Marked Page 4

  Chapter 2

  Adriana Paige

  Interstate 15

  Western Montana

  It would have been impossible to adequately describe the chaos of the next few hours as call after call came in from our people letting us know that they had somehow picked up Coun'hij tails and that they needed help.

  It wasn't surprising to find out that our RV had been set up with advanced communications equipment—that was exactly the kind of foresight I'd come to expect out of Alec and Donovan. What was surprising was the fact that we came frighteningly close to exceeding its capabilities and it was the only thing keeping our people from being cornered and defeated in detail.

  None of us knew how it had happened, but somehow the Coun'hij had managed to track most of our people from the time that we'd split up. To be honest, most of us didn't have the time to think about the bigger picture. We left that to Alec and just focused on our little piece of the puzzle. Everyone was pressed into service in some capacity or another—even Vik, the hulking Tonopah hybrid who was currently serving as my bodyguard, ended up manning a headset.

  Somewhere along the way both RV's started moving again, but I was too busy to notice. My world narrowed down to the laptop in front of me and the procession of voices coming through my headset. I never had time to change out of my pajamas—I barely even had time to understand what I was supposed to be doing.

  All of the calls into Alec's personal cellphone were routed into the main switchboard and from there sent out to Vik or me for verification. Once the caller's identity was established I ran through a checklist of questions and entered their responses into my laptop.

  "Are there any indications that you're being followed?" "Are you currently in motion?" "Where are you right now and where are you headed?" "How long do you have before you'll run out of gas?"

  The questions were the kind of straightforward thing that I should have been able to memorize after my first time through them, but the sheer terror in their voices made it hard to type in their responses—I was pretty sure that I wasn't physically capable of anything more complicated than that.

  As bad as the terror was, in some ways the ones who weren't alarmed were even worse. They were confident that Alec would find a way to save them, which made it easier to get the information I needed out of them, but it was hard not to disabuse them of their faith considering that I could turn my head and see the flurry of activity taking place around Donovan's desk.

  Alec had a big map of the Western United States up on the giant touchscreen mounted on the wall and he was desperately trying to create a plan that would allow our people to survive what was coming next.

  Yellow dots popped into existence every time a new call came into the switchboard. As I finished inputting the information from my current caller, a middle-aged woman from the Las Cruces pack named Daphne, a dotted line appeared around her location in Southern Utah.

  The dotted line formed a circle that represented how much further she thought she could drive before she would run out of fuel. The single black dot orbiting her position on the map meant that she was being followed by only one Coun'hij vehicle.

  "You'll send help, right?"

  I tore my eyes away from the screen and forced a smile on my face, hoping the old adage about people being able to hear the smile in your voice was true. "Yes, we've had a few calls like yours come in today, so Alec is just tracking down which of our people are best placed to intercept the group that is currently following you. For now, turn back north the first chance you get. It looks like Cedar City is probably your best bet, but give me a call once you're headed north so I can confirm your location and the amount of fuel you have left."

  "Thank you, Mistress Paige. I swear I've been careful ever since I left the main group in Nevada. I don't know how they managed to find me like this."

  "Given the circumstances, I think it would be just fine for you to address me as Adriana, Daphne. I'm sure that you were careful, but we'll worry about how they found you after you're safe. For now you just concentrate on driving and Alec or I will get back to you as soon as he's arranged for someone to meet up with you."

  "Thank you, Mistr…Adriana. Thank you very much. I knew that your fiancé wasn't the kind to leave his people hanging in the wind. That's why I was so willing to swear fealty to him when I arrived at the estate. Oh dear, listen to me go on. I'll let you go take care of your other duties."

  It nearly broke my heart to hear such trust in her voice. She was old enough to be my great-grandmother and she was in an incredible amount of danger while I sat in a comfortable, climate-controlled RV and made promises I wasn't sure I was going to be able to keep.

  I looked at the monitor at the top of my screen and confirmed that there wasn't anyone else in the queue. I flashed Vik a 'stay there' gesture and stood so I could walk over to Alec and Donovan.

  "How many of our people are still unaccounted for, Donovan?"

  Alec's voice was starting to sound a little strained, but Donovan didn't seem to notice. "We've had roughly seventy percent report in on their own. I've managed to get through to another ten percent and per your instructions I've instructed them to fill up their vehicles and prepare for some kind of rescue operation, but our connection to the outside world is becoming less and less reliable."

  I shook my head. "What do you mean? It's been nonstop calls in for Vik and me. We haven't had anyone disconnect on us."

  Alec nodded, but he didn't look away from the screen. "Donovan diverted most of our hacking resources toward keeping the incoming lines open, but it looks like the Coun'hij has finally entered the computer age. They are keeping constant pressure on our communications. It doesn't really matter at this point whether they are hoping to track us down or if it's simply an attempt to stop us from mustering any kind of coordinated response to the attack on our physical assets. At some point we're going to have to address their growing capabilities."

  "Those are people out there, Alec. They aren't just assets."

  Alec's knuckles went white and I realized that I'd pushed too hard. He was too much of a gentleman to say so, but he didn't need me jostling his elbow at a time like this.

