Splintered (19 page)

I wished that Alec had just hit me instead. For
him, of all people, to discount what I'd been through was an almost
physical pain. I lashed out with the only thing I could think of
that had any chance of causing him the same kind of
hurt.

"I've been wrong all this time. You really are
nothing more than an animal."

I turned and walked away, ignoring his sudden
intake of breath. I made it all the way to the front door before I
heard him following.

"Where are you going?"

"I'm going home. I've got a spectacular fight
waiting for me."

"You're going to have to wait a few
more minutes. I need half an hour or so to check on the pack.
Things are really strained right now and…"

I cut him off. "I don't want a ride
home from you. I'll walk."

"Don't be ridiculous. It will take you hours to
walk home, and it's not safe. There's still a chance that Agony's
guys are in the area."

"I'm not safe here, not really. I'll take my
chances on the road."

I could hear Alec's teeth grinding
and his knuckles went white on the doorknob. "If you'll wait five
minutes I'll get Rachel to give you a ride home."

I turned on Alec, poking him as hard in the
chest as I was able. "How dare you bully Rachel after everything
she's gone through this week. If you force her to come up here and
drive me home I swear I'll never talk to you again."

Alec pulled his keys out and dropped them at my
feet. "Take the Porsche. Leave it in your driveway, or in the trees
a mile or so past your lane. I'll come get it in a day or two when
I'm able."

**

Mom was waiting for me when I pulled up in
Alec's Porsche. I'd considered leaving it on the road. I was pretty
sure it was just going to give Mom one more thing to freak out
about, but I didn't want to spend the next two days worrying that
it'd been stolen.

As I came through the door Mom grabbed me by
the shoulders and shook me. "What the hell were you thinking? I was
about thirty seconds from calling the cops."

"I'm sorry, Mom. Something came up. Rachel
needed me."

"You mean Alec needed you."

"The whole family needed me."

Mom let me go and started pacing back and forth
across the living room floor. "Adri, real friends don't ask you to
do things that will get you in trouble. I like Rachel, but can you
honestly tell me that you didn't see or do anything tonight that
made you feel uncomfortable?"

I felt myself flinch. I knew it was a lost
cause, but I lied anyways. "Mom, nothing happened
tonight."

"I don't believe you. Even if you're telling
the truth, it's only a matter of nothing happened yet. I'm telling
you, Alec is not the good guy you think he is."

After everything I'd just seen, everything that
had just happened, it felt odd to defend Alec. "He's a good guy;
he's just caught in a tough situation right now."

"No, Adri. That's not how it works. Tough times
don't hide a person's true nature; trials bring that true nature
out. The things you're seeing now are things that have always been
there in Alec, he's just been hiding them."

I shook my head. "I can't believe
that. He's just been forced off to a path other than what he would
have chosen for himself. He's a good person who really does care
about others."

"Then your only hope of saving him
is to give him the kind of massive wakeup call that will knock him
back onto the right path."

I felt tears start to fill my eyes. I opened my
mouth to respond but she talked right over me.

"You're not mature enough to make this kind of
decision, so I'm making it for you. There will be no more Alec, no
more Rachel, no more of any of that. This whole episode of your
life is over."

Chapter 23

It was an unseasonably warm day.
Nothing compared to the temperatures when we'd first arrived in
Sanctuary, but it reminded me somehow of the furnace that had
greeted us when we got out of the moving truck so long ago.
Minnesota would have snow by now.

Mom pulled the Jeep over to the side of the
road. We'd had another fight. She'd wanted to drive me right up to
the door, but I'd finally managed to win some privacy. Odd to think
after I'd fought so hard that I now didn't want to make the trip
alone.

I sat fingering what was left of the necklace
Alec had given me for several seconds before Mom cleared her
throat. "I really am sorry about your necklace, Adri."

"It's okay, it was an accident. It
was bound to happen-glass is only about the most breakable
substance known to man."

"Still, I feel bad. I never would have guessed
that it would splinter like that."

It was an odd break. The glass
hadn't shattered or even simply broken in half like I would have
expected when Mom knocked it off the coffee table. Instead a long
sliver of glass had separated from the main heart. I'd kicked
possible causes around off and on for most of a day now. All I
could come up with was that there must have been some kind of flaw
accidentally built into the piece.

"I'll bet we can find a way to fix it still,
dear."

"No. You can't glue glass together. Even if you
could, it wouldn't really be fixed, it would be ugly."

I angled the heart back and forth, watching the
way it caught the light, throwing off small rainbows of light. In
some ways what it had lost in perfection of form had been partially
made up for by the way light now refracted through it.

I knew better, but still couldn't
help myself. My thumb slid forward to the broken edge. It was the
lightest of touches but that was all the razor edge of the glass
required to slice into my skin. I was wrong, it wasn't still
pretty.

"It can't be put together and it's dangerous
now. Neither piece will ever really be safe again."

I exited the Jeep before Mom could respond, and
started up the asphalt lane. I'd been to Alec's so many times, but
usually in too much of a hurry to appreciate the scenery. Andrew
and Donovan really did do an amazing job maintaining the
grounds.

I rang the doorbell, managing a
tentative smile for Donovan. "Mistress Paige. I'm glad to see
you're okay. I've spent no small amount of time worrying about how
you've held up after the events of this last week."

"I'm okay, Donovan. You're doing
okay too?"

"I'm recovering apace. None of my injuries were
inflicted by Agony so I expect to be as fit as ever shortly. Are
you not coming in?"

