by Dean Murray
There wasn't much in the way of traffic past the gas station, which made it harder and harder to justify spending my time up there, so after the first full day I put up a new sign saying we'd reduced our hours and started spending more time down in the bunker.
The last thing I'd wanted to do was clean up a bunch of dead bodies, but once they had started rotting I hadn't had much of a choice. I'd spent three hours during my second full night dragging them all into one of the bunk rooms and locking them in there. I left the exterior door up for an hour or so after that and it had gone a long ways towards making the air breathable again.
I'd had to get inventive when it came to moving the bodies, so I put that same inventiveness to work that same night moving Taggart. I got a second slick tarp, since the first one was now good for nothing but being incinerated, and used it to drag Taggart to Paulo's master suite, after which I'd been too exhausted to do anything more than shower, change the sheets on Paulo's bed and then crash for the night.
I tried to contact Alec again that night, and I'd even stocked up on extra calories during the day, but I didn't have any more luck than I had the first night. I once again made some kind of connection, but it never got to the point where I could use it to pull him to me or me to him. I tried to sever the filament sooner this time, but it was still too elastic.
I slept in for an extra two hours, almost missing my shortened hours up at the store, and still felt like I'd been run over by a freight train. I actually had two whole customers stop for gas and munchies that second day, but other than that I just spent a lot of time worrying about Taggart and stressing over the fact that I hadn't been able to make contact with Alec yet.
I spent another two hours that evening cleaning. I didn't try to address all of the blood and fire damage, but I did clean up the couple short corridors between the master suite and the tunnel to the store. I also grabbed some replacement batteries from the store and used the lantern to brave the semi-darkness in the kitchen.
I couldn't time Taggart's periods of wakefulness enough to make cooking for him worthwhile, but I at least was able to cook some rice and beans for myself. It wasn't anything fancy, but after the things I'd seen in the forty-eight hours prior to that I didn't feel like anything more adventurous.
I'd showered again before cooking, so once I finished up the food and checked on Taggart, who was still on the floor because I wasn't strong enough to pull him up into Paulo's bed, there wasn't anything left to do but sleep.
I wasn't up to trying to talk to Alec again, but luckily I'd had another idea during the long hours minding the store. I'd been wrong when I'd said that there was only one other supernatural being I knew besides Taggart. Alec and Taggart were the two I knew the most about, but there had been that girl at the away game who I'd saved from being beaten to death by the other team's cheerleaders.
She hadn't told me her name, but I didn't actually need a name to make contact with someone. It was risky, far riskier than reaching out to Alec, despite what Taggart might have said, but it also felt like the right answer, so after I fell asleep I sent myself back to the school where I'd saved her and closed my dream eyes so that I could concentrate.
Things went better this time. It didn't take the tendrils anywhere near as long to make contact with her, and I hardly felt like I'd expended any energy at all by the time I had a connection strong enough to use.
I took a deep breath, mentally grabbed the thick cable between the two of us, and pulled with all of my might. It was like trying to lift a house with a cable and a thousand-pulley block and tackle. I was pulling in the rope and I knew that meant that I was moving her, but it was so hard and it felt like she was barely traveling any distance at all. That phase only lasted for a second or two though and then she was accelerating towards me at impossible speeds.
It would have been tempting to slack off, but I gritted my teeth and pulled harder. I knew what came next and I wanted to have all of the momentum I possibly could generate before she hit the wall I'd experienced with Taggart.
A second later, she hit the barrier. It was like trying to pull an elephant through a mailbox. She was moving so fast that it seemed impossible that anything could stop her, but I could feel reality flexing and shivering as it tried to keep from allowing her into my dream.
I pulled with everything I had left—even though I was pretty sure that nothing I could do this late in the game could possibly make any difference—and I felt myself start to lose my grip on my dream. That was terrifying. The last thing I wanted was to send myself into the gray plane of nonexistence that I could feel her traveling through, but I needed her here.
I gave one last desperate tug on the cable between us even as I clawed at my surroundings to keep from being pulled in after her. The universe tore and then suddenly she was standing before me, confused and wary.
"I'm sorry, I hope that wasn't an unpleasant experience for you."
She looked around at our surroundings, taking in the school behind me and the shop building we were standing next to.
"I've been here before."
"I know, I was there too. You were letting four girls beat you. I stopped them without realizing that you didn't need my help."
She nodded slowly. "And in return, I warned you that one of your companions was dangerous."
"You were right. Jackson was a vampire. That's why he was there with me. Before then he'd found me in the dream world, but at that point he hadn't figured out my real identity."
I hadn't changed my appearance, so I knew she recognized me, but she seemed to take a degree of comfort from the fact that we'd both described an event known only to a handful of people. I was realizing that there weren't any bulletproof guarantees when it came to the supernatural world, but this was as close as I could get to proving I was really who she thought I was.
"So you're a traveler then? I'd heard rumors of someone who could do this, but I didn't know that there was more than one of you."
