Fragile Bonds

by Adelaide Walsh

  “Hey, Anton. Yeah, sorry. Still kind of out of it I guess.”

  His bright grey eyes searched my face and then he looked up, over my head in the direction that I’d come from.

  “You stay with Rora again?”

  I shoved a hand through my hair that I’d left down to dry into its natural mess of waves. “Yeah. I figured I could use a walk before the briefing. You coming?”

  He swept his hands out to the sides in a dramatic gesture. “I’m here aren’t I?”

  I rolled my eyes. “I don’t know what you do.”

  “Well it’s sure as hell not hanging out with these damn bears for the fun of it.”

  I could feel my lips kick up in a wicked grin. “Is that so? I heard you were spotted crawling out of Bella’s window the last time you graced us with your presence.”

  He raised his hand, thumb and index finger extended, to his temple and pulled the “trigger”.

  “Boom.”

  “That bad huh?” I asked, feigning concern.

  “You have no idea.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. Anton was funny. And weirdly enough, he’d become an even closer friend than Rora in these last few months. I was effectively living with Joaquín because Rora was right, I couldn’t go home any more. Surrounded as I was by Bears, all of whom were loyal to Joaquín right down to the bone, my status as an outsider here was glaringly obvious. The Jaguar alpha was the only other person in this mess that didn’t belong. And that fact connected us, despite Joaquín’s antipathy toward the man.

  “Come on, let’s go see what the spooks have got for us.” I pulled Anton by the arm, marching in the direction of the governing borough.

  When we arrived at Joaquín’s office, Bella led us into the conference room we’d reserved for the meeting. The alpha’s usually bitchy assistant was especially terse, today. Apparently, she hadn’t appreciated the one-night stand. Imagine that.

  “Haven’t you ever heard that saying? You know, the one about not mixing business and pleasure?” I hissed at Anton as we sat down across from each other at the big conference table positioned squarely in the center of a smartly designed conference room. We were early, and I was suddenly dreading Joaquín’s arrival.

  He pointed an accusing finger at me. “Pot.” Then he stabbed himself in the chest with that same finger. “Kettle.”

  I chose not to dignify that with a response and instead began to fiddle with the tablet controls for the comm system. Moving on. Ten minutes later, when the door opened again, two Jaguar soldiers poured in, followed by Rora and Arc—Joaquín’s most senior General. This was an interesting development. Arc, as far as I knew, had not been invited to this little shindig. Joaquín, remained noticeably absent.

  Arc sat down across from me. Although I liked the guy, I could tell he remained skeptical of me, and today his face was set in stern lines. Super. An awkward silence stretched between us, the effective offensive force behind the Rebel cell working to dethrone Dariel and his Snakes.

  I leaned back in my chair, resting a booted foot on the edge of the heavy wood table. “Valeria says she’s got some info for us.” I announced, alleviating the tension at the table and turning the focus of those deadly men and women to our crusade. “We intercepted some chatter about a supply station to the north of Bogotá. We think it might be our next hit. Looks like the place is being used a drop for basic supplies, brought in from stores in Venezuela. The communications that we have suggest the stash is low priority when it comes to security, but, if we disrupt the supply lines coming in from Venezuela, Dariel is going to struggle to keep Bogotá in outfitted with the gear the Snakes need to defend it.”

  “Sounds like an easy hit.” Beno crossed his arms over his wide chest. “What info are we waiting on?” The Jaguar, a man whom I’d personally dragged from the clutches of his would-be murderers, was one of my staunchest supporters. The Snakes had roughed him up when they kidnapped him for disrupting the electrical grid following their invasion of Bogotá, but he’d walked away from the incident alive. Pissed off to no end, but alive thanks to the visions I’d been able to conjure. Beno trusted me implicitly, and although the responsibility that trust implied was startling, I was honored to have the support of such a loyal solider.

