Marked Read online

  Happily ever after takes a lot more effort than they let on in fairytales.

  Adriana Paige thought she was getting married. Days before the wedding, shape shifters and werewolves tore through the estate killing and burning.

  Their forces once again outnumbered, pack members scattered and locked in their own battles, Adri turns to Alec for protection and leadership, but Alec faces even more sinister forces than ever before.

  Adri needs to find the strength required to wage a war across an entire continent. If she fails, Alec and everyone else she cares about will be killed before her eyes.

  This time Adri must become the alpha.

  Marked

  by Dean Murray

  Copyright 2014 by Dean Murray

  Also by Dean Murray:

  The Reflections Series

  Broken (free)

  Torn (free if you sign up for Dean's Mailing List)

  Splintered

  Intrusion

  Trapped

  Forsaken

  Riven

  Driven

  Lost

  Marked

  The Greater Darkness (Writing as Eldon Murphy) (free)

  A Darkness Mirrored (Writing as Eldon Murphy)

  The Dark Reflections Series

  Bound

  Hunted

  Ambushed

  Shattered

  The Guadel Chronicles

  Frozen Prospects (free)

  Thawed Fortunes (free if you sign up for Dean's Mailing List)

  Brittle Bonds

  Shattered Ties

  Chapter 1

  Adriana Paige

  Interstate 15

  Western Montana

  I was running.

  The sense that something terrible was chasing me was simply too strong for me to do anything else. I knew I was dreaming—my surroundings were too beautiful to be explained by anything else—but even that knowledge wasn't enough to make me stand my ground. It was like there was some kind of evolutionary cutout at work. The part of me that was advanced enough to talk and use tools was no match for instincts developed over thousands of years—not when faced by something that ran hunched over, with claws that dripped a combination of venom and blood.

  It felt like I'd been running for hours, but given the way that time seemed to skip and stretch inside of dreams, there was no way of being sure how long I'd been fleeing. I jumped over a fallen tree, clearing the eight-foot-tall obstacle without breaking my stride. The trunk, a dark bar covered by faintly-glowing moss, sailed by with a speed I never could have managed in the real world. It was one more sign that this was nothing more than a nightmare, but I didn't slow my pace.

  I was running on two feet, darting between softly glowing pillars that I knew had to be trees, and that felt wrong too. I was seeing the world the same way that Alec and the rest of my friends who were shape shifters saw it. It felt like I should be running on four legs, but there wasn't time to stop and make myself change shapes—even assuming that I was capable of something like that inside of a dream.

  Heedless of the noise I was making, I crashed through a set of tall bushes that looked like some kind of glowing, new-age glass sculpture, and then I was free of the forest. The ground I was running across now couldn't possibly have supported the kind of dense forest that I'd just left. Rather than the soft black soil I'd been expecting, it had shifted to hard red rock.

  It had been dark in the forest, but I exited into sunlight that was so bright it was almost blinding. I stumbled, squinting as I tried to continue forward, but before I'd even finished taking my second step the sun had vanished. It didn't set, it just disappeared, leaving me in a darkness that was so profound I felt like I'd stepped into some kind of void.

  Only the feel of the rock underneath my feet gave lie to the idea that I'd stepped into a realm of nothingness. There wasn't anything living on the rock, nothing to provide even the barest hint of illumination to my borrowed, supernatural vision.

  Before the light had disappeared the ground before me had been flat, but now it sloped upwards in a set of irregular steps that tripped me. I caught myself with my hands, but the impact sent shooting jabs of pain up my arms.

  As I scrambled back to my feet, I heard something come crashing out of the forest. I knew I would be better off not looking back to see what was chasing me, but I couldn't help myself. It was big, much bigger than any hybrid, bigger even than the werewolf that had nearly killed Isaac and Jasmin in New York.

  I'd only thought that the night around me was dark, but now I could see that I'd been wrong. The night still felt dark, but it was nothing compared to the darkness that streamed off of the creature. It was like nothing I'd ever seen.

  I wanted to say that it was a dark light, but even with my heart trying to tear itself free of my chest I still knew that was a contradiction. Darkness was an absence of light, but this darkness acted like light, reached out with greedy tendrils in an effort to fill the space around the thing slowly advancing toward me.

  The blackness was strong enough that it was hard to make out details. I'd already registered the fact that it was huge. The claws flexing at the ends of its fingers were longer than my arms and I got an impression there were more teeth crammed into its mouth than could have physically fit inside of the pit housing them.

  The ground shook slightly as it approached. I needed to get away, needed to run—until my heart exploded inside of my chest if necessary—but I was having a hard time looking away from its eyes. They were green and seemed to flicker, moving inside of the deep sockets in its head as though they were made out of some kind of grotesque fire.

  I'd always thought of green as a color that symbolized life, but in this instance green had been perverted into something unclean, something that devoured life and left behind only ruin.

  "You can't escape me."

