Bound (Dark Reflections Volume 1)

by Dean Murray

  I slashed twice in quick succession, but Brandon had assumed a low stance. It gave up some of his mobility, but it let him use his hands to help propel him back and forth at incredible speeds. Neither of my attacks landed and when I tried to follow up with another lunge he simply swatted the point of my sword away with his claws.

  "Before I kill you, I wanted to make sure that you knew that Vincent was chasing down James and your girls. He'll probably kill them, but even if he doesn't I can guarantee you that I'll kill them when I get back. I suspect that you had some fancy plan that you thought would shield them if this all went badly, but Kaleb is dancing to my tune now. I'll demand all three of their heads and he won't be able to say no to me."

  I swung my sword again, putting more effort into it in the hopes that it would give me enough speed to land a blow on him, but Brandon knocked the blade away again and this time he slashed the inside of my arm.

  I recovered before he could get any closer and this time I clipped his shoulder, but mine was the more serious wound and we both knew it. There was a chance that he'd missed the bigger arteries that ran along the inside of my arm, but just judging by the amount of blood pouring out of my arm he'd at least gotten one or two of the smaller ones.

  "You were always the one I knew I needed to beat. I'm young enough that I can always just outlast fossils like Kaleb if that's the only way to power, but you were a whole different problem. Mallory must have told me a dozen times a year just how much potential power you had. I think she hoped it would scare me away, but it just made you a bigger target. If I would have known that you'd be stupid enough to throw your future away over your sister, I would have made this happen years ago."

  My beast had been strangely quiet since before the fight started, but mention of Rachel brought a roar of power out of me and this time when I stabbed at Brandon I had that little extra bit of speed that I'd been lacking and the sword went into the right side of his chest. I'd been aiming for his heart, but he'd twisted to the side at the last second.

  I pulled back, but Brandon moved with me. I tried to use the sword to keep him back but he simply let the blade sink further into him in his quest to reach me. I let go of the sword with my left hand and managed to grab ahold of one of his arms, but his other arm savaged my right leg.

  Brandon backed away, pulling himself off of the sword rather than pressing his advantage, but we both knew that the fight was over. I used the sword to help get me back to my feet, but my leg was just too damaged to provide the kind of mobility I needed in order to take advantage of the superior reach my sword gave me.

  "In some ways I almost can't blame you, Alec. I've seen what happens to the girls that Vincent takes an interest in and it's not pretty. The shape shifter girls last a little longer, but even they can't take more than a few weeks before they just don't have anything left to bring them back from the edge when he takes them there. Still, you would have been better off just waiting and avenging her once you finally came into your full power. As it is she's still going to become his pet and you're going to be dead."

  Brandon liked to gloat, I'd known that for years, but there was something else there this time. As my sword started to shake in hands that were becoming too weak to hold it upright, I tried to figure out what angle he was trying to work.

  My mind reached blindly for any explanation and then suddenly I knew why he was stalling. I'd spent nearly half an hour pouring over maps, satellite and otherwise, in an attempt to find the absolute best spot to board the train. My realization almost came too late. I had nothing but instinct and a slight change in the sound of the air hissing around the train to go on, but I was dead either way, so I threw myself forward, stabbing with my sword as I shifted back down to human form.

  Unlike me, Brandon had been facing forward and had been able to see the metal girder we were quickly approaching. He'd no doubt been planning on ducking down underneath it just like I'd done, but he hadn't been counting on my sword slicing through the exact volume of space where he'd been planning on taking shelter.

  Any other hybrid probably would have been impaled. Brandon had already started moving forward and there was only so much the laws of physics would let you do to change direction once you had that much weight committed to a course of action, but he somehow twisted up just enough that my sword missed him.

  It was as though everything was happening in slow motion. I saw Brandon sink his claws in the sheet metal below us and begin pulling himself back down in an effort to dodge the girder that crossed over the tracks, but even he wasn't fast enough to drop the last couple of inches before the train swept him into the beam and he was knocked from the train accompanied by the crunch of broken bones.

  Chapter 26

  James Wright

  Three miles outside of town

  Sanctuary, Utah

  We all watched Vincent vanish down the road leaving Jess, Jasmin and me with two of Vincent's bruisers. Doug and Randy would have outclassed all three of us even if I hadn't been broken and two hard kicks away from death.

  It shouldn't have surprised me that the two of them were well-versed in cheap tricks, or that they were completely unthreatened by Jasmin and Jessica. They'd spent their entire adult lives bullying people. It didn't particularly matter whether you matched them up against the girls as hybrids versus wolves or if you left all four in their primary forms. Either way the girls didn't stand a chance.

  I was the dominant here, it was my job to put myself between jerks like this and submissives like Jessica and Jasmin, but I just didn't have anything left to give. I tried to move and nearly passed out from the pain.

  I looked up to tell Jasmin that I was sorry and when our eyes met I could see her plan in her eyes. We'd been through a lot together, but I never would have guessed that we'd be able to communicate so much without using words. I looked over at Jess and she seemed to be on the same page, so I took a deep breath and tried not to cough.

