Ambushed

by Dean Murray

  He looked over at me and gave me a sad smile as soon as he felt my gaze. "I'm sorry, Adriana. I owe you an apology. When I agreed to train you I vowed that you'd be able to choose your own targets or no targets at all. I didn't mean to break that promise last night. I can't change the fact that you're a weapon, neither of us can, but you at least deserve to decide how you'll use your power."

  Even despite all of the clues to the contrary, I'd still been ready to stand up to him and defend my actions. I'd been ready for a yelling match; this was so far different than my expectations that it nearly brought me to tears.

  "I'm sorry, Taggart. I just couldn't do it. Maybe Eric and that other guy were both deserving of death, but I just couldn't be the one to make it happen. We'd beaten them, it wasn't like last time when Pamela was just outside of my house. I wasn't in danger this time, not by then."

  Taggart sighed. "I understand. You haven't had a chance to see for yourself what the Coun'hij has been responsible for, but that's just the way that things have to be for now. Once you have control of your nightmares, maybe I'll be able to change your mind. I'm just glad that you chose to intervene on my behalf during the fight. It probably would have gone very badly for me if you hadn't."

  I nodded uncomfortably. "To be honest, the deeper I get into all of this, the more worried I am about everything. I don't know anything about your world and I'm worried I'll end up doing things that I'll come to regret."

  "Believe it or not, I understand what you're going through, Adriana, at least to some extent. Initially my exile wasn't of my own choice. I spent a lot of years in isolation, but eventually I was contacted by the Coun'hij. I'd tried to keep my abilities quiet, but they'd figured out that there was more to some of their dreams than pure chance. They didn't know who I was, but they invited me to join them, on any terms that I cared to name."

  I was having a hard time believing what I was hearing. Taggart had told me again and again, ever since we'd met, that the Coun'hij couldn't be trusted. I'd never even suspected that his knowledge might have come from having worked with them, from having committed the kinds of atrocities that he was always hinting that they routinely turned to in order to keep control of the other shape shifters, in order to keep the existence of Taggart's people a secret.

  "They weren't as bad back then, Adriana. I know that sounds like a cheap justification, but it's the truth. Oh, there were signs, things that were distasteful, instances where someone went too far, but their goals were worthy goals. They were the ones who kept the chaos and corruption south of our border from boiling up into our homeland. They were the ones who were hunting down the vampires and the werewolves. The only reason that we hadn't been wiped out by the humans decades ago was that they had kept our existence a secret."

  "What happened?"

  He refused to meet my eyes. "I had nearly accepted…no, that's not true, I had accepted their offer. I was working with them. Not in any big ways, but in a multitude of smaller things. I kept an eye on some of the more dangerous figures south of the border and I was responsible for gathering intelligence about vampires in Los Angeles and Chicago. My work was key to identifying a network of more than fifty vampires that Ulrich and the rest of the Chicago pack destroyed over the course of a single night. Just that one raid saved the lives of hundreds, possibly even thousands of humans who otherwise would have been killed in Chicago each year."

  "You're right, that sounds like an admirable goal to me."

  "I spent nearly ten years as a de facto member of the Coun'hij. The first eight years was a heady time. You know how hard it is for me to form new dream connections with individuals. I didn't bother forming connections with most of the Coun'hij. Some of them operated in a cloak of secrecy just like I'd been doing, but mostly that was just because there was always someone else who I needed to make contact with. Vampires and jaguars mostly, but by the end I was being used more and more against my own kind."

  "They started cracking down on dissident elements?" I wasn't a history genius or anything, but I'd seen enough documentaries on what had happened in Nazi Germany and other totalitarian regimes to have an idea of how governments went from being the good guys to the bad guys.

  "Yes. There was always a reason. Mostly I was being used against rogue dispossessed, people like me who were considered too dangerous not to keep tabs on. Some of them had extreme abilities, the kinds of things that could be used to wipe out a small town all by themselves. It was hard to disagree with the need to make sure that they weren't becoming unstable."

  Taggart dropped his head into his hands. "Some of them were complete monsters. I found proof that they'd done terrible things, things that deserved execution, but I later found out that the Coun'hij was recruiting them, just like they'd recruited me. They cared more about securing their power than they did about justice or protecting the humans who were being caught in the crossfire."

  "So you left?"

  "No, not at first. I still thought that I could help with the good stuff and not get caught up with the bad. My contact with the Coun'hij was surprisingly understanding. I didn't come right out and tell him that I wouldn't continue to spy on the dispossessed for him or that I wasn't going to continue to gather intelligence on the various unaligned packs, but he saw the pattern. When I was given an assignment to establish a connection with one of the jaguars I could usually manage it within a month. When I got an assignment I didn't want to do, I just never managed to establish contact.

  "I made it another year and a half like that, picking and choosing assignments, telling myself that I had to work with the Coun'hij because nobody else had the resources it would take to deal with the biggest problems out there. I was miserable, but I was fighting the best way I knew how. I might have still been doing the exact same thing today except I screwed up and my contact was able to figure out my real identity."

