[Southern Arcana 3.0] Deadlock (28 page)

God help him, he wanted to save it with her.
For
her.

“
Alec
.” Nick sighed. “Jesus, I hope Cesar Mendoza knows what he’s opened up.”

“Don’t think he could, Peyton.” Alec glanced back at her and smiled. “Because I’m going to do the stupidest thing there is. I’m going to fix our world.”

Carmen dragged her hair back into a sloppy ponytail. “Okay, Miguel. Clark needs help moving equipment out of the storage area and into the finished rooms on this end of the warehouse.”

He hopped off the desk immediately, moving with a grace he hadn’t always possessed. “Got it.”

She turned to Kat, who’d already pulled a sleek silver laptop out of her bag. “I hope you brought your own Wi-Fi, because there are a few things we need to find, and quick. They’re not in the inventory Franklin already stocked, but we need them in the next day or so.”

“I brought everything.” A boxy white MacBook and two tiny netbooks joined the first laptop on the table. “I figured you might need more than one computer online for the next few days, until I can set up something a little more permanent. I’ve got a mobile hotspot. The range isn’t great, but I might be able to boost it enough so that you can get a signal from anywhere in the building.”

“Thanks, Kat.”

Tara waved her cell phone at Carmen. “You said you called Sokolov up in Shreveport, right?”

“That’s right. She’ll be down first thing in the morning.”

“I know a guy who works in anesthesia at Our Lady of the Lake.”

“In Baton Rouge?”

“Yeah. He knows plenty of spells that could come in handy, including one that can slow Franklin’s shifter healing long enough for Dr. Sokolov to operate.”

The only member missing from their specialized OR team. Alec’s partner Jackson had offered to try if they couldn’t find anyone else, but the last thing any of them wanted to do was take chances with Franklin’s well-being. “Offer him whatever he wants if he can be here tomorrow.”

Tara grinned, already dialing. “I’ll talk him into it.”

Carmen slid her hand into her pocket, closing her fingers around the borrowed cell phone there. Kat had handed it over readily, without question, and it was time for Carmen to use it.

The offices that occupied one end of the warehouse had been modified and outfitted as exam rooms or meeting spaces. When she found one with a large desk and a single folding chair, she sat down to dial the number Franklin had given her.

It rang five times before the call connected. Carmen heard rustling, then the sound of a door clicking shut before a quiet, tense voice answered. “Hello?”

“Is this Sera Sinclaire?”

The sound of water filled the background. A shower, maybe, or a sink running. “Kat? Is that you?”

“Kat lent me her phone. My name is Carmen Mendoza. I’m calling because your father’s been hurt.”

Sera’s breath caught. Hard on the heels of the gasp came a protest. “He’s not—if you know Kat, you know…what he is?”

“I know.” Carmen swallowed hard. “I work with Franklin at his clinic.”

“Oh.” Her voice sounded young and afraid. “Is it—how bad is it? Is he going to be okay?”

“He’s all right. Stable. He needs surgery, probably tomorrow.” She hesitated. “Your father told me you live in Arkansas. Can we send someone to pick you up, or—?”

“No!” Something clattered in the background, then paper crinkled. “I’ve got a pen. Give me the address, and I’ll come.”

Carmen rattled off the address she’d already memorized. “If you need help finding it, just call Kat’s phone and someone will answer. I think most of us are going to be here all night.”

“Okay. How did—was it Kat? Did she track me down?”

Lying might have been easier, but Carmen refused to do it. “Your father gave me your number and asked me to call.”

Sera let out a soft breath. “Are you sure he wants to see me?”

A heartbreaking question, and so simple to answer. “I don’t think there’s anything he wants more.”

“Okay.” Relief, for a moment, but tension wreathed the words that followed. “I just need to talk to my husband. I’ll be there by tomorrow morning.”

“Sera.” Instinct—and Alec’s words—prompted Carmen to speak. “If you need help, if you need anything, call us. Please.”

“I will.” A muffled male voice called out in the background, and Sera swore. “I need to go. Tell him I’m on my way, okay?”

“Be safe.” Carmen disconnected the call and rubbed her hands over her face. So much left to do, and all she really wanted to do was hide.

