Ambushed (7 page)

I looked up to
see James stagger back from the broken window. The claws on his right
hand were painted red with my blood, and he'd left deep gouges in the
metal of the structural steel beam he'd been holding onto.

James met my
eye for a second before falling to the ground and shifting back to
human form. I'd had no idea just how outmatched we were when we'd set
out earlier that evening, but somehow we'd all survived. We'd just
burned up all of our luck for at least the next couple of decades.

Adriana Paige
The Premier Pillow Motel
North Platte, Nebraska

I opened the door to our motel room, which turned out to be furnished
all in browns that hadn't seen an update since before I'd been born,
and then turned and watched as Taggart maneuvered our suitcases
through the door with an ease that contradicted his apparent age. He
looked like a sixty-year-old Native American man who would have a
hard time withstanding a strong gust of wind, but in truth he was
both older and stronger than he looked.

I'd
tried several times to get him to let me carry my own luggage, but
Taggart was old-fashioned. Not old-fashioned like some people I'd
known who had latched onto something they'd read about for some
reason or another. He was old fashioned in that he still clung to
ways of behaving that he'd grown up with, protocol and etiquette that
had mostly died out a couple hundred years ago.

As
much as I wanted to, I'd never quite been able to bring myself to ask
Taggart how old he was—it didn't seem polite—but from
some of the stuff he'd let drop I was pretty sure that he'd been
around when the United States had been founded. In addition to being
incredibly strong, shape shifters apparently lived for a lot longer
than normal humans.

"You
know it would look a lot more normal for me to get my own luggage,
don't you? Even if we ignore the fact that girls have been carrying
their own stuff for decades, you don't look like you should be able
to casually swing a couple hundred pounds over your shoulder. That's
the kind of thing that people remember."

Taggart
looked up at me with a hint of fire in his eyes. It took a moment for
him to force the anger back down, but I was getting used to that.

"There
are some things I'm prepared to abandon in the name of expediency,
Adriana, but I learned a long time ago that if you don't hold to at
least a few core principles then you're liable to be blown completely
off course when you least expect it."

It
was another clue. Taggart had saved my life. He'd rescued my sister
Cindi and me from an honest-to-goodness vampire and in the process
he'd saved Tristan, the star quarterback Cindi had been crushing on.
I was incredibly grateful that he'd risked so much to help me, but
that didn't mean that I completely understood him.

Taggart
wasn't always the safest person to be around. I'd first met him in a
dream shortly after I'd realized that my dreams weren't like everyone
else's.

It
seemed impossible, but I could reach out to people while I was
asleep, share their dreams and interact with them while they were at
their most unguarded. I'd initially thought that I was the only
person who could do what I did, but it turned out there was at least
one more, Taggart, although even he didn't seem to have exactly the
same gift as me.

Our
first two encounters had been terrifying. Part of that had been
because neither of us had been sure we could trust each other, but
that had only been a small part of the reason. Mostly it had been the
fact that Taggart's beast, the otherworld energy that allowed him to
change shapes, was always just a second or two away from trying to
take control away from the man I'd just spent the last several days
driving cross-country with.

Taggart
had explained the basics of his condition in a few brief sentences
during our first full day together, but he'd been less expansive when
it came to the details and causes. Mostly he'd focused on what I
needed to do to help defuse the situation if his beast got too close
to the surface. It mostly centered on not escalating things. Don't
look him in the eyes, try to take up less space, talk softly.

It
was more or less what I'd always imagined you'd find in a Boy Scout
book in the section about dealing with dangerous animals. I'd spent
my first day alone with Taggart wondering if I should be trying to
make a run for it, but little by little I started to see the other
parts of him, the less scary ones.

He
held onto his manners because they were one more link in the chain he
used to keep himself under control. He didn't always succeed, but it
was obvious to me that he really was giving it his best. Someone else
might have dismissed his efforts, might have said that he was just
another kind of addict, but I didn't. I didn't understand his beast,
but it was obvious to me that there was something else there,
something inside of him that had its own set of priorities, something
that was as strong-willed as any other person I'd ever met.

Taggart's
manners weren't just odd because they were so anachronistic, they
were odd because they didn't come from any one time period. They were
an eclectic collection of things that he'd managed to hold onto
despite the long years that had worn away at him. I didn't know how
long he'd been on the run, but I'd been doing it for less than a
month so far and it was already changing me in ways I hadn't
anticipated.

"Do
most shape shifters wander around on their own like this?"

The
question slipped out of me without conscious decision. It wasn't the
smartest thing to do, not so soon after he'd had to force his beast
down from a perceived slight, but Taggart seemed to have himself well
in hand now.

"No,
Adriana, most of my kind live very different lives than I do. We're
social by nature. Humans are inherently that way, but there's an
extra degree of that for us. We form packs because they offer us a
place in the world, they let us know where we fit into the dominance
hierarchy and they offer protection for the strong and the weak
alike."

"From
vampires?"

"Yes…and
other things."

"Like
what?"

He
studied me for several seconds and then shook his head. "You're
already dealing with nightmares, I don't think that it's wise to add
to your worries right now. Later, once you've had a chance to see how
drastically your world has changed, I'll tell you more about the
dangers most people never encounter."

I wanted to argue with him, wanted to tell him that I was ready
to hear everything, but he was right. I hadn't slept very well ever
since Jackson had tried to kill me. For a normal person nightmares
were unpleasant enough, for a dream walker they could be deadly.

As long as I realized I was dreaming there wasn't much to be
concerned about, but I was generally more present in my dreams
than a normal person was. I didn't understand how—I wasn't sure
that even Taggart really understood how it happened—but that meant
that I could be injured while dreaming.

For Taggart, any injury was potentially problematic because
anything that happened to him physically during a dream was carried
back into the waking world. Things didn't work quite like that for me.

