Marked (8 page)

I
shook myself out of my stupor and hurried back towards the RV. I
would have insisted that Donovan go before me since he was the one we
needed to get to Alec's side, but I wasn't sure that he would bend
protocol that much, even with Alec's life on the line. It was easier
and quicker to just move as fast as I was able.

A
few seconds later we reached my room at the back of the RV and
Donovan was pouring rubbing alcohol over his hands as Mallory used
her free hand to finish laying out the supplies from the medical kit
stored in the front of the RV.

Donovan
fished out a pair of tiny clamps and then moved Mallory's hand out of
the way. He talked as he inserted both clamps into the hole in Alec's
chest and then went back for more.

"We're
expecting one more car, but the fact that it hasn't arrived yet means
that they are probably already dead. Every minute we stay here
increases the odds that we're not going to be leaving. Mallory,
someone has to get the convoy moving. Please see to it. Out of all of
the people we have left, you have the most derived authority given
your close association to Alec."

For
a second I thought Mallory was going to argue that I needed to be the
one to organize our remaining forces. She'd known Alec for longer
than I had and obviously wanted to be there at his side if these were
his last minutes on earth.

Donovan
looked away from the needle he was threading through the ruin of
Alec's chest for just long enough to shoot Mallory a stern look. "It
has to be you. I need Miss Paige here to communicate with our IT
assets. Some of them refuse to use a phone and you don't even know
how to type."

Mallory
would have been less incensed if Donovan had physically slapped her.
The expression on her face said that he would pay for that comment
later on when there weren't any witnesses around, but she spun on her
heels and headed out of the room without saying another word.

"Miss
Paige, I need an assistant, but don't waste time trying to find the
perfect candidate. Please grab the nearest submissive you can find,
and bring them back here. I should have thought that particular need
through minutes ago. You're going to need both of your hands to
fulfill your task. It will do us no good for me to save Alec's life
only so that all of us can die in prison cells, assassinated by
Coun'hij agents a month from now."

I
nodded and ran to the front of the RV. Mallory was already giving
orders and apparently Donovan had been right about the amount of
authority Alec had invested her with because nobody was arguing with
her.

I
spent less than a second looking over the crowd of people starting to
disperse to the various tasks that Mallory had assigned them. My time
with the pack had taught me a lot about body language and the short
brunette on my side of the group had submissive written all over her.

It
would have been a very bad idea to grab the arm of most shape
shifters, but I grabbed her arm and didn't even think about the
possible consequences until later. Apparently she was even more
submissive than most, that or my status as Alec's fiancé gave
me even more weight to throw around than I'd thought.

"I
need you to come with me. What's your name?"

"But
Mallory just told me to…"

I
looked over at Mallory. "I need this one—find someone to
fill in for her."

Mallory
didn't look happy to be taking yet another set of orders, but I
didn't give her a chance to argue with me. I stepped into the RV,
still pulling Donovan's newest assistant forward by one arm.

"What
is your name?"

"Ruby,
your highness. My name is Ruby."

"Good.
Do you have any first-aid training, Ruby?"

"A
little. Louis made all of us take some classes, but I really don't
know very much."

"That's
okay, you don't need to know much. Mostly you just need to be able to
follow directions. Donovan, this is Ruby—Ruby, meet Donovan.
Help him with whatever he needs. Alec's life depends on it."

Ruby
turned so white that I thought for a moment that she was going to
pass out, but either she was made out of sterner stuff than I would
have originally guessed or the habit of obedience was just too
ingrained to allow her to do anything other than follow orders. She
nodded and then stepped towards the bottle of rubbing alcohol.

I
brushed a lock of hair out of the way as I forced myself to look away
from Alec's bleeding form. "Okay, Donovan, what do you need me
to do?"

"Please
get my laptop, it has all of the necessary protocol installed on it."

The
next two hours passed in erratic stops and starts. When I was deep in
the middle of communicating with one of Donovan's hackers I was
temporarily able to forget that Alec was bleeding to death less than
four feet away from me. When that was the case time flowed by at a
normal speed. The rest of the time it felt like I was balanced on the
edge of a cliff, like I'd already slipped and had started to fall and
only the fact that time was holding still had stopped me from
plummeting to my death.

Donovan
steadfastly refused to answer any of my questions about how the
surgery was going. Initially he simply didn't acknowledge that I'd
even asked them. It took several attempts before he finally looked up
from Alec's chest and frowned at me.

"With
all due respect, Mistress Adriana, I'm at the limits of my
capability. I can operate on Master Alec and I can probably direct
you with sufficient skill to get us away safely, but my attempting
anything more than that will simply guarantee that I'll fail at one
or both of those other tasks."

After
that I shut up and other than asking questions directly related to
what he needed me to communicate to his hackers, I let him focus on
sewing up Alec.

The
first two hours were more intense than I would have guessed they
would be. I had multiple chat windows open and was trying to answer
four or five hackers at the same time at any given moment. I couldn't
even keep straight who was asking what, but Donovan kept track of all
the personalities and what they were asking without even seeming to
break a sweat. There were even several times where he anticipated a
question before it was asked.

Up
to that point in my life there hadn't been very many chances to watch
a true master practice their chosen vocation. My mom had probably
been the first. She'd started out as a terrible photographer, but the
last shoot I'd gone to with her in New York had been nothing less
than amazing. That was probably the first time that I'd really
understood why she'd turned our lives upside down twice in an effort
to follow her dreams.

Mom
had owned the entire location. She'd kept the shooting schedule in
her head at the same time that she'd worked with one model and
monitored the progress of three others who'd been in various stages
of getting into wardrobe or having their makeup done. The level of
respect that everyone there had accorded her had bordered on awe—and
I'd completely understood why they'd felt that way.

