by Dean Murray
Chapter 8
Alec Graves
Rest Easy Hotel
Rio Rico, Arizona
I made it through most of the operations manual before it was time to go to Brandon's briefing. I knocked on the doors to James' and the girls' rooms and then we all went downstairs together. I'd thought that there were a lot of moonborn waiting for us at the airport, but that was nothing compared to the sheer number of people packed into the conference room. I counted thirty people and when you factored in the fact that there were probably some of Brandon's people still detached as lookouts and guards, it meant that the actual size of Brandon's force was probably somewhere in the range of forty or fifty warriors, and I only recognized about half of the faces present.
It wasn't something designed to help me rest easy at night. Not only did Brandon have a miniature army more than twice the size of most packs, he'd successfully recruited from outside of the Sanctuary pack, which meant there was a chance that Kaleb didn't even know the full extent of Brandon's power base.
Vincent entered through a side door and then held it open so that Brandon could walk through it. Brandon scanned the waiting shape shifters and then seemingly satisfied that everyone was there, he launched into his briefing.
"We got another anonymous tip last week and the Brain Box, our intelligence group, has finally managed to confirm its validity."
Brandon pulled a remote out of his pocket as someone hit the lights and a second later the overhead projector that had been quietly humming flared to life with a map of northern Mexico.
"A nest of cats have set up an hour west of Santa Ana apparently relying on the sheer distance between here and there to keep them safe. It's taken some work to confirm numbers that far away from our normal area of operations, but the Brain Box puts the group at twenty, only two of whom are old enough to potentially be classified as Ancients."
The projector flashed and the map was replaced by a picture of a compound. "This is an aerial view of their base…"
I relaxed into the briefing, memorizing the layout of the compound and making mental notes of how Brandon was deploying his people. It appeared that he had pulled in his thirty best fighters and was planning on using them to storm through the interior of the compound. He was likely more than a match for one ancient, which meant that Vincent and the rest of his people should outnumber the rest of the cats by a healthy enough margin that at least some of the cats would scatter and try to get out of the compound.
Fortunately for us, there were really only two decent routes away from the compound, so Brandon was deploying two more groups outside of the compound to serve as a safety net to scoop up all of the runners.
It was a simple plan that seemed to rely more on Brandon's extreme lethality and our superior numbers than on anything else, but I couldn't see any glaring holes in it. I looked away from the screen and back at Brandon as he started to wrap up.
"…We've got information packets for you all to review on the trip out, but despite the fact that it's outside of our normal theater of operations and a bigger group than we usually tackle, it should be a pretty straightforward job. For the most part you're all staying in your normal units. The team leaders have already been pre-briefed and they'll reach out to anyone who's been moved between teams. Let's kill some cats and all come back in one piece. This could be the propaganda win that we need to get the trickle of recruits to start flowing south again."
Apparently any questions would be answered by the team leaders because Brandon walked out of the room without looking back. James gave me an inquiring look, but I just shrugged. There wasn't anything that we could do other than just sit here and wait for our new team leader to come find us.
A couple of seconds later someone tapped me on the shoulder. "You're Graves?"
"Yeah. This is James and that's Jasmin and Jessica. Are you our team leader?"
"Yes, my name is Juan Ruiz. Let's go find somewhere quiet so that I can bring the four of you up to speed."
Juan caught Alison's eye as he carefully made his way through all of the bodies between us and the main exit. Alison didn't look thrilled about any part of what was going on, but she nodded and started towards us.
We walked for nearly five minutes before Juan turned off into a tiny coffee shop that looked like it was on its last legs. The Hispanic woman behind the counter was well past middle age, but the way she smiled when Juan walked through the door made her seem much younger than she actually was.
Languages have never been my strongest area, so I didn't catch much from the lightning-fast exchange that Juan and the woman carried on in Spanish, but she motioned us towards the back of the store as she continued to talk to Juan.
Alison seemed to know where she was going. She led the rest of us up a narrow flight of stairs which terminated on a small landing, only when we went through the door we found another staircase which climbed up the back of the building. The whole affair seemed to have been cobbled together as an afterthought, but when we finally reached the end of the creaking stairs we found that the top of the roof had been converted into a kind of sunroom paradise.
Alison fidgeted with a couple of dials on an ancient-looking machine and then it roared to life with a gust of cool damp air. "Swamp cooler."