  A wave of sympathetic terror ran through me. Our anonymity was our greatest defense. Even before I'd really understood anything about my ability, I'd instinctively understood that as long as nobody knew who I really was that I'd be safe.

  "What happened?"

  "My contact turned out to be a much better person than I'd realized. I'd spent the entire ten years I was working with him thinking he was just like all of the rest of the Coun'hij. I thought that he didn't give me static over my refusal to spy on the dispossessed because the Coun'hij, as a group, had decided that it wasn't worth forcing the issue and risking the possibility that I'd just walk away."

  "They were mad, and he was running interference for you?"

  "Yes. I think he saw something of me inside himself. He was—he is—younger than me, but he'd spent some time as one of the dispossessed too before joining up with the Coun'hij. The next time I saw him he told me that he knew who I was, and that the Coun'hij wouldn't allow him to keep that secret for long once they realized he'd figured it out. He said that I needed to go to ground, to disappear for a few years and after that I needed to make sure I had even less contact with other shape shifters than I'd been having."

  "That doesn't sound like enough. You've said again and again that if the Coun'hij actually knows who it is they are after that they can find anyone. They can hack the facial recognition software at airports and train stations, they are unstoppable."

  "Yes, I told you that because that's exactly what he told me, that I wouldn't be safe once they knew what I really looked like. Then he told me that I'd been right all along. He said that he'd spent so long thinking that the ends justified the means that he'd almost convinced himself, but in obtaining our end we'd become the very thing we'd been fighting against. He slipped away from the Coun'hij's secret base that very night and has been on the run ever since."

  "He ran away to keep your secret safe."

  The sheer scope of what Taggart was implying boggled my mind. I'd been struggling to comprehend what it must be like to live on the run for years because you had no other choice. It seemed impossible to believe that someone would
choose that life on behalf of someone else.

  Taggart finally met my gaze and nodded. "Indeed he did. He told me at the time that he didn't expect to last long, maybe a decade or two, but at least he'd buy me that much longer before the Coun'hij came looking for me armed with the knowledge of who I really was. He was wrong though, he's made it longer than anyone else believed possible.

  "They've been looking for him this entire time, but he's become a ghost, slipping through the cracks in our society even as he became a symbol for everyone who wants to see the Coun'hij overthrown."

  "Why are you telling me this?"

  "For a lot of reasons. You deserve to know the truth about me, you deserve to know that my history is nearly as dark as that of the people I'm trying to fight, but that isn't the only reason. I'm also telling you because it's the perfect example of what I need to be doing with you. I knew I could trust my friend on the Coun'hij because he was willing to allow me to make my own choices, even when those choices meant extra risk for him.

  "I would never have even thought to ask for such a sacrifice from him, but the fact that he was willing to make it for me told me all I needed to know. It told me that he was someone I could trust with my life and, even more importantly, someone I could trust with my honor."

  "There's more, isn't there?"

  I couldn't have said how I knew, but I did. Taggart was about to deliver some kind of terrible news, something that was going to change everything for us.

  "I visited another contact last night after the fiasco with Eric, and I learned something important. My friend has finally been captured after all these years. His name is Agony and the Coun'hij has him. I'm going to do whatever I can to free him, which means that I'm going to be putting myself back in the crosshairs again. I won't compel you to help, I'll respect your decision to get as far away from me as you can if that's what you want to do, but I have no choice but to at least ask for your help.

  "I can't do this by myself, but I have to try. The only question is how much, if at all, you'll be willing to aid me."

  Chapter 8

  Adriana Paige

  Marauder's Gas Station

  Central Wyoming

  My mind had been spinning non-stop ever since Taggart had told me that his friend Agony was in trouble. Taggart had helped me when I needed it, and a part of me wanted to respond in kind, but in a lot of ways his story had just reinforced my fears. I was in the middle of an impossibly complex situation and I could only come up with one possible way to figure out how far I could trust Taggart.

  I already trusted him with my life, but I still didn't know if I could trust him to tell me who lived and who died. I needed to know if I trusted him enough to kill for him.

  I needed another source of information, a source as close to unbiased as possible, or at least one who didn't have a vested interest in working with Taggart, but I didn't know very many shape shifters. Taggart, Eric, the red hybrid…and Alec Graves, the one person Taggart was almost desperate to keep me from talking to.

  We'd gotten a late start, but we'd still been driving for long enough that I desperately wanted a chance to stretch my legs. Luckily, the fuel gauge was down to just over a quarter of a tank, so a break couldn't be too far away.

  Taggart said that we were headed to Montana. He apparently had a cabin up there in some remote corner of the state. It wasn't the perfect location when it came to dream walking. Distance mattered when it came to our ability, just like it mattered with most other things. Reaching someone on the East Coast would be difficult, as would contacting someone all of the way down in Arizona or in Mexico, but Taggart said that the extra fatigue involved was more than offset by the fact that we'd be safe up there.