So far it seemed like broken bones and the like weren't a big
deal, they usually just meant that I'd spend the next day or two
dealing with an odd phantom pain while I was awake. The big question
was what would happen if I was seriously injured. There was a remote
possibility that something life-threatening would just result in
me spending several days in bed suffering in extreme pain, but
Taggart and I were pretty unanimous in the belief that if I got
hurt badly enough inside the dream it would be just as fatal for me
as those kinds of injuries would be for him.

It was a sobering possibility. Taggart was more experienced
than I was inside of the dream and he was naturally stronger and
harder to kill as a result of being a shape shifter, but even so
we'd lost several days of travel time not too long after he'd found
me. He'd tangled with someone or something in a dream that had nearly
gotten the better of him. It had been a chilling lesson in just
how deep the waters I was now swimming in were.

"Okay,
you're right."

Taggart
nodded and turned away as if to unzip his suitcase, but I wasn't done
with him yet. If he was in the mood to talk then I wanted to get as
much out of him as possible.

"Why
did you leave your pack then? Is it because of Kaleb and the rest of
the…Coun'hij?"

"I've
been on my own for more than two hundred years. Kaleb is practically
a child. He's been part of the Coun'hij for less than two decades.
No, he didn't have anything to do with my exile."

I
waited for several seconds, hoping that he'd choose to tell me, but
growing more nervous with each heartbeat. I wanted to know, but I
also didn't want to push and cause problems between us.

"You
don't have to tell me if you don't want to. There's just so much I
don't understand."

Taggart
sighed and then sat down on his bed. He looked even older when he was
hunched over like that. I'd seen his hybrid form. It was still huge
and unbowed despite the silver mixed in with his fur. It was hard
sometimes to view the two forms as being the same person.

"I'm
by myself because I couldn't be trusted to control my beast. I hurt
some people when I wasn't much older than you, and my pack drove me
away."

"I'm
so sorry."

I
wasn't sure it was the right thing to say, but then again I spent
most of my time these days uncertain of how I was supposed to be
responding to things. Taggart had said he'd
hurt
people, he hadn't said that he'd
killed
anyone, but even if he had, I could tell that he was sorry for what
had happened.

"Don't
be, Adriana. It was no less than I deserved. I was as bad as the men
and women I've spent so many years fighting. I was completely sure of
myself, confident that whatever I wanted was right simply because I
wanted it."

"I'm
not saying it's right, but that's not that uncommon for a
seventeen-year-old. Most of us tend to be pretty self-centered."

Taggart
shook his head, refusing to meet my eyes. "Most
seventeen-year-olds aren't killing machines who weigh four or five
hundred pounds. It was worse than that, I was addicted to the thrill
of the fight. My alpha had told me repeatedly that I needed to call
my beast to heel, that I needed to control it rather than letting it
control me, but I refused to listen. I thought my beast made me
strong."

He
stood and walked over to the window, still refusing to look at me,
still determined to put as much distance between us as he could.

"He
was right. There was a girl and another boy who was competing with me
for her affections. Things were different back then. There were
places where we weren't completely in hiding. They were both humans,
but they knew what I was. The boy thought I should stick to my own
kind, that I shouldn't be chasing after a human, that I wasn't
safe
for her to be around."

"What
happened?"

"We
got into an argument and I lost control of myself. It had happened
before against other hybrids, but that was the first time I'd given
into my beast when facing off against someone who couldn't possibly
stand up to me."

"I'm
sorry. I know you said I shouldn't be, but I am."

Taggart
shrugged. "I tried after that. My pack kept me imprisoned until
they knew whether…well, until they knew whether I was a
murderer, but I knew I was probably going to be exiled, turned into
one of the dispossessed. I tried to control myself, tried to master
my beast in the hopes that they would recant and let me stay, but it
was so hard."

Taggart,
the terrifying apparition that other shape shifters called Dream
Stealer, rested his forehead against the cool glass of the window and
I realized for the first time that his stooped back wasn't from age
as much as it was from what he'd been through.

"It
seemed so much harder for me than for the others my age. It wasn't
until later, after I'd been exiled, that my ability manifested.
Sometimes I want to blame everything that happened on my ability, but
that is just another way of trying to shirk my guilt."

"An
ability means that you have a stronger beast?"

"Nobody
knows for sure. It's true that the weaker of my kind seem to struggle
much less with their beasts. Some of the weakest wolves claim to not
even believe that the rest of us have a distinct entity inside of us,
but there are aberrations even to that, wolves who struggle like I
did to control themselves. More importantly, there are powerful
hybrids, individuals with legendary gifts, who don't seem to have any
problem mastering their beasts."

"So
since they can do it you feel like you should have been able to?"

"It's
more than just a feeling, Adriana. I've spent nearly two centuries
trying to learn how to control my inner nature, trying to replace
savagery with something higher. I've made some progress, maybe—no,
certainly—less than I should have, but I've made progress. I'm
damned by my own success. My accomplishment since then has only
proven that I could have done better back then if I'd really wanted
to."

I
opened my mouth wanting to say something comforting, but he cut me
off.

"That's
not important other than making sure you know what you're getting
into. I'll do my very best not to harm you, but I can't make any
promises."

I
knew I should be scared, but somehow hearing the story of how he got
like this, the reason he'd spent two hundred years alone and on the
run, reinforced something I'd known all along. He wasn't going to
hurt me. I needed to do my absolute best to make it easier for him,
but when push came to shove, I knew he didn't want to hurt me. I'd
seen him do incredible things inside of the dream, things that had
taken an almost inconceivable force of will, and I refused to believe
even his beast was stronger than the man I'd seen, the one who'd
saved me and two of the most important people in my life.