Ambushed (13 page)

The
run back down to Alec and the others was a complete nightmare. Every
step hurt and I left a trail of blood that was going to eventually
lead the police right to us, but there wasn't anything I could do
about that. I'd be even slower as a human and I'd still be bleeding
all over everything.

Jack
and Alec ended up meeting us halfway down with both vehicles and the
rest of our people. I collapsed into the SUV as Alec waved James into
the driver's seat and slapped gauze over the worst of my wounds.

"Find
us a parking place somewhere on the second floor, James, while I get
Jasmin stabilized."

James
grunted and then once Jess was inside, got us back into motion. I was
pretty sure that I was starting to go loopy from blood loss, but I
couldn't make myself care.

"You
knew. You knew that Kaleb would have people waiting for us when we
got off of the plane and you set this whole thing up."

Alec
nodded. "Yeah, I knew it was going to be an issue even before we
flew down to the Caymans. I didn't have a solution in place when we
left, but I spent a good chunk of the time we were down there trying
to come up with some way to get back stateside without getting all
four of us killed."

"Jack.
That was brilliant, I never would have thought of recruiting him."

There
were already some pretty massive gashes in my ha'bit, but Alec tore
them even wider. Jess kept direct pressure on my right side while
Alec started taping up the more dangerous gashes between the ribs on
my left side.

"You
were out on patrol for a good chunk of the time that we were in St.
Louis, but I got to spend a few minutes talking to him once I woke up
the next day. I knew that he was furious at Kaleb over his son's
death, so I figured it was worth a shot. That's why we stayed longer
than you were expecting in the Caymans. Jack and his people came over
to scout out what we were likely to see in the way of opposition when
we landed."

Alec
moved over to my other side and I hissed in pain as he pushed on the
cracked ribs. "I'm sorry."

"Don't
be. I know the drill. You have to make sure that they are only
fractured and not broken."

"No,
not for that. I'm sorry that I couldn't tell you what was going on.
That was Jack's condition for coming and helping. He trusted me, and
he believed that I thought you were all trustworthy, but he wasn't
ready to risk his people's lives on that. I had to promise that I
wouldn't tell any of you what was going on."

"Because
if we'd been double agents then we could have ruined everything by
letting Kaleb know that he needed to increase the size of his
welcoming party."

"Yeah,
that about sums it up."

"So
what now? Jack still isn't going to trust any of us, and now he's got
to worry about the fact that we'll leak the fact that he helped to
Kaleb."

Alec
shook his head at me. "I don't think that's going to be an
issue. All three of you practically killed yourselves running down
those last two hybrids. If any of you were working for the other team
you would have let that last guy get away. If James had picked even a
slightly more cautious way of engaging the one who was running
interference then you never would have caught the last guy, and Jess
could have very easily gotten you killed once she met up with you."

It
took a couple of minutes for that to process through my pain-dulled
mind. "I guess you're right. Jack's still got to worry about us
getting captured and tortured, but he's probably safe other than
that. Unless the Coun'hij is playing an even longer game and they are
hoping to use you to flush out all of the rebellious elements so that
they can take care of the undesirables once and for all."

"I
know, but Jack's already thought of that too. If he really thought
that Kaleb and the others were trying to do that then he never would
have agreed to talk to me in the first place."

"I
guess you're right. I'm sorry too, Alec. I don't mean to be losing my
edge, I just can't seem to help it."

"Don't
worry about that, you did exactly what needed doing and you did a
spectacular job of it, Jas. I know no matter how bad things get that
I can count on you, on all of you."

He
pulled out a syringe and injected me with a general anesthetic. It
wasn't enough to put me out, there weren't a large number of things
that would do that to a shape shifter, but it took away the pain and
left me floating in a pool of relaxation.

"Alec."

"Yeah?"

"Can
we go find Rachel now?"

"Sure
thing. She'll be excited to see you too."

I
was just enough with it to notice as Jack walked up to our vehicle
and let himself inside.