  Safety sounded good to me. There was a chance that the Coun'hij already knew Taggart's name and were slowly looking through every video feed in the United States in the hope of finding him. It would take a lot of computing power to go through weeks and weeks of video feed, but eventually they were bound to find a hit of some kind or another. Nobody could hope to make it through even a single month without being caught on a video camera of some kind at least a couple of times.

  The real question was whether the Coun'hij would hack into the right video feeds. They already routinely scanned the feeds from airports and train stations simply because it was a good way to keep tabs on known vampires. There were so many people on those feeds that it was a great return on their hacking investment.

  Breaking into the computer systems that supported some backwater gas station was another matter entirely, as they mostly just recorded an unchanging view of the gas station in question. All we could do was try to avoid high-population areas and hope that any hits the Coun'hij did manage to get would be too old and too scattered to be useful.

  I'd just about worked up the nerve to tell Taggart that I was going to start trying to contact Alec when we drove past a sign that said we were approaching the last gas station for the next eighty miles.

  Taggart frowned. "I guess that settles it, we'll have to stop."

  I bit back a sigh of relief, but I shouldn't have even bothered, Taggart of course heard the nascent sigh.

  "That really settles it then. We'll stop so you can get out and walk around. Hopefully this gas station is large enough that we can pick up something more than just a couple of candy bars for dinner. I'm starving and you still need to put on more weight so you don't blow away after the next time you dream walk."

  I stuck out my tongue at him and then leaned back in my seat. Taggart's current ride was an eight-year-old Honda. The air and heat worked, as did the radio, but that was where the amenities ended. The one thing it did have though was a very, very comfortable set of seats. Apparently when you spent as much time on the road as Taggart did you figured out which cars would leave you still able to walk after fifteen hours behind the wheel.

  "Will we make it to Montana tonight?"

  Taggart shook his head as he slowed down and pulled up next to the pump. "I doubt it. If we really had to make it there I could probably manage to drive straight through, or we could maybe swap off and I could grab an hour or so of sleep while you keep us going, but I think it's more important not to miss a night of dream walking than it is to make it to my cabin tonight."

  That made a lot of sense. I'd already realized that Taggart viewed his nights as a kind of non-renewable resource. He made a difference when he was sleeping and therefore he tried very hard to make sure that his sleep schedule didn't get out of sync with the rest of North America.

  "I'm serious about you eating more, Adriana. The limiting factor on how much I can get done in a given night is fact that we shape shifters don't require as much sleep as you humans. I'm lucky if I can stretch it to four or five hours most nights. It's enough to visit a couple of people, but it still means that a lot of things happen with a kind of frustrating slowness that you've luckily never had to deal with."

  I knew where he was going with this and he was right, but that didn't mean that I wanted to hear it. I'd been eating enough lately that I'd put on a few more pounds, but part of me was still worried that if I upped my caloric intake even more that I'd balloon up to twice my old size.

  I liked to think that I wasn't as shallow as most people, but the truth was that I liked being skinny. I liked guys looking at me with the kind of appreciation that had once been reserved only for Cindi, and I liked the fact that I looked good in my clothes now.

  "I know, my limiting factor isn't how long I can sleep, it's how much fat I can pack onto my body."

  Taggart frowned at me as he reached down to pop open the little door on the gas tank. "I'm not trying to say you should become unhealthy, Adriana. Believe it or not, I remember what it was like to be seventeen. The definition of physical perfection has changed a lot since then, but the way we feel when we do or don't achieve that standard hasn't changed. You don't need to add back a lot of weight, but you need more of a margin of safety than you have right now."

  "
Right, or my heart could stop mid-dream."

  Taggart's eyes got a little bigger and I realized that he'd never thought in those terms. "Actually, I was thinking that you needed to have the physical reserves to go on an extra dream walk or two if something terrible happened and you needed to redouble your efforts for a single night."

  "Yeah, that's what I meant. That's a way better reason, my most paranoid sensei."

  That earned me an eye roll and then Taggart opened his door and started to get out. I was reaching for my door release when Taggart reached over and grabbed my arm. There was a smile on his face, but I could see the tension around his eyes, the wrinkles that only showed up when he was really worried.

  "Change of plans, Adriana. You're going to need to stay in the car."

  "What's going on?"

  I was proud of the fact that I managed to keep my voice level and my expression steady.

  "Vampires. I can smell them and it's strong enough that I don't think it was just someone passing through."

  I could feel myself starting to shake, but I forced my upper body at least to stay mobile. The fight with Eric and the red hybrid had been pretty intense, but I'd never been in that much danger. The fight with Jackson and Pamela had been a whole different matter. I'd been terrified for what had seemed like hours and my nightmares hadn't mellowed out even weeks later. If there was a group of vampires here I was almost certainly going to die.

  "We need to go, we need to get out of here."

  Taggart reached over and rested his hand on my shoulder. "I know you're scared, but you need to act like nothing has changed. We don't have enough gas to make it to the next station, not without turning around and going back the way we came, and I'd rather not do that. I'll fill the car up and then we'll go."

  I managed a nod, it was a choppy one, but under the circumstances it was the best I could manage. Taggart gave me another smile, this one more natural and less worried.