Forsaken (18 page)

"Are
you okay? I didn't realize it had gotten this bad. We can make an
excuse and you can head back to the airport."

"I'm
fine, Alec. I'm not showing weakness in front of your new best buds."

"Jas,
I'm serious. This isn't a normal field trip. If you're off your game
as much as it looks like you are, then you need to go back to the
plane."

"I'm
not screwing around either. All of the signs point to the fact that
you're going to shack up with the Russian princess over there, and
when that happens I'm not going to be doing myself any favors if I
undermine my credibility right now. This is as much of a tryout for
us as it is for them. Get back over there and act like a real alpha
instead of sitting here holding my hand."

My
beast took exception to her tone and power bubbled up from
inside of me. It wasn't threatening a full transformation yet, but if
she kept pushing I'd find it harder and harder not to kick her back
to the plane. The safest bet right now was distance, so I turned and
walked away, hoping the entire time that she could keep from getting
herself killed in this fight.

Another
map was out and resting across the hood of the limo. Peter was
drawing lines on the streets closest to us. He waited until the four
of us were close enough to see what he was doing before he launched
into his update.

"It's
definitely here. Male, middle-aged, and it smells like he's been
running through some fields, because there's an undertone of
fertilizer there as well. You'll probably be able to pick him out as
we get closer. Nothing else seems the same as the last place I
tracked them to, but it's a safe bet that the other two are around
here somewhere."

Jaclyn
nodded and took the pencil from Peter. "Okay, I'd recommend that
we split into two groups. The Tucson pack will take the north street
here and move east so that we flush the things away from town if they
decide to run. Remember, they are faster than a hybrid, but you
should have a slight edge as a wolf. Be careful not to engage them by
yourself. Three to one odds are acceptable. Four to one is better."

She
paused and scanned the group, making sure everyone nodded before
continuing. Isaac seemed to be operating under the same assumptions
as Jasmin. He refused to acknowledge her stare until I called up
power and thrust it in his direction hard enough to ignite an
answering flare from him. It put him on notice that I wasn't in the
mood for him to be difficult, but more importantly, it gave him a
pretext for backing down that relied on the fact that I was dominant
to him. It was a thin pretext, but it allowed him to avoid admitting
that Jaclyn could wipe the floor with him any time she felt like it.

Satisfied
that everyone had gotten her message loud and clear, Jaclyn drew
another line.

"I'll
take the southern road here with Tasha and the Sanctuary pack. If you
see one vacuum, howl for help and pile on it. If you see two, then
howl for help and stay away from them until the other group can
arrive and pitch in."

Everyone
nodded again and then we split up and started walking towards our
respective routes. I looked back to confirm that Arnold seemed to
have taken command of the other detachment and then turned to Jaclyn.

"You've
done this before, so I'm happy to follow your lead."

She
nodded, but it was obvious she and Tasha were both on high alert
already. Feeling a bit like an amateur who had shown up unprepared
to a pro game, I shut up and started paying more attention to our
surroundings.

The
buildings were reasonably well-maintained, but they had an air of
disuse that indicated that the town had suffered in the recent
economic contraction and was having a hard time attracting new businesses.
This far outside
of town there weren't any streetlights, but there were enough
exterior lights and motion-activated security lights to provide
plenty of illumination even in this form. My eyes were better than a
human's still, but nowhere near as good as what I had as a wolf.

We'd
been walking for several seconds before I realized what was bothering
me about the night. There wasn't any ambient noise. I could hear an
air conditioner kick on somewhere behind us, and it sounded like one
of the buildings off to the right had some kind of slow leak in the
plumbing somewhere, but the kind of organic sounds that you'd expect
on the edge of the city were shockingly absent. There weren't any
insects of any kind, and I hadn't heard a single dog bark since we'd
arrived.

