Riven (16 page)

I'd expected as
much given that Shawn hadn't spent the last few years in a state of
near-constant skirmish with Brandon's pack like I had, but I didn't
expect for Grayson to do much the same to me.

At first I thought
I was just losing my edge, but that wasn't it. I hit Grayson with
some of my best moves and he countered them with combinations that
I'd never seen. He was aggressive, but there was something missing
there, maybe a lack of commitment that would have otherwise allowed
him to take me down in the first few seconds of the fight. As it was
I managed to stretch things out for nearly a full minute before he
finally managed a clinch and took me to the ground.

He demonstrated
greater than usual control of his beast and rolled away without
having to be pulled off of me, but even after he was several feet
away I stayed on the ground reconstructing the last few seconds of
the fight. It was like the difference between a street fighter and a
classically trained martial artist. I had experience and pure
aggression on my side, but he'd stayed a step ahead of me nearly the
entire fight. It could have gone the other way with a little luck on
my side, but it was one more piece of evidence that there was more to
Grayson than met the eye. No dispossessed would have such a complete
breadth of training. There were only a few packs that had maintained
their integrity for long enough to be able to muster the knowledge
base required to produce someone like Grayson.

Ulrich's pack
topped the list, but I knew Grayson hadn't ever belonged to the
Chicago pack, just like I knew he hadn't been part of any of the
others that were possibilities. He was still holding out on me and I
was running out of time to convince him that I was one of the good
guys.

For all that I'd
received the most thorough trouncing I'd suffered through in months,
the sparring session was over all too soon. I cleaned up and then
jumped on an encrypted conference call with Ash, Donovan, and the
pack leaders who'd sworn to me. Just because they'd promised
obedience didn't mean that they were all completely ready to give up
jockeying for position, and I nearly lost my temper more than once
during the course of the call. The only thing that got me through the
call was the knowledge that Adri would be waiting for me as soon as
we were done.

Once the call was
done, I confirmed with Donovan that the arrangements for our date
were all completed and then went looking for Adri. I found her
waiting for me in my room with a copy of
Pride and Prejudice
resting open on her lap.

"Happy
Valentine's Day, Adri."

I leaned in and
kissed her and then realized as I drew back just how tired she
looked.

"Are you
okay, Adri?"

"Yeah, I'm
fine. Having Mom here just took more out of me than I expected it to.
Did you know that Russ proposed?"

I double-checked
that my ability wasn't subconsciously draining her and then shook my
head in response to her question. "I didn't know—I don't keep a
really close eye on her, but I can start doing so if you want me to."

"No, it's
okay. I suspect that Russ is more than capable of doing that all by
himself. What do you think of the idea of them getting married?"

I shrugged. "She's
not my mom, Adri. What really matters is how you feel about it."

"I guess
you're right. I'm happy for her, it just feels really, really odd for
her to be marrying again already."

I gently picked
the book up off of her knees and set it on the table beside her
before pulling her to her feet.

"For whatever
it's worth I didn't turn up any kind of dirt on Russ in any of the
checks we did on him. I think he's a very capable, very good guy.
Your mom could do a lot worse."

She leaned into me
and wrapped her arms around my shoulders. "Russ sounds an awful
lot like someone else I know."

The trip out to
the far greenhouse took nearly twenty minutes, but it was all worth
it when I got to see the expression on Adri's face as I led her into
our own little tropical paradise. Nearly every kind of fruit could be
found somewhere inside this particular greenhouse and Adri seemed
eager to go explore.

I laughed and then
nudged her towards the raspberries. "They are through that door
on the right side. Here's a basket, you go ahead. I'll put out the
blanket and then join you in a minute."

The picnic basket
was perfect. With all of the new arrivals we'd had to hire a cook and
Donovan had made sure that she'd included plenty of warm, fresh-baked
bread and enough butter to slather every piece in yellow goodness and
still have half the tin left over. I spread everything out and then
picked up an empty container and followed Adri's scent trail. She'd
covered the bottom of her bucket with raspberries and then moved on
through the various separate sections of the greenhouse collecting
tangerines, guava fruit and kiwis. She seemed to be debating over a
casaba melon when I finally caught up to her.

When she wasn't
looking I carefully set a grapefruit, which I knew she hated, into
her basket and then lifted her up so that she could reach the bottom
of an unusually tall peach tree. Our conversation was relaxed and
natural for the next twenty minutes while we filled our respective
buckets up with fruit.

Back at the
blanket we slowly worked our way through a combination of what
Donovan had sent along and the stuff that we'd gathered from inside
the greenhouse. Adri cocked her head to the side when I started in on
my second loaf of bread. "I thought I was the bread lover."

"You are, I'm
just trying to make sure that I consume enough calories that I'm not
hungry sometime in the next two hours."

She nodded and
popped a raspberry into her mouth. "This was perfect, Alec. It
reminds me of when we were first together. Simple activities that
didn't get in the way of you and I getting to know each other."

I found myself
smiling. "Just wait until you have to mix your own dessert.
You'll start singing a different tune then."

Adri grabbed a
container of vanilla yogurt and mixed pieces of tangerine into it.
"Nope, I'm still happy. I know that my life is going to be
pretty high-profile in some ways after marrying you, but it's
memories like this that will keep me going through all of that."

I used my spoon to
sample a bit of her yogurt and gave her a nod. "You should
market that stuff, it's really quite good. I think it needs more
grapefruit though."

Adri stuck her
tongue out at me and we both laughed for a couple of minutes. Once
the laughter died down I reached over and tucked a stray strand of
hair behind her left ear. "This has been hard on you, hasn't
it?"

"Honestly?
Yes. Not just all the craziness of the wedding prep, although that
has been plenty odious. It's all of the other girls too."

