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  We came to rest separated by a distance of more than twenty feet and for nearly a second I couldn't get my body to move. I would have worried that I'd been paralyzed except for the fact that I could still feel my legs and they hurt too bad for the nerves between my head and toes to be anything other than still working normally.

  I managed to pull myself up onto my feet and took an unsteady step towards Nicolas, but Celeste pulled me up short with a yell.

  "No! There isn't time to finish him off; we have to get out of here before the rest of them get here."

  I looked over to where she was pointing and saw four more hybrids headed our way. It was like something out of a nightmare. Under other circumstances nobody would have dared to let a fight escalate like this. The Coun'hij would have had all of our heads for this, but I was already a marked man. Apparently Nicolas and the others figured that killing me would buy them some leniency with Puppeteer and the rest.

  Either way, the containment teams were going to have their work cut out for them this time. If the Coun'hij expected to keep this particular incident off of the national stage they were going to have to leave Oblivion down here for the next week or two.

  I itched to cover the rest of the distance over to Nicolas and end him once and for all, but Celeste was right, the other four hybrids were just too close. Not only that, Nicolas was starting to stir.

  I staggered over to Ash, picked him up, and carried him over to Celeste's Pathfinder. Three seconds later we were tearing out of the parking lot. I looked back and saw the other hybrids gathering around Nicolas just before we rounded a corner that hid them all from view.

  As much as I might wish otherwise, I knew that we hadn't managed to kill Nicolas. It was too bad. I was pretty sure that I'd eventually end up fighting him again at some point and the odds were very good that I wouldn't survive our next meeting.

  Chapter 9

  Isaac Nazir

  Highway 310

  Eastern Louisiana

  Once I was satisfied that the hybrids from the New Orleans pack weren't going to run us down and force me into another fight that I was nearly guaranteed to lose, I turned back to Ash. He still had a pulse and he was still breathing, but he was fading fast.

  I tore open the bags we'd smuggled out of the hospital and swore when I found the first-aid kit. Neither Ash nor I had thought to pre thread the second needle after our adventure earlier that night.

  "What's going on back there? He's still alive, right?"

  The terror I'd heard in Celeste's voice hadn't ever really disappeared, its cause had just morphed as we'd narrowly avoided one catastrophe and plunged towards another.

  "He's still alive right now, but he won't be for much longer unless I can get the bleeding under control."

  I finally managed to get the needle threaded as Celeste flipped on the dome light. Then, for the second time in less than twenty-four hours, I stuck my hands inside one of my friends hoping that I'd be able to stop them from bleeding to death.

  "Where are we headed?"

  "Shouldn't you be concentrating on Ashley?"

  I'd opened Ash up thinking that Nicolas couldn't have hit any major arteries, but I'd been wrong. Given the placement of the wound it would have been a small miracle for that to have been the case, but that hadn't stopped me from hoping.

  "Yeah, I'll be plenty focused on sewing Ash up in about three seconds, but I haven't made it to the tricky part yet. Where are you taking us? They know what we're driving, what's your plan for slipping through whatever net they're trying to set up?"

  The kidneys are a bad place to be stabbed or cut. There are a lot of blood vessels there and the main renal artery was capable of bleeding an average person out in something like a minute, with unconsciousness occurring in a quarter of that time.

  Ash's right renal artery hadn't been severed or he would have already been dead, but it had been nicked. I went to start my first stitch, but then paused.

  "Are we on a straightaway or are you about to throw us into a turn?"

  "What? No, we'll be going straight for another minute or two, I'll warn you before that changes."

  I slid the needle into Ash's renal artery and angled it so that the needle would come back out just above the tear.

  Celeste sounded like she was shaking, but she kept the SUV steady. "I've got a boat about ten minutes from here. We can ditch the car and take the boat. That should give us a chance at losing Onyx's people."

  I pulled the first stitch tight while she was talking and started on the second one. The first one had gone in about right, but I was worried about the second one. If I didn't pull it tight enough then Ash would bleed to death. If I pulled it too tight then the tear might not match up correctly and he'd still bleed to death.

  "We can't stay on a boat forever. What do we do when it's time to return to dry land?"

  "I'm still working on that part of the plan. If nothing else I can arrange to have a different car waiting for us somewhere else when it's time to come out of the swamp."

  "So you're making this up as you go then?"

  "Do you have a problem with that?"

  The second stitch was done and the third one seemed to have the right amount of tension on it. I shook my head without looking up from Ash.

  "No, surprisingly enough, I don't seem to have any kind of problem at all with that. I guess my beast sees the family resemblance too."

  I could feel her staring daggers at me in the rearview mirror, but that was okay. She'd busted Ash's chops for not having a better plan for getting us out of the hospital, but she was apparently cut from the same cloth. As long as all she did was stare then I didn't care how pissed off she might be.

  "Turning now."

  Ash didn't have a lot of time to waste by that point. He'd lost a lot of blood already. I'd managed to slow the bleeding from the renal artery to something that was barely more than a trickle, but I was still worried about him.