I shook my head. "I don't have
long." I opened my mouth to ask to see Alec, but something made me
pause. I knew that Donovan's loyalty to Alec and Rachel was
absolute, but I still somehow trusted him to tell me the
truth.

"Donovan, Agony was lying,
right?"

I'd never really seen Donovan at a
loss for words, but it took him several seconds to
respond.

"To be honest, Miss Adri, I'm not
really sure. I'm sure it seems like our ability to decipher between
honesty and falsehood is nearly magical, but in fact it's more
along the lines of an educated guess backed up by more
observational data than you have access to."

My frustration with the answer was
probably woefully apparent to him. After another several seconds he
sighed and then continued.

"Our ability to detect lies breaks
down the worst when dealing with one of our own kind. Agony is
quite good at suppressing his body's natural tells. Almost too
good. Actually, his ability in that area borders on what you'd see
from a psychopath. When you add in that he's quite good at mixing
truth and lies together, it becomes very difficult to hazard a
guess as to whether or not he was lying."

I shook my head, anger starting to chip away at
the respect I usually showed the old butler.

"It's obvious he lied. I don't
believe Jess was working with Vincent. Even if you believe she was
capable of turning against Isaac and the rest of the pack, you have
to know that she'd never have chosen to work with
Vincent."

Donovan nodded. "Indeed, I don't
believe Jess did the things that Agony said she did, but I don't
believe everything he said was a lie. That doesn't…feel…right
against what I observed that night."

"So what, Alison was in league with
Vincent?"

I was really trying to keep the
hostility out of my voice, but even I could tell that I wasn't
doing a very good job. Donovan didn't seem rattled
though.

"No, I don't think Alison was
ambitious enough to throw her lot in with Vincent."

"You're contradicting yourself,
Donovan. Either there was truth to what Agony said or there wasn't.
You can't have it both ways."

"Jack possibly, he was stupid
enough, but my money would have been on Sam. He was ambitious
enough for a wolf with several times his ability. He knew Vincent,
and I think he was higher up in Brandon's pack than anyone ever let
on."

I shook my head, trying to deny
Donovan's words, but he talked right over me for the first time
that I could remember.

"I think that Sam was working with
Vincent, not to rise up against the Coun'hij, but to give Agony and
Vincent an inside track in their efforts to rip this pack apart.
Agony always likes a sure thing and by all accounts he should have
succeeded. I doubt you'll ever really understand how close he came
to obtaining his goal, but when Alec managed to steer us more or
less unscathed to that last meeting Agony needed a win of some
kind."

Donovan looked off into the distance
for a moment. "The Coun'hij rules through fear and fear alone. Any
real uprising among the packs could bring them down. It would
probably be bloody, but it's a very real possibility, one which
Agony understands extremely well. Each and every one of his actions
has to be couched in a way that provides at least some
justification, or he could push the rest of my kind over the edge
into rebellion. At the same time, the Coun'hij can't afford to ever
come away second best in a confrontation or they risk that the fear
that they depend on to keep control will start to erode away out
from under them. Agony couldn't leave without killing one or more
members of our pack, not if he wanted to stop Alec from becoming a
rallying point."

I could follow the logic. That
didn't mean Donovan was right, but it made a kind of sick sense.
Vincent had been helping Agony, but killing one of his own helped
sell the legitimacy of Agony's story. Vincent was the newest of the
Coun'hij's thugs, so it probably hadn't bothered Agony's other guys
in the slightest. Killing Sam would have been more believable, but
nobody outside of our pack would have known the difference. By
attacking Alison it had been practically guaranteed that Sam would
jump into the fray, and where Sam went Jack usually followed. If
Isaac had been the slightest bit faster, half of the pack would
have been sucked into a fight with Agony's men and summarily
killed.

Donovan looked me in the eyes for
several heartbeats and then shook his head. "Agony wasn't going to
leave Sanctuary without killing someone, probably more than one. In
the end I'm glad that it was just Alison, Sam and Jack rather than
someone I've spent the last decade helping raise."

I shook my head, fists clenched.
"Alison didn't deserve that and I can't believe you're dismissing
her death so easily."

"Who should have died in her place
then, Adri? You, me? Someone was going to die, that was the only
outcome left us by the choices that had led us to where we were at
that moment. Alison has been supporting Sam for years. On some
level, whether she knew it or not, she enabled his treachery. In
our world, those kinds of actions have consequences."

It was like I'd been doused in cold
water. The anger was still there, but it wasn't at the forefront of
my being like it had been before. If I'd had any doubts they were
gone now. How could Alec possibly see the error of his ways when
everyone around him held the same kind of callous
beliefs?

I found myself retreating into the safety of
the formality that had characterized most of my previous exchanges
with Donovan.

"Could you please ask Alec if he's
able to see me?"

If the abrupt change in tracks threw
Donovan for a loop, he didn't show it.

"I'm sure he'll drop whatever he's working on.
I'll go let him know you're here."

I watched a tiny bird with curiously bright
markings jump from one flower to another while I waited. A few
seconds later Alec came around the corner and joined me in front of
the manor.

"Adri, I'm so glad you came by. You haven't
been returning my calls and I was worried. I would have come by
your house, but I didn't know if that would get you in more trouble
with your mom. Didn't you get any of my messages?"

"I got them; I just didn't think it was a good
idea to call you back."

"I'm really sorry about what I said. You didn't
deserve that."

I pulled my phone out of my pocket and handed
it to him. "Here, this is yours."