by Dean Murray
It took a lot of willpower to throw yourself into a fight that you knew you'd probably lose, a fight that might even result in your death, but if you did it often enough, if you were determined enough, then you could effectively swing above your weight class and convince people who were more dangerous than you to back down.
James, Jasmin and I had used that principle to good effect several times over the first year or two after we'd manifested a second form. It had generated some unhappiness inside the pack, but we were careful to only use it defensively, which meant that for the most part the people who were grumbling were the kind of bullies nobody particularly liked in the first place.
Life had been pretty crappy for those first years, but then James and I had manifested the ability to shift into hybrids and things had gotten better. The wolves had pretty much left us alone after that, and even the hybrids mostly didn't bother us unless we were truly out of line. They knew we'd hang together and that as soon as they healed up from fighting one of us, another one would be challenging them.
Life got a lot better for James' mom after that, but he and she both knew just how fragile her newfound peace was. If James were out of the picture, or even if our little coalition lost too many members to back James up, then she'd once again become an easy target.
James had stewed about it for the entire flight out to Missouri, but once we arrived at the airport, the hybrid Kaleb had put in charge of our operation snapped James out of his funk.
Jack had been with the pack since before even Kaleb had taken power. He was a grizzled old hybrid who was partway into his third century and he had a history of raw aggression in dominance fights that had allowed him to carve out a spot towards the top of the food chain a long time ago.
The aggression that had served Jack Senior so well had proved to be his son's undoing. Jack Junior had been killed in a dominance fight only a few months after he'd first turned, and a lot of the fire seemed to have gone out of his dad since then.
As near as I could tell, the posting out to St Louis was a blessing and a curse all wrapped up in one for Jack. Kaleb had used Puppeteer two years ago to shatter the stranglehold that the vampires had on the city. For centuries we wolves had fought a defensive shadow war with the vampires. Our biggest advantage had been that the vampires didn't even know we existed. We'd used our knowledge of them to kill them whenever they ventured outside of the cities that were their natural breeding ground, but the urbanization of America had meant that their reach had continued to grow while we were slowly pushed out of one city after another.
A lot of people had said that Kaleb was courting disaster to attempt an all-out frontal assault on St Louis, but he and Puppeteer had proceeded with their plan despite the disapproval of most of the individual packs.
Puppeteer had used his power to bring scores of werewolves into the city. Werewolves were even bigger than hybrids and seemed to view anything other than another werewolf as their rightful prey. We shape shifters had tried to wipe the werewolves out a couple of times in the past, but the disease that transformed them from thinking people to mindless beasts was an unusual strain of rabies that had an extremely long incubation period.
No matter how drastically we cut back their numbers, they eventually came back and started killing innocents again. The only good thing about werewolves was that they tended to be fairly solitary and they preferred preying on vampires more than humans.
Puppeteer's ascension to the Coun'hij had resulted in a drastically different policy on the part of shape shifters towards werewolves. We weren't allowed to hunt them down and kill them anymore. Instead Puppeteer was cultivating them as elite shock troops that only he could control.
Nobody was exactly sure how Puppeteer's particular gift worked, or what exactly his limits were, but he was able to control individual werewolves completely enough to force them into massive cages which he'd then used to ship them into St Louis. Some of our pack had been stationed along the major routes out of the city, so even those of us back in Sanctuary for the operation had heard firsthand accounts of large semi-trucks, each containing three or four werewolves, being unloaded in the outskirts of the city.
Every so often they'd get a call from an untraceable number instructing them to let one of the werewolves out. It was always obvious which werewolf they were supposed to free because it would go from snarling and hissing to quiet and calm. Our people would open the cage up and each time the werewolf would run off into the night under Puppeteer's control.
There were rumors that the werewolves our people had been responsible for had been nothing more than backups. The rumors said that Puppeteer had arrived in town on a large commercial bus the night the operation started and that the bus had been filled to the brim with werewolves that he'd compelled back into human form for the duration of the trip until he could unleash them on the unprepared vampires of the city.
I wasn't sure how much faith to put in those particular rumors. Puppeteer was possibly the most hated member of the Coun'hij. He, if he really was a male, had gone to great lengths to keep his identity a secret. It seemed very unlikely to me that he'd really arrived in town with a bus full of werewolves, but if he had, he wouldn't have allowed anyone to live to spread that particular tale around.
The siege of St Louis had lasted nearly seven nights, but when the dust settled hundreds of vampires were dead and the humans were blissfully unaware of the scope of the battle that had just been waged inside of their city.
For some reason that no one understood, werewolves exercised as much care to remain undetected by humans as both we and the vampires did. They occasionally preyed on humans, either to feed or to replenish their numbers, but that usually only happened when there wasn't a shape shifter or a vampire around to provide a more tempting target.
