by Dean Murray
Jasmin nipped at James, apparently having been released as soon as the vampire had taken James over, but the momentum of the fight had shifted away from us. All four of us had been hard-pressed to keep the bloodsucker occupied. Now that he was turning us against each other there didn't seem to be much hope of winning.
Amazingly, one of the chairs I'd just thrown clipped the vampire in the shoulder before ricocheting off and hitting the window behind him. He stepped out of the path of the third chair, and the cracks on the window behind him doubled in size.
I had managed to hit him though, and that meant he couldn't take one of us over and stay inside our minds well enough to anticipate our every action at the same time.
Jasmin yelped in pain as James connected with his claws, but I was too far away to stop James, and if I let myself get distracted it would leave the vampire free to do whatever he wanted. I heard movement off to my left and charged forward just in time to avoid a large knife that leapt off of the kitchen counter, powered by a telekinetic push.
There wasn't any way to get all of us out of this particular fight alive. I'd gotten us in over our heads, which meant that I needed to be the one to save them.
My dodge of the knife hadn't just been a single step forward. That's probably all it would have taken to avoid being impaled, but I'd dashed towards the vampire at a full sprint. The distance between us wasn't sufficient to get up to full speed, but I came close and the vampire obviously hadn't been expecting that.
The smart thing would have been to avoid overcommitting. You had to commit your bodyweight to any given attack when you were fighting another hybrid or a werewolf because they were too big for anything less, but that wasn't how you fought a wolf.
For those kinds of fights you kept your weight balanced so that you could change directions on a dime and used your claws in lightning-quick attacks to keep your enemy off balance. Fighting a vampire was a lot more like fighting a wolf than anything else and that went doubly so when it came to fighting a vampire who might or might not be inside of your head at any given time.
I ignored all of the rules of smart fighting and threw myself at the monster currently inside of my friend's mind. The katana darted in from my left side, but the sheer stupidity of my attack succeeded in catching the vampire off guard. He started to hold his ground just like he would have done against a human, but even if he'd cut me in half that still wouldn't have been enough to stop me from colliding with him.
At the last second he tried to move to the side, which robbed his blow of most of its power. My claws deflected the blade up into the meaty part of my side, and then my right hand grabbed him.
We were going to hit the glass hard.
Maybe the glass would have held if it hadn't been compromised already by the chairs that had cracked it, but more than likely we still would have shattered it. I pushed the vampire ahead of me and felt him trying to break into my mind in the split second before he hit the window.
It was the last effort of a desperate man, but even as dark threads of thought breached my defenses I knew he was too late. Even if I'd been trying to stop us from hurtling out into space I wouldn't have been able to.
I heard footsteps, James' heavy hybrid thumps and the lighter ones from the two girls and wondered whether or not one of them was still being controlled by the vampire, but that didn't matter either. Even another hybrid couldn't stop me now, there was simply too much mass moving at too great of a speed.
The glass bowed as the back of the vampire's head hit it, and then it shattered. I had so much adrenaline in my system that it all happened in slow motion. One moment I was looking at a single pane of glass, spiderwebbed with cracks, and then tens of thousands of pieces shivered in the air as the vampire cut through them in a spray of red.
The vampire was all of the way out of the building now, but he let go of his sword and was trying to grab hold of my arm. It didn't matter, nothing mattered anymore, but I didn't want to fall to my death connected to a parasite who had killed thousands of people to preserve his unnatural existence.
I shifted forms, and the vampire's hands closed on empty air, my human fingertips now ending nearly a foot sooner than they had as a hybrid. The vampire finally realized that there wasn't anything he could do to save himself and I saw a level of terror on his face that I hope to never see again.
Popular culture glorifies vampires and portrays them as powerful beings who survive for centuries based off of willpower, but at that moment I saw the truth. He'd survived for centuries, but it hadn't been because of a drive to achieve some kind of master plan. He'd survived because he'd been terrified of dying.
I closed my eyes as gravity started to take hold of me. Things had happened so quickly that I couldn't have traveled more than a few inches, a foot at most, out of the building, but I had nothing to push against, no way of reversing my course.
I had a moment to hope that my death wouldn't hit Rachel too hard, hidden away back in the States against her will because I hadn't wanted to expose her to danger, and then my leg was practically ripped from my body.
The pain nearly made me black out. It wasn't just the sudden deceleration. James tried not to tear me up too badly, but he'd been most concerned with stopping me, so he'd sunk all five claws into my leg nearly down to the bone.
My course reversed with a suddenness that would have been impossible with anything less than the massive, preternaturally strong muscles of a hybrid powering the change, and then I was sliding across the floor.
I looked up to see James stagger back from the broken window. The claws on his right hand were painted red with my blood, and he'd left deep gouges in the metal of the structural steel beam he'd been holding onto.
James met my eye for a second before falling to the ground and shifting back to human form. I'd had no idea just how outmatched we were when we'd set out earlier that evening, but somehow we'd all survived. We'd just burned up all of our luck for at least the next couple of decades.