The words weren't said to anyone in particular, and after Alison said them she went over to one of the chairs on the far end of the glassed-off enclosure and used it to get high enough up to crack open one of the windows before plopping down on the faded plastic seat with a sigh of resignation.
It was obvious that Alison didn't want to make small talk so I motioned James and the girls into chairs and then pulled up one of my own. We passed the next couple of minutes in silence until Juan walked into view and let himself into the sunroom.
"Can someone please get that window over there? Swamp coolers only work properly if you give the air somewhere to escape to."
Jessica saw to the window in question while Juan opened a third window and then pulled out a couple of white noise generators and stationed them as far away from the swamp cooler as possible.
"Okay, everyone huddle up. With all of the racket in here nobody should be able to listen in on anything we're saying, but we'll need to get closer or we won't be able to hear each other."
We all moved in, James and the others with an air of curiosity, Alison looking like she was ready to start swearing. Juan let the silence stretch out for several seconds and then waved at Alison. "If you have something to say then go ahead and get it off of your chest."
"Why in the hell did you let us get stuck with them? I didn't expect that we'd get a pair of top-tier hybrids to replace Jones and Rivera, but having these four on our team is worse than having nobody at all. By letting Brandon stick us with them you've painted a big old target on our backs."
I expected Juan to slap Alison down with a roar of power, but he just shrugged mildly and turned to address me.
"You'll have to excuse Alison. She's normally not quite so abrasive, but she hates your father pretty badly."
Alison shot Juan a fierce look. "Don't go there. They don't have any right to know."
"Now that's where you're wrong. Your feelings are going to make everyone's lives more difficult and the main purpose for this meeting is to clear the air. Either you can do it or I will. And don't break Reina's chair or I'll stick you here helping her on your days off to pay for a new one."
Alison's hands had been white-knuckled on the arms of her chair, but she let go of the creaking plastic like it was burning her. "I hate you."
Juan shrugged and smiled and I wondered for a second whether or not this was partially punishment for her refusal to properly submit to him.
"I'll tell it then, but I'll probably get some of it wrong since I'm not from your pack and I heard it all secondhand."
"I'll do it." Alison's voice was low and seethed with rage. "I was in love with Sam Giles for years. My mom said he wasn't any good, but that just made me want him more.
I was so far gone that I even convinced myself that I didn't mind that he couldn't seem to pick between me and Chloe."
I started slightly. I remembered Chloe, she'd been a couple of years younger than us, but she'd left with her parents about the same time as Alison had been deployed down to the border.
"Right, you probably still believe the official story that her parents wanted to fight the cats so badly that they both volunteered to go down to southern California. Well, that's just another of Kaleb's lies. The truth is that Sam was just using Chloe and me. We formed our own little power bloc that helped keep him safe while he worked for what he really wanted."
Alison looked up with challenge in her eyes. "He wanted to work directly for your dad. He kept telling us that he was studying all of those business books because he wanted to go to college and live a normal life, but it was a bald-faced lie. He wanted to help manage the pack's money because he saw the way that it made Donovan untouchable. He figured it was the best way to secure his future and when Kaleb offered him the chance he jumped at it and cut Chloe and me loose."
"Chloe's parents didn't volunteer in a fit of patriotism, did they?"
"No, they were forced down there because Sam didn't want a reminder of his duplicity hanging around. He and Kaleb would have been satisfied with just sending Chloe away, but her parents wouldn't just stand idly by while she was sent off to die. They started raising a fuss directly to Kaleb so he disappeared them to California and sent Chloe and me here to Arizona."
Juan interrupted. "Alison and Chloe were both assigned to my team, which is how I found out what had happened to them. I tried very hard to keep Chloe alive, but she was just too young, too inexperienced and small. She didn't even last two weeks."
Alison looked like her rage was the only thing keeping her from tears. "My mom is still in Sanctuary pretending like everything is okay because Kaleb personally told her that he'd have me killed if she said anything to anyone."
"And if you cause problems here then Brandon will tell Kaleb and he'll have your mother killed. You both serve as a guarantee of the other's cooperation."
My voice came out low and angry. What had been done to Chloe and Alison was wrong. Kaleb had put a price on the lives of five people; he'd implicitly said that the extra money that Sam would generate for him was worth more than the lives of Chloe, Alison and their parents. I wanted to jump into a car and drive back to Sanctuary so that I could throw myself at Kaleb, but there was a tiny part of me that hadn't given into the rage of my beast, and that sliver of self-control knew that the implications of what Alison had just told me were much greater than she knew.