The only sign of their presence in a particular town was usually the rolling blackouts that they invariably spawned. It didn't manifest when they were in human form, but once a werewolf shifted forms to the bestial, two-legged animal that had spawned so many legends, they served as a kind of energy vortex, grounding out electrical power as well as short-circuiting any abilities that a vampire or a shape shifter might try to use on them.
In a lot of ways werewolves were the ultimate predators. Their superior size and strength meant that on a purely physical level they were more than a match for any single hybrid, and their unique ability to nullify special powers meant that any fight involving a werewolf was fought on an exclusively physical plane.
Once the bulk of the vampires in the city were either dead or disorganized and demoralized, Puppeteer had marched his werewolves back to the empty cages they'd arrived in, and forced them to remain still as our people had locked them back up and loaded them into the trucks that were awaiting them.
Ever since then, Jack had been stationed here in St Louis with a squad of wolves to support him. The wolves scoured the city each day looking for the distinctive old-blood scent trail of vampires. When they tracked a single vampire back to its lair then Jack and the wolves were more than capable of eliminating it, but when they found a nest of vampires he called for backup and Kaleb would reroute a squad through St Louis on their way down to fight the cats on the southern border.
The position meant that Jack was away from all of the things that reminded him of his son, but it also meant that he was out of circulation enough that a good percentage of the up-and-coming hybrids now viewed him as a target that they could take down in order to bring up their own standing in the pack.
The fact that he'd fought several challenge matches against the people Kaleb had sent out to help him was evident in the cautious, almost resigned way that he greeted us as we walked across the scorching hot blacktop the plane had landed on.
"Am I going to have any problems with you lot?"
James and I looked at each other and then I shrugged as a stray breeze teased my nose with the smell of hot rubber and jet fuel. "I'm not particularly interested in fighting you, Jack, an
d my beast seems remarkably calm right now. If you can avoid lording the fact that you're in charge over us, then it's possible that we can avoid any kind of petty fights."
Jack grunted and then nodded. "Okay then. My boys and girls have found a group of four or five vampires that need to be taken out. The four of you, plus me and the four of my people I can spare means that we should have them outnumbered roughly two to one."
"Roughly?"
James' question could have been interpreted as questioning Jack in some form or fashion, but Jack showed an unusual amount of restraint and just answered the question as though it was nothing more than a request for information.
"Vampires are easy as hell to track because the scent of a vampire is so distinctive, but that signature scent is so strong that it can be hard sometimes to identify individuals. I had my best people scour the area and then added a third again as many vampires as they felt like they could identify. That usually works out to about the right number of vampires, but the system isn't perfect."
"What's the worst-case scenario that we're looking at?"
"Them waiting for us, fully prepared for an attack and outnumbering us two or three to one."
My question apparently hadn't been respectful enough. It had triggered a pulse of power from Jack's beast and a short, almost dismissive, response from him which in turn sent my beast dashing towards the surface, eager to display its own dominance and power.
I didn't want to fight Jack. I wanted to get the operation done and go home, hopefully without anyone on our side getting seriously injured. My beast had other ideas though. He wanted to beat Jack and demonstrate conclusively that we were tougher. Increasing our dominance inside of the pack would mean safety for us and our friends, but my beast didn't care about that as much as he did testing himself against a worthy opponent, an opponent who had just questioned his status.
My flare of power triggered an even bigger flash of energy from Jack, which tipped some kind of lever inside of me. What started out as a steady but containable pressure inside of me suddenly crested into a tsunami of power that ripped through me in an unstoppable explosion that could only have one outcome.
I felt the transformation trigger, but I knew now wasn't the time. We were in full view of the public and a dominance fight between Jack and me would just cause Kaleb to come down on me like a ton of bricks.
I'd never stopped a transformation when it was this far along, but this time I had to stop it or the consequences would impact more than just me. The rush of power didn't want to be stopped, it fought me as it looked for an outlet through which to escape.
Molten lead surged up through my core and rebounded off of my will. I'd never realized the full extent of my capabilities before. I'd thought I'd tested myself previously, but now I realized that I hadn't, that I'd always had a safety net, always husbanded reserves of strength for a future time of greater need.
These reserves went up in a flash of heat and fire as I latched onto the forces that were trying to tear my body open and remake it into something more dangerous. I directed my mental hands into that stream of pain and grabbed hold of it in an effort to stop something that I wasn't sure was even possible.
The power seemed to grow even more ferocious as I tried to control it. Heartbeats seemed to pass as hours in my fight to keep control of myself. I almost thought I had the battle won and then suddenly my beast crashed into my defenses, lending his considerable power to the forces trying to shift me.
I lost my grip on part of the power and it streamed through my body once again, but I had managed to funnel it even though I wasn't capable of controlling it. My right hand shifted, taking on the longer proportions and deadly claws of my hybrid form.
Jack took a step back in astonishment as he saw my limited transformation. "I thought you said I wasn't going to have any problems with you."
