Bound (Dark Reflections Volume 1) (12 page)

"Why would she have let you get hurt like that?"

"I think that she had been instructed by Kaleb to do whatever she could to increase the bond between us. She must have thought that her delay would go unnoticed, that I would think that she'd saved my life rather than risking it. She came to me while I was still in bed trying to recover from my injuries and she told me that she wanted to be with me, but that there was something hanging over her head that wouldn't allow it. Of course I begged her to tell me what was stopping her and finally she told me that Kaleb was planning on betraying the pack. She said that she was worried that he would use our relationship to manipulate both of us and that the only way for us to act on our feelings for each other would be for us to run away."

Donovan stared off into the distance for nearly a minute before sighing. "I didn't have access to nearly as much of your father's finances back then as I have now, but I could have easily made off with millions. It would have been enough for the two of us to live out our lives on a small island somewhere safe from Kaleb and the Coun'hij both."

"You told her no."

"I did indeed. I told her that my oath to your father was more important to me than even my feelings for her. I said that if he were indeed to betray us that things would be different, but until then I would have to stand by Kaleb no matter what else might come."

"It was a test."

"Indeed, a most shrewd one at that. I'd never realized until then just how accomplished a liar Mallory was. Her scent, her pulse, her expression, her voice, they were all perfect. I had no doubt that she was telling the truth and I chose to stand by Kaleb regardless. The only clue I had during the whole lead up to their test was the fact that she'd almost let me die, but only minutes after she left my room Kaleb came in and told me that I'd passed, that I'd shown the kind of loyalty that he'd always known I'd possessed."

"At which point he put you in charge of all of the pack finances."

"Correct, Master Alec. It was a cruel irony that not too long after that Kaleb joined the Coun'hij and I started to realize that everything Mallory had said had been true other than that she wanted to run away with me."

"I'm so sorry, Donovan."

"Don't be, Master Alec. I've had a long time to work through the bulk of my feelings where Mallory is concerned. I related the story now only because I think it's important for you to know what you are up against. Master Kaleb and Mallory are capable of almost any atrocity if they think that it might bring them closer to their goals."

Donovan shook himself slightly and then bowed his head respectfully. "I'll let your mother know that she can send Rachel over at any time."

I watched in silence as Donovan turned and left my room. I went back to my weights and made it through two more sets before Rachel arrived, but my heart wasn't in the workout anymore, so I didn't feel particularly put out by needing to stop to get the door for her.

Rachel wrinkled her nose at me as she stepped into my room. "You've been working out."

"I hardly worked out at all, but I can go jump through the shower if you want me to."

Rachel shook her head. "That's a bad idea if I've ever heard one. If you did that then I'd get bored and go back to Mom's rooms, thereby defeating the purpose of her suggesting I come and check up on you. You're not very good at this spy stuff."

I rolled my eyes at her. "Somehow I'm not surprised that you saw through Mom's attempt at getting you out of the way. It makes life a lot easier though because it means I
could
go shower without worrying that you'll wander off."

"If it's all the same to you, I'd rather you stay out here and talk to me. If I'm by myself then I'll just think about Dad yelling at Mom." Rachel looked down at the carpet and then shrugged. "Mom and I went on a shopping trip, which is what has Dad pissed off."

"Usually she schedules those a week or two in advance to make sure that it causes the minimum amount of fuss possible. What made her change things up at the last minute this time?"

Rachel sighed and tried not to meet my eyes, but I reached out and gently brought her chin up so that she had no other choice.

"Mom got a call from Jack in St. Louis. He told her that you'd been hurt and that he needed some help coming up with a way to keep you there for a day or two. She figured that a request from him combined with us screwing up the schedule for one of the planes would do it. She was right, but now Dad is going to yell at her again."

There was almost more information in those few sentences than I knew what to do with. Apparently Jack was working with my mother, maybe not all of the time, but enough still that they would do each other favors, at least when it came to protecting me.

