what the jostling might be doing to Alec. Once James found a small country road things got better and he was able to speed up at the same time that the ride got much smoother.

  "I'm sorry you didn't get a chance to say goodbye to Dom."

  James shrugged. "It's for the best this way. I'm not a huge fan of big, mushy goodbyes. Hopefully if I survive this, Dom will forgive me. Anyway, you heard Rachel, we didn't exactly have very much time. Where are we headed by the way?"

  "I'm not sure. Really, we just need to find a city. It doesn't matter which, just one that is big enough that Alec and I will be able to disappear for a month or so. Once you drop us off you can go to ground yourself for a couple of weeks, after which Donovan should have Alec's phone up and running again. You should be back with Dom before the month is over."

  "What about this town?"

  It took me a couple of seconds to realize what he was talking about; my eyes just weren't as good as his, so it was a lot harder for me to pick out the darkened silhouettes of the buildings that were just now rising up from the horizon.

  "I don't know, James. The entire town doesn't look like it has any buildings over two stories. That feels like the kind of place where people pay attention to their neighbors. Not only that, we're still awfully close to where we left everyone else. The last thing I want is to still be inside of the Coun'hij's perimeter if they decide to do some kind of door-to-door search."

  "Doesn't that violate the Constitution?"

  "Probably, but I'm not sure that would stop the Coun'hij, not when they might be able to just scent-track me to my door."

  "Good point. Do you mind if we go ahead and stop for gas here even though it's not your final destination? We're down to just over a quarter tank, which isn't going to be enough to make it very far if we do end up with a kill team trailing us."

  "Do you think there's even a working gas station here? The closer we get the more I realize just how dead this town looks. Shouldn't there be more lights?"

  James shrugged again. He was nothing if not laconic, but after a second he went ahead and answered my question.

  "The buildings we're headed towards seem to all be industrial construction, and most of them look abandoned. I think things will start looking a little more lively once we get into the center of town."

  "Okay, but let's not get too deep into the town. I'm perfectly happy with a quiet gas station on the edge of everything if we can find it."

  "Noted."

  As it turned out, the first gas station we came across fit the bill well enough that I motioned James to go ahead and turn into it. James climbed out and started pumping gas without having to be asked.

  I was feeling pretty good about how things were going—right up until the white and blue police car pulled in behind us. I tried to act casual, tried not to draw any attention to myself, but I instantly started shaking.

  There was a good chance that this particular cop wasn't even looking for us, but all it would take was for him to see Alec. One glimpse of an unconscious, restrained man in our backseat would be more than enough to get us hauled in for questioning.

  I tried to keep a surreptitious eye on the young-looking police officer out of the passenger side mirror as he started fueling up his vehicle. The SUV's tinted windows were a godsend inasmuch as they stopped anyone from being able to look inside of the vehicle, but right now they also meant that James couldn't see me trying to get his attention.

  It boggled the mind that he hadn't already seen the police officer. If nothing else, by now he should have been able to smell the gun oil on the cop's gun.

  "James. James, can you hear me? There's a cop behind us!"

  Apparently I'd managed to be just loud enough for James to hear me without alerting the cop. James stiffened slightly and then casually looked over his shoulder. He stopped the flow of fuel into the SUV and turned to rack the hose, but he was actually moving too slow.

  It was understandable. In a crisis situation, with all that adrenaline surging through their system, it was even harder for a shape shifter to avoid moving with the kind of preternatural speed that gave them away as being more than just human. James was trying to move slowly enough not to draw attention to himself, but he'd gone too far the other way, and I watched as the police officer behind us looked up and saw James slowly put the nozzle back into its receptacle.

  The officer stepped away from his vehicle, moving in our direction, as James opened the driver's-side door.

  "Evening."

  "Evening, officer."

  "That's a nice rig you've got there. Looks like you're from out of state—what brings you through our little town?"

  "We're visiting some family in New York."

  "Oh, that's great. What's the occasion?"

  James stopped with one foot inside the vehicle. I wanted to reach over and pull him into the SUV so we could make a run for it, but I knew he was right. Leaving would just guarantee that we would have the police after us. The only way forward was to make nice and hope that we didn't make the officer's Spidey sense start tingling.

  "My brother just had his first child, and my wife is really good friends with my sister-in-law, so I'm taking a week and a half off under protest so we can go out there and help them with the new arrival."

  James was an even better liar than I'd realized. He put exactly the right amount of unhappiness into his voice when talking about being forced to take time off of work, but rather than just walking on in to the convenience store like I'd been hoping he would, the police officer was walking up to my door.

