Intrusion (2 page)

I shook my head and followed Rachel over to the
closest bench.

"You're sure you're fine to just sit
here, Jess? I mean, I know it's not really the ideal time away from
the estate, but I'm way behind."

"It's okay. Mostly I just wanted
out. Sitting, walking, doesn't much matter as long as I get a
break. Besides, the park really is pretty."

I said it more to soothe Rachel's
worries than out of a real appreciation for the park, but as I
looked around I realized it was the truth. We were on the side of
town that tended more towards greenery, and the park was a
beautiful example of landscaping. Semi-wild roses grew off to one
side of the space, somehow pulling the eye away from the periphery
and leading it to the center where a simple stone sculpture
effortlessly dominated the slight elevation upon which it was
located.

Visually everything was perfect, but it would
have still been incomplete without the stream opposite the roses.
The sound as the water tumbled across the rocks formed the perfect
auditory complement.

I watched the sunlight dance across the surface
of the water for several minutes and then finally sat down next to
Rachel on the bench. The warm metal slowly pulled the tension out
of my knotted shoulders, and I felt my eyes closing.

I was nearly to the point of nodding off when
the breeze carried over the foulest scent I'd ever run across. My
eyes snapped open as my heart rate shot up. Rachel looked up from
her book and then went completely still as her mind registered my
distress.

"What is it, Jess?"

"I'm not sure. A smell--a bad
one."

Maybe someone else would have disregarded
something as simple as a scent, but even just a few weeks had been
enough to teach me that for a shape shifter our sense of smell was
one of the most important warning systems we had. Rachel had been
part of the pack long enough that she already knew stuff I was
still trying to learn.

"Can you describe it?"

"Something stale, maybe iron."

"Old blood with a hint of decay?"

I felt my eyebrows climb as I realized Rach had
hit on it exactly. "You can smell it too?"

Rachel was on her feet already,
pulling me up. My beast surged up at her presumption, but we both
knew she outranked me. I let her pull me towards my car, still a
bit confused. Once I was moving under my own power she let me go
and flipped out her phone.

"We've got vampires in the area."

Alec's response had none of the fuzzy distance
I'd been picking up from him ever since Adri had left.

"How do you know? Did you see them?"

"No, but Jess smelled something
odd--the description sounds like what you told everyone to be on
the lookout for."

There was a pause as Alec ran
through decision trees. "Okay, don't go home. If you've been
spotted we don't want to lead them back here. Head to the center of
town, find as big a crowd as you can and just stay put until we
show up. When we drive past follow us."

My heart was still frantically hammering away
inside my chest as we pulled away from the curb. I wanted nothing
more than to just stomp on the gas, but Rachel kept reminding me
not to do anything to attract attention.

The center of town wasn't any more
or less deserted than usual, but it felt like there weren't nearly
enough people to serve as a shield if worse came to worst. Rachel
finally pointed at a small restaurant with an outdoor patio which
had a cop car parked in front of it and I carefully pulled in
behind it.

As we sat waiting for Alec and the
rest of the pack, I found that I was getting more anxious not less.
It only took a moment's thought to know exactly why. Rachel had her
phone out and looked like she was texting, but I couldn't not
ask.

"How does it work? I mean fighting as wolves.
I've barely transformed since the Coun'hij was here, and I've never
fought with Dom or Jas."

Rachel's eyes got big, but she waited to
respond until she'd finished her text. "That was a bad idea, Jess.
You know what pack life is like. I know you're towards the bottom
of the food chain here, but you still need to be able to protect
yourself. Otherwise you're just relying on Isaac even more to
protect you from the inevitable squabbling."

"I…I guess I hadn't thought about it
that way. I went and watched everyone spar one of the first times
right after everything happened. I'd been planning on
participating, but it was scary the way everyone was going at each
other."

"That's because they all know their lives
depend on how well they can protect themselves. If anything the
fighting was probably more intense because of the Coun'hij having
just been there. Even so, they would have been careful with you.
Isaac or Alec either one would have been able to control their
beasts enough to teach you rather than just ripping into
you."

I suddenly felt really stupid. "I guess I
didn't think of it that way. I was just thinking about how much it
was going to hurt and worrying about what would happen if Isaac
couldn't rip Jas off of me fast enough once I'd lost."

Her phone chirped but she ignored it. "It's
water under the bridge now, but you have to remember that there's
still so much you don't know yet. If Alec or Isaac asks you to do
something, they'll have thought it through. Frankly I'm surprised
that Alec let you bow out. I'd have expected for him to push the
issue."

"He tried, but Isaac got in his face about
it."

The look on Rachel's face pulled at
my heart. It wasn't just sad, it was nearly hopeless. I almost
asked what was wrong, but it didn't take a rocket scientist to
figure out what was bothering her. Alec had kept his position at
the top of the pack in no small part because Isaac invariably
backed him to the hilt. With everything that had happened when the
Coun'hij had come, it wasn't surprising that Alec had lost some
real goodwill with the rest of the pack.

I cleared my throat. "I'm sorry,
Rach. I don't mean to make things worse for Alec. I really do
believe he's doing the best he can for us."

"It's not your fault. I get how scary all of
this must be for you. It's just that everyone but Alec has been so
focused on trying to avoid being killed by Brandon and the others
that it's like they're operating blind now. From the way everyone
is turning on each other you'd think we were out of the woods, but
if anything we're in more danger now than we were
before."

"Because of the dispossessed?"