  Its voice sounded like plates of chitin sliding across each other, like a billion insects chittering in unison.

  "What do you want?"

  It was stupid. In the back of my mind I knew that nothing I was experiencing was real, but part of me couldn't help but act as though this was all real, as though the creature was something that could be reasoned with.

  "The death of everything you hold dear, the destruction of everything you stand for."

  I opened my mouth to tell it that I didn't understand, but before I could get the words out, it sprang towards me. Nothing that big should have been able to move so quickly. I'd spent most of the last six months watching werewolves and shape shifters fight. I'd been exposed to unbelievable speed, to people who were so preternaturally fast that they could cover a dozen yards before I could even blink, but this was more than that. It didn't just cross the distance between us, it was as though it teleported, as though the space simply ceased to exist for one critical instant.

  The impossibly long claws took me in the stomach, pierced my flesh at the same time that they sent me into a state of shock. I tried to push myself off of them in a vain attempt to get free so that I could flee from something faster than thought, but it picked me up.

  "So easy. I thought maybe you would be a challenge, that you would be stronger than your friends. Will you beg for me to end your life too?"

  Its words didn't make any sense. I'd never been the strong one. Alec, Jasmin, Dominic and even Rachel all had sources of strength that I'd never possessed. The very act of trying to understand what its words meant pulled my mind out of the shock that had been cushioning me from the pain up until then.

  It was like having bars of liquid fire shoved into my gut. I'd spent months suffering from emotional wounds that had come within inches of destroying me. I'd thought that nothing could equal the agony I'd felt then, but this was a whole new kind of pain. It was like agony and despair all rol
led up into one terrible package.

  For a split second I balanced on the edge of disaster. I wanted to give up, to give into the pain and surrender, to let it carry me away into oblivion, but then I thought about Alec.

  He needed me. Shawn's gift had settled that particular question as far as the future of the rebellion went. As hard as it was to believe, without Alec and me, the rest of my friends were doomed. With me by Alec's side they had a chance, slender though it was.

  It was more than that though. I'd heard enough stories about how life in the pack had been while I'd been gone to know that Alec had been under incredible stress after I left Sanctuary. He'd dealt with things with admirable determination, but when you came right down to it he needed me in the same way that I needed him.

  I wasn't going to give up and sentence him to a life of loneliness simply because fighting back against this thing hurt.

  Thinking about Alec sent a warm rush of energy humming through me. The pain was still there, but the tingling power that had filled me to the point where I nearly couldn't contain it had somehow muted the pain to a point where I could function again.

  "I'm not scared of you."

  Even as I said the words, I kicked off against the creature's arm with every ounce of strength I could muster. In the real world I never could have hoped to muster enough force to tear myself free of three-foot claws, but in this particular dream I did exactly that.

  The pain spiked as I hurled myself back and up, but I'd known that would be the case and I gritted my teeth in a vain effort to stop myself from screaming again. The creature started to bring its other hand around, trying to rip me out of the air, and I knew that would be the end of everything.

  In that instant I needed to be faster, and this time reality conformed itself to my needs in the way that dreams sometimes allow. I sailed up over the grasping, deadly points of the creature's claws seemingly moving in slow motion, but still somehow managing to be faster than the nightmare that had been chasing me.

  I should have crashed to the ground on my back, but instead the dream once again molded itself to my needs. I tucked my legs and turned what should have been a disastrous, leg-breaking landing into a graceful backflip.

  It wasn't something I could do in real life. I didn't even know how to tumble, let alone have the guts to do it in the middle of a fight for my life, but somehow it all came together for me and for one impossibly long second I felt a kind of weightless, perfection that would have probably haunted me forever if I'd been able to dwell on the feeling.

  Rock shattered, crushed into powder under my feet from the force of my landing, and then I spun and took off at a run.

  It was insane. I was still bleeding and I hadn't been able to outrun the creature even when I'd been at my best, but apparently I was firmly in flight mode.

  I could hear the creature behind me, claws chipping away at the rock as it used them for extra traction while giving chase. My mind whirled desperately, looking for a weapon or a refuge, but this time my surroundings proved stubbornly uncooperative.

  I took another step, hands forward to help propel me up the incline, and then I was at the top of the climb. I was trapped. There was twenty feet of flat ground and then beyond that a ravine that was more than fifty feet across.

  Alec would have turned and attacked the creature, using his superior position to get at its head and neck, but I wasn't Alec. I was already gasping for breath, but I reached deep inside and tapped into some of the energy that had brought me this far. It was leaking out in time with the blood that had already soaked my pants, but there was enough left for one more good sprint.

  I crossed the open expanse of rock in three impossibly long strides. I took my speed as a good sign, as proof that my dream was about to conform to my needs, and then threw myself across the ravine.

  There was a glimmer of something on the other side that looked like it might be a safe landing spot, and that was what I was aiming for. I reached towards that spot with my mind and pulled with everything I had, willing the future I wanted into being.

