Shattered (3 page)

"So me
saying that you had no concept of what it would be like to lose a
child pushed you over the edge."

"I'm
afraid so. I ask your forgiveness, Alec. I should not have let my
demons come out like that, not in a situation already so fraught with
peril."

I shrugged my
massive hybrid shoulders. "That's part and parcel of being one
of the moonborn. Our demons seem more persistent than most. At least
something good came out of it all. I think I finally understand what
you were trying to teach me about committing to an attack rather than
thinking so much in terms of feints and misdirection."

"Indeed, I
was quite pleased with the quality of your last attack. It was well
executed and you showed no signs of hesitation. You've taken a
significant step forward. Time will see your skills continue to
improve, but the basics of your technique are already good. From here
you'll find that you focus more on reading your opponent so that you
can properly pick the right moment to commit."

I nodded and
turned to put my edged sword away, but Carson cleared his throat.

"There was
more than one thing accomplished today, Alec. Even through my rage, I
was still testing you. I never intended to push you so far, but there
at the end I was able to gain an important insight into who you are."

Now it was my
turn to feel discomfort at where the conversation was headed. "I'm
glad that I didn't act on the desire to try to take you with me. It
would have been a waste for both of us to die when neither of us
really wanted that particular fight."

"Indeed,
that would have been a tragedy, but as far as you knew at the time,
the contest was deadly serious. That isn't the reason that you
forbore from trying to kill me."

"No,
you're right. I didn't know that at the time. I didn't go after you
because I knew that people were depending on me. The odds that I'd be
able to make much of a difference as a submissive aren't very good,
but there's still a chance and I owe it to everyone who's risked so
much for me already to keep going as long as there is even the
smallest chance that I could break free eventually and go back to
fighting Kaleb and the rest."

"And with
that we return full circle. I do understand your concerns, Alec, but
I've seen just how thin the line is between civilization and anarchy.
The humans are ill-prepared to deal with the things that we've kept
hidden from them for so long. Out of all the major powers, we are the
only race that has any interest in the humans as anything other than
slaves and food. The jaguars are reproducing more quickly than we
are, and since the vampires and werewolves spread by way of a virus
there isn't any practical limit to how fast their population could
explode. We wolves are the only thing preventing the United States
from turning into something like Europe and Asia."

I shuddered.
There wasn't much reliable information coming across the Atlantic,
but everything pointed to the vampires and werewolves being locked in
a shadow war that was always one slip away from making front-page
news.

"I don't
want that any more than you do, Carson, but I can't just leave the
Coun'hij untouched and go after the other threats. They'd constantly
be taking potshots at me. Eventually they'd get lucky and it would be
game over."

Carson nodded
with a considering air about him. "What if there was a way to
make it so that the Coun'hij couldn't find you? What if there was a
way to guarantee your safety from the Coun'hij while you carried on
your battle against the vampires and the werewolves?"

"So now
we're going to explore hypotheticals?"

"Please,
Alec, humor me."

"I don't
know for sure, Carson, but it feels like that doesn't drastically
change things. The Coun'hij isn't just some kind of benign
dictatorship. They are killing wolves and hybrids we're going to need
in order to fight off the other threats. The best I could say is that
if there was a way to shield my people from the Coun'hij then I would
be more careful with my target selection. I'd make even more effort
to make sure that I wasn't killing the people who are just helping
the Coun'hij because they are scared."

Carson
considered my words for nearly a full minute. "I think that
might be enough of a common ground for us to continue to work
together, Alec."

"I hope
so, Carson. I could really use your help. You and your friends could
make a big difference with regards to whether or not this war is
winnable."

"And yet
even if you knew that the war wasn't winnable you would still fight
it, wouldn't you?"

"Yeah, I
guess I would. I won't continue to prop up Kaleb and the rest.
Passively going along with them while knowing that they were
massacring innocents wouldn't be as bad as killing those innocents
myself, but it would still be wrong."

Carson's swords
disappeared into the heavy bag he used to transport them, and then he
looked up at me with a sad smile. "You hold yourself to a much
higher standard than you do your potential subjects."

I shrugged
uncomfortably and then shifted back to human form a second after he
did. I knew that there were some logical holes in my arguments that
couldn't be fully explained away by the fact that most of the
moonborn didn't know the full extent of the Coun'hij's crimes, but
that didn't mean I was completely ready to face the roots of those
inconsistencies.

Carson adjusted
his ha'bit, which he'd taken to wearing once we'd started working
together, and then picked up his bag and started down the trail that
led back to the cabin. I didn't follow, and he stopped after only a
couple of steps.

"I'm sorry
for your loss, Carson. I can't imagine what that must have felt like,
and I'm sorry that I said what I said earlier. The closest thing I
can think of is what I would have felt like if I'd had to watch
Rachel die, and I'm pretty sure that still wouldn't have been as bad
as what you went through."

Carson didn't
turn back to look at me, and for several seconds he didn't respond.
When he did finally acknowledge my words, it was with a ragged sigh
that contained more hurt than I'd known was possible for such a
simple gesture.

"It
happened almost a year ago, but I've thought about her every single
day since she died. She was the same age as you and your friends, in
fact that girl who was with Taggart, Adri, reminded me a lot of my
daughter."

I opened my
mouth hoping that something suitably comforting would come out, but
before I could find the right words, the sound of Brindi hurrying
back precluded any kind of further conversation.

"Alec,
come quick. It's James, something happened to his mother."

Adriana Paige
Marauder's Gas Station
Central Wyoming

A month ago I
would have said that the underground bunker where Taggart and I had
both nearly died couldn't ever feel like home, but Isaac and
Dominic's group had worked miracles in just the week that they'd been
here.

