Bound (Dark Reflections Volume 1) (25 page)

Juan slumped down in his chair. I could tell that he wanted to disbelieve what James and I were telling him, but the pieces fit together much too well for that. This was exactly the kind of thing that Brandon needed right now, and hard as it was to believe that anyone would order the death of so many people solely in the hopes that it would bring more troops down from the north, Brandon really was capable of doing it if anyone was.

"What have I done?"

It was a time for brutal honesty. "You've supported Brandon by killing jaguars, but more importantly you've helped put in place all of the controls that make independents willing to come down here and fight for Brandon and Kaleb. We need to stop that. The best thing in the world is for Brandon and Kaleb to spend all of their time fighting the cats because while they waste their strength against each other it allows us to start preparing to stop them."

"You're talking about some kind of coup? Do you have any idea how impossible that is?"

I nodded. "I do. Maybe not as much as you, but I know that our odds of winning are so close to zero that for all practical purposes anything we do probably isn't going to make a difference. I can't continue to support Brandon and Kaleb though. There are people resisting them—look at Agony and Dream Stealer. Those two haven't let the odds stop them from fighting and there is always a possibility that we can convince others. You said it yourself that Jaclyn has pretty much already told the Coun'hij to go screw themselves. Just the fact that she sent me to watch that massacre says that she's passively working against Kaleb. How much more would it really take to bring her over to the point where she's actively working against them?"

"A lot, Alec, it would take a lot. All three of the people you just mentioned are major powers in our world, but Agony and Dream Stealer can afford to actively work against the Coun'hij precisely because they don't have any friends or family that the Coun'hij can use against them. Jaclyn has an entire pack and a daughter to worry about. She'll never do anything that will put her daughter truly at risk."

A knot formed in my stomach. With everything else that had happened recently I hadn't thought about Rachel. Mother was a consideration too, but lately I wasn't sure how much she was really on my side or not.

Juan was right. It was one thing to throw yourself into a fight against the Coun'hij knowing that they'd do terrible things if they caught you, it was quite a different prospect to put people you cared about into harm's way.

"We've got to do something, Juan."

"For now I can start quietly letting the other independents know that Brandon staged the murder scene at Naco to make it look like it was cats instead of Vincent. That should cause the word to slowly percolate up to the various packs and make sure that Brandon doesn't get the influx of recruits that he was hoping for."

"How do we get the independents out of here? Every independent we lose down here is one more person who won't be able to stand against Kaleb if the opportunity arises."

"I don't know, Alec. It's not like every independent down here could just pack up and leave all at once without causing Kaleb to ask a lot of questions. I think the best we can hope for is to stop the flow of recruits in and then those who are here will have to gradually leave as they can come up with good reasons why they have to go back home."

"As the number of independents starts to drop, whoever is still here is going to be in a lot more danger."

"I know. It's the exact opposite problem from what we had when we started operations with Brandon, but it's exacerbated because at least then Brandon had a compelling reason to treat us well so as not to preclude the possibility of additional reinforcements arriving."

Alec Graves
Three miles south of Lochiel, Arizona
Northern Mexico

I could tell that Jasmin and Jessica were still in shock from the revelation James and I had shared, but I couldn't do anything at this point but hope that they'd be able to shake it off enough not to have it interfere with their ability to fight.

Juan seemed to be handling the news better, but I could tell that he was still a little off of his game. He'd finished briefing us on the latest version of the operation and then we'd made it back just in time to form up with the rest of the teams for transport down to the ambush location.

This was an operation that had been solely put together by the Brain Box rather than originating from Brandon's anonymous source and then being vetted by the Brain Box. I wasn't sure that it should make any kind of difference either way, but for whatever reason I was more nervous about this deployment than either of the last two.

The Brain Box had apparently identified a shipment of drugs that was being run up into the United States by one of the drug cartels that had especially heavy backing from a group of fifteen jaguars who'd spent the last decade or so kicking out all of the competition from their home city of Zacatecas. I was unclear on whether or not the authorities even realized that Zacatecas was where ten percent of the cocaine in the United States originated, but apparently the cartel had been having problems with a couple of the other regional drug gangs and as a result they were especially worried about making sure this particular shipment made it across the border.

The Brain Box had a long list of hacked email accounts that indicated that the Zacatecas crew had turned to their usual MO and escalated by including nearly a dozen jaguars to serve as guards for the shipment as it made its way north. If they continued with their normal procedure those guards would then pay a visit to the competing cartels and kill everyone they could find, but thanks to some more fancy hacking the Brain Box had a complete roster of who was going to be along for the ride as well as the route and schedule for the caravan.

Brandon had decided that we would intercept the convoy just short of the United States border, all of which explained why we'd spent the last hour in the darkness alongside the road setting up a series of tire shredders and vehicles such that we could block off the road in seconds.

The Brain Box apparently had aerial eyes on the convoy, and about the time that we all left Rio Rico they confirmed that the number of guards still matched up exactly with the count from the emails that had tipped us off about the operation in the first place.

A couple of minutes before three a.m. we got the signal that the convoy was only ten minutes out and that there were no other vehicles between us and them, so we sprang into action. The tire shredders were flipped to the 'shred' position and the SUV blockade was rolled into place.

Our team was on the north side of the road along with some other people from various teams while Vincent's team and Brandon were on the south side. The thinking was that the terrain to the south was less rugged and therefore we could reasonably expect that most of the bad guys would try to flee south once they realized how much trouble they were in.

