Chapter 1

Alec Graves
Roan Mountain State Park
Tennessee

The sword that whipped through the cool air was directed at my head, but I easily stepped back out of the way of the blow and then darted forward and stabbed at Carson’s chest. I heard a gasp of astonishment from Brindi at the ferocity of our attacks, but in truth we were relatively safe. We were using heavy practice swords that were more than capable of breaking even hybrid bones, but which lacked the fine edges that would have been required to actually cut off limbs and pierce flesh.

After our failed attempt at rescuing Agony, my people had split up. Jasmin, James and Jess had come back to Tennessee with Carson so that he could begin training me with a sword, but Carson had indicated that there wasn’t room for Jack’s people back at his cabin in Tennessee.

Jack had taken his people back to St Louis because he figured that they knew the city better than anyone the Coun’hij might send after them. It also had the added benefit of being the last place that anyone would expect him to go, but I suspected that mostly Jack just wanted to go home and get back to killing vampires.

He was as committed to trying to overthrow my father, Kaleb, as I was, but that didn’t mean either of us enjoyed killing our own kind. Most of the hybrids who worked directly for the Coun’hij were every bit as sadistic as Vincent and Brandon, but between the war with the jaguars south of the border and the various cities Kaleb and Puppeteer had tried to cleanse of vampires, the Coun’hij was spread pretty thin.

That meant that we weren’t always fighting guys like Brandon and Vincent. All too often we ended up fighting people like Alison, people who were just caught up on the wrong side of this war. Some of them actually thought we were the bad guys, but most of them fought because they had someone back home who would pay if they didn’t.

Conscripted troops would gladly turn on their masters the first chance they got, but Kaleb and the rest of the Coun’hij were experts when it came to covering themselves and manipulating everyone around them.

I didn’t think there was any way that the rank-and-file pack members would spontaneously rise up and join our side of the war, but Carson disagreed with me. We agreed that the Coun’hij was the worst thing that had ever happened to our people, but there were a lot of other points where we disagreed quite heatedly.

The question of how to proceed with the rebellion had become thorny, and it probably helped explain why Carson had come at me so much harder than normal on that last exchange.

I’d thrown everything I had into my stab at Carson, but I couldn’t seem to muster the kind of blinding speed that characterized all of his attacks. He easily knocked my blade to one side and then stepped forward and casually punched me in the side of the head.

It was humiliating. Carson was one of the best fighters I’d ever seen, with or without a sword. He didn’t have Brandon’s preternatural—even for a hybrid—speed and strength, but he was quick and he seemed to know the perfect counter to every conceivable attack. Against someone like Carson there was no shame in losing, but even he never should have been able to hit me with that kind of sucker punch.

I was better than that. I was no Brandon or Carson, but I’d spent half a decade holding my own in dominance fights, and I’d recently been involved in several weeks of heavy fighting with everyone from jaguars to vampires to Coun’hij enforcers. Nobody should be able to hit me like that without even really trying.

The massive seven-foot sword that I’d stolen from Kaleb was a weapon that would allow me to mow down regular hybrids once I mastered it. It would provide me with a reach advantage that would be almost impossible to overcome and I needed to learn how to use it if I was ever going to have a chance of killing Brandon, but so far I’d proven to be a terrible student.

Carson could have easily ripped my throat out rather than just cracking me alongside the head with his knuckles, and my beast didn’t like that we were being bested so easily.

Normally Carson used his ability—manipulating the emotions of everyone around him—to smooth over the tempers that inevitably rose to the surface whenever you had shape shifters training against each other. It was part of what made him such an incredible instructor, but today he’d either forgotten to use his ability or he’d decided that I needed to learn some kind of lesson.

It was even possible that he was waiting for me to ask for help calming my beast, but I wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of begging. The balance of power in our relationship was already too one-sided. The first king of the wolves had trained his men without the benefit of Carson’s gift; I wasn’t going to be less than they’d been.

“You’re still too slow, Alec. You’re fighting like a hybrid rather than a wolf. That would work if you were using a rapier, but these are more like Scottish lowlander swords. If you went up against one of the Ancients like that he’d rip you to pieces before you even realized what hit you.”

Carson had stepped back out of the simple circle we’d drawn in the dirt, so I knew he wasn’t planning on coming at me again.

