Burned (6 page)

I knew that I
was breaking his heart, that he was more and more concerned about how
despondent I'd gotten, but I just couldn't bring myself to care. I
slept fitfully when I slept at all—scared to death of going
back into someone else's dreams—but I rarely got out of bed.

Nellie was the
only person who seemed to be able to cut through the storm clouds.
She cared about me, but not so much that she wasn't willing to kick
my butt a little when she felt like it was necessary. She was the one
who made me eat when I wanted nothing more than to just starve to
death. For a few days I'd almost thought she was going to get me back
outside walking around and pretending that I was a normal human
being.

It was odd. I
knew that Taggart cared about me, but his company never seemed to do
anything to dull my anguish. Nellie on the other hand seemed to be
able to buffer the worst of my pain simply by sitting next to me and
holding my hand. Just having her around put a layer of gauze between
me and my emotions.

That had all
changed somehow when we arrived in Florida. Days before that I'd
become so sleep-deprived that I'd started having waking
dreams—hallucinations really. They had always been disturbing,
but in Florida I'd started seeing Alec in my dreams.

That was the
last straw for me. Intellectually I knew that Alec couldn't have
known that the vampire leader had twenty tons of machinery suspended
over my parents' heads when he'd come crashing into the center of the
building and sucked away all of her energy. He'd been doing the best
he could, and he'd saved the lives of Taggart, Isaac, Dom, and Heath.
He'd even saved Cindi. He'd saved the lives of
almost
everyone
I cared about, but all I could think about was the fact that he'd
failed.

He'd been the
one who'd sent the machinery crashing down that had killed my
parents.

I tried to tell
myself that it wasn't Alec I was seeing, but it didn't work. It was
Alec and I knew it. He was older looking, and sterner, with
unforgiving eyes, but it was him.

I'd started out
ignoring him—and the shadowy presences just outside my field of
vision—but it didn't work. He didn't go away, didn't disappear
to be replaced by some other hallucination. I was reaching the end of
my rope.

Ignoring the
fake Alec hadn't worked, and at some point I was going to start
yelling and screaming at him. Once that happened, Taggart was going
to have no alternative but to sedate me. I could see it all bearing
down on me, an unstoppable freight train, and I just couldn't bring
myself to care enough to get off of the tracks.

As it always
did, Nellie's presence took away the smallest part of my anguish, but
the effect never lasted for very long. It went away sooner than
normal when I saw that she wasn't alone.

There was a
reason that I'd given her a key to my room, but not given one to
Taggart. Our shared ritual of hot coco in the evenings had fallen by
the wayside. Underneath all of the concern, Taggart's eyes had become
too judgmental for me to spend time around him.

"We have
news, Adri. Alec has heard rumors that the Coun'hij is preparing to
take out the Tucson pack."

Taggart
obviously wanted some kind of response from me, but I didn't give him
one. He sighed and then continued.

"I know
you don't know anything about the Tucson pack, Adri, and I know that
you don't want to be reminded about Alec right now, but those are
real people out there. They have people who love them, and they're in
terrible danger. If Alec's intel is right, the Coun'hij has decided
to start purging dissident packs. They're starting with Tucson
because they are small enough that Kaleb figures they can be
eliminated in one fell swoop, but big—and strong—enough
that it will send the right kind of message to anyone who's been
thinking about declaring openly for the rebellion."

"You're
right, I don't know anything about the Tucson pack, and I don't want
to. If you want to save them, then go ahead. Take Nellie, call up
Isaac and Heath, and go meet up with Alec. You don't need me and I'll
be better off without you."

Taggart turned
to Nellie. "Leave us."

To her credit,
Nellie looked like she wanted to argue with him. She cared about me
every bit as much as he did, and she could see what was coming as
well as I could. She wanted to tell him this was a bad idea, but
arguing with a dominant—especially a dominant as strong as
Taggart, one who was obviously just looking for a reason to let his
anger off its leash—was a bad idea.

