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  Forsaken

  by Dean Murray

  Copyright 2012 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

  The Greater Darkness (Writing as Eldon Murphy)

  A Darkness Mirrored (Writing as Eldon Murphy)

  The Dark Reflections Series

  Bound

  Hunted

  The Guadel Chronicles

  Frozen Prospects (free)

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

  Brittle Bonds

  Shattered Ties

  Chapter 1

  Alec Graves

  Graves Estate

  Sanctuary, Utah

  The blank canvas staring at me hadn't changed in weeks. I still went through the motions, still came here regularly and mixed up paints, but I hadn't managed to actually paint anything since she'd left.

  I was going to have to order another set of blank canvases before too much longer. It was ludicrous in so many ways, but it was the only way to keep up appearances. The pack was hanging together mostly out of sheer inertia these days. I, for one, wasn't eager to do anything to upset the status quo. As long as I kept retiring into my studio on a regular basis, there was still a chance that nobody would think to ask if I was still painting.

  Once they asked, I wouldn't be able to lie. I'd have been willing to lie—it seemed that there wasn't much I wasn't willing to do anymore—but they'd smell the deception immediately. When you lived with people who could hear your heartbeat change and smell your body start to perspire, misdirection became the best way to avoid having to face up to truths that you didn't particularly want to share with everyone.

  I heard Jasmin coming while she was still several seconds away. It gave me plenty of time to make sure I looked convincing when she arrived.

  "Alec, we've got a problem. The first of the dispossessed just arrived."

  I nodded, looked at my brush and palette, and then just mentally shrugged as I dropped them both into a wastebasket. It was probably time to get another set of supplies ordered anyway.

  Pack life wasn't a very simple thing, and it wasn't even always very desirable. True submissives tended to stay with a pack because of the protection that packs offered, but dominants were another matter. There were occasionally dominants like Ash who were happy to lead a solitary life, but for the most part, wolves were social beings.

  Most dominants wanted to belong to a pack, but more importantly, they wanted to rule a pack. When their abilities fell short of their aspirations, they often found themselves run out of the pack that they'd failed to take over. Some of them ended up joining up with the Coun'hij, the shape shifter ruling body, as one of their bully boys, but most of them were too rebellious for even the Coun'hij to put up with them.

  They weren't any real danger to a healthy pack, but they posed a potentially fatal problem for a weakened pack.

  Our pack was the definition of unhealthy right now, and it was small enough that it would draw challengers sooner rather than later. I'd actually been expecting the first challenger to arrive a week earlier.

  I gestured for Jasmin to lead the way and then followed her out of my studio.

  "Has Ash returned from Vegas yet?"

  Jasmin shook her head, and the motion spoke volumes about our situation.

  "No, he's still gone, and Dominic is still not doing well. I saw her and James earlier today, and she looked like she'd been run over by a truck."

  It was another concern. Jasmin was putting on a good front, but I knew she wasn't in a whole lot better shape than Dom was. In a human it would have been the kind of thing that I'd have just chalked up to a virus, but shape shifters were supposed to be immune to pretty much every pathogen there was.

  There were exceptions to every rule, but Rachel seemed to have whatever it was too, and that was even harder to explain away. I'd had Donovan cart Rachel into town so Dr. Samuels could run a bunch of different blood work on her, but he'd found nothing that explained how tired she was all of the time.

  I couldn't send Jas or Dominic in for the same kind of tests, not without blowing some poor lab tech's mind with the fact that neither of them was quite human, but the fact that Rachel's results had come back clean was a pretty good bit of evidence that whatever it was couldn't be explained by purely physical means.

  I hadn't said anything to the rest of the pack, not even to Donovan, but I was pretty sure the Coun'hij were somehow responsible. It still wasn't a very likely explanation. None of the Coun'hij were rumored to have anything at all like the ability to inflict the kind of general malaise that we were seeing, but I hadn't missed out on the fact that it was bringing down the three people who were the most loyal to me. I kept thinking that if the Coun'hij really did have a secret weapon, then pulling Dom, Rachel and Jasmin out of the power structure was pretty much guaranteed to cause our pack problems.

  Despite the fact that Jasmin was moving a bit more slowly than normal, we were still making good time. We only had a few seconds before we'd be within earshot of the front door.

  "What's this guy like?"

  "About James' size, and he gives off enough power that I'm pretty sure he's a hybrid. I've never heard of him, though, so I don't think he's got any kind of extra ability over and above the normal."

  I nodded. It was a reasonable assumption on more levels than one. Most of the hybrids who developed any kind of useful power tended to end up ruling a pack, but you never knew when someone who had been a plain-Jane hybrid would manifest a power that was sufficient to shake things up. It didn't happen often, but it did happen. More telling was the fact that this guy was the first challenger we'd seen.

  Any of the really powerful dispossessed would wait to make their move until they had a better idea of what they'd be up against. The weaker hybrids would move first either because they were hoping for a lucky break or because they were pushed into doing it by someone higher up on the food chain.