Her uncle, her
family
. All this pain and destruction, just because Franklin had flouted an authority that wasn’t supposed to extend to him in the first place. And now Alec—

She stomped on the thought, pushing it down with absolute determination as she rose and made her way back down the half-lit hallway. There was no mistaking Alec’s intention; he planned to make sure that nothing like this ever happened in his town again.

His town.

She pushed through the exit and into the controlled chaos of the main warehouse. Alec still sat at a table near the entrance, talking to Nicole Peyton. Though his glowering had subsided into a sort of quiet thoughtfulness, she didn’t doubt that rage still boiled inside him, high and hot.

He would challenge Cesar and end up with his council seat. He would do it because he had no other recourse, even though he’d lain in her bed only days before and told her that anyone who went up against the Southeast council would die trying to change it.

His town.

He’d survive the first round of challenges, maybe even the first few. But no one could stand alone against an establishment, against so many who wanted to keep things exactly the way they were.

Lady luck favors you if you bring a friend. Or two.

Wesley Dade’s words. Days old, but they echoed in her ear as if he stood beside her now, bringing painful clarity to the core issue at hand—Alec couldn’t change the council, the Conclave, by himself.

Spotters keep count, and the big player drops in to strike while the iron’s hot.

He couldn’t do it alone, but he didn’t have to.

“Carmen?” Alec’s fingers brushed her shoulder, bringing the warmth of worry and protection. “You all right?”

She must have been staring, so lost in thought that she hadn’t even noticed him crossing the warehouse. “I’m fine. I was…I was just thinking about something someone said to me the other day.”

Worry intensified. “What’d they say?”

“That counting cards is a group activity,” she answered absently. “What if you didn’t take on the council alone?”

Alec’s fingers closed on her chin and tilted her head back. “Honey, you’re scaring me more than a little. Do you need to sit down?”

“No, listen.” She grasped his upper arms and looked up at him. “One person they don’t want on the Southeast council? That person’s a target. I’m talking about bringing backup. Majority rule.”

Alec blinked. Frowned. “I’m trying to think of a reason why that wouldn’t work. It
feels
like it wouldn’t work. It feels…”

“It would take special people, ones you trusted. Ones who wanted to help, not take what you had.”

“And here I was about to say it seems too easy.” Alec’s gaze unfocused. “Strong enough to get on the council. Strong enough to hold against challenges. Willing to lead, but capable of following too.”

“My brother.” He’d kill her for even thinking it, much less mentioning it to Alec, but it was true. “You need Julio.”

He laughed suddenly. “Hell, if we’re going to break all the rules, why go small? Andrew. Andrew can damn near take me out. He can win a challenge.”

Carmen’s heart began to pound. “It isn’t breaking the rules because the rules are already broken.”

“Oh, it’s breaking all of the rules,” he whispered. “All the ones no one ever wrote down because they just
are
. The rules that need to be smashed into pieces.”

Exactly what she’d meant, but it didn’t matter. She moved without thinking, sliding her hands up to his face. “Could you do it? If you weren’t alone?”

“Depends.” He gripped her hips and pulled her close, seemingly unconcerned with the attention they were attracting. “Will I have you?”

It was so much more than anything they’d discussed before, and it took her the span of a breath to know the answer. “You’ll have me, no matter what you do.”

He smiled, a smile full of warmth and excitement and
hope
, and then, in front of half the people they knew and a dozen they didn’t, he dragged her to him and kissed her.

He kissed her as if nothing had ever been more vital, as if he would never stop, and nothing penetrated the haze of pleasure and possession until she heard both of her brothers calling her name in unison.

She broke away and turned to Miguel, who held the neatly lettered list she’d made for Kat. “Hate to break it up,” he murmured, his cheeks red, “but you told us you’d put this in order so we knew what to track down first.”

“Right.” They had twelve hours to find most of the equipment, eighteen at the outside. “I have to do this, Alec. Can you go see if Franklin is awake? Even if he’s not…tell him Sera’s on her way, would you?”

“Will do.” Alec smoothed back her hair and smiled. “We can do this.”

“Yes.” The council, the makeshift clinic, all of it. “We can.”

