Shattered (Alchemy Series Book #3)
Read Shattered (Alchemy Series Book #3) Online
Authors: Donna Augustine
SHATTERED
Donna Augustine
Copyright © Donna Augustine 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced.
This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author
’s imagination and used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, people or places is entirely coincidental.
ISBN:
0615921450
ISBN-13:
978-0615921457
Strong Hold Publishing
For my mother, who swears I'm the most brilliant writer even though she's never read any of my books.
Edited by Express Editing Solutions
Table of Contents
I leaned my head back against the leather conference chair as I rested the soles of my boots on the dark mahogany table. The room was packed to bursting, between the leadership of wolves, the Fae and humans. Eyes closed, I tried to listen through the din for specific voices but it was too chaotic to follow. They were all speaking at once.
"Enough," Cormac said, or more accurately, yelled. He very seldom raised his voice
but after the week we'd just had, I wasn't surprised he was more on edge than normal.
One week
ago today, we had closed the final tear in the universe, located exactly where New York City used to be. The hell that we unleashed was beyond any of our imaginations. Slow death by radiation was looking more and more like it might have been the better choice. That was no longer an option. We'd merged our existence with the plane of magic, and for better or worse, this was the new world, perhaps the
only
world.
There was no w
ay of telling what happened to Vitor's planet. It was too risky to try and open a wormhole now, if it were even possible. What once might have had a predictable outcome was now a game of Russian Roulette. That's what happens when the machine gets all gunked up with extra crap in the engine. In this case, the extra crap happened to be magic.
Magic. Does anyone really even know what it is? If I'd been asked f
or a definition a year ago, I would have said it was beautiful and impossible things, unicorns frolicking under rainbows and pots of gold guarded by strange little men wearing green. It might still be all of those things…but it was also so much more. It was the ghastly images from nightmares and your deepest fears come to life. And now, it was just your run of the mill day, sitting at a meeting with creatures you didn't know existed a year ago.
The packed conference room fell silent and I forced my
heavy eyelids open. Cormac stood, leaning over the table, palms flat on its surface with his head bent down. His shirtsleeves were rolled up as usual, showing off the tense muscular forearms that accented even further how on edge he was, if you hadn't already picked up on his “rip your head off” tone.
If he had been a
mentally weaker man, this would've been his breaking point. I know if I thought it was an option, it would've been mine. I've never considered myself a slouch in the stamina department, but my limits were being tested daily.
I looked around the room as the silence continued.
This was one of the many "open" meetings we'd had since our return. Everyone would all come in and wait for Cormac to utter some words of brilliance that would make things okay, would make sense of the chaos that ensued after New York. They just didn't get it. There was nothing that was going to make this okay. We'd destroyed something that night and there was no fixing it. This was it.
Burrom, Vitor, Rogo an
d all their people…the ones still alive that is, had been waiting for us at The Lacard when we finally managed to get back. "We" is what's left of The Keepers, a number that was less than it had been a week ago. We'd lost three just on the way home, not to mention the heap of metal that had once been a shiny 747.
"I don't have any answers," Cormac's voice broke
the silence and brought me roughly back to the present.
"What are those grey cre
atures hovering out there? The ones everyone calls the rippers?" A human named Sally asked. "They
ate
one of my friends! Tore him apart, limb by limb, in front of us."
"I t
old you, I don't know. We're working on it." Cormac ran a hand through his black hair, the shadow along his jaw darker than normal.
I felt human
eyes upon me but ignored them. I had the Fae and wolves’ attention as well, and I ignored them too, staring up at the ceiling instead. They all wanted to come here to Earth. So much so, they'd been willing to do it by any means possible. Now that it had turned ugly, they wanted to blame The Keepers for it, and me most of all. And the thing I feared the most was, maybe they were right.
It was hard to defend yourself when you could barely br
eathe past the guilt that weighed down your chest. I ignored them until their attention moved elsewhere, which I knew it shortly would. The anger was in plentiful supply and was being spread out liberally.
"I want the
seventh floor. The ninth is unlucky and I won't stay there anymore," Burrom said, as the fight for domain began again. They'd been bickering between themselves nonstop about who would take what area. The stout little Fae was the only one in the room that seemed unfretted by everything else going on. All he cared about was his sleeping requirements.
"Done,
" Cormac answered, I think relieved to have a problem so easily fixed.
"Wait…I already set up on the
seventh," Vitor said. You'd never know that Vitor and Burrom were of the same race. Vitor was the epitome of casual and refined grace, even if he was twitching more than a chipmunk on crack lately.
"Move your shit
." Cormac leaned a little further in the direction of Vitor. "I said you could stay here. If you've got an issue with the accommodations…leave. That goes for all of you." He looked to Vitor, Burrom, Rogo and Adam, who was the human's representative.