  "Who's with him?"

  "Isaac and Donovan. I called James on my way, so he'll be bringing Dom. Jess is still gone."

  I grunted. Jess wouldn't have made much difference even if she'd been here. She'd been our weakest fighter even before she'd lost her memories. Now that she was missing all of the experience she'd racked up fighting Brandon's pack for all of those years, she was even more useless in a fight.

  "It's going to have to be you who leads off, Jas. I don't particularly like it, but if Dom is still as bad off as you're saying, then sending her in against a hybrid is just too risky."

  It was the truth, but it wasn't the whole truth. I hated the state we'd come to. Jasmin knew exactly the kinds of games I was forced to play. If I sent Dominic in first, James would be even more pissed at me than normal, and he'd have a decent reason to be mad. Dom was seriously off her game right now. I could lead with her anyway and tell Jasmin to sit the fight out. It would be a way to guarantee that James entered the fight as soon as things started going bad for Dom, but that wasn't the way that I wanted to run the pack.

  Instead I was going to send Jasmin in, knowing that she wasn't at the top of her game, and hope that James appreciated the gesture enough to jump in before things got too dire for her. It wasn't the kind of thing I wanted to do, but it was my best chance of earning some brownie points with James, and I needed to get the pack working together again.

  Jasmin looked at me for several seconds and then finally nodded. "I'll do my best, but I'm not going to be able to bring this guy down by myself. You'll have to get James in the mi
x pretty fast or I'm going to be out of commission for a while."

  We crossed into the range of the white noise generator that Isaac or Donovan had turned on when the challenger had arrived. It wasn't safe to talk anymore so I was left with nothing to distract me from my thoughts.

  My asking Jasmin to lead was also telling as far as the status of my on-again, off-again ability went. I'd been told since I was little that I had the potential of developing an incredibly powerful 'extra' ability, but it had steadfastly refused to materialize until the night I'd faced off against a rival pack leader in a fight to the death that everyone knew I couldn't win. I'd been well on my way to losing the battle, and then all of a sudden, it had been like a rift opened up inside of me and sucked in power from everyone around me.

  I'd brought two whole packs to their knees before the rift closed, but luckily I'd been the one to recover from the experience the fastest, which had allowed me to kill the rival pack leader. Since then, there had been a number of times when it would have been really useful to uncork my ability and bring people to their knees. Unfortunately, each time I'd reached for my power I'd come away with nothing.

  When we'd gone up against a rogue cat from south of the border, there'd been the hint of something there as I'd tried to drain him of power and energy, but it hadn't been nearly as effective as the night I'd killed Brandon. I managed to slow him down a little, but I'd slowed the rest of my pack down nearly as badly, so the net effect had only been slightly positive.

  The surest way for us to shut down the stream of dispossessed challengers we no doubt had coming our way would be for me to use my power to instantly level the first couple who came up against us. Unfortunately, it was looking more and more like my power was going to refuse to come when called.

  Barring me being able to pull the equivalent of a tactical nuke out of my pocket, our next best bet was to demonstrate that we had a string of capable pack members that any challenger would have to go through before they'd get a shot at me. Six months ago, I would have said that everyone in the pack would have stepped forward at need to help send the right message to the rest of the shape shifter world at large. Now I wasn't so sure.

  Jasmin would do her best, and her lineage granted her an extra degree of deadliness that most normal wolves couldn't hope to match, but given her current state, the best I could hope for was that she'd tire him out a little and bleed him enough to slow him down. Dom was out of the question unless I was prepared to run a much higher likelihood than normal that she wouldn't survive even long enough for Jasmin or one of the others to tap in, and Isaac was probably still pissed off at me for refusing to let him go camping with Jessica and Andrew.

  That meant that things depended entirely on James. If he jumped in to relieve Jasmin and then managed to conclude the fight, we'd send a strong message that any other challengers would have to go through Jasmin and James just to get to Isaac. If James couldn't bring the fight to a resolution, then there was a chance I'd be pulled in to save James and we'd be telling everyone that all they needed to do to take our pack over was beat Jasmin, James and me.

  Jasmin and I came around the last corner before the front reception area, and I got my first look at the shape shifter who was going to do his best to kill us over the next few minutes. He was a tall redhead, maybe even a little bigger than James, and he looked old enough that I suspected he was more dangerous than Jasmin had initially thought. Nobody made it into middle age as one of the dispossessed without being a very good fighter.

  James and Dom were both there, which I'd expected, but I hadn't anticipated James' mother would accompany them. Addison was usually the last person to take an interest in a fight, but whenever she did show up for something, it invariably spelled trouble. I noted her presence and then confirmed that Donovan and Isaac were also there before acknowledging the challenger.

  "What brings you to our territory uninvited, unwelcome?"

  The challenger smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. "My name is Derrick, and I come here to challenge your right to rule your pack."

  I nodded as though it wasn't something everyone present had known since the second Derrick had set foot in our territory.

