Forsaken (30 page)

I'd
started looking away from her as I'd talked, unable to bear seeing
what I was about to lose, but she put her hands on either side of my
face and brought it back around so I had to meet her eyes.

"We
have to stop it from happening."

"There's
no way, Adri. Agony always charges too high a price for survival. My
father knew that, but it's taken me longer than it should have to
understand that."

I
could see the tears starting to form at the corners of her eyes, but
I gave her my best smile as I pulled her hands down to my chest and
then reached up and wiped her tears away. Adri buried her head in my
chest, I think more to save me from having to watch her cry than out
of any weakness. She was so much stronger than I'd realized back when
we'd been dating.

"I
don't care whether or not this is just a dream, Alec. If I remember
this when I wake up, then I'm coming straight out to Utah. I'll
swallow my pride and beg for your forgiveness. I'll plead for you to
love me again and then I'll do whatever I have to do to earn my way
back into your heart."

It
was my turn to gently pull her face up so I could see her eyes.

"You
don't need to ask for forgiveness, Adri. I haven't stopped loving
you, and my heart has been yours almost from the first day we met. I
forgave you a long time ago."

I
could feel my voice getting rougher as tears started threatening to
undo my composure.

"I'm...glad
we had our time together. I'm thankful that I got to tell you how I
felt one last time, Adri. I guess I hope that this is real, that you
aren't a figment of my imagination, but I hope you don't remember any
of this when you wake up. Seeing you again would just make it harder
to do what I'm going to have to do."

The dream started to dissolve around me, but I locked gazes with
Adri until the very last of the dream was gone. My memories of the
last few minutes started disappearing only a few moments after the
blackness came for me. I couldn't have come up with a better last
request myself. Not if I'd had weeks to think of it rather than just
a few hours.

Adriana Paige
Upper East Side
Manhattan, New York

We'd
seen Russ out and then Dom had escorted me back to her place. It had
been obvious that I was just in the way, so I'd gone back to my
bedroom in the hopes that once I was out of sight that she'd be able
to just get on with the business of saving Ben and making sure Mom
and I didn't end up with some kind of vampire hit squad knocking on
our door at some point in the next few weeks.

I
fell asleep a few minutes after I flopped onto my bed and didn't wake
up until Jasmin barged into my room.

"Sorry,
Adri. I know you're tired, but can we talk? I've heard Dom's version
of things, but I'd really like to hear your side of things while it's
still fresh in your mind."

As
I looked up at Jasmin I saw her expression change and then realized a
few seconds later that I was crying.

"What's
wrong, Adri?"

I
wiped my tears away and tried to get control of myself, but I was
finding it surprisingly hard to stop new tears from replacing the
ones I'd wiped away.

"I
don't know. I thought maybe I was just really glad to finally see you
again, but I don't think that's it. It almost feels like something
really sad happened in my dream, but I can't remember anything about
it."

"Nothing?"

"I
think maybe I was happy and I felt really safe before the bad
thing."

An
idea floated up from the deepest recesses of my psyche and I almost
couldn't bring myself to ask the question.

"Jasmin,
is Alec okay? I can't explain it, but I feel like something
bad happened to him."

The
snort I got in response was hardly the kind of thing you'd expect out
of someone who looked like a supermodel, but Jasmin pulled it off.

"Alec
is the best he's ever been. I saw him only a few hours ago with that
slut Tasha. He's got two of the bruisers from her pack standing by to
pummel any challenger who might show up, and right now the biggest
danger he's in is that he might stumble into Tasha and bruise his
lips against her face."

I
let out a gasp. I almost attributed it to my normal difficulty
hearing Alec's name, but there was something else there, something
that didn't feel right. I was blindly reaching for the answer but
Jasmin was my only clue.

"That's
not like you, Jasmin. What's really going on?"

She
looked at me for a second and for the first time in ages, I could
see the frustration at her core. Her
incredible beauty was so blinding that sometimes it was hard to see
past it to the person underneath everything.

Jasmin
put her head in her hands for a couple of seconds and then stood up
and closed the door.

"Do
you have a privacy box in here?"

"I
think that's it over on the dresser."

Dom
would have sat down next to me on the bed. Jasmin turned the white
noise generator on and then paced the full length of the room as she
was talking.

"You
know how I've been able to beat James and even Isaac sometimes? Well,
that shouldn't be possible. The only reason I even had a chance
against them is because one of my ancestors cheated."

"What
do you mean?"

"Thanatas
was the second king over the northern shape shifters. His father,
Jaldul, created the monarchy through little more than brute force of
personality. He created a web of alliances that ultimately united
every pack under his rule and then broke the back of the southern
invasion. What the histories tend to gloss over is that the war took
decades. Thanatas grew up knowing nothing but war."

My
eyes were as wide as they'd ever been. This was exactly the kind of
information I'd wanted to know when I'd been in Sanctuary, but which
Alec had been reluctant to tell me.

"Thanatas
seemed to think of peace as some kind of mythical thing. He made some
very bad decisions that ultimately cost him the monarchy, but before
that happened, he had four sons and he passed on a measure of his
gift to them."

"What
does that mean?"

Jasmin
smiled bitterly. "It means his descendants have an unfair
advantage. Thanatas' power was the ability to make small, gradual
changes to his body that made him faster and stronger than even any
hybrid should have been. Some of those changes apparently were
dominant genetic traits. Any descendant of the royal line has a
chance to manifest a kind of juiced-up version of the normal wolf or
hybrid form. Think faster, stronger, harder to kill."

Bits
of information were starting to click into place for me. "That's
how Alec was able to be so clearly dominant to Isaac and James."

