Burned

by Dean Murray

  Some of the newcomers realized what was going on too late—after they'd already stumbled into the dead zone that surrounded me. The shock of so many new bodies—new power sources—nearly brought my absorption field down and I was forced to shrink it.

  Carson paced me on one side—now enveloped in fighting as some of the hybrids I'd been immobilizing staggered to their feet—and I could hear Jas and Jess behind me wreaking nine different kinds of destruction on the hybrids that I'd bypassed, but all of that was secondary to Brandon's bellows.

  "Overwhelm him—there are only so many he can affect at one time. Pile on and bring him down now!"

  He was right. It was a replay of my experience with Shawn all over again. I'd strolled into battle thinking that I'd thought through all of the ways in which I was vulnerable, but I'd been gravely mistaken.

  The fighting behind me intensified as some of Jaclyn's people were free of my ability and joined Jas and Jess, but the new arrivals among Brandon's people were spilling around now and engaging the wolves behind me. My ability wobbled again, and I was forced to reduce the radius I was affecting once again or risk losing control altogether. I was sprinting from target to target, trying not to be pushed back into Carson, but seeing that moment approaching all too quickly.

  In another second or two my limit was going to be reached and then I'd be forced back against the house and any of my people caught up in my field would be set upon as soon as I'd passed them by, before they could gather their strength again.

  I desperately looked for a way out that would allow us to survive what was coming, and then I heard the first shot.

  It was Adri. She'd come out through the front door of the mansion and she was calmly putting round after round into the shifting pile of shape shifters who'd thrown themselves into the circle of my power.

  She fired with the precision of a metronome, emptying her magazine and then reloading and resuming with barely a pause. I'd seen action movies where the shots weren't as close together as she was managing, and even shape shifters couldn't endure that indefinitely. Things balanced on the edge of a razor, my ability trembling from the strain of draining so much power, as Carson, Adri and I killed hybrids by the dozen. Two more seconds dragged by, and then suddenly the enforcer and loyalist hybrids were streaming around my dead zone in an effort to get at the rest of my people.

  As the pressure came off of me, I stopped moving and let the area I was affecting shift around more freely. I'd been thinking of this all wrong. It wasn't about dropping people and pinning them in place until I'd managed to kill them myself, it was about dropping large numbers of enemies and then pulling my ability back far enough that my people could kill them.

  Carson figured out what I was doing even before I announced the change in my strategy. He watched me temporarily immobilize half a dozen hybrids and then darted in once they began moving again, and killed them in a series of lightning-fast strikes that took less than three seconds.

  Jasmin and the rest of the wolves at my back figured things out as I yelled for them to alternately fall back and then attack. They'd been a fearsome bunch even before that, but now they were four-legged reapers who were felling enemies many times their size with each pass, killing with near impunity.

  A scream from up ahead of me pulled my attention back to the wider battle, and what I saw chilled my blood. The dark angel had fallen back around the perimeter of the estate and had joined up with the cadre of enforcers that Brandon had formed up around him.

  The fighting over there mostly involved members from the Tucson pack, and they were even less prepared to go up against a creature like that than our people were. Heath had moved around far enough that large chunks of our people were flickering in and out of sight as he extended his ability to its limit, but even that was only slowing the rout that was developing on that side of the fight.

  I tried to push forward faster, tried to get over to where I could influence that side of things, but more and more of my people had been peeled off of my side of the fighting and forced to shore up Jaclyn's forces. The only way to move through the press of people between me and Brandon would be to turn my ability off altogether, and run through the horde of semiconscious enforcers ahead of me. I could do it, but Jasmin, Jess and the rest behind me would fall in seconds against those overwhelming numbers.

  I moved forward anyway, trying to expand out my sphere of influence, and as an ever-increasing torrent of energy roared through me and into the semi-tame black hole inside of me, I realized something for the first time.

  The energy I was siphoning off wasn't going somewhere, it was going somewheres. My ability didn't just form a single conduit. There was one big conduit, but I could also sense smaller threads heading off in other directions. The reservoir where my ability was sending all of that energy wasn't a single reservoir, it was one big reservoir and more than a dozen smaller reservoirs.

  I'd been right in fearing earlier that I'd reached the limit of how much power that reservoir could absorb. I had. The bigger reservoir was nearly tapped out—or maybe just my ability to use it had been reached. The smaller reservoirs though still had capacity.

  I reached down one of the threads between me and a secondary reservoir, and to my inner eye it was a brilliant golden thread. It disappeared into the ether, impossible to follow, but all of a sudden I somehow knew where the thread went. It went to Carson, tireless, deadly, loyal Carson.

  I followed other threads, felt them go off into other dimensions that somehow terminated in people I knew. Rachel was there, a tiny thread that was so slender I almost couldn't see it inside the landscape of my mind's eye.

  Brindi was there too, a thread that was nearly as big around as the one leading to Carson, but the reservoir she represented was no bigger than the one inside of Rachel. I expanded my awareness into each of them, and there was one thread that was different than all of the rest. I tracked it to its destination and found James, locked in combat alongside Taggart and others against Brandon.

