Authors: Dean Murray
Alec
looked over at me. "The police just found Rex. He was
unconscious on the side of the road, just like Rachel's note said he
would be. She's definitely gone."
It
was like I'd been struck. I'd known that this was a possibility, but
even with the note I'd still had a hard time believing that
Rachel—even the new, unpredictable Rachel—could have really left
like that. I crossed over to Alec and took his hand.
He
gave me a sad smile and then turned back to his phone. "Donovan,
I'd like you to take the Hummer and go get Mallory. Don't worry about
leaving a trail, it's time for her to come home."
Donovan Harringsford
Highway 112
Sanctuary, Utah
The
night had taken on an undeniably surreal feeling. First Master Alec
had informed me that Mistress Rachel had disappeared and then he'd
ordered me into one of the vehicles and granted me the deepest desire
of my heart.
It
was nothing less than ridiculous, but I couldn't stop from feeling
slightly guilty. The byzantine pathways in my mind seemed to have
linked the two events. I knew they were unrelated, but what if I was
wrong, what if my joy had only been possible because it was balanced
by the tragedy of Mistress Rachel abandoning us?
On
any other day my attention would have been wholly focused on the
road. I did so little driving that each time I manned the wheel of
one of the fantastical beasts that filled the garage it felt as
though I was taking my life into my own hands. Tonight was different,
almost as though my mind was flittering about in an effort to not
focus on my purpose. It was like one of those dreams where you
approached your destination slowly because you knew that once you
arrived you'd wake up and you couldn't bear to have the dream end any
sooner than it had to.
I
took myself to task once again and brought the vehicle's speed back
up to something that would allow me to return home to the estate
sometime before sunrise. This might be the moment that I'd yearned
for countless times over the last two decades, but that didn't excuse
me from my duties. Master Alec would doubtless require my assistance
with the effort to find his sister.
Just
ahead, barely visible because of the Hummer's powerful headlights,
was the shed where Alec stored his motorcycle when he came for a
visit. I slowed the vehicle and then turned to the right, bringing it
gently off of the road and onto the barren land that concealed more
than any casual observer would have realized.
My
progress was painfully slow, but still much better than I could have
managed by foot. Alec had selected the vehicle most able to make the
journey, but even so nearly half an hour passed before I finally saw
the entrance to the shallow cave that contained Mallory's home.
I
brought the vehicle to a halt and turned it off without any conscious
memory of having done so, and then found myself standing less than a
pace from Mallory's door. Part of me still wished to prolong the
moment, but I knew that she would be worried. Alec never would have
arrived in such a fashion, so she likely assumed that our enemies had
finally found her. I tugged my suit jacket into place and knocked on
the door.
I
schooled my features into a shadow of their normal proper expression
and then waited as she crossed the distance between us and then
opened the door.
"D...Donovan.
Is it really you or am I caught up in a dream again?"
"If
it's a dream then I'm trapped in the same one. I say trapped, but I
mean favored. Master Alec instructed me to come retrieve you. He
believes that it is past time for you to come out of the shadows and
take your rightful place at his side."
Her
fragile body, wrapped as it was in a simple dress, was a pale
reflection of what it had been before Agony had crippled it, but it
was a beautiful improvement over what she'd been like when I'd left
her here so many years ago. Then she'd been bloodied and a bare
couple of steps from death.
She
looked at me out of the corner of her eye with the doubtful look I
remembered from the time before Agony's first visit. "Alec
didn't really say that, did he?"
"It
was implied. Master Alec didn't actually need to say the words for me
to know how he felt in this instance."
"I
asked him to give me some time to think about his proposal, but I
didn't expect him to be gone for so long. I've spent the last several
weeks alternately hoping for and dreading his next visit. The last
thing I expected was that he would send you here and take my choice
away."
"Master
Alec is coming into his inheritance. It is his to command and ours to
obey, but you still have a choice, that is never really taken from
you."
She
smiled at me. "As you say. It would have been better for me to
have said that he knows my heart as well as he knows yours. If he
commands then I'll obey out of love for him. It's my heart that
leaves me no choice."
I
struggled to keep the hope out of my voice. "You'll come then?"
"I'm
scared, Donovan. I'm not what I once was. The last twenty years have
taken more from me than I ever would have believed possible. What if
I fail Alec just like I failed his father?"
"Master
Kaleb would never have agreed that you failed him."
"Wouldn't
he? He made a choice to trade his life for yours, but I wasn't ready
to see him go so I pulled nearly the entire pack into a fight that we
couldn't win. It's taken me a lot of years to realize it, but I did
fail Kaleb."
I
shook my head at her but she wasn't done.
"As
sorry as I am for that, as much as I don't want to fail, Alec, I'm
more worried that I'll fail you, Donovan. We've spent so long like
this, a world apart. Are we really going to be able to make things
work when we see each other every day?"
I
gently took her hand and put it on my arm. She didn't resist as I
slowly led her back towards the Hummer.
"I
don't have any answers about the future, but I do know that the
question is one that is entirely within your control. I loved you for
more than two decades before Master Kaleb's death. I will continue to
love you regardless of our circumstances."
Alec Graves
Graves Estate
Sanctuary, Utah
I felt like I was going to lose my mind. Adri's presence was the only
thing keeping me from going over the edge.
Nobody
had seen any sign of Rachel and there wasn't anything else I could
realistically do to find her at this point. We didn't have enough
spare manpower right now to conduct some kind of massive search, not
without leaving the estate completely exposed, and it probably
wouldn't have helped even if we had a thousand people to send out in
cars looking for her.
