Burned (18 page)

"Okay,
we'd best be going if we want to finish up and get me back to my
people before sunrise."

"What are
you talking about? I need to get you back to your people now and then
take up a position close enough nearby that I will be able to
intervene if something happens."

I cocked my
head to one side. "Is this the first time that you've been
loaned out as executive protection?"

"No. It
doesn't happen often—Ulrich doesn't like to leave Shawn
uncovered—but it has happened a couple of times before."

"Great—that
means that you've got a clear playbook that you're operating from.
I'd ask you if you're prohibited from assaulting your principal, but
it actually doesn't matter because I could drop you where you stand
without even working up a sweat."

"You could
try, but not even you are unbeatable, Mr. Graves. I'm unlike anyone
you've ever faced off against before now."

Nearly any
other shape shifter—hybrid or wolf—would have taken my
words as a sign that I was getting ready to fight them, but Vicki
seemed completely relaxed. I smiled at her, and then stepped
backwards as I cracked open the cover over the miniature black hole
that I carried around inside of me.

It wasn't
enough to force her to the ground—it probably wasn't even
enough for her to feel—but it had exactly the effect I'd been
hoping for.

"What did
you just do?"

Vicki's yell
was that of someone who was ready to rip out my throat, but she
looked like she wanted to turn and run away. She looked like someone
who'd just been deprived of one of their senses.

"I'm
making a point. I have no doubt that you're one of the single most
deadly hybrids within a thousand miles, but you're not ready to force
me into doing anything I don't want to do—not unless you're
ready to kill me, and even then your odds aren't great. I can take
your gift away at any moment, and there isn't anything you can do to
stop me."

"Okay,
you've made your point. Give it back to me. Now! Anything could
happen at any moment, and I'm defenseless to stop it."

I closed my
power up tightly again, and then gave her a sad smile. "Welcome
to the world the rest of us deal with, Vicki. Now please go get your
people. I'm going werewolf hunting, and I suspect that you're going
to want them along if you're really serious about keeping me alive."

It took us just
over half an hour to make it to the location that was most likely the
current home base of the werewolves. It was a town so small that it
didn't even show up on the map on my phone until I'd zoomed it in to
nearly its highest resolution setting.

Vicki didn't
speak to me even once on the drive there. One of her people drove the
SUV we were in, while the rest of her people had crowded into the
other two vehicles she'd rented at the airport.

Once we arrived
at our destination, Vicki dispatched her people with an expertise
that told me she wasn't any stranger to hunting werewolves—that
or she'd had some very good teachers over the years. Either way, I
was glad to have her along. It was like being accompanied by a
younger, more attractive version of Jack, a version that I suspected
was much more deadly than any three Jacks could have been.

Vicki's people
disappeared into the darkness and then it was just the two of us. She
threw me a challenging look, and then started stripping out of her
clothes. I shot her a wry smile and then turned around and started
pulling my clothes off. Unlike us, the Chicago pack still didn't use
ha'bits, and regardless of what the custom was in her pack, I wasn't
going to stand there and ogle her.

A few seconds
later we were both in hybrid form and moving through the darkness.
I'd felt a multi-pointed rush of power while we were shedding our
clothes, so I knew that her people were already ready to go. I
hadn't, however, anticipated what came next.

Vicki's people
didn't have radios or phones—not that they could have used them
while on four legs—but instead they reported in with pulses of
energy at regular intervals. It was genius.

We weren't
getting all that far away from each other, but wolves probably
couldn't have managed pulses strong enough to be felt this far out.
Luckily our team was comprised solely of hybrids, which meant that we
could communicate—at least in a rudimentary manner—by
pulses of energy, pulses that served as a kind of sonar to keep Vicki
and me apprised of exactly where the others were.

"This is
incredible."

Vicki shrugged
massive hybrid shoulders. She was darkly furred and only slightly
smaller than I was. She blended in almost perfectly with the night.

"Hunting
werewolves is prohibited, but we have the single largest pack in the
world, and Ulrich doesn't recruit just based on raw physical power.
We have some of the best tactical minds in the world, and we've had
decades to game out simulations. This wouldn't work against other
shape shifters, but we've had people pretend to be dispossessed for
long periods of time. They used this tactic to great effect against
werewolves."

I nodded. "Of
course. It probably doesn't even matter whether the werewolves can
feel the pulses. If it attracts their attention it's all the better
since we have to lure them out of hiding."

"Yes. My
people are all well-trained enough to maintain adequate separation
between us—if there are any werewolves out here they should
engage with our scouting elements well before they sense the rest of
us."

Vicki cut loose
with a surge of power to provide a reference point for our people,
and my beast tried to respond with a burst of his own, but I stopped
him. She looked over at me in surprise.

"You're
not what I expected, Mr. Graves. Most dominants struggle to avoid
responding in kind—it's part of why all our signals don't
attribute any meaning to a second pulse from the same location."

"I guess
I'll take that as a compliment since this isn't the first time that
we've met. I do try to keep people guessing. We're on the same side
for now though, so if there's something on your mind go ahead and
ask."

She waited
until we'd received the next round of pulses from the perimeter
before speaking again. "Why are we out here? You're leaving your
people exposed—every minute you're gone is a minute that they
have no real defense against the Coun'hij enforcers if they arrive in
overwhelming numbers."

That made me
chuckle. "It's like you're reading my mind. I was worrying about
the same thing on my way over to your motel, but the truth is that my
people are much better equipped for this battle than Shawn realizes.
As of right now, you and I are the fourth and fifth hybrids with
effective combat abilities down here on our side. Things might get a
little sticky without the two of us, but my people are far from
defenseless."

She nodded,
seemingly unsurprised. Maybe Shawn's intelligence was even more
comprehensive than I'd assumed it was.

