Hidden Realms Read online

  "What would my father have done?"

  "That isn't a fair question. Your father never faced this. At that time the closest rival pack was more than a hundred miles away. Not only that, there were enough of us that exile or execution would have been feasible alternatives for anyone causing excessive trouble. Unfortunately in the current situation you need every wolf you can nominally count on, and James represents too great an asset to push away."

  Donovan bowed gracefully and then limped out of the room leaving me alone with Rachel, who hadn't stirred since she'd helped put away the last of the medical implements.

  "Alec, you wouldn't really kill James, would you?"

  She deserved an answer, she'd suffered and bled almost as much as the rest of us, but I knew she wouldn't push, so I chose the coward's route and didn't answer. I didn't want to kill part of our extended family, but the pack wasn't healthy, wasn't balanced. We had too many dominants with too few submissives to serve as a buffer between the more forceful personalities.

  "You should have been in bed hours ago, Rach."

  "I tried but I couldn't sleep."

  For the first time I noticed how red her eyes were, and cursed the preoccupation that stopped me from noticing it earlier.

  "What's wrong? Did Mother say something?"

  A brave smile met my words, but she couldn't hide the hurt. "No worse than usual. I just didn't react very well to it tonight."

  "She doesn't mean to hurt you, Rach. She's sick."

  "I know. Sometimes I think it would be better if I just stopped visiting her, but she really does seem to do better when we don't leave her in as much isolation."

  It was a silent recrimination. I hadn't visited Mother frequently enough lately.

  "I'm sorry I've left that for you to take care of. I haven't spent much time with either of you lately."

  "It's okay, Alec. I understand. Brandon's been pushing and he's got more bodies to push with. The pack's being run ragged, you more than anyone. It's just lonely around here when you're all gone."

  I pulled myself off of the examination table and hugged her. It only took a few minutes to walk her to her room and tuck her in, but even once I reached my bed I was unable to fall asleep. I needed to find a solution for Rachel's isolation, needed to chart a course through the coming war with Brandon, and solve a half-dozen other problems. My mind continued to grind away at the worries long after the rest of the house went quiet.

  Chapter 2

  The weekend hadn't brought any more excursions by Brandon's pack. The best-case scenario would be that the wounds Vincent and Cassie had suffered had caused some of Brandon's wolves to refuse to come up against us again. It wasn't very likely, but I'd been grasping at straws for months now. It was unlikely Brandon's pack was going to just self-destruct, but more and more that was looking like the only hope we had of avoiding everything he had planned for us.

  Donovan's nightly updates had revealed that Brandon had somehow found out about the family's investment in our Colorado mining startup. We'd gone from having all of the necessary approvals and permits on Friday afternoon to having a whole slew of complications and roadblocks waiting for me when I got up Monday morning.

  Someone needed to fly down and smooth things over. My best guess was that Brandon had bribed a certain highly-placed male we'd been working with. It was a rare male of any species who could resist Jasmin, so she was the obvious choice to fix the situation. Even so, I wasn't looking forward to telling her she had to go.

  We'd just finished up with History when I got the text from Donovan. I pulled her aside as we exited the room, and flipped out my phone as a distraction. Shape shifter hearing was acute enough to catch subvocalized speech. As long as we were careful to make sure none of the other pack's wolves were nearby we could carry on an entire conversation with nobody else the wiser.

  "We're having problems in Colorado. I need you to go down there and straighten things out."

  Normally Jasmin enjoyed a chance to get out of town and use a combination of charm and money to undo whatever mischief Brandon's minions had caused. Everyone in school thought we were dating. It was a useful fiction when it came to keeping the humans at arm's length, but Jasmin seemed to miss the opportunity to flirt more than I did. Once she got out of Sanctuary, there was never any shortage of males wanting to lavish attention on her.

