Bound (Dark Reflections Volume 1) (6 page)

Kaleb had apparently been serious when he'd said that he was going to start sending my friends and me into the field. He'd called us all into his office yesterday and told us that we were being deployed to St. Louis today.

Jasmin had actually been excited at the prospect of getting out of the manor house and seeing some action. Jess had been doing her best to hide just how scared she was, while James was obviously worried about his mother. Addison had long been one of my mother's most staunch supporters inside of the pack.

Back when my parents had first gotten married Addison's support, contrasted against the grudging acceptance nearly everyone else had displayed, had garnered no small amount of favor with Kaleb. As the years had gone by and Mother had become further and further estranged from Kaleb, Addison had become more and more tormented by the rest of the pack.

Mother had done her best to protect Addison, and Kaleb had agreed to forbid the rest of the pack from challenging Addison to any kind of dominance fight, but that hadn't stopped some of his people from tormenting her in a thousand smaller ways.

James had been a fierce protector of his mother for as long as I could remember. Back even before he'd manifested the ability to change to a wolf, he'd still gotten in the face of anyone who harassed his mother when he was around. It had earned him far more than his fair share of beatings over the years, but things had just escalated once he could shift. A wolf was almost never a match for a hybrid, so his aggressive defense of his mother had meant that he had taken a lot more damage from the few hybrids who'd still had it out for his mother after so many years.

Jasmin and I had both been worried that James would end up dead before he hit sixteen, but his relentless refusal to back down where his mother was concerned, combined with his complete disinterest in fighting for almost any other cause, had earned him a kind of grudging acceptance from the hybrids that he tangled with.

They all knew that they could wipe the floor with him at any time, but after a while they'd stopped doing the things that caused him to get in their faces. That would have been a tremendous win for a young wolf, but he also tore into any and every wolf he even suspected was tormenting his mother.

He was too young and inexperienced to win very many of even those fights, but they were always much closer affairs and his opponents quickly realized that it was a lot easier to just avoid a fight with James than it was to continue to tangle with him and risk getting beaten and losing their current position inside of the pack dominance hierarchy.

It was an admirable display of James' loyalty to his mother, and it was when I'd first realized that dominance inside of the pack wasn't just about who could beat who in a fight, it was also about who was the most passionate about what they were fighting for.

It took a lot of willpower to throw yourself into a fight that you knew you'd probably lose, a fight that might even result in your death, but if you did it often enough, if you were determined enough, then you could effectively swing above your weight class and convince people who were more dangerous than you to back down.

James, Jasmin and I had used that principle to good effect several times over the first year or two after we'd manifested a second form. It had generated some unhappiness inside the pack, but we were careful to only use it defensively, which meant that for the most part the people who were grumbling were the kind of bullies nobody particularly liked in the first place.

Life had been pretty crappy for those first years, but then James and I had manifested the ability to shift into hybrids and things had gotten better. The wolves had pretty much left us alone after that, and even the hybrids mostly didn't bother us unless we were truly out of line. They knew we'd hang together and that as soon as they healed up from fighting one of us, another one would be challenging them.

Life got a lot better for James' mom after that, but he and she both knew just how fragile her newfound peace was. If James were out of the picture, or even if our little coalition lost too many members to back James up, then she'd once again become an easy target.

James had stewed about it for the entire flight out to Missouri, but once we arrived at the airport, the hybrid Kaleb had put in charge of our operation snapped James out of his funk.

Jack had been with the pack since before even Kaleb had taken power. He was a grizzled old hybrid who was partway into his third century and he had a history of raw aggression in dominance fights that had allowed him to carve out a spot towards the top of the food chain a long time ago.

The aggression that had served Jack Senior so well had proved to be his son's undoing. Jack Junior had been killed in a dominance fight only a few months after he'd first turned, and a lot of the fire seemed to have gone out of his dad since then.

As near as I could tell, the posting out to St Louis was a blessing and a curse all wrapped up in one for Jack. Kaleb had used Puppeteer two years ago to shatter the stranglehold that the vampires had on the city. For centuries we wolves had fought a defensive shadow war with the vampires. Our biggest advantage had been that the vampires didn't even know we existed. We'd used our knowledge of them to kill them whenever they ventured outside of the cities that were their natural breeding ground, but the urbanization of America had meant that their reach had continued to grow while we were slowly pushed out of one city after another.

A lot of people had said that Kaleb was courting disaster to attempt an all-out frontal assault on St Louis, but he and Puppeteer had proceeded with their plan despite the disapproval of most of the individual packs.

Puppeteer had used his power to bring scores of werewolves into the city. Werewolves were even bigger than hybrids and seemed to view anything other than another werewolf as their rightful prey. We shape shifters had tried to wipe the werewolves out a couple of times in the past, but the disease that transformed them from thinking people to mindless beasts was an unusual strain of rabies that had an extremely long incubation period.

No matter how drastically we cut back their numbers, they eventually came back and started killing innocents again. The only good thing about werewolves was that they tended to be fairly solitary and they preferred preying on vampires more than humans.

Puppeteer's ascension to the Coun'hij had resulted in a drastically different policy on the part of shape shifters towards werewolves. We weren't allowed to hunt them down and kill them anymore. Instead Puppeteer was cultivating them as elite shock troops that only he could control.

Nobody was exactly sure how Puppeteer's particular gift worked, or what exactly his limits were, but he was able to control individual werewolves completely enough to force them into massive cages which he'd then used to ship them into St Louis. Some of our pack had been stationed along the major routes out of the city, so even those of us back in Sanctuary for the operation had heard firsthand accounts of large semi-trucks, each containing three or four werewolves, being unloaded in the outskirts of the city.

