Ambushed (10 page)

Just
before the bat connected with Eric's knee I realized that the blow
wouldn't actually hurt unless the bat was heavy. Even with my
enhanced reflexes and time sense, I almost didn't have enough time to
make the needed change. I imagined the bat regaining its former mass,
but I was more focused on the concept of
heavy
than an actual defined amount of weight.

I
over-compensated. The bat went from weighing less than three pounds
to something in the neighborhood of a hundred and fifty pounds. I had
no prayer of holding onto it at that point, but it didn't matter
because the bat retained its original velocity.

It
crunched into Eric's knee with enough force to shatter the spine of a
rhinoceros. The bat tore itself free of my hands and nearly knocked
me down in the process, but it laid Eric out flat. I stumbled
backwards, trying to make sure I was out of range of the deadly claws
that flailed towards me.

I
wanted to be sick. I'd helped kill Pamela, but I hadn't been the one
doing the damage to her, that had been Taggart. I told myself that it
wasn't real, that Eric would wake up in a few hours with nothing more
than a dull pain in his knee, and forced myself not to throw up. I
didn't have time to be squeamish.

The
red hybrid darted towards me, no doubt intending on killing me
quickly so that he could return his attention to Taggart, but he made
it less than a full step before Taggart grabbed his arm and swung him
around, hurling him headfirst into another pillar of stone that
appeared between one heartbeat and the next.

"Hold
them here!"

Taggart
was fearsome in his hybrid form, blood dripping from his wounds, his
claws painted the same gory red, but I found myself shaking my head.

"I'm
sorry, I can't do it."

An
invisible, metaphysical wind tore across the white plain where we
were standing. It would have scared me, but I'd felt it before.
Taggart was holding both Eric and the other hybrid here in the dream,
but he couldn't keep them here indefinitely. The best he could do was
prolong their stay, only I could pull them into the dream completely
enough for him to kill them.

He
apparently misunderstood my refusal.

"Fine,
just hold the red one here. We can always come back and deal with
Eric later, the red one is more dangerous anyway."

I
shook my head as I slowly backed away from all three of them. He
thought I just couldn't hold two of them there at one time. If I'd
been able to get away with lying to him maybe I would have claimed
that I couldn't hold someone inside of their own dream, that it only
worked inside of my dream, but he would have known immediately that
it was a lie.

Besides,
it wouldn't have changed anything in the long run, it just would have
meant that he'd have wanted me to pull them into my dreams, one at a
time, and kill them tomorrow or next week, or next month.

"It's
not that I'm unable, Ta…Dream Stealer. It's that I won't do
it. Not now, not like this."

I
threw myself out of the dream. I'd half expected Taggart to keep me
there too, but he let me leave. It didn't matter though. I'd saved
myself from watching him torture them, but that wouldn't protect me
from his rage once he woke back up.

Jasmin Bianchi
Two Pines Private Airport
Atlanta, Georgia

Alec hadn't confronted me about the fact that I was losing my nerve yet,
but it was only a matter of time. After the fight with the vampire
mentalist I'd managed to keep the shakes from setting in until we
made it back to the hotel and I was safely alone in my room, but it
had been a close thing.

I'd
been scared a lot lately, but having that
thing
wear my body like a glove had been the worst yet. I'd been fine,
fighting as best as I could against an enemy that could read my plans
as fast as I could come up with them, and then between one instant
and the next I'd been nothing more than a passenger inside of my own
head.

Alec
and James had both indicated that for them the mental contact had
gone both ways. They'd gotten bits and pieces, memories and thoughts
from the vampire, but it hadn't been like that for me. All I'd gotten
from the vampire was an incredible sense of wrongness, a dark decay
that could only be described as evil.

I
pulled my crap together enough to go back out with everyone the next
day, but it was a good thing that we didn't run into any problems
with the second delivery. James, Jess and I once again waited in the
swanky bank lobby while Alec went down to the vault and took delivery
of an obscene amount of wealth.

