by Dean Murray
By the time he'd finished teasing every event of the last few weeks out of me, I was in desperate need of a bathroom. Our last pit stop had been nearly six hours earlier, and it must have been pretty obvious that I was uncomfortable because Dominic volunteered to escort me up to one of the stores.
Taggart seemed for a moment like he was going to protest, but Dominic promised that she wouldn't let anything happen to me, which was enough of an assurance that Taggart apparently decided that it wasn't some kind of ruse designed to split us up.
I pulled my sunglasses back down onto my face and shifted my hood forward while Dominic put on a blond wig and glasses of her own and then we headed off as Isaac began interrogating Taggart.
We passed the trip up to the bathroom in silence, but by the time I finished up and we'd started back down to the parking garage, my curiosity had gotten the better of me.
"Thank you for arranging this meeting. It doesn't seem like you've been part of this group for very long so I suspect it was a little nerve-racking to have to push for something like this."
Dominic shrugged. She was a strange mixture of shy and confident now that we were away from the others.
"You're welcome. I appreciated what you tried to do for me back in Minnesota and I'm just sorry that I didn't figure out a way to confirm which of your friends was the vampire."
"No, you don't need to be sorry at all. Things ended up working out okay for the most part. I mean I nearly died and all of that, but all of the good guys survived and if Jackson and Pamela hadn't found me I might not have ever had the courage to pull Taggart into my dreams."
"Still, I wish I could have done more. The little bit of help I offered wasn't a very good repayment for your help."
I shot her a look of disbelief. "You could have easily wrapped all four of those girls into knots all by yourself. You didn't need my help."
Dominic's blond wig was positioned so that it obscured most of the right side of her face. She looked up at me from behind a curtain of hair as we stepped into an empty elevator and I pushed the button for our floor.
"You're right, physically they weren't a match for me, but I was at a real low point when you saw me. It wasn't that I couldn't defend myself, I didn't want to. I guess I'd lost hope. I came up here to your country thinking that I'd be entering some kind of paradise where law and order reigned supreme and the people were fundamentally different than everyone I'd known back home.
"Instead, I found out that people are the same everywhere you go. The ordinary people here confine their actions to something mostly within your laws, but most of them aren't any better or worse than anyone from my country."
Her smooth alto and beautiful accent didn't give any hint to what she'd gone through, but I'd seen some of the depths that people could descend to when they didn't think anyone was watching. My own sister had even tried to make my life miserable enough to quit the cheerleading team despite the fact that my joining had been her idea from the start.
"I'm so sorry. Things must have been really hard for you here. I can't imagine what it would be like not to have any support system, no family, no friends, nobody to make the bullies think that it might not be a good idea to pick on you."
"Sí, it was pretty bad. I was ready to give up, to crawl off somewhere and die, but you reminded me that there were other kinds of people out there, good, kind people. You gave me back my hope and convinced me that I just need to go back out there and find more people like you."
"I'm glad I was able to help, even if I didn't really do much of anything. It seems like you've found a good home with Isaac and the others."
Dominic's smile and nod were the most completely unreserved expressions I'd seen out of her yet. "Yes, they are like the family I wish I could have had growing up."
"I was surprised to see that Isaac was so young. He seems like he can't be much older than us. I thought pack alphas were usually older, more experienced but still in the prime of their lives."
"They usually are, but we aren't exactly a pack and Isaac isn't really our alpha."
Our elevator glided to a stop. I gave her a confused look as we stepped out onto the white concrete.
"I don't understand."
"It's hard to explain. I don't know that there's ever been anything quite like this before. Before Isaac was exiled there was no us. It was just a bunch of dispossessed who had all lived in the same area for long enough that they knew each other and had worked out a rough dominance hierarchy."
"Isaac changed all of that?"
"Yes. Some of the most dominant hybrids were as bad as any of the alpha jaguars back home. The only thing that kept them even slightly in check was the fear that if they pushed too far or didn't keep our existence a secret the Coun'hij would step in and kill them."
That was exactly what I would have expected out of a group of shape shifters without a central authority. It mirrored the things Taggart had described from his time as one of the dispossessed.
"Isaac wasn't like that. He doesn't have any kind of special ability like some of the hybrids have, but he was young and strong. The wolves in our territory expected him to come in and claim one of the better areas for himself. That would have forced whoever he pushed out to take another territory from one of the other wolves. Those kinds of fights, when a shape shifter has been robbed of their territory and have to fight for a new spot, are some of the most deadly. When we are away from home and operating without any kind of safety net we are the most vulnerable."
"So I take it that Isaac didn't do that?"
"No, he found one of the more submissive wolves and asked her if he could share her territory. She thought he was just going to edge her out over time rather than all at once, but he didn't and when one of the lesser hybrids came through and tried to steal from her, Isaac ran him off."
I could see where the story was going. Isaac already sounded like a standup guy. He was exactly the kind of guy I'd been thinking Alec was until Taggart had burst my bubble.