"I call it dream walking instead of travelling, but you're right, there weren't two of us, at least not until a few months ago."
"Why have you brought me here?"
"I need your help again. I know I don't have a right to it, but I had to ask regardless. I've learned a lot since we last talked. I know you're a shape shifter, that's the only way that you could have known that Jackson was a vampire. You could smell him, but he and Tristan were standing so close together that you couldn't tell for sure which one was the vampire."
For a long time she didn't say anything. Her brown eyes seemed to be taking stock of me in ways that I didn't understand, that or she was just trying to see if I would crack under the pressure as the weight of the silence between us continued to grow.
"Let's say for now that you're right and I'm a shape shifter. What difference does it make?"
"I need to know about the Coun'hij. I need to know everything you can tell me about them."
"Why?" Her voice had changed. It wasn't that her beautiful accent had gone away, although for a second I thought that was the reason. It was because her voice had gone flat. It was like someone had stripped away all of the emotion and life from her.
For a moment I couldn't get any words to come out. I was skirting dangerous ground now. Everything I revealed could potentially make it back to the Coun'hij, could potentially be used against Taggart and me at a later date.
"You know the other one like me?"
"Dream Stealer?"
"Yeah, that's the one. Together we could be a much bigger threat to the Coun'hij than he's been so far. He's asking me to help him, to…kill the Coun'hij's agents, and I don't know if that's the right thing to be doing. I like Dream Stealer and I think I trust him, but it's hard to kill people based off of the word of just one man."
She sighed and then started walking toward the football field. "What's your name?"
"Adri."
"Very well, Adri. My name is Dominic. Let's go find somewhere to sit down, somewhere that will le
t us stay far enough away from each other that we're unlikely to attack each other, but close enough that we can talk comfortably. I've had a long day already."
I thought about creating a pair of benches out of thin air in front of us, but I didn't want to spook her. Besides, it was just as easy to let her lead me over to the bleachers. She waved me up onto the stands, then selected a bench several rows down from me and turned around so she was facing me.
"I've never heard anyone say that they liked the Dream Stealer. His methods are said to be brutal, but no more brutal than the Coun'hij. I'm not sure that you can fight a superior force without being at least as vicious as they are."
"So the Coun'hij is bad then, just like he said they were?"
"I'm not sure I'm the best one to answer that question, Adri. I come from somewhere much worse than here. I expected to live and die down there, probably at the hands of one of the self-styled rulers of my people. The Coun'hij is much less corrupt and murderous than my own father is."
"You're saying it's all relative?"
Dominic looked away from me for a couple of seconds before nodding. "I guess I am, at least partly. The Coun'hij is prosecuting a war against my people, a war that they had no real reason to fight. Hundreds have been killed already, many of them for nothing more nefarious than wanting to cross the border from Mexico so that they could lose themselves here in the United States where they might have a chance at a normal life."
I tried to remember everything that Taggart had let drop during the few short weeks that I'd known him.
"So you're a…jaguar then, not a wolf? Dream Stealer said that there was fighting going on between the wolves and the jaguars. I guess I didn't really give it a second thought. He's always seemed a lot more focused on the Coun'hij than anything else."
Dominic nodded. "Most people seem to find their own pet causes and ignore the rest of the bad going on in the world. It's like we can't simultaneously think about all of the terrible things out there so we just pick one and put everything else out of our mind."
I felt like I was in the middle of the ocean without a life preserver. I needed something to hold onto, something certain, something that could anchor me against all of the things that I didn't know.
"So what should I be doing then? Forget about the Coun'hij and try to stop the worst of the jaguars instead?"
"Are you really so eager to kill that you have to find a target?"
"No, I've killed before and I didn't like it, but I think that Dream Stealer is probably right. I'm a weapon. I didn't ask to become like this, but I have the ability to do things nobody else can do. If I don't chart my own course then sooner or later I'm going to end up manipulated into doing something I don't want to do. Besides, if I can make a difference and don't then in my own way I'm just as bad as the people who are making the world crap."
Dominic flinched a little at my last statement. I hadn't been trying to make her feel bad, but apparently that was a little too close to home for her.
"Very well, I'll tell you as plainly as I can, Adri. There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of wolves who live their life out in security, safe from any kind of harm other than what they deal with by being part of a pack. In almost every way the wolves live better lives than us cats, but you can't measure the Coun'hij by that one fact any more than you could say that they are good simply because they are doing their best to wipe out the vampires."
I opened my mouth, but she talked over me. "The truth is that the wolves are happiest when the Coun'hij doesn't notice them enough to interfere in their lives. Once you come to the attention of the Coun'hij things go badly. For them, might is right. There is nobody that the Coun'hij wouldn't murder if it was in their interest, no law they wouldn't break, no right that they wouldn't abridge if it suited their purpose. They surround themselves with murderers and thugs because, at its heart, the Coun'hij is the biggest collection of villains around."