Taggart waited
until she was gone and then pulled a handgun out from the back of his
waistband. It wasn't just any gun, it was my gun. It was the gun that
I'd used to drive Brandon off, the gun I'd used to shoot vampires
after…after Mom and Dad had been killed.

That gun had
been a promise of power, of never being defenseless again. It had
been my own personal talisman, and it had all been a big lie. It had
failed me. I'd stood there powerless, unable to move while my parents
had been executed.

He tossed my
weapon on the bed. "Pick it up."

"Go away."

"This
isn't you, Adri. The girl I knew wouldn't have let herself spend
twenty-three hours of every day in bed. The Adri I knew was a
fighter. She was willing to go head to head with the most dangerous
things out there in the darkness rather than just roll over and die."

"That Adri
was nothing more than an illusion, Taggart. I'm sorry that you had to
find out this way, but it's better for you to find out now rather
than later."

"If that
Adri wasn't real, then pick up that gun and end it. If you're not
willing to fight then you're betraying your father—the man that
I watched face death looking his killer in the eyes. More than that,
you're betraying Isaac, Heath, Dominic and me. We all put our lives
on the line for you—not your parents, you. We went up against
something that still gives me nightmares because we cared about you
and thought you were worth saving."

I opened my
mouth to tell him that I hadn't asked any of them to risk their
lives, but I couldn't remember if that was true. It was all a big
hazy mess of repressed memories. Everything from immediately before
and immediately after my parent's death was too blurry to pick out
anything useful from it.

I could
remember the instant when my parents had been crushed in perfect,
painful detail, but everything else had faded away into nothing.

The flare of
anger I'd felt at Taggart's words was new. It wasn't one of the
emotions that had taken me over since the fight. It wasn't safe. I
looked at the gun lying on the bedspread, scant inches away from my
fingers, and felt an overpowering urge to pick it up.

Taggart wasn't
done talking though. "Do you want to know the worst part? You've
betrayed Alec, and that is a transgression I never thought I'd see
you commit."

"How dare
you! How dare you mention his name to me. You of all people. You
spent weeks telling me that he couldn't be trusted. First it was
because of who his father was and then it was because he'd addicted
Brindi to his touch. You had a hundred reasons why he was wrong for
me."

"Yes, and
all of them were wrong. He—"

"They were
right! He killed my parents, Taggart. Don't you tell me to pick up
that gun. If I pick it up I won't use it on myself. I'll hunt Alec
down and use it on him."

Somewhere along
the line I'd jumped out of bed and thrown myself at Taggart, but he
caught me and easily immobilized me so that I couldn't hurt him.

"It's okay
to be mad at him, Adri. It's natural to want someone to blame, but
it's not his fault. You need to allow yourself to grieve so that you
can work past this. You can't stay mad at him forever."

"No, you
were right all along. He's no good. He's a glory hound who only cares
about making sure that he's seen as the hero who saved the best hope
of the rebellion."

"He went
in after Cindi expecting to die, Adri. He didn't want you to have to
pick between her and your parents, so he came up with a plan that was
believable enough that you wouldn't question it. His power wasn't
working when he set out to 'rescue' Cindi. You know this—or if
you don't you should.

"Alec
isn't the villain here, he's the one who saved Cindi. He was ready to
sacrifice his life for nothing more than the hope that you would be
happy. The real question is how many people would be willing to do
that for you, Adri."

"You just
finished telling me the answer to that question. You, Isaac, Dom,
Heath, and more than a dozen others."

"No. Being
willing to risk one's life isn't the same thing as going into a fight
knowing you will die, Adri. You should know that better than anyone.
You were ready to do exactly that for your family. Would you do that
for Dom? For Isaac? For me?

"Alec is
going to try to help the Tucson pack simply because it's the right
thing to do. The only question is if you're going to let him go into
battle by himself. He needs us—needs you. You don't have to be
past what happened to your parents, but you need to acknowledge that
it wasn't Alec's fault."

