Marked (33 page)

"Stop
and think about the situation from my end of things, Lori. You're not
just every leader's biggest fears made flesh, you're every woman's
worst nightmare. If I let you just wander around and interact with
anybody you please then Alec and I will have half our people up in
arms convinced that you're arranging some kind of coup d'état
and the other half of our people will be up in arms worried that
you're manipulating their boyfriends or husbands.

"The
truth is that there is a very good chance you're going to have
somebody come after you the first time their boyfriend breaks up with
them because they'll be convinced that he secretly wants to date you.
The guards are as much for your protection as anything else."

Lori
looked at me for several seconds. "You only have one thing that
I want, Adriana Paige. I've spent a good chunk of my life knowing
that I could have any guy I wanted. Once I realized that, they all
became completely undesirable. Part of that is the same thrill of the
hunt that all women enjoy, but part of it is because as long as I can
manufacture a man's feelings for me those feelings are less than
worthless. There's only one straight man who has ever resisted my
advances."

It
was a good thing that we were standing still or the sinking sensation
in my stomach probably would have made me trip.

"You
want Alec."

"Indeed,
I do. He's rich, powerful, considerate, and completely immune to my
power. You can hardly blame me for wanting him."

"No,
I completely understand the appeal, but you haven't answered my
question. Do we have a deal?"

"What,
no additional restriction that I not interact with Alec either?"

"You
wouldn't honor it even if I tried, but I'm not going to ask because I
know Alec is his own person. Either he'll continue to choose me or he
won't. I can't stop him if he chooses to leave me, all I can do is
try to be the very best fiancée I can be and remind him every
day why he chose me in the first place."

"You're
not nearly as confident of that as you're trying to pretend you are."

She
was right. Looking at her, still drop-dead gorgeous despite the fact
that she needed a shower and didn't have any makeup on, it was hard
to see a future where Alec didn't eventually choose her over me. In
the end though, it didn't matter. I would rather see Alec alive and
with her than lose him to Dream Stealer. I needed her if I was going
to save Alec, the only question was whether I could keep her under
control for long enough to aim her at the Coun'hij before she turned
on me.

We
shook on our agreement and I tried to ignore the little part of me
that died in the process.

Adriana Paige
East Side
Kansas City, Missouri

Now
that we were theoretically on the same side, Lori gave me back my
burner phone and I called Donovan on his latest prepaid phone. He
promised to procure another RV as well as sending a car filled with
capable female shape shifters to pick us up at a prearranged location
in an hour.

Lori
gave me a curious look at the timing, but I wasn't going to get into
the habit of explaining my every move to her. I asked her to dismiss
her bodyguards with a request that they not talk about their time
with us, and then we set off on foot towards downtown Kansas City.

It
took us forty minutes to get to the section of town that I wanted,
and by then it was much too late for two young ladies to be out on
foot by themselves, but I knew Lori would be able to handle almost
any conceivable threat we might run into so I just focused on putting
one foot in front of another and not falling asleep mid stride.

"You
do know that without me here to manipulate people's emotions you
would have been raped three times already tonight, right?"

"I
suspected as much—thanks for doing your job."

"You
don't like me very much, do you?"

"Are
we really having this conversation? You just told me that you were
going to try to steal my fiancé."

"Yeah,
I don't expect you to like me—most girls don't—but I'm
still trying to understand why you gave me a job anyway."

I
rubbed my eyes and wished that I was safely back in my bunk, a bunk
that could very well be hosting one of Tiffany's people as we spoke.
That was a depressing thought. Oh well, I could always just go into
the bedroom with Alec and sleep there, even if that never seemed as
restful as the nights where I slept in my own bed.

"Look,
I don't have to like you to give you a job. The fact of the matter is
if it were completely up to me, I probably would have kicked you to
the curb, but this is bigger than just Alec and me. A lot of people
are going to die if we can't overthrow the Coun'hij."

"I
would venture a guess that a lot of people are still going to die
even if you do manage to overthrow the Coun'hij."

"The
proper statement is that a lot of people are going to die even if
we
manage to overthrow the Coun'hij—you're on my side now,
remember?"

"Fine,
people are still going to die even if
we
succeed in bringing down the Coun'hij."

"Yeah,
but in that case it will be their people dying rather than our
people."

"So
it's just a question of us or them?"

I
suppressed the urge to tell her that she was being childish. "Lori,
you yourself said that you felt worse about the innocents that got
killed during the fight in Nephi than you did about the enforcers.
This is just that same thing on a larger scale. The Coun'hij has been
taking away people's rights for centuries. We aren't fighting for
money or power, we're fighting to give our kids a chance to grow up
in a world where they don't have to worry about being killed by
someone like Agony because they were in the wrong place at the wrong
time."

"You
sound like that's not just hypothetical…"

"It's
not."

"Who
was it and what happened?"

"Her
name was Alison. There were others who died at the same time, and
Jess lost her memories, but Alison got the rawest end of the deal
because unlike the boys, she never did anything to hurt anyone. Agony
came through a little while after I moved into Sanctuary, and when he
didn't manage to force Alec into a fight, that was his last big play.
He murdered our friends and dared us to do something about it."

"I'm
sorry."

"Are
you really, Lori? Because so far you don't seem like you really get
it. I'm not going to go back on my offer of a place to live and
access to Alec, but if you really want to be pulled into the inner
circle you're going to have to gain some real empathy. Alec will be
able to use you either way, but you're not going to impress him
talking like you are now."

"I
think you're actually serious…"

"You
know I am—you'd be able to tell if I was lying."

"Why
would you help me in my quest to steal Alec away from you?"