"I didn't know that Mom let you hear those kinds of things. Usually she sends you out of the room whenever we talk about something important."

Rachel nodded. "Yeah, that's pretty much just for show. If it's just the two of us and a call comes in she rarely makes me leave. As long as we keep up the appearance that I don't know anything then she figures that I'm pretty safe. Nobody will try to sweat me for information if they don't know that I'm privy to most of what she knows. You'd be surprised at some of the stuff that's rattling around inside of my head, Alec."

She said it with a smile, but there was an undertone of worry to her voice.

"What's wrong, Rachel? I mean besides the fact that Kaleb and Mother are in her rooms fighting. There's something else, isn't there?"

"Yeah. Mom has started keeping a secret from me, or maybe I've just started to realize that she's not telling me everything like I thought she was. There's something going on down at the border, something that has her worried, but she keeps dodging my attempts to try to figure out what it is. I don't suppose you know what's going on?"

I shook my head. I could feel a headache coming on. I'd always thought that Mom kept me in the loop on everything and kept Rachel in the dark as much as possible. Rachel had just shaken my worldview in a slight but very real way.

"I don't know, but I'd bet that Jack does. He more or less hinted that something terrible was going on down on the border, but when I tried to press him about stuff, he shut me down in spectacular fashion."

Rachel frowned. "I don't like this. I don't like the fact that they are keeping some huge secret from us. It makes me question for the first time whether or not I can trust Mom. It seems like the stakes just keep getting higher and higher."

"Are you still hoping that Kaleb isn't the bad guy here?"

"I'm not an idiot, Alec. I know that Dad isn't very nice, and I know that he's done some pretty mean things. The fact that I'm holding out a little bit of hope that he's in some way redeemable doesn't mean that I'm going to allow him to hurt me or the people I care about. I'm telling you though that there is something about what Dad is doing that just doesn't add up, and I'm going to keep digging whenever I get the chance to try and figure out what is really going on."

I pulled Rachel into a hug and closed my eyes as I rested my chin on the top of her head. "You're too good for this life, Rachel. Someone as kind and smart as you belongs in the normal world where you can make some lucky guy extremely happy and then have a life where the worst thing you worry about is whether or not the two of you will be able to make your mortgage payments."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence, Alec. You're pretty okay yourself. Out of everyone in my life, you're the one person I still feel like I can trust completely. Please don't betray my trust. I'm not sure that I could survive that."

"Don't worry, Rachel. I'll do everything I can to protect you."

Alec Graves
Rio Rico Airport
Rio Rico, Arizona

Our plane touched down in Rio Rico a little before noon. We found 100-degree heat and a fearsome reception waiting for us. I'd expected our arrival to be fairly low-key. Rio Rico was a small town with less than twenty thousand people that hadn't even had an airport until Kaleb had decided to make it one of the centers for his war on the southerners.

Instead of the bored local holding a sign with our names on it, we found Brandon, Vincent, and half a dozen other shape shifters from our pack waiting for us. It was like something out of an action movie. The way that the hybrids were all facing outwards, prepared to respond to any kind of threat, gave me the distinct impression that we were in hostile territory.

Alison, one of the wolves who had been sent down to the southern front more than four months ago, stepped forward and pointed towards a line of black SUVs waiting less than fifty feet from the plane.

"The cats have attacked the airport several times over the last two months. The four of you aren't versed in our standard operating procedure, so Brandon has asked that you go take a seat in the cars while the rest of us keep an eye on the plane until it is refueled and begins taxiing."

My beast didn't particularly like being told what to do by a submissive, but I mentally sat on him to keep him from sending out a flare of power that might tip off Brandon or Vincent to the fact that I was more powerful now than the last time they'd seen me.

"You heard the lady, let's get over to the vehicles."