Every so often they'd get a call from an untraceable number instructing them to let one of the werewolves out. It was always obvious which werewolf they were supposed to free because it would go from snarling and hissing to quiet and calm. Our people would open the cage up and each time the werewolf would run off into the night under Puppeteer's control.

There were rumors that the werewolves our people had been responsible for had been nothing more than backups. The rumors said that Puppeteer had arrived in town on a large commercial bus the night the operation started and that the bus had been filled to the brim with werewolves that he'd compelled back into human form for the duration of the trip until he could unleash them on the unprepared vampires of the city.

I wasn't sure how much faith to put in those particular rumors. Puppeteer was possibly the most hated member of the Coun'hij. He, if he really was a male, had gone to great lengths to keep his identity a secret. It seemed very unlikely to me that he'd really arrived in town with a bus full of werewolves, but if he had, he wouldn't have allowed anyone to live to spread that particular tale around.

The siege of St Louis had lasted nearly seven nights, but when the dust settled hundreds of vampires were dead and the humans were blissfully unaware of the scope of the battle that had just been waged inside of their city.

For some reason that no one understood, werewolves exercised as much care to remain undetected by humans as both we and the vampires did. They occasionally preyed on humans, either to feed or to replenish their numbers, but that usually only happened when there wasn't a shape shifter or a vampire around to provide a more tempting target.

The only sign of their presence in a particular town was usually the rolling blackouts that they invariably spawned. It didn't manifest when they were in human form, but once a werewolf shifted forms to the bestial, two-legged animal that had spawned so many legends, they served as a kind of energy vortex, grounding out electrical power as well as short-circuiting any abilities that a vampire or a shape shifter might try to use on them.

In a lot of ways werewolves were the ultimate predators. Their superior size and strength meant that on a purely physical level they were more than a match for any single hybrid, and their unique ability to nullify special powers meant that any fight involving a werewolf was fought on an exclusively physical plane.

Once the bulk of the vampires in the city were either dead or disorganized and demoralized, Puppeteer had marched his werewolves back to the empty cages they'd arrived in, and forced them to remain still as our people had locked them back up and loaded them into the trucks that were awaiting them.

Ever since then, Jack had been stationed here in St Louis with a squad of wolves to support him. The wolves scoured the city each day looking for the distinctive old-blood scent trail of vampires. When they tracked a single vampire back to its lair then Jack and the wolves were more than capable of eliminating it, but when they found a nest of vampires he called for backup and Kaleb would reroute a squad through St Louis on their way down to fight the cats on the southern border.

The position meant that Jack was away from all of the things that reminded him of his son, but it also meant that he was out of circulation enough that a good percentage of the up-and-coming hybrids now viewed him as a target that they could take down in order to bring up their own standing in the pack.

The fact that he'd fought several challenge matches against the people Kaleb had sent out to help him was evident in the cautious, almost resigned way that he greeted us as we walked across the scorching hot blacktop the plane had landed on.

"Am I going to have any problems with you lot?"

James and I looked at each other and then I shrugged as a stray breeze teased my nose with the smell of hot rubber and jet fuel. "I'm not particularly interested in fighting you, Jack, and my beast seems remarkably calm right now. If you can avoid lording the fact that you're in charge over us, then it's possible that we can avoid any kind of petty fights."

Jack grunted and then nodded. "Okay then. My boys and girls have found a group of four or five vampires that need to be taken out. The four of you, plus me and the four of my people I can spare means that we should have them outnumbered roughly two to one."

"Roughly?"

James' question could have been interpreted as questioning Jack in some form or fashion, but Jack showed an unusual amount of restraint and just answered the question as though it was nothing more than a request for information.

"Vampires are easy as hell to track because the scent of a vampire is so distinctive, but that signature scent is so strong that it can be hard sometimes to identify individuals. I had my best people scour the area and then added a third again as many vampires as they felt like they could identify. That usually works out to about the right number of vampires, but the system isn't perfect."

"What's the worst-case scenario that we're looking at?"

"Them waiting for us, fully prepared for an attack and outnumbering us two or three to one."

My question apparently hadn't been respectful enough. It had triggered a pulse of power from Jack's beast and a short, almost dismissive, response from him which in turn sent my beast dashing towards the surface, eager to display its own dominance and power.

I
didn't want to fight Jack. I wanted to get the operation done and go home, hopefully without anyone on our side getting seriously injured. My beast had other ideas though.
He
wanted to beat Jack and demonstrate conclusively that we were tougher. Increasing our dominance inside of the pack would mean safety for us and our friends, but my beast didn't care about that as much as he did testing himself against a worthy opponent, an opponent who had just questioned his status.

My flare of power triggered an even bigger flash of energy from Jack, which tipped some kind of lever inside of me. What started out as a steady but containable pressure inside of me suddenly crested into a tsunami of power that ripped through me in an unstoppable explosion that could only have one outcome.

I felt the transformation trigger, but I knew now wasn't the time. We were in full view of the public and a dominance fight between Jack and me would just cause Kaleb to come down on me like a ton of bricks.

I'd never stopped a transformation when it was this far along, but this time I had to stop it or the consequences would impact more than just me. The rush of power didn't want to be stopped, it fought me as it looked for an outlet through which to escape.

Molten lead surged up through my core and rebounded off of my will. I'd never realized the full extent of my capabilities before. I'd thought I'd tested myself previously, but now I realized that I hadn't, that I'd always had a safety net, always husbanded reserves of strength for a future time of greater need.