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

by Dean Murray

  Chapter 7

  Alec Graves

  Rio Rico Airport

  Rio Rico, Arizona

  Our plane touched down in Rio Rico a little before noon. We found 100-degree heat and a fearsome reception waiting for us. I'd expected our arrival to be fairly low-key. Rio Rico was a small town with less than twenty thousand people that hadn't even had an airport until Kaleb had decided to make it one of the centers for his war on the southerners.

  Instead of the bored local holding a sign with our names on it, we found Brandon, Vincent, and half a dozen other shape shifters from our pack waiting for us. It was like something out of an action movie. The way that the hybrids were all facing outwards, prepared to respond to any kind of threat, gave me the distinct impression that we were in hostile territory.

  Alison, one of the wolves who had been sent down to the southern front more than four months ago, stepped forward and pointed towards a line of black SUVs waiting less than fifty feet from the plane.

  "The cats have attacked the airport several times over the last two months. The four of you aren't versed in our standard operating procedure, so Brandon has asked that you go take a seat in the cars while the rest of us keep an eye on the plane until it is refueled and begins taxiing."

  My beast didn't particularly like being told what to do by a submissive, but I mentally sat on him to keep him from sending out a flare of power that might tip off Brandon or Vincent to the fact that I was more powerful now than the last time they'd seen me.

  "You heard the lady, let's get over to the vehicles."

  James shot me an unhappy look. Apparently his beast was likewise dissatisfied with the way the chain of command was working, but I was dominant to him, so unless he wanted to start a fight with me out here in broad daylight there wasn't much he could do but follow Jasmin and Jessica to the SUVs.

  Once we were inside one of the air-conditioned bubbles of calm, James practically exploded. The surge of power he unleashed into the air around him made my ears pop.

  "That was a calculated insult. Brandon should have been the one giving us orders rather than sending Alison to do it."

  I locked gazes with James and refused to back down until he looked away. "I think you're probably right that Brandon was insulting us, but just because that was an insult doesn't mean that it was all that it was."

  Jasmin looked up with curiosity written all over her face. "What do you mean?"

  "Look at them." I pointed at the circle of men and women standing in a loose circle around the plane. "We see Brandon and Vincent back in Sanctuary on a pretty regular basis, but the rest of these guys are out here for months at a time. Even when Kaleb gives them some down time he doesn't usually let them come back to Sanctuary—instead he sends them in twos and threes off to someplace where they can blow off some steam without causing any waves back home. Do any of the people from our pack look the way you remember?"

  Jess shook her head. "No, Alison was practically scared of her own shadow before. Now she looks like she could rip me in half without breaking a sweat."

  I nodded, not just because Jess was right, but because that was exactly the same difference I'd noticed almost as soon as we landed. The old Alison never would have given me an order, no matter how politely worded and no matter whom she was representing. This new Alison had chopped her hair into a ragged bob and dyed a light-red streak through it. Everything from her clothes—black cargo pants and a tank top—up to her posture seemed to indicate that she'd been through hell during the last four months and that she was more than able to handle herself in any of the situations she was likely to run into.

  We watched as the ground crew finished refueling and checking the plane and then two of the waiting figures left their spots in the circle and boarded the plane. Fifteen minutes later the plane was taxiing down the runway and everyone else was piling into the waiting vehicles. Alison took the driver seat to our SUV and drove with a kind of easy confidence that told me she'd done this many times before and that she didn't expect problems now that we were moving.

  We'd left the front passenger seat open, but now I moved forward and sat down beside her. "What's going on down here?"

  "We're in the middle of a war; that pretty much says it all."

  "The reports we've been getting back in Sanctuary led us to believe that we were winning."

  Alison nodded, a short, choppy motion that conveyed her supreme discomfort with where I was steering the conversation.

  "We are winning if you just look at the kill numbers. We've killed four or five cats for each of our people that they've retired."

  "But that's not the full story because you guys don't look like the winning team."

  "Right, well, the truth is that the jaguars who have carved off territory and set themselves up as petty dictators tend to have bastard children by the scores. Even if only a relatively small percentage of those kids turn out to be moonborn, that still adds up to a lot of cats running around down there. Before now, they always spent most of their time fighting against each other, but now that we've gone and stirred things up they are setting aside their differences so that they can fight us."

  "So we're way more outnumbered than anyone back home realizes."