Sam having been brought in expressly to help manage the pack's tithe and Kaleb's fortune meant that Donovan was at risk in more ways than one, but more concerning was the fact that neither Donovan or my mother had told me anything about what had happened with Alison and Chloe.
I looked down and realized that James had his hand on my chest and that I was only a step away from the door. I'd thought I was still at least peripherally in control, but apparently my beast had been calling more of the shots than I'd realized.
"Sit down, Alec. You too, James. Nobody is going to leave right now, we're not done talking."
Juan's voice was even, but it was still a command and my control wasn't up to keeping my beast from bristling at the order. Power exploded out of me, and it wasn't just the limited surge that I'd been trying to train myself to use, it was everything I was capable of. Waves of energy beat against the walls in a metaphysical rush that caused James to back away from me and all three of the girls to shrink in on themselves in a clear bid to avoid becoming the focus of my ire.
"You shouldn't have done that."
Juan didn't rise to the rage in my voice. "You didn't give me any choice, Alec, any more than Alison gave me one. If I hadn't given you another target to focus on then you and James would have come to blows and you'd be halfway back to the hotel so you could steal a vehicle by now."
The things he was saying were just words, and they weren't capable of deflecting my beast—not now, not without something more substantial to back them up. I roared at him and sent out another crest of power to batter him. This time I did spark a response from him and he unleashed a pulse of energy that was respectable but less than I'd managed even before my recent gains.
"There you have it, Alec. I've much less power than you. Your beast is telling you to attack, to prove your dominance, but what will that really prove? If you kill me then you'll be giving Brandon exactly the excuse he's looking for, and if you beat me without killing me then you'll be the leader of this team but a leader without the knowledge that would allow you to keep all of us alive. Is that what you want? You, not the beast that isn't capable of planning more than a few hours ahead."
I wanted to sink my claws into him so badly that it was all I could do to stop the shift that was threatening to tear through me. My whole body was trembling from the need to transform and rend, but the incident with Jack had shown me that I was more capable of mastering my beast than I'd ever realized previously.
I focused on my breathing, letting some of the tension out each time I exhaled, and within a few seconds the shakes were gone and I was enough in control to look at Juan without wanting to kill him.
"Good job, Alec."
The words could have been mocking, but something about Juan's tone told me that he was sincerely impressed, which helped dissipate most of the rest of my beast's anger.
"There aren't very many hybrids who could have done what you just did."
I waved off the compliment. "It doesn't help me stand up to Brandon or Kaleb, so it amounts to little more than a cheap parlor trick."
"With all due respect, it has the potential of keeping you alive when less controlled hybrids would get themselves killed by picking the wrong time and place."
I shrugged and looked around as I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. Reina appeared less than a minute later with a heavily-laden tray of food and beverages. Juan thanked the old lady and handed her a hundred-dollar bill. Once she had retreated back down the stairs he waved at the tray.
"Eat up. She made sandwiches and the drink is an agua fresca with watermelon. We'll be leaving in less than an hour now and you're going to wish you had something in your stomach by the time we get down there if you don't eat now."
I sampled the drink and found it to be delicious. In addition to the watermelon, it had a ton of crushed ice and what tasted like lime juice. I drained the glass and then refilled it from the large pitcher in the center of the tray.
"So what did all of that accomplish other than almost getting you and me in a fight right before we were supposed to leave on an op?"
Juan motioned towards Alison with his head. "For starters, it proved to Alison that you aren't any more of a fan of your dad than she is. That isn't going to magically make everything better, but I suspect it's going to go a long ways towards making it so that we can survive as a team rather than getting cut to ribbons the first time that one of Brandon's plans comes apart at the seams."
Juan took a bite of his sandwich and I waited while he chewed and swallowed. "It also gave you a chance to prove that you aren't just some young hothead who can't override your beast enough to stop from getting yourself killed for no good reason, which means that I can trust you more than I would have otherwise. Not only that, it helped you see that you weren't being told the full story by people you've been trusting."
"You knew that already?"
"Yeah. Even without Alison's story having been confirmed to me via other sources I still would have suspected as much. I've been in healthy packs before. I'm atypical because I don't usually hang around for very long, but I've seen how a pack is supposed to function and everything coming out of Sanctuary smells like a cat that's been dead for six days."
"So you don't trust Kaleb either?"
Juan gave me a hard smile. "I don't trust very many people, and I definitely don't trust any
one associated with the Coun'hij."