"I'm
not, I'm trying to help you become a better person. Now be quiet. I
need to make some phone calls and we don't have very long before
Donovan's team picks us up."

I
dialed Jaclyn's number first because I hadn't heard from her since
the day Alec had been shot, and because, right about now, I couldn't
think of anyone better suited for keeping Lori in check.
Unfortunately Jaclyn didn't pick up, which meant I was back to square
one when it came to how to keep Lori safely contained.

"Jaclyn,
it's Adriana Paige. We need to talk—preferably sooner rather
than later. There have been some developments and I'm not entirely
sure that your mission is necessary anymore. We've got another way
and your ability would be especially useful back here right about
now. This is a burner phone, so don't bother calling me back on this
number. You can reach Alec and me on his normal number—we've
got a communications system up and working for inbound calls again."

"Jaclyn
Annikov?"

I
nodded as I dialed Tasha's number. I was surprised when a man
answered her phone. "What?"

"I
need to talk to Tasha."

"She's
not here." The voice was familiar sounding, but I didn't know
anyone who could manage to sound that emotionless.

"Grayson,
is that you?"

"Yeah,
Adri, it's me. What do you want?"

"What's
going on? Why do you sound so different?"

I
half expected him to get angry with me. A hybrid as dominant as
Grayson wasn't usually very willing to sit and play Twenty Questions.
In a way, I almost hoped that he would get angry with me. The dead,
monotone voice he was currently using was unnerving.

"I'm
not going to answer that question. What do you want?"

"I
want you and Tasha to gather everyone up and come meet us. We have
good intel with regards to where the Coun'hij is based and I want to
reassemble our strike teams. How soon can you all be on the road?"

"I
can't help you, Adri. You'll have to find someone else to do your
dirty work."

"Can't
or won't?"

"I
suppose you're right, I could help you, but I'm not going to."

"I
don't understand what's going on, Grayson. Tell me why you're acting
so weird and where Tasha is!"

"You're
right, you
don't
understand what's going on. Don't bother calling this phone number
again, Adri, nobody will be around to answer it."

I
threw my phone into the side of a building with enough force that it
looked like it exploded when it hit.

Adriana Paige
Interstate 64
Western Kentucky

My hand had started shaking whenever I didn't have anything in it. I'd
had Donovan give me his professional opinion, but all he could
recommend was a vitamin supplement, meditation for my nerves and more
sleep. I followed his advice on the vitamin supplements, but the
other two items were just not going to happen while everything around
us was one ill-timed sneeze from blowing up in our faces.

Lori
had caused an even bigger stir than I'd been afraid of—it had
been all Mallory could do to find enough women to fill out a guard
schedule for the fourth RV. At one point it had looked like we were
going to lose our few volunteers simply because there weren't going
to be enough of them to take her down if it became necessary to do
so.

In
the end, Dominic had to take a ten-hour shift each day and Mallory
had to sign on for a six-hour shift to make everything work. Even
that wasn't going to be sustainable long-term. We needed to convince
some of our remaining females to help out with guard duty, that or
meet up with more of our people. I figured that Rebekka and her
daughter would be tough-minded enough to stand guard over Lori, but
unfortunately they hadn't called to check in for quite a while.

Throwing
my phone against the wall after talking to Grayson had been foolish.
I should have thought to call Rebekka and ask her to meet back up
with us, but at the time I'd just been too frustrated by the fact
that Jaclyn had refused to pick up and Grayson had refused to even
talk to me.

Part
of me wanted to stop somewhere and call them now, but that would have
been a major mistake. The Coun'hij was getting closer and closer to
tracking us down, and Donovan was fairly certain that any outbound
calls with encryption would lead them right to us.

We
could still take inbound calls, but even that was getting more spotty
and dangerous. None of our hackers were quite sure what had happened,
but the Coun'hij hackers seemed to have found a way to strip away
much of the benefit of our communication suite. The risk monitor
running on the tablet in Alec's room rarely ever dropped below sixty
percent lately, even when I wasn't actually on a call, and
occasionally spiked up above ninety percent for no discernable
reason. When that happened the equipment went into a low-power
standby mode until our hackers could implement more of their
techno-wizardry and throw the Coun'hij a little further off of our
trail.

That
meant that our communications capabilities had become so intermittent
that I was losing any real feel for how the war was going. Some of my
people seemed to have given up trying to check in and now I was
having to try and keep track of them through rumors.

I
was pretty sure that we'd lost a group sometime the day before. There
had been some kind of massive explosion in a small town in Colorado
that the media had been covering for almost fourteen hours straight.
Almost three hundred people had been killed and nobody seemed to have
any real idea what had caused it.

Donovan
was convinced that it was the Coun'hij covering up a massive fight
between our people and theirs. I had a hard time believing that any
of our teams could have put up that much of a fight, but I wasn't
going to second-guess him. All I could do at this point was try and
figure out who we'd lost.

All
that would have been enough to bring me to my knees, but when you
threw in the fact that Alec's condition seemed to be decaying much
faster than last time around, it was all I could do to pull myself
out of bed in the mornings.

Alec's
phone—my phone now—started ringing, and I reflexively
looked over at the tablet. We were a little above eighty percent
risk—it would have to be a quick call.

"This
is Adri—what do you need?"

"Adri?
Where is Alec?"

"Jess,
is that you?"

"Yeah,
it's me. Where is Alec? I really need to talk to him."

"He
can't come to the phone right now—tell me what you need and
I'll pass the message along. Unless it's something I can take care of
myself. In that case, I'll just make it happen."

Jess
suddenly sounded uncertain. "How have you been, Adri?"