Shattered (10 page)

"Maybe
they don't fear you all the way that you are right now, maybe they
fear what your people could become. Maybe they don't want to be the
ones sitting on the throne, maybe they figure that this way they can
continue on regardless of what else happens. If someone manages to
overthrow the Coun'hij, then this other group will just pick up a new
set of puppet strings and still be just as powerful as they always
have been."

"Indeed,
that holds together with a certain elegance that is hard to
discount."

"So what
do you want to do next?"

"That is
where the true difficulties arise, Adri. I don't want to put you in
even more danger than you are in already. I don't see any way that we
can go after this other group without putting ourselves even more in
the crosshairs than we already are."

I felt myself
start to shake. I considered trying to hide that fact from Taggart,
but the odds were that he already knew what I was feeling. He could
smell the fear and the stress flooding through my system, which
should have felt invasive, but somehow it wasn't. Instead it was
incredibly liberating to know that I couldn't hide anything from him.
It meant there wasn't any reason to waste effort trying to keep up
some kind of false pretense.

I could just be
myself. I could acknowledge the fact that I was scared out of my
mind, acknowledge that this wasn't the kind of thing that I would
have chosen for myself if there had been other options.

"The fact
that you are worried about what might happen to me tells me that you
want to fight."

Taggart held
his hand up as though to interrupt me, but I didn't give him a
chance. "I think it's the right thing for us to do. Not just
you,
us
. I'm scared of what might happen, but I can't just let
you, Isaac and Dominic go into this fight by yourselves."

"There is
nothing to say that I have to involve your other friends, Adri."

"Yes,
there is. In a way they are already involved. They are working to
overthrow the Coun'hij. They aren't going to just suddenly abandon
their beliefs, which means that unless we stop this other group
everyone in the rebellion is just setting themselves up to be
blindsided by someone even worse than the Coun'hij if they manage to
beat the Puppeteer and the rest.

"The guys
Agony tried to warn us about have all of the time in the world to
scout out both sides of the war and then pick the time and place to
strike that best serves their eventual goals. The only way that any
of us have a chance is for our side to figure out exactly what it is
we're up against. That sounds like a job for you and me."

Taggart reached
over and put his arm around my shoulders. "Are you sure?"

"Yeah,
part of me wishes that I was the kind of person that could just put
my head back into the sand, but I can't. I'm terrified, but I'm in."

Taggart gave me a sad smile. "I gave up on the idea of having
any kind of family of my own a long time ago. I know that I have no
right to usurp the role of your real family, but I've taken more
pleasure than I would have imagined possible in seeing how far you've
come in such a short time. I couldn't be more proud of you if you
were my own daughter."

My throat had
gotten strangely tight and it was all that I could do to get words
out. Taggart wasn't the kind of person to give out praise easily;
those few words were worth more than gold to me.

"Where do
you want to start?"

"I think
that there is really only one place for us to go. We're going to have
to stop wasting our time poking around the periphery. We know that
certain members of the Coun'hij know about this other group, so I
think we should start there. You need a dreamless night to put a
little more meat back on your bones, and then tomorrow night we'll go
visit Kaleb Graves."

James Wright
Roan Mountain State Park
Tennessee

"If you
want to ever see your mother again, you need to bring five million
dollars to the location I'll be texting you tomorrow."

It was the last
thing I'd expected to hear when I picked up the phone to answer my
mom's latest call.

We weren't
supposed to be making calls while we were at Carson's cabin. There
were exceptions to that rule for things like letting Alec keep in
touch with Jack, but I was supposed to be keeping my contact with my
mom limited to a text every week or two confirming that she was okay
and that she hadn't somehow managed to run out of money yet.

Supposed to.
Unfortunately my mom hasn't ever been one to listen to orders that
she doesn't agree with. She'd been pestering me every day or two
asking if I'd told Alec about her suspicions that something was
seriously wrong in the section of LA where she was living, and they
hadn't been short calls either.

My relationship
with my mother has been complicated for as long as I can remember.
She's insanely proud of our heritage, of the fact that up until I
came along we were all wolves, the 'working class' of the shape
shifter world. I can't blame her for being proud of our ancestor's
accomplishments—some of us did a whole lot more with fewer
native advantages than their hybrid overlords—but my mom wasn't
any different than anyone else.

She saw the
world through her own special set of frames and instinctively
dismissed anything that didn't gel with her worldview. She'd grown up
hearing about how amazing her parents and grandparents were, but
she'd never really experienced the brutal, ongoing dominance
posturing that most wolves were subject to. At first it had been
because of my father.

Dad had been
just
a wolf, but he'd been a wolf like Jasmin was a wolf. He'd
been fast, strong, and skilled enough to occasionally beat the
younger hybrids who'd tried to push him around as a way of
establishing their street cred inside of the pack. Losing a fight to
a wolf, even a wolf so clearly above the norm as my dad was, did
terrible things to a hybrid's ranking inside of the pack, so it had
only taken a few of those kinds of wins to make most of the hybrids
back off.

Even if you
were pretty sure that you could take someone like my dad, it wasn't
worth taking the chance that he
might
beat you, not just so
you could push around one more wolf, not when there were dozens of
other, less dangerous wolves that you could safely count on to do
whatever you wanted done.

If it had been
my mom who had beaten a hybrid it would have done her absolutely no
good because she would have pushed the issue and forced the rest of
the hybrids inside of the pack to put her in her place. My dad was
smarter than that. He didn't rub anyone's nose in the fact that he'd
defeated them, he didn't try to assert his dominance over them,
didn't put them in a position where they felt like they had to
challenge him again and again until they could consistently beat him.

