Marked

Happily ever after takes a lot more effort than they let on in fairytales.

Adriana Paige thought she was getting married. Days before the wedding, shape shifters and werewolves tore through the estate killing and burning.

Their forces once again outnumbered, pack members scattered and locked in their own battles, Adri turns to Alec for protection and leadership, but Alec faces even more sinister forces than ever before.

Adri needs to find the strength required to wage a war across an entire continent. If she fails, Alec and everyone else she cares about will be killed before her eyes.

This time Adri must become the alpha.

Copyright 2014 by Dean Murray

Adriana Paige
Interstate 15
Western Montana

I was running.

The sense that something terrible was chasing me was simply too strong
for me to do anything else. I knew I was dreaming—my
surroundings were too beautiful to be explained by anything else—but
even that knowledge wasn't enough to make me stand my ground. It was
like there was some kind of evolutionary cutout at work. The part of
me that was advanced enough to talk and use tools was no match for
instincts developed over thousands of years—not when faced by
something that ran hunched over, with claws that dripped a
combination of venom and blood.

It
felt like I'd been running for hours, but given the way that time
seemed to skip and stretch inside of dreams, there was no way of
being sure how long I'd been fleeing. I jumped over a fallen tree,
clearing the eight-foot-tall obstacle without breaking my stride. The
trunk, a dark bar covered by faintly-glowing moss, sailed by with a
speed I never could have managed in the real world. It was one more
sign that this was nothing more than a nightmare, but I didn't slow
my pace.

I
was running on two feet, darting between softly glowing pillars that
I knew had to be trees, and that felt wrong too. I was seeing the
world the same way that Alec and the rest of my friends who were
shape shifters saw it. It felt like I should be running on four legs,
but there wasn't time to stop and make myself change shapes—even
assuming that I was capable of something like that inside of a dream.

Heedless
of the noise I was making, I crashed through a set of tall bushes
that looked like some kind of glowing, new-age glass sculpture, and
then I was free of the forest. The ground I was running across now
couldn't possibly have supported the kind of dense forest that I'd
just left. Rather than the soft black soil I'd been expecting, it had
shifted to hard red rock.

It
had been dark in the forest, but I exited into sunlight that was so
bright it was almost blinding. I stumbled, squinting as I tried to
continue forward, but before I'd even finished taking my second step
the sun had vanished. It didn't set, it just disappeared, leaving me
in a darkness that was so profound I felt like I'd stepped into some
kind of void.

Only
the feel of the rock underneath my feet gave lie to the idea that I'd
stepped into a realm of nothingness. There wasn't anything living on
the rock, nothing to provide even the barest hint of illumination to
my borrowed, supernatural vision.

Before
the light had disappeared the ground before me had been flat, but now
it sloped upwards in a set of irregular steps that tripped me. I
caught myself with my hands, but the impact sent shooting jabs of
pain up my arms.

As
I scrambled back to my feet, I heard something come crashing out of
the forest. I knew I would be better off not looking back to see what
was chasing me, but I couldn't help myself. It was big, much bigger
than any hybrid, bigger even than the werewolf that had nearly killed
Isaac and Jasmin in New York.

I'd
only thought that the night around me was dark, but now I could see
that I'd been wrong. The night still felt dark, but it was nothing
compared to the darkness that streamed off of the creature. It was
like nothing I'd ever seen.

I
wanted to say that it was a dark light, but even with my heart trying
to tear itself free of my chest I still knew that was a
contradiction. Darkness was an absence of light, but this darkness
acted like light, reached out with greedy tendrils in an effort to
fill the space around the thing slowly advancing toward me.

The
blackness was strong enough that it was hard to make out details. I'd
already registered the fact that it was huge. The claws flexing at
the ends of its fingers were longer than my arms and I got an
impression there were more teeth crammed into its mouth than could
have physically fit inside of the pit housing them.

The
ground shook slightly as it approached. I needed to get away, needed
to run—until my heart exploded inside of my chest if
necessary—but I was having a hard time looking away from its
eyes. They were green and seemed to flicker, moving inside of the
deep sockets in its head as though they were made out of some kind of
grotesque fire.

I'd
always thought of green as a color that symbolized life, but in this
instance green had been perverted into something unclean, something
that devoured life and left behind only ruin.

"You
can't escape me."

Its
voice sounded like plates of chitin sliding across each other, like a
billion insects chittering in unison.

"What
do you want?"

It
was stupid. In the back of my mind I knew that nothing I was
experiencing was real, but part of me couldn't help but act as though
this was all real, as though the creature was something that could be
reasoned with.

"The
death of everything you hold dear, the destruction of everything you
stand for."

I
opened my mouth to tell it that I didn't understand, but before I
could get the words out, it sprang towards me. Nothing that big
should have been able to move so quickly. I'd spent most of the last
six months watching werewolves and shape shifters fight. I'd been
exposed to unbelievable speed, to people who were so preternaturally
fast that they could cover a dozen yards before I could even blink,
but this was more than that. It didn't just cross the distance
between us, it was as though it teleported, as though the space
simply ceased to exist for one critical instant.

