Lost (4 page)

"Is
that safe given what happened the last time you fired up one of your
gadgets?"

I
was pretty sure Kristin was trying to get a rise out of me. Knowing
that made it easier to avoid rising to the bait.

"My
tablet doesn't have any kind of cellular connection on it and I've
even got the wi-fi turned off. There is zero chance of anyone using
this to track us down. Besides, you're one to talk."

Ash
shot me a look and then reached over with his free hand and
intertwined his fingers with Kristin's.

"Isaac
knows. He figured it out last night."

Kristin
almost seemed to come apart before my very eyes. The facade of the
strong, independent, devil-may-care woman crumbled into pieces and
for the first time I could remember I saw real fear in Kristin's
eyes.

"What
are you going to do now that you know?"

Ash
interrupted before I could respond. "He's not going to hurt you.
Even if he wanted to I wouldn't let anything happen to you."

Kristin
gave Ash a sad smile before she turned back to me. "Isaac is a
big boy, he can answer the question for himself."

I
held her gaze for a dozen seconds before I spoke. "What would
you do in my place?"

"I'd
put you down and never look back. It's the only smart answer, the
only way to guarantee that you wouldn't eventually rip my heart out
of my chest. You wouldn't even need to get the drop on me because I
have zero chance of beating you unless I have surprise on my side."

I
nodded. "You're not wrong. What about if it was Ash who was
under attack by Dream Stealer, what would you do then?"

I'd
only thought that I was seeing the real Kristin a few seconds before.
She'd let me see
some
of what was going on inside of her, but the look in her eyes now was
like the thinnest layer of sanity imaginable stretched over a hungry
pit.

"I'd
do exactly what he's doing. I'd try to help him fight it, but I'd get
him off where he couldn't do any damage when he finally snapped, and
I'd bring along someone who could put him down quick and painlessly
if it came to that."

Kristin
was good, maybe in another year or two she'd be able to lie with her
body as well as she already lied with her face and voice, but she
wasn't there yet. Ash and I both knew that she wouldn't have been
able to stand by while someone tried to kill Ash.

Kristin
had one of the strongest survival instincts I'd ever seen. Plenty of
wolves and hybrids would have just given up in the face of someone
like Anton. He'd been a relentless, nearly unstoppable killing
machine, but Ash and Kristin had just kept fighting until they
managed to beat him. They'd had help, but even that almost hadn't
been enough. If either of them had blinked at any point in that last
fight we all would have died.

It
was almost inconceivable for someone like Kristin to choose a path
she knew would get her killed when there was another option out
there, but that was exactly what she was trying so hard not to tell
us.

She
really would execute me without a second thought if I was the one who
was a living time-bomb, but she wouldn't kill Ash, not in a million
years, not even knowing that failing to do so would mean he would
eventually snap and kill her.

"Is
that why you've been extra unpleasant lately? Are you trying to make
it easier on me when the time comes to put you down?"

I
got a single, short nod in response. "Yeah, I guess so."

"Okay
then, it sounds like we all understand each other. Ash will do
whatever he has to in order to keep you alive, right up to and
possibly including killing me. I will kill both of you before I let
you hurt Alec and the rest of my friends, and you'll hold out for as
long as you possibly can because you know that once Dream Stealer
turns you, Ash is a dead man. He might be able to beat me, but he
won't be able to beat you."

"Yeah,
I guess that about sums it up."

I
wanted to close my eyes and pretend none of this was happening. This
was exactly the kind of impossible situation that Alec had faced the
first time that we'd crossed paths with Agony. I didn't have any good
options. If—no, when—Kristin buckled under the pressure
of Dream Stealer's nightly attacks, nothing I did would be right. The
best I could do at that point was try to pick a bad choice that would
still leave me able to look at myself in the mirror once it was all
said and done.

I'd
spent months hating Alec for his choices the night Jess' memories had
been torn away from her, and now I was about to walk a mile in his
shoes.

"Fine.
I'm willing to give the two of you some time before we do anything
final. I'll even help when it comes to trying to track down Dream
Stealer, not that I think we have a chance in hell of actually
finding him, but I'll do my best. The secrets and the lying stop now
though. We keep detailed logs of how you are doing each day, and you
tell us the moment that something changes.

"Assuming
that there is a lock out there that Ash hasn't already taught you to
pick, I'll even buy off on the idea of locking you up if it becomes
obvious that you are at the end of your rope, but I'm not going to
leave anything to chance. From here on out you know as little about
what's going on as possible.

"The
best way to make sure that you don't do any damage to the cause is to
keep you completely in the dark about what's going on with everyone
else. We don't tell you where we are headed, and when you fall asleep
we change directions so that even if you break we still can't be
tracked down."

Ash
shook his head. "That's going too far, Isaac. That's no way to
live, she's still got control of things, there's no reason to make
her a prisoner this soon."

I
didn't look at Ash, choosing instead to hold Kristin's gaze. "Is
it too much, Kristin?"

She
gave me a thin, bitter smile. "I rather suspect that you're just
getting started, aren't you, Isaac?"

"Answer
the question before Ash decides he needs to try to draw down on me."

Kristin
turned in her seat so she could look at Ash and then she turned back
to me. "That's fine. I'll put up with a lot worse if that's what
it takes to keep from cutting Ash's throat while he sleeps."

"Like
you said, I'm just getting started."

That
earned me another smile. "That's okay, Isaac. If nothing else,
all of the crap you're about to put me through means that I'll feel
less bad if you fail and I end up killing you."

Isaac Nazir
I-55
Western Tennessee

I didn't realize just how much Ash was still holding out on me until
the next night. We'd been tooling around the Midwest all day,
clocking a lot of miles but not really getting anywhere. Ash and
Kristin spent the day watching to make sure that we hadn't picked up
a tail. I spent the day putting together a plan of attack on every
major database I could think of.

