Burned Read online

  Alec Graves

  Highway 12

  Western Montana

  The drive from our hotel to the rendezvous spot in Montana only took a few hours. Brindi and I usually passed our drive time in companionable silence, but this time it was even quieter than normal because I'd decided we needed to make an extra early start.

  It was only possible because I needed so much less sleep than humans did. I'd been pushing things on the first leg of the drive back from Chicago, which meant that Brindi had fallen asleep in the car before we'd made it to the hotel. I'd helped her stumble from the car to the hotel room where she collapsed onto the bed and fell asleep even before I got her tucked in under the covers.

  I wasn't really surprised that she was still sleeping when I finished showering a few minutes after five a.m. I carried our bags back out to the SUV, and then once it was warmed up enough to be comfortable, I carried Brindi outside and buckled her into the vehicle.

  I'd been expecting the journey through the cold morning air to wake her up despite all of my precautions, but she just burrowed down deeper into my arms without ever opening her eyes. A few minutes later we were checked out and on the road.

  Brindi stayed asleep for so long I was actually starting to wonder if she was okay by the time we hit the outskirts of Helena. I pulled my eyes away from the road for just long enough to check her over, and found to my surprise that her eyes were open and she was watching me drive.

  "I never even heard your breathing change. How long have you been awake?"

  "I don't know—it's possible that I'm still dreaming."

  "Not unless you make a habit of dreaming with your eyes open."

  Brindi stretched and then rearranged the blanket that I'd draped over her. "In that case, I've probably been awake for twenty minutes or so. I couldn't say for sure though because I never really felt like I woke up. I just kind of transitioned from my dream to the real world. I guess my mind just added in details from the real world while I was dreaming because you were driving just like that in my dream too."

  I thought she was done talking, and started to reach for the radio, but she reached over and took my hand, eyes closed as she reveled in the feeling of my skin against hers.

  "Honestly, I've stopped worrying so much about which parts of my life are dreams and which parts are reality. Things have become so surreal since I met you that it's hard sometimes to believe that this hasn't all just been one epically-long dream that started in that club in Chicago. You're not like anyone else I've ever met, Alec. You turn reality upside down just by existing."

  I shrugged uncomfortably. "I'm sorry to drag you away from everyone else again. You've been making good progress lately, and it hasn't gone unnoticed—and not just by me either. Jess, Jasmin, Rachel—they've all mentioned how hard you've been working at limiting your contact with me. The last thing you needed right now was to be thrown back into such close quarters with me. That can't have made things any easier for you."

  "Careful, Alec, if you keep this up I'm going to feel like you support my efforts to drain your bank account down to zero. I haven't been doing anything unusual for a girl faced with a hunky guy with money to burn who wanted them out of the way for as much of the day as possible. What girl doesn't like shopping?"

  She released my hand, with a visible exercise of will, and leaned back against her door. She seemed happy to leave it at that, but it turned out that I wasn't. Somewhere along the way she'd gone from being an unwanted burden to being a friend.

  I still wanted to reconcile with Adri, but I was more and more sorry about the position that Brindi had been put in, and I'd noticed lately that I felt a pang of loss each time she broke off physical contact with me.

  "You talk a good game, Brindi, but I've noticed that your shopping trips are remarkably frugal for someone who claims to be trying to deplete my fortune. You'd have to start spending several times as much per day as you currently do if you wanted to actually make a dent in the interest off of the main operating account."

  "Yeah, well, shopping is fun and all, but it's not like we can really afford for me to add an extra suitcase full of clothes to my possessions every day."

  "Some girls wouldn't let that stop them—there are plenty of places where you could spend two thousand dollars on a sweater if you really wanted to."

  For the first time since she'd woken up, Brindi looked away from me. "Some girls, but not me. I've never run in the kind of circles where people would even be able to tell that I'd spent that much money on an article of clothing. I don't need designer—I'm already living like a queen as it is. Besides, it doesn't seem like a very good repayment for everything that you've done for me."

  "You mean like addicting you to my touch and then dragging you all across the country from one dangerous situation to another?"

  "No, like getting me out of a very dangerous situation by paying off the people I owed a ridiculous amount of money to."

  I'd actually forgotten all about that. In my mind things were long past square between us just based on the fact that she'd saved my life in Chicago just minutes after we met. The silence had suddenly become uncomfortable, but luckily we were turning onto the road where we were supposed to be meeting the rest of our group.

  I pointed at a pair of forty-foot-long RV's that were parked side by side at a run-down truck stop less than a hundred yards from the interstate. "I think that's us."

  "Good—I've needed to pee for the last twenty minutes, but I didn't really want to stop at a gas station. Those RV's look like exactly the solution to my problem. Not all of us have preternaturally-strong bladders."

  I rolled my eyes at her and then turned into the truck stop. Brindi disappeared into the closest RV, as James led me over to the other one.

  "You have any problems?"

  I shook my head. "No—I'll bring you up to speed in a minute, but let's wait until we've got all of the key people in one spot so that I don't have to tell everyone multiple times."

  "You're in luck—everyone but Alison's mom is already here."