“I guess it’s a good thing that I’m not planning on going up against any Ancients any time soon. I’ll settle for just getting good enough to help you take down Brandon.”

It was the wrong thing to say and I knew it even before the words left my mouth, but with my beast growling in the back of my mind I couldn’t bring myself to care. Carson’s lips pulled back as his beast answered my verbal jab with a crackle of power.

“Send her away.”

Carson’s order came out just loud enough for me to hear it; there was zero chance that Brindi had heard. He was obviously angry at me, but he was still giving me a chance to save face, even around Brindi, who was still oblivious to most of the intricacies of pack dominance games.

“You don’t get to order me around. I appreciate you agreeing to teach me how to use this monstrosity, but I’m not going to let you edge yourself in and take over the show. We either do this as equals or we don’t do it at all. I’ll take my people and we’ll walk.”

Carson’s face didn’t change in the slightest. “You would walk away from the power I bring to the table? You would give that up and risk not being able to bring down the Coun’hij solely out of pride?”

I looked away from him and took in the slowly swaying greenery that surrounded our little clearing. It wasn’t an easy question to answer, but there weren’t any clues to be found in our surroundings. As always, the only answers were going to be the ones that I could hammer out myself.

“It’s not just about pride. I’m not going to help overthrow the Coun’hij just so that I can see it replaced with something worse. I like you, Carson, but I don’t know you well enough to swear fealty to you. There may come a time when I decide to bend my knee, but that isn’t now.”

“You mean to establish yourself as king.”

“Yes. I’ll have the clearest claim on the throne once Kaleb is dead.”

“Are you really so arrogant that you think you’re the only one who’s worthy of the kingship?”

“Maybe. I don’t think of it that way though. The packs need a symbol to rally around, and right now I’m the best symbol. Dream Stealer—just like Agony used to be—is compromised by the fact that he was part of the Coun’hij in the past. For now I’m that symbol and I’m also the only person I can trust completely to do the right thing with that kind of power.”

“Fine, I’m not ordering you to send her away, but I will not continue your lesson as long as she is here.”

It went beyond splitting hairs, but it provided just enough of the right kind of pretext. He had the right to establish the conditions under which he was willing to teach. I turned to Brindi and mustered the closest thing I could to a smile in my hybrid form.

“Brindi, would you please go back to the cabin and grab us a couple of bottles of water from the fridge?”

She frowned. I knew she hadn’t been able to hear Carson and me, but she wasn’t stupid. It was entirely possible that she’d picked up on some of the non-verbal clues that indicated that we weren’t particularly happy with each other.

Then again, she hated when I ordered her out of my sight for any reason. She knew that I wanted her to make progress breaking the skin addiction that made her constantly want to touch me, but she didn’t see the need.

Brindi had been addicted to a lot of different things during her life, and in her mind this was the first addiction without side effects. She would have gladly remained addicted to me forever.

“You’ve kept me at arm’s length all day, Alec. I’m practically shaking over here.”

She was exaggerating, but not by much. Still, as much as I would have liked not to take such a hard line with her, she’d proven more than once that she wasn’t above playing on my sympathies to get what she wanted.

“You know my terms, Brindi. If you want to remain here with me then you need to continue to actively work on your addiction, and you need to pull your weight around here.”

“Fine, but if I die from exposure on the way back, I’m going to haunt you for the next two hundred years.”

Carson watched until Brindi had disappeared around the bend in the trail that led back to the cabin, and then listened until he was certain that she wasn’t going to come back. My beast had mostly calmed back down by that point, but Carson reawakened the anger with his next statement.

“You understand that you’re a symbol, but you fail to grasp the full meaning of that. It’s just like with your swordwork. You understand the concepts, but you refuse to carry the principles to their logical conclusion. If you’re going to be a symbol then you need to be a symbol. Quit wasting your strength fighting the Coun’hij and fight our people’s true enemies. It is abhorrent that we wolves are killing each other while the jaguars, vampires and werewolves run around almost completely unchecked.”

I wrapped mental arms around my beast’s neck and pulled him up short, but there wasn’t anything I could really do about the crackling blast of energy that he discharged into the air. It would have been more than enough to force a transformation save for the fact that I was already wearing my hybrid body.