"Alec,
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we've got a massive problem."

Adriana Paige
The Premier Pillow Motel
North Platte, Nebraska

I'd
fled Eric's dream sure that I was going to wake to find Taggart's
beast in control, but I'd fled anyway rather than be forced to kill
another person with my gift. My fears were so embedded in my
subconscious mind that I was extremely disoriented when I woke up the
next morning.

I
just lay there motionless for nearly a minute while I tried to
process what was wrong. Eventually I realized that I wasn't
disoriented because of
where
I was waking up, I was thrown off because of
how
I was waking up.

Taggart
wasn't yelling or stalking around the tiny room like a caged
predator, he was sitting on his bed writing in a plain leather-bound
journal. Not only that, I wasn't getting any of the usual signs that
alerted me to the fact that he was having a hard time controlling his
beast. There was no unearthly hum of power in the air, his eyes were
even their normal tired green rather than the hot yellow of his
beast.

He
looked over at me and gave me a sad smile as soon as he felt my gaze.
"I'm sorry, Adriana. I owe you an apology. When I agreed to
train you I vowed that you'd be able to choose your own targets or no
targets at all. I didn't mean to break that promise last night. I
can't change the fact that you're a weapon, neither of us can, but
you at least deserve to decide how you'll use your power."

Even
despite all of the clues to the contrary, I'd still been ready to
stand up to him and defend my actions. I'd been ready for a yelling
match; this was so far different than my expectations that it nearly
brought me to tears.

"I'm
sorry, Taggart. I just couldn't do it. Maybe Eric and that other guy
were both deserving of death, but I just couldn't be the one to make
it happen. We'd beaten them, it wasn't like last time when Pamela was
just outside of my house. I wasn't in danger this time, not by then."

Taggart
sighed. "I understand. You haven't had a chance to see for
yourself what the Coun'hij has been responsible for, but that's just
the way that things have to be for now. Once you have control of your
nightmares, maybe I'll be able to change your mind. I'm just glad
that you chose to intervene on my behalf during the fight. It
probably would have gone very badly for me if you hadn't."

I
nodded uncomfortably. "To be honest, the deeper I get into all
of this, the more worried I am about everything. I don't know
anything about your world and I'm worried I'll end up doing things
that I'll come to regret."

"Believe
it or not, I understand what you're going through, Adriana, at least
to some extent. Initially my exile wasn't of my own choice. I spent a
lot of years in isolation, but eventually I was contacted by the
Coun'hij. I'd tried to keep my abilities quiet, but they'd figured
out that there was more to some of their dreams than pure chance.
They didn't know who I was, but they invited me to join them, on any
terms that I cared to name."

I
was having a hard time believing what I was hearing. Taggart had told
me again and again, ever since we'd met, that the Coun'hij couldn't
be trusted. I'd never even suspected that his knowledge might have
come from having worked with them, from having committed the kinds of
atrocities that he was always hinting that they routinely turned to
in order to keep control of the other shape shifters, in order to
keep the existence of Taggart's people a secret.

"They
weren't as bad back then, Adriana. I know that sounds like a cheap
justification, but it's the truth. Oh, there were signs, things that
were distasteful, instances where someone went too far, but their
goals were worthy goals. They were the ones who kept the chaos and
corruption south of our border from boiling up into our homeland.
They were the ones who were hunting down the vampires and the
werewolves. The only reason that we hadn't been wiped out by the
humans decades ago was that they had kept our existence a secret."

"What
happened?"

He
refused to meet my eyes. "I had nearly accepted…no,
that's not true, I
had
accepted their offer. I was working with them. Not in any big ways,
but in a multitude of smaller things. I kept an eye on some of the
more dangerous figures south of the border and I was responsible for
gathering intelligence about vampires in Los Angeles and Chicago. My
work was key to identifying a network of more than fifty vampires
that Ulrich and the rest of the Chicago pack destroyed over the
course of a single night. Just that one raid saved the lives of
hundreds, possibly even thousands of humans who otherwise would have
been killed in Chicago each year."