"Yeah, they top the list. If we're
at the point where even Isaac isn't thinking things through, then
what's to stop one of them from coming in and taking over? No
dispossessed can come in and defeat a healthy pack, but there are
so many of them. Once word gets out that a pack is starting to
disintegrate a steady trickle of them will come through looking to
topple Alec."

"Right, but Alec's one of the best fighters
around. Everyone says so."

"They'll wear him down. Without his power
that's all he is, a good fighter. Sooner or later someone will get
lucky, or someone will force a challenge when he's hurt. If the
pack won't lay everything on the line to protect him it's only a
matter of time."

It was stuff that had been nibbling away at the
back of my mind for a few days now, but it was different hearing
Rachel lay out the future in such stark detail. I opened my mouth,
not sure what I was going to say, when it struck me that I hadn't
once thought about Andrew.

"Rach, what about my dad? I mean
right now. There are vampires in the area and Alec's about to leave
Dad, Donovan and your mom all by themselves."

She reached out and squeezed my
hand.

"I know. It's a bit scary, but I expect Donovan
is helping all of them plus James' mom down into the vault. Alec
wouldn't have left them alone, even protected by the vault, if
there was any other option."

Relief washed over me, not just
because Andrew was going to be okay, but because Rachel hadn't
seemed to judge me for not thinking of him sooner. She'd probably
thought of her mom first thing. For me it still wasn't second
nature to think of the old man in the wheelchair as someone I
loved. Probably because I didn't. Not yet. He was such a nice old
man that I was pretty sure I'd come to love him, but for now he was
just as much of a stranger to me as everyone else currently in my
life.

I looked up at the rear-view mirror
and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw James' Honda and Jasmin's
Mercedes headed towards us. I dropped the Escalade back into gear
and followed them to the high-school parking lot.

Isaac, James, and Dom all exited their vehicle
at the same time that Rach and I jumped down out of the Escalade.
Jasmin swung her door open, but neither she nor Alec made any move
to get out as the rest of us clustered around the
Mercedes.

Alec didn't look up from his phone, but as soon
as we were all assembled he started firing off questions at
me.

"How many of them did you smell, and where were
you two when you smelled them?"

I opened my mouth to respond and then felt my
face flush as I realized I'd been so panicked that I hadn't even
tried to gather the most basic intelligence on what we were about
to face. Rachel patted me on the side and then stepped closer to
the car.

"We were at Monument Park, Alec.
That's really about all we know."

He tapped his screen a few more times and then
shook his head. "We need more to go on than that, Rach. You're not
doing Jess any favors by sheltering her right now. Jess, how old
did the scent smell?"

"I…I'm not really sure. It seemed
old, but that might have been more of the nature of the scent
itself. Like old blood."

I felt more than heard a low rumble and
realized that Isaac hadn't appreciated Alec's tone with me. I
mentally sat on the inclination to bristle at Isaac's reaction, but
I hated the fact that I did actually need his
protection.

Alec nodded at something on his
screen and then took a deep breath. "Okay, here's how this is going
to go down. Rachel, you're going to drive Jess's car. The rest of
us will go out on foot in two-man teams, Isaac and Jess on one
side, James and Dom on the other, Jas and I in the
center."

My insides tightened up at the
thought of being out on one edge of the group, but it made sense to
keep Alec in the center such that he had the shortest possible
distance to get to whoever ended up in trouble.

"Dom, Jess and Rachel will all be on a
conference call. Jas, you'll give Rach your phone as well and
she'll speaker a call with me such that if anyone finds something,
the other two groups will know immediately."

Rachel nodded, but I could tell she was scared.
Out of all of us, she was the least able to protect herself, but
Alec wouldn't send her home alone, so she had no choice but to tag
along and hope the relative safety of the vehicle proved
sufficient.

Alec waited until the rest of the
pack nodded and then continued. "Vampires tend to be somewhat
solitary, so it's likely that we're not going to come up against
more than three of them. That means we'll likely have them
outnumbered, but I don't want anyone caught off guard if we end up
facing a larger group for some reason."

Jasmin was starting to pace, but it wasn't
nerves on her part, she was actually keyed up at the idea of facing
down one of the other supernatural group of bad asses out there. I
let my mind wander as I wondered if she'd been like this before Ben
had left. It was a mistake; I missed part of Alec's
instructions.

"…probably going to be carrying
swords or some other kind of edged weapon. Work the flanks, and
unless it turns out that we're outnumbered, there's no need to get
in a rush about anything. We can wait until everyone arrives and
we've properly tired them out. Once they get sloppy it will be
relatively easy to drag them down."

Dom cleared her throat. "Alec, what
of their powers?"

"We'll just have to hope these are young. A
vampire usually has to be at least a couple hundred years old
before their powers really become useful in a fight, and even then
it requires a degree of concentration on their part, so keep the
fight mobile; and if there is more than one of these parasites,
make sure we don't leave any of them unoccupied."

A few minutes later Isaac and I were
strolling towards the center of town. The rest of the briefing had
gone more or less as I'd expected right up to the point where Alec
had handed Rachel a deadly-looking semi-automatic and told her to
avoid getting pulled over.

Isaac and I had been walking for several
minutes before I decided to broach the subject of my unauthorized
field trip. I muted my phone so Rachel couldn't hear and then
cleared my throat.

"Don't take out your anger on
Rachel, okay? She was just trying to be my friend."

"As if I can take anything out on Rachel. As
long as Alec is determined to let the two of you act foolish, there
isn't a whole lot I can do about it. Best turn the phone back on.
If we get jumped there isn't going to be time to unmute
it."