Torn (2 page)

I held James' gaze for
several seconds and then waved him away.

Jasmin met my eyes and
then limped into the house, leaving me alone with my sister Rachel
and Donovan. I tiredly moved the rest of the way into the artificial
lights and Rachel gasped as her human eyes were finally able to make
out what Donovan had been able to see since I'd stepped out of the
trees.

"Alec, you're
hurt."

I smiled at my little
sister and then looked down to take inventory of my battered body.
My ha'bit was shredded, the important parts were still covered, but
the garment showed the wear and tear from our high-speed chase
through some of the thickest underbrush in the area. My skin had
almost as many holes in it as the tattered fabric. Vincent hadn't
managed anything crippling, but he'd been well on his way to bleeding
me out.

Rachel slipped under
my arm, trying to support me as Donovan led the way into the house.
The gesture wasn't needed. Rachel was a small fifteen, nearly as
slender as Jasmin and lacking the unnatural strength common to the
shape shifters, but I appreciated her desire to help.

Jasmin's wounds had
looked like the kind you could tend with your own set of hands. Even
if they weren't, she wasn't the type to seek help. I'd have to
remember to check on her later, but for now I was the only patient in
the examination room.

Donovan reappeared
with his graceful lurch, carrying a fresh set of towels and some
water and then set about cleaning out the worst of the wounds. It'd
become a longstanding ritual. I bled from one confrontation or
another, and then while he patched me up, he updated me on the state
of the family holdings.

Rachel handed Donovan
tools with the expertise of an experienced nurse as he began his
ministrations.

"The Montana
situation seems to be resolving itself nicely, sir. Our factor there
has managed to secure ninety percent of the water rights we're
expecting to need for the first phase of the project, and there isn't
any uptick in prices yet. He hopes to be able to come in under
budget for the first two phases. With your approval, I'll tell him
to put together a proposal for beginning construction?"

I grunted my assent,
and then flinched slightly as his probing fingers found a
particularly deep wound. I could see the gash in the overhead
mirror, and it was all the way to the bone at one point. In a human
it would be cause for concern, possibly hospitalization. For me, the
worst would be healed within forty-eight hours. Impervious to all
known diseases, and we healed back to one hundred percent from
anything that didn't kill us. Almost anything. The thought made me
glance at Donovan's leg. His immaculately-pressed pants hid a
disturbing array of scars.

Donovan worked through
the list of open business items, ticking off of a mental list as he
applied butterfly bandages and gauze to hold the deeper wounds
closed. I listened, approving his decisions or occasionally
confirming previous discussion, until he wound down to the last item.

"Sir, I assume
you remain resolved on the Paige matter? It does bring an element of
risk with it. Each additional human in the town represents another
set of eyes to be avoided by the moon born."

"Yes, Donovan,
I'm resolved. This town is already starting to implode. It's too
stagnant. You saw how everyone responded to the new doctor and his
family. If we don't get new blood into Sanctuary we're going to have
people eating each other at some point. Unless you've found
something worrisome in the preliminary background check, we go
forward with making it possible for them to move in."

"Very good, sir.
The background check, rudimentary though it's been, hasn't turned up
anything concerning. I expect we'll have to make some payments.
Brandon's bribed some of the local officials, but we should be able
to get the Paige's safely into their new home for less than
fifty-thousand."

Donovan taped up the
last gash deep enough to need attention, and then cleaned up. As he
turned to leave I reached out and stopped him.

"The
infighting's getting worse isn't it Donovan?"

The older shape
shifter, the man that'd been my surrogate father for nearly as long
as I could remember looked up to meet my eyes with concern on his
features.

"I wasn't
present for the latest outburst, sir. That being said, it does seem
as though they are increasing in intensity."

The weight of the
night suddenly seemed to settle fully on me and I wanted nothing more
than to go straight to my bed.

"What would my
father have done?"