"Adri, you
know I'd never..."

She interrupted me
with a quick headshake. "I know you're not responding to any of
their advances, but it's still hard to see them throwing themselves
at you again and again. It's...well, it's like I get daily
evidence that if you ever got the least bit tired of me that you'd
have plenty of other options."

She looked away
from me for several seconds and sighed. "I've been wanting to
talk to you about how much I hate planning for the wedding, but I
haven't. Partly because you warned me that it was going to be like
this back when you proposed, but mostly it's because I don't want to
seem ungrateful, don't want to make you second-guess your decision to
marry me in the first place. Mom told me that I should talk to you
about it though."

I pulled her back
around so that I could see her face and then I kissed her forehead.
"Adri, I wish you would have said something sooner. Your mom was
right, you should always bring these kinds of concerns to me. Do you
really think the fact that you prefer not to spend money would make
me second-guess marrying you? Half of those girls who are throwing
themselves at me would make one exorbitant demand after another if
they were in your shoes, just to see what they could get away with."

She looked up at
me with the barest glimmer of hope in her expression and I smiled at
her. "I think you're amazing on every level. I'm doing what I
can to keep our guests in check, but if it will make you happy I'll
send them all home and we can have the simple ceremony that you
want."

The offer hung in
the air between us for several seconds before she shook her head
again. "No, I knew what I was getting into and besides, it would
be the wrong answer. You need to handle the other packs however you
think gives us the best chance of recruiting them to our side.
Everything depends on that. Not just my happiness but the survival of
everyone who depends on you. I haven't forgotten what Shawn told us
and I haven't forgotten that I swore to do everything in my power to
support you in your quest to take down the Coun'hij and see your
people free once again."

"Not my
people, our people. We are off to a small start but things are
starting to come together. They'll start to snowball from here and
before you know it we'll be safe, truly safe, again."

"Our people?"

"Yes, our
people. I couldn't do all of this without you."

Adri pulled me
down into a kiss and for a while nothing else mattered.

Dominic Sanchez
Abandoned Industrial Park
Cedar City, Utah

It was nice to be
spending a night away from the house, but I couldn't help but feel
guilty at the same time. Rachel was doing worse than ever and there
wasn't anything I could do but sit there and watch. I'd tried to
exercise my supposed healing talent, but nothing had happened. For a
second or two I'd almost felt like I was touching something bigger
than just Rachel or me, but then it disappeared and I was left with
the same result as the time I'd tried to heal James. In a word,
nothing.

The patrols that
Alec had started having people run weren't necessarily the kind of
thing that most people wanted to be doing, but it was better than
sitting there and watching Rachel talk to people who weren't in the
room with us. Sometimes she didn't even seem to be able to hear me
when I tried to talk to her.

Jess reached for
the stereo and it was all I could do not to hiss at her. We were the
wheels for this particular excursion. That meant that we were
supposed to be listening to the handheld radio, not rocking out to
whatever new song Wyatt had introduced Jess to.

I told myself to
calm down as I took a right turn so that we'd be able to continue to
shadow James and Peter. I didn't particularly like Jess' current
choice in crushes, but at least some of that was because I knew
exactly how much she and Isaac had been through before Oblivion had
stolen her memories.
She
didn't remember that, not any more at
least, so I needed to cut her a break, at least a little bit of one.

It would have been
easier if she wasn't behaving stupidly in so many other respects.
This wasn't a punishment detail for the rest of us, but it definitely
was for Jess. Since she'd left Rachel on her own Alec had kept her
busy with one mission after another, but she still found time to hang
out with Wyatt somehow.

Alec was pretty
shrewd, but I was starting to think that he was getting too clever
this time around. The patrol needed to be run—we couldn't let the
disappearance of five people in two days go uninvestigated this close
to our territory—but she didn't need to be here. Rather than
punishing her, he was actually just punishing the rest of us with her
presence.

The two-way radio
crackled with static and then James' voice reached out of it and
soothed away some of my irritation. "Our nose thinks that he's
found the scent of one of our missing people. He's headed north."

I grabbed the
transmitter before Jess could pick it up and say something that would
piss James off. "Werewolves don't usually drag their victims
this far out to kill them."

"Yeah, I
know. They also don't usually leave them alive for this long. I'm
starting to think that we're dealing with something else."

"Not
bloodsuckers?"

"Nope, the
whole town smells wonderfully vampire-free. No, best bet is just some
psycho dayborn."

We'd borrowed the
setup for these patrols from the Tucson pack. They had a long history
of hunting werewolves despite the Coun'hij's orders not to do so, and
Peter was their go-to guy for this kind of thing. Peter had been
ranging around on four legs for the last two hours as our 'nose' with
James following along behind in his normal shape so that he could
provide backup if Peter got jumped.

Jess and I were
supposed to stay close enough for the guys to be able to use us as a
getaway car but not so close that we'd get pulled into a trap
ourselves.

The silence after
James' last transmission lasted only a few seconds before Jess used
her bubblegum to blow a massive bubble. "You're lucky to have
James. He doesn't seem nearly as annoying as Isaac."

I shook my head.
"James and I have our share of problems, but we work at it and
so far things have worked out. Having a relationship is never easy."

I must have let a
little more of my frustration slip into my voice than I'd realized.
Jess sat in silence for several seconds before trying again. "So
are you going to swear one of these stupid oaths to Alec?"

"Yes, I am. I
would have done so already but James asked me to wait a few weeks so
he could think things over."

"Why? I know
you guys think Alec hung the moon, but all he's done lately is order
people around and spend a lot of time behind closed doors."

"That's kind
of a personal thing to be asking me. Besides, I'm not sure you'd
understand even if I tried to explain it."