Shattered

A hidden world full of danger and love.

Adriana Paige in a dream walker. She reaches into other people's dreams and ferrets out terrible secrets the rebellion desperately needs.

Someday she'll become the perfect weapon—if she survives the dangerous forces hunting her. Her survival hinges on her friends—her friends and alpha shape shifter Alec Graves.

Alec brings along dangerous enemies of his own, but Adri can't get him out of her mind. Gorgeous, loyal, and compassionate—Alec is worth fighting for.

But with both of them on the run and hundreds of miles separating them, things started out just this side of impossible, and they are about to get much worse.

A new player wants to control Adri and they're willing to go after the people she cares most about in order to force her hand.

Copyright 2014 by Dean Murray

Alec Graves
Roan Mountain State Park
Tennessee

The sword that
whipped through the cool air was directed at my head, but I easily
stepped back out of the way of the blow and then darted forward and
stabbed at Carson's chest. I heard a gasp of astonishment from Brindi
at the ferocity of our attacks, but in truth we were relatively safe.
We were using heavy practice swords that were more than capable of
breaking even hybrid bones, but which lacked the fine edges that
would have been required to actually cut off limbs and pierce flesh.

After our
failed attempt at rescuing Agony, my people had split up. Jasmin,
James and Jess had come back to Tennessee with Carson so that he
could begin training me with a sword, but Carson had indicated that
there wasn't room for Jack's people back at his cabin in Tennessee.

Jack had taken
his people back to St Louis because he figured that they knew the
city better than anyone the Coun'hij might send after them. It also
had the added benefit of being the last place that anyone would
expect him to go, but I suspected that mostly Jack just wanted to go
home and get back to killing vampires.

He was as
committed to trying to overthrow my father, Kaleb, as I was, but that
didn't mean either of us enjoyed killing our own kind. Most of the
hybrids who worked directly for the Coun'hij were every bit as
sadistic as Vincent and Brandon, but between the war with the jaguars
south of the border and the various cities Kaleb and Puppeteer had
tried to cleanse of vampires, the Coun'hij was spread pretty thin.

That meant that
we weren't always fighting guys like Brandon and Vincent. All too
often we ended up fighting people like Alison, people who were just
caught up on the wrong side of this war. Some of them actually
thought we were the bad guys, but most of them fought because they
had someone back home who would pay if they didn't.

Conscripted
troops would gladly turn on their masters the first chance they got,
but Kaleb and the rest of the Coun'hij were experts when it came to
covering themselves and manipulating everyone around them.

I didn't think
there was any way that the rank-and-file pack members would
spontaneously rise up and join our side of the war, but Carson
disagreed with me. We agreed that the Coun'hij was the worst thing
that had ever happened to our people, but there were a lot of other
points where we disagreed quite heatedly.

The question of
how to proceed with the rebellion had become thorny, and it probably
helped explain why Carson had come at me so much harder than normal
on that last exchange.

I'd thrown
everything I had into my stab at Carson, but I couldn't seem to
muster the kind of blinding speed that characterized all of his
attacks. He easily knocked my blade to one side and then stepped
forward and casually punched me in the side of the head.

It was
humiliating. Carson was one of the best fighters I'd ever seen, with
or without a sword. He didn't have Brandon's preternatural—even
for a hybrid—speed and strength, but he was quick and he seemed
to know the perfect counter to every conceivable attack. Against
someone like Carson there was no shame in losing, but even he never
should have been able to hit me with that kind of sucker punch.

I was better
than that. I was no Brandon or Carson, but I'd spent half a decade
holding my own in dominance fights, and I'd recently been involved in
several weeks of heavy fighting with everyone from jaguars to
vampires to Coun'hij enforcers. Nobody should be able to hit me like
that without even really trying.

The massive
seven-foot sword that I'd stolen from Kaleb was a weapon that would
allow me to mow down regular hybrids once I mastered it. It would
provide me with a reach advantage that would be almost impossible to
overcome and I needed to learn how to use it if I was ever going to
have a chance of killing Brandon, but so far I'd proven to be a
terrible student.

Carson could
have easily ripped my throat out rather than just cracking me
alongside the head with his knuckles, and my beast didn't like that
we were being bested so easily.

Normally Carson
used his ability—manipulating the emotions of everyone around
him—to smooth over the tempers that inevitably rose to the
surface whenever you had shape shifters training against each other.
It was part of what made him such an incredible instructor, but today
he'd either forgotten to use his ability or he'd decided that I
needed to learn some kind of lesson.

It was even
possible that he was waiting for me to ask for help calming my beast,
but I wasn't about to give him the satisfaction of begging. The
balance of power in our relationship was already too one-sided. The
first king of the wolves had trained his men without the benefit of
Carson's gift; I wasn't going to be less than they'd been.

"You're
still too slow, Alec. You're fighting like a hybrid rather than a
wolf. That would work if you were using a rapier, but these are more
like Scottish lowlander swords. If you went up against one of the
Ancients like that he'd rip you to pieces before you even realized
what hit you."