The
impossibly long claws took me in the stomach, pierced my flesh at the
same time that they sent me into a state of shock. I tried to push
myself off of them in a vain attempt to get free so that I could flee
from something faster than thought, but it picked me up.

"So
easy. I thought maybe you would be a challenge, that you would be
stronger than your friends. Will you beg for me to end your life
too?"

Its
words didn't make any sense. I'd never been the strong one. Alec,
Jasmin, Dominic and even Rachel all had sources of strength that I'd
never possessed. The very act of trying to understand what its words
meant pulled my mind out of the shock that had been cushioning me
from the pain up until then.

It
was like having bars of liquid fire shoved into my gut. I'd spent
months suffering from emotional wounds that had come within inches of
destroying me. I'd thought that nothing could equal the agony I'd
felt then, but this was a whole new kind of pain. It was like agony
and despair all rolled up into one terrible package.

For
a split second I balanced on the edge of disaster. I wanted to give
up, to give into the pain and surrender, to let it carry me away into
oblivion, but then I thought about Alec.

He
needed me. Shawn's gift had settled that particular question as far
as the future of the rebellion went. As hard as it was to believe,
without Alec and me, the rest of my friends were doomed. With me by
Alec's side they had a chance, slender though it was.

It
was more than that though. I'd heard enough stories about how life in
the pack had been while I'd been gone to know that Alec had been
under incredible stress after I left Sanctuary. He'd dealt with
things with admirable determination, but when you came right down to
it he needed me in the same way that I needed him.

I
wasn't going to give up and sentence him to a life of loneliness
simply because fighting back against this thing hurt.

Thinking
about Alec sent a warm rush of energy humming through me. The pain
was still there, but the tingling power that had filled me to the
point where I nearly couldn't contain it had somehow muted the pain
to a point where I could function again.

"I'm
not scared of you."

Even
as I said the words, I kicked off against the creature's arm with
every ounce of strength I could muster. In the real world I never
could have hoped to muster enough force to tear myself free of
three-foot claws, but in this particular dream I did exactly that.

The
pain spiked as I hurled myself back and up, but I'd known that would
be the case and I gritted my teeth in a vain effort to stop myself
from screaming again. The creature started to bring its other hand
around, trying to rip me out of the air, and I knew that would be the
end of everything.

In
that instant I needed to be faster, and this time reality conformed
itself to my needs in the way that dreams sometimes allow. I sailed
up over the grasping, deadly points of the creature's claws seemingly
moving in slow motion, but still somehow managing to be faster than
the nightmare that had been chasing me.

I
should have crashed to the ground on my back, but instead the dream
once again molded itself to my needs. I tucked my legs and turned
what should have been a disastrous, leg-breaking landing into a
graceful backflip.

It
wasn't something I could do in real life. I didn't even know how to
tumble, let alone have the guts to do it in the middle of a fight for
my life, but somehow it all came together for me and for one
impossibly long second I felt a kind of weightless, perfection that
would have probably haunted me forever if I'd been able to dwell on
the feeling.

Rock
shattered, crushed into powder under my feet from the force of my
landing, and then I spun and took off at a run.

It
was insane. I was still bleeding and I hadn't been able to outrun the
creature even when I'd been at my best, but apparently I was firmly
in flight mode.

I
could hear the creature behind me, claws chipping away at the rock as
it used them for extra traction while giving chase. My mind whirled
desperately, looking for a weapon or a refuge, but this time my
surroundings proved stubbornly uncooperative.

I
took another step, hands forward to help propel me up the incline,
and then I was at the top of the climb. I was trapped. There was
twenty feet of flat ground and then beyond that a ravine that was
more than fifty feet across.

Alec
would have turned and attacked the creature, using his superior
position to get at its head and neck, but I wasn't Alec. I was
already gasping for breath, but I reached deep inside and tapped into
some of the energy that had brought me this far. It was leaking out
in time with the blood that had already soaked my pants, but there
was enough left for one more good sprint.

I
crossed the open expanse of rock in three impossibly long strides. I
took my speed as a good sign, as proof that my dream was about to
conform to my needs, and then threw myself across the ravine.

There
was a glimmer of something on the other side that looked like it
might be a safe landing spot, and that was what I was aiming for. I
reached towards that spot with my mind and pulled with everything I
had, willing the future I wanted into being.

I
heard the creature scream in rage, a raspy roar that made my blood
freeze, but it was too late—I was already two-thirds of the way
across the ravine and showed no signs of slowing. A grin started to
force its way past my concentration, and then suddenly the cliff
seemed to get further away from me.

The
shock as I started to fall was so complete that for a second my mind
refused to function. I was dead…only a tiny voice kept trying
to tell me that it was impossible to die in a dream.