by Dean Murray
"You mean those kinds of people just hang out a shingle and teach whoever?"
Ash's chuckle was a dry thing, but I took it as a good sign.
"No, those kinds of people don't just teach whoever. Most of the people I ran into were complete hacks, frauds even. But I kept my ears open and asked a lot of questions. After they had my money most of them could be persuaded to recommend other places I should go for more training. Eventually that chain led up to people who really were what I was looking for."
"Wow, what was the training like?"
I was deciding that Ash's shrugs were a language unto themselves. This one almost seemed to say he didn't want to brag but he'd talk if I pressed. I waited and he finally continued.
"It was tough. They didn't do some of the extreme stuff they'd gone through because it had just been designed to test loyalty. They'd satisfied themselves that I wasn't some kind of psychotic killer, so they mostly just passed on information and skills. How to evade pursuit, use pistols, knives, unarmed combat, surveillance, tailing, that kind of thing."
I once again felt a bit like I'd just stepped into a James Bond movie.
"So why did you think you needed all of that training? I mean the other wolves didn't need it, right?"
"What makes you think that the other wolves don't get similar training?"
That one stumped me for a minute. I had to think for a minute or two about what I knew and which pieces had pointed me in the direction of believing Ash wasn't typical.
"Well, if that had been the case then I would have expected you would have had the training before you left, or at least had been able to get in with the right kind of people quickly once you did leave."
"Not bad. You're right, most wolves don't get any of that kind of training."
"So, if most wolves don't, why did you?"
Ash shifted lanes to pass someone and then took a deep breath.
"I'm maybe the weakest wolf currently alive. I'm faster and stronger than most regular humans, but I'm practically a child next to even a regular wolf, let alone a hybrid."
"A…hybrid?"
"Yeah. Most wolves just have two shapes. Human and wolf. The strongest, most powerful ones have a third shape, a kind of big wolf-man."
"So you're not the strongest and fastest…I'm not following why that matters so much, but I can tell that it's somehow important."
Ash's knuckles went white on the steering wheel. For a minute I thought maybe he wasn't going to answer me.
"Being a shape shifter is more than just being able to change shapes. We get urges, almost compulsions that are hard not to act on. Some of us actually believe that we have a separate…being inside of us. They call it their beast and struggle not to be as savage as real animals."
I put my hand on his arm. It was a silly gesture, but it was the only thing I could think of to do and it seemed to calm him down.
"Inside of a pack everything is about who's strongest. The weakest members of the pack have to cater to the whims of the strongest. You either bend to what they want or you're beaten, or worse."
"So you left."
"Yes. I won't be anyone's slave, but I knew that I wasn't strong enough to stand up to the alphas in my pack. If I hadn't gotten out when I did they would have killed me. You either break or die."
"What about your parents? Surely they could have done something to help protect you."
Ash shook his head. "Once upon a time my family was powerful. Not just money, they were some of the most dangerous hybrids around. Our pack held a huge chunk of the southern border. We were part of the key forces that were responsible for stopping southern scum like Anton in the last war."
I hadn't realized how much my questions were going to cost Ash to answer, but I knew that leaving the rest of the story untold would be wrong. I cared about what had happened to bring him to where he was now and it was important that he understand how much I cared.
"What happened?"
"Peace happened. For centuries the northern wolves and the southern cats were locked at each other's throats. The cats are usually individually stronger, but the wolves have always been better at working together."
Things were starting to make sense to me. Anton had shaken off bullets, stabbings, you name it, and come after us with hardly a pause. Ash had healed quickly and I knew he was fast, but even with a gun he seemed outclassed when he went up against Anton.
"We lived for centuries with the barbarians always just outside the gates, but mostly it would be a minor cat lord who tested our mettle. Finally a single southerner mustered nearly all of his kind into a single force and really pushed. The wolves had been more of a confederation than anything up to that point. The system worked because most of the strongest wolves had gone down to the border to help resist cat incursions."
"Why?"
"Partly civic duty. The areas of the south that were ruled directly by shape shifters have always been the absolute worst cesspools. We knew that we were the only thing keeping civilization from crumbling under the onslaught. Partly though it was just to prove ourselves. The strongest of us would go down to the border and cover themselves in glory."
"Confederations don't usually work that well against a large external threat."
Ash nodded. "You're right. If we'd stayed as we were, we wouldn't have survived. Dozens of small packs, each loosely allied with larger packs. Instead one of the largest stepped forward to lead in the face of the greatest threat we'd ever known, and most of the rest of us flocked to them."
"Most?"
The bitter laugh was back.
"Not my family. We led one of the largest packs and we never really trusted our new 'king.' We ultimately bowed to the pressures brought to bear on us, but we never forgot that slightly different events could have left us with the crown instead of them."
"What happened after you threw the southerners back?"