“I didn’t make the rules that are stopping our kind from hunting the werewolves, Carson, and I want the jaguars stopped and the vampires exterminated as much as anyone else, but there is a limit to what I can accomplish.”

“By yourself, that is true, but you don’t have to remain by yourself. You need to inspire the packs. Show them what kind of leader you would be and they will flock to your standard. The Coun’hij rules because the unaligned wolves and hybrids let them. They rule because nobody has given the regular wolves a better option.”

I shook my head. “No, the Coun’hij rules because of fear. They rule because every man, woman and child of our kind knows that if they step out of line, someone they care about will suffer as a consequence.”

Carson looked at me oddly. “It’s the same thing.”

“No, Carson, it’s not. You want me to go out and do some grand heroic thing that will make the packs spontaneously rise up. You want me to convince them to rush headlong off of a cliff. I know what it took for me to leave Sanctuary, and the only reason I was able to bring myself to act was that I took everyone I cared about with me.”

“You don’t think that the packs are strong enough to do what you did?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t think that it’s right of me to demand that from them. It makes much more sense to pull the boot off of their necks and then they can join me without having to worry about what will happen to their friends and family.”

The puzzlement that I’d seen on Carson’s face a second before was gone. He looked angry again. “If our people aren’t willing to risk everything in order to obtain their freedom, then they don’t deserve it. You can’t just give freedom to someone, Alec. Freedom has to be earned.”

He was stroking the hilt of his practice sword, rubbing the glyph that had been carved into the steel. I’d asked him about the glyph before, but all that he’d ever told me was that the man who had given him both of his swords had commissioned the glyph on the practice sword.

I wasn’t an expert when it came to the royal sigils that had been part of the pomp and pageantry of the monarchy, but I had spent enough time studying to know that there was an underlying language that the sigils were based on. By the time one of the pictorial glyphs had been transformed into a sigil—into the personal mark of a member of royalty—it was often difficult to decipher which glyph had been used as the basis of the artwork.

What knowledge I did have was the result of hours of forced study that Kaleb had inflicted on me growing up. Like so many other things, he hadn’t bothered explaining why he wanted me to learn a dead language, he’d just handed me some of his research journals and told me to learn everything I could about the royal sigils.

I’d initially tried to master the language, but my hand had always been too clumsy to draw the sigils out in the level of detail that Kaleb had demanded, and I’d eventually become an indifferent student despite Kaleb’s displeasure. For the first time in years I found myself wishing that I’d put forth a more sustained effort to learn the sigils and the glyphs that made them up.

I absently stared at the sigil as my mind spun, searching for something that I could use to deflect our conversation back onto a safer path. I started to open my mouth to ask Carson once again about the hybrids that had come with him to try and free Agony, but suddenly I was able to discern the shape of the underlying glyph that made up the sigil on his practice sword.

“Gardener…no, the Gardener. That’s what it means, right? Are you the Gardener?”

Carson went completely still. “I didn’t expect for you to be able to read that. It’s not something that I’m willing to discuss. Never mention the glyph again.”

My control over my beast had already been frayed to the point of breaking. This last order was simply too much.

“No. You don’t get to press me to leave innocent children to die and then refuse to discuss anything that makes you the least bit uncomfortable, Gardener. Unlike you and your friends, the average wolf or human that’s been caught up in pack business doesn’t have the option of just running away and hiding in a hole somewhere. I’m not going to be the reason that kids no older than Rachel are cut down in order to punish their parents for siding with me. You’ve obviously never had a family, or you’d understand that.”

I’d seen Carson angry before, but those past instances were nothing like what faced me now. Power came off him in sheets, and somehow he’d traded out swords. His practice sword was resting on the heavy material he normally wrapped it in, and the deadly sharp blade that I’d seen used to such great effect against Brandon was in his hand.

“Get your weapon, Alec.”

I opened my mouth to tell him to calm down, only he sprang at me before I could get the words out. I lunged to one side and hit the ground in a roll that let me grab my edged sword as I came back to my feet.

“Calm down, Carson!”

“You spoke about that of which you have no knowledge, Alec. Where I come from there are consequences for that kind of thing.”