  Despite my concerns, I waited to start the second-to-last stitch until we were through the turn. I didn't want to risk tearing the artery open if we hit a bump—what I was doing was already dangerous enough.

  The last two stitches went in without any problem and then I used what was left of his shirt to soak up the blood that had puddled inside of him so I could see where I had additional problems. There were a few, but none of them were as bad as I expected them to be.

  We drove in silence for a couple more minutes as I tried to take care of all of the other places where blood was leaking out of his body. The fight seemed to have taken even more out of me than I'd realized, my vision was going blurry.

  I did some quick math while I closed up a vein and came to a total number of hours since I'd last slept that was only just this side of dangerous. No wonder I was dragging. In the last thirty-six hours I'd been in two major fights, performed two emergency surgeries, hacked two separate systems inside the hospital and done it all without getting any sleep.

  "Ash told you about the lamias?"

  "Some. He seemed to think that they might be able to tell us where the Coun'hij was based, but he swore me to secrecy. He said the lamias were like the ultimate trump card, something that needed to stay a secret for when you'd played every other card you had."

  "Yeah, I think I might be to that point now. A lot has changed since Ashley was here last. Onyx is a fast learner and he's not afraid to play dirty. Are you up to a challenge match if it comes to that? I'd do it myself, but their queens don't fight and this whole thing is one colossal bluff that all depends on them believing that I'm a queen, just like their queen, and therefore due the same rights and privileges."

  "Do I have any choice?"

  "Not if we want to survive."

  "Then I guess I'd better be ready for a fight to the death against something capable of bringing down a werewolf all by itself."

  "It won't be as bad as that—don't get me wrong, it will still be bad—but they like their fights more evenly matched than that. They have an
incredibly powerful venom that they inject via the tips of their claws that is the primary reason they are able to bring down werewolves. They wouldn't use that on you unless they viewed you as being as big a threat as a werewolf. If you were to survive enough challenge matches you might eventually be classified as an opponent worthy of using venom on, but you'll be safe for a while."

  I tied off the last stitch on another blood vessel—this one had been cut all of the way through—and tried to remember how many of them I'd sewn up so far. I'd lost count somewhere around five; I was pretty sure that we'd been driving for more than ten minutes.

  "How many fights are we talking?"

  "I'm not sure. It depends on how long we're there, but there are other factors. They'll challenge you at irregular intervals throughout our time with them. There is always a challenge when a new queen first shows up, but I don't know what triggers subsequent challenges after that."

  As the SUV coasted to a stop I used Ash's shirt again to soak up the blood that had continued to pool while I'd been working. Looking at the bloody material jogged something in the back of my mind and I suddenly realized that I was naked.

  My face heated up instantly. Our pack hadn't ever practiced the kind of casual nudity common in most other packs. It made things go much more smoothly when you didn't have the dominants inside of the pack worrying about who was getting an eyeful of whose girlfriend or boyfriend each time someone changed back to human form.

  Normally I would have put a new ha'bit on as soon as I changed out of the ruined one, but I'd been so worried about Kristin on the way to the car that it hadn't even crossed my mind. I decided that Ash was stabilized enough to move and unobtrusively reached for the change of clothes in my bag.

  Celeste chuckled as she put her Pathfinder into park. "I was wondering how long it was going to take for you to realize that. Grab your clothes and put them on if you have to, but work fast. There's no telling how long we have before Nicolas' guys show up. There are only so many places we could have been headed."

  She slipped out of the vehicle and headed towards the dock and the two dozen boats moored to it. I pulled on my last undamaged ha'bit and then covered it up with jeans and a t-shirt so that I wouldn't stand out any more than necessary.

  The daggers I'd felt her staring at me during the drive had suddenly taken on a different significance altogether. I was pretty sure if the shoe had been on the other foot and I'd been checking her out while she hadn't even realized she wasn't wearing clothes that there would have been hell to pay.

  Part of me wanted to challenge her right then and there, but the situation was more complex than that. The question of dominance needed to be established between us, but I was already hurt so I'd be starting out at a disadvantage.

  Even if I did win, the price might very well be our lives. Even if Onyx's people didn't happen on us before the fight was over, it would just make it that much harder to beat the lamias in an hour or two.

  Now wasn't the time, but the time would eventually come, and when it did I was going to hit her so hard her head would spin.

  I gently picked Ash up and carried him down to the aluminum boat, realizing in the process that it probably didn't matter much what I looked like while I was carrying a limp body in my arms. So much for being unobtrusive.

  "Go get Kristin and the bags while I finish up with Ash."

  Celeste turned towards me with fire in her eyes. "You don't tell me what to do."

  "Consider it a down payment on the show you got earlier. Unless you want to try your hand at a little vascular surgery while I fetch our things."

  Her mouth tightened and she picked up a fine tremble in her arms like she was having a hard time keeping her beast in check enough to maintain her shape. I looked down at Ash, turning my back on her the way you would do with an enemy who wasn't worth worrying about. I knew it would piss her off, which was part of why I'd done it, but I was also still worried about Ash.