  Even if she hadn't had the advantages common to our kind, that still would've been the case. Nature had gifted her with incredible looks and the thin, runway model build most girls had to starve themselves to achieve. Lately though she'd been fighting any assignment that took her out of town.

  "I don't want to leave. Send Donovan."

  "That won't work. Brandon's bribed the police commissioner, and he's launched criminal investigations on our principals down there. Unless we want to get into a bidding war for his questionable loyalty we need someone who can do more than just wave money under his nose."

  "Fine, send Dom. She's plenty pretty enough to flirt her way into his office and bluff him into backing off."

  "It has to be you, Jas. Dominic's too much of a submissive to carry something like that off. You can take one of the jets and be back within a day, thirty-six hours at the outside."

  My logic was solid, but she was far too stubborn to back down without a battle of wills. I could feel the energy bubble off of her as she geared up for a full-blown argument, but I didn't need any extra hints. There were plenty of visual clues that she was mad. Her blue eyes, incontestable proof of her royal ancestry, had gone unnaturally pale. They were already nearly the ice blue of her wolf form, and she was bleeding light so badly it was visible even in this form.

  Visible for shape shifters at least. Humans would see nothing out of the ordinary, but the moonborn lived in a world where every living organism gave off a soft glow. In human form the light was dimmer than when I was in my hybrid or wolf body. Normally with these eyes I'd have to work to pick out glow from anyone but Isaac, James or another hybrid.

  She'd made her point that she was pissed, but this close to the full moon I was less willing to deal with her theatrics. I let my beast rise up until I was just a hairsbreadth from transforming. Power rushed out and beat against Jasmin with an almost physical force. It washed over her with a fury that left no question who had the power to enforce their will. It still took several seconds of futile defiance before she bowed her head in submission.

  "Go this afternoon, go tonight. It makes no difference to me, but you will be on that plane, and you will do your best to bring things to a successful conclusion. Brandon already overmatches us in a straight-up fight. We can't afford to let him surpass us economically too."

  Jasmin gave me a choppy nod and then turned and stomped off towards our lockers. To be fair she was far too graceful for it to really be a stomp, but the intangible plane gave the impression of unhappy obedience. Jasmin's power still whipped around her, opening a thin corridor of bodies through the crowded hall as I followed along in her wake.

  The humans didn't realize they were moving out of her way, didn't understand why they felt inclined to move, but the vestigial instincts that'd once kept them alive in a world when far more threatening things had roamed moved them now.

  Just before we reached our lockers I picked up a new scent. It didn't belong in the school, didn't belong to any of the students I knew. Worse though, it didn't taste right. For the briefest moment I smelled sickness, and then it faded back into a normal, if novel, smell.

  The Paiges had a girl our age and Donovan had indicated they'd moved into the old Anderson home during the weekend. I scanned the familiar faces looking for the new arrival, and then my muscles tensed up as I saw Adriana Paige for the first time.

  She was slightly taller than most seventeen-year-olds, with straight blond hair and a body that was only slightly curvier than Jasmin's. Her jeans marked her as different from the rest of the student body, nearly all of whom wore shorts all year, but that wasn't what raised every a
ggressive instinct I possessed to high alert.

  She glowed. Not just the faint glow of a normal person or the slightly stronger glow of a wolf. She shone with the light of a powerful moonborn hybrid, and she didn't belong to my pack, so she was an intruder.

  She met my eyes and then flinched slightly as if she'd been struck. It was the action of a human girl, not that of a rival shape shifter. The gesture was just intriguing enough to check the urge to attack, to rip out her throat before she could try and do the same to me.

  I pushed my power out, thrusting it at her with more force even than I'd used on Jasmin just seconds before. It was the gravest of insults, not as severe as showing up on another pack's doorstep unannounced, but still the kind of thing that led to fights. Only she failed completely to react to the provocation. As my rage started to cool I realized that she didn't feel like another shape shifter. There wasn't any answering rush of power, no reflexive effort to establish dominance.