Carson’s blade darted towards me and this time there wasn’t anything lazy about the blow. He was moving as fast as I’d ever seen before and it was all I could do to knock the strike off to one side as I desperately backpedaled.

His next attack took me across the chest, slicing nearly a full inch into my flesh despite my best effort to get out of the way. Hybrids were built to go forward. We are capable of retreating, and in fact we can move incredibly quickly in any direction, but we really shine when we are springing forward. No matter how hard I tried, I wasn’t going to be able to match his footwork as long as I was retreating.

I needed to shift things around and press the attack, but that was easier said than done. Carson’s blade was in constant motion as he launched a series of slashes and thrusts that pushed me beyond anything I’d ever managed before. He attacked again and I got my blade in place to stop him from gutting me, but I was already bleeding from half a dozen places.

Carson had to have tells, but I hadn’t been training with him long enough to learn them, so his techniques came at me in a blur with absolutely no warning of what was going to come next. I couldn’t plan, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but react and I found myself responding with counters that I would have said I was nowhere near ready to use in a real fight.

My options were limited, and as the edge of Carson’s sword took me across the stomach, leaving another shallow gash, I realized that I was only going to get one shot at stopping him. I’d thought there for a moment that he was playing with me, but he was moving too quickly for that. If I’d missed any one of the last half dozen or so counters I would have lost a limb at the very least.

I couldn’t read Carson’s attacks, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t anything I could do. I could still try to lure him into using the attack that I wanted him to use. It was more than likely going to get me killed, but it was better than nothing.

I stood a fraction of an inch taller, coming ever so slightly out of the crouch that Carson had spent the last week drilling into me. It was a small thing, but it meant that my sword had to shield a greater volume of space. It meant that there was going to be a hole in my defenses, but this time I made sure the hole was where I wanted it to be.

The tip of my sword dropped half an inch rather than returning perfectly to position after the next block. There wasn’t a pause in the flow of battle—not exactly—but I could feel the moment in which Carson decided to exploit the opening that I’d left him.

His sword cut through the air like a living thing that wanted my blood. It was too fast, and my sword was too far out of position to block it completely. Stepping back out of range wasn’t an option either. Carson had closed up the distance between us slightly just as he launched the attack, and even if he hadn’t my weight was too far forward.

Instead of blocking or backing up, I dropped down so that my knees were almost all the way to the ground. Carson’s sword skittered off of mine in a spray of sparks and then passed over the top of my head with less than an inch to spare.

It was the kind of exchange that I knew I would relive in my dreams, waking in a cold sweat as I thought about just how close I’d come to dying, but there wasn’t time for that now. Instead I used the force of Carson’s strike to give my blade extra speed as I threw myself forward.

I’d never been so fast before, but then again, I’d never committed myself like this in any of the practice sessions we’d had together. The point of my blade darted towards Carson’s heart, blurring with speed in an attack that I knew would take his life.

My sword was too fast for Carson to get his weapon in position to block, but he twisted away from me at the last second, providing a narrower target at the same time that his right hand swept down. He slapped my blade aside with his claws and then his hand darted forward and he grabbed me by the throat.

It was a killing grip. There wasn’t any way for me to break free without him ripping my throat out. The question of who was dominant to whom, the question that the two of us had tried so hard to avoid answering, had just been resolved. He was dominant to me, which meant that even if he didn’t kill me right now, the threat of death would always be out there in a way that it hadn’t been before.

We stood there motionless for nearly a full minute. My claws ached to go for him. There was a slight chance that I could take him with me, and a part of me was sure that it would be better to die than add one more person to the list of people who could give me orders with impunity.

It was a seductive option. The kind of thing that I might have done if other people weren’t depending on me. If Carson was so inclined, and both suitably creative and ruthless, then nothing I had was safe. He could force me to hand over all of the wealth that I’d stolen from Kaleb along with my sword, but he couldn’t take away my hope.

I couldn’t throw my life away, not if there was still a chance that I might be able to throw off his chains and escape. I owed Rachel and my friends at least that much, so I forced the rage back far enough that I could stop myself from lunging at Carson.

The rage was still there. My efforts were enough to contain the anger, but I would have said that no force in the universe would have been enough to eradicate it. Only then it disappeared as completely as water out of a cracked cistern. One moment it was a frothing, burning mess and then it was leaking away to somewhere outside of me, a place where it no longer had the power to influence me.