  “It looks like an easy target, but we gotta make sure it’s as lightly patrolled as we think it is. The packs have been effectively purged from Bogotá, so we have virtually no first-hand intel to go on. Our spies have the best info we can get our hands on. We gotta get confirmation from them that the intel we intercept is still good.” The changelings tended to discount my human soldiers. Despite the fact that Valeria and her group had led us to a handful of good targets over the last few months, had a 100% accuracy rate on all the intel they’d fed me, prejudices between the groups ran deep. I was trying to get my people to see that we were all the same…but the process was slow going. People, it seemed, were inclined to draw lines. No matter what skin—or fur or scales or feathers—they wore, it was just easier for them to understand the world if they could divide living things into neat little boxes, divided with bright lines and immovable walls. And I was trying to change that. I kept telling myself to be patient, but patience wasn’t exactly my best quality.

  “What makes you think we haven’t been made? They’ve got to have a tech team just as advanced as ours. How can we be sure they haven’t realized we’ve got access to their comms and are playing us?” Arc, obviously, was totally justified in playing devil’s advocate here, however, this was something we’d discussed at length. Both privately and with Joquin’s full security team. The question felt like a hostile restatement of our biggest weakness.

  “We can’t know.” Facts were facts. We had no one inside Dariel’s organization. But this was a risk we had to take to move forward. We couldn’t protect the people of this country with by standing still. “The best we can do is attempt to verify the info from multiple sources. Valeria has got people who work as closely with the Snakes as we can get, and we’ve all agreed that we don’t put people in the line of fire unless we can validate the info for the hit through at least one unrelated source.” I told the head of Joaquín’s guard everything I could. And I felt every ounce of lack in what I could share. It sucked that I was asking my people to risk as much as they were. But we didn’t have another choice.

  “Where are your visions now, Adriana?” The rancor in Arc’s comment was unconcealed. But the thing that cut the deepest was that I had no answer for him. My knowing seemed to work just fine, but there had been no visions since we rescued Beno.

  “I do not control the visions, Arc. You saw what it took to find the Jaguar. I’m not sure I’d survive a similar encounter with the Snakes.” What remained unsaid was that I wasn’t sure I’d come out of the incident with Anton unscathed either. Joaquín hadn’t truly been able to forgive me for what he perceived as my betrayal in the arms of the Jaguar alpha. My visions apparently needed touch, intimate touch, to trigger. Joaquín and his lieutenants had been forced to watch me writhe in the arms of another man. Sure, we saved someone’s life because of it, but Joaquín seemed to see those as two separate topics. He seemed to think I had a choice in the matter. To save a life or to choose not to touch another man. I didn’t. And even if I had, I would do it all over again. No one deserved to die if I could save them.

  Anton threw his weight behind me to defend the risks we were all taking, and the subtleties of this weren’t lost on me. “We’re weighing the risks of every hit against the potential value the mission provides in the grand scheme of the rebellion. The humans are giving us everything they can, and Adriana’s team is cherry picking targets that align with intel her spies have been able to confirm from atypical sources. We obviously take a risk every time we move out, but the risk of inaction has, thus far, outweighed that of each mission.” Anton stacked his hands smartly on the table in front of him. My felt a twinge in area of my heart at the fact that my friend, a man to whom I’d made no promises, no com
mitments, was defending my choices as a leader to the agent of my lover. A lover who couldn’t even manage to put aside the baggage of our relationship and show up that day. Asshole.

  Arc just nodded. His tattoos appearing to slither up the tendons of his neck with that discreet movement. The comm system chimed, and I patched in Valeria to our little conference. The line was as secure as digital communication could be. I’d spend hours setting up a system that would protect my spies but let them talk, and I was confident that each member of my rebel cell was safe. Her voice, distorted by the systems security features into an electronic drone, came across the line, asking for the secure confirmation code that had been randomly generated by the system. I spelled out the code and could hear the sigh of relief in tone, even through the vocal distortion.

