Burned (19 page)

It was worse
than standing at ground-zero for a lightning strike. The energy that
I'd sucked out of the vampires had stressed my ability to the very
limit. It had been a raw, angry kind of power, but it had nothing on
what I was pulling away from the werewolf.

The energy I
was sucking down from the werewolf was distilled malice. It burned my
insides, but it was coming down, and that was all that I cared about
until I felt the rift start to destabilize.

Up until that
moment I'd never worried about where all of the energy I was
absorbing went. I understood physics better than the average
layperson, but I'd forgotten one of the most fundamental rules of the
universe. Energy doesn't just disappear. It can be redirected and it
can be transformed into another form, but it doesn't just vanish.

I'd somehow
thought that I could just dump an endless amount of energy into my
rift without any concern for anything other than how wide I could
crank that rift open. Before now, the strength of my absorption
effect had been the limiting factor, but something had changed over
the last few days.

Maybe it was a
result of the practice I'd put in experimenting on Carson and my
friends. Maybe it was just a new level of power brought on by raw
need. Either way, I opened up the portal inside of me wider than I'd
ever managed before, and for the first time I noticed that the energy
was going somewhere else, somewhere that had limits of its own.

The rift inside
me wasn't destabilizing because it couldn't handle the flow of energy
I was feeding into it, the rift was destabilizing because whatever
place I was sending that energy into couldn't accept it—at
least not that much, not so quickly.

The werewolf
missed a step and nearly tripped. I could see it in its eyes, the
savage orbs that usually conveyed only the most violent of emotions.
The werewolf had been taken off guard by the sensation of me stealing
its energy away, but as the werewolf righted itself my rift slammed
shut, and it was me who was falling.

I was dead.
There was no other possible outcome—not with more than a
quarter-ton of deadly werewolf crashing toward me—but Vicki
didn't function under the same constraints as the rest of us.

She shot past
me in a blur, a blur that defied all common sense by arrowing in
straight at the werewolf rather than dodging to one side. The
werewolf had all of the cards. It was bigger, heavier, had a longer
reach, and was faster than Vicki.

No hybrid could
go toe-to-toe with a werewolf and survive more than the first pass,
but Vicki did. The werewolf moved like barely-leashed lightning, but
no matter how fast it struck, she always managed to be a fraction of
an inch ahead of the blow.

My legs were
weak. I knew I needed to get back to my feet and help Vicki, but I
couldn't seem to get my body to respond. Vicki danced in, claws
scoring on the werewolf's arm, and then threw herself over the
counterattack, body clearing the deadly claws that otherwise would
have ended her life.

For a second I
thought she was moving faster than she'd been moving on the way into
the fight, but that wasn't the case. She wasn't moving any faster
than I could have moved if I'd been able to get up. The difference
was that there was no wasted movement to anything she did.

It didn't
matter what the werewolf did, or how fast it moved, Vicki always
moved from wherever she was to wherever she needed to be in order to
avoid its attacks. She chained together combinations of movements
that were unreal. She was using techniques that should have gotten
her killed several times over.

Her fighting
style was all of the commitment that Carson had spent weeks beating
into me, but it was reckless in ways that he never would have
condoned. A slip, a hesitation, if anything had gone wrong in the
first three seconds of her fight she would have died a dozen times
over, but time and time again her crazy, reckless actions proved to
be exactly what she needed in order to survive against an opponent
that she had no hope of beating.

The sound of
wolf pads on asphalt told me that the rest of Vicki's people were
only seconds away from joining the fight. A surge of relief crashed
through me at the knowledge that Vicki wouldn't be forced to continue
fighting by herself.

Somehow my mind
hadn't been able to process what I'd been seeing ever since Vicki had
engaged the werewolf. I still thought that she couldn't win, still
expected her to back off and wait until the rest of her people joined
the fight.

The way to take
down a werewolf was the same way that wolves took down hybrids.
Surround it with greater numbers and harry it until it made a mistake
that let one of the smaller combatants get into position to kill it
from behind.

As if reading
my mind, Vicki did exactly the opposite of what I'd been
anticipating. She didn't fall back, she upped the intensity of the
fight. She charged forward into deadly, foot-long claws, and it was
like she was made out of nothing more than air.

The claws
flashed by, passing within millimeters of her, and then she lashed
out, a single impossible blow that ripped out the werewolf's throat.
The death throes of something as big and dangerous as a werewolf were
more than capable of taking an unsuspecting hybrid with it, but Vicki
danced back out of range shrugging off blows that should have opened
her up from hip to collarbone.

She watched the
werewolf bleed out to make sure that it wasn't going to lunge forward
and kill her, and then turned as though planning on going to check on
her downed hybrid. In the heat of the moment I'd forgotten all about
the hybrid who'd been backhanded by the werewolf, but I looked over
to find three of Vicki's people clustered around their teammate.

Vicki was
halfway over to the group when one of them turned around and gave her
a thumbs up to indicate that they'd managed to stabilize the injured
hybrid. I was astonished—very few hybrids would have survived
that kind of blow. Apparently Shawn hadn't been kidding when he said
that he would be sending down some of his very best.

Vicki sighed in
relief at the confirmation she hadn't lost anyone, and then turned
back to me.

"I assume
we passed muster?"

Alec Graves
The Socorro Motel
Tucson, Arizona

I managed to
walk back to the SUVs under my own power, but it was a close thing.
Under other circumstances I probably would have been worried about
showing so much weakness in front of a hybrid I didn't know very
well, but the idea that Vicki might decide to take advantage never
crossed my mind. She was the consummate professional.