As
good as Mom had been, Donovan was even more impressive. I don't know
if anyone else in the world could have accomplished that kind of
surgery in a moving vehicle, bags of blood swaying in the air next to
them, while working with an untrained assistant, and directing
counterintelligence operations against the best cyber-talent the
Coun'hij had managed to bring to the event.

At
one point I couldn't help but stop what I was doing and just sit
there and watch Donovan's sure, deft movements. He was in his element
in a way that I'd never experienced before because I didn't have an
element. All I could do was continue relaying his instructions and
hope that his skills were sufficient to save Alec.

Mallory
got the RV moving and back on the interstate within minutes of me
arriving back in the bedroom with Ruby. She even sent someone back to
the bedroom to ask for the number to the last car, the one that had
been supposed to meet us back at the amphitheater but which never
showed.

I
didn't find out until later that the driver of that last vehicle
never answered his phone. All we could assume was that Donovan's
fears had come to pass and the Coun'hij's people had managed to run
him off of the road sometime before he could make it to the
rendezvous point.

Somewhere
along the way Donovan instructed me to go out into the main section
of the RV and get Vik back on the phones so we could resume relaying
instructions to the rest of our people.

The
data that started flowing in once the switchboard was manned wasn't
pretty. The initial ambushes had gone well, but once the Coun'hij had
figured out that Alec and Donovan were luring them into traps things
had gotten ugly. Our people went from having slight numerical
advantages to fighting outnumbered.

We'd
had a few surprise upsets—hybrids who outfought some of the
Coun'hij's best or wolves who bailed out of their cars and then
proceeded to outrun their pursuers on four legs—but we'd lost a
lot more people, people we couldn't afford to lose.

The
only truly bright spot was the fact that throwing those kinds of
numbers at us required time for the enforcers to reposition.
Occasionally they guessed wrong with regards to where we were trying
to set up our ambush, so whoever was running their side of the
operation wasn't infallible.

Even
when they guessed right sometimes they weren't able to get people
shifted to the location in time, and even when they did, that meant
whoever they had been following before being ordered to redeploy to
the supposed ambush site was then free and clear.

When
it became clear that we couldn't continue to count on winning our
ambushes, Donovan and I started instructing our people to start
trying to lose whoever was tailing them. I would have given almost
anything right then to have access to Ash, but he steadfastly refused
to pick up his phone.

Donovan
indicated that Alec had talked to Isaac earlier in the day, but Isaac
and Kristin had gone completely dark too, which meant that we had to
use the next best resource we had. I hated calling Dominic more than
almost anything. Calling her meant that I was putting her, James,
Andrew, Addison and Alec's mom all in danger, but I couldn't come up
with any other way of giving the rest of our people who were still
being chased a chance of surviving the next few hours.

Dominic
was the one who seemed to have picked up the most tradecraft from Ash
in the weeks and months leading up to the attack on the estate. That
was probably part of why Alec had chosen Dom and James to guard the
pack's noncombatants. So far Alec's trust in Dom's skills was being
vindicated, but after the way that the Coun'hij had managed to track
down such a large percentage of our people, I wasn't sure how long
even her luck could last.

Donovan
seemed to be focusing on the idea that we'd been outmaneuvered by the
Coun'hij's cyber-assets, but I wasn't so sure of that. We'd go ahead
and take all of the precautions Donovan wanted to implement now that
we couldn't be positive that we had the edge when it came to hacker
talent, but I didn't really think that we were being tracked by way
of our phones. I was pretty sure that the Coun'hij had just unveiled
one of their secret members, one of the ones Alec had been worrying
about earlier that morning.

Dominic
graciously agreed to do whatever she could to talk the rest of our
people through trying to lose their tails, but I could hear the doubt
in her voice even as she agreed to my request and I handed her off to
Vik to route her to whoever was the closest to running out of gas.

I
didn't say anything to try and reassure her because I knew she was
right. It isn't easy to lose someone who is determined to follow you.
It's possible, but only if you knew what to look for. Dominic could
explain the principles over the phone, but the chances of someone
correctly implementing them on their first try in a real-world
situation were not very good.

Once
everything else had been dealt with, I finally turned my attention to
piecing together what had happened in Nephi. I'd already caught bits
and pieces of information as Vik and whoever was helping him updated
our database. It didn't sound good, but I'd told him to put the
highest-ranked individual we had on the ground there in charge and
then I'd buried myself in everything else that needed to be done.

I
knew it was a questionable decision. All of those other people I'd
chosen to put at the front of the queue were important too, but Nephi
was our biggest single concentration of assets and it was hard to
legitimately value anything ahead of that.

I
could tell that Donovan had picked up on my hesitation to pursue the
situation in Nephi, but he didn't press, either because he was too
focused on trying to keep Alec alive, or because he didn't want me to
lose face in front of Ruby. I didn't analyze it too much because that
would have pulled my own feelings out into the open where I couldn't
continue to ignore them.

The
situation came to a head when my screen flashed with an incoming call
that I hadn't asked Vik to put through to me.

"What
in the hell were you thinking, Alec?"

I'd
exchanged maybe ten words with Natasha Annikov since I got back from
New York and found out that she and Alec had been days away from
sealing an alliance between the Tucson and Sanctuary packs by getting
married like a couple of feudal nobles. Despite not having heard her
voice more than two or three times, I recognized it instantly. Call
me jealous, but everything about Tasha was burned into my memory.
She'd come very, very close to taking Alec away from me forever and
the worst part was the nagging little voice in the back of my mind
that kept telling me I couldn't hate her because it had all been
my
fault for having walked out on Alec in the first place.