James shot me an unhappy look. Apparently his beast was likewise dissatisfied with the way the chain of command was working, but I was dominant to him, so unless he wanted to start a fight with me out here in broad daylight there wasn't much he could do but follow Jasmin and Jessica to the SUVs.

Once we were inside one of the air-conditioned bubbles of calm, James practically exploded. The surge of power he unleashed into the air around him made my ears pop.

"That was a calculated insult. Brandon should have been the one giving us orders rather than sending Alison to do it."

I locked gazes with James and refused to back down until he looked away. "I think you're probably right that Brandon was insulting us, but just because that was an insult doesn't mean that it was all that it was."

Jasmin looked up with curiosity written all over her face. "What do you mean?"

"Look at them." I pointed at the circle of men and women standing in a loose circle around the plane. "We see Brandon and Vincent back in Sanctuary on a pretty regular basis, but the rest of these guys are out here for months at a time. Even when Kaleb gives them some down time he doesn't usually let them come back to Sanctuary—instead he sends them in twos and threes off to someplace where they can blow off some steam without causing any waves back home. Do any of the people from our pack look the way you remember?"

Jess shook her head. "No, Alison was practically scared of her own shadow before. Now she looks like she could rip me in half without breaking a sweat."

I nodded, not just because Jess was right, but because that was exactly the same difference I'd noticed almost as soon as we landed. The old Alison never would have given me an order, no matter how politely worded and no matter whom she was representing. This new Alison had chopped her hair into a ragged bob and dyed a light-red streak through it. Everything from her clothes—black cargo pants and a tank top—up to her posture seemed to indicate that she'd been through hell during the last four months and that she was more than able to handle herself in any of the situations she was likely to run into.

We watched as the ground crew finished refueling and checking the plane and then two of the waiting figures left their spots in the circle and boarded the plane. Fifteen minutes later the plane was taxiing down the runway and everyone else was piling into the waiting vehicles. Alison took the driver seat to our SUV and drove with a kind of easy confidence that told me she'd done this many times before and that she didn't expect problems now that we were moving.

We'd left the front passenger seat open, but now I moved forward and sat down beside her. "What's going on down here?"

"We're in the middle of a war; that pretty much says it all."

"The reports we've been getting back in Sanctuary led us to believe that we were winning."

Alison nodded, a short, choppy motion that conveyed her supreme discomfort with where I was steering the conversation.

"We are winning if you just look at the kill numbers. We've killed four or five cats for each of our people that they've retired."

"But that's not the full story because you guys don't look like the winning team."

"Right, well, the truth is that the jaguars who have carved off territory and set themselves up as petty dictators tend to have bastard children by the scores. Even if only a relatively small percentage of those kids turn out to be moonborn, that still adds up to a lot of cats running around down there. Before now, they always spent most of their time fighting against each other, but now that we've gone and stirred things up they are setting aside their differences so that they can fight us."

"So we're way more outnumbered than anyone back home realizes."

Alison snorted. "That's got to be the understatement of the year. Even if every wolf in North America was down here fighting we'd still be outnumbered. As it is we've got only a relatively small percentage of the able-bodied adults down here on the border so our odds are even worse."

"How are you guys holding out against those kinds of numbers?"

"In a word? Brandon. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of people down here pulling together. We've got everything from some of the Coun'hij's bully-boys to some of the dispossessed who've decided to come in from the cold and help fight the good fight, but it's Brandon who always turns the tide of every fight that he's in. I've seen him take out three cats in three seconds and do it without taking even a scratch in return."

There was a glow in Alison's eyes that made me distinctly uneasy, but either I managed to keep my feelings off of my face or she was just too caught up in what she was telling me to notice anything short of the conversational equivalent to a tactical nuke.

"Two months ago one of the really old cats made the trip up from Nicaragua. The intelligence operation your dad put together saw him coming days before he arrived and it scared the crap out of everyone here. You know how cats just continue to get stronger and faster as they age rather than plateauing out like we do."