  "You know, it really is too bad."

  "What's that, Wright? Are you talking about the fact that you chose to back the wrong horse or that you were dumb enough to think Vincent would honor a challenge match when there weren't any witnesses around?"

  I shook my head slowly. "No, it's too bad that we didn't have this conversation before you killed all of those people in Naco."

  I could see the wheels turning in their head for the split second I gave them before I shifted into my hybrid form in the biggest, noisiest show of power I'd ever managed.

  The two of them had been standing so that they could watch the girls over by the SUV and me off on the side of the road. Even though they were both a half beat slow from trying to solve the riddle of how I knew that they'd been responsible for Naco, they still turned towards me to honor the threat of a fellow hybrid.

  It was exactly the kind of thing that you'd expect them to do, exactly the kind of thing that their beasts would demand of them, and it was exactly the wrong response.

  They never even saw the girls shift and spring towards them. Jasmin and Jessica timed their jumps perfectly and they ripped out both of the guys' throats a split second before either of them managed to shift to their hybrid forms.

  Shifting into a hybrid had healed some of the worst of the damage to my body, but it was still more than I could do to pull myself to my feet. After a couple of seconds, the girls shifted back to their human forms and cleaned the blood off of their mouths.

  "Just shift back and we'll carry you, James. It's time to get back on the road or we're going to miss Alec's timetable."

  "All right, but I was kind of looking forward to freaking out the next people to drive by here. As long as we're going to be outlaws we really ought to get the full enjoyment out of the experience."

  Chapter 27

  Alec Graves

  The Express Rail Line

  Southern Utah

  It had turned out that Brandon had in fact missed the big arteries in my arm, and the small ones had mostly healed when I'd sh
ifted back to human form. It had been too dark to see what happened to Brandon after the girder scraped him off of the top of the train, but I had a feeling that he'd survived somehow.

  One thing that the fight had convinced me of was that Brandon had been hiding the full extent of his ability for years. It was terrifying to think of a hybrid durable enough to survive colliding head-on with something at more than seventy miles per hour like that, but I was pretty sure I hadn't seen the last of him.

  As the train continued on into the night I slowly made my way up to where Rachel was huddled between two of the cars. We then found a cargo car and I used my hybrid claws to punch through the lock and let us in.

  Reception for my cell phone had been much spottier than I'd counted on, but I still managed to get a series of texts through. The first one was to Mother asking her to go get Donovan if nobody else had found him yet and then I sent a couple to Jasmin with instructions on how we were going to meet back up. Once that was done I turned my phone back off and swapped sim cards again.

  Rachel and I passed a quiet hour or so huddled on a couple of cardboard boxes before it was time for me to go back outside again. The best use of the lull would have been to start working through the accounts from Kaleb's safe and get as much money transferred away as possible, but I just couldn't bring myself to pull the tablet out after having come so close to dying.

  The air was colder when I finally opened the door to the cargo car and worked my way to the top of the car Rachel was in. It took only a few minutes before Jasmin and the others were visible. They were strung out in a line almost a hundred yards apart from each other just as I'd instructed.

  There was a bit of a grade on this section of the track, but nothing like the one that Rachel and I had used to get on the train. By my best estimate we were still doing in excess of forty miles an hour, but that was okay, James and the girls had their instructions and everything should work.

  I climbed back down so that my feet were on the bottom rung of the ladder and then wrapped my right arm around another rung. Even after such a short time my arm was mostly healed, but I decided not to risk opening the wound back up. I'd already lost a lot of blood today.

  I swung around so that I was looking down the track towards Jasmin and then waved until she saw me and waved back. She started a slow jog as soon as she saw me, and then sped up to an all-out sprint as I reached her.

  "Jump on three!"

  The count went smoothly and Jasmin jumped right on schedule. I grabbed her arms, plucking her out of the air and then pulling her over to the ladder so that she could get her feet under her.

  "Rachel is in this car. Go ahead and go in so that there is room for the others."

  Jasmin shook her head and anchored herself similarly to what I'd done.

  "You're going to need help with James. Vincent beat the crap out of him. He's standing there, but you're not going to get any kind of speed or life out of him, it's pretty much going to be lifting dead weight."

  I grunted in response and then it was time to pick Jess up. Things went even more smoothly then they had with Jasmin and as soon as I got ahold of her wrist Jasmin helped me lift her up onto the ladder.

  Jessica climbed over the top of me so that I was sandwiched between the two of them. I took a deep, preparatory breath and had a second to revel in Jasmin and Jessica's scent. It was like being home again, but not the home I actually remembered from my childhood—a home where people I loved would take incredible risks to protect me and my sister.

  An instant later we'd caught up with James and it was every bit as bad as I was afraid it would be. James tried to jump, I saw him go white from the effort, but he barely got his feet off of the ground.

  I grabbed his outstretched hand and both of my arms nearly ripped out of their sockets. I think James screamed, but it was hard to tell over my own cry of pain, and then the girls had ahold of his arm and they were helping me pull him up to the ladder.

