Marked

by Dean Murray

  It wasn't much, but it was all that I could offer her, and we both knew it. After my call with Daphne, things slowed down enough that I was able to catch more of what was going on, albeit in a second-hand manner, but for some reason it refused to integrate into any kind of cohesive picture. All I registered was fragments of information, pieces of scenes.

  At one point Donovan looked up from his computer, hand pressed against his headset to make sure he could hear what was being said.

  "The first ambush was a success. Louis reports that they drove off the enforcers with only three casualties."

  Alec didn't even blink. "What was our loss ratio and how many of them did we kill? I need to know if we're losing ground to them."

  "We lost two wolves and a hybrid in return for three of their hybrids."

  "Fine, that means the odds shifted slightly in our favor. Tell Louis to get everyone there consolidated into the largest three or four vehicles and get on their way. They can bandage each other up while they are driving—we need them at the next site as soon as possible or the Coun'hij will beat them there."

  I was on the phone for the next fight. I'd been guiding one of our wolves who was having a hard time finding the industrial park where we were staging the next fight. I'd just asked him if he could see the rendezvous site coming up on his right when he swore and floored the car. Two seconds later a terrible crash was the last thing I heard before the line went dead.

  I didn't find out until later that the Coun'hij had correctly guessed his destination and tried to set up a counter-ambush. They'd underestimated how many of our people Alec had waiting there and the numbers were almost even right up until our guy slammed his car into one of the Coun'hij's hybrids. The driver ended up with a concussion and all of our people got injured in one way or another, but that time we managed to kill two hybrids before being chased off by the arrival of the car that had been tailing the wolf I'd been on the phone with.

  They were going to be in for a long, tense drive, but they had a full tank of gas, which meant that they had time before they could be forced into another fight. Alec moved them to the bottom of the priority list and started scrambling for another way to fill in the hole that had been created by our not managing to leave the ambush site without a tail.

  I watched the clock slowly count down to the time for the ambush in Nephi and my insides clenched tighter and tighter with each passing minute. I was so focused on the impending massacre in Southern Utah that I completely forgot about the fact that we'd been headed to Idaho with the intention of setting up an ambush designed to save the other half of our people.

  It took me completely by surprise when the massive RV gently shuddered to a stop. Alec was at my side before I even managed to get out of my chair.

  "I want you to stay inside the RV, Adri. This should be a quick, easy fight, but there's still no reason to risk you."

  I wanted to argue with him, wanted to tell him that I belonged by his side, but I knew exactly how tight our timing was on this particular operation. I couldn't bring myself to argue with him, not this time, not when I knew doing so could end up costing lives.

  "Fine, I'll stay inside, but I want you to take Vik with you. If things go badly I want you to have all the help possible out there."

  "Okay. I'll take Vik and Donovan can stay here to drive the RV in case we need to bug out quickly."

  "No, take Donovan out there too. I can drive the RV."

  Alec wanted to argue with me, but I could see the same understanding in his eyes that was in the forefront of my mind. We simply didn't have time to waste, not if we were going to save our people. I got a short nod and then the rest of the shape shifters started filing out of the vehicle.

  I worked my way up past all of the laptops and settled into the driver's seat, unrolling the passenger's window so I would be able to hear what was going on.

  Whoever had picked this location for the ambush site had been nothing less than brilliant—it was that perfect. We were situated in some kind of low, natural amphitheater in the middle of a lava field. We were parked on a large stretch of blacktop that seemed to indicate someone had been planning on building something out here at some point in the past, but if so they'd never followed up.

  Paul, Alec's bodyguard, had parked our vehicle so that we were facing back the direction we'd come from, but I noted that only because it meant that I wouldn't have to turn the beast of an RV around if we did have to leave in a hurry. The other RV was parked just to the left of me, and I looked over expecting to find Mallory sitting behind the wheel, but the driver's seat was empty.

  A few seconds of searching let me find Mallory, who was obviously in no condition to be in the middle of any kind of fight. That didn't seem to be stopping her though and even Donovan's beseeching looks in her direction didn't seem to be having any kind of effect on her. She had some kind of pistol hanging from the end of her arm and seemed to know how to use it.

  "I want everyone to spread out in an arc. Stay far enough back that you don't get caught up in the area of effect of my ability, but if something goes wrong be ready to jump in and help out the new arrivals."

  Alec's orders got a round of nods and then everyone turned towards the entrance of the amphitheater. A few seconds later I was able to hear it too, an engine under hard acceleration. The white subcompact that raced into view caused Alec and Donovan to look at each other in astonishment.

  "I thought we were expecting someone in a black SUV first, Donovan."

  "Indeed, sir."

  The white car was followed by a red minivan which was in turn followed by a pair of black SUV's, which would have been good except for the fact that these SUV's were sporting flecks of red and white paint from where they'd tried to run our people off of the road.

  "They've learned from the other ambushes so far—they're being more aggressive. They want to get their people here all at once rather than letting them come in piecemeal. Why didn't we know this was developing? This is going to have major strategy implications, Donovan."

