Forsaken

by Dean Murray

  "So you're cured?"

  "I'm not sure what it means. I'm not sure of much as things stand right now. The questions are arriving much faster than the answers."

  Chapter 9

  Alec Graves

  Sanctuary High School

  Sanctuary, Utah

  Now that we didn't have the constant threat of Brandon's pack hanging over us, the pack had started developing hobbies that expanded beyond what you could do just at the estate. The fact that we weren't all confined to the estate quite so much helped ease some of the tension in the pack, but like so much else right now, it was too little too late. With Dom in Manhattan and Rachel confined to bed, we had plenty of extra vehicles, but Tasha had still started dropping me off at school each morning and picking me up in the afternoon.

  It had an element of staking out her territory to it, which I didn't particularly love, but it did have the benefit of keeping the girls at school at arm's length. It also had the benefit of giving me a few private moments each day with Tasha. I hadn't expected things to progress as well as they had so far.

  Physically, Tasha was superficially similar to Adri. She had blond hair, a slender build, and was more than just merely pretty. As far as temperaments went, though, the two of them were markedly different. Where Adri had been accepting and gentle, Tasha was challenging, and when someone couldn't back up their position she wasn't above calling them an idiot.

  Adri hadn't understood pack life because she'd only ever had a ring-side seat. She'd wanted me to be better than the savagery that was part and parcel of being a shape shifter. Tasha had lived in that ring her entire life and understood exactly how hard I'd had to work to create even the superficial bubble of civilization around the Sanctuary pack.

  I exited the school and saw Tasha waiting inside her car for me. I suspected she actually came to pick me up just as a way of getting away from the estate. She seemed to keep busy, even from an entire state away, helping her mother manage their financial holdings, but I could already tell she was more social than I was. She didn't go hang out at Sanctuary's one and only bar or anything, but driving through town and seeing honest-to-goodness humans seemed to satisfy some unspoken need for her.

  "So what great bits of knowledge did you learn today?"

  I shook my head at her recurring question. "School is just like any other way of learning knowledge. You rarely learn something that moves the world all on its own. It's more a gradual process. At the end of it all, you realize that you're better equipped in some area than you were when you started the process."

  "Ah, finally a decent answer out of you, Alec. That means I can go on to my next question."

  As always, there was a hint of mocking laughter to our time together.

  "If school is merely a method of acquiring knowledge, then why haven't you optimized your efforts the way you have in most other aspects of your life?"

  It only took a second for me to realize what she was getting at.

  "You're saying that I'm wasting my time by going to school."

  "Maybe not in so many words, but yes. High school isn't optimized for learning; it's optimized for a broader set of things. I would suggest that you don't need much of what this school is still able to offer you. Get your GED if you must, but your time would be better spent running your pack."

  I didn't like the idea, but I suddenly realized I couldn't think of a single rational reason to stay in school. I could learn faster on my own, or with hired tutors. It was meaningless as far as helping me get into a college. College might have been an option if my father had still been alive, but the alpha of a pack couldn't be gone for nine months out of the year.

  There wasn't even a social reason for me to be spending so much of my time each day sitting in classrooms. I hadn't interacted with the rest of the student body very much even before we'd killed Brandon's pack. Since then, everyone had been polite but distant. I suspected they were worried that they might somehow run afoul of me and suffer a similar fate.

  Adri had pierced my armor in part because she'd come from outside Sanctuary and arrived without the deference that most of the town offered my family almost instinctively. There wasn't anything saying that something like that couldn't happen, but ultimately, could I justify bringing another human into my world? It had been more than Adri had been able to handle. Odds were that any other normal human would have an equally hard time fitting into my life. What was worse, they would always be a liability. I'd never thought about Adri in those terms before Tasha arrived, but it was impossible not to see the differences between the two of them when it came to their suitability to life as the mate of an alpha.

  Adri had been completely defenseless. Tasha wasn't a hybrid, so she was only a step above Adri when it came to being able to protect herself, but that one small step would still translate to fewer problems inside the pack. More telling was the fact that Tasha had been raised to rule a pack. I'd loved Adri. I still loved Adri if I was brutally honest about it, but from a practical standpoint Tasha was right. Marrying a shape shifter had destroyed my mother. There was every reason to believe that it would do the same thing to any other human I tried to bring into my life.

  The silence had stretched out long enough that it would have felt uncomfortable with almost anyone else, but Tasha was content to wait for me to think through her points. I finally shrugged and motioned that we should get started back home.

  "I can't argue with your logic, but I find myself oddly reluctant to abandon school right now."

  Tasha smiled as she dropped her BMW into gear. For once the mocking undertone was gone. "That's a good enough answer for now. As time goes on, you'll either come up with a real reason or you'll realize your reasons are purely emotional."

  I nodded, but the truth was that I already had a pretty good idea that my reason was emotional. That didn't mean it was invalid though. That was one of the places where I was suspecting we didn't see eye to eye.

  We drove in silence for several seconds before Tasha ventured another question. "Do you trust me yet, Alec?"