  I heard the creature scream in rage, a raspy roar that made my blood freeze, but it was too late—I was already two-thirds of the way across the ravine and showed no signs of slowing. A grin started to force its way past my concentration, and then suddenly the cliff seemed to get further away from me.

  The shock as I started to fall was so complete that for a second my mind refused to function. I was dead…only a tiny voice kept trying to tell me that it was impossible to die in a dream.

  Was I dreaming? Suddenly I wasn't so sure. Maybe I'd simply had some kind of psychotic break from the stress of dealing with the attack on the estate. It was possible for multiple psychological blows to send someone over the edge like that.

  First there had been Dad and Cindi dying in that car wreck and then I'd nearly died more times than I could count. Really, it was a surprise that I hadn't completely melted down when Alec and I had broken up.

  It hit me with a suddenness that took my breath away. What if everything that had happened since the accident had all been nothing more than some kind of massive hallucination? What if none of it had been real?

  The universe felt like a crystal goblet vibrating a hairsbreadth away from high C. All it would take was the slightest change in pitch for everything to shatter. Life had gotten a lot harder since the accident, but that had always felt like a fair trade in exchange for having Alec in my life. The thought of going back to how I'd been, a broken little doll with nothing to look forward to, no purpose other than just getting through the day, was more than I could handle and something in the depths of my mind started to unravel.

  I probably would have blacked out again, returning to the welcome oblivion of one of my panic attacks, if not for the warm, tingly energy flowing through me. That energy was Alec's. It had been one of his defining characteristics for as long as I'd known him.

  I could very nearly feel his arms wrapped around me and that pulled me back from the edge of insanity. Alec was too amazing to be nothing more than a figment of my imagination. Even in the middle of the worst kind of psychotic break, I still wouldn't have been capable of imagining a version of reality where I ended up with him.

  People sometimes say that someone—or something—is too good to be true, but this was the exact opposite of that. Alec was too good not to be true, and that was all the reassurance that I needed. Besides, I wasn't sure that it was possible to feel this much pain in the middle of a hallucination.

  Then again, it wasn't supposed to be possible to feel pain in the middle of a dream either. That was worrisome. Alec being real didn't necessarily prove that I wasn't falling. In fact, it actually made more sense that a mind facing death would come up with reasons why nothing it was experiencing was real. There were probably lots of people who fell to their deaths convinced that they were just about to wake up from a nightmare.

  No, I could see myself doing that, but everything that had happened during the last few minutes was too far outside even the normal dream craziness for me to believe it was all real. This had to be a dream. Maybe the pain was just a side effect of the dream power that Mallory was convinced I had.

  I was still falling; my brush with insanity had taken no more than a second, but I was moving impossibly fast and the ground wasn't very far away.

  This wasn't my first falling dream and I relaxed as I fell the last hundred feet, expecting to wake up in the instant before I would have crashed into the ground. I started to drift free and then some kind of heavy pressure pushed me back into my body.

  I screamed again, my mind clawing desperately for some escape, and then another wave of energy crashed through me and my eyes popped open.

  I was safely in my bed at the back of Alec's massive RV. The chase and fall had been nothing more than a bad dream, a dream that was swiftly slipping away from me despite my best efforts to hold onto it for analysis.

  There was something about what I'd just experienced that put i
t in a category all of its own. It was more than just seeing the world in shades of glowing white or the fact that I'd felt such intense pain. There was something fundamentally different about this dream, something that felt important.

  It was right on the edge of my mind, like I'd started to say something and then had the word I'd wanted to use dissolve out of my memory. Maybe I would have managed to pin it down if I hadn't realized a second later that Alec's warm, muscular arms were wrapped around me.

  "Are you okay, Adri?"

  I couldn't think of a better surprise to wake up to. Alec and I were still sleeping separately despite the temptation to do otherwise. Waking up and finding Alec in bed with me sent thoughts of my nightmare tumbling out of my skull.

  "I think so—what happened?"

  "I was about to ask you the same question. You started screaming a little while ago. I came back to check on you and saw that you were thrashing around hard enough that you'd broken the bookshelf."

  I didn't want to give Alec a reason to let go of me, so I didn't move very far, but I turned my head enough to see the pile of books on the far end of the bed.

  "Wow, I'm lucky I didn't get brained by one of them."

  "Yeah. In hindsight maybe it wasn't the best idea to mount a shelf above the bed like that. I was worried you were going to break the other one as well so I immobilized your arms. I've been trying to wake you up for nearly five minutes. Bad dream?"

  "Yeah, I guess."

  "You want to talk about it?"

  "Actually I do, but I don't seem to remember much about it. I think something was chasing me, but that's about all that stuck with me."

  "You're sure there's nothing else?"

  "I don't know…maybe the sense that it wasn't a normal dream, but I couldn't tell you for sure what made it special. I'm sure exhausted though. I feel like I've been running for hours—I was less tired than this when I went to bed."

  "There's a lot of that going around."