Authors: Dean Murray
"He
ran away to keep your secret safe."
The
sheer scope of what Taggart was implying boggled my mind. I'd been
struggling to comprehend what it must be like to live on the run for
years because you had no other choice. It seemed impossible to
believe that someone would choose that life on behalf of someone
else.
Taggart
finally met my gaze and nodded. "Indeed he did. He told me at
the time that he didn't expect to last long, maybe a decade or two,
but at least he'd buy me that much longer before the Coun'hij came
looking for me armed with the knowledge of who I really was. He was
wrong though, he's made it longer than anyone else believed possible.
"They've
been looking for him this entire time, but he's become a ghost,
slipping through the cracks in our society even as he became a symbol
for everyone who wants to see the Coun'hij overthrown."
"Why
are you telling me this?"
"For
a lot of reasons. You deserve to know the truth about me, you deserve
to know that my history is nearly as dark as that of the people I'm
trying to fight, but that isn't the only reason. I'm also telling you
because it's the perfect example of what I need to be doing with you.
I knew I could trust my friend on the Coun'hij because he was willing
to allow me to make my own choices, even when those choices meant
extra risk for him.
"I
would never have even thought to ask for such a sacrifice from him,
but the fact that he was willing to make it for me told me all I
needed to know. It told me that he was someone I could trust with my
life and, even more importantly, someone I could trust with my
honor."
"There's
more, isn't there?"
I
couldn't have said how I knew, but I did. Taggart was about to
deliver some kind of terrible news, something that was going to
change everything for us.
"I
visited another contact last night after the fiasco with Eric, and I
learned something important. My friend has finally been captured
after all these years. His name is Agony and the Coun'hij has him.
I'm going to do whatever I can to free him, which means that I'm
going to be putting myself back in the crosshairs again. I won't
compel you to help, I'll respect your decision to get as far away
from me as you can if that's what you want to do, but I have no
choice but to at least ask for your help.
"I
can't do this by myself, but I have to try. The only question is how
much, if at all, you'll be willing to aid me."
Adriana Paige
Marauder's Gas Station
Central Wyoming
My mind had been spinning non-stop ever since Taggart had told me that
his friend Agony was in trouble. Taggart had helped me when I needed
it, and a part of me wanted to respond in kind, but in a lot of ways
his story had just reinforced my fears. I was in the middle of an
impossibly complex situation and I could only come up with one
possible way to figure out how far I could trust Taggart.
I
already trusted him with my life, but I still didn't know if I could
trust him to tell me who lived and who died. I needed to know if I
trusted him enough to kill for him.
I
needed another source of information, a source as close to unbiased
as possible, or at least one who didn't have a vested interest in
working
with
Taggart, but I didn't know very many shape shifters. Taggart, Eric,
the red hybrid…and Alec Graves, the one person Taggart was
almost desperate to keep me from talking to.
We'd
gotten a late start, but we'd still been driving for long enough that
I desperately wanted a chance to stretch my legs. Luckily, the fuel
gauge was down to just over a quarter of a tank, so a break couldn't
be too far away.
Taggart
said that we were headed to Montana. He apparently had a cabin up
there in some remote corner of the state. It wasn't the perfect
location when it came to dream walking. Distance mattered when it
came to our ability, just like it mattered with most other things.
Reaching someone on the East Coast would be difficult, as would
contacting someone all of the way down in Arizona or in Mexico, but
Taggart said that the extra fatigue involved was more than offset by
the fact that we'd be safe up there.
Safety
sounded good to me. There was a chance that the Coun'hij already knew
Taggart's name and were slowly looking through every video feed in
the United States in the hope of finding him. It would take a lot of
computing power to go through weeks and weeks of video feed, but
eventually they were bound to find a hit of some kind or another.
Nobody could hope to make it through even a single month without
being caught on a video camera of some kind at least a couple of
times.
The
real question was whether the Coun'hij would hack into the right
video feeds. They already routinely scanned the feeds from airports
and train stations simply because it was a good way to keep tabs on
known vampires. There were so many people on those feeds that it was
a great return on their hacking investment.
Breaking
into the computer systems that supported some backwater gas station
was another matter entirely, as they mostly just recorded an
unchanging view of the gas station in question. All we could do was
try to avoid high-population areas and hope that any hits the Coun'hij
did manage to get would be too old and too scattered to be useful.
I'd
just about worked up the nerve to tell Taggart that I was going to
start trying to contact Alec when we drove past a sign that said we
were approaching the last gas station for the next eighty miles.
Taggart
frowned. "I guess that settles it, we'll have to stop."
I
bit back a sigh of relief, but I shouldn't have even bothered,
Taggart of course heard the nascent sigh.
"That
really settles it then. We'll stop so you can get out and walk
around. Hopefully this gas station is large enough that we can pick
up something more than just a couple of candy bars for dinner. I'm
starving and you still need to put on more weight so you don't blow
away after the next time you dream walk."
I
stuck out my tongue at him and then leaned back in my seat. Taggart's
current ride was an eight-year-old Honda. The air and heat worked, as
did the radio, but that was where the amenities ended. The one thing
it did have though was a very, very comfortable set of seats.
Apparently when you spent as much time on the road as Taggart did you
figured out which cars would leave you still able to walk after
fifteen hours behind the wheel.
"Will
we make it to Montana tonight?"
Taggart
shook his head as he slowed down and pulled up next to the pump. "I
doubt it. If we really had to make it there I could probably manage
to drive straight through, or we could maybe swap off and I could
grab an hour or so of sleep while you keep us going, but I think it's
more important not to miss a night of dream walking than it is to
make it to my cabin tonight."