I was shaking,
sobs wracking my body, and somewhere along the way Taggart's
restraining hold turned to an embrace. As the sobs finally started to
die down, I looked down and realized that I had my gun dangling from
my right hand.

Taggart saw my
questioning look and wiped away my tears. "You have one of the
strongest survival instincts of anyone I know. I didn't know any
other way to get through to you."

"That's a
hell of a risk for you to be taking—for both of us."

"It wasn't
loaded, but even if it had been, it would have been a risk I would
have been willing to take—for you."

Alec Graves
The Comfort Motel
Minneapolis Minnesota

I knew I was
dreaming because Brindi wasn't anywhere to be seen. I'd spent years
trying to train myself to be aware of my dreams enough to detect when
Dream Stealer—Taggart—paid me a visit, and it had all
been useless, but a lack of Brindi's presence instantly alerted me
that this couldn't be reality.

Even as I
thought it, I knew that wasn't fair. Kaleb—my father—had
warned me that it had taken him more than a decade to learn to
instantly recognize his dreams, so it wasn't as though I was
surprised at not having mastered that particular discipline yet.

It was funny
really. There had been a period of time where I'd held out hope that
Kaleb's training was secretly because he didn't want Dream Stealer to
find out that he was working against the Coun'hij. It was by far the
less-likely explanation, but somehow my young mind had fixated on
that idea rather than just understanding that Kaleb was every bit as
bad as my mother had been telling me he was.

Of course she
turned out not to be so amazing herself.

As far as
Brindi went, that wasn't quite fair either. She was around on a
nearly constant basis—she'd been waiting for me back at our
hotel when I'd finished up with Shawn—but she was genuinely
making an effort to work on the skin addiction.

It wasn't
uncommon for her to go eight hours at a time without any physical
contact with me, but I'd realized somewhere along the way that
whenever she was out of my sight I could feel an invisible timer
ticking away in the back of my mind. It counted down the seconds
until she needed to see me again.

It wasn't
exactly that I was looking forward to seeing her—although it
was nice to have one person in my life who was always glad to see
me—it was more like an acknowledgment of the fact that she
depended on me. If the clock got too close to zero without her making
it back, then I knew I needed to track her down before the shakes
settled in and she lost the ability to make it back to me.

That was
actually one of the reasons that I knew Brindi was making an honest
effort to distance herself from me. The old Brindi would have never
let herself get more than a dozen yards away from me for more than an
hour. The new Brindi actually pushed the envelope more than she
should have. There had been a couple of times already where she'd
stayed out so long that James or one of the girls had been forced to
go retrieve her.

It was
frustrating. She was trying so hard now, but the withdrawal symptoms
had gotten even worse. Carson didn't have any more experience with
the Ja'tell bond than I did, but he agreed that this was unlike
anything he'd ever seen before. He'd even floated the theory that the
strength of Brindi's addiction had something to do with my being from
the royal line.

I'd been
racking my mind ever since in an attempt to remember exactly how bad
things had gotten with my mother, but she'd mostly retreated back
into her rooms when her symptoms had gotten the worst. Rachel was of
the opinion that Mom's addiction hadn't been as bad, but that had
just confirmed what I'd already been suspecting. The simple fact was
that Brindi hadn't been this bad before I'd manifested my ability.

Somehow
I
was doing this to Brindi. I suspected that Brindi had come to the
same conclusion, and that was part of why she was trying so hard to
get some distance from me, but I hadn't had the courage to ask her
yet.

Not hearing
that timer ticking away had been all I needed to know that what I was
experiencing couldn't be real. Some part of my subconscious mind knew
that Brindi was sleeping on the second bed in my room, that she was
safe.

I looked around
at my surroundings and realized that I was back in the gardens that
surrounded the estate in Sanctuary. It was just as breathtaking as
always, but then again I'd reconstructed this from my memories of
home, so it only made sense that it would meet my expectations in
every way.