"That isn't a
fair question. Your father never faced this. At that time the
closest rival pack was more than a hundred miles away. Not only
that, there were enough of us that exile or execution would have been
feasible alternatives for anyone causing excessive trouble.
Unfortunately in the current situation you need every wolf you can
nominally count on, and James represents too great an asset to push
away."

Donovan bowed
gracefully and then limped out of the room leaving me alone with
Rachel, who hadn't stirred since she'd helped put away the last of
the medical implements.

"Alec, you
wouldn't really kill James would you?"

She deserved an
answer, she'd suffered and bled almost as much as the rest of us, but
I knew she wouldn't push, so I chose the coward's route and didn't
answer. I didn't want to kill part of our extended family, but the
pack wasn't healthy, wasn't balanced. We had too many dominants with
too few submissives to serve as a buffer between the more forceful
personalities.

"You should have
been in bed hours ago, Rach."

"I tried but I
couldn't sleep."

For the first time I
noticed how red her eyes were, and cursed the preoccupation that
stopped me from noticing it earlier.

"What's wrong?
Did mother say something?"

A brave smile met my
words, but she couldn't hide the hurt. "No worse than usual.
I just didn't react very well to it tonight."

"She doesn't
mean to hurt you, Rach. She's sick."

"I know.
Sometimes I think it would be better if I just stopped visiting her,
but she really does seem to do better when we don't leave her in as
much isolation."

It was a silent
recrimination. I hadn't visited mother frequently enough lately.

"I'm sorry I've
left that for you to take care of. I haven't spent much time with
either of you lately."

"It's ok, Alec.
I understand. Brandon's been pushing and he's got more bodies to
push with. The pack's being run ragged, you more than anyone. It's
just lonely around here when you're all gone."

I pulled myself off of
the examination table and hugged her. It only took a few minutes to
walk her to her room and tuck her in, but even once I reached my bed
I was unable to fall asleep. I needed to find a solution for
Rachel's isolation, needed to chart a course through the coming war
with Brandon, and solve a half-dozen other problems. My mind
continued to grind away at the worries long after the rest of the
house went quiet.

The weekend hadn't
brought any more excursions by Brandon's pack. The best case
scenario would be that the wounds Vincent and Cassie had suffered had
caused some of Brandon's wolves to refuse to come up against us
again. It wasn't very likely, but I'd been grasping at straws for
months now. It was unlikely Brandon's pack was going to just
self-destruct, but more and more that was looking like the only hope
we had of avoiding everything he had planned for us.

Donovan's nightly
updates had revealed that Brandon had somehow found out about the
family's investment in our Colorado mining startup. We'd gone from
having all of the necessary approvals and permits on Friday afternoon
to having a whole slew of complications and roadblocks waiting for me
when I got up Monday morning.

Someone needed to fly
down and smooth things over. My best guess was that Brandon had
bribed a certain highly-placed male we'd been working with. It was a
rare male of any species that could resist Jasmin, so she was the
obvious choice to fix the situation. Even so, I wasn't looking
forward to telling her she had to go.

We'd just finished up
with History when I got the text from Donovan. I pulled her aside as
we exited the room, and flipped out my phone as a distraction. Shape
shifter hearing was acute enough to catch sub vocalized speech. As
long as we were careful to make sure none of the other pack's wolves
were nearby we could carry on an entire conversation with nobody else
the wiser.

"We're having
problems in Colorado. I need you to go down there and straighten
things out."

Normally Jasmin
enjoyed a chance to get out of town and use a combination of charm
and money to undo whatever mischief Brandon's minions had caused.
Everyone in school thought we were dating. It was a useful fiction
when it came to keeping the humans at arm's length, but Jasmin seemed
to miss the opportunity to flirt more than I did. Once she got out
of Sanctuary, there was never any shortage of males wanting to lavish
attention on her.

Even if she hadn't had
the advantages common to our kind, that still would've been the case.
Nature had gifted her with incredible looks and the thin, runway
model build most girls had to starve themselves to achieve. Lately
though she'd been fighting any assignment that took her out of town.