"I ask
again—why? Just because your people might survive an attack
while you're away from them isn't a good reason to leave them to face
it without you."

"We're out
here for two reasons. Partly we're here because I want to see just
how good all of you are, but mostly we're here because I need to see
if my ability works on werewolves. I've tested it on vampires and
other shape shifters, but I've never taken it into battle against any
of the earthborn."

It went without
saying that testing her people was shorthand for testing her, but she
didn't seem angry about that—not even after having refused to
explain her power to me earlier.

"You'll be
able to make sure that your power doesn't interfere with mine if we
do get into a fight?"

I shrugged. "I
think so, but we won't know for sure until we try. My power will be
focused on an area of ground around the werewolf, but I've never done
any testing to determine how much bleed-through there is out into the
surrounding areas. Your power seems somewhat…fragile. It
didn't take much for me to short it out earlier. Based on that,
you're going to want to avoid committing too deeply until after
you've confirmed that I'm not going to cause you problems."

I'd seen Vicki
face down several times her number in hybrids from within her pack
and she'd never even blinked, but she was scared now. Even if she
hadn't showed fear earlier, I could smell it coming off of her now.
She was scared—terribly so—but she wasn't letting it
cripple her. I found myself suppressing flashes of envy. Shawn had an
incredible find in this one. Even without her ability she would have
made a fine bodyguard. With it, she was in a league all her own.

"Try to
give me a few seconds to try out my ability on any werewolves before
you kill them."

"That
would have been useful for my people to know before we sent them out
where we can't talk to them."

"I know. I
considered saying something, but I didn't want to make them hesitate.
I'd rather lose the opportunity to test out my new toy than have one
of them killed because they retreated when they should have
attacked."

I could smell
the approval coming off of her. It made me wonder if her other
assignments had been cavalier when it came to her life or the lives
of her people, but that was a question for another time. I felt three
pulses of power come from up ahead of us.

"You're
about to get your chance."

Even as the
words left her mouth, Vicki threw herself into motion, but I was only
half a step behind. She cut loose with three bursts of power before
we'd even managed to cover the first dozen feet, and I felt single
pulses of acknowledgments come from the other teams.

Vicki was
fast—startlingly so—but it wasn't the product of her
ability, it was nothing more than the preternaturally strong muscles
of a hybrid combined with someone who obviously trained on a regular
basis to make sure that she had every edge possible.

Before I'd
spent weeks moving between St Louis and the Mexican border I wouldn't
have had a chance of keeping up with her, but I'd toughened up since
I'd left home, and Carson's unrelenting weapons training had taught
me a bit about commitment. I threw myself forward, right to the point
of falling forward, and then dug in with everything I had to keep my
center of gravity from tipping to the point where I would fall.

It took us less
than ten seconds to get close enough to our team to see the fighting.
Two on one was the bare minimum for engaging a werewolf. Vicki's
people were obviously good, but they were struggling against a tower
of bone and muscle that outweighed the two of them combined.

I itched to
unleash my power, but we were still too far away. Aiming in three
dimensions was a lot harder than aiming a gun, and if I misjudged the
distance between us I might clip one of our operatives and knock
their legs out from under them at precisely the wrong time.

Vicki and I
were both starting to breathe heavily as our secondary circulatory
organs kicked in to try to take some of the load off of our hearts.
One of our people darted forward in an effort to score a long slash
on the werewolf's arm, but they weren't quite fast enough, and the
werewolf caught them with a backhand that threw them into the side of
a building with enough force to go through the bricks.

I
winced—hitting anything that hard wasn't pleasant, but the real
danger was the back edge of the werewolf's claws. Unlike our claws,
they were sharp on both edges. There was a decent chance that Vicki's
person was already dead.

The other
hybrid from the team backpedaled in an effort to stay out of the
werewolf's reach, but the legs on werewolves were jointed exactly the
same way as ours. We were designed to go forward, not backwards and
the monster ahead of us had several inches of height on our comrade.

Vicki bent down
and picked up a length of steel pipe without missing a step. Our guy
was losing ground. He reversed direction and then threw himself to
the right in the hopes that the werewolf was moving too fast to match
their lateral velocity.

It wasn't going
to work—he was fast, but nobody was fast enough to beat a
werewolf in a one-on-one fight, not once the werewolf was that close.
I reached down for more speed—even though I knew it wouldn't be
enough to save our guy—and then Vicki planted and hurled her
length of pipe through the air like a javelin.

I'd spent weeks
learning how to use a sword, but Vicki managed to pick up something
that hadn't ever been meant to be thrown, and turned it into a spear,
a spear that hit the werewolf with enough force to bury itself six
inches deep into the werewolf's arm.

It was little
more than a flesh wound for something that big, but the attack did
its job—it knocked the werewolf's blow just enough off track
that our hybrid took a glancing blow to the shoulder rather than a
fatal blow to the chest.

I let out a
roar as I pounded past Vicki, who'd lost her lead on me when she'd
planted to throw the pipe. The yell had been more instinct than
anything else, but it served to bring the werewolf around in a charge
at me rather than finishing off the hybrid who was even now spinning
across the blacktop in a spray of blood.

I let it take
two steps in my direction, and then I ripped the cover off from the
rift inside of me. I'd learned my lesson in the past. Opening my gift
all of the way up usually resulted in me spending the next several
hours on my back, so I normally used only the barest amount of power
possible. That all went out the window this time.

I took off all
of the stops and I landed my absorption field directly on the
werewolf as the sparse streetlights around us momentarily flickered
back on.

It was like
trying to drink down a hurricane using a straw. It should have been
impossible, but somehow I managed to get my metaphysical hooks into
the werewolf enough that I felt the stream of energy start to ground
out in the center of my body.