  "That is your right, but we won't do that here. There is a space out back that is more appropriate for a challenge."

  Derrick nodded, obviously trying to look unshaken, but still unable to fully mask the flash of relief that went through him at my implicit confirmation that the Sanctuary pack would be honoring his challenge right. It was rare, but some packs had been known to attack a challenger en masse, killing them rather than granting the challenge.

  It was a dangerous, short-term game to play, but it had been known to happen. At some point though, word of their actions inevitably got out, and when that happened, the dispossessed always banded together and destroyed the offending pack.

  There was very little the dispossessed could agree on, but nearly all of them held challenge law as sacrosanct. Their ongoing ability to challenge for a place in a pack represented their only real hope of leaving the solitary existence to which they'd been consigned.

  I noted Derrick's relative inexperience with actual challenges and then motioned for Donovan to lead the way. There were traditions around nearly every aspect of a challenge, and this was no different. The weakest member of the pack led the way, then the challenger, then the rest of the pack, starting with the other weaker members and ending with the alpha. It minimized the risk to both the challenger and the pack. The challenger could attack Donovan, but if he did so, he'd quickly be swarmed under by the rest of the pack. It also meant that there was a buffer of space between him and the pack's hybrids, so he had at least a chance of being able to flee in the event of deception on the part of the pack, as long as he didn't stop to attack Donovan on his way out.

  If I'd had my choice, I would have put James' mother in Donovan's place. Both of them were crippled from what the Coun'hij had done to them decades ago, but Donovan ran the pack's financial affairs. More importantly, to my mind at least, Donovan could be counted on to support me, while Addison took every possible chance to make my life difficult.

  A few minutes later, we arrived. The sandy square that we'd all taken to calling Donovan's Zen Garden, was sheltered from observation by trees, both above and to the sides, and offered a chance to use the terrain to our advantage. It was a small chance, but our experience fighting on the shifting medium was the closest thing we had to a home court advantage.

  The challenge rules required all fights to take place outside so that other dispossessed could watch from afar if they wanted to. The Zen Garden met the requirement of being outside, but not the bit about others being able to watch. It was another risk, but that was one of the rules that had taken a beating over the last few years. With modern technology it was getting harder and harder to keep our existence a secret, so I felt relatively comfortable running this particular risk. Still, only time would tell whether or not the dispossessed at large would agree that secrecy trumped their need to monitor challenges.

  I used the brief pause afforded by Derrick walking over to the other side of the arena to look over the pack. Dominic, standing on the other side of James, looked tired, but determined. She stepped forward, planning on being the first to engage Derrick, but I waved her back as Jasmin stepped forward. James gave me a considering look, but I'd already moved on to Isaac.

  Isaac folded his arms and stared at me in a way that I knew meant he wasn't going to back down. For more years than I cared to think about, Isaac had been my strong right hand, but he'd started to lose some of his trademark calm since Jess had lost her memories. I hadn't been able to decide whether the stress of trying to court Jess was getting to him, or if Jess had somehow been the source of his serenity.

  Whichever it was, the loss was becoming a greater and greater problem. He'd thrown nearly a James-style fit when Jess and Andrew had told him that they wanted to go camping without him, and that hadn't been like Isaac at all. The
old Isaac would have understood that Andrew was his biggest ally in the fight to win Jess' heart and would have welcomed the sign that Jess was at least interested in reconnecting with her father. The new Isaac fixated on the fact that Jess was actively cutting him out of her life and tried to bully her into including him.

  I tilted my head questioningly, and Isaac frowned. It seemed like he was surprised at his own response, but he shook his head slowly and then refused to meet my eyes. It wasn't surprising to me, but it was no less frustrating for being what I'd expected out of him. It would be Jasmin, James and me after all.

  Derrick reached the other side of the sand, turned around, and called up his beast with a surge of power that was greater than I'd expected out of our first challenger. One second, a fairly large man stood across from us, and then in the next instant, we were faced with a tower of muscle, fangs, and claws.

  His hybrid form was at least six foot three and had to weigh in at somewhere around three hundred and twenty pounds, but Jasmin didn't even hesitate. Her wolf form exploded out and then she was in motion towards him. Jasmin played the hothead, but when it came to a fight, she was as calculating as just about anyone I knew. She moved towards him to trigger motion on his part and then carefully gauged her speed so that they met on our half of the field.

  It was a shrewd action that made sure James didn't have as far to run when it came time for him to take her place, but it meant she had to duck under Derrick's first attack. Jasmin didn't normally fight a defensive game, and it put her off balance slightly. Only the fact that Derrick didn't seem entirely comfortable fighting on the sand saved Jas from a nasty slash across her side, but then she was past him and spinning around to tear into his leg.

  Jasmin released him and rolled with the force of the backhand that he landed on her, shaken but obviously not down yet. She couldn't kill him fast from behind, but she didn't need to kill him, not with James waiting in the wings. Instead, Jasmin fought aggressively but focused more on bleeding him and tiring him out.