"We didn't just throw them back. We hounded them well into South America, killing every one of them we could find. Packs of hybrids assassinated the strongest of the cats, decimating the leadership they'd spent nearly a century hammering into place. When we finally turned back and headed for home we'd killed hundreds of cats and the few who survived were left to fight amongst themselves."
"Then what happened?"
Ash's hands went so white that I half worried he was going to rip the steering wheel from the column.
"Our people aren't well suited to peace. We should have turned east and started cleaning out the vampires, but at the time there weren't that many people in the west, not enough really to support a large population of vampires. The east was different. The vampires largely didn't know of our existence. If we'd openly gone to war against them that would have all changed."
"So you turned on each other instead?"
It was the logical course of events given everything he'd said so far, but part of me winced a little when he nodded.
"Yes. We turned on each other, but not in the way that anyone expected. The king was focused on trying to keep whole packs from breaking away. He never anticipated that some of the most powerful hybrids, individuals from widely dispersed packs, would combine against him. The fighting was long and bloody and my ancestors chose not to intervene. We were jealous of the king's power and thought that his defeat would restore the old order."
I'd let my hand slide away from his arm, but as his voice caught again I wished I'd left it there, that I had a way to comfort him.
"We were fatally wrong. We watched while the rogue hybrids tore through dozens of the king's people and when the dust settled, instead of both sides being worn down in the conflict, the rogues, the Coun'hij, had decimated the old order with relatively few losses of their own."
"And then they turned on your people?"
"In a way. They didn't get their hands dirty. A number of other influential packs had likewise decided to sit the conflict out and the Coun'hij knew that they couldn't stand off our entire race. Instead of coming out openly a
gainst us, they informed a group of vampires of our existence. In a single night the bloodsucking parasites killed every dominant member of the pack. There was no proof, but as one pack after another was torn apart it became obvious that the Coun'hij had to be behind it. Only by then it was too late. Our pack was a shadow of what it had been, our race was ruled by a corrupt group of sadists and there was nobody strong enough to contest their will."
Chapter 9
I'd wanted to continue talking, but I'd sensed that Ash was talked out after relating the history of how his family had fallen from power. I still had so many questions, but I'd bitten my tongue and managed not to pester him.
Rather than stopping for the night as it started to get dark, Ash had indicated that we were close enough to our destination that a few more hours of driving would see us there and offered to just keep driving.
I agreed readily. It wasn't that I wasn't looking forward to a shower and a real bed rather than the SUV passenger seat, I'd just realized that another night in a motel was probably going to be torture. I was attracted to Ash, no question there. The more I got to know him, the more powerful the attraction became. Hopefully when we got to his place, our apparent destination, there would be a little more space. I needed some room if I was going to avoid throwing myself at him. I got the definite feeling that me coming on too strong was likely to ruin everything, which was the last thing I wanted.
Ash apparently counted hours differently than the rest of the world. I managed to make it until 3 a.m. before falling asleep, Ash never yawned once. My last thought before I finally closed my eyes and let sleep take me was that my next series of questions would revolve around just exactly what benefits he got out of being a shape shifter other than strength and speed.
I must have been more exhausted than I'd realized because I don't remember us arriving or him carrying me into the house. I woke up in a twin bed in an honest-to-goodness log cabin.
Don't get me wrong, it was a modern kind of house. The bedroom I was in had electrical outlets and the kind of thick, deep carpet that just asks for you to walk barefoot around the house. That being said, I could see the horizontally-positioned logs that made up all of the walls around me.
Other than the almost sinfully rich carpet, the bedroom was fairly Spartan. There was a bathroom off to my left, a side table with a lamp and a simple chair next to what looked like a walk-in closet. No books, no T.V., nothing that really said 'I live here, this is my stuff.'
Obviously a guest bedroom. The only real oddity about the room was the thick, blackout curtains that were obviously designed to stop any light from getting out or in. It was the kind of thing you expected to see for someone that worked nights and needed to sleep during the day, but it somehow wasn't something I'd expected out of Ash.
Then again I didn't really know what to expect when it came to Ash. I finally slid out of bed and onto the carpet, which was every bit as nice as I'd suspected it would be. I was dressed still in the clothes I'd been wearing the night before and what I really wanted was a shower, but it seemed prudent to go explore my new surroundings first.
My bedroom opened into a large living room type area. I guess I hadn't ever realized that log cabins could come in two-story versions, but this one certainly did. The living room was two stories tall and had an incredible number of windows that faced some kind of large hill, which wasn't exactly the view I would have picked, but was still fairly picturesque.
The living room opened right into the kitchen which was one of those modern, stainless steel jobs which I wouldn't have expected to work so well in a log cabin, but somehow everything went very well together. It was almost…minimalist luxury. Ash hadn't cluttered the house with anything that didn't serve a purpose, but the things he did have were the kind of top-quality items that the rich bought just to show off their money.
I was still taking in the room when Ash quietly appeared, slipping into the living room from another adjoining room.
"You slept OK then?"
"Yes. So this is your place?"
