Shattered (8 page)

There was a
disturbing scent that always seemed to be just this side of
undetectable, a scent that she almost recognized, a scent that
somehow signified danger to her beast. Addison wasn't one of those
high-and-mighty dominant hybrids, but that didn't mean that she
didn't understand her duty as one of the moonborn.

Humans were
singularly unequipped to deal with most of the things that went bump
in the night. All their technology and weapons hadn't changed that
despite the last thousand years of innovation. It didn't matter how
big of a bomb you could build when the enemy was indistinguishable
from your own people. It didn't matter how good your cameras were
when the bad guys were living inside of your major cities, safely
anonymous among the masses of the people just like you.

For thousands
of years it had been wolves like Addison who had protected the
humans. The hybrids were usually at the forefront of the fighting,
but the wolves were the glue that held everything together. The
strongest hybrid could be defeated if taken by surprise or
outnumbered. It was the wolves who kept that from happening, the
wolves who served as the pack's eyes, ears and noses.

Families like
the Graves family had a long, proud history of producing hybrids, but
Addison belonged to a bloodline that had produced more than two
thousand years of unsung heroes. Wolves who had quietly gone about
doing the jobs that the hybrids refused to do, wolves who'd kept
their hybrid masters from being killed time and time again.

Addison's
people had developed a kind of instinct for being able to tell when
something was about to go pear-shaped and that instinct had started
screaming at her almost as soon as she'd arrived in LA. She'd left
half a dozen messages for James, but so far he'd just blown her off.

He'd done so
politely—respectfully even—but he'd refused to believe
that his mother might be onto something—that she was anything
more than just a scared old woman. James was a good boy, remarkably
good when you considered the fact that he was a hybrid and that he'd
fallen in with the likes of Alec Graves, but a good upbringing only
saw you so far.

Addison turned
off of the main street and into the warren of concrete and steel that
was her latest home. The projects were supposed to be filled on the
basis of need, but whenever you put something out there below market
price it seemed like the vultures came out to try and steal as much
as they could before the benefits percolated down to the poor people
who actually needed the help.

Perkins was a
kind of government slum lord. He'd spent ten years working for the
various housing assistance programs in LA, and during that time he'd
managed to doctor the paperwork of hundreds of housing recipients. A
little creative filing and judicious use of whiteout had turned
eighty-year-old grandmas on their deathbeds into twenty-something
mothers who would continue to draw benefits until long after Perkins
was dead and gone.

Addison was
merely one more in a long line of residents who paid Perkins for the
chance to stay in the projects. It was theft on a grand scale, and it
turned Addison's stomach to see the public defrauded in such a
manner, but she had no way of getting at Perkins, not without
creating the kind of ruckus that would eventually draw the Coun'hij
down on her.

Still, there
was an addictive quality to the freedom that she'd experienced since
fleeing from Sanctuary. She'd spent her entire life under the thumb
of the dominants of the pack, convinced that being a combination
servant and whipping girl was a small price to pay for the safety of
the pack.

It was only now
that she realized just how wrong she'd been. She had every intention
of getting her hands on some of the tithe Alec had stolen from his
father and then disappearing forever, preferably with James, but by
herself if that was what was required.

An elusive
scent tickled the back of her throat as she passed the first of the
twenty-five-story buildings of her development. It was familiar in
ways that she couldn't quite place. It had something in common with
the smell that had been putting her hackles up since the day she'd
arrived, but it wasn't quite the same.

Addison turned
into the wind, seeking the source of the smell, but all she caught
was a flash of movement as someone disappeared into a shop across the
block. Addison was left with an impression of pasty white skin, but
little else. She filed the tidbit of information away, but there
wasn't anything else she could do about it right then, not without
acting out of character and potentially drawing unwanted attention to
herself.

Turning back
towards her building was one of the harder things she'd ever done,
but once she got moving it got easier. By the time she arrived at the
front door she'd made the decision that she'd been putting off for
the last several days.

There was
something bad going on in this part of Los Angeles, but it wasn't the
kind of thing that she could stop all by herself. She had a car
sitting in long-term parking an hour's bus ride north of her
apartment. It was too late to start off on that kind of trip now, but
she would pack up the couple of things that she didn't want to leave
behind and get started first thing tomorrow morning.

She had enough
cash left over from what James had given her to establish herself in
a new place, so that was what she would do. She'd thought that the
inner city was the best place to lose herself, but she could see now
that she'd been wrong. The suburbs were filled with bored housewives
with nothing better to do than spy on each other, but that was a
lesser danger than living in the burnt-out remains of a neighborhood
that had survived more than three decades of constant turf warfare.

Addison had
been shaken down for protection money on her second day in her
apartment and then again a week later. At the current rate they were
charging for 'protection' she would be too poor to move again
sometime in the next two months.

The door to
Addison's building was supposed to lock so that the residents would
have at least a basic level of security, but someone had forced it
open, probably years ago. Now it hung half-open all of the time so
that gang bangers, crackheads and prostitutes could come and go at
will.

The walls were
covered with tags, mostly black permanent marker, but some
enterprising artist had done a massive gang sign on one wall with red
and black spray paint. The only common resource in the entire
building that still functioned was the elevator and that was simply
because even delinquents hated climbing stairs.

The smell was
back in the lobby of the building—not the one that she'd just
scented outside, the one that had been bothering her for days.
Unfortunately she couldn't get any better of a handle on what she was
smelling because it was mostly being masked by the sickly sweet smell
of pot.