"Then why are you down here fighting their war for them?"
"I'm not. I'm down here helping them fight my war. My mother was a human, a lot like yours is supposed to be if rumors can be believed, but she immigrated here from Mexico before meeting my father. I've spent time on both sides of the border, I've seen the pros and cons to both countries and one thing stands out loud and clear with regards to Mexico. All of its problems stem from corruption, which ultimately can be placed at the feet of the shape shifters who've set themselves up as untouchable whether via the drug trade or some other mechanism."
"So you want the cats dead."
"Either dead or following policies more like the wolves follow in North America. I've been fighting this particular war since before Kaleb and Puppeteer were born. I'll take advantage of their current willingness to prosecute it, but that doesn't mean that I'm not looking for a better offer."
"You're taking a massive risk telling us that."
Juan leaned back in his chair and shrugged. "Yes, I am. Not as big of a risk as you might think though, and it needed to be done because you need to know that I'm out here as a potential resource and what my terms are."
"Why me?"
"Because any resistance to Kaleb and the Coun'hij will naturally congeal around you. You're the golden boy Mallory has been excited about for more than seventeen years. Brandon too, but by all accounts he's turned out to be a disappointment from the standpoint of realizing the potential that she saw in him so many years ago."
"I just finished finding out that Brandon is the single most deadly individual in the world, how can he be a disappointment? Puppeteer could probably take him down under the right set of circumstances with enough werewolves, but nobody else even comes close. Besides, how would you even know that?"
"Back when you and Brandon were first born Mallory was so excited she couldn't keep her mouth shut, at least not inside the pack. That changed pretty quickly, but as discontent inside of the Sanctuary pack has grown, her early slipups have become common knowledge inside of certain circles."
Juan took a long drink of agua fresca and then looked back up at me. "As for the other part of your question, Brandon is a disappointment for the same reason that Kaleb is vastly more important to our people than Puppeteer could ever be in the short term. Puppeteer is an example of an ability that serves as a force multiplier for short periods of time with a very limited application. It's become obvious, despite Kaleb's efforts to keep it a secret, that he's dramatically increasing the birthrate there in Sanctuary. That whole bit about him being able to heal faster than anyone else who's ever lived is nothing more than a sideshow. His real power boils down to the fact that his pack is growing four or five times as fast as it should be. That's why the Coun'hij puts up with him. Part of it is that they are running scared of just how big the Sanctuary pack has gotten, but mostly they are greedy. By helping him keep as many shape shifters around him as possible they are creating a population explosion that could expand our numbers by an incredible amount over the next couple of hundred years."
It was like a punch to the stomach. I'd already been forcibly educated as to the fact that I wasn't being fed as much information as I'd thought, but this was something else entirely. There were entire planks that my world was built on that I'd never even suspected existed. I looked over at James and the girls and they looked just as shocked as I felt.
"So they are hoping that I'll manifest some kind of ability that will benefit our people more broadly, something like what Kaleb has rather than something like Brandon or Puppeteer have."
"Exactly. That's why you've been given a ton more rope than most of your fellows and it's also why Kaleb and Mallory have been so careful to keep you isolated from the other packs until now. They didn't want anyone giving you a more complete perspective on your worth out of worry that it would make you more difficult to deal with. They can't afford to go wrong with you."
My laugh was a bitter, mocking thing. "I don't see why. You've just finished telling me that Kaleb turns any pack into a baby factory. If he alienates me it's still only a matter of time until the pack produces a dozen more with as great or greater potential."
Juan shook his head. "Frankly the math behind all of that doesn't interest me in the slightest, but statistically speaking hybrids with your level of potential are extremely rare—think a fraction of a percent of all moonborn births. There was some talk that Kaleb had somehow shifted the odds when you and Brandon were born at the same time, but it's been nearly two decades and there hasn't been a repeat, so it's looking very much like that's not the case. That means that Kaleb and Mallory will probably only get to see another two or three savant births. Mallory is older, she might see one or two less, Kaleb is younger so he might see one or two more, but he won't even be able to identify his potential successors without her. There's always a chance that one of the non-savant level hybrids will manifest a particularly useful power like Kaleb's which has an impact all out of relation to the power required to fuel it, but it's unlikely."
"So Kaleb needs me to solidify his hold over our people and secure his legacy."
"Yeah, that's pretty much the size of it."