"So, I'm guessing that once Isaac beat that other hybrid everyone expected him to go in and evict the guy he'd beaten?"
"Yeah, pretty much, but instead Isaac paid him a visit and told him that he had nothing to fear as long as he stopped shaking down Isaac's friend."
"Only hybrid number two was shaking down more than just the one wolf…"
"Right, the other hybrid—Clarence is his name—kept robbing from the other wolves and in fact took more from them to make up for the fact that he couldn't steal from Isaac's friend, Zaire. Once word of what had happened got around to the other wolves, they went to Isaac and asked him to protect them from Clarence."
We were only a little ways away from the others, but I didn't want to go back just yet. I was pretty sure that once we were around everyone else Dominic would clam up and I would miss out on the rest of the story. I reached out and placed a hand on Dominic's arm. She stopped and looked at me.
"What happened next?"
"Isaac visited Clarence with half a dozen wolves at his back and told Clarence that his protection racket was done for."
"I'll bet Clarence didn't like that."
Dominic looked a little sad now. "He didn't, but not for the reason you think. He was shaking down the wolves because one of the other more dangerous hybrids kept coming around and shaking him down. He told Isaac what was going on and Isaac agreed to help him stand up to the hybrid who had been giving Clarence problems."
My mind was whirling in astonishment at what I'd just heard.
"Isaac just reestablished civilization among the dispossessed in your area."
Dominic nodded. "Exactly. It's nothing less than amazing. For so many years, back in my country, I thought that barbarity and lawlessness was unusual. I thought the natural order of the world was something like you all have here in the United States. I got here and found out I'd had it backwards the entire time."
"Right, the natural order of things is for the strong to prey on the weak."
"Even so. It takes a special set of circumstances and rare kind of person to bring civilization to something like what Isaac found when he first arrived in our territory. Most of it happened before I'd arrived, but even hearing about it secondhand was amazing."
I had so many questions that I almost didn't know where to start. "But you're not a pack and Isaac isn't your leader?"
"No, not in the traditional sense. Many of the dispossessed are dispossessed for good reason. Some of them don't play very well with others, so we haven't formed anything as rigid as a pack. Instead it's more like an…understanding. Isaac has a set of rules, simple things like no robbing from each other, no evicting someone from their territory."
"A basic legal code…"
"Sí, that's it exactly. The dispossessed are divided into two groups, those who have agreed to uphold Isaac's rules, and those who haven't. Isaac is the final arbitrator of any disagreements between two of us who have agreed to his law."
"What about conflicts between you guys and the ones outside of his law?"
"Isaac settles those according to the rules he's established. It almost always comes down to bloodshed, but no one hybrid can hope to stand against Isaac and the rest of us."
"And the Coun'hij doesn't know about any of this?"
Dominic shook her head. "We don't think so. They usually only monitor the most powerful dispossessed and we've tried very hard to keep a low profile. It helps that Isaac isn't the best fighter or most powerful hybrid in the area. Anyone looking in from the outside is unlikely to view him as being at the center of anything."
"Only he is."
"Exactly."
We started walking again. I still had questions, but we'd been away long enough that Taggart was probably starting to get worried. Besides, none of the rest of my questions really mattered, not compared to what I'd already learned.
We came around the corner just in time to hear Taggart finish responding to another of Isaac's questions.
"…so I've got the current location and the first leg of their route, but no idea what they'll do after that."
Isaac sighed. "Which means that you've got a very narrow window in which to strike; if you miss it you might lose him forever."
"I'm afraid so."
The tension between Isaac's people and Taggart had continued to ratchet down in my absence. Nobody was standing anymore; they'd all found cars to sit on. Some of the guys with Isaac even seemed to have relaxed enough that smiling at Dominic and me as we came back wasn't a capital offense.
Isaac stared off into space for several seconds before nodding. "All right, I'm in. You're either both telling the truth or you're the most accomplished liars I've ever encountered. Either way, you're right. If Agony disappears permanently things will get noticeably worse for all of the rest of us."
The last of the tension melted out of Taggart and, for the first time since he'd found out that Agony had been captured, he seemed to have a measure of hope.
"Great, how many people will you be bringing?"
"I'm sorry, but our group doesn't work that way. I don't just give orders and expect everyone to hop. Everyone with us here today now knows enough to make their own decision, and it will be their decision. As for the rest of the people who've chosen to live by our rules, it will take me a day or so to get the message out to them."
For a second I thought Taggart was going to say something he'd regret. What Isaac was describing went against everything Taggart had seen in nearly three hundred years of life and I could tell he was having a hard time believing it. I made a quick 'calm down' gesture and he fortunately chose not to take umbrage at what could have been considered an order.
"Another day when we don't have something more pressing going on, I'd be interested in learning more about your group."
Isaac's nod of agreement was accompanied by a smile that seemed to say that he knew just how much it had cost Taggart not to say something else, but it wasn't a mean smile by any stretch of the imagination. If anything I got the feeling that Isaac himself was surprised that he'd managed to accomplish so much with such a dangerous, disparate group.
