Marked (24 page)

"I'm
sorry; I should have gotten up and helped before now…I've just
been so tired lately."

Alec
shook his head as he stood and grabbed hold of Dom's arm to steady
her. "You shouldn't even be up right now, Dom. Go back to bed.
My mother can wait."

Dom's
smile was a thing of beauty. It transformed a face that had felt
ancient and alien just a second ago into something that belonged to
the girl we all knew and loved. "You're one to talk, Alec.
Neither of us is supposed to be out of bed yet, but here we both are.
Really, I'll be okay—it will probably be good for me. I don't
feel as bad now that I'm up and moving around."

Alec
hesitated for a second, hand still on Dom's arm, before finally
nodding. "Thank you, Dom. Not just for this either. I appreciate
what you did for me earlier too. I'm not sure I would have lasted
this long without your help. If it gets to be too much for you let us
know and Donovan will jump back over and help finish up with James."

"
Sí
,
Alec. Things will be fine."

"No
healing him, Dom. We can't risk it right now. Take care of him the
old-fashioned way."

There
was a heartbeat there where I thought that Dom was going to argue
with Alec, but in the end she nodded her agreement and hobbled past
us. Actually, hobbled wasn't the right word—she started out
moving with obvious difficulty, but Alec steadied her for the first
few steps, after which she seemed fine.

Alec
looked at me with misery written large across his face. "This is
my fault."

"Don't
say that. You can't control your mother any more than you can force
any of the rest of us to behave. Besides, James is going to be fine
and your mother didn't manage to actually lay a hand on me."

"No,
you're right about the rest, but that wasn't actually what I was
talking about. My mom being unconscious is my fault. I was trying to
keep her from getting back up and attacking anyone; I had my gift
open just a crack, just enough to keep her down, but then there at
the end there was such a surge of power out of her that I had to
increase the amount of energy I was pulling in or she would have been
able to get up."

"I
don't understand, Alec."

"I
drained away the surge of energy to wherever it is that I send stuff
with my ability, but then her power level dropped so quickly that I
wasn't ready and didn't rein in my absorption fast enough. I took too
much from her, Adri. I tried to stop, but it's hard when it's wide
open like that. There at the end I could feel her life force
guttering. I almost killed my own mother."

"But
you didn't, Alec, she's going to be just fine."

"Is
she? I may not have killed her, but I did send her back into a coma.
Who knows when—or even if—she'll wake up again."

"Don't
talk like that, Alec. This isn't your fault—you don't even know
that she's in a coma yet."

"She
is…I can feel it, Adri. Maybe I'm the one who put her into a
coma the first time around. I'm not safe to be around, not even for
my own mother."

I
put my hand on the side of Alec's face and pulled his head around so
that he had to look at me. "You're right, you are very dangerous
to be around—that's exactly the reason that we're all here. If
you'd been even a smidgen less dangerous we'd all be dead. You're
dangerous, but you're infinitely better than the rest of what's out
there. We
need
you to be dangerous, but right now you need to be back in bed."

Alec
looked at me uncomprehendingly for several seconds before shaking
himself as though waking from a dream as Donovan knelt down next to
us. "There isn't time for that, Adri. Donovan, please see to my
mother—I'm afraid that I'm going to be unable to wait at her
bedside as protocol might demand."

Alec
stood up and started walking back towards his bedroom, but he was
still moving as though in a daze, so I was easily able to jump over
his mother's legs and catch up to him.

"Alec,
you
have
to lie back down. If we lose you then we lose everything."

"There
isn't time, Adri. If I don't take this opportunity to circulate among
our people then we're still going to lose everything. You said that
we lost the communications equipment—how are we keeping in
contact with Mallory and the rest of our people?"