  I shrugged. I'd already pretty much expected her to turn the tables on me at some point in our conversation.

  "I'm not sure it really matters whether or not I trust you yet."

  She took her eyes off the road and gave me a frustrated look.

  "It absolutely matters. We're not talking about some kind of business joint venture where we've only got a couple of million at stake. We're talking about a complete merger between our packs and a marriage between you and me. Trust absolutely has to be at the bottom of all of that, or we all may as well just slit our throats right now."

  "Okay, point taken, but the truth is that I still don't know how far I can trust you. Based on your actions so far, you're either honest or a very accomplished liar. Do you trust me?"

  Tasha nodded without taking her eyes off the road this time. "Yes, I do actually. I have the advantage of being here where I can watch your interactions with your pack, all of whom have known you for your entire life. You're honest. You're a decent leader, too, except for the way you keep oscillating back and forth between trying to build some kind of consensus and being more authoritative."

  "So you're all in then?"

  She shook her head. "No, I wouldn't go that far, but I can see my way to dealing with some of the issues I think you bring to the table with you. The real question now is how I go about managing to convince you that I can be trusted. Mom figured that if we waited long enough the pressure from the challenges would convince you that you didn't have much of a choice but to jump into bed with us. Dominic bought you more time than I expected with her little miracle win though."

  Tasha didn't realize it, but it was comments like that which were still putting the biggest brake on our relationship. I didn't think I'd be falling in love with her any time soon, but I could have gotten past that. Plenty of people had married out of duty in the past, but I wouldn't put my friends and family in a position that was worse than we were i
n now. I still got the impression that the other members of my pack were little more than counters on a board for her.

  I waited in silence for another couple of minutes, and then, as we pulled past the gate into the estate, she seemed to make a decision.

  "Okay, the only way this is going to progress is if one of us takes a risk and exposes themselves to something that could really come back to bite them. Since you seem to need the convincing, I'll take the risk."

  I raised an eyebrow expectantly. She took a deep breath before continuing. "We've been killing any werewolves we run across in our territory for years now."

  That in and of itself was a pretty hefty admission. The Coun'hij had outlawed werewolf hunts as part of the agreement that brought Puppeteer firmly onto their side. It had been all but inevitable really. He'd been much too powerful to let wander around loose, and no other pack had wanted anything to do with him, not after he'd lost control of one of his minions and gotten his original pack's alpha killed.

  "So you guys hunt werewolves. Everyone kind of expects the border packs to march to their own tune. I could maybe make life a bit more difficult for you if I went to the Coun'hij and told them, but short of them agreeing to let Puppeteer overwhelm you guys in a sea of werewolves, it won't change the fundamental balance of power. They still don't have anyone who can take your mom one on one, and you're still too small of a group to really threaten their powerbase."

  She was nodding, already seeing where I was headed. "Right, and I would have known you'd see things that way, so I risked very little by telling you, because you would have known that the Coun'hij is hardly likely to embrace you like a prodigal son. Even if you do turn informer for them, it's not going to outweigh the risk you represent as a rallying point for the rest of our people."

  "Right, so you haven't risked much of anything yet, Tasha."

  "What about if I invite you on a hunt with us? That's how your dad and my mom started down the path to an alliance, you know. Mom chased a pair of vacuums up into Utah and your dad heard about it somehow. He brought four of his most trusted hybrids far enough south to help trap both of the werewolves in a dry canyon somewhere around here. When the dust finally settled, the combatants from both packs were plenty the worse for the wear, but both alphas respected each other for being willing to do what was right, even though it could have created waves for them with the Coun'hij."

  I shook my head in amazement. It hadn't been one of the stories that Donovan had shared with me. It was possible he hadn't known how the first tentative steps had been taken towards an alliance between the two packs, but it did sound remarkably like something my dad would have done.

  It wasn't that much more of a risk than what she'd already done, and it actually put me and the rest of the Sanctuary pack in more danger. Agony and the rest would love nothing more than to catch us hunting a few werewolves and use it as a pretext to destroy the entire pack.

  Even so, it would give me a chance to take the measure of whoever came north from her pack, and it would provide an opportunity to see how their dominants and our dominants interacted.

  "Okay, I'm in, and I'll see what I can do to get at least a couple of the others to come with us."

  "Perfect, have Donovan get your jet warmed up. We've got the ideal prey already identified."

  **

  Just over an hour later, Isaac, Jasmin, Jess, Tasha and I were landing in a tiny airport just outside of Clifton, which was on the extreme east edge of Arizona. Isaac wasn't happy about Jess accompanying us, but I wanted at least one of our submissives along for the ride so I could see how the Tucson pack reacted to more than just our dominants. James had stayed home to mind the store, but honestly, if another challenger showed up he was going to just have to stall for an hour or so until we could make it back there.

  Jasmin had agreed to come along with a minimum of coaxing, but it was obvious that her heart wasn't in the hunt. She was coming along because she figured something was up between Tasha and me, and she wanted to get as much firsthand data as she could so that she didn't get blindsided by whatever we had in the works.

