Fate Succumbs (4 page)

When I questioned that statement, Liam
explained how far the power of the Alpha Pack reached. There aren’t
exactly a ton of Shifters in the world, but there are enough in
positions of power throughout the world to make the Alphas major
players in world politics. According to Liam, the Den - the Alpha
Pack headquarters located in Romania - operated like a small but
powerful country. In addition to the strongest fighters and most
gifted Seers, it was home to the smartest and most skilled of us
from all over the world. I hadn’t touched a computer or cell phone
since our escape on Liam’s insistence that the Alpha Pack could
trace a call, text, or Facebook message in seconds. Like Liam, I
didn’t doubt her ability to make sure a well-respected Washington
politician called in the doctor she wanted to attend to a person
hurt while trying to save his granddaughter. What I doubted was my
grandfather’s desire to call in anyone, Alpha Pack doctor or not.
Sure, he would play up the whole granddaughter kidnapping story for
press coverage and polling points, but to actually care enough to
do something about it? We didn’t have that kind of
relationship.

“
Why the car
crash/terrorist story?” I asked as Liam got down on his hands and
knees and started combing the carpet I didn’t even want to have my
feet on. “And what on earth are you doing?”

He plucked a long silvery strand of hair off
the floor. “Being cautious. The police most likely won’t come back
here, but if they do, I don’t want them to find your DNA
conveniently lying around.” Not for the first time, I questioned
his sanity. “And the news story was a way to flush you out using
the best resources available. You and I might have been able to
slip around the country unnoticed for years before, but now that
the whole world knows the granddaughter of Senator Harper is
missing? Every person who sees you will be calling 9-1-1.”

He was right. Of course he was right. I let
out a frustrated roar, flopped back onto the bed, realized what I
was doing, and hopped back up and began looking for any hairs that
may have landed on the comforter.

“
I should turn myself in,”
I said, thinking aloud. “The Alpha Pack can’t do anything to me
with the world watching. Their plan will backfire. I’ll get to go
home to my family, and they can’t touch me without attracting
unwanted attention.”

Liam’s voice was bland when he said,
“They’ll kill you before you ever see your parents again. And not
only you, but anyone they see as collateral damage. Police
officers. FBI agents. It doesn’t matter. None of them stand a
chance against well-trained Shifters.”

“
Then what are the options?
It’s not like I can blend into the masses.” He had to realize that.
After all, he was the one who pointed out less than an hour ago how
someone couldn’t forget my weird face.

“
I’ve got a
plan.”

“
Care to clue me
in?”

Liam looked around the room with a critical
eye. “No.”

Chapter 4

I kept a steady stream of
curses aimed at Liam going as I climbed out the tiny window whose
width was exactly the same measurement as my hips.
Just climb on the back of the toilet and hoist
yourself through,
I mimicked his voice in
my head.
Be sure you don’t make any noise
or scratch yourself on that metal. Someone might notice the blood.
Oh? What? You wanted me to be concerned about it hurting you?
Sorry, no. I don’t care if you get cut by rusty metal, except the
resulting infection might slow us down as we carefully execute this
elaborate plan I have but won’t tell you because you’re so far
below my notice I can’t be bothered.

If I didn’t rip out his throat with my bare
human teeth it would put us even for him saving my life, right?

We drove on to Denver that
day since there was the chance the police were keeping an eye on
Liam. Or, I guess I should say
Liam
drove to Denver. I had to stay crouched down in
the back seat the entire journey. My legs hurt from staying
scrunched up and I was getting claustrophobic from sitting in the
floorboard, but it was better than Liam’s idea, which had me riding
in the trunk.

The motel in Denver was a bit better than
the other one, but still somewhere my family would have never
considered staying on our vacations. At least I got to walk in the
front door instead of shimmying through a window or vent.