"You're
right, that sounds like an admirable goal to me."

"I
spent nearly ten years as a de facto member of the Coun'hij. The
first eight years was a heady time. You know how hard it is for me to
form new dream connections with individuals. I didn't bother forming
connections with most of the Coun'hij. Some of them operated in a
cloak of secrecy just like I'd been doing, but mostly that was just
because there was always someone else who I needed to make contact
with. Vampires and jaguars mostly, but by the end I was being used
more and more against my own kind."

"They
started cracking down on dissident elements?" I wasn't a history
genius or anything, but I'd seen enough documentaries on what had
happened in Nazi Germany and other totalitarian regimes to have an
idea of how governments went from being the good guys to the bad
guys.

"Yes.
There was always a reason. Mostly I was being used against rogue
dispossessed, people like me who were considered too dangerous not to
keep tabs on. Some of them had extreme abilities, the kinds of things
that could be used to wipe out a small town all by themselves. It was
hard to disagree with the need to make sure that they weren't
becoming unstable."

Taggart
dropped his head into his hands. "Some of them were complete
monsters. I found proof that they'd done terrible things, things that
deserved execution, but I later found out that the Coun'hij was
recruiting them, just like they'd recruited me. They cared more about
securing their power than they did about justice or protecting the
humans who were being caught in the crossfire."

"So
you left?"

"No,
not at first. I still thought that I could help with the good stuff
and not get caught up with the bad. My contact with the Coun'hij was
surprisingly understanding. I didn't come right out and tell him that
I wouldn't continue to spy on the dispossessed for him or that I
wasn't going to continue to gather intelligence on the various
unaligned packs, but he saw the pattern. When I was given an
assignment to establish a connection with one of the jaguars I could
usually manage it within a month. When I got an assignment I
didn't want to do, I just never managed to establish contact.

"I
made it another year and a half like that, picking and choosing
assignments, telling myself that I had to work with the Coun'hij
because nobody else had the resources it would take to deal with the
biggest problems out there. I was miserable, but I was fighting the
best way I knew how. I might have still been doing the exact same
thing today except I screwed up and my contact was able to figure out
my real identity."

A
wave of sympathetic terror ran through me. Our anonymity was our
greatest defense. Even before I'd really understood anything about my
ability, I'd instinctively understood that as long as nobody knew who
I really was that I'd be safe.

"What
happened?"

"My
contact turned out to be a much better person than I'd realized. I'd
spent the entire ten years I was working with him thinking he was
just like all of the rest of the Coun'hij. I thought that he didn't
give me static over my refusal to spy on the dispossessed because the
Coun'hij, as a group, had decided that it wasn't worth forcing the
issue and risking the possibility that I'd just walk away."

"They
were mad, and he was running interference for you?"

"Yes.
I think he saw something of me inside himself. He was—he
is—younger than me, but he'd spent some time as one of the
dispossessed too before joining up with the Coun'hij. The next time I
saw him he told me that he knew who I was, and that the Coun'hij
wouldn't allow him to keep that secret for long once they realized
he'd figured it out. He said that I needed to go to ground, to
disappear for a few years and after that I needed to make sure I had
even less contact with other shape shifters than I'd been having."

"That
doesn't sound like enough. You've said again and again that if the
Coun'hij actually knows who it is they are after that they can find
anyone. They can hack the facial recognition software at airports and
train stations, they are unstoppable."

"Yes,
I told you that because that's exactly what he told me, that I
wouldn't be safe once they knew what I really looked like. Then he
told me that I'd been right all along. He said that he'd spent so
long thinking that the ends justified the means that he'd almost
convinced himself, but in obtaining our end we'd become the very
thing we'd been fighting against. He slipped away from the Coun'hij's
secret base that very night and has been on the run ever since."