  Jaclyn met us at the airport with a trio of bulky guys who almost had to be hybrids, and a guy and a girl I was pretty sure were normal wolves that she'd brought along for the same reason I'd brought Jess. She inclined her head slightly in my direction when I walked into the tiny terminal.

  "I'm glad to see Tasha was able to convince you to join us. This is Arnold, Brutus and Alexei; they are three of my dominants. Peter and Jane will be acting as scouts; I'd like to keep them out of the main fight if we can manage it."

  She'd presumably followed the normal convention of introducing her pack in order of dominance, but that just confirmed what I'd expected. At sixteen, Alexei was too young to have unseated either of the other two yet. Arnold was a massively-muscled man who had to be midway through his second century. Brutus was only slightly smaller and younger. They both looked like they'd be a handful in a fight.

  Peter and Jane had an alert, cautious air that backed up the idea that they were towards the bottom of the pack's power structure, but they weren't overly jumpy, which meant Jaclyn probably kept her hybrids from doing anything overtly cruel to the rest of her people.

  "We've never hunted vacuums before, but we thought maybe it was time to do something more constructive than just lock horns with more of the dispossessed. This is Isaac, Jasmin and Jess. I'd like to keep Jasmin and Jess on the fringes of things as well if at all possible."

  Jaclyn smiled and waved us all over to a table that already had a map laid out on it.

  "We occasionally run extended patrols in an effort to make sure we don't have any vampires moving into the area. We keyed into the trail of a werewolf six weeks ago and have been slowly tracking it down since then. We probably would have gotten to it before now, but Natasha's already told you about the run-in we had with that cat."

  I nodded as I stepped forward and found our position on the map. Jaclyn pointed to a cluster of buildings off on the east side of the town.

  "They are probably in this area, so we'll take a foot patrol through here and see if we can find them. Do you guys have any questions before we head out?"

  It was a test. She knew as well as I did that the Sanctuary pack knew next to nothing about hunting werewolves, but an insecure alpha would try to pretend they knew what they were doing. She would probably keep our ignorance from getting any of her people killed, but I wasn't that stupid.

  "What tips can you give us about fighting werewolves? We don't know much more than that they have some kind of absorptive aura."

  Jaclyn nodded to Brutus, who stepped forward and cleared his throat.

  "They're bigger, stronger and faster than nearly any hybrid, so the best bet is to attack with greater numbers and try to keep them off balance. They have a shoulder and elbow construction that limits their ability to get at anything behind them. Similar to a hybrid, but you have to be mindful of just how fast they are when you're trying to exploit it."

  I stepped back from the map so Isaac and Jasmin could get a good look at it, and Tasha picked up the thread of the explanation.

  "It's hard to predict how any given werewolf will behave when they run into a shape shifter. We've seen anything from berserker attacks against a superior force to cunning ambushes and guerilla tactics. The newer wolves tend to be less dangerous though. They are smaller and act more...confused in battle."

  Isaac looked up from the map and then looked around at the Tucson pack. "Any distinctive smell to them? Do we need to worry about their absorption ability?"

  Peter shook his head. "Nothing unusual about the scents of the younger ones, which these all seem to be. We usually find them by watching the news for unexplained power outages on the night of a full moon. Once you've got a scent trail, it's like following anyone else, but they tend not to jump in cars or the like to obscure where they've been. They don't function very well, even in human form, so you generally find them on the fring
es of society."

  Jane tentatively cleared her throat. "Their scent seems to transition really slowly though. The older they get, the more they seem to have a common note to their scent, but it's really, really hard to pick out."

  Jaclyn smiled at Jane and then turned back to Isaac. "To your question regarding their absorptive abilities, they don't seem to be offensive weapons, but they can be a strong defensive measure. They completely absorb any kind of electrical shock without evidencing any kind of ill effects. Some of the pack histories have accounts of werewolves attacking vampires, and as nearly as the observers could tell, the vampires weren't able to manifest any of their unusual abilities. No fire, no telekinesis."

  She'd just essentially told us that her arcing ability was off the table for this fight. None of the Sanctuary pack had any kind of extra power, so it sounded like this was going to be a purely physical fight.

  Seeing no more questions from any of us, Jaclyn got everyone moving out to a pair of SUVs and a limo. A group this size didn't need so many vehicles, but it meant we'd be able to keep the two packs out of close quarters, which was a really good idea until after any dominance questions had been shaken out. I climbed into the limo with Tasha and Jaclyn, despite a little trepidation on the part of my beast at the idea of being outnumbered inside of such a small space.

  Peter slid into the driver's seat and raised the privacy partition. Jaclyn waited until we started moving and then offered me a bottle of water.

  "You look a lot like him, you know. Your dad, I mean. He was always remarkably self-possessed. I know your beast is acting up at the idea of being in the car with both Tasha and me. I expect it knows that you're clearly dominant to Tasha, but the question of dominance between you and me hasn't been settled."

  I allowed myself a guarded nod, not sure where she was going.