This
time at least we got to listen to a new round of rumors while we
cooled our heels. Being a shape shifter meant that we could hear
whispered conversations from a lot further away than a human, and
every person I could hear had been talking about the sheer number of
armored cars that had visited the bank that morning.

The
line employees hadn't known what was inside the cars, but everyone
had known that
something
was up. Apparently the VP Alec was working with was worth whatever
the bank was paying him though, because by the time we'd arrived he'd
already taken four other people down to the vault.

Decoys,
brought in for the express purpose of making sure that nobody could
say for certain that Alec was the recipient of the dragon's hoard
that had been shipped in from the rest of the banks on the island.

I'd
actually been more than a little surprised that there had been enough
bearer bonds on the entire island to cash Alec out, but then again
maybe there hadn't been. Maybe one or more of the banks had issued an
entirely new round of debt just to make sure that they got in on the
fees Alec was ponying up to break the electronic trail of what had
happened to Kaleb's money.

I
thought I was going to lose it again between when we left Deutsche
Bank and when we arrived at the Cayman National Bank. I probably
would have if we'd been jumped again, but we weren't and I didn't.

I
expected Alec to order us back onto a charter plane as soon as we
finished up at the second bank, but he led us back to the hotel and
left us twiddling our thumbs there for two more days. You would have
thought that two days of downtime would have helped me put myself
back together a little, but the waiting was almost as bad as the
fighting had been, and it wasn't just that way for me. I was pretty
sure I was seeing the same signs of stress in James and Jess.

None
of us came right out and said it, but we all knew that Kaleb was
looking for us and there were only so many places you could go if you
wanted to launder billions of dollars' worth of stolen money. When
you threw in the fact that we'd been involved in not just one, but
two, sets of homicides since we'd arrived on the island, it felt like
we were running on borrowed time.

When
Alec finally showed up and told us that he'd arranged a charter
flight back to the States, I hoped my stress level would start going
down, but I spent the whole flight fidgeting in my seat. I probably
would have given Alec a piece of my mind, but he'd found four more
people from the island and lured them onto the plane on the pretext
of them having won some kind of trip to the mainland.

It
didn't seem very wise to air all of our dirty laundry in front of a
bunch of humans, so I refrained. That and the plane wasn't big enough
to deal with Alec in hybrid form, which is what might have happened
if I'd unloaded on him.

Exiting
a chartered flight is pretty much just like arriving on a private
jet. You walk down the stairs onto the tarmac, grab the luggage that
is lined up waiting for you, and walk to your car.

Depending
on how rich you are and the size of the airport in question, your
vehicle might be less than twenty yards away or it might be a five-
or six-minute walk away, but either way you could be on your way
while the commercial passengers were still waiting for the fasten
seatbelts light to turn off.

Usually
it's the best possible way to travel, but my spider sense started
tingling as soon as we got out of the plane. Alec had a white SUV
waiting for us, but there was another SUV, a black one, idling just
outside of the gate onto the tarmac.

Alec
didn't seem to notice. He was busy shaking hands with the four shills
who'd shared the flight with us. I grabbed his arm to get his
attention, but he reached down and removed my hand without looking at
me.

"Act
natural, Jas. Trust me, you do not want to blow things right now."

"Are
you out of your frickin' mind, Alec? We got lucky with that
mentalist, hell, we got lucky with his minions earlier that day too.
That SUV could be chock full of hybrids who are waiting to follow us
to whatever hotel you've got lined up for us. Even the best case
scenario, that there are only one or two guys watching us right now,
is still bad because now they know where we are and it's going to be
that much harder to disappear again."

Alec
finally looked at me. He had a casual-looking smile on his face, but
I could feel his anger bubbling just beneath the surface. He was
wearing sunglasses, but I would have bet any amount of money that his
eyes had turned a paler shade of blue, the color of his beast rather
than the color of the human that was normally in the driver seat
inside his head.