  He wasn't kidding; the RV was standing room only. I looked over all of the people who'd been waiting for Brindi and me to arrive and felt a surge of relief crash through me as I saw that none of them had been killed during the time that we'd been separated.

  James, Jack, Alison, Jess, Jasmin, Carson, Rachel—they were all there, and they were the most welcome sight I'd ever seen.

  Alison pointed back at the second RV. "I can bring my mom up to speed later if you want—unless you need Brindi to be here for this."

  "No, that's fine. Before I get started though I'd like to hear how things in LA ended."

  There was a moment as everyone looked around at each other. I'd gone to great lengths in order to stop everyone from getting carried away with the question of who was dominant to whom. It was working because I was so clearly dominant to everyone else, but it did occasionally have some downsides.

  "Jack, you were the one taking point on that operation—why don't you go ahead and report on it?"

  "Not much to tell. Losing James, Jasmin, Jess and Carson put a real crimp in our operations, but we managed to keep a lid on everything until they could get back. We killed another four vampires and just shy of two dozen gang members who were in deep enough that they'd picked up that odd, almost vampire scent that Addison noticed while she was there."

  "So you would say that the problem has been contained?"

  He shrugged. "It's hard to say for sure. I think that the gang is in tatters. The fact that we could sniff them out meant that we killed all of the members who were very committed. We destroyed about a million dollars' worth of drugs, and seized another hundred thousand in hard currency. They aren't going to be rebuilding the gang into a force in that area any time soon—at least not without outside help.

  "I don't think that we need to worry about the humans finding out about us—not this late in the game—but there isn't any way of knowing for sure if the vampires got a m
essage out to whomever they report to before we wiped out the group that was holding Addison."

  I nodded. Out of everything that had happened, I was most worried about whoever was at the top of the organization that was fielding super-vamps in such great numbers. We'd run into two of them in LA, and then killed three more in Minnesota. I'd managed to kill all of the ones that we'd tangled with so far, but it was far from guaranteed that I was going to continue to be able to do so.

  I could only be in one place at a time, which was bad enough, but I was even more worried about the sheer level of power that would be required to unite such a powerful group of vampires together. It had been all that I could do to bring down the more powerful of the vampires we'd encountered—what would happen if I faced off against the head vampire and it turned out that he was too powerful for me to use my ability on him?

  Not only that, every shape shifter we killed over the course of this war was one less soldier who could be thrown into the fight if the vampires decided to start expanding their operations over onto our shores. It was very possible that I was weakening our race at the precise time we could least afford it.

  Someone like Puppeteer could be an invaluable weapon if we suddenly found ourselves awash in ridiculously powerful vampires, but only if he could be counted on not to turn against us at the first sign of weakness. No, we were going to have to eliminate the Coun'hij just as Taggart and I had discussed. Hopefully once all the smoke cleared there would still be enough of us—with powers or otherwise—remaining to stem the tide of the invasion I knew in my bones was headed our way.

  I pulled myself back to the present conversation. "Good work all around. Go ahead and split up the money according to the number of days that everyone was involved in containing the problem in LA. A double share goes to Jack as the person running point, but there should still be plenty of money to go around."

  It was a small gesture, but it was important to let them see some kind of benefit from all of the fighting and killing they'd just been through.

  "Thank you for that report, Jack, everyone is to be commended. I know we didn't fundamentally change the state of things in LA—a lot of innocent people are still going to die there every year—but at least now they are going to be killed by other humans rather than sucked dry by a gang of vampires.

  "The long and the short of my most recent trip is that I've found out there's an operation going down outside of Tucson. The Coun'hij is targeting Jaclyn Annikov's pack. My contact thinks that the Coun'hij wants to make an example out of them."

  "Thereby scaring all of the smaller packs into lining up behind them."

  Jack's words were bitter beyond anything I'd expected out of him. I'd known that he was struggling with having lost so many people in LA, but I'd been hoping that sitting out the Minnesota operation—combined with helping take down what was left of the gang that had kidnapped James' mom—would be enough to help him start to put the loss behind him.

  "Yeah, that's the general idea."

  "Does your contact have a name?"

  The belligerence in Jack's voice was only getting worse. I'd missed something in my response to his report, but I wasn't sure what.

  "Yes, my contact has a name, but that information is strictly need-to-know, and none of you need to know."

  "I could figure it out, and we both know it, Alec. Brindi probably knows—if not, she at least knows where you went. It wouldn't take much to get that information out of her."

  I stood as straight as I could, reaching for every inch of height I could muster. At the same time, I relaxed my grip on the greedy rift at the center of my being. It wasn't enough to actually bring Jack to his knees, but between one second and the next I manifested a tiny, insubstantial black hole just above his navel.

  I'd never tried something so tiny before now, but my ability had precisely the effect I'd been hoping for. Jack was suddenly faced by someone nearly as big as him at the same time that a wave of weakness and exhaustion rolled over him.

