Bound: A YA Urban Fantasy Novel (Volume 1 of the Dark Reflections Books)

by Dean Murray

  **

  Like it indeed. The plan involved using explosives and small, hopefully contained, fires to drive the vampires into a large, empty warehouse. I would have said that it was reckless, but Jack seemed confident that his people could keep the blaze from getting out of control and that the fight would be long over by the time the police and firefighters arrived.

  Pseudo-dominant to him or not, it wasn't my place to second-guess his plan, so I nodded in all of the right places and a few hours later found myself sitting with James in a dusty corner of the ambush warehouse as the sun went down.

  "How long have you been holding out on us, Alec?"

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Being able to shift just your hands like that is a big deal."

  "I haven't been holding out on you. I didn't know I could do that until just this afternoon. I'm not even sure that I could repeat it."

  "Well, once we're back home you should spend some time figuring out how to do it and then we should start telling everyone. That's going to be a huge deterrent for guys like Vincent."

  I shook my head. "I'll see if I can replicate it, but this needs to stay quiet."

  James looked at me like I was crazy. "Alec, it's a big deal. Only the most powerful hybrids have that kind of control over their transformation."

  "I'm still the same guy Vincent practically hospitalized a little while ago. Maybe you're right and this is a sign of good things to come, but right now it would just be painting a big target on my back. Maybe it would make Vincent back down from the next fight, but it would also bump me up into the territory where Brandon would start fighting me instead of just insulting me all of the time. I'm not ready to go up to the next weight class yet. I'm planning on trying to get Jack off by himself before we go and asking him to keep it quiet too."

  "You're sure you don't feel any different?"

  "Not even a little bit."

  James looked disappointed. It seemed like everyone had something riding on whether or not I managed to finally manifest an ability that would make me a force within our pack and the wider world. Sometimes I wished that I could tell everyone to go away. I already had enough to worry about just trying to keep James, Jessica and Jasmin safe, not to mention our families.

  It wasn't like I didn't have help, but in some indefinable way I knew that I was the lynchpin to it all. With me it all hung together more or less well enough to keep everyone alive and in one piece. Without me it would just be a matter of time before our entire wobbly house of cards came down.

  Further conversation was cut off by the sound of an explosion. The building muffled it, but to shape shifter ears it was still loud enough to serve as a signal that we were about to be up against company. James and I spread out slightly to give each other room to work. I looked back to confirm the position of the exit that we were guarding and then as I felt a surge of energy from James, I also loosed the chains on my beast.

  The roar of power from my beast was greater than I remembered it being. It was like I'd satisfied my beast that it could take the kid gloves off and it was responding by doing exactly that. My transformation ripped through my body, lengthening bones and bulking up muscles at the same time that claws formed on the end of each finger.

  Despite my words to James earlier I did in fact feel a little different. My skin felt tight and there was an extra measure of restless energy bouncing around inside of me. I opened my mouth to tell James that maybe I'd been wrong, but the sound of running feet stopped me before the words could form.

  The vampires came pouring through the door on the far end of the warehouse and there were more of them than we'd been expecting. I counted seven emaciated, dirty figures led by an eighth, a huge man who was nearly as big as Brandon in his human shape.

  The leader already had a pair of smallish hand axes out and the two vampires at the back of the pack were armed with swords, but as the vampires saw us the other five of them pulled out a motley assortment of weapons that ranged from short swords and knives to lengths of chain.

  Based on the sheer amount of noise still coming from behind the vampires Jack was making sure to move slowly and give the vampires plenty of time to get out into the center of the warehouse before arriving on scene.

  "We may only have seconds before the ones from behind us catch up. Spread out and swarm these two under."

  The siege of the city was obviously having an impact on the vampires. Other than the leader and one or two others, this group all moved with an obvious exhaustion, but as they got close to us and massive amounts of adrenaline dumped into their systems they started moving more quickly.

  Jack had doubtless heard the leader giving orders because the cacophony of sound from the other end of the building had stopped and only half a second later Jack and the others appeared behind the vampires.

  The vampires compressed back towards a wall as wolves came streaming around the other side of the open space so that they could support James and me. Jessica and Jasmin were closest to us which was reassuring on several levels. I liked the idea of having them close enough that I could support them if things started going badly for one of them, and I was more comfortable with the idea of having them backing me up than Jack's people, even if Jack's wolves were the more experienced fighters.

  "Spread out and try to use our advantage in numbers."

  Jack's voice was barely recognizable as a consequence of the changes that being in hybrid form put onto his vocal cords, but his people moved forward without any hesitation. I stepped forward, James and the others at my flanks, and suddenly the room was engulfed in combat.

  The leader took a swing at me with the axe in his right hand, but it was nothing more than a feint. I dodged backwards and then tried to slash his arm with my claws before he could recover, but he was superhuman fast.

  His offhand flicked his axe forward and knocked my claws wide a split second before the weapon in his right hand licked back out and nicked the top of my left arm.

  I knew it was just the opening stages of the fight, that we were just feeling each other out still, but so far he was proving to be the better fighter. It wasn't a realization designed to fill me with confidence.

  I caught snatches of the fight around me as I backpedaled to get out of range of his next attack. James was up against a skeletal-looking woman with a huge two-handed sword and a look of intense concentration on her face while Jasmin and Jess were squared off against what looked like a kid our age who was stabbing at them with a pair of short swords.