Getting back to
Vicki's motel was easy. The challenge arose when it was time to
discuss me getting back to my RV.

"You've
got tinted windows, Alec. Drive me back to your RV and just leave me
in the car."

"They'll
be able to smell you—not well, not with the small amount of
airflow in and out of the vehicle, but well enough that James, Jess
and Jasmin will recognize you if they get close enough."

Vicki scowled.
"You're right. I'm not used to being in a location where someone
outside of the pack will recognize my scent. You'll have to relocate
your operations here. I'll send one of my people out for food, and
then we'll hole up inside of our rooms so that nobody has a chance to
see or smell us."

Now it was my
turn to frown. "I can't uproot my entire operation and move them
here. That would look incredibly suspicious to anyone watching a
satellite feed. We worked really hard to make sure that we arrived in
staggered waves precisely to avoid that."

"I can't
protect you from all the way over here, Alec. That's not the way that
my gift works."

"Then tell
me how your gift works, Vicki. I need something to go off of if we're
going to figure out a solution that puts you close enough to help out
if things go south without blowing your cover if they don't."

She waved the
rest of her team out of her room before speaking.

"I'm doing
this under protest, but I suspect that you already have a pretty good
idea of what I'm capable of now that you've had a chance to see me
fight. I can see the future."

"That's
incredible!"

"Not as
incredible as you might think. I can't predict stock market crashes
or tell you who's going to win the Super Bowl. All I can see is the
next few seconds. It's enough to give me advance warning when
something big goes down around me, and if I'm really concentrating
I'll know what an opponent is going to do before they do it."

The
possibilities were incredible, and with every second that I continued
to think about her gift, additional uses unfolded before me.

"I was
suspecting something like that, but to be honest I was leaning
towards some kind of telepathy to explain what you were doing
earlier. No wonder you were freaking out earlier when I cut off your
power. You're used to knowing everything that's going to happen
before it happens. Losing that would be worse than going blind."

"It wasn't
pleasant, but it probably wasn't as bad as all of that. I don't see
everything that happens, but I'm used to knowing if I'm in danger
with plenty of time to react and get myself and Shawn out of
trouble."

"How do
you process all of that information? Is it like light or sound, or
something completely different?"

Vicki looked at
me oddly. "Nobody has ever asked me anything like that."

"Sorry, I
didn't mean to pry. I'm just still in the middle of figuring out the
limits of my own power, so I'm extra curious right now. An ability
like the one you've just described is fundamentally different than
something like Brandon Worthingfield's. His is solely an increase in
his physical attributes, yours has nothing to do with your speed or
strength and everything to do with receiving a completely separate
feed of information, one that normal brains aren't equipped to
handle."

She shook her
head. "I wasn't angry, just surprised. Most people just want to
know what I can do rather than how I can do it. In answer to your
question, I get…premonitory sensory feeds from all three major
senses. Sight, sound, smell, I constantly get information coming in
from all three of those senses that tells me what's going on in
real-time and what could happen in the future."

"Could
happen?"

"Yes, the
concept of destiny is a bunch of rubbish—at least in the short
term. Every action I take causes ripples in the possible futures that
I sense. Right now the future I'm sensing indicates that we're going
to spend the next few seconds just talking, but if I threw myself at
you and tried to rip your head off, all of that would change."

She said it so
calmly that I almost failed to react, but my beast was more on the
ball than the rest of me. He lashed out with the energy required to
trigger a transformation to hybrid form, but I managed to intercept
the surge. I wasn't fast enough to stop the flare of energy
completely, but I grounded enough of it out to stop from
transforming.

Vicki smiled.
"That was also a possibility, but it wasn't very likely until I
said what I said just now."

"And you
can see all of it at the same time?"

"I wish.
No, it's like you said, our minds aren't really designed to handle an
infinite stream of information coming at us. In theory I could see
all of it at the same time—the information seems to be
there—but I discard most of it. It's like standing in a normal
room and picking out a single conversation from all of the background
noise. It's taken a lot of practice, but I've mostly managed to train
myself to pick out the most important bits and ignore everything
else."

"You had a
hard time when you first manifested your gift, didn't you?"

"If by
hard time you mean I was borderline catatonic for more than a month
while my mind tried to put itself back together after being fractured
by more information than any mind was ever supposed to be exposed to
at one time, then yes, it was a hard time.

"It was
Shawn who helped me. We'd known each other since we were kids, but we
weren't that close until then. He sat at my bedside for weeks. More
importantly, he ordered everyone else to leave me alone. The fact
that he was Ulrich's son meant that he had enough pull to make an
order like that stick. That was when I first started to be able to
cope with things.

"He'd
reduced the number of futures facing me, and then as I started being
able to tell him what was happening, he moved me even further away
from people. It took another three months of gradually exposing me to
more and more varied environments before I could function more or
less normally, but even now I sometimes have to shut down one or more
of my senses in order to focus on the futures headed at me. While I
was fighting that werewolf I shut down my sense of smell and my sense
of taste. That bought me almost a full second of extra foresight."

"So you
just see the future play out in your head alongside the present?"

"No, it's
more like a series of ghost images that play along in real time. The
most likely events are more defined, but the further you get into the
future the harder it is to pick things out."

She'd just
given me part of the secret to beating her, and we both knew it. I
hated myself for doing it, but I added that piece of information to
the files I kept inside my head detailing the weaknesses of all of
the hybrids with known powers. In a one-on-one fight Vicki was going
to be nearly unbeatable, but if I could throw her into the middle of
a bigger fight where she was up against more opponents, she would
have a harder time dealing with all of the stimuli coming at her.