by Dean Murray
"That was a calculated insult. Brandon should have been the one giving us orders rather than sending Alison to do it."
I locked gazes with James and refused to back down until he looked away. "I think you're probably right that Brandon was insulting us, but just because that was an insult doesn't mean that it was all that it was."
Jasmin looked up with curiosity written all over her face. "What do you mean?"
"Look at them." I pointed at the circle of men and women standing in a loose circle around the plane. "We see Brandon and Vincent back in Sanctuary on a pretty regular basis, but the rest of these guys are out here for months at a time. Even when Kaleb gives them some down time he doesn't usually let them come back to Sanctuary—instead he sends them in twos and threes off to someplace where they can blow off some steam without causing any waves back home. Do any of the people from our pack look the way you remember?"
Jess shook her head. "No, Alison was practically scared of her own shadow before. Now she looks like she could rip me in half without breaking a sweat."
I nodded, not just because Jess was right, but because that was exactly the same difference I'd noticed almost as soon as we landed. The old Alison never would have given me an order, no matter how politely worded and no matter whom she was representing. This new Alison had chopped her hair into a ragged bob and dyed a light-red streak through it. Everything from her clothes—black cargo pants and a tank top—up to her posture seemed to indicate that she'd been through hell during the last four months and that she was more than able to handle herself in any of the situations she was likely to run into.
We watched as the ground crew finished refueling and checking the plane and then two of the waiting figures left their spots in the circle and boarded the plane. Fifteen minutes later the plane was taxiing down the runway and everyone else was piling into the waiting vehicles. Alison took the driver seat to our SUV and drove with a kind of easy confidence that told me she'd done this many times before and that she didn't expect problems now that we were moving.
We'd left the front passenger seat open, but now I moved forward and sat down beside her. "What's going on down here?"
"We're in the middle of a war; that pretty much says it all."
"The reports we've been getting back in Sanctuary led us to believe that we were winning."
Alison nodded, a short, choppy motion that conveyed her supreme discomfort with where I was steering the conversation.
"We are winning if you just look at the kill numbers. We've killed four or five cats for each of our people that they've retired."
"But that's not the full story because you guys don't look like the winning team."
"Right, well, the truth is that the jaguars who have carved off territory and set themselves up as petty dictators tend to have bastard children by the scores. Even if only a relatively small percentage of those kids turn out to be moonborn, that still adds up to a lot of cats running around down there. Before now, they always spent most of their time fighting against each other, but now that we've gone and stirred things up they are setting aside their differences so that they can fight us."
"So we're way more outnumbered than anyone back home realizes."
Alison snorted. "That's got to be the understatement of the year. Even if every wolf in North America was down here fighting we'd still be outnumbered. As it is we've got only a relatively small percentage of the able-bodied adults down here on the border so our odds are even worse."
"How are you guys holding out against those kinds of numbers?"
"In a word? Brandon. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of people down here pulling together. We've got everything from some of the Coun'hij's bully-boys to some of the dispossessed who've decided to come in from the cold and help fight the good fight, but it's Brandon who always turns the tide of every fight that he's in. I've seen him take out three cats in three seconds and do it without taking even a scratch in return."
There was a glow in Alison's eyes that made me distinctly uneasy, but either I managed to keep my feelings off of my face or she was just too caught up in what she was telling me to notice anything short of the conversational equivalent to a tactical nuke.
"Two months ago one of the really old cats made the trip up from Nicaragua. The intelligence operation your dad put together saw him coming days before he arrived and it scared the crap out of everyone here. You know how cats just continue to get stronger and faster as they age rather than plateauing out like we do."
I nodded, but Alison seemed to take it as a given that I knew what she was talking about. She resumed talking after only a second.
"Mostly as they get older they tend to carve out little kingdoms in the middle of nowhere and surround themselves with younger cats to serve as bodyguards. Eventually it seems like a few of the lieutenants always get together and kill their boss before splitting up the kingdom and then setting to trying to kill each other. Somehow this guy managed to not only survive a heck of a lot longer than most of his kind, he also won the loyalty of his people such that they willingly followed him up here to tear us apart."
Alison looked away from the road long enough to meet my eyes. "It's almost like a holy war with most of these guys, Alec. You'll have to see it to believe it, but they blame us for all of the centuries of poverty and corruption down there. They want to break into the United States because they think that once they are here they will have the same kind of lifestyle as we've enjoyed for so many years."
"So what happened when he arrived?"
"Hmm? Oh yeah, Anton. He came in as bold as anything I've ever seen and demanded to fight our leader. Brandon stepped forward without any kind of hesitation and then proceeded to fight Anton to a standstill. I've never seen two guys who were so strong and fast. For a minute there I thought that maybe Brandon had finally met his match, but he killed Anton five minutes into the fight, after which Anton's people scattered and we spent the next four days hunting them down and picking them off one by one."
We turned onto a side street and I noticed two guys up on the roof of one of the taller buildings. A couple of seconds later Alison followed the rest of the caravan into the parking lot of a Rest Easy Motel and then put the SUV into park and turned to look directly at me.