  My guy slashed at me with a complicated double attack that I couldn't follow and only barely managed to knock aside with the back side of my claws, and then someone screamed and I saw one of Jack's wolves burst into flame. She hit the ground and rolled in an effort to put the fire out, but it continued to burn despite her best efforts.

  Jack swore and picked his opponent up, spinning once before throwing the struggling man into the vampire who was responsible for the fire.

  "Quit screwing around and just commit. You're fighting their kind of fight instead of our kind of fight!"

  He was right. Facing off against people who were armed instead of against hybrids or wolves had thrown us all off of our game, but Jasmin was the first to recover. I saw her take advantage of an opening and throw herself at her opponent, jaws finding his throat as Jess grabbed hold of his right arm, slowing it just long enough for Jasmin to plant her legs and start whipping her vampire back and forth.

  James was trying to create an opportunity to get in close to the girl he was fighting, but she seemed to be anticipating every move he made. He was already bleeding from half a dozen slashes to his arms and legs, but even more concerning was the spot where she'd stabbed him in the chest. It had obviously missed his heart, but he was clearly outmatched.

  My vampire attacked again, burying one of his axes in the muscle of my left arm before spinning away and grabbing another axe from his belt.

  I couldn't see enough of the rest of the f
ight from where I was standing to tell whether or not Jack's people were holding their own, but our little corner wasn't going well. Jasmin was still trying to kill the vampire she had latched onto. He'd dropped one of his swords and Jess had ahold of his arm again to prevent him from stabbing Jasmin with his other weapon, but he was proving remarkably hard to finish off.

  It was only a matter of time before Jasmin and Jessica succeeded in killing the vampire they'd been fighting, but there was no telling how much longer James was going to last and that was even assuming that they didn't get wrapped up in a fight with one of the other vampires.

  My opponent looked like he was experiencing some of the same kind of frustrations I was feeling. I hadn't succeeded in marking him yet, but it was obvious that he'd expected to beat me already and be on to his second or third opponent. He needed to connect with a blow to my neck or chest if he was going to end our fight quickly and so far all I'd given up was strikes that were only slightly more than flesh wounds.

  He attacked again, but this time his hands were slightly out of position. There was a very high likelihood that the opening was something he'd left there on purpose in an effort to draw me out, but I couldn't afford to pass it up, not if I was going to help James and the girls.

  I took the opportunity, but I took it the same way that I would have attacked another hybrid. My left hand shot forward claws seeking for his chest, but at the same time I charged forward with all of my considerable weight bearing down on him as my right foot came up so that I could sink talons into his stomach and carry him to the ground.

  Against an off-balance hybrid it was a devastating attack. Against a vampire who couldn't weigh much over two hundred and thirty pounds or so, it was practically guaranteed to be successful. It was just a question of how much damage he'd do to me as I killed him.

  Only suddenly it wasn't a foregone conclusion like I'd thought it was. My left hand hit something a few inches in front of his chest, something hard and unyielding where my eyes were telling me that nothing existed. I'd been leading with my left arm and while bringing my left arm to a complete halt wasn't sufficient to completely arrest my forward momentum, it was definitely enough to slow me down. It felt like the barrier hadn't been intended to stop as much force as I'd generated. Rather than a plate of steel, it now felt like a block of wood. I could feel my claws catch on imperfections in the surface as my talons sank into my opponent's flesh.

  He'd set himself and was trying to bring his axes back around to take advantage of the edge that his telekinetic shield had bought him, but the combination of my talons in his belly and the force of me slamming into him, even slower than I'd intended to, was enough to knock him off balance and break his concentration.

  As his head slammed into the warehouse's hard concrete floor his shield disintegrated and my claws tore into his chest. Mindful of just how hard of a time Jasmin was having putting her vampire down, I put my other hand through his heart and then rolled back to my feet.

  Jasmin and Jess were still working their fallen vampire over, so I sprang at James' opponent. I was coming in from the side and slightly behind her, so there was no way for her to have seen me, but somehow she still started around, almost managing to bring her sword up fast enough to impale me through the heart. I managed to slap the blade aside at the last second, claws screeching against steel, and then I was within arm's length of her.

  She blocked my first strike with her hilt in a masterful display of swordsmanship, but James grabbed both of her arms in his claws and a second later she was dead despite all the advantages that her hardy vampire constitution gave her.

  In the end the pyromancer vampire started another of Jack's wolves on fire, but Jasmin ripped his throat out before the blaze managed to really get burning hot. I visually checked the vampires over as I walked towards Jack, confirming that none of them were a threat anymore.

  "What next?"

  Jack looked at me and shook his head. "We need to get the wounded into the vans and start first aid on them. I'll start dousing the vampires in oil and we'll torch them before we go."

  "Where is the oil? I'll go grab it."

  Jack grabbed my arm, his lethal claws gently stopping me from turning away without breaking the skin.

  "You need to get into the van with the rest of the wounded. We don't have much time and I'm not eager to have to carry you there if you pass out and don't shift down to your normal form."

  "What do you mean? I'm fine."

  Jack pointed at my right side and I looked down to see that my first opponent, although off balance and disoriented, had still managed to sink both of his axes into my side before I killed him. I made it four more steps before my knees started to buckle. I passed out about the same time as I hit the floor.