  "You headed into a busy time at work? What is it that you do?"

  "It's always a busy time at work. I work in finance. Nothing big ticket or anything—I don't have enough experience for the really high-profile stuff, but so far it's paying the bills."

  "That's all any of us can ask for, right? Still, with a job like that I'm surprised you didn't save yourself the hassle of driving. It's got to hurt putting so many miles on such a nice car."

  An edge had crept
into the officer's voice. He was suspicious of us—probably had been suspicious of us the entire time.

  "I would have loved to have flown, but Alice has a phobia of flying, and there was no way I was going to get her on a bus, so this was the only option."

  "That's a real shame that she's got a fear of flying…what's the technical name for that?"

  James shook his head, a perfect picture of innocence, but I could tell by the way his fist tightened around the steering wheel that he knew the game was nearly up.

  "I never can remember. I can do net present value calculations in my sleep, but all the Latin in the medical terms just goes in one ear and out the other."

  "Why don't you ask your wife to roll down her window so that I can ask her what the proper name of her particular phobia is?"

  I wanted to scream, but James' expression didn't change in the slightest. "You heard the nice man, Alice. Roll down your window so that you can tell him the name of your condition."

  The window came down with the perfect smoothness only found in top-of-the-line vehicles, and as soon as our eyes met I knew that he'd seen my face before. My time sense ratcheted to high alert as the officer stepped backwards to buy himself room to draw his gun.

  It felt like he was moving in slow motion and I seemed to have forever in which to analyze and discard countless plans. James was on the other side of the car from us, which meant there was going to be very little he could do. Hybrids are fast, but he wasn't going to want to shift forms if he could avoid it, and even in his hybrid form he wasn't going to be able to outrun a bullet.

  "Show me your hands! Now!"

  I put my right hand out of the window. "The other one is broken."

  It was as though he couldn't hear me. Maybe it was all of the adrenaline in his system, or maybe he just didn't believe me.

  "I said show me your hands!"

  "I can't! This hand is paralyzed—it doesn't work anymore."

  That finally seemed to get through to him. The police officer blinked and then pointed at my door with his gun. "Open your door from the outside and then come out and face the car."

  I looked at James, who had both hands pointed straight up.

  "Don't look at him, look at me! Now do what I told you to do."

  I nodded and reached around so I could open my door. Once I was standing against the side of the car, the officer motioned James around to my side of the SUV, and then he cautiously approached us and started frisking James. I was desperately trying to come up with a plan that didn't end with us getting shot or imprisoned, when James suddenly spun in place and made a grab for the officer's gun.

  Even with my time sense ramped all of the way up, I still almost couldn't follow James' movements. He grabbed the gun with one hand and the officer's wrist with the other, and then threw the poor man into the side of our vehicle with enough force that I was half afraid he'd broken the officer's neck.

  As the gun hit the ground, James picked the officer up and carried him back to the police car. "Get back in our car, Adri!"

  My shakes hadn't ever gone completely away, but they were back now with a vengeance. It took me two tries to get my door open. By the time I managed to pull myself inside of the SUV, James was back and he had the officer's radio in one hand and a police-issue gun in the other.

  I reached out for the tough-minded persona that had gotten me through so much in the last few weeks, but she'd deserted me. Fighting against the Coun'hij was one thing. Being an accomplice to knocking a police officer unconscious was something else altogether. The police officer had just been doing his job. I felt like we'd crossed a line we couldn't ever come back from.

  James dropped the gun onto his lap and then set the radio on the center console. "Just focus on your breathing, Adri. He's going to have a massive headache when he wakes up, but other than that he's going to be okay. It's his own fault really. If he'd followed procedure and called us in I wouldn't have even tried something like that, not with a dozen other cops on the way. He must have been fresh out of the academy."

  "What do we do now?"

  "We get as far away from the scene of the crime as we can without drawing attention to ourselves and we listen to his radio so that we will know if someone saw what just happened and calls it in."

  "How can you be so calm, James? You could have been shot. And we're now criminals."

  James started the SUV into motion without putting on his seatbelt. "I'm not skilled with hand-to-hand in human form, but weapon control and disarmament is something that Donovan made all of us practice years ago. As for the part about being criminals, he recognized your face, Adri. You're already a wanted woman."

  "I think I liked it better when you didn't talk as much. In fact…"

  James shushed me as the radio crackled to life.