"Some of the other older cats were slowly moving north before Brandon killed Anton, but him taking down Anton all by himself scared them enough that they've all moved back to their home bases. Now it's mostly just the younger, more adventurous cats pushing against our territory in an attempt to break through. Brandon is the only reason we're not all dead already and most of the people down here respect him for that despite whatever other faults he might have. I know you and he have had your differences in the past, but if you know what's in your best interest you'll bury the hatchet—assuming Brandon will let you."
We all piled out of the vehicles and then stood there a bit at a loss for what to do next until Alison had made her way around to our side of the SUV.
"There are room reservations in your names at the front desk and there's a copy of our standard operating procedures waiting for you in your rooms. You've got the next eight or so hours to start getting comfortable with what's in that manual. Brandon will conduct a briefing at eight tonight in the main conference room. Trust me, you don't want to be late."
Alison walked off without saying goodbye, and everyone else was already disappearing into the hotel, so I motioned for James and the girls to follow me inside. We got our rooms without any problem and the promised manual was indeed waiting for me. I unpacked my small suitcase and then James knocked on my door before I could sit down and start reading. Jessica and Jasmin were just visible in the hall behind him.
I waved all three of them into my tiny room and then once the door was shut I turned on the two privacy generators I'd brought with me, placing them on opposite sides of the room.
"What are we going to do now, Alec? Brandon is building himself an army of fanatics."
I nodded. "Yeah, I picked up on that too. It's worrying, but for right now our best bet is just to keep our heads down and do as we're told. Hopefully Brandon will leave us together for the most part since we already have all of the dominance issues sorted out between each other. To be honest, I'm starting to wonder what we've been thrown into. Everyone back home knows that Brandon is bad news, but I hadn't heard anything indicating that he was strong and fast enough to take down one of the Ancients like this Anton is supposed to have been. For the first time in my life I think I'm starting to hope that Kaleb knows what he's doing. Someone needs to put the brakes on Brandon or things could get ugly really, really fast."
Chapter 8
Alec Graves
Rest Easy Hotel
Rio Rico, Arizona
I made it through most of the operations manual before it was time to go to Brandon's briefing. I knocked on the doors to James' and the girls' rooms and then we all went downstairs together. I'd thought that there were a lot of moonborn waiting for us at the airport, but that was nothing compared to the sheer number of people packed into the conference room. I counted thirty people and when you factored in the fact that there were probably some of Brandon's people still detached as lookouts and guards, it meant that the actual size of Brandon's force was probably somewhere in the range of forty or fifty warriors, and I only recognized about half of the faces present.
It wasn't something designed to help me rest easy at night. Not only did Brandon have a miniature army more than twice the size of most packs, he'd successfully recruited from outside of the Sanctuary pack, which meant there was a chance that Kaleb didn't even know the full extent of Brandon's powerbase.
Vincent entered through a side door and then held it open so that Brandon could walk through it. Brandon scanned the waiting shape shifters and then seemingly satisfied that everyone was there, he launched into his briefing.
"We got another anonymous tip last week and the Brain Box, our intelligence group, has finally managed to confirm its validity."
Brandon pulled a remote out of his pocket as someone hit the lights and a second later the overhead projector that had been quietly humming flared to life with a map of northern Mexico.
"A nest of cats have set up an hour west of Santa Ana apparently relying on the sheer distance between here and there to keep them safe. It's taken some work to confirm numbers that far away from our normal area of operations, but the Brain Box puts the group at twenty, only two of whom are old enough to potentially be classified as Ancients."
The projector flashed and the map was replaced by a picture of a compound. "This is an aerial view of their base…"
I relaxed into the briefing, memorizing the layout of the compound and making mental notes of how Brandon was deploying his people. It appeared that he had pulled in his thirty best fighters and was planning on using them to storm through the interior of the compound. He was likely more than a match for one ancient, which meant that Vincent and the rest of his people should outnumber the rest of the cats by a healthy enough margin that at least some of the cats would scatter and try to get out of the compound.
Fortunately for us, there were really only two decent routes away from the compound, so Brandon was deploying two more groups outside of the compound to serve as a safety net to scoop up all of the runners.
It was a simple plan that seemed to rely more on Brandon's extreme lethality and our superior numbers than on anything else, but I couldn't see any glaring holes in it. I looked away from the screen and back at Brandon as he started to wrap up.
"…We've got information packets for you all to review on the trip out, but despite the fact that it's outside of our normal theater of operations and a bigger group than we usually tackle, it should be a pretty straightforward job. For the most part you're all staying in your normal units. The team leaders have already been pre-briefed and they'll reach out to anyone who's been moved between teams. Let's kill some cats and all come back in one piece. This could be the propaganda win that we need to get the trickle of recruits to start flowing south again."