It
had taken a tremendous act of will, but I'd done all that I could and
then I forced Rachel's situation out of my mind and went back to my
room. Adri had come with me and we'd spent the last two hours cuddled
together on my bed while I waited for updates from Grayson's team or
some kind of response out of the IT guys that Donovan had been
chasing before I'd sent him to go get Mallory.
"Alec,
what's going to happen after we get married? We can't really leave
for a honeymoon or anything, can we?"
"It
wouldn't be a very good idea. We'd be leaving everyone here exposed
and we'd be in more than a little danger if we were off in some
tropical paradise without any bodyguards."
Adri
turned around so that she was facing me. "So what are we doing
instead?"
"Who
says that we're doing anything after the wedding?"
She
rolled her eyes at me. "Please. I know you much too well to
believe that for a moment. You've got something planned and I want to
know what it is."
"You
don't want to be surprised?"
"No,
surprises aren't what everyone makes them out to be. I'd rather know
what's coming."
I
gave her a moment to reconsider and then nodded. "You're right,
I have something planned. You haven't noticed, not with all of the
craziness of getting the wedding ready to go, but there's been
another construction project underway since just after we flew back
from Chicago. Everything is on schedule for us to spend our first
night as man and wife together in a small cabin that I've been
wanting to have built for a few months now. The original it's based
on was located in much colder environs, but I'm still very happy with
how things are turning out."
Adri
smiled and then buried her face in my chest. "That's perfect,
Alec. A tiny little house where we can pretend for at least a few
days that we're just two newlyweds, two normal, poor newlyweds."
"Maybe
I should clarify what I meant by small..."
Adri
didn't look entirely happy, but her response was preempted by a chirp
from my phone which was followed by another message a couple of
seconds later. The first one was from Grayson to inform me that
they'd touched down in Sanctuary. Grayson had already indicated that
he hadn't lost anyone and I'd been enjoying being alone with Adri so
much that I'd resisted the urge to call and get a report on their
operation, but it looked like our peaceful interlude was about to
come to an end.
I
was just about to call Grayson when I saw the second message. It was
just a phone number, but the numeric code behind it told me that it
was from the hacker who'd been so unreliable lately.
I
took a deep breath and then dialed the number. The voice on the other
end was being run through some kind of filter to make it
unrecognizable.
"This
is Alec, where have you been for the last six hours?"
"What
do you mean where have I been? I've been doing exactly what you told
me to do, I've been sitting inside the NSA's systems and doing
everything I could to foil whoever is trying to hack in right now. By
the way, everything I've been doing lately is way over what we agreed
on two years ago when you hired me. I'm on the ragged edge of being
caught here and you're going to get one hell of a bill when I
actually have a few minutes to draw one up."
A
shiver worked its way up my back. "I never told you to protect
the NSA. I've had every other available resource trying to hack in so
I could get access to their satellite feeds."
There
was complete silence on the other end of the line for several
seconds. "I got a message in the usual way four weeks ago
telling me to hack in and shred all of the satellite feeds for a
six-hour window that just ended. That data is gone, not even I could
get it back at this point."
I
felt a headache coming on. "Was there anything in the message
that would have tipped you off to the fact that it wasn't coming from
me?"
"No,
the headers all originated from your network and you had all of the
agreed-on codes and encryption in place. Given all of that, how was I
supposed to know that it wasn't you? Even the odd bit at the end of
the message didn't matter, not against all of the other proofs I had
that it
was
you."
"What
was at the end of the message?"
"I
don't know, not exactly, I'd have to go dig it back up. Something
about this secret remaining in the dark still."
I
closed my eyes for a moment as I tried to keep my temper from getting
away from me. "Please dig the message up and send it to me. Once
you've done that go ahead and start reversing your efforts from the
last couple of days. I need access to the NSA's satellites."
I
hung up the phone and then turned back to Adri who was watching me
with a frown on her face. "It was Rachel, wasn't it?"
"I
suspect so. I don't know how she managed it, but I'm almost sure it
was her."
Whatever
Adri was about to say in response was cut off by Jasmin stomping into
my room. "We need to talk."
My
beast didn't like her tone, and I was inclined to agree with him. I
opened my mouth to tear into her, but the memory of Rachel's note
stopped me. Rachel had said that I needed to go easy on Jasmin, and
while Rach wasn't omniscient, she knew our pack dynamic as well as
anyone else and the fact that she stood outside of the power
struggles meant that sometimes she saw things that I missed. Instead
of dressing Jasmin down I waved her to a chair.
"Report."
"Isn't
that Grayson's job?"
"Yes,
yes, it is. He's not here yet though and you are, so you get to be
debriefed in his place."
She
was still mad, but she'd come expecting a fight and my response had
thrown her off balance.
"It
was the scariest thing I've ever seen. We got inside the building
without any problems. Ash shot both of the desk guards with a
tranquilizer gun before they could react and then we searched the
place floor by floor. There was a basement five levels underground
that had almost two dozen caged werewolves in it."
"They
changed when they saw you?"
"Yeah,
they changed and then went at their cages like there was no tomorrow.
Killing them inside of the cages was tricky. Ash burned through two
whole clips from his assault rifle killing just one of them so the
hybrids started surrounding a few cages at a time and bleeding them
out through the bars."
Jasmin
took a deep breath and then lifted her shirt up far enough for me to
see the huge swaths of gauze and tape that had been used to keep her
from bleeding to death.
"Everything
was going pretty well right up until all of the cages opened up
automatically and the remaining vacuums tried to swarm us under."
"Grayson
said that you guys didn't lose anyone."
She
looked away for a moment and when she turned back to me her eyes were
full of challenge once again.