"Bingo.
The thing is, you only get one souped-up form, either wolf or hybrid.
I manifested my 'royal' hybrid form back before anyone else in either
pack had become hybrids, so for a little while there, Alec and I
traded off on who was top dog. Once Alec became a hybrid then he got
all of the royal goodies. I think Donovan suspects some of the truth.
He spends too much time fixing Alec and me up to not get at least a
clue here and there when Alec's circulatory system doesn't look
right, even for a hybrid, but as far as I know you're the first
person outside of the royal line to have ever been told that we get
extra advantages the rest of the shape shifters don't get."

Jasmin
was still pacing, but if anything, she was more worked up now rather
than less. My hope that the movement would burn off the edge
of whatever was bothering her was obviously vain.

"I've
lost my royal traits, Adri. I'm not better than any other wolf, in
fact in some ways I'm worse. I keep acting like I still have extra
speed that just isn't there. It almost got me killed a little while
ago."

"Are
you sure? It's not just the effects of whatever has been bothering
you, Dom and Rachel?"

"I'm
sure. It all just fits too nicely together."

Her
words didn't match with her expression or tone. My chest went
tight as I realized that, for Jasmin at least, losing the extra
vitality that had seen her through so much danger somehow wasn't the
worst part of what she had to tell me.

"It's
Alec. He's the reason. Who are the three members of the pack who are
the most loyal to him? Rachel would lie across a railroad track and
wait for a train to hit her if Alec told her to. Dom's nearly as bad,
and I'm obviously worse than I thought."

"What
do you mean?"

"I
know that he's feeding on me somehow. His power is actually working,
it just works all the time rather than in a sudden burst like what
took Brandon's pack down. I know it, but I haven't left yet. I've
dropped all kinds of hints, but he's never reacted in the slightest.
He can lie when he needs to, but not like this. He's consuming all
three of us, and I still can't bring myself to just leave him to die
all by himself."

A
couple more pieces dropped in place inside my head. "That's why
Dom has been feeling better when she's all the way out here. His
power must not work when the...victims aren't close by."

Jasmin
nodded and finally collapsed onto the bed next to me. "Yeah.
That was the bit that finally put it all together for me. That and
the fact that I think Alec is getting physically stronger. I saw him
do something the other day that shouldn't have been possible. He's
turned into some kind of metaphysical vampire."

I
wrapped my arms around Jasmin and put my head on her shoulder. "We'll
figure something out."

"I
hope so, Adri, but I just can't see any options. We're getting ringed
in at every turn and I just can't see a way out of this. Not one that
I'd be able to take and then still live with myself after it was all
over."

Jasmin Bianchi
Outside of Up Town Customs
Brooklyn, New York

I
looked out the van window at the mostly darkened street and found
myself tapping my fingers on the dashboard. We weren't far enough out
for Brooklyn to have turned into something very rural, but at
least there weren't as many neon signs around.

Adri
had been fighting a severe headache ever since the night Ben called.
It wasn't bad enough to go to a doctor over, but I was starting to worry
about her.

She'd
told me everything she could remember about Ben's call, the night
they'd seen him at the book signing, and the time he'd texted while
she'd been on a date with Albert. I'd filed everything she'd said
away and then left so she could go back to sleep. I was pretty sure
she'd spent at least the next few hours worrying about my latest set
of Alec revelations, but there wasn't anything I could do to take it
all back now.

Usually
I was smarter than that. Adri wasn't the kind of person you could
drop a bomb like that on and then expect them to shrug it off like
nothing had happened. It was one of the reasons she was so likable.

She
hadn't been sleeping well the last couple of days. There was a
definite pattern where the headaches were their worst early in the
morning, and then they seemed to taper off in the evening. Assuming
Isaac and I made it through the next couple of hours, I was going to
suggest we give her something to really knock her out tonight and see
if that made things better. Alec could have Dr. Samuels call a
prescription out here pretty much on the drop of a hat.

Isaac
snapped his fingers to get my attention and I nodded. He was right. A
few minutes before we launched an operation that could get us killed
wasn't the time to be woolgathering.

"You
still sure you want to do this tonight, Jas? Even another couple of
days of surveillance could make a big difference."

"Unless
you tell me that you won't go in tonight, I want to do it now. I
don't trust those parasites. If they've realized that Ben called us,
they may have already done something drastic to him. Even if they
haven't, he has to be getting antsy. I don't want him doing something
stupid because he thinks we're not coming for him."

Isaac
nodded and I worried again at how morose he was getting. Isaac and I
weren't close enough for girl talk, but it was obvious he still
hadn't worked through his crap where Alec and the rest of the pack
were concerned. There was a lot of that going around.

"Okay,
tonight it is. It looks like three a.m. is the best time from what
we've seen so far. You want to get some sleep before we roll?"

"No,
I slept before I came out here to relieve you. Why don't you go ahead
and crash in the back of the van. I'll just run through the building
blueprints again."

"Sounds
good. Just don't get too fixated on them. A place like that could
have all kinds of modifications to the floor plan since it was
built."

"Yeah,
I know. Dealing with mind readers makes everything tougher. If this
were just a regular bunch of drug runners, we could at least get
someone inside to look around and tell us what the public areas look
like."

"Woulda,
coulda, shoulda. We'll just have to do the best we can. In and out
quick and hope they left Ben there by himself."

"You
think we'll actually get that lucky?"

"Everything
points that way, but no, I don't. Nothing's gone our way since Agony
showed up in town the last time. We'll end up having to fight our way
in."

"You're
turning into a pessimist."

"School
of hard knocks and all that."

Isaac worked his way to the back of the van and then lay down
in the aisle between the two banks of equipment. He dropped off to
sleep almost instantly, and I was left to face the next couple of
hours of waiting by myself.