  "I'm sorry, Alec. I guess the pressure is getting to me. The calls keep coming in and I can't offer them anything solid. I feel like I'm just lulling them into a state of complacency rather than letting them know just how bad things are. I don't even know how bad things are."

  "Bad. Really bad, but you don't need to apologize. You're right, I need to make sure I don't get so caught up in playing a giant game of chess that I forget that those are real people out there."

  Alec turned toward Donovan, rewarding me with a smile in the process, and for the first time I realized how tired Alec looked. His eyes were bloodshot and he had dark circles under them. It seemed impossible that he was the same person I'd been cuddling with such a short time ago. He was under even more stress than I'd realized if he'd gone downhill so quickly and I suddenly felt even more guilty for my recrimination.

  Alec hadn't ever forgotten that he was dealing with real people, not if he looked like that.

  "Donovan, please add back in the location information for the ten percent of our people who aren't currently being followed. Color us, Grayson and Jaclyn red so I can decide where exactly I want to position the interceptions."

  A dozen blue dots materialized on the map. The blue dots were just as scattered as the yellow dots, but they were still surprisingly comforting despite the fact that they were so few in number. I started to feel better about our situation right up until I realized that there was only one red dot on the map.

  "I'm sorry, Master Alec; it looks like we've still been unable to contact Jaclyn or Grayson."

  Alec closed his eyes as though momentarily unable to face the reality we found ourselves in. "That's going to make this a lot harder. Even if we manage to get ahold of the other twenty percent of our people we're still going to be looking at something like six-to-one odds."
>
  "Indeed, sir. I'll divert some of the IT assets to establishing a secure line out now that the calls in have started to taper off and I'll personally try to get ahold of both of them."

  Alec nodded absently as he started selecting blue and yellow dots. "Sync these seven up and then calculate a least-time intercept here on I-70. Try to bring the ones without tails together with whoever is the furthest east with enough time that they can fight the first round and still have time to get set before the next batch shows up."

  It was like watching a special kind of symphony, one that used space, time and numbers in place of woods, brass and strings. We were too outnumbered to get away with just throwing all of our people into one big fight. Instead Alec wove a complex ballet of movement that resulted in our people coming together in ways that gave them sufficient numbers to have a chance of beating the opposition.

  It felt like I stood there watching Alec for hours, but the truth was that the whole process took less than five minutes. At the end, Alec stepped back from the board and surveyed the results with a worried look.

  "That takes care of the first round. I'm not sure it's wise to try to lock anything else in at this point. Too much will depend on how the first set of fights go."

  "What about those two groups in the center? You've diverted almost everyone else who could help out away from those groups."

  Alec nodded. "It was never going to work to try and cherry-pick them off anywhere but on the fringes. Donovan, are we still headed back the way we came?"

  "Yes, Master Alec. I'm sorry to say though that I've still been unable to reach Grayson or Jaclyn."

  "Fine. If we speed up just a little bit we'll be in a position to bail out this group here about the time the first of them runs out of gas."

  Alec picked up a headset and keyed in a number from memory. It was obvious after the first second or two that he was going to go through to voicemail.

  "Tasha, it's me. Look, I know you're not particularly happy about everything that has happened over the last couple of months, but this is bigger than you or me. We've had some kind of massive security breach. More than two-thirds of our people are being tailed right now by what we have to assume are Coun'hij forces. I've redeployed my remaining people, but there's simply not enough of us to deal with this problem by throwing bodies at it. I need you and Grayson in Nephi, Utah within the next hour and fifty minutes. Faster if you can manage it, but you absolutely have to be there by then or a lot of people are going to die, including a few from your pack."

  Alec hung up on her and then turned back to Donovan. "Get me someone important in the Del Rio pack and then get started directing traffic out there. We've almost waited too long if we're going to make some of those intercepts work. I kept hoping that we would be able to get in contact with more of our people, but it can't be helped now. Once we have all of the intercepts in motion we can go back to trying to contact whoever we still haven't heard from. I doubt we'll be able to use them to set up any more intercepts, but maybe they will be able to tip the odds further in our direction at some of the fights we're already committed to."

  Donovan nodded and began pulling up the number Alec had asked for. Alec gave me a tired smile. "They are going to need your help on the phones, Adri, if we're going to make this work. Just hang in there for a few more hours and things should calm down enough that we can start rotating people out for breaks."

  "I know, don't worry about me. I'll call as many people as I have to."

  Donovan looked up and pointed at Alec's headset. "I'm putting you through to a hybrid named Tiffany Marks. The last information I got out of Del Rio is that she's the one calling the shots right now."

  I walked back over to my laptop and slipped on my headset as Alec adjusted his boom mike.

  "This is Alec Graves. Am I talking to Tiffany Marks? Good, I have a business proposition for you. No, I don't care about your supposed neutrality. You're going to listen to me. Why? Because I'm the reason you're in power right now. Without me your whole pack would still be under Lori's thumb."

