Authors: Dean Murray
"Did you
hear me? We have your mother."
"Yeah, I
heard you. Five million dollars or I'll never see her again, you'll
text me the address, yada, yada. Here's the thing, I don't have five
million in liquid cash that I can just hand over in less than
twenty-four hours, even assuming that I can really come up with that
much at all. I need more time, and I need to talk to her so that I
know she's still alive."
My voice came
out even, which surprised me until I realized that somehow I'd been
mentally preparing for something like this to happen from almost the
first day that my mom had left Sanctuary. She was the kind of person
who could barely function without a minder. Part of me had wanted to
bring her with us, wanted to keep her close at hand where I could
protect her, but the rest of me recognized that for the spectacularly
bad idea it was.
Alec and my mom
would have just struck sparks off of each other. She would have been
constantly telling him that he should be more respectful of his
mother, that he wasn't giving Samantha enough credit, that Samantha
had never intended for anything to happen to Rachel. Just as bad, she
would have constantly been telling him what to do when it came to
running our little corner of the resistance.
Alec was pretty
laid-back as far as dominant hybrids went, but talking about the way
that his mom had signed off on Rachel being sold to Vincent like some
kind of harem girl was the one thing guaranteed to set him off. The
rest of my mom's baggage would have just been the icing on the cake.
So I'd made a
choice. I'd picked Alec, Jasmin and Jess over her. I'd picked
fighting back against Kaleb and the rest, or at least trying to fight
back, over running and hiding somewhere that the two of us would
never be found.
I'd made that
choice partially because I knew that the Coun'hij needed to be
stopped, but in the furthest reaches of my mind I knew that I'd also
made that choice because I hadn't wanted to be alone with my mom for
the next couple hundred years.
I'd chosen to
abandon her—partially at least—and now she was paying the
price for my decision. The guilt felt like it was going to crush me.
It had built into a back-breaking swell poised just above my head,
but I pushed it back far enough to make sure that I could function. I
owed my mother at least that much.
Afterwards, win
or lose, I could wallow in the guilt and regrets, but for now I
needed to be strong and give her the best chance I could to survive.
I fell back on countless hours of movies and a mind that was
frantically racing to put together all of the pieces of the picture.
I needed to
make them think that it was going to be hard to get that much cash
together or they might ask for more money, and I needed to know that
they really had my mom. Beyond that more time would give us more
options, which I figured would be the hardest thing to get out of
them.
"James, is
that you?"
My mom's voice
had never sounded as sweet as it did in that moment. It was all that
I could do to stop my knees from buckling, but I forced myself to
keep walking back towards the cabin. I needed Jess or Jasmin to
overhear as much of this conversation as possible in case they were
able to pick up on something that I missed.
"Yeah,
Mom. Are you okay, have they hurt you?"
"Not yet,
but I wouldn't put it past these
parasites
. They…"
Someone put
their hand over my mom's mouth. I could still hear her in the
background as they pulled her out of the room. It sounded like she
landed a kick based on the faint grunt I could just make out, but
once again I found myself wishing that my mom was with it enough to
realize that it was pure stupidity to antagonize her captors.
Jasmin was in
sight now, sitting in the mouth of the green and gray tent she'd
pitched less than ten feet from Carson's cabin. If I talked a little
louder there was a chance that she would be able to hear me.
"Okay,
you've proved your point. You have my mom. I'll get you the money
that you need, but I'm going to need more time. Give me two days and
I'll have every cent you asked for."
Jasmin's eyes
got wide and she stood up and started hurrying towards me. I closed
my eyes and hoped that I'd managed the right mix of desperation and
assertiveness.
"You have
until tomorrow evening. Bring the money to Los Angeles. If you can
only bring half of it that's fine with us, we'll give you back half
of your mother. If you want her back unharmed then you'll find a way
to come up with all of it."
Brindi appeared
slogging up the trail Alec and Carson had taken earlier in the day,
and Jasmin turned towards her.
"Go get
Alec. Tell him that something happened to James' mom. Go, run!"
Under other
circumstances it probably would have been comical to watch Brindi go
white and nearly stumble in her haste to turn around, but right then
I was just glad that she wasn't wasting any time.
Jasmin had
cupped her hands over her mouth to try and keep her words from making
it to my phone, but I'd been able to make them out still. Hopefully
it was below the threshold of what the cellphone mic was able to pick
up.
"I told
you that I'd get all of your money and I will, but if you hurt her I
promise you that I'll make you pay. I'll rip your—"
The click as
they hung up on me was a perfectly eloquent illustration of exactly
how scared they were of me, which was probably a good thing. If
they'd started rummaging around inside of my mom's memories they
wouldn't have dismissed my threats so cavalierly.
I lost some
time there. It was like my mind had been stressed beyond its normal
capacity. I'd kept it working through pure willpower, but once I no
longer had to function, once I was no longer on the phone with my
mom's abductors, it simply shut down.
I couldn't have
said how much time I lost. It might have been as little as a few
seconds or as much as a couple of minutes. All I knew was that I was
grateful that it had started functioning again. Now that it was
working there wasn't time to waste asking Jasmin how much I'd missed
out on.
"…need
you to talk to me, James. What's going on?"
I started to
brush past Jasmin, but then thought better of that. I needed to get
moving, needed to get back to a vehicle, needed to get back to
civilization, but somebody needed to tell Alec what had happened. I
was going to need his help if I was going to come up with the ransom
money. Even if Jess and Jasmin pitched in with everything Alec had
given them, it still wouldn't be enough to save my mom.
"My mom
has been abducted. They want five million dollars or they'll kill
her. I'll get a text sometime tomorrow afternoon with a time and a
location for the drop. I need to get on my way. Can you please ask
Alec to arrange for the money? I'll call once I make it to the
airport."