"We're
using burner phones, but you should really…"

While
I'd been talking Alec had stripped off his shirt and I got my first
good look at his chest since before we'd fought Dream Stealer
together. He wasn't fully healed, but the angry red scars that had
persisted for so much longer than they should have were almost
completely gone. His shoulder looked like it had never been injured,
and all that was left of the gunshot that had nearly destroyed his
heart was a mass of white scar tissue that looked like it was years
old.

"How
did that happen? I thought you were still weak when you woke up—you
couldn't even make it out of the bed."

"I
was weak—I could feel a flutter in my heart and it was all I
could do to move my arm, but sometime between now and then all of
that went away. There's still no guarantee that I don't have some
kind of critical damage to my heart, but if so the simple passage of
time probably isn't going to make any kind of difference."

"You're
telling me that your chest healed during the course of less than five
minutes? That's impossible, even for a hybrid."

"I
know it's hard to believe, Adri. I don't have an explanation, but the
thing I keep thinking about is that this was how my father used to be
before he died. It doesn't make any sense, but we don't have time to
stop and question it—I need to talk to Mallory and the others
and then I need to make about a dozen calls. There are things that
need to be set into motion if you…if we are going to have any
chance of winning this war."

I
wanted to run over to him and wrap my good arm around his bare chest.
I'd only just barely gotten Alec back and it didn't seem fair to lose
him to the demands of his duty already, but he was right. I'd already
neglected our people to a dangerous degree and there was no telling
how much work he had ahead of him repairing the damage I'd done.

"I'll
go get a couple of burner phones and wait for you out with everyone
else."

I
turned to go, but Alec was suddenly blocking my way and his arms had
wrapped themselves around me so fast that I didn't even see them
coming.

"I'm
sorry we aren't going to have more time to just be together without
all of the rest of this craziness right now, Adri."

I
wiped a tear away from the corner of one of my eyes, hoping that I'd
managed to catch it before he noticed. "No, it's okay. I
understand—I really do. Maybe if I hadn't made such a mess of
things it would be different, but I did, so it's not."

"You
can't say that, Adri. You've done an amazing job. You provided the
direction needed to keep our people from splintering into a dozen
different pieces. Not only that, you did battle with Dream Stealer
himself and brought me back. You've been incredible in every way."

"It
doesn't feel like I've been incredible. It feels like I started out
decently and then cracked under the pressure after I nearly got one
of my best friends killed. You would have done a lot better if you'd
been in my shoes."

"I
was in your shoes not too long ago, Adri. You were gone and I made an
absolute mess of things. You've managed to keep a group of complete
strangers headed in the same direction—I nearly alienated my
closest friends, people who were ready to give me the benefit of the
doubt over and over again. You've exceeded anything I could have
hoped for and I wouldn't be here if not for you. You're the most
amazing person I could have hoped to end up with. I'm so sorry about
your arm."

He
kissed me, one, long glorious kiss that seemed to transport me to
somewhere else, to a location where we didn't have to worry about
Dream Stealer or the rest of the Coun'hij. I wanted to stay there in
his arms, pressed up against the bare skin of his chest, forever, but
in the end, I was the one who broke the contact.

"You're
right, we need to get moving. I'll be waiting for you as soon as you
finish changing."

Donovan
had just finished lifting Alec's mom into one of the bunks as I
pulled the bedroom door shut behind me.

"How
is she?"

"Resting.
I fear that Master Alec is right and she's slipped back into a coma,
but I'm most worried about Master Alec."

"You're
going to have to see it for yourself, but it looks like his hybrid
healing has finally kicked in. His chest is almost completely
healed."

Donovan
had to reach for the wall to steady himself. "How is that
possible?"

"I
don't know, but it couldn't have come at a better time. I need to
grab some burner phones so Alec can call Mallory. I suspect that he's
going to want to make some calls to the rest of our people, which
means that we need a city, something big enough that we have a chance
of losing ourselves in the crowds while Alec makes calls to numbers
that are almost certainly being tracked."