I wasn’t angry anymore, but that didn’t mean that I’d lost sight of the consequences of what had just happened.

“Was that your plan all along, to wait until my guard was down and then defeat me so that you could take over?”

Carson let go of my throat and shook his head as he slowly backed away. “No, Alec, that was never my intention. The last thing I want is to be dominant to anyone. Once upon a time that wouldn’t have been the case. The man who thought he was the Gardener might have done exactly that and told himself it was necessary to stave off a greater evil, but he would have been wrong.

“I know now that I’m not the Gardener, and I don’t want to interfere with your free will. I would like for you and I to continue as we were, as equals exploring the possibility of an alliance against the great evils of our world.”

I wanted to believe him, but the stakes were just so high. He’d been angry in a way that I’d never seen out of him before; there was obviously more going on than he’d told me so far.

“What happened, Carson?”

Carson gave me a sad smile. “I came out here today planning on manufacturing a confrontation. You’ve continued to hold back when it comes to your sword technique. You needed a reason to commit; you needed to believe that this time our sparring was something more than just sparring.”

“We could have killed each other.”

Carson hesitated for a second before nodding. “That is always a possibility when edged weapons are used. I was fairly confident I could control the fight well enough to keep either of us from being seriously injured, but there was never any guarantee of that.”

“That’s a pretty big risk to be taking just to teach someone how to use a sword.”

“I’m afraid that you’ve entered an arena where all of the risks you take will be big, Alec. I promised to do my best to teach you the way of the sword, and I felt like I’d used all other means at my disposal and failed.”

“And that bit at the end?”

“I’m sorry. I never intended for things to get to that point. Our discussions about how to handle the Coun’hij have always been heated. That’s why I turned to that subject—I needed something that you would believe could trigger the kind of violent confrontation that would finally force you to commit. I didn’t count on you deciphering the sigil on my sword. It brought up feelings that I thought I’d managed to safely lock away.”

“We almost killed each other because I said you were the Gardener? Who is the Gardener and why did mentioning him draw that kind of reaction out of you?”

“The Gardener is a prophecy that many of my…people believed in. He was supposed to…actually it doesn’t matter. Events have proved that the prophecy wasn’t true, but for a long time the Prophecy of the Gardener was the only thing that kept my people going. There was a certain task that every young man and woman undertook when they were young. Success at the task was a sign that the Gardener had finally arrived.”

“You succeeded at the task.”

“After a fashion. There were those who said the way that I fulfilled the task wasn’t in keeping with the prophecies, that I wasn’t actually the Gardener, but as time went on it seemed as though I was fulfilling other signs.”

“That doesn’t seem like a reason to get mad at me, Carson.”

“Indeed, it shouldn’t have been, except that the day I finally realized I wasn’t the Gardener was the day that my daughter was killed, and it was my fault that she died. Everyone was depending on me and I failed with a completeness that words can’t possibly describe. I failed my liege, my people, and my own flesh and blood.”

“So me saying that you had no concept of what it would be like to lose a child pushed you over the edge.”

“I’m afraid so. I ask your forgiveness, Alec. I should not have let my demons come out like that, not in a situation already so fraught with peril.”

I shrugged my massive hybrid shoulders. “That’s part and parcel of being one of the moonborn. Our demons seem more persistent than most. At least something good came out of it all. I think I finally understand what you were trying to teach me about committing to an attack rather than thinking so much in terms of feints and misdirection.”

“Indeed, I was quite pleased with the quality of your last attack. It was well executed and you showed no signs of hesitation. You’ve taken a significant step forward. Time will see your skills continue to improve, but the basics of your technique are already good. From here you’ll find that you focus more on reading your opponent so that you can properly pick the right moment to commit.”

I nodded and turned to put my edged sword away, but Carson cleared his throat.

“There was more than one thing accomplished today, Alec. Even through my rage, I was still testing you. I never intended to push you so far, but there at the end I was able to gain an important insight into who you are.”

Now it was my turn to feel discomfort at where the conversation was headed. “I’m glad that I didn’t act on the desire to try to take you with me. It would have been a waste for both of us to die when neither of us really wanted that particular fight.”

