Splintered (Reflections)

by Murray, Dean

  "Where's Sam?"

  Alison shrugged. "With Alec. They didn't say what they were up to, just that they were going to be gone for an hour or so."

  The conversation between the girls skittered around for a minute or two before Rachel got everyone busy talking about another shopping trip to Vegas. Everyone made a valiant effort to include me, but I just couldn't lose myself in the idea of buying more pretty clothes that I'd never be able to wear for fear my mom would freak out. She was plenty self-absorbed most of the time, but if I came back sporting the kind of clothes Rachel was going to want to buy me, she'd instantly know I'd spent more money than I could possibly have made in two years of working at the tutor lab.

  The boys were discussing motorcycles. As usual when it came to boisterous conversation, James had taken the lead.

  "I'm telling you, man. The new 900cc Kawasaki has way more potential than the other bikes this year. You could easily crank another twenty horses out of that thing without even replacing any hardware."

  Isaac shook his head. "I don't know. I mean you're right that the Kawasaki is a better machine but those things are already pushed pretty close to spec. I'm not sure even you can crank that kind of power just by tweaking the fuel map."

  James shook his head in mock disbelief. "You're crazy, man. They aren't cars, but it's the same principle."

  Jack chuckled along with Isaac. "You're both wrong. I happen to know on good authority that Alec just ordered another R1. Now that's a machine. It starts out with ten percent more power and it's got a frame that's fifteen percent lighter."

  It was like a cold front had just blown in. Isaac turned towards Jack and suddenly the air was dancing with invisible shape shifter energy. An answering flare of power rushed out from Jack but it was obvious he was outclassed.

  Jack still didn't look like he was going to back down though until James turned on him as well. The other members of the pack were all buzzing with power too, but it was just the reflex response to danger, not the hostile presence the two hybrids were generating.

  Alison reached out to Jack, possibly just to try and calm him down, but I noticed Jasmin go utterly still at the motion. Jas wasn't paying attention to Jack, but she was ready to take Alison down if things boiled over to some kind of confrontation.

  For a brief moment things teetered on the edge of violence and then Jack looked down and the tension slowly melted away. It was the kind of freaky thing that had happened all the time when Brandon had been trying to drive us into a misstep, but it felt wrong to happen when we were all supposed to be on the same side.

  The group broke up before lunch was over, all heading off in separate directions in an attempt to regain our composure before we had to interact with the humans again. I felt myself rubbing my arms. Apparently it had been too long since I'd seen the preliminaries when shape shifters were about to throw down. It hadn't affected me this badly before.

  Mrs. Campbell stopped me near my locker.

  "Adriana, I've been meaning to talk to you. The load at the tutoring lab has gone up over the last two weeks. I don't know if you're still unavailable, but I'd love to have you back."

  I felt a surge of relief as she offered me a way out of the looming confrontation with my mom.

  "That would be really great, Mrs. Campbell. Things have really opened up lately for me and I'd love to help out."

  "Well then, shall we say tonight? I'll let Albert know to expect you."

  I all but skipped to my locker and opened it. I never expected to find a note sitting on top of my physics book. For a heartbeat I thought maybe it was from Alec, but I opened it to find Sam's awkward scrawl.

  Alec wanted me to let you know he's going to be out for the rest of the day. Alison wants me to see if you want to do lunch Saturday, and I wanted to let you know that I'm getting writer's cramp.

  --Sam

  By the time school ended I was definitely missing Alec. It was going to take a lot more effort than I'd realized to re-accustom myself to only seeing him an hour or two per day. I was trying to distract myself by working on homework when Albert stopped by my table.

  "Hey now, we don't hold with any of that history stuff here."

  Albert had always been able to draw a smile out of me.

  "Some of us have better things to do than just sitting around solving equations all day."

  "Ouch." Albert sat down on the edge of the table. "So how have you been? We've missed you around here."

  "I'm okay. Just been a lot of things going on lately. What about you? How's Fatal Angst?"

  I could always count on steering the conversation around to his band to make Albert uncomfortable.

  "They're not bad. We got a new bassist who also does backup vocals. Some of the guys are starting to talk big."

  His tone was casual, but something he really didn't care about wouldn't have made him so uncomfortable. I guess it's possible to get desensitized to that feeling, but mostly it seemed like the strongest reactions are all driven by how important something is to us. I wasn't going to 'out' him though.

  "That's great. I mean I hope you guys go really far."

  Albert rolled his eyes. "Right, we'll be topping the charts next week. It's nice though, the sound's starting to come together. Hey, you should come down and take in a set sometime."

  That was dangerous. Not for me, not really. Skin addiction or not, I was starting to really understand that my heart would always belong to Alec. It was dangerous for Albert though.

  "Thanks, but now that my mom's back in town I'm lucky to make it ten minutes away to visit Alec. I'm pretty sure she'd freak out if I said I wanted to go to Vegas to take in a real-live rock group."

  He flinched a little but mustered up a smile as he said his good byes.

  I more or less sleepwalked through helping the few students who hung around until my shift, and then came up for air when Rachel bounced over and hugged me.

  "Hey, Dom texted me for help. Don't worry though, I arranged you a perfectly good ride."