Several
someones were moving around in one of the hallways on the other side
of the elevator. Addison pushed the call button and hoped the smokers
would stay in the other hall until after she'd made it safely back up
to her apartment and behind the five different deadbolt locks
securing her door.

Just as the
elevator arrived and the doors started opening, a group of four
poorly-dressed young men came out of the hallway and gathered a
couple of feet away from her. They were all obviously high. The one
on the right was definitely the pot smoker—he seemed to find
everything quite hilarious—but the others had eyes that were
too-bright and seemed to be moving with too much jerky speed to not
be high on something else.

Addison pushed
her cart into the elevator and had to suppress a grimace as all four
teenagers crowded into the elevator behind her. She pushed the button
for the eleventh floor, but none of the boys pushed any of the other
buttons.

It wasn't until
the doors had closed that she realized that the disturbing smell, the
one that had been mostly covered up by the smell of pot, was coming
from the boys. Only it wasn't anything that they were wearing, it was
coming out of their pores.

Addison's
stomach knotted up tighter and tighter as the seconds crawled by. If
her new suspicion was correct, then she was in a lot more trouble
than she'd realized. It wasn't a matter of just overwhelming a few
teenagers or her cover getting blown anymore. She needed to get out
of town as soon as possible and make sure that James and Alec
understood the full extent of her suspicions.

None of the
boys hassled her on the way up to her floor. One of them even held
the doors for her so she could get her cart up over the two-inch lip
created by the elevator's stubborn refusal to stop even with the
floor.

The smell of
pot momentarily crested to the point that it wiped out every other
smell as the weed smoker moved closer to her, but she didn't think
anything of it until it was too late.

One second she
was struggling with her cart and then in the next she had a
handkerchief over her mouth and she was breathing in something that
burned her lungs. Addison managed to get an elbow into the boy on her
right, the one who had been holding the doors open, but even that
took more out of her than it should have.

The urge to
sleep was sudden and overwhelming. Addison tried to stomp down on the
instep of the pothead who had dosed her with the chloroform, but her
limbs didn't want to cooperate. She was too clumsy and exhausted; she
collapsed into the arms of the boys who'd been waiting to catch her.

"This
better be the right hag. I think she might have busted one of my
ribs. Are you sure this is the right one?"

"Yeah,
Slash and the boss were watching her the whole way back from the
grocery store."

"Why does
he want her again? She doesn't seem special."

"I don't
know. He said something about Perkins tipping him off when she moved
in and then she didn't act right when he shook her down last week. He
thinks she's got access to more money than she should have."

Addison's
thoughts were slow and clunky. She wanted to open her eyes, but they
were just too heavy. If she'd been a human, a dose that size would
have put her under, but her shape shifter metabolism had been just
strong enough to keep her from completely losing consciousness.

Unfortunately
it hadn't been up to the task of keeping her in fighting condition,
and even now her mind was spinning like a stripped cog. She'd tried
so hard to stay in character when they'd shaken her down, but
apparently she'd misjudged just exactly how much money someone in the
projects would have had.

The elevator
had started back down towards the ground floor at some point while
she'd been trying to follow the gang members' conversations. That
somehow didn't seem as important as the fact that Addison didn't know
what had happened to her cart.

Momentarily
forgetting that she was supposed to be pretending to be completely
unconscious, she tried to ask about the cart, but the words just
wouldn't come. All she managed to do was open her mouth a fraction of
an inch, which was interesting only because it meant that some of her
breath was tickling her lips.

The sensation
made her want to smile, but her face wasn't responding to her will.
About the third time she tried unsuccessfully to smile, the elevator
made it to the bottom floor and ground to a halt. A second later the
door opened and Addison no longer felt like smiling.

This close
there was no mistaking what was waiting for them just outside the
elevator, and that was the one smell guaranteed to sober her up in a
hurry. Addison still couldn't move on her own, so there wasn't any
visible change, but inside she was screaming.

The scents were
opposite sides of the same coin. It was impossible, but there was no
arguing with her nose now. She was in trouble and it was very
unlikely that she was ever going to see her son again.

Adriana Paige
Marauder's Gas Station
Central Wyoming

I woke more
exhausted than I had in a really long time, but that was nothing
compared to the black hole sitting in the spot that was supposed to
house my stomach.

There were
still a lot of differences between my gift and Taggart's, but there
was one thing that we'd long since figured out. My gift used my own
body as a power source. Specifically, whatever fat cells I had
managed to accumulate by the time that I went to sleep.

I was on a
high-calorie, high-fat diet now, which had been enough to fill me
back out a little, but I still didn't have enough physical reserves
to pull the kind of stunt that I'd pulled with Tristan and Cindi on a
regular basis.

I grabbed a
handful of penny candies out of the stash that I'd commandeered from
the store and started wolfing them down while I pulled up my white
tank top so I could assess the damage. It wasn't good. I'd looked
worse in the past, but not by much. It meant that I didn't have any
kind of safety margin if Taggart needed me to help with something.

I could always
try to get an extra few hundred calories down me over the course of
the day, but I didn't like doing that. There was a practical limit to
how much I could physically fit inside of my stomach, and I didn't
like going around all day feeling like I was going to burst.

Chastising
myself wasn't going to make any kind of difference, not in the long
run, but I resolved once again to be more careful about using my
powers. Taggart was still doing most of the heavy lifting when it
came to doing reconnaissance on the Coun'hij, but things were getting
more dangerous for him lately. More and more of his contacts were
being found out by Kaleb and the others, and neither of us had
forgotten about the red-furred hybrid who had shown up the first time
that I'd followed Taggart to one of his meets.