  Heath had warned me about the fact that his ability didn't work on Brandon, but I hadn't been prepared for what that really meant. Brandon was fighting some of our best warriors and it was obvious that he was just biding his time, waiting for one of them to make a mistake that would let him start picking them off.

  Each and every hybrid fighting him moved with the speed and precision that was only found in the most deadly of our kind, but they were no match for him—not individually, not even collectively. Brandon moved with a speed and strength that allowed him to dodge out of the way of multiple attacks all at once and check the blows that he couldn't avoid.

  There was a thread connecting me to Taggart too, but it was James my attention was pulled towards even as I killed the enforcer at my feet. The thread to James was the biggest around of any of them, and his reservoir was big—just like the reservoirs of all of the hybrids I was connected to, but there was more to it than that. He was nearly full to the brim with energy, but I could feel something balancing on the edge of becoming something else.

  More power flowed down the link between us, and I felt it get that much closer to becoming that other thing. A group of wolves came racing around the inside of the wall, and I was momentarily forced to extend my ability out to them, cutting their legs out from under them in an effort to buy Jasmin and the others time to fall back to Carson.

  The surge of power coming into me was too much, and I felt my ability momentarily short out, but not before James' reservoir hit some critical mass. James stumbled and went down on one knee, and I knew that I'd just killed him without meaning to. He was still breathing, his heart was still beating, but I'd just created the opening Brandon had been waiting for. He moved forward to dispatch James, and there was nothing I could do to stop him.

  Taggart and the others threw themselves at Brandon with renewed energy, but he beat them all back, and then there was nothing between him and James but the tawny body of a wolf that had come out of nowhere to throw hers
elf at Brandon. I was too far away to be able to confirm the identity of the wolf, but I didn't need to be able to see her to know that it was Addison.

  Brandon tore her out of the air in a shower of blood, and continued forward intent on killing James, but James wasn't where he'd been a split second earlier. James spun to the side and slammed his fist home into Brandon's side with a force that lifted Brandon up and threw him into the wall.

  It was an impossible blow—not just the strength of it, but the speed. I'd known James since before he'd become a hybrid, and I'd never seen him move that quickly. He followed up his initial strike with a series of attacks that were nothing more than a blur to me. The only time I'd ever seen anything even remotely like that had been when Brandon had been fighting the Ancients down in Mexico.

  James wasn't the equal of Brandon—nobody living was—but the margin of difference had just shrunk down to the point where few beings who weren't as fast as them could have hoped to tell them apart.

  Brandon scored several deep blows against James, but he didn't manage a killing strike, and that was unheard of. Nobody had stood against him in single combat since before he'd first manifested his power. Brandon surged forward in an attempt to end the fight and dispatch James, but now James' allies had arrived and Brandon was being driven backwards.

  The hybrids all around me were struggling back to their feet, and for the next several seconds my attention was fully occupied with trying to keep myself alive. Carson and a few others fought their way to my side, and for a long eternity we all traded blows with our adversaries in an endless round of violence.

  Somewhere along the way I realized that I was using both arms, that my ribs didn't hurt, but there was no time to wonder at the miraculous healing I'd experienced. One of my opponents hit me with enough force to send me reeling backwards, and I was convinced I was going to die right up until the Coun'hij enforcers started falling to invisible foes. Heath had just arrived with help.

  I stepped back as a horde of bodies—some seen and others still invisible—pushed past me, eager to get in on the final kills. A scream brought me around in time to see Adri fall to the ground. I crossed the distance between us without even considering if I should be focused elsewhere. Despite everything else that had happened, part of me was still more concerned about her than almost anything else.

  A battle still raged around us, but less than five feet from her were the bloody remains of the fallen angel, and it was obvious that we were going to win. Adri was kneeling between Taggart on one side and James on the other, and her sobs precluded anything approaching speech.

  Both men had shifted back to human form because of their wounds, which was never a good thing. It meant that they didn't have long. Their wounds were bad enough that I was surprised that they'd lasted this long.

  I didn't realize that I'd shifted back to human form until I took each of their hands in mine. Their body temperature had both already started to plummet, but I didn't try to administer first aid—their injuries were mostly internal, the kind of thing that even a surgeon couldn't have fixed in the time they had left.

  James was trying to say something, but struggling to breathe past the blood. I leaned down close enough to hear him and my heart dropped as I realized he was asking about his mother. I didn't have the heart to tell him that she was already dead—resting less than a dozen feet from us.

  "I've never seen anything like it." Vicki was standing at my back. "The two of them chased Brandon Worthingfield off and then crashed into the damn angel like it was just any other enemy. I tried to get in there to save them, but there just weren't any openings. The wings provided it with too much coverage."

  I nodded. "I suspect that they knew that—they were trying to create that opening for you. They knew that it had tied too many of our people up for too long, people we needed over on the other side of the battle. It looks like you managed to get it though. It's a relief knowing that it's gone. There will be one fewer of those things that we'll have to deal with in the future."