  A few minutes later we were all inside of the cargo car with Rachel. Rachel hugged everyone and then gave them all a big, tearful thank you. We made James as comfortable as possible on a makeshift bed of boxes and then once he was asleep and Jessica was talking to Rachel, Jasmin turned to me.

  "So what next, oh criminal mastermind?"

  I fished the tablet and the ledger out of the backpack and then tossed the rest to her. She let out a low whistle as I hit the power button on the tablet and found that it did indeed still work.

  "That's a lot of cash."

  "A fifth of it belongs to you; don't go spending it all in one place."

  She shook her head. "This wasn't about the money for any of us."

  "I know it wasn't, but I need to know that you guys are all taken care of in case something happens to me."

  I fired up the wireless connection and started looking for the login information for the first bank before I realized that I hadn't answered her question.

  "We'll ride the train for another few hours and then we'll get off somewhere around Salt Lake City. I haven't had a chance to scout a spot yet, but if we jump off the same way that we got out of that helicopter we can afford to exit at a higher rate of speed than we got on at. Some of it will depend on how James is feeling by then."

  Jasmin nodded, but she didn't seem satisfied with my answer.

  "What about after that?"

  "Well, we're going to spend some time consolidating all of the Graves resources that I can get my hands on, and then we're going to start a war. I'm going to do whatever it takes to bring down Kaleb and the Coun'hij."

  —The Story Continues in Hunted—

  Publisher's Note:

  If you've enjoyed this book, please consider signing up for the author's mailing list. By signing up you'll receive $10.00 worth of free books. We'll be offering a special discount to existing fans for the first week each new book is live, so signing up for his mailing list will mean that you'll always know about new releases with plenty of time to take advantage of the new release discount.

  Author's Note:

  This is one of those books that I probably shouldn't have written. I have a bad habit of doing that, unfortunately. From an income perspective, I should just write Alec and Adri books for as long as I can, but that's not the way I think.

  As much as I love Alec and Adri, the Reflections series is more than that. There is a much larger story that needs to be told, and Dark Reflections is part of telling that. Bound is a great story in and of itself, but it also has let me start paving the road for even greater things to come. I couldn't do justice to Alec and Adri's story without writing the Dark Reflections books.

  I hope you enjoyed Bound; Hunted will be out March 27th, 2014 and will show us what was happening with Adri during this same block of time. If you haven't read the Reflections books yet please go pick up Broken, Torn and The Greater Darkness. There are some great stories in those books; and if you liked Bound, then you're almost certain to enjoy them.

  Don't forget to sign up for my mailing list (I only use it to announce new releases) at deanwrites.com. It's a great way to make sure you always know when a new book comes out.

  Acknowledgments:

  As always, there have been a lot of people who have helped make this book a reality. My editors, RJ Locksley and Amy Jirsa-Smith did stellar work just like they always do. My advance readers continue to provide much-needed feedback. Larry, Loa, Mark, Mimi, Matthew, Shalese and Kim have been joined by Chris—thank you one and all!

  There isn't any getting around the fact that Katie is the glue that holds all of this together. Not only is she my first reader, she also puts in countless hours working on covers. All while keeping our daughters from starting the house on fire. Thanks, Katie, you're the best!

  For Bound, the cover was actually done by Elle Casey, another indie writer who is a much bigger deal than I am, who was kind enough to give Katie and me a hand simply because she's an incredible person. You may want to check out her writing at http://ellecasey.c
om/. Thank you, Elle for being so awesome.

  Lastly, I want to say thanks to the many great fans out there who do so much to help spread the word about my books. Without all of you I'd be back working a day job by now and many of these stories probably wouldn't ever be written.

  About the Author:

  Dean Murray is a prolific author with 23 titles across multiple pen names and more than 300,000 copies of his work currently in circulation.

  Dean started reading seriously in the second grade due to a competition and has spent most of the subsequent three decades lost in other people's worlds.

  Things worsened, or improved depending on your point of view, when he first started experimenting with writing while finishing up his accounting degree. These days Dean has a wonderful wife and two lovely daughters to keep him rather more grounded, but the idea of bringing others along with him as he meets interesting new people in universes nobody else has ever seen tends to drag him back to his computer on a fairly regular basis.

  Keep up to speed on Dean's latest projects at deanwrites.com.

  Other Books by Dean Murray

  The Greater Darkness

  (Writing as Eldon Murphy)

  Something powerful is stirring in the darkness. Something so ancient that even creatures who've been alive for hundreds of years have long since discounted this new threat as nothing more than myth.

  Normal humans will be caught in the crossfire, but then that's always the way of things. Geoffrey has no memory of his past life or any idea how to survive in the violent, dangerous world in which he's trapped. Despite his best efforts, he's about to find himself in the middle of a conflict that threatens to sweep away everything, and everyone he's been fighting so hard to protect.

  Torn

  Shape shifter Alec Graves has spent nearly a decade trying to keep his family from being drawn into open warfare with a larger pack. The new girl at school shouldn't matter, but the more he gets to know her, the more mysterious she becomes. Worse, she seems to know things she shouldn't about his shadowy world.