Chapter 4
Adriana Paige
The Premier Pillow Motel
North Platte, Nebraska
I opened the door to our motel room, which turned out to be furnished all in browns that hadn't seen an update since before I'd been born, and then turned and watched as Taggart maneuvered our suitcases through the door with an ease that contradicted his apparent age. He looked like a sixty-year-old Native American man who would have a hard time withstanding a strong gust of wind, but in truth he was both older and stronger than he looked.
I'd tried several times to get him to let me carry my own luggage, but Taggart was old-fashioned. Not old-fashioned like some people I'd known who had latched onto something they'd read about for some reason or another. He was old fashioned in that he still clung to ways of behaving that he'd grown up with, protocol and etiquette that had mostly died out a couple hundred years ago.
As much as I wanted to, I'd never quite been able to bring myself to ask Taggart how old he was—it didn't seem polite—but from some of the stuff he'd let drop I was pretty sure that he'd been around when the United States had been founded. In addition to being incredibly strong, shape shifters apparently lived for a lot longer than normal humans.
"You know it would look a lot more normal for me to get my own luggage, don't you? Even if we ignore the fact that girls have been carrying their own stuff for decades, you don't look like you should be able to casually swing a couple hundred pounds over your shoulder. That's the kind of thing that people remember."
Taggart looked up at me with a hint of fire in his eyes. It took a moment for him to force the anger back down, but I was getting used to that.
"There are some things I'm prepared to abandon in the name of expediency, Adriana, but I learned a long time ago that if you don't hold to at least a few core principles then you're liable to be blown completely off course when you least expect it."
It was another clue. Taggart had saved my life. He'd rescued my sister Cindi and me f
rom an honest-to-goodness vampire and in the process he'd saved Tristan, the star quarterback Cindi had been crushing on. I was incredibly grateful that he'd risked so much to help me, but that didn't mean that I completely understood him.
Taggart wasn't always the safest person to be around. I'd first met him in a dream shortly after I'd realized that my dreams weren't like everyone else's.
It seemed impossible, but I could reach out to people while I was asleep, share their dreams and interact with them while they were at their most unguarded. I'd initially thought that I was the only person who could do what I did, but it turned out there was at least one more, Taggart, although even he didn't seem to have exactly the same gift as me.
Our first two encounters had been terrifying. Part of that had been because neither of us had been sure we could trust each other, but that had only been a small part of the reason. Mostly it had been the fact that Taggart's beast, the otherworld energy that allowed him to change shapes, was always just a second or two away from trying to take control away from the man I'd just spent the last several days driving cross-country with.
Taggart had explained the basics of his condition in a few brief sentences during our first full day together, but he'd been less expansive when it came to the details and causes. Mostly he'd focused on what I needed to do to help defuse the situation if his beast got too close to the surface. It mostly centered on not escalating things. Don't look him in the eyes, try to take up less space, talk softly.
It was more or less what I'd always imagined you'd find in a Boy Scout book in the section about dealing with dangerous animals. I'd spent my first day alone with Taggart wondering if I should be trying to make a run for it, but little by little I started to see the other parts of him, the less scary ones.
He held onto his manners because they were one more link in the chain he used to keep himself under control. He didn't always succeed, but it was obvious to me that he really was giving it his best. Someone else might have dismissed his efforts, might have said that he was just another kind of addict, but I didn't. I didn't understand his beast, but it was obvious to me that there was something else there, something inside of him that had its own set of priorities, something that was as strong-willed as any other person I'd ever met.
Taggart's manners weren't just odd because they were so anachronistic, they were odd because they didn't come from any one time period. They were an eclectic collection of things that he'd managed to hold onto despite the long years that had worn away at him. I didn't know how long he'd been on the run, but I'd been doing it for less than a month so far and it was already changing me in ways I hadn't anticipated.
"Do most shape shifters wander around on their own like this?"
The question slipped out of me without conscious decision. It wasn't the smartest thing to do, not so soon after he'd had to force his beast down from a perceived slight, but Taggart seemed to have himself well in hand now.
"No, Adriana, most of my kind live very different lives than I do. We're social by nature. Humans are inherently that way, but there's an extra degree of that for us. We form packs because they offer us a place in the world, they let us know where we fit into the dominance hierarchy and they offer protection for the strong and the weak alike."
"From vampires?"
"Yes…and other things."
"Like what?"
He studied me for several seconds and then shook his head. "You're already dealing with nightmares, I don't think that it's wise to add to your worries right now. Later, once you've had a chance to see how drastically your world has changed, I'll tell you more about the dangers most people never encounter."
I wanted to argue with him, wanted to tell him that I was ready to hear everything, but he was right. I hadn't slept very well ever since Jackson had tried to kill me. For a normal person nightmares were unpleasant enough, for a dream walker they could be deadly.
As long as I realized I was dreaming there wasn't much to be concerned about, but I was generally more present in my dreams than a normal person was. I didn't understand how—I wasn't sure that even Taggart really understood how it happened—but that meant that I could be injured while dreaming.