  I followed her gesture, half expecting to find one of the jocks we both detested. Alec's smile as my eyes found him sent butterflies rampaging about my stomach.

  "Sorry I missed class again. Can I make it up to you on the way home?"

  The drive home was companionable. There was plenty of silence, but it wasn't the kind of quiet that awkwardly demanded I try and drown it out.

  "So I've got some good news for you and some bad, Miss Paige."

  "You're not starting off great if you're still hoping to make up for ditching out on me again."

  Alec chuckled at my attempted humor. "The bad news is I'm going out of town for a few days. A week tops."

  My mood imploded. "Where now?"

  He always got the same look when he was trying to tiptoe past something he didn't think it was safe for me to know.

  "I don't think I can tell you that, not right now. Suffice it to say it's work-related and it's not a trip I'd be taking if I didn't have to."

  A sigh escaped me despite my best efforts. "You do know that time spent with me while I'm asleep doesn't really count, not from a relationship standpoint."

  Crap. I'd just said the 'r' word.

  "Maybe not for you, but it does for me. I'll take whatever I can get."

  I felt my cheeks heat up. Alec reached over almost as if to take my hand before he thought better of it.

  "I really wish I could take you with me."

  "Yeah, I don't suppose that would work, not now that Mom's back."

  He hesitated, on the verge of saying something before shrugging. "In good news, Christmas is just around the corner."

  I put my head in my hands. "Somebody needs to teach you the meaning of 'good' news."

  "For your information, I have it on good authority that most people do think the arrival of Christmas is a good thing. Rachel goes positively giddy at the thought."

  "That's just because it's the perfect opportunity for her to spend obscene amounts of your money on peo
ple who can't refuse her gifts without looking like Scrooge."

  "True. Despite all that, the arrival of Christmas wasn't the actual good news." Alec paused, as if he needed the dramatic flair to keep me hanging on his every word. "I've booked a holiday for us. Skiing in Aspen. You, me, Rachel, Donovan, my mom, your mom. All of us."

  I felt my eyebrows reach for the sky. "Alec, you can't do that. What about the rest of the pack?"

  "I've booked them trips to a wide array of locals. Mostly warmer and widely dispersed, geographically speaking. I think everyone could use a bit of a break from each other."

  "But the cost. I mean it's way too…"

  Alec cut me off. "It's that or I stop trying to be a restraining influence on Rachel. I mean, you think she's bad now, but really you haven't seen anything yet."

  I was fumbling for excuses now. "My mom. I mean she'll never go for it. I don't even know how I'd broach something like that with her."

  Alec smiled again. "Don't worry about that. I'll ask her. In fact that's part of why I told Rachel I'd drive you home today. This way I can meet her and start the wheels turning for our trip."

  We'd just turned off the road and I felt my stomach drop as my house came into view. Mom had been worried enough about me dating Brandon. She'd flip at the thought of another rich, gorgeous boy dating me…wanting to pay for expensive trips for us.

  "I don't think that's a good idea. I mean I do want you to meet my mom, but I think it would be best if I had a few days to prep her."

  "I don't think that's the way to go here, Adri. I mean she's bound to see me drop you off. That's going to tip her off, and then I'll look less than honorable."

  "Alec. Please trust me. I need some time to prep her before something like this is even remotely possible."

  He had that look in his eye. He was going to fight me on this. I gave him my best puppy-dog eyes. A few seconds later he sighed. "I still think it's a bad idea."

  "Thank you."

  Flush with success at having brought Alec around to my thinking, I watched him pull down the lane until he disappeared around the corner.

  Mom was standing at the window waiting for me, and she didn't look amused.

  Chapter 6

  Alec - 5 hours previously

  It was always a nightmare getting Sam off by himself. On the one hand I understood where the three of them were coming from. Sam, Jack, Alison, they'd all been through hell. In Brandon's pack you could never be sure that a dominant getting you off by yourself wasn't a prelude to getting the stuffing kicked out of you or worse.

  In that kind of environment the submissives pretty much had to band together into miniature power blocs that had half a chance of avoiding the worst of the excesses. Still, they'd been with us for long enough now to know I wouldn't put up with that kind of stuff even had the rest of the pack been so inclined.

  Based on that and the fact Sam knew exactly what it was I wanted to get him off to talk about, I had to assume he was trying to avoid the discussion. By the time lunch rolled around I'd decided to force the issue.

  A quiet word with Isaac pretty much guaranteed that Jack wouldn't be offering to come along when I told Sam we were leaving the campus for lunch. I'd done everything I could to guarantee Isaac wouldn't kill Jack in his sleep or anything, but since the animosity wasn't going anywhere, I might as well get some use out of it. It was certainly making my life extra hard to compensate.

  Alison was a lesser concern. She wasn't very good at reading the subtext in most conversations. If it wasn't for Jack and Sam she probably wouldn't have survived a year in Brandon's group. As long as I waited for Rachel or somebody to get her talking about shopping I had known I could slip away with Sam and she would hardly notice.

  I led Sam over to my Porsche and then drove us over to Kostas' so we could get a sandwich while we talked. Luckily the place was pretty much deserted.