  Jasmin had already left for her Literature class, too angry with me to notice the new arrival, but I waited, eavesdropping on her conversation with Britney Samuels as I dropped my History book into my locker.

  "We so have to go down there soon. It's the only place within an hour and a half where you can do any decent shopping."

  Britney's familiar voice was full of eagerness. She finally had a new set of ears to listen to her gossip, a new sidekick to help her flirt, sleep or otherwise scale her way closer to the top of the social food chain. I already thought less of the new girl for letting Britney latch onto her.

  As I closed my locker, Adri's response came floating over.

  "That sounds great; I can't wait to get out of this stupid town."

  My locker door hit with more force than I'd intended. The closest kids edged away from me, but I was too mad to care whether or not they thought I was going to suddenly lose control.

  I'd spent tens of thousands of dollars and called in three separate favors with local officials to get her and her mom past all of Brandon's efforts to block them, and this was what I got? Another self-absorbed Britney-clone who was too stupid to realize insulting Sanctuary wouldn't impress the people who'd spent their entire lives here?

  I stalked off towards my art class, and this time it was my power that crackled through the hall clearing a way between the other students.

  Art should have been a refuge. It generally was a place where I could forget about dominance posturing and pack business. It helped that it was one of two classes I didn't share with Jasmin. Donovan had implied that my father had likewise escaped the burdens of his life by fleeing to the act of creating. Of course his passion hadn't been anything as perishable as painting. Still, painting at least had the simplicity of being something I loved just in and of itself. For all that Dad had liked metalwork, he'd still mostly been driven by the hope of discovering one of our people's lost arts.

  Sanctuary wasn't large enough for the high school to have a class dedicated strictly to painting. I'd had Donovan make some discreet inquiries to the school board, but no amount of implied donations had swayed them, so I was currently stuck sitting through a section on sketching.

  Try as I might, I couldn't lose myself in my current piece. The indignity of having helped someone who wouldn't have appreciated the effort even had they known about it continued to worry at the back of my mind.

  When the bell finally rang, I was out the door before most of the other kids finished putting up their supplies. I hurried down the stairs only to pull up short as Brandon turned into the hall six feet ahead of me.

  We'd once been nearly the same size, but he'd put an extra two inches and fifty pounds on over the last year, and now he loomed over my six-one frame.

  "And here I'd been hoping you'd still be limping."

  Even subvocalized, Brandon's words carried his usual streak of disdain. My reply was equally inaudible to everyone else around us.

  "No limp here. It's too bad your pack wasn't two seconds slower though. You'd be down Vincent and Cassie in addition to needing to explain to the Coun'hij why it is your pack is violating our territory."

  I'd expected his pulse to jump at least a little at the prospect of facing the one group that held the power of life and death over every wolf in North America. It didn't vary in the slightest. There was no scent of nervous perspiration, nothing. He was either a dramatically improved liar, or he no longer feared the Coun'hij.

  His silent, mocking laughter implied the latter.

  "I wouldn't be running off to bear tales right now. You'll find that where you're concerned a slightly different set of rules is currently in effect. No aid is going to be provided to a pack that isn't strong enough even to police its own borders. Especially one so busy fighting among itself."

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  It was a stupid lie, the kind of mistake I hadn't made in all too long, but his revelation had shaken me. If things had changed that much, then our pack was operating under even more of a disadvantage than I'd realized.

  "Don't insult my intelligence, Alec. If all of the blood we stumbled across in the buffer had belonged to you and Jasmin you'd both be dead. Somebody, possibly more than one somebodies stepped out of line and you had to make them bleed to bring the situation back under control."

  He was wrong, not by much but he was still wrong. Donovan said it was his biggest weakness. Brandon tended to assume that everyone thought like he thought, wanted what he wanted, and would act like he would act in any given situation. It was starting to seem like his only weakness.