Brandon had also positioned a few wolves around the ambush site in a rough circle a hundred yards or so from the road. Jaguars are usually faster than wolves, so the hope was that the wolves would be able to intercept and at least slow down any of the cats who broke free of the main fight and made a run for it. If everything went according to plan then we'd be facing an outnumbered group of cats with a few humans thrown in and we'd have the element of surprise on our side.

My shoulders tensed up as I saw the first SUV appear around a bend in the road. A second SUV followed less than twenty yards from the first, and then a large semi came into view next. Two more black SUVs rounded out the convoy and the next couple of minutes passed agonizingly slowly as we waited for the vehicles to enter our trap.

Brandon had positioned our team on the extreme western edge of the ambush site, so I was able to see our targets well before they had any possibility of seeing our roadblock. The rest of our teams were pretty well hidden, but still visible if you knew where to look. I watched as the same ripple of anxiety that I was feeling slowly swept down both sides of the road as each new wolf or hybrid was able to finally see the approaching group of cars.

The reaction by the lead car was almost perfect when they saw that the road was blocked ahead of them. They must have had radios, because all five vehicles started to accelerate at the same time. Trying to ram their way through our blockade was risky, but they couldn't reverse course quickly, not without losing the semi-truck and the tens of millions of dollars of drugs it was carrying.

They'd all slowed down to negotiate the final curve in the road, which meant that they were starting from a less than ideal velocity, but they still would have been able to break through if not for the tire shredders which they hit less than a second later. Within a few heartbeats the first two SUVs and the truck were all on bare metal rims and the last two SUVs' tires were smoking as they stopped just short of the shredders.

Four more of our SUVs rolled into place behind the convoy and then Brandon shot off a flare and all around me people were shifting forms in a multi-pointed roar of power. My hybrid legs tore into the hard ground underneath me as I joined everyone else in sprinting down towards the road.

At close range humans with guns simply aren't much of a threat because of how slow the operators are, but we were starting out far enough away that I'd been worried that five or six guards armed with fully automatic weapons might do some damage before we got close enough to neutralize them. Hybrids are generally big enough and our internal systems are redundant enough that we are hard to kill with anything less than large-caliber rifle fire, but a pistol shot to the head could still bring us down and the wolves are much less resilient.

My concerns meant that I was hyper-aware and looking for weapons, which explained how I ended up as the first person to realize it was a trap. People were piling out of the SUVs just as expected, but rather than splitting into two groups, one of which was armed and the other of which dropped down onto all fours as they transformed, every single one of the guards shifted with a lash of power and charged towards the hybrids and wolves attacking them.

"It's a trap!"

My words hadn't even had a chance to begin fading away before Brandon started yelling for everyone to push on and attack.

I'd slowed down slightly when I realized that the cats were prepared for us, but I heeded Brandon's orders and crashed into a large male jaguar a second later. There was nothing of finesse in the exchange of blows. He jumped at me with quickness that I wouldn't have thought I'd be able to match, but I somehow managed to get an arm up between the two of us and I picked him out of the air and plunged my claws into his side.

I'd been lucky and I knew it, but as I dropped his lifeless corpse to the ground the back of the semi-truck opened up and three more men jumped out and suddenly the odds had tilted against us.

With one squad detached to Naco, the security team that had stayed back at the hotel, and a few people like Alison still on light duty, we were down to twenty-three effectives onsite at the ambush. We'd been expecting twelve cats and half a dozen humans, which would have meant that we'd essentially have them outnumbered by about fifty percent, once you factor in the fact that we had some wolves out to catch leakers rather than stationed where they could get right into the fight.

Instead, we were up against twenty-one cats, counting the three that had been hidden inside of the trailer with the drugs. Suddenly we were outnumbered and fighting a holding action until the wolves out on the perimeter could arrive and help tilt things back in our direction.

I ducked another cat and then ripped a smaller female off of James' back, but she writhed out of my grasp before I could kill her. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jess and Jasmin double-team the jaguar that I'd just dodged, but there was still something tickling the back of my mind. In order to have planned this ambush the cats must have had a pretty good idea of how many people we could field. I didn't see any way they could have known that we'd be down a team, so counter-ambushing us with such a small number of shape shifters didn't make any sense.

Another cat tried to attack Jess and drive her off so that she couldn't assist Jasmin, but Juan got ahold of the cat's ribs and slammed it into the ground hard enough that I heard bones break. Before Juan could follow up and finish off his injured opponent, two more cats threw themselves at him. One cat latched onto his leg and the other hit him higher up, gaining a purchase on his chest as its back legs tore into his stomach. He needed help, but another cat was circling me and I knew if I turned my back on it that I'd be dead within seconds.

Down on the south side of the road our forces were even worse off than we were. Whether by accident or design, the cats had sent most of their numbers down there and I could see that they were being pressed badly by the sheer weight of numbers arrayed against them. Vincent and his guys were almost all fighting more than one opponent and bleeding in several places, but the real show was being put on by Brandon.

I'd never seen Brandon go all-out before, which meant that I'd never realized just how much he'd been holding back in all of the fights I'd seen him in before. He wasn't just fast, he seemed to flicker from one place to the next without actually crossing the intervening distance. Brandon killed two cats in three seconds while I was watching out of the corner of my eye and I suddenly realized he was right. He just needed the rest of us to hold on for another minute or so and he'd swing the odds back in our favor all by himself.

My opponent suddenly switched directions and threw himself at James, but I managed to move with him and I got a couple of claws into his feline body. It wasn't much more than a flesh wound, but it threw off his timing and trajectory enough that James was able to spin around and land a couple of blows of his own.

We were in the middle of a total free-for-all. I jumped in and tried to keep the cat James had been fighting up until that point occupied, which positioned me perfectly to see Brandon's plan finally finish unraveling.