  "What do you want, Alec?"

  "You know exactly what I want. I want you to give up the Georgia contact."

  Sam jumped a little. It was starting to look like he was either completely stupid or the most accomplished liar I'd ever met. Living with shape shifters generally conditioned you to tell the truth. Not many of us could lie with both our scent and pulse.

  "I don't think that's fair. I've been more than helpful when it's come to helping you snatch up the rest of Brandon's assets. Heck, without me you would have been in the dark."

  I shook my head. "We already knew about every holding and operation you've told us about. We would have had a harder time in a hostile takeover situation, but we still could have picked them all up and turned a hefty profit over the next couple of years."

  "Fine, you and Donovan are omniscient. Why do you need me?"

  "Let's cut the crap. You've been trying to let on that you were only peripherally involved with Brandon's holdings. I haven't believed it for a moment. Brandon was never out of contact long enough to be taking a really active role in managing the pack's tithe. You, on the other hand, have entirely too much lip for someone who supposedly spent his entire life at the bottom of the food chain. You've been running the financial side of things for at least the last three years."

  "Okay. It was me. Can you blame me for keeping my head down? You and Donovan were always right on our tails and you had ten or fifteen times the working capital we had to play with. I fought tooth and nail to keep you from absorbing us financially because my and Alison's safety depended on it."

  I unwrapped my sandwich to buy time while I decided exactly how much of what I knew to place on the table. "No, you did what you did because you enjoyed it and it brought you power. More importantly, while you may have ended with one-tenth of our holdings, you started out with somewhere around two percent. That's astonishing growth by almost any yardstick I can imagine."

  Sam leaned back, smiling at the perceived compliment. "That's exactly why you should go ahead and let me run the Savannah group. I'm good at this kind of stuff."

  "What's the prime rule of finance?"

  "I don't know; whoever has the gold makes the rules?"

  "No, the prime rule of finance is that you can only grow as fast as the rate of return on your capital unless you have outside funding."

  I thought I detected a slight blip in Sam's heart rate. A good liar yes, but not a perfect liar still.

  "In layman's terms, your nest egg didn't double nearly three times in three years without either someone else loaning you a whole heap of money or experiencing the kind of growth that is almost never found in legal endeavors. Probably both."

  "I don't know what you're talking about. The Georgia group is completely above board. I ran a lot of the business, but Brandon kept his hand in some. That's where the real growth was."

  I slipped my hand under the table, shifted it over to nine inches plus of retractable claws, and sank a couple inches into Sam's leg. "You're lying. The so-called Savannah group isn't even based in Savannah. We tracked Vincent over to Savannah three times and the round trip time between when he dropped out of sight and when he resurfaced was perfect for Charleston."

  Sam was sweating now, very obviously fighting the urge to squirm, which would just drive my claws further into his leg. He opened his mouth, likely to lie again, but I cut him off.

  "The profit we'll turn on the holdings we've swept up in the last couple of weeks will undoubtedly come in handy at some future date, but that's not the only reason we've been interested in Brandon's old activities. Donovan and I have been hunting down your illegal golden goose."

  When lying didn't work Sam turned to anger. It was a useful piece of information.

  "I brought a lot to the table when we offered to join you. We could have gone to any number of different packs and been treated like royalty based on the amount of money we could produce. I could still do that. I'm sure the Coun'hij would be very willing to cough up a million dollars as seed money knowing that I could double it inside a year."

  I shook my head again. "There's been
a bank error. All of your assets have been frozen. You won't make it very far, especially if you drag Alison and Jack along with you."

  I let Sam process that fact. I was pretty sure he had the odd fifteen grand hidden here and there, but he had to know most alphas would just torture him for the information and then discard him once they had it.

  "I want a name and a location, Sam. You've been running something illegal and it needs to stop."

  Sam sighed, rubbing his wrist where James had thrown him into a table earlier. "Okay, it's illegal, but it's not a big deal. The contact distributes marijuana, but those kinds of deals are always cash at the time the transaction goes down. Our guy is pretty successful but he likes to spend his earnings, so every time he looks to expand we're the ones that he turns to for financing."

  I let the silence radiate out, watched it work on him. I wasn't surprised when he was the first to break it.

  "Look, could you please let go of my leg? I swear I'm telling the truth."

  "Fine, give up your contact and everything will be okay. Refuse and you're going to find out just how unpleasant I can get."

  Chapter 7

  "Adriana Paige. You can't really think I'm going to believe that!"

  "It's the truth, Mom. We just started hanging out together. It's nothing, we're just really good friends."

  I'd known Mom would freak out about the idea of Alec taking us on a trip. I hadn't expected she'd be so concerned about my having a new guy friend. We'd been arguing for the last ten minutes and it was starting to look like Alec had been right.

  "You're lying to me. Don't tell me you're not, I can tell."

  I opened my mouth to protest and she cut me off again. "You obviously like him, and based on the way he was looking at you, he's very much attracted to you."

  That made me pause. It was so easy to forget Alec really liked me. Without outside reminders I was always talking myself into believing it was a temporary thing for him.

  "What have you been up to while I've been gone? He's probably been over every night."