He kept a low
profile, which meant that most of the hybrids were willing to let him
stand outside of most of the dominance posturing. My bet was that Mom
had very nearly ruined things for him, but it sounded like after some
pretty spectacular arguments between the two of them that he'd
finally convinced her to curtail the worst of her tendency to piss
off everyone else in the pack.

Later on Mom
had allied herself with Samantha Graves, which had served as an added
shield while my father was alive and had even managed to keep her out
of the worst of the infighting after he died.

Mom had lived a
life that most other wolves would have said was incredibly blessed,
but even after so many years she didn't see it that way. She looked
at what our bloodline had accomplished and just figured that she'd
been given no less than her due. It was really kind of funny. Mom was
every bit as much of an elitist as any of the hybrids that she
resented for thinking that they were better than the wolves around
them simply because they were
hybrids
.

As Samantha had
fallen out of favor with Kaleb and had less and less real power
inside of the pack, I'd been forced to step up and shield my mom. I'd
mostly managed to avoid the life-threatening injuries that were part
and parcel of dominance fights, but it had been a close thing. There
had been more than a dozen fights where I'd avoided defeat and
serious injury by nothing more than the skin of my teeth.

Even with all
of that, it had been Alec, Jess and Jasmin who had really been the
reason that I hadn't been curb-stomped years ago. They couldn't join
in the actual dominance fights once they started, but Alec had
quietly turned us into a miniature power bloc inside of the pack. We
didn't have anywhere near enough pull to influence pack
policy—especially not at first—but Alec quietly made it
known that if you jumped one of us for something stupid, then you
were effectively jumping all four of us.

Jess got hurt
pretty badly in a challenge fight six months after she first shifted
into a wolf. She'd been fighting one of the older wolves who had
taken to putting his opponents in the hospital as a way of
discouraging other wolves from challenging him.

Alec, Jasmin
and I had all challenged him one after another within hours of
finding out what he'd done to Jess. I drew the longest straw, so I'd
gone at him last after he was already nursing half a dozen injuries
from the three fights he'd just finished fighting. It had taken me a
month before my right leg had stopped hurting every time a rainstorm
blew through Sanctuary, but I'd left him in the hospital for eight
days, which was about as close as you could get to killing a shape
shifter and still have them recover from their wounds.

It hadn't been
pretty, and I hadn't been proud of what I'd done. It had been
necessary and I'd been glad that we'd helped rein in some of the
worst excesses that had been starting to show up inside of the pack,
but it hadn't been any more fair than what Jess had had done to her.

My mom didn't
see it that way though. She'd seen my victory over a much older wolf
as proof that I was destined for great things. When I'd first
manifested my hybrid shape she'd been obviously conflicted. On the
one hand, I'd just broken with something like two thousand years of
tradition, but on the other hand she figured it meant that I would be
all but unstoppable inside of the pack. After all, if my ancestors
had managed such great things as mere wolves, then surely I could do
even more now that I was a hybrid.

The truth
though was that I wasn't really any better than any other hybrid. I'd
managed so far by picking my fights very carefully and because my
alliance with Alec and the girls was much closer and stronger than
what you usually found outside of blood relations.

It made me
wonder about some of the stories my mom had told me though. Maybe in
another couple hundred years things would be different. Maybe by then
I would have the skills to be able to go up against the best the
Sanctuary pack had to offer, but for now that simply wasn't the case.
How many of my ancestors had found themselves in impossible
situations and simply gotten lucky enough to survive against all of
the odds? How many of them had been sitting in my place with stories
of greatness rattling around inside of their heads and no idea how to
live up to what was expected of them?

Those
expectations colored every interaction between my mother and me. Even
this latest business regarding whatever she thought was going on in
LA. She expected me to walk up to Alec and demand that he drag all of
us—and Jack's people—three quarters of the way across the
country to investigate the strange smell that she'd found.

It wouldn't
have surprised me to find out that she expected me to challenge Alec
to a dominance match if that was what it took to get her the backup
she thought she needed. She just didn't seem to understand that my
relationship with Alec hadn't ever worked like that and it was even
less so now that he was the alpha for our little pack.

Even assuming
that I could actually beat Alec in a challenge match, that wouldn't
accomplish much. Alec hadn't bound us together using violence and
fear, he'd bonded us using a completely different tactic. Not only
that, he'd given all four of us and Jack enough money to make sure
that we wouldn't have to work for a very long time if we didn't want
to.

My trying to
take over the pack, even assuming that had been what I really wanted
to do, would have just resulted in Alec and the girls disappearing
the first time my back was turned and then reforming without me
someplace where I'd never be able to find them.

I'd tried to
explain that to my mom a couple of different times, but it had been
just as incomprehensible to her as the actual value of the money that
I'd handed her before she'd left the estate.

She'd spent the
last four or five decades inside the artificial bubble of the pack
with her needs taken care of—first by her parents, and then by
my father, and then most recently by Samantha. Food, clothing,
shelter, it all just appeared as if by magic with no work on her
part. Her perception of reality when it came to actual pack dynamics
was just as skewed, but I'd long since stopped trying to educate her.

Despite all of
her idiosyncrasies she was my mother and I loved her because of what
she'd done for me over the years, that and for the good that I could
see in her beneath the surface.

All of which
explained why the male voice on the other end of the phone line was
an even greater shock than most people would have otherwise assumed.
I'd answered expecting another frustrating fight. I'd answered
already planning on being angry with her by the time we hung up on
each other.

I didn't expect
to be told that I might not ever see her again, and my preemptive
frustration with her just made me feel even more guilty for not
having been there for her, for not listening to her when she said
that there was something even more dangerous going on in LA than
anyone suspected.