  I'd had him all sewn up by the time we'd stopped, but there was a possibility that moving him had ripped some of his stitches. I started carefully probing the long gashes in his back while I waited to see what Celeste was going to do.

  "This isn't over. Damn Sanctuary prima donna. We're going to have a knock-down drag-out once we get somewhere safe."

  "I look forward to it; now hurry up before we have company."

  Less than five minutes later Kristin and all three bags had been moved to the boat and we'd pushed off from the dock. The boat was one of the shallow-bottomed fan boats that were primarily used in swamps and bayous, which hadn't been a surprise, but I was shocked at just how loud the prop turned out to be.

  I finished checking Ash's internal injuries, taped all of the gashes up to stop them from seeping blood from hundreds of smaller blood vessels, and checked over Kristin before staggering to the other chair.

  It felt odd to be sitting in something that put me four feet above the bottom of the boat when Ash and Kristin were lying at my feet, but I put the discomfort out of my mind, much like I'd done with the incessant droning of the motor behind us, and looked around at our surroundings.

  It was more than five minutes later that I happened to look up at Celeste just as a gust of wind pushed her hair out of the way enough for me to see the bright green earplugs in her ears.

  I tapped her shoulder and then pointed to the earplugs. "I want some too."

  "Tough."

  I'd noticed a small black bag affixed to the bottom of her seat with Velcro when I'd been working on Kristin and Ash. I hadn't heard her unzip it, but that might just mean she'd waited to fish out her earplugs until after the prop was spinning.

  I waited until she was focused on the water ahead of us again and then reached down and pulled the bag away from her seat. She shot me another angry look as I unzipped the bag and found that it did indeed contain additional sets of earplugs along with clothes made out of stretchy, soft black cloth.

  I was pushing her too hard, but she wasn't going to do anything about it until after we were all out of danger. Once that was the case, I would welcome the chance to see who was really dominant to whom.

  I'd already checked over my wounds and taped up the worst of them, but I was still exhausted.

  "How long until we arrive in the lamias' territory?"

  "An hour, give or take. Why?"

  "I haven't slept in almost a day and a half. If there's any way to stretch out the trip maybe I could get caught up on my sleep and have a chance at winning that fight."

  Her face softened slightly. "You didn't say anything about being that tired when I first told you we were headed towards the lamias. How are you keeping control of your beast?"

  I shrugged. "I didn't mention anything because it doesn't matter. We would either have time to rest before we got there or we wouldn't. Either way I'll still go through with the fight and do my best to save Ash and Kristin. As for the other, I can't really explain it. My beast has been more difficult to control lately, not less. When you throw in the way that you and I have been playing dominance-chicken, I should be struggling a lot more than I am to keep him leashed."

  "The lamias aren't going to be fighting our kind of challenge match, Isaac. This is for real; they will be trying to kill you."

  "I know, I gathered as much already. It doesn't matter though, I've been in fights like that before. I'm not looking to die, even though that sounds like the most likely outcome, but if it happens it happens. I'll have given it my best shot and there are worse fates than dying cleanly in battle."

  "I think you'll do better against the lamias than you think. I've never seen anyone stand up against Nicolas even half as well as you did."

  "That wasn't anything to be impressed with. I got in a single lucky shot, but other than that he controlled the entire fight."

  "One lucky shot is more than I've ever seen anyone else manage. Go ahead and take a nap. I'll buy you an extra hour. Go on, I'll wake you up with plenty of time to prepare for your match."
<
br />   The abrupt change in Celeste's manner, the sudden softening of her expression, was dizzying. I got the feeling that we were still going to end up fighting each other before all was said and done, but neither of us was looking forward to it quite as much as we had been.

  Chapter 10

  Isaac Nazir

  Bayou Perot

  Eastern Louisiana

  I awoke to a different world. We'd still been within sight of the ocean when I'd closed my eyes, but now we were deep inside the bayou.

  The Cyprus trees looked like something out of a horror film. Their trunks branched out as they disappeared into the water. It was almost like they'd become confused and started growing roots above ground. As we slowly coasted past a particularly large specimen I wondered if it was pulling more of its nutrients from the water than was normal in other locations.

  The water was a muddy morass that was so full of algae that in some sections the brown of the dirt had been overpowered by green.

  In places the Spanish moss hanging down from the trees was long enough to touch the water, creating an odd, barely moving veil of vegetation that made me nervous for some reason. It wasn't until we'd been slowly gliding forward for a couple of minutes that I realized what had me so on edge.

  I could smell something out there in the water, something big and reptilian, and the moss was making it so I couldn't locate whatever it was.

  "Do you smell that?"

  Celeste nodded. "It's an alligator, a big one."

  "Should I be worried?"

  She shot me an uncertain smile. "I don't know. In most parts of the bayou I'd say no, but we're at the outer edge of the lamias' hunting territory. Things get weirder and weirder the further in you get. All of the predators get bigger. I've seen alligators almost twice as big as what I've seen anywhere else, bull sharks the size of a great white, and water moccasins that are bigger around than your arm."