There
was a limit to what I could do on my tablet with no internet
connection. I couldn't even scout to see what kind of security I was
going to be up against, but in a way that was good because it forced
me to think much more big picture than I normally did. It was
actually kind of liberating to come up with a plan of attack and not
have to worry about how we were going to make the specifics work.

I
was pretty good, but I wasn't world-class, not like the guys Alec had
on the payroll these days. I couldn't hack the State Department, but
Ash was right, I knew enough to keep the guys who could hack the big
targets mostly honest. It was still basically tilting at windmills,
but I was willing to give it a chance for as long as Ash was willing
to fund the kind of talent we would need if we were going to have any
chance of succeeding.

Kristin
had moved back to the back seat before falling asleep so that I'd
have better access for my power adapter. My tablet was a wonderful
piece of engineering, but even it couldn't go for twenty hours at a
stretch without being recharged. The fact that I was in the front
passenger seat meant that I was perfectly positioned to notice when
Ash turned south rather than north as I'd been expecting him to when
we hit the west edge of Tennessee.

"What
are you doing? I thought your safe house was up in Montana
somewhere."

"It
is—or rather one of them is—but that's where Kristin is
expecting us to go. You were the one who was all up in arms about
making sure that she couldn't lead Dream Stealer to us. I'm doing the
unexpected."

My
armrest started to groan and I forced myself to relax before I ripped
it free of the chair. "Montana is a pretty big state; I think
that Dream Stealer would have a hard time finding us with nothing
more than that to go on, but you know that even better than I do. How
about you cut the crap and tell me what's going on before I decide to
leave the two of you and go my own way?"

"You
don't have the cash to do that, Isaac."

I
purposefully made my laugh extra mocking, but I kept it low enough
not to wake up Kristin. "You've obviously spent too much time as
the only rich boy in the neighborhood. Do you really think that Alec
would send us all out without a war chest? The Graves family is worth
billions. Not one or two billion dollars, mid to high double digits.

"Every
single one of those RV's was loaded with something like half a
million dollars in cash and prepaid credit cards. I've got more than
enough to get me wherever I need to go and Alec will send more with
nothing more than a call. Your money doesn't have any kind of hold
over me. Start talking."

Ash
took a deep breath and a little ray of warmth shone through me as I
realized that I'd managed to get under
his
skin for a change. It was petty, but it was also a sign that he
wasn't in complete control of everything like he usually pretended.
Our little partnership wasn't going to work unless he was willing to
eventually acknowledge that he was just as far in over his head as I
was.

"Fine.
I've tried to keep this particular card close to my chest because
it's not really my secret to be sharing."

"Whose
secret is it?"

"My
family's. We've got more of them even than you'd expect. It's the
only reason that we haven't been run entirely out of the New Orleans
pack—that or killed. My sister is still back there, still under
Onyx's thumb, and what I'm about to tell you is one of her hole
cards. It's the one she'll play when she's out of all other options,
so it's vital that none of this make it back to Onyx before then."

Ash
waited to make sure that I understood the importance of what he'd
just told me, and then cleared his throat.

"What
do you know about lamias?"

It
was such a non sequitur that it took me a moment to collect my
thoughts. "Greek mythological creatures, snakes below the waist,
women above the waist. The Old World is even more off limits than the
eastern half of the United States, so there is less in the way of
confirmation when it comes to whether or not something from over
there is based in fact or not, but I haven't seen anything that makes
me think they are more than just a legend."

"Yeah,
they're real. I mean there is a lot that the myths got wrong, but
there's something out in the bayous that I'm pretty sure is based on
the same thing as the Greek legends. There are bits and pieces of
other stuff that seems to tie back to the same creature. One of the
Aztec gods was depicted as a man with snake fangs—I think his
name was Tlaloc. That's supposedly closer to the truth."

My
stomach was already tying itself into knots. Even my beast wasn't
happy about the news that there was yet another thing out there that
might end up hunting us at some point.

"The
Aztec gods weren't a very warm and cuddly pantheon, Ash. Why are we
headed down to see something that had a hand in human sacrifices? Do
you know that some sources claim that the Aztecs alone sacrificed a
quarter of a million people per year?"

Ash
nodded. "I'm not as well read as you are generally speaking, but
I think that you'll find that in this area I'm just as informed as
you are. The Incan and the Mayan civilizations practiced human
sacrifice too, but it does seem like the Aztecs took it to a whole
other level. The rededication of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan
resulted in somewhere between ten thousand and eighty thousand
sacrifices over the course of just four days."

"You
know that Strakes originally thought that the presence of human
sacrifice in South America was compelling evidence that there were
vampires in the New World before the arrival of Columbus?"

Benitone
Strakes was the closest thing we shape shifters had to a historian,
at least one whose writings had survived and been disseminated beyond
just their immediate pack.

My
observation earned me a rare smile from Ash. He smiled at Kristin
sometimes, but most of the rest of us never saw anything other than
his game face.

"Does
this mean you're not pissed off at me anymore?"

"No,
it means I'm willing to avoid thinking about just how pissed I am for
as long as you continue to keep this conversation interesting."

It
wasn't completely a lie. I was still kind of mad, but I wasn't as mad
as I should have been. Ash looked back at the road and shrugged.

"Yeah,
I was aware of that, but you're starting to get to the very edge of
my expertise. Strakes has been conclusively disproved on that point
from what I understand though. There aren't any records of shape
shifters encountering vampires on this continent until well after the
Europeans started founding colonies over here. The case is still out
when it comes to werewolves—there have been plenty of
unexplained disappearances that they might have caused—but
unlike vampires, werewolves are pretty good at hiding from us since
they don't have as distinctive a smell."