by Dean Murray
We made it through the night without any problems. I got a full three hours of sleep, and then once Ash was satisfied that I wasn't going to pass out at the drop of a hat he finally resigned the wheel and let me drive until almost dawn while he slept.
Kristin slept the entire time without waking up, but it wasn't a peaceful slumber by any stretch of the imagination. She thrashed around almost constantly while Ash was asleep in the back of the SUV, and a few times she yelled loud enough that she woke up Ash.
It was one of the more disturbing experiences that I'd had to endure. It felt like I was sitting next to a bomb. Dream Stealer had a long history of driving people insane, he just usually worked with a finer touch than this. Most of the time his victims didn't even realize what was going on until it was too late.
From the outside, most people never even saw it coming. You woke up one morning and met a friend for breakfast. Maybe it was your girlfriend, maybe it was a buddy you'd known since before you could walk.
Sometimes you knew that they'd been struggling with insomnia, sometimes you didn't. Maybe they weren't there when you arrived at the restaurant, maybe they arrived late, maybe they never arrived at all and you didn't know what had happened until you saw the special report on the news later that day.
Sometimes they snapped and drove a fuel truck into an elementary school. Other times they walked up to you and stabbed you in the chest before you could get out of your seat. There was no telling how one of Dream Stealer's victims would go off of the rails, but they all went off of the deep end eventually and they usually took someone else with them when it happened.
Ash seemed confident that Kristin still had things under control, but I wasn't so sure. Dream Stealer had turned two-hundred-year-old shape shifters. A teenage girl who occasionally had visions of the future didn't stand a chance against him no matter how spunky she was.
I spent the entire time I was driving worried Kristin was going to wake up and try to stick a knife in the side of my neck. It wasn't exactly conducive to recovering from nearly being disemboweled, so I protested a lot less than normal when Ash offered to relieve me behind the wheel.
We made the switch at the next gas station and then hit another drive-through for a fatty breakfast of sausage and biscuits that had plenty of calories to stoke bodies that had all been pushed to their limits in one way or another.
The smell of the food was enough to finally wake Kristin, but she was so groggy that I was done with my food before she'd done much more than start picking at hers. I made a mental note to ask Ash if the lethargy was a new development as I pulled out my tablet and plugged it into the keyboard that turned it into the equivalent of a laptop.
"Is that safe given what happened the last time you fired up one of your gadgets?"
I was pretty sure Kristin was trying to get a rise out of me. Knowing that made it easier to avoid rising to the bait.
"My tablet doesn't have any kind of cellular connection on it and I've even got the wi-fi turned off. There is zero chance of anyone using this to track us down. Besides, you're one to talk."
Ash shot me a look and then reached over with his free hand and intertwined his fingers with Kristin's.
"Isaac knows. He figured it out last night."
Kristin almost seemed to come apart before my very eyes. The facade of the strong, independent, devil-may-care woman crumbled into pieces and for the first time I could remember I saw real fear in Kristin's eyes.
"What are you going to do now that you know?"
Ash interrupted before I could respond. "He's not going to hurt you. Even if he wanted to I wouldn't let anything happen to you."
Kristin gave Ash a sad smile before she turned back to me. "Isaac is a big boy, he can answer the question for himself."
I held her gaze for a dozen seconds before I spoke. "What would you do in my place?"
"I'd put you down and never look back. It's the only smart answer, the only way to guarantee that you wouldn't eventually rip my heart out of my chest. You wouldn't even need to get the drop on me because I have zero chance of beating you unless I have surprise on my side."
I nodded. "You're not wrong. What about if it was Ash who was under attack by Dream Stealer, what would you do then?"
I'd only thought that I was seeing the real Kristin a few seconds before. She'd let me see some of what was going on inside of her, but the look in her eyes now was like the thinnest layer of sanity imaginable stretched over a hungry pit.
"I'd do exactly what he's doing. I'd try to help him fight it, but I'd get him off where he couldn't do any damage when he finally snapped, and I'd bring along someone who could put him down quick and painlessly if it came to that."
Kristin was good, maybe in another year or two she'd be able to lie with her body as well as she already lied with her face and voice, but she wasn't there yet. Ash and I both knew that she wouldn't have been able to stand by while someone tried to kill Ash.
Kristin had one of the strongest survival instincts I'd ever seen. Plenty of wolves and hybrids would have just given up in the face of someone like Anton. He'd been a relentless, nearly unstoppable killing machine, but Ash and Kristin had just kept fighting until they managed to beat him. They'd had help, but even that almost hadn't been enough. If either of them had blinked at any point in that last fight we all would have died.
It was almost inconceivable for someone like Kristin to choose a path she knew would get her killed when there was another option out there, but that was exactly what she was trying so hard not to tell us.
She really would execute me without a second thought if I was the one who was a living time-bomb, but she wouldn't kill Ash, not in a million years, not even knowing that failing to do so would mean he would eventually snap and kill her.
"Is that why you've been extra unpleasant lately? Are you trying to make it easier on me when the time comes to put you down?"
I got a single, short nod in response. "Yeah, I guess so."