Jasmin yelled
for Jess and then grabbed my arm. "You can't do that, James. If
you go to an airport the Coun'hij will make you before you even get
on your plane. They've got live feeds into all of the airports and
are running round-the-clock facial recognition software. Flying
commercial is a death sentence and you know it."
It was all I
could do to stop myself from trying to rip her head off. My beast was
already halfway into the driver's seat inside of my head. Only the
fact that we'd been through so much together allowed me to override
the impulse and respond in something approaching my normal voice.
That and maybe the knowledge that if I tangled with Jasmin I would
take damage I couldn't afford to take right now.
"Fine,
I'll charter a plane. What's another few thousand dollars on top of
the five million bucks that I'm already asking Alec for?"
"That's
better, but you're still not thinking. An awful lot of the smaller
airports still have cameras that are being monitored. You can't just
jump on a plane like that anymore. You need to scout out the airport;
you need to make sure that you can make it onto the plane without
being caught on camera. Even then it's risky. A short-notice flight
will raise flags in all kinds of places. We both know that the
Coun'hij pays extra attention to flights headed to the West Coast
from anywhere east of the Mississippi. They probably won't have
anyone waiting for you when you get off of the plane in California,
but it will be one more data point, one more strand in the rope that
they are trying to slip over our heads."
"I'm not
going to just let her die, Jasmin!"
"I'm not
saying that you should, I'm just saying that you need to wait for a
few minutes until Alec can get back here. He and Jack are the experts
when it comes to this kind of thing. A few minutes right now could
save you hours later on."
"I don't
know if I have a few minutes. If I have to drive…"
"If you
have to drive then she's as good as dead and you know it. You'd have
to speed the entire way to make it there in time and all it would
take is being pulled over by a cop to have even that chance fall
apart for you. If you're flying then you can afford to take the time
to talk to Alec. If you're not flying, then it doesn't matter how
long you spend here talking."
"Fine, but
I'm not just sitting here and waiting. I'm going to Alec."
I turned
towards the path that Brindi had disappeared down a few minutes
before, but Alec had just come into view. The bag containing his
swords was clutched in one hand, and he looked like he'd sprinted the
entire way back from whatever spot they were using as their practice
ground.
"Brindi
told me that something happened to your mom. What's going on?"
"She was
kidnapped by a bunch of vampires. She's been telling me for days that
there was something bad going on there in LA, but you wouldn't give
me even an hour to discuss her concerns."
It wasn't fair
and I knew it. If I'd pushed harder Alec would have cleared out some
time for me, but
I
hadn't even been convinced that there was a
real threat there. How could my perennially oblivious mother who
thought nothing of tweaking a two-hundred-year-old hybrid who could
rip her head off without breaking a sweat, have been right this time?
More than just
not being fair, making an accusation like that was dangerous. I
normally knew better, but not this time, not when I was going out of
my mind with concern over my mom. Another hybrid, one who was less
understanding than Alec, one who didn't have such a long history with
me—one who had even a smidgen less self-control—would
have torn into me right then, but Alec managed to maintain control of
his shape despite picking up the fine tremble of a shape shifter who
was a hair's breadth from shifting.
"You're
lucky that I've already thrown down once today, James. You told me
that you wanted to talk, but I have a lot of demands on my time these
days. If you thought it was that urgent you should have said so
instead of continuing to risk all of us being found because you
couldn't go more than twenty-four hours without talking to her."
My beast roared
in frustration inside of my head, sending out a pulse of power that
felt like it should have melted the patchy snow around us. The fact
that Alec was saying the same thing that I'd just finished thinking
didn't help my anger. It just made me even madder.
The pressure
building inside of me was nearly to the point of triggering a shift
over to my hybrid form, but there wasn't anything I could do to stop
it now. It was much too late—once I got this worked up it was
basically a self-sustaining process. The more my beast got control
over my emotions, the more he was able to fill me full of rage, which
further weakened my control.
I opened my
mouth to return his insult with one of my own, and then suddenly all
of that fury melted away between one heartbeat and the next.
Carson stepped
out of the trees and I realized that for the first time I was getting
a front-row seat for a display of just what he was capable of. My
beast didn't like being manipulated by an outside force any more than
I did and tried to push for more control.
Maybe it was
stupid, but I was tired of taking a backseat to everyone else. A lot
of my mom's arguments didn't hold water, but there was a core of
truth there or I would have found a way to shut her up a long time
ago. It wasn't anything I'd ever consciously realized up until that
point, but it snapped into focus for me now.
I wanted to
be
special, like my mom kept telling me I was. I wanted to chart my own
course through the storm rather than always drifting along behind
someone like Alec or Carson. Giving my beast his head had the
potential to cause even bigger problems than I was already facing,
but by that point I didn't care. I wasn't the most deadly hybrid to
ever walk the face of the earth, but I was a dominant and that meant
something.
I did more than
just give my beast his head; I got behind him and pushed. I was
determined to prove that Carson couldn't control me, that Alec might
be able to kill me, but he couldn't make me grovel before him. I
reached out for the burning surge of power that signaled an impending
transformation and found…nothing.
Carson's face
tightened and I got the feeling that he'd just about reached the
limit of what he could do, so I reached down deep for something else
to throw at him. Maybe I would have succeeded, but at that precise
moment Alec stopped fighting him.
I could feel
the difference once Carson only had me to deal with. I went beyond
not being angry and moved into feeling so calm that I was almost
tired. I could feel my eyelids fighting to close, feel my breathing
slow down to the point where I would have been out of breath even
from just starting a slow walk towards Alec.