Carson had
stepped back out of the simple circle we'd drawn in the dirt, so I
knew he wasn't planning on coming at me again.

"I guess
it's a good thing that I'm not planning on going up against any
Ancients any time soon. I'll settle for just getting good enough to
help you take down Brandon."

It was the
wrong thing to say and I knew it even before the words left my mouth,
but with my beast growling in the back of my mind I couldn't bring
myself to care. Carson's lips pulled back as his beast answered my
verbal jab with a crackle of power.

"Send her
away."

Carson's order
came out just loud enough for me to hear it; there was zero chance
that Brindi had heard. He was obviously angry at me, but he was still
giving me a chance to save face, even around Brindi, who was still
oblivious to most of the intricacies of pack dominance games.

"You don't
get to order me around. I appreciate you agreeing to teach me how to
use this monstrosity, but I'm not going to let you edge yourself in
and take over the show. We either do this as equals or we don't do it
at all. I'll take my people and we'll walk."

Carson's face
didn't change in the slightest. "You would walk away from the
power I bring to the table? You would give that up and risk not being
able to bring down the Coun'hij solely out of pride?"

I looked away
from him and took in the slowly swaying greenery that surrounded our
little clearing. It wasn't an easy question to answer, but there
weren't any clues to be found in our surroundings. As always, the
only answers were going to be the ones that I could hammer out
myself.

"It's not
just about pride. I'm not going to help overthrow the Coun'hij just
so that I can see it replaced with something worse. I like you,
Carson, but I don't know you well enough to swear fealty to you.
There may come a time when I decide to bend my knee, but that isn't
now."

"You mean
to establish yourself as king."

"Yes. I'll
have the clearest claim on the throne once Kaleb is dead."

"Are you
really so arrogant that you think you're the only one who's worthy of
the kingship?"

"Maybe. I
don't think of it that way though. The packs need a symbol to rally
around, and right now I'm the best symbol. Dream Stealer—just
like Agony used to be—is compromised by the fact that he was
part of the Coun'hij in the past. For now I'm that symbol and I'm
also the only person I can trust completely to do the right thing
with that kind of power."

"Fine, I'm
not ordering you to send her away, but I will not continue your
lesson as long as she is here."

It went beyond
splitting hairs, but it provided just enough of the right kind of
pretext. He had the right to establish the conditions under which he
was willing to teach. I turned to Brindi and mustered the closest
thing I could to a smile in my hybrid form.

"Brindi,
would you please go back to the cabin and grab us a couple of bottles
of water from the fridge?"

She frowned. I
knew she hadn't been able to hear Carson and me, but she wasn't
stupid. It was entirely possible that she'd picked up on some of the
non-verbal clues that indicated that we weren't particularly happy
with each other.

Then again, she
hated when I ordered her out of my sight for any reason. She knew
that I wanted her to make progress breaking the skin addiction that
made her constantly want to touch me, but she didn't see the need.

Brindi had been
addicted to a lot of different things during her life, and in her
mind this was the first addiction without side effects. She would
have gladly remained addicted to me forever.

"You've
kept me at arm's length all day, Alec. I'm practically shaking over
here."

She was
exaggerating, but not by much. Still, as much as I would have liked
not to take such a hard line with her, she'd proven more than once
that she wasn't above playing on my sympathies to get what she
wanted.

"You know
my terms, Brindi. If you want to remain here with me then you need to
continue to actively work on your addiction, and you need to pull
your weight around here."

"Fine, but
if I die from exposure on the way back, I'm going to haunt you for
the next two hundred years."

Carson watched
until Brindi had disappeared around the bend in the trail that led
back to the cabin, and then listened until he was certain that she
wasn't going to come back. My beast had mostly calmed back down by
that point, but Carson reawakened the anger with his next statement.

"You
understand that you're a symbol, but you fail to grasp the full
meaning of that. It's just like with your swordwork. You understand
the concepts, but you refuse to carry the principles to their logical
conclusion. If you're going to be a symbol then you need to be a
symbol. Quit wasting your strength fighting the Coun'hij and fight
our people's true enemies. It is abhorrent that we wolves are killing
each other while the jaguars, vampires and werewolves run around
almost completely unchecked."

I wrapped
mental arms around my beast's neck and pulled him up short, but there
wasn't anything I could really do about the crackling blast of energy
that he discharged into the air. It would have been more than enough
to force a transformation save for the fact that I was already
wearing my hybrid body.

"I didn't
make the rules that are stopping our kind from hunting the
werewolves, Carson, and I want the jaguars stopped and the vampires
exterminated as much as anyone else, but there is a limit to what I
can accomplish."

"By
yourself, that is true, but you don't have to remain by yourself. You
need to inspire the packs. Show them what kind of leader you would be
and they will flock to your standard. The Coun'hij rules because the
unaligned wolves and hybrids let them. They rule because nobody has
given the regular wolves a better option."

I shook my
head. "No, the Coun'hij rules because of fear. They rule because
every man, woman and child of our kind knows that if they step out of
line, someone they care about will suffer as a consequence."