"I
gave you an order. Smile and then go get your luggage like you don't
have a care in the world. You're above your pay grade on this one."

I
wanted to flip him off, or shift and go for his throat right there in
plain view of everyone, but the first idea was bad and the second one
was even worse. I pasted a sarcastic smile across my face and then
turned and stalked off towards my bag.

It
took all of two minutes for us to pile into the SUV with James and
Alec in the front and Jess and I in the back seat. Our windows were
heavily tinted, so I watched the other SUV as we pulled out onto the
main road.

Whoever
was driving it was good. They waited until we were quite a ways ahead
before they pulled out and followed us. They kept two cars between us
at all times, but I still caught occasional glimpses that confirmed
my fear that they were following us.

I
managed to bite my tongue for nearly ten minutes before I couldn't
stand it anymore.

"Alec,
you can tell me to shut up all you want, but it isn't going to make
that SUV from the airport go away. We've got a serious problem on our
hands."

Alec
looked like he wanted to bite my head off, but he took a deep breath
and pointed out our exit for James before turning back to look at me.

"I
tried telling you to shut up already, but it didn't work the first
time so I don't suppose yelling at you again is going to make any
difference. You're right, that SUV is following us and it's probably
full of either Kaleb's people or maybe Coun'hij enforcers if Kaleb
has finally come clean with the Coun'hij about the fact that we're in
open rebellion against him. Either way, there's a reasonable chance
that we're screwed, but you telling me that we've got a problem when
I already know about it isn't going to solve the problem.
Please
shut up and let me concentrate. The only way to get out of a
situation like this with our skins intact is for me to outthink
whoever is back there."

I
felt the shakes threatening to return. I wanted to scream at Alec, to
tell him he was the alpha and it was his responsibility to make sure
that we didn't get outmaneuvered like this, but I gritted my teeth
and looked away from him. If I started yelling at him I was virtually
guaranteed to lose control in other ways, and none of us could afford
for me to have a breakdown right now.

The
rest of the trip took less than five minutes with Alec navigating and
James driving, but it wasn't until the very end that I surfaced
enough from my internal battle to realize that something wasn't
right. Alec's words weren't matching up with his actions. He didn't
seem like someone who was worried.

As
far as alphas went, Alec was pretty standup. Any dominant was going
to treat you like crap from time to time simply because their beast
wanted to push your nose in the fact that you were subordinate to
them, but Alec usually kept that kind of stuff to a minimum.

We'd
been through a lot together already and Alec valued loyalty too much
to treat me like dirt without a good reason. Besides, his
instructions to James were coming too smoothly. He wasn't choosing
our route on the fly; he was following a preplanned route.

A
second later we pulled into what had to be the largest parking garage
in the city. We started down and with every level we descended the
tension inside of our SUV ratcheted up a little tighter. I counted
seven levels before Alec sat up in his seat and pointed at a line of
orange cones to our right.

"Run
over the cones."

The
cones were placed in a curved line to guide the traffic down to the
next level and there were a couple of signs indicating that there was
some kind of construction going on, but James didn't even hesitate.
He turned the wheel hard to the right and mowed over three of the
cones, crushing them under our tires.

"Go
on to the very back. There, pull into a space behind that Escalade
and kill the engine."

It
wasn't a very good plan. Alec seemed to be hoping that the guys who'd
been following us wouldn't notice the crushed cones, or if they did
that they wouldn't pick our SUV out of the line of six cars we were
parked next to. It wasn't bad considering how little time he'd had to
plan, but it was a slim hope to be risking our lives on.

Fifteen
seconds after our engine died, the black SUV that had been following
us pulled into view. I hadn't gotten a good look at the plate back at
the airport, but I knew it was the same one. There was simply no way
that a different black GMC had decided to drive over the cones and
come our direction.