  Alec's voice was completely emotionless. It was like nothing I'd ever heard out of him before and it was driven home to me once again that Alec had grown up in a very different world than I had. I was completely lost when it came to high-stakes negotiations, but Alec was perfectly at home in a world where showing the wrong emotion at the wrong time could result in people getting killed.

  "I'm sorry, but a simple 'thank you' isn't going to balance the ledger between us. Yes, you could hang up on me, but if you do that I'll burn your entire pack to the ground and salt the earth as I leave town. Don't tell me that you don't think I could do it. We both know I wouldn't even have to see to it myself."

  My hand was hurting, but I didn't understand why until I realized that it was clenched around the red coffee mug that I'd filled with water hours before.

  Alec continued on, oblivious to how much distress he was causing me.

  "No, you're right, on the face of things, that's not very much in keeping with my public persona of justice and mercy, but I know something you don't. You see, I'm fully aware that you've kept Everett locked up in a cage since shortly after you realized that he and his daughter have spent the last ten years playing you all for fools. I know that you've kept Lori in a drug-induced coma for weeks now, and that you killed Everett's right-hand man when he protested against what your little cabal was doing.

  "How is that relevant? It's relevant because your entire pack has done enough wrong over the course of your coup that I'm sure I can find a pretext for executing you and the rest of the ring-leaders once I come to power. You have a choice—you can hang up on me now and hope that the Coun'hij succeeds, or you can do me a favor in exchange for leniency after I come to power.

  "I want Lori, Everett, and anyone else you can spare on a plane to Utah in the next ten minutes. You have exactly one hour and forty-eight minutes to have Lori on the ground in Nephi, Utah and she needs to be awake and able to use her power against the Coun'hij enforcers who will be rolling into town five minutes after your arrival.

  "I'm fully aware what that will mean. I suggest you leave half the pack behind to start packing. You'll want to be out of town before the Coun'hij can reposition one of their strike teams to come after your people.

  "You don't have the option of sitting on the fence and we both know it. Right now you're down three hybrids, and without Lori you don't have anyone who's capable of playing the kinds of diplomatic games that have allowed you to stay neutral up until now. It was only going to be a matter of time before you were going to have to pick a side. All I've done is move up the schedule a little bit."

  I didn't get a chance to listen in on the end of the conversation because my headset started ringing as Donovan finally got the outbound call details fed into the queue.

  Chapter 3

  Adriana Paige

  Interstate 15

  Western Montana

  The next two hours were every bit as much of a nightmare as I'd expected them to be. On the one hand it was good, because Donovan kept me busy making dozens of phone calls to reroute our people to the ambush sites that Alec had picked out, but it was exhausting to project an air of calm assurance while knowing just how fragile Alec's solution really was.

  I caught bits and pieces of what was going on around me. When we stopped for gas, Mallory tried to change over to our RV from the other one where Alec had assigned her when the calls had first started coming in. She wasn't happy when Alec told her there wasn't room for her inside of our vehicle, but she didn't have Donovan's computer expertise, she couldn't take over as the driver, and both Vik and I were in the middle of calls so she couldn't kick either of us out.

  I heard Alec try to call Shawn and Ulrich at least two or three times to no avail. I got the impression when he finally got ahold of Jaclyn that she was too far away to be of any help. Alec asked her to go to Chicago instead and see what she could dig up on Ulrich's people.

  That would
have been depressing enough all by itself, but I also got the feeling that neither Tasha or Grayson had gotten back to us, which meant that everyone I was sending toward Nephi at varying speeds so that they would all arrive in town at the same time was probably headed into a gigantic trap.

  The worst was when Daphne came up on my queue. I took a deep breath and then pushed the dial button.

  "Hello?"

  "Daphne, it's me, Adriana Paige again."

  "Oh, thank goodness. I have to admit I was starting to get worried after so long without hearing from you. I called back in to let you know that I'd turned around as you instructed, but your bodyguard refused to let me through to talk to you."

  "I'm sorry about that, Daphne. We got you headed north, which was the most important thing, so there were some other…issues that needed handling before I could get back to you. We're going to have you meet up with several of our people in a little town called Nephi. Do you still have enough gas to make it there?"

  Apparently something in my voice gave me away—even over the phone. Daphne was quiet for several seconds and then sighed. "You're going to have to work on that, Adriana. Even good queens have to keep secrets from people. I hope you don't mind some unsolicited advice from an old woman who's way out of line right now, but you need to spend some time with someone you trust practicing the art of misdirection. How bad are things, really?"

  "Pretty bad. You aren't the only one who is being followed by enforcers. Alec is redeploying people to try to ambush the Coun'hij teams, but we're awfully spread out and some people had a lot less fuel in their tanks than you did when they realized that they'd picked up a tail."

  "Is there actually anyone waiting for me in Nephi?"

  "Yeah, there will be, but most of them have tails of their own. Alec is trying to get one or more of our powerful hybrids down there to give you all the edge that you'll need to come out on top, but I'm not sure if they are going to make it there on time. Stay in your car for as long as possible and if push comes to shove change shapes and make a run for the location I'm texting you right now."