  "When I inform certain contacts that you've even started sponsoring additional human traffic into the town, over my direct objections and despite the fact that it increases our risk of being exposed to the humans, I think you'll find a blind eye will be turned to almost any activity I choose to undertake."

  "You're wrong. There are limits to what the moonborn at large will accept. If pack leaders are no longer sacrosanct they'll have an uprising on their hands."

  "Oh dear, stupid Alec. Always so secure in the nobility of your bloodline. Of course I can't do anything too overt, but that's the very reason why I've been given carte blanche where you're concerned. It was your father's undoing and it'll be yours as well. The Coun'hij can't afford to have a possible focal point for rebellion running around."

  He was right. If I'd chosen to remain safely anonymous rather than rising to rule my pack, they'd possibly have forgiven my lineage, but now that they couldn't just execute me at will I'd become too much of a threat.

  "I do hope you've found the Paiges to be all you'd hoped and dreamed."

  His departing barb was too close to on target. I'd been practicing for years to control the myriad signs that stopped the moonborn from lying to each other, but the rage from earlier reawakened and provided Brandon with a stronger response than he'd expected.

  He turned back to look at me, flashing a satisfied smile before disappearing towards the cafeteria.

  The fact that I'd just accidentally painted a big target on the new girl's chest continued to bother me throughout lunch and into Chemistry. Considering just how much I currently despised her, it shouldn't have been a cause for worry, but I'd seen Brandon in action before. Adriana Paige was going to be used and discarded before she even knew what hit her.

  Physics was my second favorite class, more because Mrs. Alexander was so absentminded than for any other reason. I slipped into class a couple seconds before the bell rang, only to pull up short when I saw the new arrival sitting in the back of the room.

  Adriana Paige didn't exactly look excited to be in Honors physics, but the mere fact she'd signed up for the class was enough to raise her stock with me. It was the smallest class in the entire school and I had a sneaking suspicion at least a third of the students were going to drop out at the end of the semester.

  I took my usual seat in the back of the room as Mrs. Alexander used the blackboard to diagram the different parts of an electromagnetic wave. Nothi
ng earth-shattering there. My attention turned back to Adriana as the explanation wound down.

  She was prettier than I'd realized. A lot prettier. It explained quite a bit actually. Girls that pretty almost never had a difficult go of it in life so they tended towards self-absorbed and lazy.

  Jasmin was an exception to that rule, but she'd paid for her maturity. You couldn't go through the kinds of horrors she'd experienced without figuring out several times over that the world didn't revolve around you.

  Adriana on the other hand probably resented the move to Sanctuary because it took her away from all of the malls and hordes of cute, admiring boys.

  Mrs. Alexander finished her lecture and told everyone to start forming into our usual groups. I should have seen it coming. I'd managed to convince her I worked best alone. The fact that there'd been an odd number of students for the first month of school had helped, but with the addition of Adriana that was no longer the case.

  "Miss Paige, you'll have the good luck of working with Mr. Graves."

  Despite my best efforts, I allowed some of my distaste to show. It was only for a split second, but it was sloppy. Joni Winters and Susan Bower giggled nastily when they saw it, and for the first time I realized just how hard the move was for Adriana.

  The emotionless mask that she'd been wearing slipped slightly and for a brief moment she was just a lonely girl who'd been torn away from everything she knew.

  Mrs. Alexander turned back to me with a frown, as if I were the one causing all of the problems.

  "I'm sure you'll enjoy working with Miss Paige, Alec. After all, you can't really expect to do everything by yourself. Occasionally a helping hand is exactly what's called for."

  The elevated pulse that had been teasing my ears suddenly shot up to panic levels as Adriana went completely white. I was the closest to her, but she was still pretty far away and there were desks in the way.

  By the time I realized she was really collapsing, it was almost too late to catch her. Without thinking, I sprang to my feet, knocking desks out of the way. It wasn't until I held her limp body in my arms that I realized what I'd done.