"One of them. Really, this is the one I think of as home. I have a couple of unobtrusive places in a couple of cities and a refuge of last resort up in Alaska, but this is where I spend most of my time."
"Am I allowed to ask where we are?"
"Of course. You're not my captive. We're in Idaho, a stone's throw from the border with Montana. The nearest town is more than an hour that way, but unless you know the way out and have a fairly sturdy vehicle you're probably better off just opting for a two-day hike."
"So we're even more in the middle of nowhere than I was at home. How do you even get electricity out here?"
"There is a wind farm ten miles from here. It was all funded through one of the shell corporations that I own. The power lines from the wind farm take an odd course to hook into the main grid and actually come within a mile of here. I ran the cables between here and there myself."
"What do you do when it's not windy?"
"I've got a very deep well and a very large water tank. The well is always running, filling up the water tank. When the wind farm stops producing power, the pumps stop pulling water up from the well. Instead the water drives water turbines which power the house."
"I guess it's hard to get much more 'off the grid' than that."
"Yeah. I've taken similar kinds of precautions around internet access. I need to be able to monitor various projects and investments, but I've done everything I could to make this house as untraceable as possible."
It was like something out of a spy movie, but I couldn't argue with the need, not after running from Anton for so long. Ash was scary good at what he did, but sometimes there was no option but to run, and you could only run for so long before you needed some kind of safe house.
"So what happens next?"
Ash shrugged. "Breakfast for you while I catch up on a couple of things. After that? Well, we're as safe as we're going to get here, so it's pretty much your call. You can watch internet TV, read, whatever."
Books. Wow, had I ever missed reading. That wasn't what I'd meant though.
"That all sounds nice, but I mean where do we…I go from here? I can't really just go back to high school and my job at the TacoHut."
Ash went silent for a moment and then shook his head. "No, you can't go back to any of that. Assuming that Anton doesn't run into someone bigger and meaner than him, he'll have nothing but time on his hands. I fully expect that he'll check back on your hometown from time to time hoping that you've finally gone back."
"So what does a high school dropout on the run from a South American were-cat do with the rest of her life?"
Ash didn't seem to want to look at me. It felt like a bad sign.
"You've got a lot of options. There isn't anything we can do immediately, but I can have fake IDs made up for you. With enough time we can construct a full-blown alternate identity complete with a real history behind it. It won't ever be perfect. You wouldn't want to use it to try and get a job with the FBI or anything, but it would serve for most things. We could find you a new place to live and I could set you up with an income stream—probably some sort of trust fund."
It was the kind of thing most people would have jumped at. He hadn't explicitly said I'd be rich, but he was still more or less telling me that he'd make all of my problems go away. It was a fairytale kind of solution, but it wasn't me. I'd worked extremely hard to make it on my own. All of that had just gone out the door, but I still wanted to be able to look back in five years and feel like everything hadn't just been handed to me. Besides, call me crazy, but I wasn't willing to let him just vanish on me like that. His world scared the crap out of me, but I was pretty sure that being with him would offset some of that.
"Wow, that's really generous of you, but you don't owe me anything like that. You wouldn't have been through any of this if you hadn't saved my life. I guess if I had the ability to choose, I'd like an option that didn't exile me completely from you…your life. Knowing th
at there was so much going on beneath the surface of things but never being in the know on what was really happening would kill me if I tried to go back to something like a normal life."
For a second it seemed like I hadn't covered my slipup well enough, but finally Ash nodded.
"So a solution that lets you still be part of this world, but one that doesn't put you in as much danger as you've faced the last few days."
"Yeah. I mean if that's possible."
"You're sure about this?"
I suddenly wanted to back out. Ash wasn't the kind to take a job lightly. If he was committed to giving me a chance to survive in his world, he was going to do everything short of killing me to get me there. Only my desire to remain around Ash was sufficient to make me nod.
"OK. Get yourself some breakfast. You're going to need it."
**
Ash hadn't been kidding. We started with flexibility and strength training. He would have picked endurance training first, but I didn't have proper shoes for a leisurely jog through the mountains.
Once I was too sweaty and exhausted to continue he sat me down and started in on the non-physical aspects of my training. I learned the moving parts of a firearm, how to disassemble and clean one, and then we started in on how to set up and maintain a safe house in urbanized environments.
By the time the sun set my body was exhausted and my mind felt like all of the knowledge he'd been trying to pour into it was just sloshing around rather than sticking. The only thing that had kept me going all day had been a desire to keep his respect, and the hope that I'd get time to really talk to him once he released me for the day.
Instead I shoveled food into my mouth and then nearly fell asleep before he could help me back into the guest bedroom. I had a brief moment before I nodded off to hope that tomorrow would be better.
The next day was both better and worse. I was already sore and not at all happy to hear his prediction that I'd feel even worse the next day. Still, he didn't push me physically and when we stopped for lunch I was actually still with it enough to start getting in some of my questions.