“Indeed, that would have been a tragedy, but as far as you knew at the time, the contest was deadly serious. That isn’t the reason that you forbore from trying to kill me.”

“No, you’re right. I didn’t know that at the time. I didn’t go after you because I knew that people were depending on me. The odds that I’d be able to make much of a difference as a submissive aren’t very good, but there’s still a chance and I owe it to everyone who’s risked so much for me already to keep going as long as there is even the smallest chance that I could break free eventually and go back to fighting Kaleb and the rest.”

“And with that we return full circle. I do understand your concerns, Alec, but I’ve seen just how thin the line is between civilization and anarchy. The humans are ill-prepared to deal with the things that we’ve kept hidden from them for so long. Out of all the major powers, we are the only race that has any interest in the humans as anything other than slaves and food. The jaguars are reproducing more quickly than we are, and since the vampires and werewolves spread by way of a virus there isn’t any practical limit to how fast their population could explode. We wolves are the only thing preventing the United States from turning into something like Europe and Asia.”

I shuddered. There wasn’t much reliable information coming across the Atlantic, but everything pointed to the vampires and werewolves being locked in a shadow war that was always one slip away from making front-page news.

“I don’t want that any more than you do, Carson, but I can’t just leave the Coun’hij untouched and go after the other threats. They’d constantly be taking potshots at me. Eventually they’d get lucky and it would be game over.”

Carson nodded with a considering air about him. “What if there was a way to make it so that the Coun’hij couldn’t find you? What if there was a way to guarantee your safety from the Coun’hij while you carried on your battle against the vampires and the werewolves?”

“So now we’re going to explore hypotheticals?”

“Please, Alec, humor me.”

“I don’t know for sure, Carson, but it feels like that doesn’t drastically change things. The Coun’hij isn’t just some kind of benign dictatorship. They are killing wolves and hybrids we’re going to need in order to fight off the other threats. The best I could say is that if there was a way to shield my people from the Coun’hij then I would be more careful with my target selection. I’d make even more effort to make sure that I wasn’t killing the people who are just helping the Coun’hij because they are scared.”

Carson considered my words for nearly a full minute. “I think that might be enough of a common ground for us to continue to work together, Alec.”

“I hope so, Carson. I could really use your help. You and your friends could make a big difference with regards to whether or not this war is winnable.”

“And yet even if you knew that the war wasn’t winnable you would still fight it, wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah, I guess I would. I won’t continue to prop up Kaleb and the rest. Passively going along with them while knowing that they were massacring innocents wouldn’t be as bad as killing those innocents myself, but it would still be wrong.”

Carson’s swords disappeared into the heavy bag he used to transport them, and then he looked up at me with a sad smile. “You hold yourself to a much higher standard than you do your potential subjects.”

I shrugged uncomfortably and then shifted back to human form a second after he did. I knew that there were some logical holes in my arguments that couldn’t be fully explained away by the fact that most of the moonborn didn’t know the full extent of the Coun’hij’s crimes, but that didn’t mean I was completely ready to face the roots of those inconsistencies.

Carson adjusted his ha’bit, which he’d taken to wearing once we’d started working together, and then picked up his bag and started down the trail that led back to the cabin. I didn’t follow, and he stopped after only a couple of steps.

“I’m sorry for your loss, Carson. I can’t imagine what that must have felt like, and I’m sorry that I said what I said earlier. The closest thing I can think of is what I would have felt like if I’d had to watch Rachel die, and I’m pretty sure that still wouldn’t have been as bad as what you went through.”

Carson didn’t turn back to look at me, and for several seconds he didn’t respond. When he did finally acknowledge my words, it was with a ragged sigh that contained more hurt than I’d known was possible for such a simple gesture.

“It happened almost a year ago, but I’ve thought about her every single day since she died. She was the same age as you and your friends, in fact that girl who was with Taggart, Adri, reminded me a lot of my daughter.”

I opened my mouth hoping that something suitably comforting would come out, but before I could find the right words, the sound of Brindi hurrying back precluded any kind of further conversation.

“Alec, come quick. It’s James, something happened to his mother.”

—

I hope that you all enjoyed this sneak preview of Shattered. It goes live on December 26th, but you can preorder it at many of the retailers on the Shattered Product Page.