"So you would agree with Dream Stealer then, anyone that works with the Coun'hij is someone who the world would be better off without."
"No, I think that is a step too far. I think people can end up working for the Coun'hij for a variety of reasons, fear being not the least of them. You can't blindly kill the Coun'hij's pawns without risking injustice, but you are more in the right to be fighting them than you would be if you were aiding them."
Chapter 13
Alec Graves
Club Pure Vertigo
Chicago, Illinois
The lights were back on, which meant that I could see the full destruction that had been wrought on the club. Ulrich had arrived with a force of more than forty shape shifters and he'd come prepared to contain the situation in more ways than one.
He'd had a group of hybrids march away the surviving Coun'hij loyalists who'd attacked Shawn and then turned his attention to keeping the humans out of the club until his people had cleaned up enough that nobody would know the damage had been done by six-and-a-half-foot-tall monsters.
Two hundred years was plenty of time to get really good at your chosen profession and Ulrich's medics had obviously been practicing their craft for a long time. One of them, a big male who communicated mostly in grunts with the occasional gesture thrown in for good measure, took over Brindi's care within seconds of Ulrich's arrival.
I'd been edged out of the way by another of the Chicago pack while the medic got to work running an IV drip and hanging a blood bag off of a metal rod similar to the one I'd used to impale the wolf that had been such a problem during my fight with the hybrid. My beast probably would have resented being managed like that, but I was too tired and shocky to protest right at that instant.
I stood with a vague plan of checking on James and the girls, but it took less than a second to locate them. They were all bruised and bleeding, but they each had a medic or two attending them and now that the bootlickers were all gone nobody seemed noticeably on edge.
Shawn got my attention and waved me over to where he was talking to his dad. I hid a grimace and nodded as I started picking my way over to them.
I could hear the white noise generators when I was still several feet away from the booth. There were several of them, which meant that Ulrich was serious about keeping our conversation a secret.
Ulrich and Shawn had already disappeared into the booth by the time I arrived, so I took a deep breath and followed them inside. Shawn was even bloodier than I was, but he seemed in good spirits, so there was a reasonable chance that most of it belonged to the other team.
I opened my mouth to apologize to Ulrich for having entered his territory unannounced, but he cut me off before I could even get started.
"Do you have any idea the kind of position you've put me in by coming here, Alec? By all rights, I should just kill you and your friends and save myself the headache."
Shawn winced, but I didn't wait for him to come to my defense. "You'd be well within your rights to try, but unless you're planning on executing the next Coun'hij enforcer who shows up on your doorstep unexpectedly, you'll be creating a dangerous precedent when it comes to your prized neutrality."
He didn't like that, but then again I hadn't expected him to. I was in as deep as I was going to get, and there wasn't anything to be gained by being timid.
"Don't push me, boy. I was here before your dad was born and I intend to be here long after you and he kill each other off, assuming that you're up to that kind of challenge."
We locked eyes, but I refused to back down. After a handful of seconds Ulrich finally smiled and leaned back in his chair.
"You've got guts, and not just because you were sneaking around in my backyard plotting with Shawn. I like that. Besides, I owe you for keeping Shawn alive."
Shawn looked like he was going to protest, but Ulrich stared him down.
"Despite what you might think, not even Vicki can pull you through against three-to-one odds, Shawn."
Satisfied that Shawn was suitably cowed, Ulrich turned back to me.
"Yo
u've earned yourself a bit of leniency this time around, but don't come back through here without permission again."
Ulrich worked his way around the table until he could stand and leave the booth. "I've got some things to check on. Finish up your conversation quickly, I can only hold off the police for so long."
I looked over at Shawn with a raised eyebrow. He ran his hands through his hair and sighed.
"Thanks for standing by me when we got jumped."
"I didn't really have much of a choice. Most packs will turn against the outsiders before they'll fight amongst themselves. Standing with you was my best chance of getting my people out in one piece."
"Was that really what you were thinking at the time?"
I hesitated for a second before shaking my head. "No, it didn't even cross my mind. You'd been good enough to talk to me without ratting us out. It just seemed right to fight with you guys instead of against you."
Sometimes not being able to lie was a real pain, but other times—like now—it was a lot easier. Shawn knew that I'd just told him the truth.
"That's what makes my job hard, Alec. Kaleb or Puppeteer would have turned on me the instant that they thought it might help them get ahead, but you're willing to stand by people even when it's likely to cost you."
Shawn tapped on the table for a second before looking up at me. "How's your sister? Did she make it out of Sanctuary with you okay?"
"Yeah. I'm surprised that you know about that."
"There isn't a lot that we don't find out about. Like I said earlier, we're the biggest unclaimed prize out there so I tend to hear from all kinds of people who are trying to convince me to stage a takeover of the pack. Somebody back in Sanctuary has been talking. Maybe it's your mom, but I can't be sure."