Now that
the shit had hit the fan, there were no secrets left to protect. All the cards were on the table, well, as far as the humans knew anyway, but this was one of the open meetings. There were still the closed meetings where the real shit went down, but no one, including myself, thought the humans were ready for that.
"We
need larger food rations," Adam said, changing the subject.
"No, you don't. If
your people stopped hoarding what they get and actually ate it instead, they'd be fine," Cormac said.
"They're scared," Mark defended.
"We've got enough." Cormac flipped through a few sheets of paper in front of him.
He was looking at the inventory of supplies. I knew exactly what the papers said because I had prepared them. We still had enough if we were careful.
"And when we don't?" Mark countered.
"We'll get more."
Mark dropped the subject but I wondered the same thing in my head. Cormac couldn't single handedly grow food for everyone and we had a limited amount. I took a sip out of my coffee canister filled mostly with coffee and a drop of whiskey. It was only eleven a.m. I certainly couldn't go to the straight stuff for at least a few more hours.
"W
hat about my sister?" Vitor asked.
She's
probably dead, Vitor. They all are! Even if they aren't, you won't ever see them again so they might as well be.
I sank a little deeper into seat as that sentence stole the last bit of energy I had left. I banged my head against the back of the chair but it was cushioned, so it lost all effect.
If Cormac and Vitor were going to finally come to blows, then so be it.
One less mouth to feed, was the way I was starting to view it. Not that I was excited about our numbers dwindling, but if you were going to be a pain in the ass, I'd kick your butt out the door for the rippers myself. There was only so much food left and I certainly didn't want to waste it on a whiner.
"What about her?"
Cormac asked - it wasn't a question, it was a threat.
"We had a deal."
I heard the slightest quiver in Vitor's voice. He was realizing the same thing I was noticing; this wasn't the same Cormac I knew a week ago. The Cormac of old would have beaten him to an inch of his life. This Cormac wouldn't leave an inch. I was getting the distinct impression that Cormac was shedding his civilized façade just as quickly as civilization had fallen to ruins.
"Things change."
Cormac glanced at me and I got the message. It felt as if his eyes were piercing straight through to my soul. Vitor wasn't the only person that had run out of time and he wanted to make sure I understood that loud and clear.
All eyes in the room bounced back and forth betw
een Vitor and Cormac. Even I joined the dance.
Vitor,
predictable as ever, continued on. "You are a Keeper. You keep the portals, the contracts, the peace. You can't just disregard the agreements."
"Everybody here
better listen up." Cormac scanned the room, meeting stare after stare. "The Lacard is the last bastion in the storm. And it belongs to me. My rules, my way. Yesterday doesn’t exist. You get in the way of my survival, then you get out." He turned and looked pointedly at Vitor before he spoke his next words. "There will be no more portals, no more contracts and if you want peace, then you better be ready to fight for it."
Vitor said nothing as Cormac grabbed his stuff from the table, preparing to leave.
A few feet shuffled about as Cormac walked from the room, leaving everyone else to digest his words.
"Fair enough," Burrom said in his deep
gruff voice, then gathered up his people and left, presumably to the seventh floor to evict Vitor's people.
Rogo
, Adam and Vitor's people that were still there, started bartering for the floors they wanted that were left. I leaned my head back again and closed my eyes. I'd get up in a minute. Right now, I couldn't move.
I sensed a shadow
and I opened them to see Vitor, sitting on the edge of the table in front of me.
"He's turning into an animal."
His demeanor reminded me of the lunch lady on the playground in grammar school, when the kids got a bit too rough.
"
Don't care." I hadn't cared when the kids in fifth grade beat each other up, either. Cormac was acting as raw as I felt and I understood it. Vitor was reminding me of a spoiled child, who didn't realize the world had a whole lot more problems than what was in his immediate vision. It didn't help that I knew he was playing both sides, friendly to me when it suited his purpose, but just as ready to burn me at the stake when he needed a scapegoat.
"What happened to you?" Vitor
furrowed his brow as he sized me up, sensing the changes in me.
His question drummed up memories of t
he tornados that had sprung up when we'd been flying back, and nearly ripped the plane apart. A wall of them had formed just as we had hit Montana. There had been nothing natural about them and everything terrifying.
I shook my head. "N
othing," I answered, leaving off that I didn’t want to talk about it
,
but he got the hint. "I'd get over there." I tilted my head toward the group on my left, who were negotiating only a few feet from us.
I stood, getting ready to exit the room. I'd rather drag my exhausted body up
ward than field anymore questions. "By the way, the fifth floor has the smallest square footage and, for some reason, the water pressure sucks."
I passed by
the remaining people, that were picking at the scraps of square footage left, as I walked out of the room.