  "I'm not sure, Master Alec. The logical answer is that they must have used their IT resources to shut down our communications."

  "Once we're clear of this we're going to need to invest in some dedicated communications equipment. It's not going to be possible to get by just using the commercial providers like we've been doing up until now."

  The car and the minivan both screeched to a stop less than a dozen feet away from the RV's, but rather than following them, the two SUVs stopped back by the entrance to the amphitheater. I realized what was going on at the same time that Alec did.

  "They're trying to trap the rest of our people and kill them before we can get there!"

  The words came from a throat that was no longer human. Alec had thrown himself forward, shifting to hybrid form mid leap. The rest of our people—everyone but Donovan—followed less than a second behind, charging the two SUVs and the six heavily-tattooed men who were already exiting the vehicles.

  Donovan was the last person I would have expected to lose his nerve, but then again maybe I wasn't being fair to him. It had been decades since he'd last fought in anything other than the financial arena, and there was something to be said for the idea that he was too valuable to be risked in a grand melee where luck would play just as much a part in his fate as his rusty combat skills.

  I opened my mouth to call Donovan back, to order him into the other RV as a way of saving face, when it happened. The sound was a kind of crack, with an odd kind of vibrating echo that seemed to hang in the air afterwards. At first I didn't understand what had happened. Even after I finally registered that what I was hearing was gunfire, I initially thought the shot had come from Mallory who was limping along behind everyone else. Only her gun was still pointed down toward the ground.

  By the time the second shot rang out, Alec was less than a dozen feet from the Coun'hij enforcers and based on the way that they'd crumpled to the ground, his power was active. The first shot had taken
him in the left shoulder, but he didn't even slow down.

  Afterwards I would ask myself again and again whether he initially just didn't realize that he'd been shot or if he knew but threw himself forward regardless, desperate to neutralize the enforcers who were guarding the only usable cover in the kill zone that the parking lot had just become.

  Ash would have told me that the first shot out of a cold barrel is always the least accurate one. The sniper had missed Alec's heart by inches with his first shot. The second shot should have taken Alec's head off, but somehow he managed to twist aside at precisely the right instant to make the second shot miss him and tear through one of the SUV's instead.

  I didn't remember starting up the RV, but I started it forward with a vague idea that I needed to be there with Alec rather than sitting here uselessly dozens of yards away. I started to veer to the left to avoid running Donovan over, but the only sign of his presence was fragments of black and white cloth that hadn't even had a chance to finish fluttering toward the ground yet.

  Some of our people had figured out what was going on, but they still weren't fast enough. The third shot took Alec through the chest and he went down in a spray of blood that I knew was much worse than any other injury he'd ever sustained.

  The two wolves and the hybrid who had arrived in the white car and the minivan scattered in an effort to avoid the incoming gunfire. Even Vik started towards the SUV's as though intent on saving his own neck. Only Paul acted the way that a bodyguard was supposed to.

  Alec had started falling as a hybrid, but by the time he slammed into the ground he'd shifted back to his human form. It was a bad sign, he wouldn't have abandoned the safety of his hybrid body unless he was forced to. That meant severely injured…or dead.

  Paul scooped Alec up with one hand, barely breaking stride as he charged towards the SUV's. His massive hybrid claws tore into Alec's flesh, but there wasn't anything to be done about it. Paul was right—the first priority had to be getting Alec out of the line of fire.

  The Coun'hij enforcers that Alec had laid out so casually with his power were starting to stir now that he wasn't actively draining them. We still had at least a second or two before they would recover enough to pull themselves up to their feet and be a threat, but our people were too scattered. We needed them concentrated around the SUV's so that they could take advantage of the small window of time during which the enforcers were vulnerable, but if they'd stayed together they would have been too easy for the sniper to pick off.

  All of that went through my mind in a flash as the RV finally got up to twenty miles per hour. I was contemplating trying to run the hybrids over, as unlikely as that was to work considering just how fast they were, and then I saw Mallory. She hadn't gone over to try and get Alec out of the line of fire, but then again given how crippled Agony had left her it was unlikely she could have done anything to save him.

  Instead she continued limping toward the SUV's with the same determined gait that she'd used so far. She was less than twenty feet away from the enforcers when she raised her handgun and sighted in on the first hybrid.

  They really weren't that far away in the grand scheme of things, but I couldn't imagine a world where I could have hit someone from so far away. Luckily Mallory wasn't me; her first shot was perfectly placed in the chest of her target and the next one followed up a split second later.

  The sound of the handgun was nothing more than muted pops in comparison to the crack of the hypervelocity rounds from the rifle. As another shot rang out from the sniper I absently wondered how I'd ever thought that first shot had come from Mallory. This time the sniper hit Paul. I didn't see where the shot landed, but Paul went down with a suddenness that initially made me think that he'd just tripped.

  Mallory was still working her way through the enforcers. The third one had pulled himself to his knees by the time that she started in on him and it took three shots to put him down. Vik was past the initial shock of being shot at for the first time and he blurred into motion. I shouldn't have been able to follow him—maybe I simply visualized what I thought was happening, since my mind wasn't capable of following his actual motions—but it looked like he raked his claws across the throat of one enemy and then put his fist into the chest of a second enforcer.

