Bound (Dark Reflections Volume 1) (7 page)

These reserves went up in a flash of heat and fire as I latched onto the forces that were trying to tear my body open and remake it into something more dangerous. I directed my mental hands into that stream of pain and grabbed hold of it in an effort to stop something that I wasn't sure was even possible.

The power seemed to grow even more ferocious as I tried to control it. Heartbeats seemed to pass as hours in my fight to keep control of myself. I almost thought I had the battle won and then suddenly my beast crashed into my defenses, lending his considerable power to the forces trying to shift me.

I lost my grip on part of the power and it streamed through my body once again, but I had managed to funnel it even though I wasn't capable of controlling it. My right hand shifted, taking on the longer proportions and deadly claws of my hybrid form.

Jack took a step back in astonishment as he saw my limited transformation. "I thought you said I wasn't going to have any problems with you."

"I said that I'd try not to get in your face as long as you didn't lord your position of command over me. You didn't exactly make that easy."

My words came out through gritted teeth. The human part of me still didn't want to fight, and the transformation had bled off an appreciable chunk of the energy that my beast had conjured up, but my beast was still pushing for a confrontation, preferably a deadly one so that we'd never have to worry about Jack coming back for a rematch.

"Look, I really don't want to fight you, Alec. If I apologize will that be enough to let you keep control of yourself?"

"I don't know, give it a shot and let's see where things go."

My response was too curt. It was the kind of response that generally led to an escalating pattern of posturing, but Jack just held his hands up in a calming manner.

"I'm very sorry that I took your question the wrong way. Let's just finish this briefing so that we can go beat on the vampires rather than on each other."

It wasn't a great apology as things went, but the mere fact that he was making it told my beast that Jack didn't want to fight us. There could be a lot of reasons for his reluctance to embrace a dominance challenge right now, some of which might not have anything to do with fear of us, but I'd just done something I'd never done before and my beast was prepared to be magnanimous given just how likely it was that my display of a partial transformation had intimidated Jack.

The pressure inside of me reduced to the point where my hand was able to shrink back down to its normal size and shape.

"It looks like that did the trick. Thank you for the apology. You were saying?"

I could tell by the set of his jaw that Jack didn't think that my response was conciliatory enough, but he let it stand.

"In answer to your question earlier, I don't know for sure how bad things might get. Our entire operation here has been designed to keep our presence, our very existence, secret from the bloodsuckers. We've been hoping that they'd key into the werewolves as the only threat that they are facing and that they'd attribute our ongoing reduction of their numbers to more werewolf kills or else to infighting between various factions among the vampires."

"You're not confident that you've been entirely successful though?"

Jack shook his head. "There's no way to be completely confident, not given the fact that some of the vampires still alive in the city are undoubtedly powerful mentalists. The odds that one of them will happen to scan the minds of one of our people rather than one of the humans is incredibly small, but if we operate in close proximity to the vampires like this for long enough it becomes just a matter of when rather than if."

Now wasn't the time to be questioning the policies that Kaleb and the Coun'hij had settled on, but I couldn't help myself.

"Once they figure out that there are more supernatural threats out there than just the werewolves, how likely do you think it is that the information will spread?"

Jack shrugged. "It's impossible to say. Inside the city it will probably spread pretty quickly. The different vampire elders and factions may not be on good terms, but an external threat like that always goes a long way towards making people set aside their differences. Their only real difficulty will be in making contact with each other. We've kept them from developing the kind of social hubs that they had in the city before, and I expect that the different factions don't have each other on speed dial or anything."

"What about the odds of it spreading to other cities?"

Jack looked as unhappy as I felt. "I just don't know, Alec. I would expect that there is much less in the way of information flow between cities, but what information flow there is won't have been as disrupted by our operation here."

"So really it's only a matter of time before the vampires know about our existence and we're actively hunted by them."

Jack nodded, seemingly unwilling to put his assent in words. I let my statement hang in the air for a few seconds. It was a chilling prospect for any shape shifter to consider. We tended to live for three to four times as long as humans, but our fertility rate and resulting population growth was commensurately lower. That meant that a war was especially devastating to our population base as we had a hard time replacing individuals in a short period of time. The Sanctuary pack seemed to be an exception to that iron-clad rule, but nobody seemed to know exactly what was going on there.

Vampires on the other hand were a parasitic organism that could grow at almost exponential rates as long as their host population held out. One vampire could conceivably infest multiple humans per day who could in turn each infect additional people. There was a limit to how fast the vampire population could increase without becoming common knowledge to the humans, but apart from that, or them running out of people to feed on, there was realistically no top end on how many vampires we could find throwing themselves at us if they decided to try to wipe out our entire race.

We'd always relied on secrecy to shield us while we tried to wear down the vampires' numbers, but Kaleb and Puppeteer had said that it was only a matter of when rather than if the vampires would discover us, and they'd thrown millennia of tradition to the wind.

There might have even been some justification behind their position that we needed to strike now while Puppeteer could field armies of werewolves on our behalf, except for the fact that our race was also prosecuting a war against our cousins who lived in South and Central America. It was very much feeling like we'd put ourselves into a two-front war that we couldn't possibly win.

Jack seemed to be waiting for me to give him permission to proceed. It took me a little aback until I realized that it was the natural effect of what had just transpired. We hadn't had a dominance challenge, but his words and actions had established me as at least somewhat dominant to him. It probably wasn't even something that he realized he was doing, but on an instinctual level he was going to defer to me at least slightly.