"Okay then, it sounds like we all understand each other. Ash will do whatever he has to in order to keep you alive, right up to and possibly including killing me. I will kill both of you before I let you hurt Alec and the rest of my friends, and you'll hold out for as long as you possibly can because you know that once Dream Stealer turns you, Ash is a dead man. He might be able to beat me, but he won't be able to beat you."
"Yeah, I guess that about sums it up."
I wanted to close my eyes and pretend none of this was happening. This was exactly the kind of impossible situation that Alec had faced the first time that we'd crossed paths with Agony. I didn't have any good options. If—no, when—Kristin buckled under the pressure of Dream Stealer's nightly attacks, nothing I did would be right. The best I could do at that point was try to pick a bad choice that would still leave me able to look at myself in the mirror once it was all said and done.
I'd spent months hating Alec for his choices the night Jess' memories had been torn away from her, and now I was about to walk a mile in his shoes.
"Fine. I'm willing to give the two of you some time before we do anything final. I'll even help when it comes to trying to track down Dream Stealer, not that I think we have a chance in hell of actually finding him, but I'll do my best. The secrets and the lying stop now though. We keep detailed logs of how you are doing each day, and you tell us the moment that something changes.
"Assuming that there is a lock out there that Ash hasn't already taught you to pick, I'll even buy off on the idea of locking you up if it becomes obvious that you are at the end of your rope, but I'm not going to leave anything to chance. From here on out you know as little about what's going on as possible.
"The best way to make sure that you don't do any damage to the cause is to keep you completely in the dark about what's going on with everyone else. We don't tell you where we are headed, and when you fall asleep we change directions so that even if you break we still can't be tracked down."
Ash shook his head. "That's going too f
ar, Isaac. That's no way to live, she's still got control of things, there's no reason to make her a prisoner this soon."
I didn't look at Ash, choosing instead to hold Kristin's gaze. "Is it too much, Kristin?"
She gave me a thin, bitter smile. "I rather suspect that you're just getting started, aren't you, Isaac?"
"Answer the question before Ash decides he needs to try to draw down on me."
Kristin turned in her seat so she could look at Ash and then she turned back to me. "That's fine. I'll put up with a lot worse if that's what it takes to keep from cutting Ash's throat while he sleeps."
"Like you said, I'm just getting started."
That earned me another smile. "That's okay, Isaac. If nothing else, all of the crap you're about to put me through means that I'll feel less bad if you fail and I end up killing you."
Chapter 5
Isaac Nazir
I-55
Western Tennessee
I didn't realize just how much Ash was still holding out on me until the next night. We'd been tooling around the Midwest all day, clocking a lot of miles but not really getting anywhere. Ash and Kristin spent the day watching to make sure that we hadn't picked up a tail. I spent the day putting together a plan of attack on every major database I could think of.
There was a limit to what I could do on my tablet with no internet connection. I couldn't even scout to see what kind of security I was going to be up against, but in a way that was good because it forced me to think much more big picture than I normally did. It was actually kind of liberating to come up with a plan of attack and not have to worry about how we were going to make the specifics work.
I was pretty good, but I wasn't world-class, not like the guys Alec had on the payroll these days. I couldn't hack the State Department, but Ash was right, I knew enough to keep the guys who could hack the big targets mostly honest. It was still basically tilting at windmills, but I was willing to give it a chance for as long as Ash was willing to fund the kind of talent we would need if we were going to have any chance of succeeding.
Kristin had moved back to the back seat before falling asleep so that I'd have better access for my power adapter. My tablet was a wonderful piece of engineering, but even it couldn't go for twenty hours at a stretch without being recharged. The fact that I was in the front passenger seat meant that I was perfectly positioned to notice when Ash turned south rather than north as I'd been expecting him to when we hit the west edge of Tennessee.
"What are you doing? I thought your safe house was up in Montana somewhere."
"It is—or rather one of them is—but that's where Kristin is expecting us to go. You were the one who was all up in arms about making sure that she couldn't lead Dream Stealer to us. I'm doing the unexpected."
My armrest started to groan and I forced myself to relax before I ripped it free of the chair. "Montana is a pretty big state; I think that Dream Stealer would have a hard time finding us with nothing more than that to go on, but you know that even better than I do. How about you cut the crap and tell me what's going on before I decide to leave the two of you and go my own way?"
"You don't have the cash to do that, Isaac."
I purposefully made my laugh extra mocking, but I kept it low enough not to wake up Kristin. "You've obviously spent too much time as the only rich boy in the neighborhood. Do you really think that Alec would send us all out without a war chest? The Graves family is worth billions. Not one or two billion dollars, mid to high double digits.
"Every single one of those RV's was loaded with something like half a million dollars in cash and prepaid credit cards. I've got more than enough to get me wherever I need to go and Alec will send more with nothing more than a call. Your money doesn't have any kind of hold over me. Start talking."
Ash took a deep breath and a little ray of warmth shone through me as I realized that I'd managed to get under his skin for a change. It was petty, but it was also a sign that he wasn't in complete control of everything like he usually pretended. Our little partnership wasn't going to work unless he was willing to eventually acknowledge that he was just as far in over his head as I was.
