Shattered (17 page)

Mine didn't go
in as far, didn't penetrate all of the way through his body, and he
simply growled as he ripped one of them free without even looking at
me. A second later I realized what Kaleb had been focused on as he
started to pull away from the wall Taggart had erected behind him.
There was a snapping sound an Kaleb's shoulder came free, moving
enough that I was able to see the end of the spike still buried in
the black glass.

The shining,
perfect metal had been transformed into a black, pitted spike that no
longer had the strength to hold against Kaleb's muscles.
He'd…rusted…the metal away, used a natural law to his
advantage in exactly the same manner that Taggart had used mass and
inertia to trap him in the first place.

Taggart
launched another batch of spikes at Kaleb, but Kaleb simply turned
his skin into something harder than steel. The spikes all struck him,
and then they all ricocheted away.

One of them
zipped by less than two inches from my head, which should have
terrified me. I felt the wind of the spike's passing, but I was too
focused on the other bit of information I'd noticed. The ends of
Taggart's spikes weren't a simple point, they had bloomed out upon
hitting the wall, creating an anchor in the rock that had meant that
Kaleb couldn't just rip them free of the glass.

I only got a
glimpse of how Taggart had constructed his spikes, but I saw enough
that I was pretty sure I could replicate them, so I set myself and
conjured another spike. I decided on one spike rather than many
partially because I could feel that I was starting to run low on
energy, but also because I figured that one big spike would hit
harder and be more likely to penetrate Kaleb's skin than a bunch of
smaller spikes.

There was still
fighting going on between Kaleb and Taggart. Kaleb had launched a
half-dozen spinning blades at Taggart, which had been deflected by
the ground at Taggart's feet, which had shot up to create an
unyielding white pillar directly in front of him.

Kaleb's attack
just confirmed what I'd already noticed about the difference between
what Taggart was doing and what I'd done. Luckily I'd internalized
the lesson by the time my spike flashed into existence. This time I
started the projectile from farther away and simply made it move
faster to help make sure that Kaleb wouldn't have time to deflect it.

My aim wasn't
as good as I'd hoped, but I wasn't capable of changing that once it
was in motion. It hit Kaleb low on the right side of his chest with a
crack that sounded like exploding rock. I'd made my spike longer and
relatively thinner than Taggart's. It still tapered down from
something as big around as my leg to a convoluted point, but the
process was more gradual.

Thankfully I'd
managed to get everything right this time and it worked. My spike
buried itself in Kaleb's chest and then went deep enough that I heard
the point expand as it penetrated the obsidian wall.

It had come
just in the nick of time. Kaleb hadn't really been trying to kill
Taggart, he'd just been hoping to distract my friend long enough to
break the original spikes holding him to the wall. He'd nearly
succeeded, in fact the force of my attack slamming into him broke the
last of Taggart's spikes, leaving Kaleb hanging from the wall pinned
only by my spike.

Kaleb looked at
me with hateful blue eyes and then threw his own set of projectiles
at me. They moved so fast that I almost didn't have time to do
anything to save myself. I acted out of reflex and raised up a
section of the floor just like Taggart had done, but I couldn't
manage as thick of a shield.

Kaleb's
projectiles crashed into the flat stone wall before me and pierced
it. Most of them didn't have enough force to carry themselves all of
the way through my shield, but one did.

The spikes that
stopped made my wall look like some kind of violent piece of modern
art, but I was in too much pain to really notice. The spike that got
past my defenses had ironically taken me low on the right side of my
chest and thrown me backwards. I landed on my back and the pain from
having the point of the spike hit the floor nearly caused me to black
out, but I clung to consciousness with everything I had.

My spike was
the only thing keeping Kaleb from coming after us physically, the
only thing keeping me alive right then, and I had to make sure that
it didn't disappear. There was another titanic impact and I half
expected to see my wall shatter into a million pieces, but it must
have been Taggart hitting Kaleb again because my wall remained in one
piece.

It was hard to
breathe. I wasn't getting enough air, which was making me
hyperventilate despite the pain. I started to pull the spike out of
my chest hoping that would allow me to breathe again, but the agony
was just too intense.

I screamed and
then suddenly Taggart was there at my side. He picked me up in one
smooth motion that managed to be both tender and quick, and then took
off at a run. We were moving so quickly that it took my breath away,
but Taggart was still able to find the energy to talk.

"Let go of
your shield but not your spike and then if you can raise a wall
behind us. It doesn't need to be thick, just tall and wide so that he
can't see us."

It was still
all that I could do to get enough air inside of me, but I leaned back
against the rock-hard muscles of his hybrid chest and gritted my
teeth. My wall came down without any problems and as I heard Kaleb's
spikes hit the ground I ripped a section of the plain free of itself
and thrust it up to create a shield ten feet tall and twelve across.

It was nearly
more than I could handle. The effort caused my vision to start
tunneling, and I could almost feel my mind starting to come apart
under the strain as I pushed it to do something I no longer had the
energy to accomplish.

Tears were
streaming out of my eyes, but I maintained my constructs despite all
of that. I couldn't do less, not after I'd gotten a good look at
Taggart as he'd picked me up. Despite the deceptive speed of our
flight I could feel him shaking and he'd had a gray cast to his fur
and skin that I was sure came from pushing too hard. As long as he
was willing to keep fighting I couldn't bring myself to give up.

"You need
to go back to your dream, Adri. I know it's going to be harder now
that you are wounded, but you've got to try."

"What
about you?"

"I grew a
wall in front of him. It means that now he has to break through the
stakes on the front side too. It also means that he can't see us
anymore, so that should make it easier for you to flee. I'll be okay,
I'm uninjured so it won't take me any effort at all to get out of
here, but I want to know that you're safe first."

