Forsaken (3 page)

I
closed my eyes and tried to ignore the pain, but I couldn't block out
the sounds of Donovan trying to save Jasmin's life. Half an hour
later, Donovan leaned back with a sigh that made me look over at him.

"She'll
be okay. Her body's own regenerative powers are finally starting to
kick in."

I
nodded and my fists unclenched. "I'm glad she made it. I
never meant to leave her in so long."

Donovan
nodded, looked at Dominic as though debating whether to wait
for her to leave the room before continuing, and then finally resumed
speaking.

"What
are you going to do? The pack won't last long if neither James or
Isaac are willing to help with the challengers."

I
could feel a headache starting. "Honestly? I'm not sure. I could
always beat the two of them into submission, assuming we have enough
time before the next batch of challengers arrive,
but that isn't the kind of dynamic that I want in the pack. We'd be
better off scattering and finding new packs that each need a person
or two than continuing like that."

Rachel
patted Jasmin's arm and then smiled. "At least Jasmin is okay.
Hopefully she'll be able to get fully back on her feet before the
next challenger arrives."

I
nodded, but I didn't have much hope of that. The best I could do
would be to call Ash back and hope that he was able to bring down the
next challenger more or less by himself.

"Honestly,
sis, I wish I could just send Jasmin away for the next little while.
She could use a break from the craziness of pack life. Nearly
anywhere would be safer than here."

Rachel
looked at me oddly. For a second it seemed like she was almost
looking through me.

"Alec,
just because someone is far away doesn't mean they are safe. There
are plenty of threats out there that won't respect someone's desire
to stay apart from the violence and danger that is part of pack life.
Even a normal human is in danger nearly all of the time."

I
would have to have been a fool not to know exactly what she was
getting at, and half of me felt a sharp stab of pain at the reminder
of what I'd lost. The other half of me was angry with her for the
risk she was running. I'd forbidden everyone in the pack from
mentioning Adri's name and I'd sealed the order with an imperative
backed up by my beast. If Rachel had come right out and said, 'Adri
isn't safe,' then I wouldn't have been able to stop myself. As it
was, it took a supreme act of will to stop from throwing her into a
wall.

"You
are skating on the very edge, Rachel."

She
shook herself, almost like she was coming out of a dream, and for a
moment it seemed like she wasn't sure what I was talking about.

"I'm
sorry, Alec. I didn't mean to do it."

I
held her gaze for several seconds before nodding. The anger had
served to cushion me from the worst of the pain, but I still
wanted to put my head in my hands and cry. The tears hadn't come, not
even right after
she'd
left, but I'd wanted them to come and give me some kind of release.

I
couldn't escape the room, not without showing how much Rachel's
comment had bothered me, and I couldn't afford that kind of weakness,
not right now. I couldn't escape, but I couldn't tear my mind away
from
her
,
from Adri, either.

The
way she'd looked the day that she'd come to tell me that she was
leaving Sanctuary had burned itself in my mind. The decision
obviously hadn't been easy for her, but her resolve had been equally
visible and it had made her even more beautiful than normal. I'd had
to stand there and watch as she first condemned me and then turned
and walked out of my life forever.

It
had been like having an angel come down and open the door to the
Garden of Eden and then push you back out into the wilderness before
you'd had a chance to sample the fruit whose aroma had been pulling
you deeper and deeper into the garden. I'd seen paradise, and the
washed-out world to which I'd been exiled was hellish in comparison
to what I'd felt when I'd been with her.

Rachel's
words spun around inside my mind, and I found myself
suddenly conscious of all of the ways, supernatural or mundane, in
which Adri could be endangered despite finally being a safe distance
away from us, from me. I'd spent so much of the few weeks we'd had
together trying to convince her to flee, to find somewhere safer than
Sanctuary, but I'd never considered just how much danger she
would be in no matter where she went.

She
was in New York. It would be hard to find another place in North
America with a higher concentration of vampires than Manhattan. Even
assuming she managed to avoid being killed by a bloodsucker, there
was no guarantee she wouldn't run afoul of a werewolf, and that
didn't even consider the fact that the Coun'hij wasn't above using
her as a pawn to get back at me for having
stood Agony off.

Isaac
walked into the room, simultaneously interrupting my thoughts and
providing me with a way to solve two problems at once.

"We
got Derrick in the cage, so even if he loses control, Donovan's
driver will be safe. The truck is loaded, all we need is a location
and a time and we'll make the handoff."

I
nodded, and then held up a hand. "James can make the drop once
Donovan has had a chance to make the arrangements. I want you on a
plane within the next hour. Pack for an extended trip."

Isaac's
control was still frayed, and I could almost see the thoughts flowing
around inside his head. He would like nothing more than to attack me,
to force me to bow to his will, but he knew that wouldn't get him
what he wanted. If our pack fell apart, there was no guarantee right
now that Jess would choose to go with him. He could very easily find
himself in a new pack all by himself.

"Where
are you sending me, and how long is 'extended'?"

"You're
going to Manhattan. I've just had it rather forcefully pointed out to
me that there are all kinds of dangers in the big city, and you're
going to go make sure that nothing happens to the member of our pack
who lives there."

Isaac's
anger was rising. I was backing him into a corner where he risked
death if he obeyed me as well as if he refused.

"It's
forbidden by the Coun'hij for any of the moonborn to go east of the
Mississippi! She doesn't even want anything to do with us. You can't
order me to make a trip like that, not for Adr..."

I'd
pulled myself to my feet while he was pacing back and forth, and now
I found myself standing in front of him with my claws around his
throat and no recollection of having crossed the distance between us.

"Be
very, very careful. The imperative still stands, and if you say her
name I
will
kill you."