Tasha
grabbed her mom's arm and pointed off to the right. It took me a
second to see what had caught her eye. There were some flickering
lights inside a building that had just come into view. I probably
would have dismissed them as nothing more than a light that was
nearly to the end of its useful life, but she was probably right. A
werewolf's absorption ability always seemed to play havoc with the
electrical grid.

Tasha
already had her phone out and was sending a text to the other group.
Jaclyn led us between two buildings and then she and Tasha both
started pulling their clothes off. My cheeks started to heat up
as I realized that the Tucson pack hadn't adopted my dad's
innovation. We tended to go through a remarkable number of ha'bits in
a given month, but avoiding the frequent nudity that most of the
packs were forced to deal with paid for the stretchy garments several
times over.

I'd
known that Isaac seeing Dom naked or James seeing Jess would have
ratcheted up all kinds of pressure inside of the pack. I hadn't
stopped to consider the fact that without a ha'bit, you were more
likely than not to see your future mother-in-law completely bare at
some point or another.

Isaac,
Jess, Jas and I stripped our own clothes off in smooth, economical
motions, and then turned to find that both Tasha and her mom had
transformed into wolves in a cool rush of power. It made sense.
People were still probably going to comment on half a dozen
abnormally large wolves this far inside the city, but it was less
likely to cause a real stir than someone seeing our hybrid forms.

We
followed suit and then all padded back out onto the street on four
legs. Jaclyn led us closer to the building with the flickering lights
as her pack caught up to us. I could hear them out there a few dozen
yards away, close enough that they could support us, but far enough
away to help ensure that we didn't have some kind of pissing match
between the dominants.

Our group
circled the building and found a door that had been ripped off its
hinges. I saw claw marks on the siding and made a mental note to have
someone come out and obscure some of the evidence once we were done
here.

We
crept into the building and found a huge, mostly-empty industrial
space. Jaclyn changed forms again, presumably judging us safe from
casual observation, and I followed suit. I always felt more prepared
for the unexpected as a hybrid. Isaac changed, too, and then we
spread out slightly, flanking Jaclyn as the wolves took the outside
edges of our formation.

I
heard the other pack slip inside the building and felt flares of
power as the three dominants completed their transformations. A
second later all of the lights outside picked up the same kind of
flicker Natasha had noticed earlier. It was darker inside than I
would have liked and the loss of artificial light was making things
worse. There were shadows deeper inside the building that even my
hybrid eyes couldn't pierce.

Jaclyn
slowly started moving forward and then I caught the edge of a smell
that didn't belong here. Peter had a split second to catch the same
scent and whine before we were attacked.

The wolf we'd been tracking
stepped out of the darkness ahead of us and my chest got tight
as I saw just how big he was. He looked like someone had taken a
rough, unfinished hybrid and scaled it up to at least eight feet tall
while making it proportionally wider than a normal hybrid. A split
second later, two bulky wolves dropped through a skylight, falling
more than forty feet before hitting the ground with enough force that
they probably cracked the concrete.

Everything still felt like it was
going more or less according to plan until a
fourth
werewolf
came out of an office behind us.

We
were surrounded, and every light for at least a block died
completely in the same instant. Only the fact that they gave off the
cool golden glow of a living organism to our vision saved us from
fighting completely blind.

Jaclyn
issued her orders without hesitation. "Alec, Isaac, with me.
Arnold and Brutus on the one to the south. Alexei, Jane and Tasha will
have to keep the one on the east distracted. The rest of you take the
one to the west. We're outnumbered, so stay in motion and try to keep
out of their reach."

As
plans went it wasn't a bad idea, but we all knew it wouldn't
survive the first few seconds of the fight. Our best bet would be for
Jaclyn, Isaac and me to overwhelm our opponent quickly so we could
turn and help with the others. If it took us too long then some of
our allies were going to fall. It would only take one or two of us
being cut down to shift the odds so far against us that our chances
of making it out alive would be almost nonexistent.