Donovan
nodded. "Of course. I think that we're within an hour or so of
St Louis. I'll get on with our IT assets now and ask them to start
encrypting random calls going out of the city. It won't do anything
to hide the fact that there is something going on in the city, and it
won't stop someone from triangulating the calls if they know what
numbers we are calling from, but it will keep the Coun'hij from
listening in on our conversations at least."

Alec
came out of the bedroom wearing designer jeans and a long-sleeved
shirt that he hadn't bothered to button up. I handed him one of the
three burner phones I'd grabbed out of the supply we'd picked up in
Denver and he smiled his thanks as he turned towards Donovan, already
sitting at the desk typing.

"Donovan,
I grabbed my phone off of the table next to my bed, but it's missing
my sim card. Did you guys get that out of the communications
equipment before you changed vehicles?"

Donovan
went white. "No, Master Alec, I should have remembered—I
knew that your sim card was at the heart of the equipment that we
left behind, but I failed to instruct our people to remove it from
the device before setting the RV on fire…"

"It's
okay, Donovan, you come pretty close, but nobody is perfect. You and
Adri have picked up quite the load since I was injured. I'm no Isaac,
but I can probably manage to clone my sim card before we get to the
closest city. I know I can't use this phone until we're almost ready
to leave, not without bringing Coun'hij kill teams down on our heads,
but by now I've probably got a hundred messages that need to be gone
through. The people with Tasha will have known not to call this
phone, but we'll have other people who are more out of the loop than
that and I need to get back to them as soon as possible."

The
next twenty minutes went by in a blur. Alec called Mallory and let
her know that he wanted to stop in St Louis so that she could handle
all of the logistics of finding a safe spot to stop inside of the
city and making sure that we didn't lose anyone along the way. From
there Alec hooked his phone and a new sim card up to his laptop and
began trying to get his phone cloned.

I ate and then kept myself busy with whatever small tasks I could find to help with
that didn't require two hands. I handed Dom medical supplies as she
finished taping up James, I helped Ruby carry Andrew to and from the
couch, and I fetched extra burner phones for Alec and Donovan as
needed, but mostly I watched the pack watch Alec.

There
was a sense of reverence to the way that they all looked at him. It
was obvious that on some level each of them had been convinced that
he wouldn't be coming back, that they would never see him again and
that our cause was doomed. That belief seemed to require that they
touch him and exchange a few words with him before they could really
accept that they'd been wrong, that they still had a chance of
surviving.

Even
James, who I was pretty sure didn't always like Alec very much, and
Donovan, who I'd thought had more faith than me, stopped Alec on some
pretext or another and spent a couple of seconds making sure that it
was really him, that he'd really come back to us healed and ready for
another round of fights.

Alec
handled each interruption with the regal bearing that he'd started
demonstrating more and more lately. He'd always been polite and
understanding, but it seemed like he'd come to understand his people
on a whole new level recently. He didn't resent the interruptions
because he knew it was the price that had to be paid if he was going
to keep everyone motivated and pulling towards the goals we needed to
achieve.

Mallory
outdid herself when it came to selecting our stopping place. Rather
than the dark parking garage that I'd been expecting, she directed
everyone to the largest music festival I'd ever seen. It was
brilliant because all of the musicians and a surprising number of the
fans had arrived in motorhomes and tour buses similar to what we were
driving.

Even
better, the festival was due to run for nearly a week—with
different musical styles each day—so I was guessing that there
would be a steady stream of RV's coming and going each day. Against
that kind of backdrop we would blend into the noise so well that it
would take a miracle for the Coun'hij to find us.

We
pulled into the massive parking lot a few minutes behind Mallory and
then, after turning around, parked close enough that our canopies
nearly touched once they were extended. We were safe from aerial
observation as well as being watched from two directions, which was
about as much as we could ask for without drawing an inordinate
amount of attention to ourselves, but Donovan still handed out sun
glasses and hats as we exited the RV.