I'd had it happen with those my age or younger, but it was a heady thing to have someone of Jack's age and experience deferring to me. I took a deep breath and reminded myself that being dominant didn't equate to being qualified to lead.

"Please proceed, Jack. You're the expert and the four of us are simply here to assist you."

He shook himself slightly and I got the idea that he'd just realized that he was deferring to me and he didn't particularly like that he'd been doing so.

"The plan is to try to lure or drive the vampires out of their den. It doesn't do us any good to outnumber them if we can only send a fraction of our people up against them at any given time. I can do a full briefing once we're back to the hotel that we're currently using as our base of operations, but I think you're all going to like this."

**

Like it indeed. The plan involved using explosives and small, hopefully contained, fires to drive the vampires into a large, empty warehouse. I would have said that it was reckless, but Jack seemed confident that his people could keep the blaze from getting out of control and that the fight would be long over by the time the police and firefighters arrived.

Pseudo-dominant to him or not, it wasn't my place to second-guess his plan, so I nodded in all of the right places and a few hours later found myself sitting with James in a dusty corner of the ambush warehouse as the sun went down.

"How long have you been holding out on us, Alec?"

"What are you talking about?"

"Being able to shift just your hands like that is a big deal."

"I haven't been holding out on you. I didn't know I could do that until just this afternoon. I'm not even sure that I could repeat it."

"Well, once we're back home you should spend some time figuring out how to do it and then we should start telling everyone. That's going to be a huge deterrent for guys like Vincent."

I shook my head. "I'll see if I can replicate it, but this needs to stay quiet."

James looked at me like I was crazy. "Alec, it's a big deal. Only the most powerful hybrids have that kind of control over their transformation."

"I'm still the same guy Vincent practically hospitalized a little while ago. Maybe you're right and this is a sign of good things to come, but right now it would just be painting a big target on my back. Maybe it would make Vincent back down from the next fight, but it would also bump me up into the territory where Brandon would start fighting me instead of just insulting me all of the time. I'm not ready to go up to the next weight class yet. I'm planning on trying to get Jack off by himself before we go and asking him to keep it quiet too."

"You're sure you don't feel any different?"

"Not even a little bit."

James looked disappointed. It seemed like everyone had something riding on whether or not I managed to finally manifest an ability that would make me a force within our pack and the wider world. Sometimes I wished that I could tell everyone to go away. I already had enough to worry about just trying to keep James, Jessica and Jasmin safe, not to mention our families.

It wasn't like I didn't have help, but in some indefinable way I knew that I was the lynchpin to it all. With me it all hung together more or less well enough to keep everyone alive and in one piece. Without me it would just be a matter of time before our entire wobbly house of cards came down.

Further conversation was cut off by the sound of an explosion. The building muffled it, but to shape shifter ears it was still loud enough to serve as a signal that we were about to be up against company. James and I spread out slightly to give each other room to work. I looked back to confirm the position of the exit that we were guarding and then as I felt a surge of energy from James, I also loosed the chains on my beast.

The roar of power from my beast was greater than I remembered it being. It was like I'd satisfied my beast that it could take the kid gloves off and it was responding by doing exactly that. My transformation ripped through my body, lengthening bones and bulking up muscles at the same time that claws formed on the end of each finger.

Despite my words to James earlier I did in fact feel a little different. My skin felt tight and there was an extra measure of restless energy bouncing around inside of me. I opened my mouth to tell James that maybe I'd been wrong, but the sound of running feet stopped me before the words could form.

The vampires came pouring through the door on the far end of the warehouse and there were more of them than we'd been expecting. I counted seven emaciated, dirty figures led by an eighth, a huge man who was nearly as big as Brandon in his human shape.

The leader already had a pair of smallish hand axes out and the two vampires at the back of the pack were armed with swords, but as the vampires saw us the other five of them pulled out a motley assortment of weapons that ranged from short swords and knives to lengths of chain.

Based on the sheer amount of noise still coming from behind the vampires Jack was making sure to move slowly and give the vampires plenty of time to get out into the center of the warehouse before arriving on scene.

"We may only have seconds before the ones from behind us catch up. Spread out and swarm these two under."

The siege of the city was obviously having an impact on the vampires. Other than the leader and one or two others, this group all moved with an obvious exhaustion, but as they got close to us and massive amounts of adrenaline dumped into their systems they started moving more quickly.

Jack had doubtless heard the leader giving orders because the cacophony of sound from the other end of the building had stopped and only half a second later Jack and the others appeared behind the vampires.

The vampires compressed back towards a wall as wolves came streaming around the other side of the open space so that they could support James and me. Jessica and Jasmin were closest to us which was reassuring on several levels. I liked the idea of having them close enough that I could support them if things started going badly for one of them, and I was more comfortable with the idea of having them backing me up than Jack's people, even if Jack's wolves were the more experienced fighters.

"Spread out and try to use our advantage in numbers."

Jack's voice was barely recognizable as a consequence of the changes that being in hybrid form put onto his vocal cords, but his people moved forward without any hesitation. I stepped forward, James and the others at my flanks, and suddenly the room was engulfed in combat.

The leader took a swing at me with the axe in his right hand, but it was nothing more than a feint. I dodged backwards and then tried to slash his arm with my claws before he could recover, but he was superhuman fast.

His offhand flicked his axe forward and knocked my claws wide a split second before the weapon in his right hand licked back out and nicked the top of my left arm.

I knew it was just the opening stages of the fight, that we were just feeling each other out still, but so far he was proving to be the better fighter. It wasn't a realization designed to fill me with confidence.