I nodded, too
winded to respond with words, and then imagined myself back in my bed
in the bunker. It was hard to think past the pain and breathlessness,
but I did the best I could to set the agony aside.

My bed was the
softest I'd ever slept in and although originally I'd felt trapped by
the sheer weight of earth and concrete above me while I slept,
somewhere along the way that had changed. Now it was reassuring,
comforting in ways I hadn't expected. Behind the thick steel and
concrete doors of the bunker the outside world couldn't get to me,
and before I'd gone to bed I'd closed and locked the heavy metal door
that sealed my suite off from the rest of the bunker. It wouldn't
stop a determined hybrid forever, but then again it didn't need to.

I had friends
in the bunker. Even if one of Isaac's people turned out to be a
traitor who was working for the Coun'hij it wouldn't matter. Dominic,
Isaac and Heath would all come to my rescue, and even if they
couldn't that didn't mean I was defenseless. My gun was within easy
reach of my bed and anyone coming through my door would be an easy
target.

I was as safe
as I'd ever been at any other point in my life—safer even. That
was the thing that had turned the bunker into a home for me and made
Taggart my new family. The pain was still there screaming for my
attention, yelling that I was going to die here despite the best that
Taggart and I could do, but I simply didn't believe it anymore.

Between one
breath and the next everything changed. I was home again and I could
finally breathe.

Alec Graves
South Central Los Angeles, California

I'd hung up the
phone after talking with Jack as worried about what I was going to do
next as I'd ever been worried about anything. The next three calls
I'd placed after that hadn't made me feel any better and James was
getting more and more antsy with every passing minute. My last call
was to Alison, who had split off after the botched attempt to rescue
Agony. She'd gone off with her mother and Chloe's parents and luckily
she was somewhere in Wyoming when I called so she figured she could
at least make it to California to make the trade.

It was
something, but I wasn't very excited at the thought of sending her
and three noncombatants into what would probably turn out to be a
gigantic trap. Alison had always been fonder of James than of me, so
she'd probably take the risk and go through with the drop by herself
if I couldn't come up with anything else, but I didn't want to lose
her in a failed attempt at getting James' mom back.

If nothing else
it calmed James down a little. I told Alison to get on the road and
promised to have a wire transfer waiting for her by the time she made
it to California. After that, there wasn't anything else to do but
try to come up with a way to get all of us to LA before the deadline
arrived.

The parking lot
was a good three-hour hike for humans, far enough to keep us off of
all the normal trails and make it unlikely that anyone was going to
find Carson's cabin. We could cover that ground a lot faster if we
changed forms, so in the end that's what I ordered everyone to do. We
stopped just long enough for the girls and me to strip down to our
ha'bits and then Jasmin strapped her backpack and Brindi's pack to
mine and everyone shifted forms.

I carried
Brindi and James was carrying Carson's backpack in his arms, but we
still covered ground at a rate that was two or three times as fast as
we had been going.

The air was
cool enough that we didn't have to worry about overheating, and we
practically flew down the trail as it cut between the dense
vegetation that covered the mountainside. By the time we arrived at
the parking lot I still didn't have a magic bullet that would solve
all of our problems. Luckily Carson had caught up to us and
he
had a magic bullet. All the rest of us had to promise not to ask any
questions and never to tell anyone else how he got us across the
United States at the drop of a hat.

Carson walked
off where we wouldn't be able to hear him, made two phone calls, and
an hour later we were all walking into one of the huge military
transport planes that are used to move around tanks and other bulky
equipment that wasn't really meant to leave the ground.

To say that the
experience was unnerving would have been an incredible
understatement. The entire trip to the airport was odd, but it wasn't
until we'd nearly arrived that I realized why.

Nobody seemed
to register our presence. They seemed to know our car was there,
nobody cut me off or turned unexpectedly, but they all looked past me
instead of meeting my eyes whenever we came to a stop sign or other
intersection.

My theory was
proved correct when we arrived at the air force base. It was a
military facility, a place with billions of dollars' worth of
government equipment that had been designed to keep out anyone who
didn't have a legitimate reason to be there, and after parking in a
non-secure lot less than a mile away from the base, we just walked
right in.

The checkpoints
were still manned and the guards checked the identification of the
car that was trying to get through when we arrived, but nobody even
batted an eye when we walked through single file. I passed within
inches of a guy holding an M16 and all he did was lean slightly to
the side so that I wouldn't clip him with my backpack.

The plane was
the same way. They were in the middle of loading a pallet full of
equipment onto the plane when we made it there, but nobody protested
when we walked up to the loading ramp and followed the pallet into
the plane.

Carson motioned
for us to stand at the back of the plane, right behind the pallet
that had just been loaded onto the plane, which was no big deal until
they started loading the last batch of equipment onto the plane.

I was pretty
sure that Jasmin was worried they were going to crush us between the
two pallets, but the team that was loading the plane stopped the
pallet with several feet to spare—even though the rest of the
pallets didn't have that kind of clearance—and then started
tying it down. A few minutes later all of the pre-flight inspections
were done, the front of the plane was buttoned up, and we were
starting down the runway.

Before we got
airborne Carson pulled out his phone and made another call.

"We are
moving now. We're out of sight and there shouldn't be any reason for
the pilots to come back here. You can stop covering us if you need
to. I'll call you when we land."

Carson hung up
and then turned to the rest of us. "Please turn off your phones.
We don't want to leave any kind of evidence that we were here,
including messing with the airplane's navigation system."

I pulled my
phone out and turned it off at the same time as everyone else, but I
did it by reflex. I wanted to know exactly what was going on, but I'd
just finished promising not to ask questions so I forced myself to
keep my mouth closed.