Infinite Harmony (3 page)

If she ever figured out who told the ambulance crew she was here, she would kill them.

“I’m sorry, Miss Jessup,” the EMT said, “but you need to come with me to the hospital.”

“But I’m fine.” Confused and still hopped up on adrenaline, but fine.

“You’re panting,” Jase pointed out.

“With everything that has happened, I think it would be for the best,” Officer McLean added.

“I—”

“Your father is already at the hospital waiting for you,” the EMT said, driving the final nail in the proverbial coffin.

“Fine,” Ada said with as much dignity and grace she could muster. She threw back her shoulders and started down the stairs. “But no stretcher. I’m walking.”

“This is going to hurt.”

Talk about your understatements. Joshua dug his fingers into the pillow beneath his head and locked his jaw.

“Son of a—”

The pillow muffled his scream and caught the tears cascading down his face. Years ago, he might have been ashamed to let his friends see him react so, but he was no longer a self-conscious child. Getting shot hurt, and having a bullet extracted from your shoulder hurt even more. You would have to be a robot to not scream and cry, and Joshua wasn’t a robot. He was an Immortal, which meant no matter how much it hurt or how much damage his body endured, he wouldn’t lose consciousness. He had to stay awake and feel every single ripped muscle and severed nerve being scraped by pliers and the bullet in reverse.

“And it’s out.” Rebecca Donovan dropped the bullet into a little glass bowl sitting next to where Joshua was sprawled out across the dining room table. “Do you want to keep it for sentimental reasons?”

“Throw it away,” he moaned. “This isn’t exactly a night I want to remember.”

During the eighty years he’d lived on this earth, Joshua had suffered his fair share of wounds. If his body scarred, it would be a map of battles fought and won. But the body of an Immortal never reflected the life lived. Joshua looked exactly as he did when he’d accepted the position and took up his sword just weeks after his nineteenth birthday. While other men who had been on this earth the same number of years were hunched-over white-haired geriatrics who shuffled from one place to the next, Joshua still got carded when he went to R-rated movies. No signs of age or the many beatings he’d taken over the years marred his body. Sometimes, he regretted it. He wanted visual proof of where he had been and what he had done. This, however, was not one of those times.

“How does an eternal warrior with the strength of ten Whos plus two get shot by an idiot druggie in the middle of Lake County?” Jase Donovan, Rebecca’s son and Joshua’s best friend, hopped up onto the table, jarring Joshua’s wound and causing a gasp of pain to escape his mouth. In true Jase form, his friend didn’t notice or miss a beat in his monologue. “And what was Ada Jessup doing there? She’s twelve. How does a twelve-year-old end up at a party like that? Who invited her? Who let her in? Do they know who her father is?”

It took a moment for Joshua to respond since Rebecca was furthering his torment by cleaning out the wound.

“I got shot because I wasn’t expecting someone to pull a gun in the middle of Lake County and druggies are, by and large, completely unpredictable,” he finally said through gritted teeth. “And Ada wasn’t at the party. She went there to break it up. She works for the resort.”

He’d been stupid to let her go with him up to the cabin. At least she hadn’t been the one to get shot. He took some comfort in that.

Jase picked up the bowl and started moving it around so the bullet spun in circles. “Ada works here? Isn’t that illegal? Child labor laws are still a thing, right?”

“I don’t think she’s literally twelve,” Joshua said.

“Ada Jessup?” Rebecca ground a piece of gauze over Joshua’s wound. “She has to be seventeen… no, eighteen now.”

Jase had the bowl spinning so fast the bullet was practically skimming the edge and producing a whirring noise that was most likely making the Shifter half of the Alpha Pack think about murderous things.

“Eighteen?” he said as if his mother had just told him the girl was a quadriplegic pole dancer. “No, she’s not. She can’t be.”

Finished with her medical duties, Rebecca moved over to the sink and lathered up her hands with soap. “That’s the problem with getting older, kiddo,” she said to her son. “Everyone else does, too.”

Not growing up in Lake County, and therefore not knowing the entire history of half the population, Joshua had no trouble accepting Ada as an almost-adult. She was what his mother would have called an old soul. You could see it in her multi-colored eyes. She might not have had many years under her belt, but she’d logged lots of miles in a short time.

Plus, she listened to Patsy Cline, and Patsy wasn’t Kidz Bop material.