  I felt a tiny thrill of hope that we might be able to salvage the situation and then the sniper fired again and Vik rocked backwards as his shoulder turned into a mess of red. Mallory swapped magazines and resumed firing, scoring a shot on the last enforcer as he lunged toward her.

  Mallory was as good as dead. In her human form she was faster than I was, but even if she hadn't been crippled she still wouldn't have been a match for a hybrid.

  I had a fraction of a second to begin mourning her and then Vik was there. His left arm wasn't working, but that didn't stop him from tackling the other hybrid like an NFL lineman. The two of them hadn't even come down from their first bounce before Mallory put another bullet into the enforcer's head.

  It was the kind of risky shot that meant she and Vik were going to have words later, but I didn't have time for worrying about that. After what felt like forever, I was finally pulling up next to Alec and Paul.

  I angled the RV so that the right side was facing the sniper's position, and then bailed out of the driver's seat into the tiny sliver of ground that was hidden from the sniper's view. I wasn't under any illusion that the RV was actually going to stop a bullet; the best I could hope for was that he wouldn't hit anybody if he couldn't see us.

  A second later another shot rang out, punching a hole in the aluminum skin of the RV that was bigger than both of my fists put together. I ducked despite knowing that it wasn't going to make any kind of difference. If the next shot had my name on it then nothing I did was going to change the outcome.

  Somehow Mallory had made it over to my side. I looked at Paul and my mind blanked out. I'd registered that Paul had gone back to human form, but that was all my mind was willing to let me see. It wasn't the first time I'd seen a dead person, but it was the first time I'd seen someone killed by a high-powered rifle round.

  "Get him off of Alec!"

  Mallory's voice was loud in my ear. I started to comply, but she grabbed onto my arm. "Not you, him."

  Vik was standing in front of me as if by magic. He'd shifted back to human form and his arm still hung limply at his side, but he was moving, which put him in better shape than Alec or Paul.

  Another bullet tore through the side of the RV and then a scream cut through the echo of the most recent shot. After all of the shooting I shouldn't have been able to hear anything, but somehow my ears were still working well enough that I was able to register the fact that the scream had ended with an abruptness that wasn't natural.

  A second later Donovan's voice drifted down to us. "The shooter has been neutralized. Get Master Alec inside before the next group of enforcers arrives."

  Chapter 4

  Adriana Paige

  Interstate 15

  Southern Idaho

  We didn't make it away before the next two carloads of our people arrived, Coun'hij enforcers in hot pursuit. Actually, we didn't even come close. Our people were still running back to the RV after having scattered six ways from Sunday.

  I thought we were all dead. Realistically we should have been. We had a slight edge in numbers, but not enough of an edge to make up for the fact that we would be pitting wolves up against hybrids. We were obviously in a state of disarray when the enforcers arrived, so they didn't seem to be in much of a hurry, at least not until the first of Donovan's shots slammed into the big hybrid at the center of their formation.

  Up until that moment I hadn't even realized that Donovan even knew how to use a firearm, let alone that he was a crack shot capable of bringing down moving targets from a couple hundred yards away with an unfamiliar weapon.

  I watched in awe as Donovan dropped three of the new enforcers in the couple of seconds between when the new arrivals stepped out of their ve
hicles and when both sides crashed into each other in a whirling frenzy of fangs and claws.

  I'd been standing next to the driver's seat of the RV, paralyzed by a combination of shock and fear as our remaining wolves and hybrids tore into the last three enforcers, but Mallory's yell got me moving again.

  "Where is Donovan? He's the best doctor the pack's ever had, but if he doesn't get here soon even he isn't going to be able to save Alec!"

  I threw open the door and hung out of the RV, heedless of the fact that I was probably making our vehicle a priority target.

  "Donovan, we need you down here right now!"

  A second later something big knocked me completely away from the RV. My world rotated a couple of times as I went sailing through the air, and only the fact that I landed looking back towards the fight allowed me to piece together what had happened.

  One of the Coun'hij hybrids had managed to break away from the fight and charge the RV. Vik had knocked me out of the way and then shifted forms as he leapt out of the RV and intercepted the enforcer.

  It wasn't a fair fight, not with Vik unable to use one of his arms, but a pair of wolves had been nipping at the heels of the enforcer and once he and Vik finished skipping across the concrete they made short work of the outnumbered hybrid.

  Donovan appeared at my side, as if by magic, and helped me to my feet. I turned to thank him and almost tripped over my own feet as I registered his appearance. He was wearing a standard, pack-issue ha'bit which meant that for the first time I was able to see the wiry musculature that his butler's uniform had always concealed before now.

  Donovan wasn't going to be featured on any swimsuit calendars in the near future—he was still obviously an old man—but there was a solidness to him that I'd never noticed before. He looked like a sixty-year-old, but he looked like a sixty-year-old who worked out.