Burned (9 page)

"I think I
understand at least part of what you're feeling, Taggart. Even after
having her basically rip my head off tonight, I still don't want to
see her turned into the kind of cold, inhuman tool that the Coun'hij
uses to do its dirty work, but you're right to have brought it up. If
we have a chance to end this without enduring a long, bloody civil
war, then we need to take it."

I looked him in
the eyes and said what needed to be said—whether he knew it or
not. "We need to start with Kaleb."

"No, Alec,
I wouldn't ask that of you. We'll start with someone else. Puppeteer
or Oblivion would both be better test cases. Puppeteer will be all
but defenseless inside of a dream. Once he's been separated from his
werewolves, he's no more dangerous than any other hybrid and less
probably than most. Killing him will do much more for the war effort
than killing your father—you said so yourself just minutes
ago."

I shook my
head. "You've never seen Puppeteer, and neither has Adri, but
she told me the first time we met that she'd watched Kaleb inside of
one of her first dream walks. That makes it easier, right? We need to
start with someone we know we can pull into my dreams, and there is
every reason to go after the single most important person we can
manage.

"You can't
guarantee that Adri will be able to connect with Puppeteer, and
Oblivion is much more dangerous than Kaleb will ever be in a
one-on-one situation. If my powers work inside of a dream, then
there's a chance that Oblivion's will too.

"Besides,
I've met Oblivion before and I'm not sure that he has to be our
enemy. It's too soon to tell, but if there's a way to salvage him we
should. Regardless of who wins this rebellion we've committed
ourselves to, we're still going to have to do damage control where it
comes to keeping the humans in the dark about our existence. Nobody
is better at that than Oblivion.

"It has to
be Kaleb, he has to be first or he'll see it coming and start
changing up his sleep schedule in order to make it harder for us to
trap him here."

I could see
that Taggart agreed with the logic behind my words, but he either
wanted to spare me from having to kill my father, or he didn't trust
that I would actually go through with it. I hoped it was the former.

"It
doesn't have to be like that, Alec. I've already considered the fact
that our enemies will eventually start changing up their sleeping
schedules. Once we've confirmed that your power works inside of
dreams, you and Adri won't need me there as backup. I'll be able to
instead spend my sleeping time tracking down and identifying targets
for the two of you."

"No,
Taggart, it does have to be like that. We can't risk Kaleb being
alerted to what's coming or everything will get much tougher. What is
it they say? The best way to kill a snake is by cutting off the head.
The Coun'hij is more like a hydra than a snake, but the principle is
the same. If you want my help then you're going to have to help me
kill Kaleb first of all."

We stood there
in silence, neither willing to back down for several seconds before
Taggart shrugged. "This is a pointless discussion until we know
if your ability will be effective under these circumstances. Let's
test it out."

I opened up the
black hole that I now carried around inside of me at all times. I
focused it on Taggart, and opened my imaginary fist up wider and
wider. It took longer than it should have—either Taggart was
even more powerful than I'd expected, or my ability wasn't as
effective here as it was in the real world—but as I hit my
maximum rate of absorption he dropped to his knees and I knew the
matter was settled.

My gift worked
here and we were going to kill Kaleb before we went after anyone
else.

Alec Graves
Highway 12
Western Montana

The drive from
our hotel to the rendezvous spot in Montana only took a few hours.
Brindi and I usually passed our drive time in companionable silence,
but this time it was even quieter than normal because I'd decided we
needed to make an extra early start.

It was only
possible because I needed so much less sleep than humans did. I'd
been pushing things on the first leg of the drive back from Chicago,
which meant that Brindi had fallen asleep in the car before we'd made
it to the hotel. I'd helped her stumble from the car to the hotel
room where she collapsed onto the bed and fell asleep even before I
got her tucked in under the covers.

I wasn't really
surprised that she was still sleeping when I finished showering a few
minutes after five a.m. I carried our bags back out to the SUV, and
then once it was warmed up enough to be comfortable, I carried Brindi
outside and buckled her into the vehicle.

I'd been
expecting the journey through the cold morning air to wake her up
despite all of my precautions, but she just burrowed down deeper into
my arms without ever opening her eyes. A few minutes later we were
checked out and on the road.

Brindi stayed
asleep for so long I was actually starting to wonder if she was okay
by the time we hit the outskirts of Helena. I pulled my eyes away
from the road for just long enough to check her over, and found to my
surprise that her eyes were open and she was watching me drive.

"I never
even heard your breathing change. How long have you been awake?"

"I don't
know—it's possible that I'm still dreaming."

"Not
unless you make a habit of dreaming with your eyes open."

Brindi
stretched and then rearranged the blanket that I'd draped over her.
"In that case, I've probably been awake for twenty minutes or
so. I couldn't say for sure though because I never really felt like I
woke up. I just kind of transitioned from my dream to the real world.
I guess my mind just added in details from the real world while I was
dreaming because you were driving just like that in my dream too."

I thought she
was done talking, and started to reach for the radio, but she reached
over and took my hand, eyes closed as she reveled in the feeling of
my skin against hers.

"Honestly,
I've stopped worrying so much about which parts of my life are dreams
and which parts are reality. Things have become so surreal since I
met you that it's hard sometimes to believe that this hasn't all just
been one epically-long dream that started in that club in Chicago.
You're not like anyone else I've ever met, Alec. You turn reality
upside down just by existing."

I shrugged
uncomfortably. "I'm sorry to drag you away from everyone else
again. You've been making good progress lately, and it hasn't gone
unnoticed—and not just by me either. Jess, Jasmin,
Rachel—they've all mentioned how hard you've been working at
limiting your contact with me. The last thing you needed right now
was to be thrown back into such close quarters with me. That can't
have made things any easier for you."