"I don't want to
leave. Send Donovan."

"That won't
work. Brandon's bribed the police commissioner, and he's launched
criminal investigations on our principals down there. Unless we want
to get into a bidding war for his questionable loyalty we need
someone who can do more than just wave money under his nose."

"Fine, send Dom.
She's plenty pretty enough to flirt her way into his office and
bluff him into backing off."

"It has to be
you, Jas. Dominic's too much of a submissive to carry something like
that off. You can take one of the jets and be back within a day,
thirty-six hours at the outside."

My logic was solid,
but she was far too stubborn to back down without a battle of wills.
I could feel the energy bubble off of her as she geared up for a
full-blown argument, but I didn't need any extra hints. There were
plenty of visual clues that she was mad. Her blue eyes,
incontestable proof of her royal ancestry, had gone unnaturally pale.
They were already nearly the ice blue of her wolf form, and she was
bleeding light so badly it was visible even in this form.

Visible for shape
shifters at least. Humans would see nothing out of the ordinary, but
the moon born lived in a world where every living organism gave off a
soft glow. In human form the light was dimmer than when I was in my
hybrid or wolf body. Normally with these eyes I'd have to work to
pick out glow from anyone but Isaac, James or another hybrid.

She'd made her point
that she was pissed, but this close to the full moon I was less
willing to deal with her theatrics. I let my beast rise up until I
was just a hairsbreadth from transforming. I felt the power rush out
and beat against Jasmin with an almost physical force. It washed
over her with a fury that left no question who had the power to
enforce their will. It still took several seconds of futile defiance
before she bowed her head in submission.

"Go this
afternoon, go tonight. It makes no difference to me, but you will be
on that plane, and you will do your best to bring things to a
successful conclusion. Brandon already over matches us in a straight
up fight. We can't afford to let him surpass us economically too."

Jasmin gave me a
choppy nod and then turned and stomped off towards our lockers. To
be fair she was far too graceful for it to really be a stomp, but the
intangible plane gave the impression of unhappy obedience. Jasmin's
power still whipped around her, opening a thin corridor of bodies
through the crowded hall as I followed along in her wake.

The humans didn't
realize they were moving out of her way, didn't understand why they
felt inclined to move, but the vestigial instincts that'd once kept
them alive in a world when far more threatening things had roamed,
moved them now.

Just before we reached
our lockers I picked up a new scent. It didn't belong in the school,
didn't belong to any of the students I knew. Worse though, it didn't
taste right. For the briefest moment I smelled sickness, and then it
faded back into a normal, if novel, smell.

The Paiges had a girl
our age and Donovan had indicated they'd moved into the old Anderson
home during the weekend. I scanned the familiar faces looking for
the new arrival, and then felt my muscles tense up as I saw Adriana
Paige for the first time.

She was slightly
taller than most seventeen year olds, with straight blond hair and a
body that was only slightly curvier than Jasmin's. Her jeans marked
her as different from the rest of the student body, nearly all of
whom wore shorts all year, but that wasn't what raised every
aggressive instinct I possessed to high alert.

She glowed. Not just
the faint glow of a normal person or the slightly stronger glow of a
wolf. She shone with the light of a powerful moon born hybrid, and
she didn't belong to my pack, so she was an intruder.

She met my eyes and
then flinched slightly as if she'd been struck. It was the action of
a human girl not that of a rival shape shifter. The gesture was just
intriguing enough to check the urge to attack, to rip out her throat
before she could try and do the same to me.

I pushed my power out,
thrusting it at her with more force even than I'd used on Jasmin just
seconds before. It was the gravest of insults, not as severe as
showing up on another pack's doorstep unannounced, but still the kind
of thing that led to fights. Only she failed completely to react to
the provocation. As my rage started to cool I realized that she
didn't feel like another shape shifter. There wasn't any answering
rush of power, no reflexive effort to establish dominance.