  "All units, we have an officer down at the Gas and Grub on Second Street. The officer involved appeared to be making an arrest at the time he was attacked. The perpetrators are in a black SUV—probably an Escalade—and were last seen headed north."

  James muttered something I was pretty sure Dom wouldn't have approved of, and then pulled the SUV into a dark alley. "Time to lose this ride—grab your gun and whatever cash Donovan gave you—leave everything else. I'll grab Alec."

  I reached back for the small black backpack purse that had all of the liquid assets, and then opened up my door and climbed out.

  "Our fingerprints are going to be all over this vehicle, James. They are going to know we were here and it's going to be pretty hard to get away on foot…"

  "I know, but we're going to have to deal with one problem at a time, Adri, and they've made our car."

  James produced a blade from his pocket and sheared through the nylon restraints holding Alec to the stretcher. Alec had lost so much weight since Dream Stealer had first attacked him that James was easily able to pull him out of the SUV using just one hand.

  "Now stand here next to me and we'll carry him between us. It's still not perfect, but it at least has a chance of looking like we're just three friends out for a stroll—that or two friends carrying a third friend who's so drunk they passed out."

  "You think that will really work?"

  "I don't know—depends on how close they are. I'm sure I don't have anything better than that though, and we need to get moving while I look for another vehicle to steal."

  James grabbed the police radio and hung it from his front pocket, and then we took off with Alec's arms slung over our shoulders and James supporting all of Alec's weight with an arm around his waist.

  We headed east and made it two blocks before I saw the first set of flashing lights. The sirens had been headed towards the gas station since before we'd even started out on foot, but they'd somehow managed to almost become background noise even just after such a short time. Seeing the lights made me freeze up, but James just shifted his arm from Alec's waist to mine and pulled me along.

  "You can't stop, Adri, we don't want to draw attention to ourselves."

  James turned right, putting a building between us and the police car that had turned onto our street a moment before.

  "They're responding too fast. A town this small shouldn't have so many cops on call, not on such short notice. Come on, we're going to have to travel through the center of the block if we're going to have any chance of getting outside of their search perimeter—it's only a matter of time now before they find the car."

  I followed James between two dark houses and then watched as he stripped down to his ha'bit and shifted into his hybrid form.

  "Is this a good idea, James?"

  "No, but it's the only way we're going to be able to travel fast enough. Right now they are running two search patterns, one assuming that we are still in our vehicle, and one assuming that we are on foot. Once they find our vehicle they are going to collapse down to just one search pattern and they know exactly how fast two people on foot are capable of moving. We've got to move faster than we have been. Put my clothes in your ba
ckpack and clip the radio to your belt. We need to be moving."

  James slung Alec over his massive shoulder with one arm, and then used the other to pick me up. James waited just long enough for me to wrap my good arm around his neck and then we were off.

  I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't experienced it for myself, but James tore through the yard we were standing in and then cleared the six-foot privacy fence in a powerful leap that shouldn't have been possible while carrying one person, let alone two. The next yard had a German Shepherd in it, but the poor dog only got one bark out before James let out a deep, menacing growl that shut it up.

  It was hard sometimes to remember just how powerful and graceful a hybrid really was. Lately everything had been about the hybrids with abilities. People like Jaclyn and Lori, like Grayson and Puppeteer. I'd had to mold all of my plans around the heavies who had no counter, but in doing so I'd lost sight of just what a single, 'normal' hybrid was capable of.

  James was already breathing hard from the added strain of sprinting while carrying several hundred extra pounds, but he didn't seem to be slowing down at all yet. Motion-activated lights flashed on in some of the yards that we passed, but we were moving so fast that I was confident very few of the people living on the block had looked up in time to see anything more than a dark shadow disappearing over their fence.

  We jumped a low set of bushes and then James skidded to a stop behind a storage shed.

  "What's going on?"

  "I can hear a car headed this way, sounds like what the local police department drives."

  "You can actually tell different cars apart just by how they sound?"

  "Yep. You can too; you've just never stopped to think about it."

  Before I could respond to that, a police car drove by slowly with its lights off. Score another point for James. Even if I'd had James' speed and strength, I would have just kept running blindly and been captured eventually.

  James stood up and darted across the road as if Alec and I combined still weighed nothing. I'd been wrong, he had been slowing down, but our pause—brief though it was—was sufficient to give him back most of his speed, and this block was full of yards with fences that were only five feet tall. We blurred forward so fast that my eyes started tearing up, but I wasn't about to complain, not when our very survival relied on James' speed.