“You.” Rebecca poked Joshua in the arm, just below his wound. Joshua loved her like the adoptive mother she’d become to him over the past four years, but he had to admit she had a sadistic streak. “I’m putting you on light duty for the next week. No working out. No sparring. And no playing with swords. You’ll reopen your wound.”

“You do realize you can’t make assignments around here, don’t you?” he asked, and then wished he hadn’t when she tried to kill him with her eyes. Jase used the same technique on occasion, but somehow it was scarier when leveled on you by a tiny nurse with grey hair decorating her temples.

“Liam and Scout are the Alphas,” Jase said, his concentration still on the bowl and bullet centrifuge he’d created. “They get to make all the assignments and rules around here.” When a pointed silence followed, he looked up and got the same glare that had just been leveled on Joshua. “Well, they are the Alphas,” he said, trying to defend himself.

“Well, I am the mom,” Rebecca said, swatting Jase on his butt with a gingham print hand towel. “And I’m the nurse you’re making do a doctor’s job, so he’s on light duty for the next week. Got it?”

“Got it.” With a flick of the wrist, Jase sent the bullet flying in the air. In a lightning-fast move only someone with a Shifter’s instincts and reflexes could accomplish, he plucked it out of the air and returned it and the bowl to the table. “He can be on Angel duty this week.”

Joshua jerked his head up so fast it made his shoulder scream. “No. Absolutely not. That is not light duty.”

“It’s a babysitting gig, and she’s twelve,” Jase said. “How on earth could that be strenuous?”

“Neither of us will make it through the week alive.”

“You’re immortal.”

Joshua snorted. “Yeah, well, there is a real chance your little sister is my version of kryptonite. A week with her, and I’ll be begging for death.”

“Hey, Mr. I-Just-Got-Shot-And-Had-You-Bandage-Me-Up Boy. That’s my baby you’re talking about.” Joshua waited for Rebecca to prove she was still capable of rational thought where her youngest child was concerned. After a moment of pointed silence, she relented with a sigh. “So she’s a little high maintenance. She’s still a good girl. And it’s not all her fault. You provoke her.”

That was a fair point. Joshua really did love antagonizing Angel. Driving her into a rage wasn’t just easy, it was fun.

“Doesn’t matter,” Joshua said. “Scout will never go for it.”

He had no more gotten the words out of his mouth when the back door swung open.

“I won’t go for what?” the Alpha Female called down the hall. If she was a normal human, she would have never heard him, but Scout was the exact opposite of normal. In fact, some might argue she wasn’t even human.

As far as Joshua could tell after doing decades of research, Shifters have always existed. Scout thought they resulted from a mutation in human DNA and had spent the last four years learning genetics at a fancy-smancy private college to prove her theory, but others argued they were a completely different species. One theory even said Scout was the moon personified, her mate Liam, the first wolf to have ever lived, and all the Shifters of the world their offspring. Joshua wasn’t sure which theory was correct. All he knew was that when most of your friends have canine-like hearing, you have to be extra careful what you say.

“Your mother put me on restrictive duty and your brother wants to assign me to Angel watch,” Joshua said just as Scout and Liam came into the kitchen. “I was just about to explain to them why it wouldn’t work.”

Scout jumped up on the counter and grabbed an apple for herself with her right hand while flicking one behind her back with her left. Liam caught the airborne fruit without tearing his gaze from the fridge.

“Yes, you’re all very agile and have amazing super-human reflexes,” Joshua said from his surgery bed/the dining room table. “I get it.”

Liam didn’t even pretend to not know what he was talking about. “We’re just saying, none of us would have gotten ourselves shot by some dime bag loser in the middle of a high-class lake resort.”

“We can’t all be Shifters.”

Joshua could heal from any wound, never got sick, and would live for the rest of eternity, but he couldn’t Change into a wolf or coyote during the full moon, and the rest of the Alpha Pack never let him forget it. Not that it bothered him. After a lifetime of being on his own, Joshua had found a place to belong. Shifters and Seers might not be the same as Immortals, but they knew what it was like to live apart and different from the rest of society. They knew who and what he was, and no one wanted to dissect him or burn him at the stake.

Well, there was a chance Scout wanted to dissect him, but he figured she’d be wrapped up in that whole where-do-Shifters-come-from research for at least the next quarter century or so.