Chapter Eighteen

Someone had brought a banged-up old card table upstairs. Someone else had provided flimsy folding chairs. Kat had given him one of her stupidly small computers, one with a keyboard so tiny he could barely type on it. A handful of cell phones lay scattered across his makeshift desk, tangled with phone lists and the files he’d had Jackson retrieve from the office.

A humble beginning for a revolution, but Alec supposed people had started with less.

They’d certainly started with less manpower. The room he’d claimed was a good twenty feet long and half that across, but with Julio, Andrew and Derek standing around the table, the place bristled with tense, uneasy power. It was almost a relief that Nick and Mackenzie had gone to raid Nick’s bar for food and supplies—six dominant shifters in so small a space would have been damn near unlivable.

Not that it was comfortable now. Only Derek seemed at ease as he sprawled in one of the chairs. “So. This is how coups start?”

Julio snorted. “I’m sure the new, civilized Conclave would call it a hostile takeover.”

After the last couple years, Alec suspected John Peyton might call it cleaning house, if he were allowed to express such sentiments out loud. “I put out a few calls. Tried to see if anyone could remember anything like this happening in the past.”

Andrew leaned one shoulder against the wall. “And?”

“Not at the council level. And not by people with good intentions.” Gangs, mostly, taking over local cities by challenging their way through the power structure and eliminating resistance in their path. Petty criminals who used the force of numbers because they didn’t have the power to stand against the council wolves, and whose own unsuitability worked against them. The one united front the councils and Conclave could muster was their response to criminals working their way up the food chain.

Maybe they don’t like the competition.

Derek crossed his arms over his chest. “So when I beat Coleman and refused to take his Conclave seat, I pretty much fucked up the whole system, didn’t I?”

“They wouldn’t have let you have it,” Julio told him. “You won his
council
seat. Leadership on the Conclave isn’t transferable, not like that. You would have still had to win out over the other members of the Southeast council.”

Alec nodded his agreement. “The hole on the council didn’t help matters, though. None of ’em dared jump until they knew who’d be at their backs. There’s no system set up for something like that—Coleman’s challenger should have taken his seat. If he’d died in an accident, his son might take his spot, but they’re weren’t going to let his daughter have that seat, even if she wanted it.”

“My cousin, Veronica.” Julio shook his head. “It’s the last thing she ever planned for. Don’t think Uncle Cesar never considered the Maglieri precedent, though.”

Andrew’s brows drew together. “What does that mean?”

“When her husband died, Enrica Maglieri took over his council seat—and then his spot on the Conclave. Cesar would like to do the same thing with Coleman’s wife—my Aunt Teresa. The Mendozas would have two council members.”

Understanding dawned in Andrew’s eyes. “And she could back all of his plays.”

“Yeah,” Alec said. “Except Enrica Maglieri is a stone-cold alpha bitch who had the strength to trample over all the men in her council.” Teresa Coleman—Teresa Mendoza, again, he supposed, with Noah finally gone—was a woman beaten down by time and her own brutal husband. She’d never have the strength to take a council seat, or the ruthlessness needed to keep one.

Derek seemed to make the same connection and took it to the next logical step—the same one Carmen had seen so clearly from her vantage point outside of the system. “So you need someone to back your plays.” His gaze found Julio, then Andrew. “Two someones.”

Julio groaned and covered his face. Andrew, on the other hand, seemed oblivious as he nodded. “Derek’s a logical choice. That empty seat is already his by tradition.”

Any hint of easygoing relaxation vanished from Derek’s face. “I’m married. And my wife’s sister is the one person these wolves pretty much universally fear and loathe. I’ll be damned before I do
anything
that’ll draw that much attention to Michelle and her kid.”

“Then I don’t understand.”

“You, Andrew.” Derek leaned forward, his gaze intense. “Alec wants you to take over the world with him.”

He must have understood after all, at least on some level, because his answer was immediate—and absolute. “Like hell.”

Alec choked back a sigh. “Julio, Derek? Would you two give us a minute?”

Julio held Alec’s gaze as he backed toward the door. “I’ll stand and I’ll fight, Jacobson, but I hope you know what you’re doing.”

The first test of leadership—and one he was long accustomed to. He knew how to be confident for the people counting on him. “Wouldn’t start a fight I couldn’t end. Count on that.”