I should have known something was up when
Liam left his bag in the car and then decided he needed to “run
some errands”. In two weeks he hadn’t left me alone any longer than
it took for me to go to the bathroom. After sitting in the Denver
motel room for four hours, I finally accepted he wasn’t coming
back.

“
I don’t blame him,” I told
the anchorman on the TV screen. Despite knowing it was a bad idea,
I had been flipping between all the news stations since Liam left,
watching the fictional account of my disappearance over and over
again. My parents declined to comment, which Fox News found
suspicious, and Charlie’s medical records weren’t being released to
the media, which caused some ire from the good folks at CNN. I
refused to watch MSNBC after I realized they were using the school
picture from my sophomore year, which was possibly the least
flattering photo of me ever taken. “He doesn’t owe me anything.
Heck, I owe him more than I could possibly ever repay. At least he
got me somewhere where I can make a decent run for it.”

And yet, I felt abandoned and kind of
hopeless. Not exactly shiny new emotions in my world, but they
sucked all the same, especially for Wolf Scout who trusted Wolf
Liam so explicitly. But I wasn’t going to let it break me. I had
already been through hell and back and was still in one piece.
Sure, I might have thought about throwing myself on the proverbial
sword for a few minutes earlier in the evening, but then one of the
news stations showed a shot of my family walking into our house. My
parents both hurried inside, heads down, as if not looking at the
crews camped out in our front yard would make them disappear.
Angel, on the other hand, stopped at the front door, turned around,
and looked directly at the camera. And even though she didn’t say
or do anything, I knew what she was thinking.

You promised.

It had been an attempt to soothe my little
sister after I almost died when Jase accidentally ripped out my
stomach last April, but it turned into something more. I wasn’t
going to die, at least not easily. If for no other reason, it was
my way to ensure Sarvarna and the rest of the Alpha Pack didn’t
win. If she wanted me dead she was going to have to work for it. I
wasn’t giving up.

Of course, that meant coming up with some
sort of plan. I couldn’t exactly eke out the rest of my existence
in a cheap motel room. For starters, I didn’t have any money, which
left me with the same overwhelming problem that made Liam bolt:
Disappearing into the crowd despite my freakish face, which every
person in America knew.

I pulled myself off the super-uncomfortable
motel bed and ambled over to the sink. The mirror hanging on the
wall was one of those really old dull things with the actual shiny
reflective stuff peeling off around the edges. It made me look like
a ghost, which caused me to giggle. Scout Donovan, the girl who
came back from the dead. Twice.

I don’t know how long I stood there, but
eventually I stopped looking like myself. That’s not exactly right.
I still looked like me - it’s not like my face suddenly morphed
into the wolf’s or anything - but I became a collection of features
instead of just Scout. And those features? They’re not so bad. It's
not like I have a hook nose, crossed eyes, and bologna-like flesh.
If it wasn’t for my hair, skin, and eyes being pretty much the
exact same color, I could pass for any other normal teenage girl on
the street.

All I had to do was change the coloring
issue, right? Except, it’s not as easy as you would think. For one,
I can’t just get a suntan and look different. My skin doesn’t
understand that whole browning process. It pretty much operates on
two settings: pale white and painful, blistered red. Eye color can
be changed with contacts, but where was I going to find those?
Maybe if I had an optometrist or Internet connection, but I was
lacking both. Hair dye was also out of the question. I tried it
once before, even had it professionally done. At first it looked
great, but then I took a shower and most of the color washed down
the drain despite being permanent. By the third day my hair was a
really unpleasant grey color. My hairdresser refused to put
anything else on it, and I was too chicken to try again.

I fingered the strands hanging down to the
middle of my back. Even if I did manage to get some contacts and
develop a tan, the hair was a dead giveaway. The color is a silvery
white, much the same as my fur when in wolf form. Sometimes you’ll
see a little kid with my hair color, but never anyone over the age
of five. My hair is the first thing people notice about me.

So what if I didn’t have any?