I rubbed my temples. I knew it was a bad thing to do from a negotiating standpoint, but I just couldn't help it. Juan had hit me with too much information in too short a time period that had much too profound of an impact on my worldview for me to be able to process it right now.
"You know that telling me this could send me on some kind of egotistical power trip."
"It's possible, but I don't think it's likely, Alec. You've had an awful lot of dirt kicked in your face during the last few years. When that happens you either end up getting to a point where you only look out for number one, or you become empathetic to the people around you. James, Jasmin and Jessica wouldn't be ready to walk through fire for you if you were the kind of person I needed to worry about. Not only that, you're obviously smart enough to eventually figure out that this doesn't actually change anything right now. It might allow you to bluff a little here or there to get something you might not have realized you could get before, but your ability is still nothing but potential. Until it manifests you don't have any choice but to dance to Kaleb's tune."
"But if it does manifest, especially if it manifests into something useful, then I can start calling some of my own shots."
"And with that we've returned to my original reason for letting Brandon put you on my team. When you become top dog—if you become top dog—I want to put a plug in for taking care of the jaguar problem south of the border."
"What if I decide that the best way to take care of the problem isn't to kill them all but to work out some kind of deal with them?"
"If it means that the corruption goes away and that my people get a chance to start building a future for themselves instead of lining the pockets of despots, then you'd have my full support. The truth is that there's no way that we'd be able to exterminate the cats. All they need to do to avoid dying is just keep a low profile. Kaleb's Brain Box employs something like two hundred analysts, and they still end up spending more than half of their time following up on the leads that we get from our anonymous tipster. Without him we would have lost the war months ago. The fact that wolves are more social means that we tend to be easier to identify, which means that the initiative would be completely on their side."
That was another piece of the puzzle that I'd never realized was missing until now. With the vampires it was relatively easy to track them down due to their distinctive scent. Werewolves didn't really have a smell that we could use to identify them, at least not the younger ones, but they were little more than dumb animals and the fact that they created rolling blackouts wherever they travelled meant that we always had some idea of where to go look for them. It seemed incredible, but I'd never realized just how hard of a time we would have finding the jaguars.
"If it is so hard to find the cats in the first pla
ce, how did we manage to nearly exterminate the cats back during the time of the monarchy?"
"It was a different world back then. There weren't any cars, so people didn't move around like they do now. It meant that your neighbors knew you, it meant that even if a town didn't believe in shape shifters, which most did back then, they still knew when there was something different about a family. From a defensive standpoint, the few travelers to come north were always suspected until we'd observed them during a full moon and confirmed that they didn't have to fight the need to change forms. From the offensive side of things, we just went from village to village and the villagers pretty much identified the jaguars for us."
I could feel my mind chewing on the problem he'd just presented me, but before I could even begin to find a solution Alison broke into the conversation.
"This is all fascinating and I'm glad that you think we'll be able to play nice with each other, but it doesn't change the fact that Alec and his friends have a massive target painted on their backs. How exactly are you planning on dealing with that little problem?"
Juan shrugged. "If the game were easy and safe then everyone would play, Alison. The truth is that I don't have a solution, at least not yet. The first step will be for Alec to evidence a change of heart where Brandon and Vincent are concerned. If you can start pulling as part of the team, then they'll be less likely to try anything. If they did do something like that they would risk losing the independents like me."
"Do you think that Vincent is smart enough to realize that?"
Alison was tapping her lips with a forefinger as she thought about my question even though it had mostly been directed at Juan.
"I think so. If he's not, then Brandon is and Brandon will certainly make the effort required to explain it to Vincent. Slightly more than a third of the wolves and hybrids here are either dispossessed or from small, unaligned packs. If they start feeling like they can't trust Brandon to keep Vincent from playing favorites that might get someone killed, then they'll leave and our ability to go in against the larger groups that the tipster tends to identify for us would be seriously compromised."
I shook my head. "It's not that I'm unwilling. My biggest beef with Brandon and Vincent has always been the way that they bully everyone beyond the requirements even of establishing their dominance. If they play nice with people here because they need them, then that takes away most of the reason, on my side at least, for friction between us. That all works, but I don't think that they are going to buy it if I suddenly become all chummy with them for no reason."
Juan's smile wasn't the least bit reassuring. "Oh, I wouldn't worry about that. Like Alison said, you've practically got an expiration date printed on your forehead now that you're down here. I suspect that you'll have an extremely good reason to change your behavior towards Brandon and Vincent in very short order."