  “How’re things in the city, mamma?” I asked, deliberately omitting her name. I was training all of my spies to be hyper vigilant. No matter how safe you thought you were, it was always better to be careful.

  “Snakes have tightened up security. New safeguards are being installed in all the government buildings. They can’t replace every employee that runs things at the moment, but they’re chipping away at us.”

  “You guys need to be vigilant. Don’t let your guard down. Let’s get some security refreshers set up for each group. I want to remind everyone about the protocols we talked about in our last chat.”

  “I’ll pass it on.” And she would. Valeria, the unassuming middle-aged office aid, ran the most powerful information network in Colombia. She held the loyalty of human spies in every level of government. Secretaries, receptionists, tech support personnel, men and women who delivered the mail, people who managed the training facilities now frequented by Snake soldiers, janitors and maintenance workers in their buildings. They were all people who tended to be overlooked. The most dangerous spies were the ones who held “menial” positions, were thought to be so far below the notice of the politicians and generals that ran the country under Dariel’s watchful eye, that their existence was simply ignored. The Snakes treated my people like insects. But a fly on the wall was exactly what they strived to be. Valeria collected and fed me sensitive information with the efficiency of a well-oiled machine. And I loved her to fucking pieces for it.

  “The mark you asked us to investigate—” She paused, and I braced myself for what sounded like bad news. “We didn’t find much. We weren’t able to confirm anything directly, but we did manage to find a few vehicle records that could support the numbers you’re surmising from the data you scraped out of those emails. We know there are two vehicles stationed there on a regular basis. From what we know it’s unlikely they would heavy forces in the area with no way out. We also found an accident report for last week which could be connected. The specific location wasn’t listed, but coordinates in the general area could mean it occurred during a routine patrol sweep by an officer stationed at the mark. Reports says the Snake got caught in a mudslide. The guy’s partner called in back up and two more soldiers were on the scene under fifteen minutes later. It took them a long time to dig the victim out. Man remains in critical condition.” Her information wasn’t iron clad by any means, but I had a weird feeling about this mission. I’d learned a long time to trust that little niggling sensation I got when it cropped up. That little trick had saved my life on too many occasions to count, but this time the knowing I got was…odd. Like it hadn’t decided which way this would go.

  “Those numbers match up with what our recon could uncover.” Grafton’s gritty voice reverberated off the sedate slate gray walls of the conference room. “Can’t imagine they’d let one of their own suffocate if they had more manpower they could throw at the situation. I’d say we’re talkin’ five, maybe six sentries.”

  I let out a breath in a relieved sigh. My team could handle six combatants. But my relief was a premature feeling.

  “There’s something else.” Valeria’s voice changed, but the exact nature of the change was hard to pinpoint through the tinny, artificial drone created by the voice changer. “We can’t be sure it’s related…” she trailed off as if unsure she should be talking.

  “You wouldn’t bring it up unless you had a reason.” I stated flatly. The woman and her team had proven themselves over and over again. I trusted her judgement.

  After another second’s pause, she dropped a bomb. “We’ve heard some discussion among the senior soldiers about targetable, short-range explosive devices. The context makes it seem like they don’t have access to the weapons yet but are expecting to soon. Ady, I think they’re talking about missiles.” Fear. Viscous and stabbing penetrated the distortion.

  Tension raced through each body at the conference table like an electric current. It was Arc who broke the silence. “They’re going to kill the packs.”

  Chapter 2

  The horror of that simple statement rang through the room and hung in the air like the rankest pollution. Up to now there had been blood and violence, but it had been relatively contained. The transfer of power had been smooth. Quiet, for the most part. Dariel had danced his way to power on the backs of sly political maneuvering and precision strikes against only those to stood in his way. The humans had essentially handed over their power bases in Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia. The packs, all over South America, remained generally untouched. Still intact. Still chiefly focused on protecting their own people and defending their own territory. But this…this was different. What other reason could Dariel have for suddenly amassing weapons of mass destruction? The tide of this rebellion had just turned. In a big fucking way. This was no longer a coup. Dariel was going to turn this into an all-out war. The word “genocide” flashed in my mind like a neon sign and remained there, burned on my brain in a searing brand that made my stomach roil.