"Careful,
Alec, if you keep this up I'm going to feel like you support my
efforts to drain your bank account down to zero. I haven't been doing
anything unusual for a girl faced with a hunky guy with money to burn
who wanted them out of the way for as much of the day as possible.
What girl doesn't like shopping?"

She released my
hand, with a visible exercise of will, and leaned back against her
door. She seemed happy to leave it at that, but it turned out that I
wasn't. Somewhere along the way she'd gone from being an unwanted
burden to being a friend.

I still wanted
to reconcile with Adri, but I was more and more sorry about the
position that Brindi had been put in, and I'd noticed lately that I
felt a pang of loss each time she broke off physical contact with me.

"You talk
a good game, Brindi, but I've noticed that your shopping trips are
remarkably frugal for someone who claims to be trying to deplete my
fortune. You'd have to start spending several times as much per day
as you currently do if you wanted to actually make a dent in the
interest off of the main operating account."

"Yeah,
well, shopping is fun and all, but it's not like we can really afford
for me to add an extra suitcase full of clothes to my possessions
every day."

"Some
girls wouldn't let that stop them—there are plenty of places
where you could spend two thousand dollars on a sweater if you really
wanted to."

For the first
time since she'd woken up, Brindi looked away from me. "Some
girls, but not me. I've never run in the kind of circles where people
would even be able to tell that I'd spent that much money on an
article of clothing. I don't need designer—I'm already living
like a queen as it is. Besides, it doesn't seem like a very good
repayment for everything that you've done for me."

"You mean
like addicting you to my touch and then dragging you all across the
country from one dangerous situation to another?"

"No, like
getting me out of a very dangerous situation by paying off the people
I owed a ridiculous amount of money to."

I'd actually
forgotten all about that. In my mind things were long past square
between us just based on the fact that she'd saved my life in Chicago
just minutes after we met. The silence had suddenly become
uncomfortable, but luckily we were turning onto the road where we
were supposed to be meeting the rest of our group.

I pointed at a
pair of forty-foot-long RV's that were parked side by side at a
run-down truck stop less than a hundred yards from the interstate. "I
think that's us."

"Good—I've
needed to pee for the last twenty minutes, but I didn't really want
to stop at a gas station. Those RV's look like exactly the solution
to my problem. Not all of us have preternaturally-strong bladders."

I rolled my
eyes at her and then turned into the truck stop. Brindi disappeared
into the closest RV, as James led me over to the other one.

"You have
any problems?"

I shook my
head. "No—I'll bring you up to speed in a minute, but
let's wait until we've got all of the key people in one spot so that
I don't have to tell everyone multiple times."

"You're in
luck—everyone but Alison's mom is already here."

He wasn't
kidding; the RV was standing room only. I looked over all of the
people who'd been waiting for Brindi and me to arrive and felt a
surge of relief crash through me as I saw that none of them had been
killed during the time that we'd been separated.

James, Jack,
Alison, Jess, Jasmin, Carson, Rachel—they were all there, and
they were the most welcome sight I'd ever seen.

Alison pointed
back at the second RV. "I can bring my mom up to speed later if
you want—unless you need Brindi to be here for this."

"No,
that's fine. Before I get started though I'd like to hear how things
in LA ended."

There was a
moment as everyone looked around at each other. I'd gone to great
lengths in order to stop everyone from getting carried away with the
question of who was dominant to whom. It was working because I was so
clearly dominant to everyone else, but it did occasionally have some
downsides.

"Jack, you
were the one taking point on that operation—why don't you go
ahead and report on it?"

"Not much
to tell. Losing James, Jasmin, Jess and Carson put a real crimp in
our operations, but we managed to keep a lid on everything until they
could get back. We killed another four vampires and just shy of two
dozen gang members who were in deep enough that they'd picked up that
odd, almost vampire scent that Addison noticed while she was there."

"So you
would say that the problem has been contained?"

He shrugged.
"It's hard to say for sure. I think that the gang is in tatters.
The fact that we could sniff them out meant that we killed all of the
members who were very committed. We destroyed about a million
dollars' worth of drugs, and seized another hundred thousand in hard
currency. They aren't going to be rebuilding the gang into a force in
that area any time soon—at least not without outside help.

"I don't
think that we need to worry about the humans finding out about us—not
this late in the game—but there isn't any way of knowing for
sure if the vampires got a message out to whomever they report to
before we wiped out the group that was holding Addison."

I nodded. Out
of everything that had happened, I was most worried about whoever was
at the top of the organization that was fielding super-vamps in such
great numbers. We'd run into two of them in LA, and then killed three
more in Minnesota. I'd managed to kill all of the ones that we'd
tangled with so far, but it was far from guaranteed that I was going
to continue to be able to do so.

I could only be
in one place at a time, which was bad enough, but I was even more
worried about the sheer level of power that would be required to
unite such a powerful group of vampires together. It had been all
that I could do to bring down the more powerful of the vampires we'd
encountered—what would happen if I faced off against the head
vampire and it turned out that he was too powerful for me to use my
ability on him?

Not only that,
every shape shifter we killed over the course of this war was one
less soldier who could be thrown into the fight if the vampires
decided to start expanding their operations over onto our shores. It
was very possible that I was weakening our race at the precise time
we could least afford it.

Someone like
Puppeteer could be an invaluable weapon if we suddenly found
ourselves awash in ridiculously powerful vampires, but only if he
could be counted on not to turn against us at the first sign of
weakness. No, we were going to have to eliminate the Coun'hij just as
Taggart and I had discussed. Hopefully once all the smoke cleared
there would still be enough of us—with powers or
otherwise—remaining to stem the tide of the invasion I knew in
my bones was headed our way.