As soon as the thought hit, a plan started
formulating. I could shave my head and then wrap it up in a scarf.
My skin tone already screamed “sickly,” and thanks to the trauma of
the past few months, my bones were a bit sharper than looked
healthy. What better way to avoid notice than passing as a cancer
patient? No one wants to look too closely at sick people, and if I
coughed every once in a while, everyone would keep their
distance.

Liam had one of those fancy electric razor
things in his bag, but all I had was some cheap disposables, which
meant I was going to have to cut it all off before shaving my head.
Fortunately, Talley had been the one to pack my escape bag, a fact
I realized the moment I opened it up to discover everything
organized neatly into individual freezer bags. I dug through what
was now a random assorted mess until I found the travel sewing kit.
Inside was a tiny pair of scissors, but a test of the ends proved
they would cut as long as I did it strand by strand.

I pulled the first strand out from my head
and positioned the scissors an inch from my scalp.

Snip.

I had about a fourth of it done with my arms
started getting tired. Halfway through I got so bored I thought I
might scream. At three-fourths of the way through the door swung
open.

“
What are you doing?” Liam
asked, setting some bags on the dresser.

I couldn’t even say anything I was so
shocked. I just sat there on the vanity, my feet in the sink, with
microscopic scissors in my hand and a pile of hair scattered about
me.

“
Did you cut off your hair?
With those?” He looked at me as if I was completely nuts.
“Why?”

“
I need to be incognito.” I
sounded like a little kid who just got caught doing something
stupid, which pissed me off. What was it to him anyhow?

Liam reached in a bag and
pulled out a brown wig. He cocked his head and lifted his eyebrows
as if to say,
what do you think this is
for?
I looked back at the mirror, actually
saw what I had done to myself, and burst into tears.

If the little kid voice had
made me angry at myself then the tears pushed me firmly into the
livid camp. I hadn’t cried in weeks. I didn’t cry when Talley’s
mom, the woman who took care of me when I was a kid, turned me over
to the Alphas, or when my brother chose a mateless,
Taxiarho-in-Training existence over my life. I hadn’t shed a tear
when I saw the guillotine that was to kill me, when Charlie hugged
me goodbye, or when I saw the devastation wrought from my escape.
But now I was in full waterworks mode over
my hair.
Yet, no matter how furious I
was with myself, I couldn’t stop. It was like a dam had
broken.

“
You’re crying,” Liam
observed with more than a hint of horror.

I answered with a gasp for breath.

Since I buried my face in my hands so I
didn’t have to look at the tragedy of my hair any longer, I didn’t
see Liam move up behind me. But I smelled him. And I felt him tug
the scissors from my hand and then begin lifting up strands of the
remaining hair.

“
I used to cut Alex’s
hair,” he said. “We never really had the money to go somewhere to
get it done. The first few times I cut it, it was horrible. I think
I may have even given him a mullet on accident, but he somehow
pulled it off.”

I looked up and watched in the mirror as the
remainder of my hair started falling away. “I bet half the guys at
school were sporting mullets by the end of the year.”

Liam smiled. It was the first time I’d ever
seen him do it, and until that moment, I would have thought him
incapable. He didn’t have Alex’s dimples, but his cheeks folded up
in a way that was equally boyish. Because of his Dominance, it was
easy to forget that Liam was just a few years older than me, but
when he smiled he actually looked like the college-age guy he was.
I found the corners of my mouth twitching upwards in response.

“
You know, he didn’t even
notice. The whole town started looking like a Billy Ray Cyrus
convention, but he had no idea it was because he started a new hair
fad.” He tilted my head forward and started trimming the hair at
the base. “To be such a smart kid, he was pretty oblivious when it
came to how other people saw him.”

“
That was part of the
charm,” I said, somewhat surprised I was willing to talk about him
with Liam. “He was beautiful and smart and funny without being even
the littlest bit arrogant.” And he had loved me, which was the most
amazing part of all.