For Taggart, any injury was potentially problematic because anything that happened to him physically during a dream was carried back into the waking world. Things didn't work quite like that for me.
So far it seemed like broken bones and the like weren't a big deal, they usually just meant that I'd spend the next day or two dealing with an odd phantom pain while I was awake. The big question was what would happen if I was seriously injured. There was a remote possibility that something life-threatening would just result in me spending several days in bed suffering in extreme pain, but Taggart and I were pretty unanimous in the belief that if I got hurt badly enough inside the dream it would be just as fatal for me as those kinds of injuries would be for him.
It was a sobering possibility. Taggart was more experienced than I was inside of the dream and he was naturally stronger and harder to kill as a result of being a shape shifter, but even so we'd lost several days of travel time not too long after he'd found me. He'd tangled with someone or something in a dream that had nearly gotten the better of him. It had been a chilling lesson in just how deep the waters I was now swimming in were.
"Okay, you're right."
Taggart nodded and turned away as if to unzip his suitcase, but I wasn't done with him yet. If he was in the mood to talk then I wanted to get as much out of him as possible.
"Why did you leave your pack then? Is it because of Kaleb and the rest of the…Coun'hij?"
"I've been on my own for more than two hundred years. Kaleb is practically a child. He's been part of the Coun'hij for less than two decades. No, he didn't have anything to do with my exile."
I waited for several seconds, hoping that he'd choose to tell me, but growing more nervous with each heartbeat. I wanted to know, but I also didn't want to push and cause problems between us.
"You don't have to tell me if you don't want to. There's just so much I don't understand."
Taggart sighed and then sat down on his bed. He looked even older when he was hunched over like that. I'd seen his hybrid form. It was still huge and unbowed despite the silver mixed in with his fur. It was hard sometimes to view the two forms as being the same person.
"I'm by myself because I couldn't be trusted to control my beast. I hurt some people when I wasn't much older than you, and my pack drove me away."
"I'm so sorry."
I wasn't sure it was the right thing to say, but then again I spent most of my time these days uncertain of how I was supposed to be responding to things. Taggart had said he'd hurt people, he hadn't said that he'd killed anyone, but even if he had, I could tell that he was sorry for what had happened.
"Don't be, Adriana. It was no less than I deserved. I was as bad as the men and women I've spent so many years fighting. I was completely sure of myself, confident that whatever I wanted was right simply because I wanted it."
"I'm not saying it's right, but that's not that uncommon for a seventeen-year-old. Most of us tend to be pretty self-centered."
Taggart shook his head, refusing to meet my eyes. "Most seventeen-year-olds aren't killing machines who weigh four or five hundred pounds. It was worse than that, I was addicted to the thrill of the fight. My alpha had told me repeatedly that I needed to call my beast to heel, that I needed to control it rather than letting it control me, but I refused to listen. I thought my beast made me strong."
He stood and walked over to the window, still refusing to look at me, still determined to put as much distance between us as he could.
"He was right. There was a girl and another boy who was competing with me for her affections. Things were different back then. There were places where we weren't completely in hiding. They were both humans, but they knew what I was. The boy thought I should stick to my own kind, that I shouldn't be chasing after a human, that I wasn
't safe for her to be around."
"What happened?"
"We got into an argument and I lost control of myself. It had happened before against other hybrids, but that was the first time I'd given into my beast when facing off against someone who couldn't possibly stand up to me."
"I'm sorry. I know you said I shouldn't be, but I am."
Taggart shrugged. "I tried after that. My pack kept me imprisoned until they knew whether…well, until they knew whether I was a murderer, but I knew I was probably going to be exiled, turned into one of the dispossessed. I tried to control myself, tried to master my beast in the hopes that they would recant and let me stay, but it was so hard."
Taggart, the terrifying apparition that other shape shifters called Dream Stealer, rested his forehead against the cool glass of the window and I realized for the first time that his stooped back wasn't from age as much as it was from what he'd been through.
"It seemed so much harder for me than for the others my age. It wasn't until later, after I'd been exiled, that my ability manifested. Sometimes I want to blame everything that happened on my ability, but that is just another way of trying to shirk my guilt."
"An ability means that you have a stronger beast?"
"Nobody knows for sure. It's true that the weaker of my kind seem to struggle much less with their beasts. Some of the weakest wolves claim to not even believe that the rest of us have a distinct entity inside of us, but there are aberrations even to that, wolves who struggle like I did to control themselves. More importantly, there are powerful hybrids, individuals with legendary gifts, who don't seem to have any problem mastering their beasts."
"So since they can do it you feel like you should have been able to?"
"It's more than just a feeling, Adriana. I've spent nearly two centuries trying to learn how to control my inner nature, trying to replace savagery with something higher. I've made some progress, maybe—no, certainly—less than I should have, but I've made progress. I'm damned by my own success. My accomplishment since then has only proven that I could have done better back then if I'd really wanted to."