Isaac
cleared his throat and then nodded jerkily.

"This
is nothing more than an overly extreme punishment. The old Alec never
would have done this."

I
released my hold on him and let my hand shrink back down to the one
I'd been born with.

"You
risked the entire pack by your refusal to fight today. Every
dispossessed hybrid in North America will rightly assume that all
they have to do is kill one or two regular wolves in order to get
their chance at me. They'll line up for the chance to take over the
pack, and you could have at least stemmed the tide slightly by
stepping in and protecting Jasmin. How many challengers will we end
up fighting who would have steered clear at the prospect of facing
two accomplished hybrids before even having a shot at me?"

"What
good will stemming the tide mean if we're still ultimately going to
be worn down?"

None
so blind as those that refuse to see.
I shrugged and swept my arm
around, taking in the manor and everything else in the area.

"I
don't know, Isaac. I don't have any bulletproof solutions right now,
but anything we can do to buy us more time will give
us a chance to find a way out of this hole."

Donovan
stepped forward and cleared his throat.

"If
I may, Master Alec. It might be prudent to kill Derrick. While it's
not something easy to contemplate, if he never reports back to the
rest of the dispossessed, that would help alleviate the problems that
have arisen today."

I'd
known Donovan would make the recommendation, but it still angered me
that he'd done so with Rachel in the room. I'd done everything I
could to shelter her from the worst aspects of what I was. I'd failed
miserably in most of the ways that mattered, but I wouldn't let her
see her older brother become a cold-blooded murderer.

"No,
he lives. If I kill him now, that buys us a couple of weeks; then
we're back here again in the exact same situation. There's no
guarantee that Isaac and James won't pull the same stunt then that
they pulled today. I won't sell my soul to cover for Isaac
or James' bad decision. I may be an animal, but there are some things
that I still won't do, especially when they aren't guaranteed to save
us in the end."

I
held Isaac's gaze for several seconds, watching his anger war with
his reason, and then pointed at the door.

"Pack
your bags, Isaac. You're going to be gone for a while, and if you let
anything happen to
her,
I'll kill you. You're starting to reap some of the consequences of
your actions."

Isaac
had been gone for quite a while before Dominic tentatively cleared
her throat.

"Alec,
you need to send me away at some point. You need to punish James—I
understand that—and the best option is for me to go to New
York. Otherwise you'll have to send James away, and that would hurt
the pack more than having me gone."

I
rubbed my temples and wished once again that I could just disappear
for a couple of days.

"I
don't want to send you away, Dom. I know how much you'll miss James,
and the rest of the pack. It doesn't seem fair to punish you at the
same time that I'm punishing James, but you're right that it would be
good if we could find a way to keep James around for the next
challenger who comes through."

Dom
smiled, but it was a sad expression. "I know, Alec. I love
James, maybe more than he loves me, and I will miss Rachel and the
others, but I understand what is at stake. If this is what it takes
to make James see reason, then I'll do it. I never expected that I'd
find the kind of happiness I've found here in Sanctuary.
I
won't run out on you after having received such a gift."

Adriana Paige
Brathingford High School
Manhattan, New York

The
clock had become my constant enemy. It wasn't just that I desperately
wanted school to be over with each day. I did. It was the fact that I
wanted the evenings to be over with too. The only escape that had
even a hint of promise was a year and a half away, and even then I
wasn't sure that college was going to be any better.

Mom
was the happiest she'd ever been. Work was going great; we had more
money than she knew what to do with, and if she wasn't shooting the
kinds of stuff that she wanted to, she was still starting to become
well known inside the fashion industry. She kept telling me that this
was just temporary, that she was going to work some time into her
schedule to do some landscape shoots, but I wasn't so sure.

From
the outside looking in, it was starting to appear as though she was
addicted to the acclaim. I didn't know what to do about that
other than hope that she'd pull out of it so we could at least
leave the city. She'd stood by me when I'd
spent half a year basically falling apart anytime I even thought of Dad
and Cindi's accident. I figured that meant I should do what I could
to support her while she worked through her own coping mechanism. It
just would have been a little easier if I'd been going to another
school, preferably not on the East Coast.

Brathingford
was one of those grand experiments that someone with more money than
sense had decided to undertake as a way of 'giving back' to the
community. It had been billed as a school for anyone who showed
promise, which was how it had gotten so much support initially from
the city. The billionaire who had funded everything had run into
absolutely zero issues getting the permits he needed to
tear down a quarter of a city block and then rebuild it with the
state of the art in teaching.

Projectors,
smart boards, screaming fast Wi-Fi. If you could think of it, we
probably had it, up to and including two full-sized swimming pools
and a gymnastics gym that was only a slight step down from the
Olympic Training Center in Colorado. Unfortunately, the construction
had run severely over budget, which hadn't seemed like a problem
until a massive shock to the real estate market had wiped out two
thirds of the billionaire's fortune.

Suddenly
the school needed to pay for itself and the students 'with promise'
had started coming exclusively from the city's wealthiest. I didn't
have anything against rich people—I'd known some really, really
rich people that I'd liked a lot—but the students here all
seemed like they lived in a permanent bubble.

A
wave of dizziness swept through me, but I'd been expecting it, so I
just grabbed ahold of the table I was sitting at and weathered the
spell. I still struggled a little sometimes with thinking about Cindi
and my dad, but by and large the attacks had disappeared, and when
they did show up they weren't really very bad.

Mom
attributed it to us getting out of Sanctuary, and therefore took
credit for them in a roundabout way, but they'd actually more or less
disappeared while I'd been dating Alec. My heart rate shot up a bit,
but I knew my limits; I took a couple of calming breaths and felt my
body start to relax a little.