  “No,” I breathed. “No that can’t be right.”

  “How sure are you? There is no room for misunderstanding here.” Arc called out to Valeria. His voice was icy calm that covered a boiling aggression building in his muscular frame. I hadn’t spent much time with Arc, but in that moment my gift stretched awake in a lazy spreading reach and I just knew that what he’d done in his life, wherever he’d been…this wasn’t his first brush with war.

  “We’ve attributed the discussions to senior soldiers exclusively. Several of my contacts have independently confirmed the rumor has come up in conversations. We haven’t found anything in writing, and, to my knowledge no one has used the exact term missiles.” A succinct summation of the information she had available to her. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach.

  Arc speared me with his dark gaze. “Has there been anything that could even remotely be construed as related to this topic in the data you’ve collected?”

  “If there had,” I shook my head, not wanting any of this to be true, and not blaming Arc for wanting crystal clear confirmation of the facts. “you’d know. The techs and I will go through every we can to reconfirm, but if they’re keeping this to the inner circle, we won’t see it. We still haven’t compromised any of the senior soldier’s accounts.

  Arc slapped the table in a frustrated outburst. “Fuck!” He hissed. “We aren’t ready for this kind of escalation.”

  I narrowed my eyes at the man and attempted to hold back my own surge of aggression. Impending war was not a barrel anyone wanted to stare down but it’s not like this was a fucking surprise. I’d been confined to den territory for months, barred from my home, running fucking hostilities against the usurpers for months! How could Joaquín fucking think this was just going to go away? This conflict had been escalating steadily since the moment Dariel had set his sights on Colombia, maybe earlier! Las Furia should have been preparing for months and yet Joaquín had fought me every step of the way. Every sign I pointed out had come packaged with resistance from the alpha. And here we were, un-fucking-prepared for a war that had been brewing on the horizon in a storm of fire and lightning. We weren’t prepared for this kind of escalation because Joaquín refused t
o listen to anyone but the stubborn voice of his own pride.

  My gaze sliced over the faces staring back at me.

  “Thank you, Valeria. I will be in touch.” I tapped the disconnect button on the comm tablet and laid the small piece of technology on the table before me with eerie calm. “We move on the supply station at dawn. Be ready to depart at two a.m. sharp.”

  “You don’t have the authority to give that order,” Arc growled at me. “The alpha has not authorized.”

  “Half the people at this table are not his to command, Arc. And If Joaquín wants to fight me for authority on this, I’m happy to leave the den. As far as I’m concerned, the Bears are hosting me as a guest alpha and the rebels are my people to command as I would.” If he wanted to play pack politics, I’d fucking play pack politics.

  His eyes flicked from me to Anton. “Are you going to let this human style herself an alpha?”

  Anton leaned back in his chair, arms crossed, jaw carved from granite. He hesitated for only a second. “We’re at war, Arc. The signs have been there.”

  “You will not,” demanded the Bear’s most prestigious general.

  “I will,” said Anton, “and I’m not so lost in my own arrogance to think it’s not the truth.” He stared me dead in the eyes as he spoke. “Adriana, Human alpha, The Jaguars formally accept your offer of protection and pledge to rise to the aid of your pack as allies.”

  I was in no way an expert in the intricacies of pack relations. I did not know the words to the song he was singing, but I understood the weight his eyes were communication. Anton was stepping beyond the bounds of changeling custom, and acknowledging me, a human, as an alpha.

  “You cannot acknowledge her dominance.” Another demand from Arc as the other changelings—Bears and Jaguars alike—looked on in utter silence.