That
made a lot of sense. I'd already realized that Taggart viewed his
nights as a kind of non-renewable resource. He made a difference when
he was sleeping and therefore he tried very hard to make sure that
his sleep schedule didn't get out of sync with the rest of North
America.
"I'm
serious about you eating more, Adriana. The limiting factor on how
much I can get done in a given night is fact that we shape shifters
don't require as much sleep as you humans. I'm lucky if I can stretch it
to four or five hours most nights. It's enough to visit a couple of
people, but it still means that a lot of things happen with a kind of
frustrating slowness that you've luckily never had to deal with."
I
knew where he was going with this and he was right, but that didn't
mean that I wanted to hear it. I'd been eating enough lately that I'd
put on a few more pounds, but part of me was still worried that if I
upped my caloric intake even more that I'd balloon up to twice my old
size.
I
liked to think that I wasn't as shallow as most people, but the truth
was that I liked being skinny. I liked guys looking at me with the
kind of appreciation that had once been reserved only for Cindi, and
I liked the fact that I looked
good
in my clothes now.
"I
know, my limiting factor isn't how long I can sleep, it's how much
fat I can pack onto my body."
Taggart
frowned at me as he reached down to pop open the little door on the
gas tank. "I'm not trying to say you should become unhealthy,
Adriana. Believe it or not, I remember what it was like to be
seventeen. The definition of physical perfection has changed a lot
since then, but the way we feel when we do or don't achieve that
standard hasn't changed. You don't need to add back a lot of weight,
but you need more of a margin of safety than you have right now."
"Right,
or my heart could stop mid-dream."
Taggart's
eyes got a little bigger and I realized that he'd never thought in
those terms. "Actually, I was thinking that you needed to have
the physical reserves to go on an extra dream walk or two if
something terrible happened and you needed to redouble your efforts
for a single night."
"Yeah,
that's what I meant. That's a way better reason, my most paranoid
sensei."
That
earned me an eye roll and then Taggart opened his door and started to
get out. I was reaching for my door release when Taggart reached over
and grabbed my arm. There was a smile on his face, but I could see
the tension around his eyes, the wrinkles that only showed up when he
was really worried.
"Change
of plans, Adriana. You're going to need to stay in the car."
"What's
going on?"
I
was proud of the fact that I managed to keep my voice level and my
expression steady.
"Vampires.
I can smell them and it's strong enough that I don't think it was
just someone passing through."
I
could feel myself starting to shake, but I forced my upper body at
least to stay mobile. The fight with Eric and the red hybrid had been
pretty intense, but I'd never been in that much danger. The fight
with Jackson and Pamela had been a whole different matter. I'd been
terrified for what had seemed like hours and my nightmares hadn't
mellowed out even weeks later. If there was a group of vampires here
I was almost certainly going to die.
"We
need to go, we need to get out of here."
Taggart
reached over and rested his hand on my shoulder. "I know you're
scared, but you need to act like nothing has changed. We don't have
enough gas to make it to the next station, not without turning around
and going back the way we came, and I'd rather not do that. I'll fill
the car up and then we'll go."
I
managed a nod, it was a choppy one, but under the circumstances it
was the best I could manage. Taggart gave me another smile, this one
more natural and less worried.
"Once
I get out, go ahead and slide over into the driver's seat. That way
we can get out of here more quickly. If push comes to shove leave me,
drive two or three miles down the road and then pull off and kill the
car. I'll shift to wolf form and come find you. Don't worry, I'm sure
it won't come to that."
Taggart
tossed me the keys and then climbed out of the car as he reached for
his wallet. I undid my seatbelt and scrambled across to his seat. It
wasn't until I was sitting behind the wheel that I realized why
Taggart hadn't started pumping yet.
There
wasn't a card reader at the pump. I didn't even know that it was
possible to have a gas station anymore without a credit card reader
at the pump. The urge to hyperventilate was almost overpowering. I
would have gotten back into the car and headed back towards the
interstate, but Taggart simply pushed the call button and bent
forward to speak into it as the speaker crackled to life.
Neither
the attendant nor Taggart was loud enough to hear through the
windows, but a second later Taggart was sticking the nozzle into our
fuel tank and I felt the vibrations of pumping fuel shake the car. It
couldn't have taken more than a couple of minutes to fill our tank,
but the experience seemed to stretch out into hours.
I
was in a cold sweat by the time that Taggart re-racked the dispenser
and started towards the store to pay for the gas. I forced a smile
across my face and fidgeted with the radio as though changing the
station, but the truth was that I was checking my rear and side view
mirrors on an almost constant basis.
It
was the next best thing to impossible, but somehow I still missed it.
One moment I was all by myself and then suddenly there was a tall,
pale man standing just outside my car.
He
was gaunt—not quite like a starvation victim, but close—and
his eyes were a lifeless, dull brown. He was also holding a very big,
very black handgun up against the passenger side window.
I
slowly moved the keys towards the ignition, but he motioned with his
head and the keys were ripped away from me by some kind of invisible
force. As I watched, the lock on the passenger door disengaged and the
man pulled open the door.
He
was a vampire, he had to be a vampire, and I was completely
outclassed. If we'd met inside of my dream I might have been able to
fend him off, but not here, not in the real world where he was faster
and stronger than me.
The
vampire slid into the car, still pointing the gun at me, and stuck
the keys in the ignition.
"Turn
on the car."
"Why,
where are you taking me?"
"Just
shut up and do it. Don't even think about trying something stupid
like you see in the movies. If you try and speed up and wreck us I'll
just force the brake and the clutch in."
I
turned on the car and double-checked that it was in first gear.
"Okay, it's on, what now?"