Riven (6 page)

"No, I
finally manifested my power in full. We were in Chicago picking up
Jasmin and Isaac who'd both been injured in a fight with a werewolf.
Agony was there and I fought him to save Jasmin and Isaac. I planned
on dying but at the very end of the fight my power came completely
awake and I brought everyone in the room to their knees. Before the
night was over, I killed Agony and half of the enforcers he brought
with him."

If Mallory hadn't
already been sitting down she probably would have fallen over. As it
was she reached for the arms of her chair with both hands in an
effort to steady herself.

"You've done
it then. A gift like that, able to operate at distance, makes you
nearly unstoppable. The dispossessed will leave you alone and every
pack within two hundred miles will be looking for some kind of
alliance."

I nodded, happy to
see Mallory's expression of relief. "We've already got
representatives from five different packs here and four of them are
looking for some kind of marriage out of the bargain but last night I
proposed to Adri."

"She's back
then?"

"Yes, she's
back and she accepted. We'll be married in a month or two."

"You're
giving up a powerful bargaining chip by marrying her instead of
binding one of the other packs more tightly to you."

My beast wanted to
take exception to her words but I knew she was just doing what she
thought was her duty.

"If the last
few months have taught me nothing else, they've taught me that there
isn't any halfway on doing the right thing. I was willing to
entertain the idea of a political marriage when I thought Adri didn't
want me, but not now. Walking away from her and marrying someone I
don't love would be wrong on every level. I've realized that being
true to myself helps the pack. When I start putting what I perceive
as the good of the pack in front of doing what's right then it's a
short road to even greater problems."

Mallory knew she
was skating up to the very edge, that the Alec that had stormed out
of her cabin weeks ago wouldn't take kindly to any more interfering,
but in her own way she was just as committed to doing the right thing
as I was.

"What about
the Ja'tell bond? I'm fond of Adri, but aren't you worried about what
the Ja'tell bond will do to her?"

The new me smiled
at her concern rather than raging at her. "Adri is stronger than
I ever gave her credit for. She hasn't shown any of the signs of
addiction and I've come to realize that I should never bet against
Adri. She knows what she wants and I'm not going to try and tell her
that we shouldn't be together anymore."

Mallory met my
eyes for several seconds and then looked down in submission. "I'll
advise, Alec, but I won't do any more than that. I've learned my
lesson. I knew it years ago when I worked with your father, but I'd
forgotten it in the intervening years. You are the one who ultimately
has to live with your decisions so they are yours to make."

"Thanks,
Mallory. That means a lot, but I hope you're happy for us as well,
not just resigned to the fact that we'll get married."

"I am happy
for the two of you. I guess I'm just cautious after all of these
years. I can't see a happy development without worrying about all of
the ways that it could go bad."

I let the silence
grow for nearly a minute as Mallory worked through the demons from
her past. When she finally leaned back in her chair she'd regained a
measure of her calm.

"Alec, can I
try to read your power? It's possible that there is something there I
can tell you that will help."

"That's part
of why I came. I wondered if you'd be able to see it without all of
the usual rigmarole now that it is fully active."

Mallory shrugged.
"With very powerful or very active abilities I can often see
them without coming into contact with the hybrid who has them, but
occasionally a power that is more subtle isn't readable without
physical contact. Yours sounds like it is something that you have to
consciously trigger so it's not necessarily surprising that I haven't been able
to get a read on it yet."

I was halfway to
her chair when her words hit me. "No, that doesn't sound right.
My power is almost always active. It's been doing a kind of low-level
drain on everyone around me for weeks. We were half convinced that
Rachel was being attacked by some new member of the Coun'hij because
she was too tired to get out of bed most days. It's only recently
that I've managed to mostly shut it off."

"Are you
draining me now?"

"No, but it's
taking a real effort. It's like walking around with my hand clenched
all of the time. As long as I keep it top of mind I remember to keep
the power from pulling at everyone's energy but as soon as I stop
thinking about it my mental 'fist' relaxes and I start draining
people a little again."

Mallory was
intrigued now. Before she'd been exiled to this cabin she'd made a
study of every living hybrid she'd been able to get her hands on. In
a very real sense she was the world's best expert on the abilities
manifested by a small subset of the hybrids among our people.

"That
is
interesting. Come here and let me take a look at you and then we'll
go from there."

I knelt in front
of her chair and then waited as she placed a hand on either side of
my face. As the minutes passed perspiration started to bead Mallory's
forehead, and her grip tightened, but I didn't interrupt her. When
she finally let go of me and slumped back into her chair it was
obvious that she wasn't satisfied with the results of her scan.

"What did you
see?"

"Nothing. No, not
quite nothing, but not what I'd hoped. Your power is active, you've
got the same increase in your overall energy level that I usually see
when a hybrid finally manifests a power, but I can't get in close
enough to get a good look at what you do. My mental probes keep
disintegrating as soon as I send them in. I tried making them more
powerful, but I still got only impressions of things rather than
anything solid."

"I'll take
impressions at this point. I know next to nothing so even an
impression is a step up."

Mallory seemed to
debate for a couple of seconds and then she shook her head. "Go
ahead and activate your power on me first and then we'll talk. Start
small and then you can work up."

I nodded and then
relaxed my grip on my power. Only a trickle at first, but then wider
and wider until Mallory started a boneless slide out of her chair. I
caught her and then shut my ability back down as I helped her back
into her chair.

Mallory sat there
for several seconds, considering what had just happened.
"Interesting. What else can you tell me? You've used it several
times by now, have
you
gotten any impressions as you've done
so?"