Apparently any questions would be answered by the team leaders because Brandon walked out of the room without looking back. James gave me an inquiring look, but I just shrugged. There wasn't anything that we could do other than just sit here and wait for our new team leader to come find us.
A couple of seconds later someone tapped me on the shoulder. "You're Graves?"
"Yeah. This is James and that's Jasmin and Jessica. Are you our team leader?"
"Yes, my name is Juan Ruiz. Let's go find somewhere quiet so that I can bring the four of you up to speed."
Juan caught Alison's eye as he carefully made his way through all of the bodies between us and the main exit. Alison didn't look thrilled about any part of what was going on, but she nodded and started towards us.
We walked for nearly five minutes before Juan turned off into a tiny coffee shop that looked like it was on its last legs. The Hispanic woman behind the counter was well past middle age, but the way she smiled when Juan walked through the door made her seem much younger than she actually was.
Languages have never been my strongest area, so I didn't catch much from the lightning-fast exchange that Juan and the woman carried on in Spanish, but she motioned us towards the back of the store as she continued to talk to Juan.
Alison seemed to know where she was going. She led the rest of us up a narrow flight of stairs which terminated on a small landing, only when we went through the door we found another staircase which climbed up the back of the building. The whole affair seemed to have been cobbled together as an afterthought, but when we finally reached the end of the creaking stairs we found that the top of the roof had been converted into a kind of sunroom paradise.
Alison fidgeted with a couple of dials on an ancient-looking machine and then it roared to life with a gust of cool damp air. "Swamp cooler."
The words weren't said to anyone in particular, and after Alison said them she went over to one of the chairs on the far end of the glassed-off enclosure and used it to get high enough up to crack open one of the windows before plopping down on the faded plastic seat with a sigh of resignation.
It was obvious that Alison didn't want to make small talk so I motioned James and the girls into chairs and then pulled up one of my own. We passed the next couple of minutes in silence until Juan walked into view and let himself into the sunroom.
"Can someone please get that window over there? Swamp coolers only work properly if you give the air somewhere to escape to."
Jessica saw to the window in question while Juan opened a third window and then pulled out a couple of white noise generators and stationed them as far away from the swamp cooler as possible.
"Okay, everyone huddle up. With all of the racket in here nobody should be able to listen in on anything we're saying, but we'll need to get closer or we won't be able to hear each other."
We all moved in, James and the others with an air of curiosity, Alison looking like she was ready to start swearing. Juan let the silence stretch out for several seconds and then waved at Alison. "If you have something to say then go ahead and get it off of your chest."
"Why in the hell did you let us get stuck with them? I didn't expect that we'd get a pair of top-tier hybrids to replace Jones and Rivera, but having these four on our team is worse than having nobody at all. By letting Brandon stick us with them you've painted a big old target on our backs."
I expected Juan to slap Alison down with a roar of power, but he just shrugged mildly and turned to address me.
"You'll have to excuse Alison. She's normally not quite so abrasive, but she hates your father pretty badly."
Alison shot Juan a fierce look. "Don't go there. They don't have any right to know."
"Now that's where you're wrong. Your feelings are going to make everyone's lives more difficult and the main purpose for this meeting is to clear the air. Either you can do it or I will. And don't break Reina's c
hair or I'll stick you here helping her on your days off to pay for a new one."
Alison's hands had been white-knuckled on the arms of her chair, but she let go of the creaking plastic like it was burning her. "I hate you."
Juan shrugged and smiled and I wondered for a second whether or not this was partially punishment for her refusal to properly submit to him.
"I'll tell it then, but I'll probably get some of it wrong since I'm not from your pack and I heard it all secondhand."
"I'll do it." Alison's voice was low and seethed with rage. "I was in love with Sam Giles for years. My mom said he wasn't any good, but that just made me want him more. I was so far gone that I even convinced myself that I didn't mind that he couldn't seem to pick between me and Chloe."
I started slightly. I remembered Chloe, she'd been a couple of years younger than us, but she'd left with her parents about the same time as Alison had been deployed down to the border.
"Right, you probably still believe the official story that her parents wanted to fight the cats so badly that they both volunteered to go down to southern California. Well, that's just another of Kaleb's lies. The truth is that Sam was just using Chloe and me. We formed our own little power bloc that helped keep him safe while he worked for what he really wanted."
Alison looked up with challenge in her eyes. "He wanted to work directly for your dad. He kept telling us that he was studying all of those business books because he wanted to go to college and live a normal life, but it was a bald-faced lie. He wanted to help manage the pack's money because he saw the way that it made Donovan untouchable. He figured it was the best way to secure his future and when Kaleb offered him the chance he jumped at it and cut Chloe and me loose."
"Chloe's parents didn't volunteer in a fit of patriotism, did they?"
"No, they were forced down there because Sam didn't want a reminder of his duplicity hanging around. He and Kaleb would have been satisfied with just sending Chloe away, but her parents wouldn't just stand idly by while she was sent off to die. They started raising a fuss directly to Kaleb so he disappeared them to California and sent Chloe and me here to Arizona."