"I said that I'd try not to get in your face as long as you didn't lord your position of command over me. You didn't exactly make that easy."
My words came out through gritted teeth. The human part of me still didn't want to fight, and the transformation had bled off an appreciable chunk of the energy that my beast had conjured up, but my beast was still pushing for a confrontation, preferably a deadly one so that we'd never have to worry about Jack coming back for a rematch.
"Look, I really don't want to fight you, Alec. If I apologize will that be enough to let you keep control of yourself?"
"I don't know, give it a shot and let's see where things go."
My response was too curt. It was the kind of response that generally led to an escalating pattern of posturing, but Jack just held his hands up in a calming manner.
"I'm very sorry that I took your question the wrong way. Let's just finish this briefing so that we can go beat on the vampires rather than on each other."
It wasn't a great apology as things went, but the mere fact that he was making it told my beast that Jack didn't want to fight us. There could be a lot of reasons for his reluctance to embrace a dominance challenge right now, some of which might not have anything to do with fear of us, but I'd just done something I'd never done before and my beast was prepared to be magnanimous given just how likely it was that my display of a partial transformation had intimidated Jack.
The pressure inside of me reduced to the point where my hand was able to shrink back down to its normal size and shape.
"It looks like that did the trick. Thank you for the apology. You were saying?"
I could tell by the set of his jaw that Jack didn't think that my response was conciliatory enough, but he let it stand.
"In answer to your question earlier, I don't know for sure how bad things might get. Our entire operation here has been designed to keep our presence, our very existence, secret from the bloodsuckers. We've been hoping that they'd key into the werewolves as the only threat that they are facing and that they'd attribute our ongoing reduction of their numbers to more werewolf kills or else to infighting between various factions among the vampires."
"You're not confident that you've been entirely successful though?"
Jack shook his head. "There's no way to be completely confident, not given the fact that some of the vampires still alive in the city are undoubtedly powerful mentalists. The odds that one of them will happen to scan the minds of one of our people rather than one of the humans is incredibly small, but if we operate in close proximity to the vampires like this for long enough it becomes just a matter of when rather than if."
Now wasn't the time to be questioning the policies that Kaleb and the Coun'hij had settled on, but I couldn't help myself.
"Once they figure out that there are more supernatural threats out there than just the werewolves, how likely do you think it is that the information will spread?"
Jack shrugged. "It's impossible to say. Inside the city it will probably spread pretty quickly. The different vampire elders and factions may not be on good terms, but an external threat like that always goes a long way towards making people set aside their differences. Their only real difficulty will be in making contact with each other. We've kept them from developing the kind of social hubs that they had in the city before, and I expect that the different factions don't have each other on speed dial or anything."
"What about the odds of it spreading to other cities?"
Jack looked as unhappy as I felt. "I just don't know, Alec. I would expect that there is much less in the way of information flow between cities, but what information flow there is won't have been as disrupted by our operation here."
"So really it's only a matter of time before the vampires know about our existence and we're actively hunted by them."
Jack nodded, seemingly unwilling to put his assent in words. I let my statement hang in the air for a few seconds. It was a chilling prospect for any shape shifter to consider. We tended to live for three to four times as long as humans, but our fertility rate and resulting population growth was commensurately lower. That meant tha
t a war was especially devastating to our population base as we had a hard time replacing individuals in a short period of time. The Sanctuary pack seemed to be an exception to that iron-clad rule, but nobody seemed to know exactly what was going on there.
Vampires on the other hand were a parasitic organism that could grow at almost exponential rates as long as their host population held out. One vampire could conceivably infest multiple humans per day who could in turn each infect additional people. There was a limit to how fast the vampire population could increase without becoming common knowledge to the humans, but apart from that, or them running out of people to feed on, there was realistically no top end on how many vampires we could find throwing themselves at us if they decided to try to wipe out our entire race.
We'd always relied on secrecy to shield us while we tried to wear down the vampires' numbers, but Kaleb and Puppeteer had said that it was only a matter of when rather than if the vampires would discover us, and they'd thrown millennia of tradition to the wind.
There might have even been some justification behind their position that we needed to strike now while Puppeteer could field armies of werewolves on our behalf, except for the fact that our race was also prosecuting a war against our cousins who lived in South and Central America. It was very much feeling like we'd put ourselves into a two-front war that we couldn't possibly win.
Jack seemed to be waiting for me to give him permission to proceed. It took me a little aback until I realized that it was the natural effect of what had just transpired. We hadn't had a dominance challenge, but his words and actions had established me as at least somewhat dominant to him. It probably wasn't even something that he realized he was doing, but on an instinctual level he was going to defer to me at least slightly.
I'd had it happen with those my age or younger, but it was a heady thing to have someone of Jack's age and experience deferring to me. I took a deep breath and reminded myself that being dominant didn't equate to being qualified to lead.