Bound (Dark Reflections Volume 1) (9 page)

"I've never heard even the slightest rumor that you might be able to do that. How long have you been able to partially shift?"

"Years, decades maybe. You've never heard any rumors to that effect because you're the first person I've ever shown."

My head was spinning. "Why didn't you capitalize on it? There's only what, Kaleb and two other people who can do that out of our entire pack?"

"I was already towards the top of the food chain and I always figured that it would be better to have an ace up my sleeve. A bit, I think, like you're figuring."

I cast back over what had happened right after we'd landed in St. Louis and tried to make sense of everything.

"Why did you back down at the airport? I thought that I just surprised you with my partial transformation and that it shook you up enough that you decided not to mix it up with me."

Jack nodded. "That's actually about right, just not in the way you're thinking. You did surprise me, not just with your new trick there, but the fact that you were trying so hard to keep it from turning into a dominance issue."

"You were trying just as hard."

"I was actually trying a lot harder. I've spent most of my time out here over the last two years trying to master my beast, to calm it down to the point where I don't have to deal with dominance fights every single time your dad sends in a new group of bruisers to help bust up a nest of vampires. You said that your beast was unusually calm when you arrived. I was the reason for that. Usually I can keep things from boiling over, but seeing you there looking so much like your dad made my control shakier than it normally is."

"You hate him, don't you?"

"Of course I do. He's the reason that my son is dead. He didn't kill my son with his own hands but he's kept the pack together for far too long. Having half of the pack deployed out on combat missions to places like here helps, but there's still too much internal pressure. I haven't been back to Sanctuary in a while now, but last time I was there it seemed like the dominance structure was in a constant state of flux."

I nodded. "It hasn't changed at all for the better over the last couple of years. There are just too many bodies there. Nobody has fought everybody, so dominance is mostly done by inference. When you encounter someone it's like you have to sit down and compare notes on who you've both fought and try to figure out who's got the best record."

"Yeah, that's about like I remember. I remember when Kaleb was young. He had a way of talking about the future that made you want to help him bring about the big dreams he had. Turns out that the dreams all just involved him horning into the Coun'hij all along. I blame Kaleb for Jack dying, but I also blame myself."

"How come?"

"I had a pet theory for a lot of years. It was something that Kaleb and I used to talk about late at night after your mom had given up on waiting for us and gone off to bed by herself. I thought that need and natural aggression were a key part of just how powerful any particular wolf could become. It seemed to me like my beast was somehow limiting the amount of power I could access and it wasn't until I really needed that power and demonstrated that I could control it that my beast let me access it."

I almost interrupted to tell him just how similar his experience was to what I'd felt last night, but I hesitated and he kept talking.

"My son, Jack, was my guinea pig. He had a natural aggression that reminded me a lot of myself at that age, but I pushed him to be more. I tried to get him to harness that aggression in the hopes that it would let him be more powerful. I knew that there were risks, but I told myself that it would be okay. I planned on being around to make sure that none of the dominance fights got out of hand."

Jack was silent for several seconds as he relived painful memories. "I figured that I was dominant to nearly everyone other than Kaleb, so I could make sure that nobody really took him to the cleaners. Besides, Kaleb had promised to help keep an eye on him."

The calm mien that had almost seemed to be Jack's trademark was gone now. His fists were knotted up and I could feel power lashing outward as his beast tried to
do
something about the feelings raging through him. The beast dealt with blacks and whites, it didn't know what to do with a problem that it couldn't fight into submission.

"I knew that things were heating up between him and Brandon's contingent, but I was only supposed to be gone for one day, only one day turned into three and Jack shot his mouth off to the wrong person. When I got back and found out that Jack was dead Kaleb refused to tell me who'd done it. To this day I still don't know."

I shook my head at him. "I wish I could tell you, but I don't know either. It happened out on the far end of town. I'm not sure that anyone really knows what happened. I mean other than Brandon's people."

"Yeah. I would have beaten an answer out of Brandon back then, but Kaleb refused to let me challenge any of those kids. He told me that I wasn't thinking clearly, and that he'd kill me himself if I tore into any of them."

I shook my head in astonishment. It wasn't necessarily any worse than some of the other stories I'd heard about how Kaleb had screwed people over, but it was remarkable that Jack's story hadn't been more talked about when it happened.

"I'm surprised that you stayed around."

"I didn't, not really. Your dad kept me deployed down to the border pretty much constantly until I volunteered for this assignment."

"Why did you volunteer to help out here? It's about the worst assignment imaginable. You've got a near-constant stream of hybrids coming through town who are going to want to challenge you to prove their dominance."

Jack shrugged. "It's actually not that bad of a gig. I've gotten pretty good at sidestepping the issue of who's the biggest, baddest wolf on the block, so I can usually avoid fighting the people that Kaleb sends to help. It really comes down to the fact that I can make a difference here. The vampires need stopped."

"You could say the same thing about the cats on the southern border, or maybe even some of the worst of the dispossessed."

"No, I'm not sure you can. I'm tired of killing my own kind. Most of the dispossessed are nothing more than round pegs in square holes. They aren't all that different than me, they just didn't luck into an assignment that let them nominally stay part of the pack while keeping enough independence to not go crazy. As for the cats, I just keep wondering how much of the snake pit down there is directly a result of the monarchy going in and assassinating most of the leadership in South America. Once you create that kind of a power vacuum it's almost guaranteed that you'll end up with a bunch of petty warlords who spend most of their time trying to kill each other."

"Which is exactly what we've got, isn't it?"

"Yeah, pretty much. At least that's what we had until your dad got us started fighting with them again. Now they've got a common enemy and that's done more to unite them than anything else possibly could have."

