Pas
PAS
Book Four of
War of the Alphas
SM REINE
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
This book is sold DRM-free so that it can be enjoyed in any way the reader sees fit. Please keep all links and attributions intact when sharing. All rights reserved.
Cover model photos sourced from Taria Reed at The Reed Files.
Copyright © SM Reine 2015
Published by Red Iris Books
1180 Selmi Drive, Suite 102
Reno, NV 89512
SERIES BY SM REINE
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ABOUT PAS
Deirdre Tombs is a Beta without her Alpha. Everton Stark is missing, just days in advance of the election to replace Rylie Gresham as leader of all North American shifters.
She can’t control his allies anymore. She also can’t win the election without him.
Everything will be lost unless Deirdre can become a better monster than Stark.
OMEGA
The weakest shapeshifter in the pack.
BETA
The right hand to the pack’s leader.
ALPHA
A gifted shifter with the power to control other shifters.
PAS
A Greek word meaning “all kinds of men.”
The riots were miles away now, but Deirdre Tombs still felt the pulse of violence within the city. There were no windows left to shatter, no more screaming, and nothing left to burn, but anger flowed through the gaean neighborhoods in a constant undercurrent.
Rage had been scarred into the face of the city. It showed in the tags spray-painted on the walls—phrases like, “YOUR SANCTUARY, YOUR SELFISHNESS.” People had posted fake election posters of Rylie Gresham with the eyes blacked out and bullet holes in her forehead. There was still glass in the gutters. The smell of melted rubber lingered in the air.
Nothing was going to alleviate that anger except the election for a new Alpha. It was only hours away now. The clock hands turned, winding tension tighter and tighter throughout New York City, throughout North America, within Deirdre’s chest.
Something was going to snap.
“Steady,” Deirdre said. “Wait for my mark.”
“I heard you the first seventeen times,” Lucifer said. The vampire lord was using a Walkie Talkie from the opposite rooftop. She could make out his dark figure moving against the stormy black night. “When’s your mark gonna happen? I’m bored.”
She didn’t dignify that with an answer. Lucifer might have thought they were on bantering terms, but she wasn’t in the mood.
Deirdre turned her binoculars on the street-level windows of the building across the way. People were moving inside even though it was far too late for humans to be at work. These wouldn’t be phlebotomists or nurses, but guards. Human guards armed with standard bullets and wooden stakes.
They should have been carrying silver, but they hadn’t thought they would need to guard a blood bank against an attack from a shifter like Deirdre.
A vampire among her party leaned in to whisper in her ear. “Two o’clock.”
Her gaze snapped to the position he indicated. There was an unmarked white van coming around the corner. It didn’t need a logo for identification with all the antennas thrusting from the hood toward the violet sky.
January Lazar had arrived.
Deirdre pressed the talk button on her Walkie Talkie. “Mark.”
She stepped off the edge of the roof.
Her trench coat billowed around her as she fell, baring legs encased in leather and a man’s combat boots. She struck the sidewalk in a crouch. It didn’t even hurt to fall six stories anymore. Her body didn’t burn with the faintest hint of healing fever.
Vampires landed around her, graceful in the night, pallid and silent.
January Lazar was already out of her van, camera shouldered with a mounted spotlight that was currently turned off. The mundane woman was her own reporter and crew, a one-woman news station. It had nothing to do with secrecy and everything to do with pride. There would be nobody for her to share the credit with.
She was flushed with excitement as her camera tracked Deirdre across the street.
They didn’t speak to each other. Their agreement was one that Deirdre felt best left undiscussed.
Deirdre had discovered the private email address that Stark had used to contact January among his possessions at Chadwick Hawfinch’s high-rise. In the past week, Deirdre had sent the reporter details for three different promotional opportunities. Three different raids on three different types of facilities. And there had been three news reports promoting Stark’s agenda to the preternatural population of North America.
But they never discussed it.
January still believed she was in touch with Stark. She didn’t realize she had anything to talk about with Deirdre.
The woman who approached the blood bank wasn’t merely Deirdre Tombs anymore, though. She was Stark’s Beta. His potential Alpha mate. Representative of the cause that they both stood for, the election they needed to win, the gaeans they must save.
Deirdre was an idea.
Her booted heel slammed into the front door of the blood bank. The handle shattered. The door swung open.
She entered, flanked by a vampire named Stoker on one side and Vidya on the other—the only non-vampire she had brought, solely for the impression she gave with razor-blade wings spread.
Guards in ill-fitting security uniforms moved forward to greet the assault. They were independent contractors without any OPA training or battle magic. Not a real threat.
“Get on the floor!” Deirdre roared in a voice that wasn’t hers, lifting her Ruger LCP .380 in one hand and a Glock in the other.
She swept the room with the muzzles, aiming at the people who approached. Between the two guns, she had twenty-four bullets, and her aim was great.
If she emptied her magazines, no guards would survive.
They knew that. They could do the math.
More than that, they recognized her.
It didn’t take a single bullet or vampire bite to drop the three guards in the waiting room. Two of them hit their knees instantly, batons falling from their hands. The third crumpled when Vidya pistol-whipped him.
“Secure them.” Deirdre didn’t have to specify whom she was ordering at this point; she had already made it clear who would be in charge of restraining hostages, and Lucifer’s vampires swept in with zip ties.
She lingered long enough to make sure the vampires handled the guards gently. There would be blood spilled that night, but if she had her way, none of it would come from living bodies.
Lucifer’s people were careful.
One of the guards was weeping, gazing at Deirdre as though she were Death walking in a human body.
She headed back into the lab.
The green glow of the exit sign reflected off of the glass walls, the shiny metal equipment. It tinted the reclining chairs a sickly shade of brown.
More guards moved through the rear of the room. They emerged from the storage area and drew their batons.
“Four of them,” Stoker said.
These ones didn’t surrender. Whether it was because they’d had more warning or because they didn’t recognize their attackers didn’t really matter.
Deirdre met the first of them by driving her elbow into his gut, slamming his head into a cabinet, kneeing him to the ground.
A second mundane tried to get at her while she was distracted.
She swung her Ruger under the opposite arm and fired from the armpit, planting a bullet in his kneecap.
Vidya shrieked as she flared her wings. The strangeness of the sound paused the other two guards mid-step, giving the vampires enough time to move in from behind.
A short scuffle, and they too went down.
“Humans!” Stoker laughed. He fist-bumped another vampire, whose name Deirdre hadn’t bothered to learn.
They were smiling, enjoying the assault. The vampires always had fun when Deirdre took them on field trips. She wished that she could have been so relaxed.
“Check the other rooms,” Deirdre said.
Vidya did. She returned a moment later. “We’re clear.”
Just like that, they had taken the blood bank, with so little resistance from the existing staff that they might as well have not been there at all.
It was frightening how easy this was becoming: the ability to knock down government installations, even though she didn’t even have Stark’s strategic mind or his ability to compel other shifters.
Deirdre only had a vision, two handguns, and an authoritative voice.
Apparently that was all it took.
She popped the Walkie Talkie off her belt. “Bring her in.”
Lucifer escorted January Lazar into the blood bank. He walked her past the disabled guards slowly enough that she could record everything. It would be streaming the feed to her computer at home, saving each second of video as she filmed it.
They had lost almost all the footage from an earlier raid when a guard cast a magical EMP and wiped out January’s solid-state drive, so now they weren’t taking that risk.
Stark’s message—Deirdre’s message—would reach the masses, no matter what the opposition tried to pull against them.
Deirdre turned to one of the female vampires, who had identified herself as Shaniqua. “How do I look?” Deirdre asked, patting down her jacket and headscarf.