I shrugged. "Not
much definitive. I can target where I draw from rather than just
dropping everyone around me, but sometimes if I try and take in too
much at once it sort of wobbles. I got the feeling last time that the
power I'm pulling from everyone is going somewhere and that there was
only so much power that I could pull in before that reservoir would
fill up."

Mallory started
absently tapping the arm of her chair. "That is potentially
problematic. If it's true it would mean that you'd want to husband
the use of your power to make sure that you always had the ability to
absorb however much power you needed to."

"I know, I
had the same thought, but I don't love the implication. Will the
reservoir gradually empty back out or have I already pretty much shot
my bolt?"

Mallory's smile
and shrug were sympathetic, but she obviously didn't know any more at
this point than I did.

"I would tend
to doubt that to be the case, Alec. Our abilities are still governed
by natural rules and laws, they just sometimes exploit them in ways
that modern science still can't explain. My suspicion would be that
the power you're sending will tend to dissipate out of whatever
container it is housed in. Things tend to move from high
concentration to low concentration, so the simple passage of time
should help empty your 'reservoir' out."

I breathed a sigh
of relief. It wasn't a guarantee, but at least it offered some hope
that I'd still be able to protect my friends and family.

Mallory looked
like she wanted to get up and pace, but she forced her hands still
and then looked back up at me. "I can offer only two other
pieces of advice. Until you know more, don't use your power
cavalierly, but at the same time don't hoard your power when you are
in danger. The ability to drop four people at once does you no good
if you let one person kill you because you were trying to protect
yourself against that future four-person threat."

"That makes
sense. I need to bind some of the other packs to me sooner rather
than later so that I've got resources to stave off minor threats or I
could find myself always depleting my ability in order to deal with penny-ante
stuff. What was the other bit of counsel?"

She was debating
on what to tell me again. She was trying to keep her uncertainty off
of her face, but I'd spent too much time with her and she'd spent too
much time by herself for her to fool me.

"Keep an open
mind about your power. With active powers like the one you have, it
is possible sometimes that it isn't the power that comes up short,
it's your own belief in what the power can do that stops you from
achieving what you otherwise might."

I'd never heard
anything like that before, at least not in so many words. It did,
however, make me think of the one time I'd met Tasha's mother.

"Jaclyn
Annikov once said that she believed her power was triggered by need,
that it didn't appear until she had something really important on the
line."

Mallory's smile
was sad. "That's fitting. Jaclyn is an example of someone who
limited herself. The last time I saw her she was using her
ability at much less than half of her potential but she was so convinced
that she was operating at the very edges of her capability that there
wasn't anything I could do to convince her otherwise."

I swallowed a
couple of times while I processed what Mallory had just said. "She's
already incredibly powerful."

"Yes, she is.
I suspect that she's hitting with a larger charge now than she was
twenty years ago, but she has the potential to strike with power much
more akin to a lightning strike than a Taser. She could quite
literally kill with a touch if she just believed herself capable of
doing so."

It was a sobering
picture. Not just the idea of Jaclyn killing other hybrids with a
discharge several times what she was currently capable of, but the
thought that she'd limited herself in such an arbitrary fashion. How
many times over the years had she lost a pack member because she
hadn't been able to recruit the full measure of her ability? If she'd
hit Anton with that kind of power he might not have shrugged it off
quite so easily. Ash and Kristin would never have met and Jaclyn's
pack wouldn't have lost all of the wolves that Anton had killed. I
pulled my focus back to the present and speared Mallory with my gaze.

"What aren't
you telling me, Mallory? I'm better off knowing it rather than
guessing."

Mallory sighed and
put her hands up in surrender. "It's more of the same. I can't
see the specifics of your ability, but you glow more powerfully than
anyone else I've ever seen, even your father."

I shrugged. "Dad
made good use of his ability, but it was hardly game-changing."

Mallory shook her
head. "Your father's death was one of the greatest tragedies
since the fall of the monarchy. His primary power was his ability to
heal, but he actually had a secondary power."

"I didn't
even know that was possible!"

"Neither did
I until I scanned him myself. He didn't even develop it until a
couple of years before you were born."

"What was
it?"

"Your
father's healing ability came from a natural affinity to life. He had
the ability to bring a similar kind of affinity out in others."

She was dancing
around the answer, but it was the missing piece of something that I'd
never been able to explain.

"The
population explosion in the pack. He caused it, didn't he?"

"Yes, yes, he
did. It was statistically impossible and I suspect it was part of
what brought things to a head with the Coun'hij. Nearly every mated
pair in the pack had a child within a few months of each other
despite the fact that most of our kind will try for years before
actually having a child."

It was almost too
amazing for words. No wonder Mallory had been struggling to just come
right out and say it.

"If he'd had
another fifteen years the pack would have been unstoppable. Who else
knew?"

"Just me. We
tried to keep the births quiet, tried to dismiss them as nothing more
than an odd fluke, but the Coun'hij could read the writing on the
wall as well as you just did. The pack would have increased by
fifteen or sixteen moonborn within the next decade and a half, which
would have been a significant increase to our combat power, and there
would probably have been another crop of children born within the
next three to five years."

I wanted to yell
or throw things, but nothing I could do now could change the past. We
were a tiny race that, even in the best of times, grew incredibly
slowly. Every time we had a solid push from south of the border we
risked being destroyed as a species. Dad had represented a chance to
change all of that. He could have triggered a population boom that
would have finally put us in a position to bring order to South
America, or to end the vampire scourge that was bleeding the East
Coast practically dry. When Agony had killed my father he truly had
robbed our people of a great treasure.