"Fine. I've tried to keep this particular card close to my chest because it's not really my secret to be sharing."
"Whose secret is it?"
"My family's. We've got more of them even than you'd expect. It's the only reason that we haven't been run entirely out of the New Orleans pack—that or killed. My sister is still back there, still under Onyx's thumb, and what I'm about to tell you is one of her hole cards. It's the one she'll play when she's out of all other options, so it's vital that none of this make it back to Onyx before then."
Ash waited to make sure that I understood the importance of what he'd just told me, and then cleared his throat.
"What do you know about lamias?"
It was such a non sequitur that it took me a moment to collect my thoughts. "Greek mythological creatures, snakes below the waist, women above the waist. The Old World is even more off limits than the eastern half of the United States, so there is less in the way of confirmation when it comes to whether or not something from over there is based in fact or not, but I haven't seen anything that makes me think they are more than just a legend."
"Yeah, they're real. I mean there is a lot that the myths got wrong, but there's something out in the bayous that I'm pretty sure is based on the same thing as the Greek legends. There are bits and pieces of other stuff that seems to tie back to the same creature. One of the Aztec gods was depicted as a man with snake fangs—I think his name was Tlaloc. That's supposedly closer to the truth."
My stomach was already tying itself into knots. Even my beast wasn't happy about the news that there was yet another thing out there that might end up hunting us at some point.
"The Aztec gods weren't a very warm and cuddly pantheon, Ash. Why are we headed down to see something that had a hand in human sacrifices? Do you know that some sources claim that the Aztecs alone sacrificed a quarter of a million people per year?"
Ash nodded. "I'm not as well read as you are generally speaking, but I think that you'll find that in this area I'm just as informed as you are. The Incan and the Mayan civilizations practiced human sacrifice too, but it does seem like the Aztecs took it to a whole other level. The rededication of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan resulted in somewhere between ten thousand and eighty thousand sacrifices over the course of just four days."
"You know that Strakes originally thought that the presence of human sacrifice in South America was compelling evidence that there were vampires in the New World before the arrival of Columbus?"
Benitone Strakes was the closest thing we shape shifters had to a historian, at least one whose writings had survived and been disseminated beyond just their immediate pack.
My observation earned me a rare smile from Ash. He smiled at Kristin sometimes, but most of the rest of us never saw anything other than his game face.
"Does this mean you're not pissed off at me anymore?"
"No, it means I'm willing to avoid thinking about just how pissed I am for as long as you continue to keep this conversation interesting."
It wasn't completely a lie. I was still kind of mad, but I wasn't as mad as I should have been. Ash looked back at the road and shrugged.
"Yeah, I was aware of that, but you're starting to get to the very edge of my expertise. Strakes has been conclusively disproved on that point from what I understand though. There aren't any records of shape shifters encountering vampires on this continent until well after the Europeans started founding colonies over here. The case is still out when it comes to werewolves—there have been plenty of unexplained disappearances that they might have caused—but unlike vampires, werewolves are pretty good at hiding from us since they don't have as distinctive a smell."
I tapped the edge of my tablet. "Sure, but the mere fact that the lamias have managed to stay a secret over here for tens of thousands of years proves that Strakes
was right about there being preternatural species here that were unknown to our people.
"We spent all of that time fighting the jaguars and never realized that there were other threats out there, never even considered that there were other continents out there. Even worse, we never even considered that the humans might someday become so numerous that we'd be forced into hiding to avoid being hunted to extinction."
"You think that we should have fought back, that the packs should have rallied together to push the Europeans back into the ocean?"
"I don't think it was even possible. The packs were all still at each other's throats. It hadn't been all that long, relatively speaking, at that point since the monarchy had been overthrown. If the Coun'hij had tried to put together the kind of massive army that fighting the colonists would have required, they would have lost control. Whoever was put in charge would have almost certainly used the army to establish themselves as the new king."
We drove in silence for a couple of minutes before Ash finally responded. "I think you're probably right. The jaguars in South and Central America tried to fight back. They worked as individuals rather than a unified force, but they had some resounding successes against the second wave of colonists. Despite that, they never really got their heads around the fact that it didn't matter how many people they slaughtered. With the promise of so much gold over here, there was no way they were going to stem the tide of conquistadores."
"Yeah, and once the native humans down there realized that the Spanish were generally the less corrupt option, the humans turned on our cousins with a speed that shocked everyone."
I thought maybe Ash was done talking history with me. We drove for five more minutes before he sighed and slouched down in his seat. "The jaguars have never forgotten that betrayal. The ones who were alive when it happened are all long dead, but hatred for humans is endemic down there. All of the corruption in that area can be traced back to the jaguars. If they'd worked together they probably could have won, but they don't see it that way. That's a weakness we all seem to have. Wolves, jaguars, vampires, werewolves, we're all terrible at cooperating with our own kind. If even one of the preternatural races could bring itself to work together like a human nation, we'd be unstoppable."