The effects of
our failed attempt at saving Agony were still coming home to roost in
ways that I hadn't anticipated when we first started talking about
the best way to break him out.

If we'd killed
all of Agony's guards then Isaac and the rest could have snuck back
to their normal territory and probably been fine. Instead, Brandon
and a few others had made it away, which meant that Isaac and likely
most of the rest of his people had been recognized. Dominic had kept
a low enough profile that the Coun'hij probably didn't know anything
about her, but the rest of Isaac's people were all known quantities.
If they went back to the territory that they'd been calling home for
the last few years then they wouldn't survive the month.

The Coun'hij
didn't exactly have a reputation for being forgiving and after losing
so many they would make killing everyone who had helped us their top
priority. Even if the Coun'hij was too busy to slap us down, I was
pretty sure that Brandon would take it upon himself to kill everyone
who had seen him nearly defeated and he was more than capable of
killing Isaac's people off three or four at a time.

Alec, Carson
and Agony had come very close to fighting him to a standstill, but
two of them had been wielding massive swords at the time. Even Heath,
the most deadly out of all of Isaac's people, couldn't hope to beat
Brandon, so instead they'd all agreed to come back to the bunker that
Taggart and I had commandeered from the vampires who had tried to
kill us just days before.

The bunker
itself was mostly just concrete and steel, but the interior had
suffered some significant fire damage from the fight between Taggart
and the vampire pyromancer that had been running the show before we'd
arrived.

There hadn't
been time for Taggart and I to get the bunker cleaned up before we'd
left, but Isaac's people hadn't complained. Instead they'd just set
about cleaning up the wreckage with a determination that not even the
last few vampire corpses had been able to quench.

I had a
sneaking suspicion that Isaac was keeping everyone busy at least
partially to keep them all from fighting, but I wasn't going to
complain about that, not when the results were so spectacular.

By now,
anything that had been damaged by the fire had been pulled out and
some of the gold that we'd found in the armory had been cashed in to
replace most of the damaged fixtures. Now that his people had run out
of other things to do, Isaac had started working them in shifts to
excavate a large area that would eventually end up serving as a
second, attached bunker.

It was the kind
of massive undertaking that I wouldn't have even known how to start,
but Isaac acted like it was no big deal. One morning he came out of
his tiny private room with several rolls of paper containing the
beginnings of a plan that he'd no doubt spent days researching
online.

Conventional
wisdom would have said that construction on this scale was impossible
without heavy machinery which would have revealed the existence of
the bunker. Conventional wisdom hadn't seen what even a single hybrid
was capable of.

It was still
relatively slow going, but once they had the camouflage netting in
place to hide the dig site from any kind of overhead observation, it
was amazing what a few hybrids could do. Their claws were harder and
sharper than any tool we could have purchased and their enormous
strength meant that they were easily able to move around gigantic
loads of rock and dirt.

Taggart hadn't
been especially happy about the cash outlay involved or the frequent
trips that were made into town the first few days of the project, but
the results so far were nothing less than astonishing. Isaac had
found a machine shop to build several custom wheelbarrows that were
so large that no normal human could have hoped to move them around
once they were full of dirt, but which were perfectly sized for use
by hybrids.

Isaac and the
other hybrids used their claws to break up the hard-packed dirt, and
then they would move to another spot while the wolves shoveled the
loose dirt and rock into the wheelbarrows. Once a wheelbarrow was
full, one of the hybrids would take it out from under the netting and
dump the dirt somewhere out of the way.

We mostly
worked at night so that nobody would be able to see the hybrids
moving around outside of the netting, and everyone turned out most
nights unless they had some other duty that they'd been assigned. I'd
taken a couple of shifts in the pit, but I wasn't strong enough to
keep up with the amount of dirt that the wolves were moving around,
so mostly I ended up manning the gas station.

Between the
excavation project, keeping the gas station manned, and maintaining a
twenty-four-hour watch, everyone was staying pretty busy. Normal
humans probably would have mutinied under the same kind of workload,
but the fact that the shape shifters needed so much less sleep meant
that the schedule was almost perfect for Isaac's people.

He kept them
busy enough that nobody really had time to get into fights, but not
so busy that people felt like they never got to unwind. The shape
shifters slept in shifts, scattered among the various dormitories
inside the bunker. There were fewer of us than the vampires Taggart
had killed saving me, but shape shifters seemed to need more personal
space than the average human.

Everyone had
their own bed, but scheduling sleeping shifts like Isaac had done
meant that the dormitories were never packed too full, which I was
pretty sure went a long ways towards heading off the fights that
otherwise would have broken out.

Moving out all
of the dirt necessary to add such a large expansion onto the bunker
was going to take weeks still, but even before then, Isaac figured
that the shape shifters would be able to use the pit to spar and
train during the daylight hours, which I was pretty sure would let
the last of the residual tension in the group dissipate.

I looked at the
big digital clock on the wall inside of the convenience store for
what felt like the tenth time in the last five minutes, and then
sighed in relief when I heard someone moving around in the back room.
A couple of seconds later Dominic walked out into the main store
area.

"Hi, Adri.
Quiet shift?"

I nodded.
"Yeah, just like always. The second guy who stopped by for gas
pretty much cleaned us out of corn nuts though. I guess we should
probably start trying to figure out how to restock the stuff we're
running low on. I think I saw some invoices or something in the back
office, but I didn't want to go in and start poking around now and
then just have to start over tomorrow."

"Oh,
that's a good idea. I'm not sure that I would have thought to look
for invoices. Do you want me to start doing some kind of inventory of
what we have right now?"