“So, tell me Immortal,” the mad scientist in question said, “why is it you can’t play personal servant… I mean
bodyguard
to the munchkin?”

Joshua pulled himself up onto his elbows. The movement didn’t make his shoulder happy, but he’d been in worse pain before, so he soldiered on.

“In case you haven’t noticed, I got shot tonight.”

“Nope, didn’t notice how I’ve been trying to smooth things over with the police for the past two hours at all,” Scout said. “Thanks for that, by the way. Nothing I love more than a good cover-up mission in the hours before dawn. It’s an extra-special way to get you up and moving in the morning.”

“I do what I can to liven things up around here. All this wedding planning stuff was getting boring, so I thought, ‘Hey, why not go out and get yourself shot?’ Worked out rather nicely, don’t you think?”

His words hit their mark. Nothing shut the Alpha Female up faster than reminding her they were all back in Timber and chilling at its most illustrious resort for her pending nuptials. For the most powerful Shifter on the planet, she was surprisingly cowardly when it came to what some enterprising Seer had termed The Wedding of the Millennium.

Her mate/fiancé, however, didn’t have the same hang up.

“Hanging out with Angel seems like the ideal assignment,” Liam said. “All you have to do is drive her around and keep her out of Scout’s hair. You don’t need your shoulder for that, do you?”

“Any other time I would agree, but…” Joshua tried to think of how he could word what he needed to say without saying too much in front of Rebecca. “In light of recent events, I think someone who is at full capacity should be with Angel.”

The fine lines around Rebecca’s eyes got deeper, but she said, “They already burned my house to the ground. What more do you think they’re going to do?”

The members of the Alpha Pack all shared a look, one they hoped Rebecca didn’t see. The truth was, there was much more that could be done. There was much more they were threatening to do.

The Society for Human Preservation, or as they liked to sign their loving correspondence, SHP, made their first strike against the Alpha Pack a little over two years ago. They’d recruited a pair of students at the college Scout attended. The two managed to kill a Shifter, deface an Alpha Pack vehicle, and burn down a building with a future Alpha Pack member inside before they were caught. The week the two students stood in front of a judge and pled guilty, the first letter arrived. In it, the writers identified themselves as The Society for Human Preservation, a group formed to protect the humans of the world from the unnatural, and then they declared war on the Shifters and Seers.

As far as wars went, this one was pretty low key and hadn’t really required much time and attention from the Alpha Pack. Other than the effort they’d put into tracking down who exactly these zealots were, there hadn’t been much in the way of battle until recently.

The first report came from a small pack in Wales. The Pack Leader called to inform his Alphas someone had set up traps on private land where his pack ran during the full moon. One of his sons had been caught, the damage so severe the Change couldn’t heal him. In the end, they had to amputate the boy’s leg. He was only fifteen.

Two days later, a letter came to the Den boasting about de-pawing one of hell’s hounds. It was signed
SHP
.

The following week a Seer went missing in Dubai. She turned up four days later, pumped so full of drugs she couldn’t remember her name. She had no idea where she’d been or what had happened to her. The only thing she was certain of was the new SHP tattoo on her shoulder.

The biggest blow had come last week. The Donovan home, where Scout and Jase’s parents and little sister lived, went up in flames. Luckily, the Donovans were out that night, so no one was hurt, but the house had been reduced to ashes. Again, a letter was delivered to the Alpha Pack. This one said, “We do not accept responsibility for the humans who have chosen to align themselves with the abominations of earth. All will perish. All will burn.”

It was signed
SHP
.

“Mom, you look beat,” Scout said. “Why don’t you go ahead and go to bed? We’ll clean up in here and keep an eye on Joshua.”

Some mothers would have protested. They would have demanded to be a part of the conversation and know what was going on. Rebecca Donovan wasn’t one of those women, at least not when it came to anything dealing with Shifters. If she could, Rebecca would happily go through her life pretending her children were completely normal and Shifters were simply a thing from fairytales. Unfortunately, her daughter went out and made herself the queen of the Shifters, so turning a blind eye wasn’t really an option anymore, but that didn’t stop Rebecca from trying. She would paste on a smile and shake hands with the Pack Leaders from around the world who came to witness the union between the Alpha Male and Alpha Female, and she would dig bullets out of Joshua’s shoulder and sew up the wounds, but she refused to do any more than necessary. The more she could distance herself from the supernatural world, the better in her opinion.