I
paced Jaclyn, staying on her left side as she rushed the gigantic
werewolf that had lured us into the trap. I couldn't get over how
much bigger he was even than I'd been told to expect. He waited until
Jaclyn was almost to him and then sprang towards her with speed that
wasn't much less than what Anton had demonstrated when we'd ambushed
him to save Ash and Kristin.

Jaclyn
dodged to the side, scoring a slash on the werewolf's arm as it tried
to spin around to follow her. I saw my opportunity and lunged
forward, trying to get in behind it, but the werewolf reacted faster
than I was expecting. He spun around and backhanded me into one of
the steel pillars that supported the roof.

Somewhere
between when the werewolf had made his move and when Jaclyn had made
hers, my senses expanded in a way that I couldn't explain. I could
feel a vortex of energy sitting roughly in the center of our
opponent's navel and there were three others not too far away, only
calling it a vortex of energy wasn't quite right. It was more like a
tiny black hole that was greedily sucking in power from everywhere
around it. When Jaclyn had attacked, I'd felt a flash of power that
exactly mirrored the energy being pulled out of the
electrical wires running all over the building.

Jaclyn
had affirmed at the start of the fight that her ability wouldn't work
on the werewolves, but it must have been so second nature to her to
release a jolt of power simultaneous to a strike that she'd gone
ahead and tried to zap it. The power arced from the tips of
her claws into the werewolf and then disappear into the tiny
singularity sitting inside of her opponent. The lights had flickered
slightly, not the ones in the building, but lights somewhere further
away, almost as though Jaclyn's ability had partially overwhelmed the
werewolf's capacity to absorb energy.

It
was an interesting piece of information, but it wouldn't help me
right now. My thoughts had taken only a split second to register, and
then I heard the splatter of blood hitting the concrete floor and got
my third huge surprise since we'd engaged what I had to assume was
the oldest werewolf in the group. His claws weren't just sharp on the
inside edge, they were sharp on the outside edge, too. A backhand
like he'd hit me with would have been a blunt blow coming from a
hybrid, but he'd opened up a series of deep slashes along my chest
with his attack.

Isaac
danced in and slashed at the werewolf's arms before dancing back out.
He'd been experimenting, trying to learn the style of fighting that
Abaddon had used to best him when Agony had visited, but even so, he
still almost wasn't fast enough. He ducked under a blow as
Jaclyn landed a strike on the werewolf's leg.

My
injury wasn't immediately concerning, so I was already rushing back
into the fight, completing the third point of the triangle that we
were using to try and keep the werewolf too busy to really go after
one of us.

I
got a glimpse of the battle around us just before I had to throw
myself to one side to avoid another swipe of the werewolf's massive
arms. Brutus and Arnold seemed to be working their opponent in much
the same way we were, but they were even more on the defensive. The
other two werewolves had retreated back to one wall and were close
enough together that nobody was managing to get in close enough to do
more than just feint at them.

I
sank my claws into our opponent's side and then jumped away, but not
fast enough to completely avoid taking an elbow to the side of my
head. Jaclyn took advantage of the distraction I'd provided to rush
in and sink both sets of claws into its arm. She rode the momentum
the werewolf's spin imparted and used it to keep just outside the
range of its other arm.

"Get
the other arm if you can!"

It
still seemed like a risky tactic, but I could see her logic. If we
could immobilize both arms at the same time then we'd only have to
worry about its leg talons and teeth. I'd already finished rolling
back to my feet, and I darted in, but Isaac got there first. He got
both hands around the wolf's right arm, but he didn't commit strongly
enough and it shook him off after only a split second.

Jaclyn
was forced to let go and spring away within heartbeats of Isaac
losing his grip on the vacuum, but they'd created an opening for me,
and I didn't second-guess the opportunity. I landed on the werewolf's
back and managed to set both sets of feet talons and one hand into
the rock-hard slabs of muscle before a violent spin nearly threw me
free again.