  Alison snorted. "That's got to be the understatement of the year. Even if every wolf in North America was down here fighting we'd still be outnumbered. As it is we've got only a relatively small percentage of the able-bodied adults down here on the border so our odds are even worse."

  "How are you guys holding out against those kinds of numbers?"

  "In a word? Brandon. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of people down here pulling together. We've got everything from some of the Coun'hij's bully-boys to some of the dispossessed who've decided to come in from the cold and help fight the good fight, but it's Brandon who always turns the tide of every fight that he's in. I've seen him take out three cats in three seconds and do it without taking even a scratch in return."

  There was a glow in Alison's eyes that made me distinctly uneasy, but either I managed to keep my feelings off of my face or she was just too caught up in what she was telling me to notice anything short of the conversational equivalent to a tactical nuke.

  "Two months ago one of the really old cats made the trip up from Nicaragua. The intelligence operation your dad put together saw him coming days before he arrived and it scared the crap out of everyone here. You know how cats just continue to get stronger and faster as they age rather than plateauing out like we do."

  I nodded, but Alison seemed to take it as a given that I knew what she was talking about. She resumed talking after only a second.

  "Mostly as they get older they tend to carve out little kingdoms in the middle of nowhere and surround themselves with younger cats to serve as bodyguards. Eventually it seems like a few of the lieutenants always get together and kill their boss before splitting up the kingdom and then setting to trying to kill each other. Somehow this guy managed to not only survive a heck of a lot longer than most of his kind, he also won the loyalty of his people such that they willingly followed him up here to tear us apart."

  Alison looked away from the road long enough to meet my eyes. "It's almost like a holy war with most of these guys, Alec. You'll have to see it to believe it, but they blame us for all of the centuries of poverty and corruption down there. They want to break into the United States because they think that once they are here they will have the same kind of lifestyle as we've enjoyed for so many years."

  "So what happened when he arrived?"

  "Hmm? Oh yeah, Anton. He came in as bold as anything I've ever seen and demanded to fight our leader. Brandon stepped forward without any kind of hesitation and then proceeded to fight Anton to a standstill. I've never seen two guys who were so strong and fast. For a minute there I thought that maybe Brandon had finally met his match, but he killed Anton five minutes into the fight, after which Anton's people scattered and we spent the next four days hunting them down and pi
cking them off one by one."

  We turned onto a side street and I noticed two guys up on the roof of one of the taller buildings. A couple of seconds later Alison followed the rest of the caravan into the parking lot of a Rest Easy Motel and then put the SUV into park and turned to look directly at me.

  "Some of the other older cats were slowly moving north before Brandon killed Anton, but him taking down Anton all by himself scared them enough that they've all moved back to their home bases. Now it's mostly just the younger, more adventurous cats pushing against our territory in an attempt to break through. Brandon is the only reason we're not all dead already and most of the people down here respect him for that despite whatever other faults he might have. I know you and he have had your differences in the past, but if you know what's in your best interest you'll bury the hatchet—assuming Brandon will let you."

  We all piled out of the vehicles and then stood there a bit at a loss for what to do next until Alison had made her way around to our side of the SUV.

  "There are room reservations in your names at the front desk and there's a copy of our standard operating procedures waiting for you in your rooms. You've got the next eight or so hours to start getting comfortable with what's in that manual. Brandon will conduct a briefing at eight tonight in the main conference room. Trust me, you don't want to be late."

  Alison walked off without saying goodbye, and everyone else was already disappearing into the hotel, so I motioned for James and the girls to follow me inside. We got our rooms without any problem and the promised manual was indeed waiting for me. I unpacked my small suitcase and then James knocked on my door before I could sit down and start reading. Jessica and Jasmin were just visible in the hall behind him.

  I waved all three of them into my tiny room and then once the door was shut I turned on the two privacy generators I'd brought with me, placing them on opposite sides of the room.

  "What are we going to do now, Alec? Brandon is building himself an army of fanatics."

  I nodded. "Yeah, I picked up on that too. It's worrying, but for right now our best bet is just to keep our heads down and do as we're told. Hopefully Brandon will leave us together for the most part since we already have all of the dominance issues sorted out between each other. To be honest, I'm starting to wonder what we've been thrown into. Everyone back home knows that Brandon is bad news, but I hadn't heard anything indicating that he was strong and fast enough to take down one of the Ancients like this Anton is supposed to have been. For the first time in my life I think I'm starting to hope that Kaleb knows what he's doing. Someone needs to put the brakes on Brandon or things could get ugly really, really fast."