"Still, I have two concerns that must be addressed if we're going to be able to work together."
Isaac waved for Taggart to go on.
"It is vitally important that news of this operation not leak out to the Coun'hij. If your group is as democratic as you say it is, then you're not going to be withholding any information from any of your people. Surely you can see my concerns from a security standpoint with that arrangement…"
"Of course, that is completely understandable. All I can say is that while there isn't any guarantee when it comes to these kinds of things, we've done everything we could to limit our exposure generally. Before we leave, each of my people will confirm to at least two other people that they won't share this information with anyone outside of our group, and that they will only do so in person after getting the same kind of promise from whomever they share the information with."
"That's not bad, but a ritual promise that bound their beast to enforcing the oath would be even better."
Isaac actually chuckled. "It would, but that isn't the kind of thing I can get away with asking. Most of the wolves and hybrids in our group have grown to love the freedom of not answering to a central authority. I'm afraid this is the best I can hope to get out of them. What was your second concern?"
Taggart didn't exactly look happy about Isaac's response, but apparently he decided it was satisfactory enough to move on to his second point.
"You must have at least some estimate of how much help your people might offer. If we're going to have any hope of pulling this off then I need—we need—to start planning today."
"Possibly as few as five or six, possibly as many as two or three dozen, but plan as though there will be twelve or thirteen of us. It's going to take much more than just a few years before most of the dispossessed will trust each other enough to fight for a cause."
Some of the air seemed to leak out of Taggart. "It's not enough. Even with fourteen hybrids we'd still be unlikely to win, not against the kinds of animals that the Coun'hij uses as enforcers. Even if they don't have someone really scary along like Puppeteer or Oblivion we still would be stupid to go in without more of a numerical advantage than that."
Isaac seemed to be debating his response, but before he could decide between whatever options he was considering one of the guys to his left stood and walked over to his side.
"It's okay, Isaac. You can tell him."
I felt Dominic go tense next to me, but I was too busy wondering why I hadn't noticed the guy next to Isaac before now. He didn't look like the others. They were hard men who looked like they were in their late thirties or early forties, which probably meant that they'd lived for more than a century already. He looked like he was all of fifteen.
"This is Heath and he's the real reason that our little group isn't constantly at each other's throats."
Isaac's words were obviously making Heath extremely uncomfortable. Heath looked like some painter's attempt at bringing an angel to life. He had straight blond hair that framed a face that didn't seem to have even the tiniest trace of guile, and his skin was as flawless as an alabaster doll.
He didn't have the massive shoulders of most of the rest of the guys, Isaac included. He didn't have any excess body fat on him, but he didn't look athletic. He looked like your best friend's kid brother, the one that you always had to protect from the neighborhood bullies.
"That's not true, Isaac. You're the one who makes all of this work. Everyone looks up to you or at least respects you."
The words had the feel of an argument that had been voiced frequently already, but there wasn't any heat to them.
Isaac smiled at Heath and then looked back at Taggart. "Even before I got exiled from Sanctuary I'd read enough books to realize that the biggest threat to any society, to any civilization, isn't the petty crooks or the second-tier criminals. The biggest threat is the hum
an equivalent to an apex predator.
"The humans deal with that by making their own apex predators. They take normal men and women and put them in the military and teach them honor and duty before they unlock their ability to kill. Of course, that would never work for us. Our apex predators are born instead of being made."
"Heath is your apex predator." It was a statement rather than a question, and there was a kind of hushed reverence to Taggart's voice that I'd never heard out of him before.
"Indeed, he is. Heath is one of those rare hybrids with an ability. He can manipulate what people see. He's been standing there with the rest of the guys the whole time, but you didn't see him there because he didn't let you see him."
"You knew all along that the wolves would support you."
I was the last person who should be interjecting something into the conversation. I wasn't a hybrid, I couldn't even ante up for the game that Isaac and Taggart were playing, but I couldn't help myself.
Luckily Isaac just smiled at me. "Indeed, I did. The wolves had the most to gain from civilization. I figured I could get the second-tier hybrids to see the benefits as well. They were like me, predators but not apex predators. Whatever we were going to lose out on because we couldn't prey on the wolves would be more than made up for by the fact that we wouldn't have the first-tier hybrids preying on us.
"The first-tier hybrids were the problem just like in any other society. Nobody was preying on them. They had to worry about conflict with each other, but by and large they just stayed in their own territories. From a purely material perspective they wouldn't gain anything by following my rules."
Heath spoke up again. "Only I didn't want money or human women. I just wanted a home and someone I knew I could trust to watch my back. I've been on my own for years already and I spent a lot of time at the bottom of the food chain before I finally became a hybrid and manifested a power. I've had enough sleeping with one eye open to last me for a lifetime. I'm in."
Even I knew that meant we had a chance of pulling this off, and knots of tension that I hadn't even realized had been paining me unknotted in my neck and shoulders. The Coun'hij enforcers couldn't kill, couldn't even fight, people that they couldn't see.