  "I'm sure you could make Brindi talk, Jack, but doing that would be a very big mistake. I'm prepared to admit that I may have gone too far in stopping everyone from establishing a clear dominance hierarchy inside of our group. If you all want to beat the tar out of each other so that you can figure out who is the most deadly, I'm fine with that. I will not, however, stand by while members of my pack are intimidated or tortured. If you want to know something you come and ask me. If I tell you no, then that's the end of it. No bullying Brindi, no pulling mileage readings off of the SUV, none of that."

  "I didn't sign up to be part of your pack, Alec. I signed up as an equal partner, not as some kind of subordinate."

  "I know, Jack, and I'm sorry if you feel like you've gotten a raw deal out of this, but half of the rebellion's problem is our inability to work together under a central authority. I would give just about anything to bring back your people, but I can't. All I can do is deal with reality as it stands right now."

  "Reality."

  Jack practically spat the word out, but he hadn't shifted and thrown himself at me yet, so that was better than I'd expected.

  "Yes, reality. The reality of our situation is that for the last several weeks you've been eating and sleeping on my dime and giving orders to my people. That isn't a complaint—I'm more than happy to cover your expenses while you're helping me out—but it's past time we stopped pretending that this is some kind of alliance of equals. We moved beyond that when I finally manifested my ability.

  "I don't plan on abusing my power, but as long as I'm the one who has to deal with the ultimate consequences of our actions, I should also be the one to be making the decisions."

  Everything hung in teetering, shifting balance for several seconds as Jack tried to settle on a course of action. I considered cranking up the strength of the absorption field nested inside of Jack, but dismissed the idea. Reminding Jack exactly why I should be the leader of our little group was reasonable, but beating him down with my power would be a step too far.

  I felt odd surges of power flickering across my absorption field. It reminded me a little bit of what I'd experienced the night before when Adri had been trying to find me so that she could pull herself into my dream. It was definitely similar, but there were differences. With Adri, all of the surges had felt like tiny points of heat. This time it was more like the tendrils were coming across from multiple directions. It was like having a mass of cotton candy pressed down on me, cotton candy that melted away as soon as it touched Jack.

  Just before Jack made his decision, I realized what was happening. It was Carson. He was trying to influence Jack's emotions, trying to calm him down enough to defuse the tension. It was tempting, but I couldn't let Carson break his oath like that. It would only mask Jack's actual feelings. Besides, there was no guarantee that Carson's ability would take effect quickly enough to offset the surge of energy Jack would feel as I shut my ability down.

  I looked Jack in the eye and refused to blink. It was enough—barely.

  "Fine, this is your show, Alec. If you want to send us all into some kind of massive trap again and get us killed, I guess that's your prerogative as the alpha."

  "You don't have to stay here if you don't want to, Jack. I want you here—I value your knowledge and experience—but I'm not going to force anyone to stay with me who doesn't believe in what we're trying to do. If you stay things aren't going to get any easier. We should start having additional recruits showing up over the next little while, and I want to put you in charge of the wolves.

  "You've got a ton of expertise when it comes to taking a group of submissives with no common ties and turning them into an effective force. Just as important, you know how the world works. In addition to training them, you'll be in charge of making sure that none of them are sleeper agents of one kind or another."

  I turned to Carson. "I'd like you to take responsibility for the hybrid recruits, Carson. Your ability makes you uniquely suited to keeping a group of dominants
from killing each other. I know that you have a certain code of behavior when it comes to using your powers, but it's possible we can think of a solution that will let you help out without violating your personal code."

  It was a low blow considering that he'd just finished trying to influence Jack like that, but there was a chance that he didn't know that I knew. If he did realize that I'd short-circuited his attempt to put a finger on the scale, he didn't show it.

  "What did you have in mind, Alec?"

  "I would propose that we tell the new recruits that you'll be manipulating their emotions. As long as they know at the outset what they are getting into, you won't be doing anything to be ashamed of."

  I looked back and forth between the two of them. "What do you think, gentlemen?"

  Jack nodded. "Okay, I'm in. Working with younger wolves has always been the part of my job that I enjoyed the most. I suspect some of our recruits are going to be older than I am, but that's okay—most of them will just sail through any training course I could come up with."

  Carson was much slower responding, which was a bad sign. Of the two jobs, the one I was trying to hand him was the more difficult proposition. Jack was a hybrid, which meant that he was automatically going to have a leg up on any of his recruits. Sure, he might get some particularly aggressive wolves—someone more like Jasmin than Jess—but by and large they weren't going to cause him a ton of problems.

  That wasn't going to be the case for Carson. He was good—maybe the single best fighter I'd ever seen—but his gift didn't necessarily make him a more lethal fighter. He was going to have to stay on top of his charges or he could end up in some kind of dominance challenge.

  "I wouldn't hand you any special cases, Carson. I'll deal with anyone who has a combat-oriented ability myself."

  That brought a ghost of a smile to Carson's face. "That's actually not what I was thinking about."

  "What were you thinking about then—if I may ask?"

  I was beginning to think that I'd made a mistake asking him in public like this. I wanted him to say yes, but it was starting to look like this wasn't going to be as open-and-shut a decision as I'd expected it to be. If we couldn't sit down and talk his concerns over because of all of the listening ears then I might not get the response I'd been counting on.