  "You don't think it's the only one of its kind, do you?"

  I shook my head. "The only way it would be the last of its kind is if there's something else out there that's even more scary hunting them down. There are more of them, and at least some of them are allied with the Coun'hij. We're going to run into them again, which means that we're going to have to find a better way of fighting them."

  Vicki looked down at my arm and did a double-take. "How did you heal that so quickly? I thought it would be days still before you'd be moving around without wincing at every step."

  "I'm not sure. It's a good thing though—I would have been dead a dozen times over out there without the use of both arms. I…"

  I suddenly had a suspicion how I'd done it. I reached out to the closest pocket of fighting and brought all of the shape shifters to their knees. Enforcers, Tucson pack members, Isaac's people, my people, I hit all of them with my power without even pausing to consider the fact that I wasn't sure if my ability was still working.

  I sucked down a torrent of power as intense as anything else I'd ever accessed, and this time I didn't let it just flow down the threads as it willed. I reached out to the threads that were still rich and vibrant, and I pinched them off, forcing the energy into the fading threads that led into Taggart and James.

  Their threads resisted the energy—there was no capacity in the fraying vessels inside of them, but I refused to be thwarted. I poured energy, poured life into them and seconds passed by as pain-filled hours until I saw the bones underneath their skin start to shift back into place. James started breathing again, and the hole in Taggart's chest sealed itself, flesh surging upwards until there wasn't even a scar left.

  It was good, but it wasn't enough. I reached for more, pulling in more and more of the people around me. The ocean of energy raging through my body threatened to consume me. It felt as though the rift that was the interior manifestation of my ability was going to tear free of the fleshy moorings that made it part of me, but I forced it wider open in an exercise of pure will and sent the resulting power racing outward, exploring the limits of my new domain, the invisible realm that comprised individual universes of possibility.

  People started fainting on all sides. Some of them lost consciousness from having their vitality drained away, some of them lost consciousness from having too much power forced into them, but still I pushed.

  I reached the end of the network of golden threads. None of them were like James, teetering on the edge of a transformation to something else. I pushed energy into the ones that were hurt, and then grabbed all of the remaining energy and tried to push it into Addison.

  I owed James. It had been my fault that he'd stumbled and his mother had been forced to sacrifice herself, I needed to bring her back. I continued to suck down more energy at the same time that I crimped the golden threads. I kept hoping that if I built up enough of a voltage differential the energy would jump from me to Addison, but it stubbornly refused to respond to my will. Something inside of me started to tear, and then I lost my grip on everything and the energy shot outward from me to all of my people and I lost consciousness.

  Chapter 19

  Alec Graves

  The Socorro Motel

  Tucson, Arizona

  We won, not that I was conscious to see the last of our enemies put down. I woke up an hour later inside of my RV surrounded by a combination of wounded and unconscious individuals. Rachel hurried over to check on me when she saw that I was awake, but I waved her off. Physically I was fine.

  I made my way outside and found that we'd returned to the motel where Vicki's people had been stationed. It was Vicki who was waiting for me, which shouldn't have surprised me. She'd been close enough to me not to get caught up in my ability when I'd started draining people, and she hadn't been connected to me by one of the golden threads, so she'd avoided being affected by the backlash of all that power at the very end.

  "We've got things under contr
ol now. As people wake up I'm sending them out to establish a perimeter. If Brandon shows back up he'll encounter stiff resistance, but I have to admit that I'm glad to see you up and about. I've never been completely confident that I could take him by myself. With you back in the picture to drain away some of that unnatural energy, my chances of taking him down are a lot better."

  I grunted. "I don't think Brandon will be coming back. They didn't expect to lose today. Brandon isn't going to come back against us unless he's confident he can win. He'll fight against terrible odds when he has to, but having James stand against him like that will have unnerved him. I don't suppose we managed to get Vincent?"

  "No. Once Brandon realized he was outclassed he pulled back over the wall with a core of his most trusted people. Vincent was one of the ones who got away."

  "How many did we lose?"

  "About a third, but we lost a lot fewer than we should have and we killed several times as many as we lost. What's left of the Tucson pack will go a long way towards replacing the people we lost."

  I shook my head. "Not replacing. Replenishing our numbers, yes, but nobody is going to replace the ones we lost. What about Ulrich? He can't hope to remain on the fence—not now, not after Brandon and his people saw you."

  She gave me a sad smile. "I've been disavowed. As much as Ulrich would have liked to be able to keep me around, I'm a liability now. If anyone asks, he and Shawn will say that I and my men were part of a splinter group inside of Shawn's movement, one that was trying to make the world think that the Chicago pack had sent me as a way of forcing Ulrich's hand."

  "Kaleb will know that's a lie."

  "Yep, but they won't risk going after him for it. The Coun'hij is going to be running scared right now. The majority of the people they just lost were hybrids from bootlicker packs, but they still lost a ton of enforcers. They are going to be trumpeting Ulrich's continued neutrality as proof that they haven't lost control of things."