"It's them or us now. If we can't break them, then they'll eventually come up into our heartland and destroy everyone."

"That's the official party line."

Jack didn't look convinced, but I didn't want to press him on it, at least not considering some of the other questions I wanted to ask. He was astonishingly easy to talk to considering that the question of who was dominant hadn't ever been settled between us, but there was still a distinct chance that things could degenerate into posturing and a fight at any moment.

"Have you thought about really leaving? With your skills and experience, not to mention your insight into how Kaleb's operation works, you could be a real asset to the dispossessed. It's even possible that you could mold a group of them into a proper pack."

"That's kind of a seditious suggestion to be coming from Kaleb's son."

There it was. We'd come to the very end of how far he felt he could trust me. All of the things he'd said so far were either common knowledge or would merit nothing more than a slap on the wrist, but I'd just taken the conversation in a direction that could get somebody killed.

"The truth is that I've thought about leaving a lot myself lately. Mentally I keep coming back to the fact that I have to stay to protect the people I care about, but if it wasn't for them I'd have left a long time ago."

As assurances went it wasn't particularly strong. If I was working with Kaleb in an effort to frame him then it wouldn't matter what I said because I wouldn't be punished for it. It had been the truth though and my respiration and heartbeat hadn't fluttered even a little when I'd been speaking.

It was back on him to decide whether or not he thought I was a good enough liar to lure him into some kind of trap.

"Yeah, kid. I've thought about leaving hundreds of times. My wife and son are both long gone, but I'm staying for the same reason you are. I've got people who depend on me here. My boys and girls out there in the city need a strong, experienced hand holding the reins or eventually they're going to get blindsided and most of them are going to get killed."

It had been a really long time since I'd felt like I had someone who understood the situation I was in. Mom understood to a degree, but she was working from a position of weakness and probably always would be.

Jack knew what it was to find his choices circumscribed by his loyalty to his friends. I'd found a kind of kindred spirit without even looking for one.

"Are we making the right decision?"

Jack's snort was eloquent. "Hell, kid, I ask myself that question every day and I'm no closer to answering it now than when I first came out here."

"I keep wondering how many people are like you and me, unhappy with the way things are going, but unwilling to stand up and be a target in an attempt to change things."

Jack looked off into the distance and shrugged. "There are lots of people who are unhappy with how things are right now, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they view the world through the same lens as you do. If you could change things, what would you change?"

"I…well, I guess I don't really know. The Coun'hij for one. I don't think that it's right that they've got every single pack in North America under threat of death."

"We're at war, kid. That requires a strong central authority if you're not going to be steamrolled by the other side."

"We're at war because Kaleb and the rest of the Coun'hij put us there."

"Fair point, but how are you going to change that? Are you going to make peace with the vampires? What about the cats down south? Do you really think that they'll agree to stop fighting us now that they've started to win the war?"

There didn't seem to be much else to say. Jack was right. The position we were in was a terrible one, but the Coun'hij pretty much had us backed into a corner. The silence between us stretched out almost for a full minute before Jack sighed.

"I've run through thousands of scenarios over the last couple of years. We can't use the humans to help contain the cats. They are already struggling to deal with just the little bit of violence that leaks over into their area as part of their war on drugs. I was around to see this nation founded and I never even imagined it could become as powerful as it has, but I also never would have guessed that it could fall so far. It's little more than a Third World government teetering on the edge of bankruptcy these days."

I opened my mouth to protest, to defend the country of my birth, but Jack pinned me to my chair with a glare.

"Don't try to tell me otherwise. We've fought our last few wars using other people's money. The humans and this country can't handle another war right now, at least not unless a whole lot of people are willing to get their hands out of their neighbors' pockets. The humans are useless in this fight unless we're prepared to tell them everything that we've been hiding from them for millennia and let them fight informed."

I cleared my throat. "I'm not sure that would be a good idea. We could just as easily end up on the bad guy list from their perspective as the vampires."

"Yeah, I had the same thought. The way I see it, me staying here has the biggest benefit for the largest number of people. It protects my boys and girls and it helps millions of humans who otherwise would be at risk from vampires. It's a crappy decision when it comes to looking out to the interest of my species, but it helps just about everyone else."

"The greatest good for the greatest number. I guess it works out pretty well for ants."

"Yeah, well people aren't ants. Ants don't spend most of their time figuring out how they can screw the system, they're just happy to let the system screw them. It's a terrible way to make decisions and it is one eventually doomed to failure, but it's all I've got right now. What we need is a serious disruption to the status quo."

"Like what?"

"Like somebody manifesting a new power that changes up the playing field, someone who has the guts to stay out of the Coun'hij and who's smart and strong enough to survive when Kaleb and the rest try to kill him as a result."

I pursed my lips and nodded. "It's happened before. Puppeteer to name just one. You could even say with the way that the population of our pack is exploding that it's only a matter of time until we see one or more game-changing abilities manifest."

"You mean assuming that our young hybrids don't get killed off in the fighting before they have a chance to realize their potential? Oh, and assuming that Mallory doesn't have every single hybrid with the potential to manifest a powerful ability already scouted out and wrapped around Kaleb's finger?"

My breath caught. He was right, Mallory and Kaleb were so many steps ahead of me that it wasn't even funny. Everywhere I turned Kaleb had already been there and made contingency plans to make sure that things went down exactly the way he wanted.

Jack looked over and gave me a sad smile. "Don't feel too bad, kid. Like I said, I've been thinking about this for years. If we had a viable standard to rally around then things would be different, but until then I'm just going to do the best I can to keep hunting down vampires while keeping my skin in one piece."